Chapter 3: Randy Rabbit and the Discussion of Metaphysics
[The previous chapters of this long piece of dreck can be found here]
Standing before Sterling was a rabbit, or possibly a hare. Sterling couldn’t tell which, though it was, in fact, a hare. The animal didn’t look anything like any rabbit he had ever seen. It stood upright, almost three and a half feet tall, and wore a set of horned-rimmed glasses, a white button-down shirt with a tie, and a pair of very worn khaki shorts cinched at the waist with a green web belt. On his feet were a pair of droopy sweat socks stuffed into large brown shoes with untied laces. The fur on the top of his head was standing up, as if unkempt, and one of his long ears was bent in the middle, flopping forward as though it was losing air.
The creature looked to Stirling like the living embodiment of a cartoon rabbit, except that it was quite real and three dimensional, covered in fur that had genuine texture and exhaling air that was warm, wet, and laced with the smell of tobacco and pot smoke.
There was a long pause after the rabbit asked his question. Sterling, Shash, and the rabbit all stood in prolonged silence. Sterling was not sure what to say. The rabbit seemed to be waiting for an answer to his question, and the bear was either not experiencing the awkwardness of the situation or not willing to dispel it.
The rabbit waited, then stepped forward and craned his neck up towards Sterling and asked, “Who, the fuck, are you?”
It was a nerdy voice, and the rabbit’s buck teeth rendered his profanity more comic than threatening. Still, Sterling was dumbstruck and said nothing, and the rabbit, who had large, expressive hands with thick, bulbous fingers, began to make a pointing gesture that was quite clearly headed for Sterling’s chest. He repeated the question a second time, “Who, the fuck, are you?” and was about to begin on a third recitation when he was interrupted by the bear.
“He’s an American I found at the crossroads”
“I can tell he’s a American, Shash.” Said the rabbit. “What I’m asking is ‘who the fuck is he?’ Can he talk?”
“I’m Sterling,” said Sterling, and he extended a hand.
“Aha, very good,” said the rabbit. “You speak English.”
“So do you,” said Sterling.
“Indeed, I do.” said the Rabbit.
“I speak some Lapine,” Said Sterling, and as soon as he said it he wasn’t sure he should have. He had read Watership Down in high school, and remembered that the rabbits in that book spoke Lapine. He was instantly afraid that his comment would sound incomprehensible, absurd, or offensive, but the rabbit smiled a big toothy grin and asked, “What words in Lapine do you know?”
Sterling only knew two words, one for “droppings” and one for “fox”.
“homba,” Sterling said, “which, I think, means ‘fox’.”
“Indeed it does,” said the rabbit. “Do you know what ‘a tafo u pahyt ol mi rusami a émar hli rul embleer yona’ means?”
The rabbit waited a beat before continuing.
“I thought not. It means, ‘I tongue the tail of your sister and mate her like a stinking hedgehog.’”
The rabbit smiled, let out a little chuckle, then pushed a finger into the bridge of his glasses to reset them back on his nose.
“I’ll have to teach you some more words. It’s much more fun to learn Lapine than Elvish or Klingon. Come inside. We can talk while we get high.”
He looked toward the bear. “Shash, I hope you brought some dope, because I don’t have enough skunk in my jar to get you and an American high.”
With that the rabbit turned and went into his hole. The bear motioned for Sterling to follow. In he went, following the rabbit into what turned out to to be a basement like hole. It wasn’t ornate and comfy like a hobbit hole, nor a cold earthen chamber like a mole hole, but a series of rooms with the stale air of a subterranean apartment and furnished in the style of a boarding school common room. There were two large sofas, a wide TV surrounded by a jumble of electronics, and several mismatched lamps. None of the lamp shades matched one another. One had a map, another was covered in rabbit silhouettes, and a third had a paisley pattern. The best looking shade in the room was a plain hunter green one.
The walls were covered with a riot of framed ephemera: pictures, postcards, clippings, advertising labels, and magazine covers, all of which looked familiar to Sterling although he could not identify the people, events or products depicted in them.
The center point of the room was most decidedly the TV, but two couches ran perpendicular to it, facing one another over a long coffee table. There was a yellow Naugahyde easy chair at the end of this boulevard, flanked on one side by a large brass lamp and on the other by a standup ashtray. It was the kind of large, glass topped ashtray that used to be used in bus stations.
Around the chair, which was clearly the command center of the room, were books, magazines, dirty mugs, and plates of half eaten food. There were beer bottles with varying amounts of liquid in them, and small piles of ashes that had missed the ashtray.
“I’ll take the helm,” said the rabbit jumping into the yellow Naugahyde chair.
“Engage, motherfuckers.” He said to nobody in particular.
Shash sat down on one of the sofas and began pawing at a large bag of brown pot that he had produced from somewhere. Sterling took his seat opposite the bear.
The rabbit watched Shash for a moment and then turned to Sterling and asked, “So, how did you end up here?”
It seemed a perfectly natural question, so Sterling began to answer it as best he could. “I was in a bar in New York City and there were these people who were singing songs. One of them was a beautiful woman. They invited me to go with them, and when we walked out of the back door of the bar we were somewhere I had never been before, a grassy set of hills, and they moved too quickly for me so I ended up alone. I walked for a while and met Shash. I have no idea where I am or how I got here.”
“You followed the faeries,” said the rabbit, “And those heartless motherfuckers let you come. I wonder why they did that.”
“Just to be cruel,” said Shash, “you followed a tail through the door and then they ditched you.”
“Yea,” said the rabbit, “You didn’t look at their asses, did you? You should never look at the ass of a faerie.”
Sterling felt quite ashamed and stupid, for he suddenly felt that he should have known not to look at the ass of a faerie, so he looked down at his feet and admitted that it was the ass of a woman that he followed in off the street.
His admission sent the two animals into a fit of giggling, the bear chuckling conservatively as he packed a hit into the bong while the rabbit succumbed to minor guffaws.
“Well, how could you not?” laughed the rabbit. “Shash will deny it, but I believe he has fifty or sixty gigabytes of porn devoted to faerie asses. He’ll say that he is only interested in Sow tail, but I know that he has a faerie ass fetish.”
“That’s complete bullshit,” said Shash, who was looking for a lighter.
Sterling’s mind had seized on the phrase “porn” in relation to “faerie” and now could not control his impulse to ask about it.
“Is there really faerie porn?” he asked.
“It’s not what you think,” said the rabbit, “don’t get your hopes up. You can’t film a faerie, so they dress people up, like furries or cosplay. It has none of the enchantment you experienced.”
The bear’s preparations, which he had done with considerable dexterity, were complete. Though his paws were large, he had no trouble lighting a small disposable lighter and putting it to the bowl of a large bamboo bong that he held with the other hand. Sterling watched with fascination as the bear took a prolonged bong hit. There were several reasons for his astonishment.
First, the amount of pot the bear was burning through was enormous. The bowl on the bong was large, but onto it the bear and sculpted a tightly packed dome of pot that looked like a small mountain. Second, the bear put his nose, not his mouth, in the end of the bong, and through his nose was able to create enough vacuum to burn through the bowl. Last, the gurgling and bubbling of the bong went on forever. It took minutes, but the bear sat and inhaled calmly, with his small eyes focused on the burning embers, blinking occasionally and utterly still. At the very moment that the bowl was completely burned through he made one last violent snort, the ash disappeared into the chamber, the bear released the carb, cleared the bong, sat back, waited an awfully long time, and then exhaled such a prodigious amount of pot smoke that the room darkened from the vapor.
While the bear began to pack another bong hit, Sterling decided that he would ask some questions. There were so many things that he wanted to know. This seemed to him like a good time to ask.
“The faeries,” he began, “Are they like elves or do they fly around like Tinkerbell?”
“When you say ‘elves’,” the rabbit asked, “are you asking, ‘are they like the Tolkien elves?’”
“Yes, I guess,” said Sterling.
“Well, they are kind of similar to Tolkien elves, or to the Faeries of Irish folk tales, except that they fuck a lot.”
“They don’t fuck a lot,” said the bear, handing the bong to the rabbit, “you’d like to think they fuck a lot, but I’ve always heard that they don’t fuck at all. That they are totally… what’s the word…”
“Celibate?” said the rabbit. “My ass they’re celibate. Those faeries fuck, you can bet on that, and what’s more, they’re into all kinds of perversion, like they like to shit on glass tables and stuff. Don’t let their good looks and pretty voices fool you. They are totally fucking depraved, or I’m a pig and not a rabbit.”
With that the rabbit took the bong and the lighter that were being offered to him by the bear and took a manic bong hit. The amount of pot he inhaled was no smaller, but whereas the bear had done his with relaxed confidence, the rabbit was full of histrionics. He too stuck his nose in the bong, but he made a great show of lighting the lighter. His eyes bulged as he took the hit. He made a humming noise as he cleared the chamber and then pulled away violently like a puffed up toad before making a long, loud, exhale. He blew a stream of smoke around the room as if spraying a fire hose. Handing the bong back to Shash he said, “you better pack Sterling a smaller hit, we don’t want to kill him on his first day in Oz.”
“Is that where I am,” Sterling asked, “Am I in Oz?”
“Well, you’re not in Kansas anymore,” said the bear, which sent him and the rabbit into peels of laughter.
“No, really,” said Sterling, taking the bong, “where am I?”
“Well,” said the Rabbit, “It’s hard to say. In your language the closest we could come is to say Quamiquatimitaugolaki, which means ‘a good place to eat oysters in May’, but most Americans who come here just call this place ‘The Land of Nod’, ‘Mushamaguntic’, or ‘The Land of the Faeries.’ I could try to help you understand the relationship of your world to this one if you know some math. Have you ever taken a class in topology?”
The blank stare on Sterling’s face was all the answer that the rabbit needed, so he went on. “Suffice it to say that we understand you, since the metaphysically higher plane of being assumes the lower, and, therefore, your cultural references are not lost on us, from bad Twilight Zone episodes…”
“I like Twilight Zone,” said the bear, who hadn’t seemed like he was paying attention. The rabbit shot him a dismissive glance and then continued “… to the intricacies of the ‘unwritten rules’ of baseball, we understand where you come from, but, I’m afraid, there is a lot about Mushamaguntic that you won’t, and probably can’t, understand.”
The rabbit paused, and looked at the bong in Sterling’s hand… a subtle clue that the guest should get on with it. Sterling put his mouth to the chamber and began slowly sucking while holding the lighter to the bowl. He had done plenty of bong hits in his life, but even the ‘reduced’ hit that the bear had packed seemed much too large to him. He was determined, however, to make a go of it. He drew a long, slow breath and felt the smoke entering his lungs. It wasn’t harsh, and he grew confident that he could complete the hit without much trouble. As he came near the end of the pot in the bowl he looked up, his mouth still on the bong, and saw his two companions looking at him with horror. The rabbit’s eyes were wide and his mouth was hanging open while the bear was squinting intensely at him. Not sure what they were bothered by, Sterling felt a sudden panic. He rushed the end of the hit, didn’t suck the ash completely through the stem, carbed too early and took his face off the bong while pot smoke still streamed from the bamboo tube.
The smoke in his lungs lurched up into his throat and nose. His chest could not hold the hit, and his attempt to hold his mouth rigidly closed only meant that when a sudden paroxysm seized him, the smoke came shooting out of his nose, and then his mouth, in a eruption of smoke and snot and coughing.
Sterling coughed, and coughed, and coughed. His head went flush and felt as if it were on fire. The room began to swim. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and also used it to blot his eyes and wipe his mouth. Meanwhile the rabbit and bear sat staring at him, making no effort to help, and not responding to Sterling’s profuse apologies and excuses. After a long while the room when silent, the two animals still staring at Sterling.
“Barbarism,” said the rabbit.
“Maybe we should smoke a joint,” said the bear.
“That would be a good idea,” said the rabbit, “so long as we don’t use papers you have been carrying around in your ass.” Then turning to Sterling he went on, “didn’t you wonder where the bear carried his pot? I mean, he has no pockets in that old basketball jersey he is wearing, so where did he carry the pot?”
“Don’t worry, Sterling,” said the bear, “I didn’t carry the pot in my ass.”
“Then where did you carry it?” asked the rabbit.
“I don’t need to tell you where I carry my stuff, but I didn’t carry it in my ass.” Sterling wasn’t curious about how the bear carried his bag of pot, though he did begin to wonder, but he was still concerned about where he was and how he got there. It all seemed so very strange, and yet not strange at all, and now that he was stoned, for the pot he had smoked seemed remarkably powerful… in a pleasant, clean, kind of way… he felt very relaxed about his new circumstance and maybe not that curious. Curious enough perhaps to ask at least one more question, but before he could ask anything, and to be fair he was having great difficulty forming a question in his head, which was now swimming along in a sea of somnambulant weirdness with thoughts spinning out infinitely, so that he was left just thinking, and thinking, about he wasn’t sure what, but before he could ask what he wanted to ask the rabbit seemed to anticipate his question and said, “What you should be trying to figure out is not where you are, but why you’re here…”
The rabbit would have continued talking but he was suddenly interrupted by an electronic alarm that, although persistent, struck Sterling as quite pretty, though the rabbit didn’t seem to react to it that way. He reached into the pocket of his shorts and hurriedly produced a cell phone, which he turned on, looked at, and then immediately blanched with horror.
“Shit!” he screamed, “The Pigs! The Pigs! The fucking pigs are coming! Hide the bong and get rid of that dope! I’m going to hide the food.”
With that he jumped up ran out of the room and into the adjoining butler’s pantry, from where there was suddenly a great racket of things being moved. There were sharp sounds of cupboards banging and locks being thrown.
Sterling had no idea what to make of the scene, but he was immediately infected with vicarious panic and helped, as best he could, clean up the detritus of their bong session.
The bear, for his part, didn’t seemed panicked at all, though he was moving quickly. The bong and pot were already gone. His large paws made a quick, effective sweep of the table. He chuckled in a low, soft voice, “don’t worry about the pigs.”
“Are the pigs pigs or cops?” asked Sterling.
“Pigs are pigs,” said the bear, “Just be polite and everything will be fine. Try not to promise them anything.”
Sterling still wasn’t sure if the pigs were pigs, and he didn’t feel like everything was going to be fine, especially with the rabbit cursing explosively in the next room. There was a loud knock on the door. Randy appeared in the doorway from to the other room and stood motionless for a second. His face looked ashen.
“The pigs are here,” he said.
