Rabbits(85)

I’d always believed I was following patterns and looking for connections related to the game because I was trying to stop thinking about my parents, but what if I’d been drawn into the world of Rabbits specifically because I wasn’t ready to let them go?



* * *



—

“What are we going to do now?” Chloe asked.

“Now, it’s bedtime,” I said.

“For real?”

“It’s almost two in the morning.”

“So? Don’t two in the morning me. What about The Children of the Gray God? We need to know all the fuck about that.”

I wanted to know all the fuck about that too, but I was worried about Chloe. She needed to sleep. I needed to sleep.

Fatman Neil’s porn store basement wasn’t more than fifteen minutes from my place, but Chloe was distracted, and after missing a couple of turns, she’d managed to turn it into a half-hour drive.

“We’ve been warned off Rabbits by Russell Milligan, the Magician, Crow, and now Fatman Neil,” I said. “Maybe we need to take a step back, just to regroup.”

“Wait, so you’re the voice of fucking reason now?” Chloe snapped.

“Hey, we ‘voice of reason’ each other. It’s what we do.”

“I can’t believe you can just go to sleep with all that’s happening.”

“You’re going to go to sleep too, okay?”

“Fine.”

We drove in silence for a few blocks.

“Sorry, I’m a bit…edgy. It’s just that I’ve been thinking a lot about Baron,” Chloe said. “It’s so fucked-up. What if we can figure out what happened?”

“We know what happened.”

“I mean what really happened.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Come on, K. Baron’s dead.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Baron’s dead and I don’t want you to be next.”

We drove in silence for another block.

“It’s because you dig me so hard, isn’t it?” Chloe said.

“Maybe,” I said.

I did dig Chloe, a whole lot, but at the moment, I had no idea what was going on with the two of us. I had a bunch of questions like: Would this version of Chloe’s interpretation of events over the past couple of months match my own? Was the strange shit I’d been experiencing some kind of weird dimensional flux, or was it something far more mundane?

What if I was in the middle of some kind of mental or emotional breakdown?



* * *



—

Chloe dropped me off at home, and although my body was exhausted, my mind was too wired to sleep. I turned on the television for the first time in ages (I kept my cable subscription for the Seahawks). I thought I’d try to find something that might help unwind my brain enough to let me fall asleep.

I laid down on the couch and started watching a black-and-white movie from the fifties called The Night of the Hunter. I’d chosen that movie not only because I knew it was a great film, but also because I’d actually fallen asleep watching it once before.



* * *



—

I was nine years old. My parents were hosting their monthly film-noir evening with their closest friends, Bill and Madeline Connors—Annie and Emily’s parents. As always, after they’d put me to bed, they made popcorn and the four of them settled in to watch their movie.

I’ve always loved movies, and whenever my parents had these film nights, I’d sneak out of my bedroom and hide upstairs behind the banister. I was able to see the television clearly from up there, but because of the angle, my parents couldn’t see me. As long as I stayed quiet, I was able to watch whatever they were watching.

The previous month they’d chosen something about a guy looking for murderous androids (a film I’d learn years later was Blade Runner), and before that it had been something about a boat and a sea creature that I couldn’t clearly recall.

But I remember exactly what it was about The Night of the Hunter that had made it impossible for me to turn away. It was the fact that the man in the movie—the preacher character played by Robert Mitchum—had two words written across his knuckles: “love” and “hate.”

“Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?” he’d said, just before he went on to mime an intense struggle between love and hate using only his hands, his fingers intertwined as if he were battling for the souls of all mankind.

The scene was mesmerizing.

The Night of the Hunter felt different from the other black-and-white movies I’d seen—more real somehow. More grown-up. There was something about the way The Night of the Hunter made me feel—as if there was something going on beneath the surface of that film, something deeply authentic and moving. It was the same way I would come to feel about Rabbits, later.

My parents found me asleep in the hallway sometime after The Night of the Hunter had ended and carried me to bed. They never mentioned anything about my cinematic transgressions, and I continued to spy on their movies from behind that banister for as long as we lived in that house.

But this time, as I was nodding off, I realized something.

I jumped up from the couch, opened my computer, and loaded a clip from The Night of the Hunter on YouTube. I pressed play.