Rabbits(92)

So I did.

I tailed the couple up Evanston to North 36th, where they turned right. I tried to stay about half a block behind them as they walked. They looked happy, laughing and holding hands. Seeing them like that—so completely together and so seemingly unburdened—made me smile.

I couldn’t remember a time when I’d felt that free.

As the two women walked by the little walkway that led into Troll’s Knoll Park, I started to feel a familiar vibration at the base of my skull, and by the time they’d passed the narrow set of stairs that led up to Aurora Avenue, the gray feeling had firmly taken hold of my brain.

Every step I took felt labored, like I was pushing my way through sludge at the bottom of a lake. I forced myself to concentrate on my breath, and looked down as I walked, counting the lines on the sidewalk to calm myself. By the time the two women had stopped moving and were standing in front of the enormous cement troll that lurked beneath the bridge, the gray feeling had been tamped down enough for me to function, and I was able to move normally. But it was still there, somewhere in the back of my mind. I could feel it.

It was waiting for something.



* * *



—

The Fremont Troll is an eighteen-foot ferroconcrete troll that lives under the Aurora Avenue Bridge (officially known as the George Washington Memorial Bridge). Somebody won an art contest or something in the late eighties, and the Fremont Troll was the result. It’s a colossal, weirdly beautiful monument that I absolutely love. Sadly, people tag and otherwise vandalize the sculpture quite often, and layer after layer of cement has to be constantly applied to bring the troll back to something close to its original appearance.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Fremont Troll is that he (or she) is clutching a car in his (or her) left hand. In 1990, when the troll was being constructed, the artists included a red Volkswagen bug with a California license plate in the sculpture. Over the years, the appearance of the Volkswagen has changed. After decades of abuse at the hands of graffiti artists, vandals, and middle school kids playing truth or dare, the color of the car is no longer discernible and the license plate is long gone.

One fact remains indisputable, however, and that’s the fact that the troll is holding an original Volkswagen Beetle from the 1960s or ’70s.

Except it wasn’t. Not anymore.

There, clutched in the troll’s hand, in place of the Volkswagen bug, was an Austin Mini Cooper.



* * *



—

The two women took a selfie with the troll in the background, then continued their walk, moving leisurely along North 36th Street.

I was trying to decide whether to follow them—while also working to come to terms with the revelation about the new model of car in the troll’s hand—when I noticed some posters glued to one of the stanchions that held up the base of the bridge.

There were four identical posters, one on each side of the stanchion, advertising an upcoming music festival in Oregon. The genre was apparently something called space rock, and the festival was taking place about two and a half hours southwest of Portland in the area surrounding the Yaquina Head Lighthouse. The reason I’d found the posters so compelling was the fact that they featured an image of a lighthouse that had been converted into a rocket.

Another rocket.

I looked for significance in the date of the event, in the names of the bands (all local Pacific Northwest indie rock), but there was nothing.

Just the rocket-lighthouse.

Was I actually considering driving hours down the coast following clues related to rockets? What if the next clue pointed to Uganda?

If I hurried, I’d be able to catch up with the couple who’d led me here, but I was pretty sure that their connection to the clues I’d been following (whether real or imagined) was over. If I wanted to keep going, the rocket-lighthouse posters were the next clue. They had to be.

But I couldn’t drive three hours on a hunch—at least not at the moment. So I did the next best thing. I pulled out my phone and used Google Street View to take a closer look at the area surrounding the lighthouse.



* * *



—

The lighthouse sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There are a few small outbuildings connected via a winding concrete pathway that bisects the wide rocky area.

I looked over everything—zoomed in to each building, explored the surrounding geography as closely as I could using Google’s images—but nothing stood out. At least, nothing obviously Rabbits or rocket-related.

I was getting hungry, so I made my way back to the coffee shop beneath the rocket. I ordered the avocado salad and grilled cheese sandwich that I’d always eaten when Baron and I used to frequent the place. I considered asking the clerk who served me about the model of the car in the Fremont Troll’s hand, but I was pretty sure he’d tell me exactly what I didn’t want to hear—that the car was now and had always been an Austin Mini Cooper.

While I ate, I zoomed in and around the area surrounding that lighthouse. I had no idea what I was expecting to find, but it gave me something to focus on while I was doing my best to avoid thinking about the implications of that car in the troll’s hand, and what this additional change in the nature of my reality might mean moving forward.

I was exploring the coastline and looking at a winding set of weatherworn wooden stairs that led from the lighthouse parking area down to the beach, when I noticed something strange. It wasn’t immediately clear what I was looking at, until I zoomed in to get a better look.