Clyde

WHEN I GET HOME FROM THE CALL CENTER, MY BROTHER JON-JON AND HIS FRIEND ARI ARE SITTING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, DISCUSSING THE RABBITS.

“They’d make a real nice coat,” Ari says. Recently, so recently it’s actually still happening, Ari has filled out in his shoulders and fingers, the places that used to be skinny and boyish. His face is white and moist-looking, like it’s been carved out of a potato. Unlike Jon-Jon, Ari looks like his brain might be planning something that the rest of him is capable of following through with.

Jon-Jon plays with Ari’s machete, slicing along the edge of the table so little flecks of wood land in a pile at his feet. A rabbit, one of the young ones that looks like newborn surf, presses its soft pink nose against the tip.

Jon-Jon nods. “Keep ya warm all winter long.”

But Crawfordville is half an hour outside Tallahassee, and no one is moving anywhere any time soon. Outside the kitchen window, strings of heat come up from the rabbit holes like smoke signals. Where our yard is not covered in fluffy white rabbits, it’s cracked and brown. The humane rabbit traps, the ones without any wires or spikes or punjis, retail for $14.99, and I’ll need at least fifteen if I’m gonna catch our yard rabbits faster than they multiply. If I don’t save up enough for the traps, and fast, Jon-Jon and Ari’s plan is gonna start looking like the humane one.

Before I even hit the parking brake, I’ll find three rabbits lying like sunbathers underneath my van. The head rabbits were raised inside, so they think underneath my GMC Safari is their warren.

I go to the fridge to see what’s left of yesterday’s pizza. Jon-Jon steps in front of me. “Watch this new trick Ari taught me,” he says. He throws the machete in the air and catches it with his teeth. I tell him that’s great but please, be careful, and maybe use a duller blade when you’re still learning?

“You’re not my mother!” he screams. I apologize and offer to buy whatever knives he needs to get better at his trick. He shows me a big Bowie Ari’s been looking to unload. It’s forty bucks, almost three humane rabbit traps. I say yes. Now, in terms of savings, I’ve only got enough for about two-point-five traps. Which is no good at all.

At first there were two, but rabbits, you know. Two fluffy white bunnies appeared in our yard, and the rest is history. The rest is pebbled layers of rabbit shit on our porch, and tumbleweeds of fine angora fur blowing past our mailbox and an extra twenty bucks a week on bags of ice for the rabbits that get too hot in the sun.

You could draw a property line around our yard using nothing but rabbits. Jon-Jon says it’s cause of the iced kiddy pool and the occasional carrots I throw their way and the how I once tried to dig burrows for them. I think it’s cause Clyde visits me almost every night now.

I’m so ready for bed but I know Clyde is gonna be upstairs when I get there—sometimes I can tell—and there he is, nestled into a fold in my duvet. Clyde is really big. This is because the other rabbits bring him his food. He’s not their king or anything—as far as I know there is no such hierarchical structure—he just commands that kind of respect. If you could see him, you’d understand. He has this long silky hair that flops down over his eyes and makes him look collegiate, professorial even, like whatever he’s thinking of has its roots in the past and implications that branch far, far into the future.

“You’ve got to do something about that little brat,” Clyde says. Clyde likes to act like he’s got ears in every room.

I tell him that’s not very nice. Jon-Jon is a good kid. Even Trisha from CPS says she sees a lot of improvement. Clyde harrumphs. I sit down on the bed and he hops over and nudges my pockets—sometimes I keep celery leaves in there after I make a batch of soup. I pull some out and Clyde’s nose tickles on my fingers like a caterpillar. Clyde’s gone through the politics of hand feeding with me before, how it’s very demeaning and necessarily places me, an opposably-thumbed individual, at a status above him, so I put the leaves on the bed.

“Any reason you’re here?” I say. “Other than to rag on Jon-Jon?” He cleans himself sitting up on his haunches. He uses one paw at a time, like rich people in cartoons do with dinner napkins. Not a lot of rabbits could clean themselves like he does, I think, look as dignified doing it.

“Yeah,” he says, “Have you accepted our lord and savior El-ahraira into your heart?”

I’m changing into my nightgown as he says this. I used to think maybe Clyde had a crush on me, so I wouldn’t change in front of him. Then he outlined the disparate differences in beauty standards between humans and rabbits. My lack of a tail and underdeveloped ears prevent him from ever seeing me as a sexual being. “You have so little hair to begin with,” he said, “and then you shave the rest of it off.” So now I do whatever I want in front of him. It feels a little weird sometimes, but it’s better than when I made him wait in the hall and he chewed all the paint off the bottom of my door trying to get back in.

“I’m not dumb you know,” I say. I put my housecoat on and sit back on the bed. “I’ve read Watership Down.” Clyde nibbles the celery. I used to have a doll that ate fake plastic veggies, until she got recalled for eating kids’ hair all the way up to the scalp, and she looked just like Clyde looks eating his celery.

“Watership Down, my ass,” Clyde says between bites, “A notorious appropriation of Lapine culture. Among educated rabbits, one can’t even utter the name Richard Adams.”

I pull my housecoat across myself and wonder if this is true: the part about there being other educated rabbits. If it is, I wonder why Clyde’s stuck hanging out with our dumb yard rabbits instead.

“But really,” he says, “how are things progressing?” This means “How close are we to buying the rabbit traps?” which itself means, “How close are we to relocating my people to their own little piece of Elysium?” Clyde finds talking transparently about these things distasteful. I am completely honest, out of respect for Clyde and the nature of our relationship, even though I know he’ll roll his eyes at the part about Jon-Jon’s knives. When he does, I’m busy brushing my hair exactly one hundred times, looking at my small ears in the mirror, so I don’t actually see him do it.

I used to not brush my hair at all, before the rabbits. It confuses me how their hair is so soft when they don’t even have brushes.

At Kwikuum Vacuum Cleaners, my name is Kelly. Crawfordville is too small and my real name is too weird to sell vacuum cleaners introducing myself as myself. Customers would want to talk about the weather, how it’s agitating their sciatica, the fact that their grandson is coming to visit—he’s very handsome, and in med school, you know—won’t I come by? Forgetting, of course, that their grandson used to write me love letters in elementary school and then lampoon my letters to the entire cafeteria when I responded in kind.

I’d probably make more sales if I didn’t keep my hand on the little button thing that hangs up the phone while I dial it, but reciting the script to a dial tone instead of an actual person makes the night go a lot faster.

Emma taught me that trick. She sits in the cubicle next to me. She only ever makes one sale per shift, which is the minimum you have to make to be invited back. She’s part of an anti-vacuum cleaner cell trying to bring Kwikuum down from the inside. She told me on her second day here.

“Did you know that the average time spent on housework per American household rose five-point-five hours per housewife per week with the invention of the vacuum cleaner?” she asks me. I think it was only four-point-five hours last time but can’t be sure. I write 5.5 on the back of my hand, to remember for the next.

In the breakroom, Emma tells me about her compatriots at Dyson and Hoover. They’re having more luck than she is. So far all she’s done is leave leaflets in the cubicles (which fall to me to collect before Mr. Kwikuum sees) and kill the aloe vera plant on Mr. Kwikuum’s desk. Still, I tell her to make sure she doesn’t destroy the company before I save up my money.

“I love your blue collar humor,” she says. Then she frowns. “That’s not offensive, right? ‘Blue collar?’ Is that,” and she whispers this next part: “a slur?”

I bring Chinese food home, but Ari and Jon-Jon have the kitchen table enveloped in that big blue graphing paper, drawing up their plans for the trebuchet they’re building.

“It’s the most humane way, really,” Jon-Jon explains. “We’ll just load ‘em up, pull this string, then—pew!—sail ‘em right down to the LoPrestis’. Their yard, their problem.”

Ari nods. “Yeah. The LoPrestis’. Perfect. They got that tree house we can take turns watching from. In case any of the rabbits pop.” He grabs a fortune cookie out of the box and crushes it between his palms at the word pop. He empties the bag into his mouth. “We’re still gonna need to keep a couple for ourselves,” he says, “for the coats.” At least that’s what I think he says, through the cookie and little bits of paper.

I take my little cardboard box of food up to my room. Clyde doesn’t eat noodles but I figure I’ll offer him some broccoli.

“This is untenable,” he says. I slurp in my lo mein and nod. Not to be tenated. Clyde looks at me a long time, until I blush and sort of cover my mouth out of embarrassment. When I do I notice a big noodle stuck to my cheek. Oh man.

“Don’t worry about the trebuchet,” I tell him between bites. The schematics they’re drawing up aren’t really schematics as much as they are pictures of rabbits with little Xs over their eyes.

Even so, Ari’s knife sharpener has been going all night and the yard rabbits seem agitated. As I opened the front door, two of them wound their way around my feet, giving me those wide bunny stares from their red bunny eyes.

“I didn’t want to do this,” Clyde says. “I’m a big believer in self-sufficiency. You know that, right? But this is just too much.” I nod in agreement. Much too much. It’s become difficult to eat in the kitchen, what with the schematics and the various inch-high piles of metal filings from the knife sharpener. “I’ve arranged something for you,” he says.

I sit up straighter in excitement, and also because Ari and Jon-Jon have cut up my housecoat to use as a pattern for their fur coats and I feel a little exposed in just my nightgown.

Clyde wiggles his large hindquarters closer to my pillow. He yawns and his tongue looks like something you’d use to catch fish. “There’s something you need to see at work tomorrow,” he says. “Something in the third door past the entrance.”

“It’s locked,” I tell him. Emma’s detailed to me the contents of every closet but that one. She’s been trying to fashion a key out of a Coke can, but it’s been tough for her, since she refuses to buy Coke.

“Maybe you don’t have to make a key?” Clyde sighs. He looks at me looking at him. “Maybe there’s already a key. Maybe in Mr. Kwikuum’s office?” he says.

I give Clyde a little tickle behind the ears. He closes his eyes and arches his back and then tells me to stop it, don’t I understand the problematic context of such an action?

It takes a long time to get alone at work. I have re-orientation. My sales figures are fine, it’s my attitude that’s a problem, i.e. my failure to accept Mr. Kwikuum’s friend request on Facebook. It’s my third time through re-orientation.

“Look, Kelly,” Mr. Kwikuum says. We don’t break character once we’re on the clock. Even my folder of sales strategies says Kelly on it. “We’re one big family here. But, like a family, we need everyone at their strongest. If one of us gets sick, we’ll all get sick.” I nod.

He sips his coffee and crosses his arms. He waits until I cross my arms too, then continues.

“But what if a member of our family refuses to get vaccinated, Kelly? And goes around touching public bathroom door handles and licking railings? And just sort of sits around, bumming us out and talking about rabbits, waiting to get sick? Know what I mean, Kelly?” He repeats my name so much Dale Carnegie would be proud. I wonder for the first time if he thinks it’s my real name. “Wouldn’t we be totally within our rights to kick said family member out? And like, no one could criticize us really, not even said family member?”

I nod my head yes. I am listening, but I am also triangulating my gaze, left eye, right eye, mouth, like Jon-Jon’s books on interpreting facial expressions taught him to do.

I move my hand to take my sales folder back but he’s holding it so hard the soft yellow paper is tearing. On my way out, while Mr. Kwikuum mumbles something about herd immunity, I grab the key hanging to the left of the door. As I do, I think of a El-ahrairah, the trickster, outrunning a fox. My hand moves so smoothly it’s like the key is magnetically pulled into it. I worry at the key with my thumb until I get out in the hall and can look at it straight-on. It’s silvery and fresh-cut—you can still see the grain in the metal. I run the jagged part along my hand, to make sure it doesn’t disappear.

The key sticks in the lock, but with some force, I get it to turn. Inside the closet is a wall. Or really, the closet is the wall, recessed enough that I can step inside, though not enough to close the door behind me. The wall is made of giant cassette players, the little white round parts on them like bugged-out eyes piling their gazes down on me. I pick up one of the tapes and read its name: Carolyn Schwartz. I pick up another: Carl Lytton. Mildred Munson. Jillian Babble. All the names sound familiar, a little, in ways I can’t place.

The sound from the cassette players hums like a tightrope walker through my feet and fingertips. There are halves of conversations—voices without mouths sleepily answering “Hello,” a pause where we would introduce ourselves, and then one of two responses that we always get: “What do you want?”/“You just called us yesterday”/“You woke my kid up” (Positive Interest Responses), or: “Stop calling here”/“Take me off your list”/“Fuck yourself with that vacuum cleaner” (Neutral Interest Responses).

The whole first week of orientation is just learning how to read the script and not sound like you’re reading it. On a poster in the break room/supply closet, a pretty lady dressed as Marilyn Monroe urges us to “Find [Our] Mark! Stick to the Script!”

But how can the scripts work? How can that be possible? How can everyone we call think and talk and buy in exactly the same way? It is the first time I wonder this. I remember all the times I strayed from the script, only to have whoever I called keep going as if they hadn’t heard, as if I’d said my part too. I remember that and remember what Clyde said about having arranged this for me, and something in my brain clicks.

I close the door and twist the key the other way. I try to tell Mr. Kwikuum I’m sick, but he is busy covering his forearms in gel hand sanitizer, so I just leave. The house is quiet. Jon-Jon and Ari are at Ari’s place, looking for scrap wood to build the trebuchet. They left a note. With very detailed drawings. Lots of red marker. On our porch, two rabbits nuzzle each other, neck to neck. The bigger one hops over to the geranium bush, bites off a few leaves, and brings them back for the smaller one. I smile as I nudge them away from the door.

Clyde is upstairs, like I know he will be. There is something sad and quiet about him. Like how I imagine a father is at his daughter’s graduation. Beside him is a tape recorder and a blank tape. And what looks to be a bill for his time and services. I wonder how he got them up here without any hands, but then I remind myself not to let my ingrained prejudices limit what I expect of him.

“Thank you,” I whisper. I reach out and scratch him between the ears, down to his soft hot scalp, twirling his silky hair between my fingers. This time, he doesn’t hop away.

From then on, I am the best caller at Kwikuum. I take Clyde’s tape recorder and record, with appropriate pauses, our side of the script. Listening back to it, I hear that my voice is resplendent, sweet without saccharine, imbued with layers of down-home friendliness, honesty, and camaraderie like a secret shared. I make twenty-four sales my first day back and attribute them all to Mr. Kwikuum’s pep talk.

My photo hangs up under “Most Sales” every month, until I demur and tell them, no, give someone else a chance, really. I never let on what I know about the cassettes and I talk about my calls as if they were with real people, deserving of my time and attention. I’m so good that on Emma’s last day of work, she growls at me that she “thought [I was] a comrade.”

I accept that Facebook friend request. I even compliment Mr. Kwikuum’s new Jordans, which he carries in a plastic bag under his arm when it rains. I complain about the heat but never about how it’s affecting the rabbits. The only thing I have to worry about is mouthing the words I should be mouthing at the times I should be mouthing them. I wonder about some of my old coworkers, the ones who never strayed from the script, either. I wonder what might have been hidden under their jackets—their own tape recorders, wrapped against their bodies with Ace bandage, like mine?

I make enough money for the rabbit traps in no time, then even more money, enough that I don’t need them at all. I hire a rabbit whisperer to come and teach them how to burrow, how to forge into new and less suburban territory, and also how to procreate with rabbits they aren’t directly related to, because honestly, some of the newest rabbits were looking a little disconcerting. I make enough money to send Jon-Jon to a sleepaway camp that teaches combat skills, but in a gentle sensei sort of way, far far away from Ari for an entire summer. I sit with my feet in the kiddie pool while I read his letters, watching the new rabbits come up from the ground, their fur streaked with brown like the wild rabbits’. I don’t see Clyde for three weeks, until I do see him, poking through a patch of clover with a sweet brown wild girl rabbit at least as big as he is. Her ears are so long she probably gets HBO.