The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

Maybe having a body can feel good; maybe pleasure can be as easy for her as it seems to be for everyone else; maybe this is an intimation. Maybe it’s just the heat.

She knew that people got murdered at this motel, but she liked it there anyway. She was at home in places of humble ugliness.

Her legs, freshly shaved and moisturized, felt silken against the sheets. An erotic sense of health and vitality made her hot, made her want to dance, made her smile at Anthony, at everything.

She always felt perversely good during a crisis; a crisis justified the panic that rattled the cage of her body at least once a month. Made her feel normal. During a crisis, everyone was plunged into the animal fear that she frequented all year round. The only benefit of her generalized anxiety disorder was that it prepared Hope for the Worst-Case Scenario; she was never surprised when one materialized because the Worst-Case Scenario was where she spent most of her time.

Of course, despite the dashing haircut, Hope didn’t feel French. She felt like what she was: someone who shopped for pants at Costco and genuinely looked forward to the county fair every year.

Hope wondered who taught all the news anchors of America how to do the American News Anchor Voice—the theatrics of it, the computerized hypnosis of it. Would those deep in the future find the footage and inaccurately conclude that this is how everyone used to talk?

Hope stopped rationing her pleasure years ago, when she realized she might not have much of it to feel before she died.

In this motel, Moses feels French, despite the comforter—feels nihilism and passion sparring like bucks for the territory of his brain.

Beth is regrettably undiscerning in her social taste. Either that or she has a preference for the mysteriously deranged.

I could hear her smiling.

Stress, stress, stress, I claimed. People never question stress. You’d be amazed by how much abnormal behavior people dismiss if you tell them you’re stressed.

But I thought you’d realize, eventually, that you bored people. I thought you’d come to understand that people were embarrassed for you, that referencing your nobody professors from your nowhere college didn’t impress people. We could see your desperation to prove that you were Smart and Different. You wanted everyone to know that, didn’t you?

He knows that if he can make her feel small enough, he can make her do anything. Anything, that is, except stay with him.

People are dangerous because they are contagions. They infect you with or without your consent; they lure you onto paths you wouldn’t have chosen; they commandeer you.

“Hey, Siri,” says Moses. “Tell me a joke.” “Where do armies go?” she obliges at once. She is savior and servant. She knows everything about him, but it doesn’t do either of them any good. That’s the problem with love. “In your sleevies.” “I don’t get it,” says Moses, but he feels like maybe he does.

“Hey, Siri,” he says. “Do you have feelings?” “I feel like doing a cartwheel sometimes.” This depresses Moses tremendously, filling his spirit with wet cement.

The evening is doing that thing it does sometimes when he drinks, animating everything inside it, giving its contents heartbeats and desires and fur, charging all of its objects with unbearable significance. He’s on the verge of transcendence, can feel it building inside him like an orgasm. Or maybe it won’t be transcendence; maybe it will be a panic attack.

In the most enchanting way, the music sounds like it was written by someone who had never heard music before.

Blandine slaps her thigh, wrenching herself out of one self-inflicted pain with another—the only way she knows how to reroute her behavior.

“All right if I watch for a second?” she asks. “It’s a free country,” he replies moodily, not looking at her. “Is it?” she asks. He ignores her. They watch television with the stiff fraudulence of actors in a school play.

Joan lives with several plastic plants in Apartment C2 on the first floor of the Rabbit Hutch. She aspires to own live plants one day but can’t summon the confidence.

Upon the unwrapping of each package, she vows to write a thank-you letter to Aunt Tammy—a letter of the handwritten, thick-papered, thesaurus-consulted variety—but every day following, Joan “forgets.” She “forgets” for so many consecutive days that the idea of a thank-you letter begins to gain weight in her mind, becoming too heavy to lift. By the end of the first week, a mass of gratitude and shame has accumulated inside her body and grown so dense that adequately transcribing it, surely, would take a lifetime. It would bruise both writer and reader. To send a thank-you letter now, she believes by week two, would be like mailing a handwritten account of my indolence, my boorishness. I can’t. I can’t.

In her youth, Penny had wanted to be a dancer. When she was in her twenties, she met a handsome banker online. After half a year of correspondence, she and the banker finally scheduled a meeting in person, upon which Penny discovered that he was in fact a bedridden and senile former bank teller. Penny visited him every weekend, nonetheless, feeding him applesauce and reading him detective novels. “I had nothing better to do,” she told Joan. “And his profile pic was really him. In his thirties. I thought that was kind of ballsy. Using a picture of who you used to be.”

She feels like a demanding and ill-fated houseplant, one that needs light in every season but will die in direct sun, one whose soil requires daily water but will drown if it receives too much, one that takes a fertilizer only sold at a store that’s open three hours a day, one that thrives in neither dry nor humid climates, one that is prone to every pest and disease. What kind of attention would make Joan feel at home? Who would ever work that hard to administer it? She will never own live houseplants.

“Nice,” says Penny neutrally. “But are you happy?” “You just asked me that.” “But you seemed like maybe you needed someone to ask you again.” “Are you happy?” “Hell no! Who is? You can feel happy, but you can’t be that way forever. Let me tell you something: if somebody says yes to that question, they either don’t understand it, or they’re on drugs. I’m only asking you because it’s a good conversation starter. I haven’t been happy since spring of ’ninety-eight.”

Joan follows Penny’s finger. Parked near the Rabbit Hutch is a shiny white vehicle with a rental tag on the visor. “What about it?” asks Joan. “He’s been parked there for hours.” “How do you know it’s a him?” “It’s always a him, even when it’s not.”

“What kind of guy?” “Fifties. Chubby. Blank.” “Blank?” “You know. No screams on his face, no birthdays, no goldfish, no jokes, no flights. Hard to picture a man like that enjoying the simple things, like a rocking chair. Or a volcano. This was a man who was—I don’t know. He was glacial.” “Glacial?” “Cold, cold, far. Doomed.” “And you gathered that from…?” “Just looked.” Penny shrugs. “You can see a hell of a lot when you look.”

Joan’s bangs collect sweat as she stands on the pavement, anxiety pounding on the door to her evening, begging her to let it inside. Not tonight, she decides. Summer storms are her favorite. Maraschino cherries are her favorite. She might even trim her bangs tonight.

She walks across the street to her bronze station wagon, which she inherited from her parents—a rusty malfunctioning machine whose windshield wipers activate every time you turn left. Last year, the door fell off when she tried to open it, and she had to take out a loan to repair it. Her parents neglected the vehicle, and she followed suit; in their household, car maintenance was viewed as a profligate waste of money, exclusively for people with disposable income. The manifestations of this intergenerational neglect are always unpredictable, often funny, never affordable.

Her limbs function, and she finds this miraculous when she dwells on it. In fact, she finds plenty of things miraculous. Forcefully, she summons her best memories. That time on a red-eye bus when the driver used the intercom to contemplate, in campfire baritone, the wonder of his grandchildren, the way they validated his life as time well spent. As he lulled the passengers with stories, someone began to pass around a Tupperware of sliced watermelon, and a drunk man offered to share the miniature bottles of whiskey from his bag, and Joan felt such overwhelming affection for her species, she feared she would sacrifice herself to save it.

Joan was downtown, leaving work early, briskly walking toward the parking garage where her station wagon waited. On the opposite end of the sidewalk, a large woman in her sixties collapsed. Immediately, two people rushed to the woman’s side, gingerly tending to her, touching her shoulders and face, speaking to her as though she were their mother—a cherished one—and Joan understood that human tenderness was not to be mocked. It was the last real thing.

Miraculous. Joan recalls the existence of dogs, craft stores, painkillers, the public library. Cream ribboning through coffee. The scent of the lilacs near her childhood home. Brown sugar on a summer strawberry. Her father’s recovery from the tyranny of multigenerational alcoholism. The imperfect but true repossession of his life. The euphoria of the first warmth after winter, the first easy breath after a cold, the return of one’s appetite after an anxiety attack. Joan has much to be happy about. She thinks: I am happy, you are happy, we are happy. These thoughts—how she can force herself to have them. Miraculous.

For the past couple years, she’d been using a Frankenstein bike she assembled from disparate parts, but someone stole it from the Valley bike rack in March. She spent an unjustifiable amount of time watching those bicycle-building video tutorials, a genre dominated by pale, enthusiastic men. She developed a tender attachment to one of the instructors: benevolent eyes, shaved head, rope necklace, rubber watch, Eastern European accent. A tendency to speak in the first-person plural. Encouraging as a kindergarten teacher. “We CAN do it, even if we are a beginner! I believe we should all of us build a bike in our life!”

Suddenly, she understands why people kill each other.

“You look exactly like the street,” the driver repeats. “That’s not my problem.” “Really?” she retorts. “You’re going to dig your heels into an argument that’s as obscene as it is idiotic?” “Bitch,” he says, then rolls up his window. “You were not adequately loved,” she says, then runs across the street to the gas station.

Inside the gas station, she aggressively turns the lever of the slushee machine and fills a cup with frozen, spectacular blue, breathing hard. She pays and stands on the curb for a moment, examining gas pumps and considering environmental doom as she sips from a straw that will probably end up in a whale.

It’s clear to Blandine from the synchronicity of their movements—the corresponding shuffles of feet, head tilts, and eye squints—that they have been trying to love each other for years.

Blandine recently learned that white barn owls reflect moonlight off their feathers to temporarily blind the voles they are hunting. Everybody does the best she can with the resources she has.

He looks like someone who has never slept through the night.

She knows little of her own heritage but decided years ago with haphazard conviction that she is Russian. It’s the country people always guess first, so she ran with it. These clovers likely blossom in her homeland. Maybe a pair of great-great-great-great-great grandparents made love in a field of them. At the library, she imagined this until it grossed her out. She researched the clovers until a man spilled his energy drink on her lap, forcing her to pack up and return to the Rabbit Hutch.

It’s like there’s a live-news lag between her words and his reception. Eventually, he shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I didn’t know that.”

She is disappointed by the domesticity of her adult fantasies but also cheered by it. Domesticity, at least, is achievable.

The vodka was the kind of alcohol that doesn’t let you forget that you’re poisoning yourself as you drink it, which is to say it was cheap, and we didn’t feel bad about stealing it.

“What year is it?” I asked. I truly couldn’t remember. They ignored me.

“What’s the matter with you?” I demanded, anger clawing at me. Todd was so small, so breakable. Suddenly, I wanted to shatter him like a Christmas ornament. “Why can’t you be normal?” Todd looked at me with an unreadable expression. He could’ve been asleep, for all I knew.

For the first and probably last time in my life, I envied women for being able to give birth. I wanted to fuse myself to somebody else. I wanted to know what it would take for me to give a damn.

Blandine appeared to me briefly, clear as a photograph, dressed in a tuxedo. I knew then that I’d never touch her. The worst part was that I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything at all.

It is so easy to express her rage toward him—far easier than it is to express anything else.

I’m trying to recognize the full human dimension of each person I encounter, and I’m—honestly, I’m exhausted. From here on out, it’s going to be New Testament justice. So I gotta get the Old Testament justice out of my system while I still have the chance.” She pinches her thigh and catches him watching. “I think I hate you.”

Now he’s getting desperate. She can see it in his face, hear it in his voice. “How can I persuade you that, despite all the horrible—despite everything I’ve done, despite how reckless I was with you, I care about your well-being and always have? How can I convince you that I have never done anything like that before, and if I could do it again, I absolutely would? I mean—differently. If I could do it again differently, I would. Everything I’m saying sounds empty, except it’s exactly what I mean.