Something was alive in the corner. That was the first thing I noticed when I entered the Mute’s room: a stripe of motion in the brown shadows near the shuttered window. It was a rabbit. A pet, you could tell from the water bottle wired to its cage bars. A pet was not just some animal, it was yours, it was loved and fed by you. Everybody knows this, of course, but for some reason the plastic water bottle looked shockingly bright to me; the clean, good smell of the straw was an exotic perfume in the Mute’s bedroom.
Mutant, meanwhile, was fishing around in a drawer.
“You think this will fit you, Larry?”
Eric held out a shrunken, wrinkled sweater that I recognized.
“Uh-huh.”
“You better now, Larry?”
“Terrific. Extra super.”
Had I gone home in my blood-soaked shirt, my ma would have freaked. She’d have been so aghast at my brush with Death that she’d try to kill me herself. Ma punished me any time I flaunted my mortality, reminded her that her son was also a bag of red fluid. Eric Mutis seemed to know this instinctively. He handed me a shirt, white socks, and I wondered why he had to be such a retard in school.
I pulled Mutis’s sweater on. I knew I should thank him.
“That’s a rabbit?” I asked like some idiot.
“Yeah.” Now Eric Mutis smiled with a brilliance that I had never seen before. “That’s my rabbit.”
I crossed the room, in Eric Mutis’s boat-striped sweater, to acquaint myself with Eric Mutis’s caged pet, feeling my afternoon curve weirdly. The rabbit’s tall ears were pushed flat against its skull, which I thought made it look like a European swimmer.
“I think you are spoiling that rabbit, dude.”
Mutis had stocked this place for the apocalypse, turned his room into a bunny stronghold. Big fifty-pound bags of straw and food pellets slouched in every corner, under the Mute’s bed. Pine straw. Timothy, orchard, meadow. ORGANIC ALFALFA — PLUS CALCIUM! said one bag. Jesus, where does Mutant get the money for organic alfalfa? I wondered. There was almost nothing else in the room: a purple cassette deck, some schoolbooks, a twin bed with the Goodwill label still on the headboard.
“My Christ, do they put steroids in that alfalfa?” I peeled off the price sticker, feeling like a city bumpkin. “Twenty bucks! You got ripped off!” I grinned. “You need to buy your grass from Jamaica, dude.”
But he had turned away from me, bending to whisper something to the quivering rabbit. Seeing this made me uncomfortable; his whisper was already a million times too loud. I felt a flare-up of my school-day rage — for a second I hated Eric Mutant again, and I hated the oblivious rabbit even more, so smugly itself inside the cage, sucking like an infant at its water nozzle. Did Mutant know what kind of ammo he was giving me? Did he honestly believe that I was going to keep his love nest a secret from my friends? I strummed my fingernails along the tiny cage bars. They felt like petrified guitar strings.
“What’s his name?”
“Her name is Saturday,” said Eric happily, and suddenly I wanted to cry. Who knows why? Because Eric Mutis had a girl’s pet; because Eric Mutis had named his dingy rabbit after the best day of the week? I’d never seen Eric Mutis say one word to a human girl, I’d never thought of Eric Mutis as a lover before. But he was kicking game to this rabbit like an old pro. Just whispering love music to her, calling down to her, “Saturday, Saturday.” Behind the cage bars his whole face was changing. Softening, like. This continued until he wasn’t ugly anymore. What had we found so repulsive about him in the first place? His finger was making the gentlest circle between the rabbit’s crushed ears, a spot that looked really delicate to me, like a baby’s head. The rabbit’s irises were fiery and dust dry, I noted, swiping hard at my own snotty face with Eric’s sleeve.
“Want to pet her?” Mutant asked, not looking at me.
“Hell no.”
But then I realized that I could do this; I could do anything in the Twilight Zone of the Mute’s closet-size room — nobody was watching me but the Mute and the voiceless thing in the cage. Some hard pressure flew out of my chest then and launched me forward, like air out of a zigzagging balloon. I let Mutant guide my fingers through the cage door. I followed his lead, brushing the green straw off Saturday’s fur. Still I thought this was pretty stupid behavior, until I petted her hide in the same direction that Mutant was going and felt actually electrified — under my palm, a cache of white life hummed.
“Can I tell you a secret?”
“Whatever. Sure.”
At that moment, it was my belief that he safely could.
Mutis smiled shyly at me, opened a drawer. There was so much dust on the bureau that the clean gleam of Saturday’s cage made it look like Incan treasure.
“Here.” The poster he thrust at me read LOST: MY PET BUNNY, MISS MOLLY MOUSE. PLEASE CALL ###-####! The albino rabbit in the photograph was unmistakably Saturday, wearing a sparkly Barbie top hat someone had balanced on her ears, the owner’s joking reference, I guessed, to that old magician’s trick of pulling rabbits out of hats — a joke that was apparently lost on Saturday, whose red eyes bored into the camera with all the warmth and personality of the planet Mars. The owner’s name, according to this poster, was Sara Jo. “I am nine,” the poster declared in plaintive hand-lettering. The date on the poster said “Lost on August 22.” The address listed was 49 Delmar, just around the corner.
“I never returned her.” His voice seemed to tremble in tempo with the rabbit’s shuddering haunches. “I saw these posters everywhere.” He paused. “I pulled them all down.” He stepped aside to show me the bureau drawer, which was filled with multiples of the Miss Molly poster. “I saw the girl who put them up. She has red hair. Two of those, what are they called …” He frowned. “Pigtails!”
“Okay.” I grinned. “That’s bad.”
Suddenly we were laughing, hard; even Saturday, with her rump-shaking tremors, appeared to be laughing along with us.
Eric stopped first. Before I heard the hinge squeak, Eric was on his feet, hustling across the room on ballerina toes to shut the bedroom door. Just before it closed I watched a hunched shape flow past and enter a maple cavity that I assumed was their bathroom. It was the same old guy who had almost mowed me down in the snouty green Cadillac on Delmar Street not thirty minutes ago. Relationship to Eric: unclear.
“Is that your father?”
Eric’s face was bright red.
“Your, ah, your grandfather? Your uncle? Your mom’s boyfriend?”
Eric Mutis, whom we could not embarrass at school, who would return your gaze without shame no matter what names you called him, did not answer me now or meet my eyes.
“That’s fine, whatever,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me shit about your situation. Honey, I can’t even say my own last name.”
I barked with laughter, because what the hell? Where the hell had that come from, my calling him “honey”?
Eric smiled. “Peaches,” he said, “that’s just fine.”
For a second we stared at each other. Then we roared. It was the first and last joke I ever heard him try to make. We clutched our stomachs and stumbled around, knocking into one another.
“Shh!” Eric said between gasps, pointing wildly at the bedroom door. “Shhh, Larry!”
And then we got quiet, me and Eric Mutis. The rabbit stood on her haunches and drank water, making a white comma between us; the whole world got quieter and quieter, until that kissy sound of a mouth getting water was all you could hear. For a minute or two, catching our breath, we got to be humans together.