Bunny Goes to the City

by Phi Le

Not once in my life have I ever been considered good-looking or remarkable in any way. I have an utterly forgettable face, and I generally don’t like to say much. That’s fine. I just do what I’m supposed to: go to junior high, give the Old Man a hand around the house, and work my after-school cashier job at the Quik-o-rama. I’ve done nothing that I’m particularly proud of, except maybe that one time during the big storm, the biggest one yet, when we got three years’ worth of rain in three days, submerging the poorer neighborhoods underwater—it was me—some thirteen-year-old boy—who held down the fort and kept the store open.

But most days, you’ll just find me walking around, headed home, or going back and forth between school and the Quik-o-rama. I’ll often take a shortcut on the steel bridge over the river channel, thinking about things and not really looking where I’m going. Along the way, I bump into the fisherman drunk in the middle of the day, or the disheveled old lady pushing a shopping cart full of cans; it’s dangerous to walk around with your head in the clouds, they tell me. The clouds are usually a dull shade of lavender, and woolly, like sheep on a livid field, and my head is a shaggy dog moving among them, herding them from here to there.

When I get home, I herd the Old Man’s things from here to there—his half-drunk mugs of coffee leaving rings on everything, dishes painted with ketchup and egg yolk, newspaper clippings, bicycle helmet, bathrobe. I herd the dusty pooch from the sofa to the yard, the Old Man from his twenty-four-hour news cycle to the dinner table.

“Can you believe it!” the Old Man would say. “They shot a kid the same age as you! Unarmed! With his back to them! Brazen! Ludicrous! Homicidal! Right in the butt cheek! On a school day! He could have died! Gosh, I mean, what if it was you! He had the same stupid-ass face as you! The country’s up in arms about it!”

The days go by, like a freight train that rolls through town one day and is gone the next, and before I know it, it’s my fourteenth birthday. Choo-choo. The Old Man gets into a fight with someone in line at the bakery, so this year, instead of a cake, all I get is a cheap bouquet of flowers from the gas station. “Town full of miserable old farts!” the Old Man shouts out of the window of the car going home.

The day after my birthday, a postcard comes in the mail. It’s from my brother. Look, says the Old Man. Let me see that, I say. It reads:

ON THE ROAD. MET A GIRL. ARGENTINIAN.

CHESS CHAMPION. SHE’S MARVELOUS.

THINKING OF YOU AND THE KID.

My brother and I had been saving up for a pair of train tickets to go to the city. We could have asked the Old Man to take us, but we wanted to go on our own, without him following us around to make sure we stayed out of trouble. We’d hatched a magnificent plan, but at the end of the day, we didn’t go. Instead, my brother had to leave. So he left. See ya! Now I’m stuck here with the Old Man.

Well, with the Old Man and my brother’s other girlfriend, Susanna Sorprendimipiccola, who comes to our house all the time, even though no one invited her. I say “my brother’s other girlfriend,” but I’m not sure if she still considers herself my brother’s girlfriend or if she even knows about his new Argentinian girlfriend. Long after my brother left, she’s still showing up almost every day, right after the streetlights come on, when I’m just getting back from the Quik-o-rama, when I want nothing more than a quiet home and a hot plate without her motormouth running constantly. But the Old Man doesn’t seem to mind having her around. She helps out around the house, hoses down the dog, moves boxes of my brother’s things where the Old Man points. Then we sit down at the dinner table and eat. Me, the Old Man, the dog, and Susanna, gobbling down our food like pigs at a trough. It pisses me off.

One time, I asked my brother why he liked Susanna so much. He told me that her mischief helped the days go by.

So then it’s a school night again. I sleep beside the open window with the streetlight’s glow filling the room and fan blades spinning down the hours. It’s hard to fall asleep in this kind of weather. I think for a long time about everything before dozing off. I think, for example, about the kid who was shot, who wouldn’t be able to sit squarely in a chair again. I put myself in his shoes: it must have hurt. But the thunderclap of the gunshot would have been more painful than the bullet itself. With his back turned, empty-handed, empty and not asking for anything but to be left alone. I just want to be left alone.

I think of Susanna, for some reason. About how I saw her once, all alone, crouched down on the paved embankment of the river channel under the overpass, trying to smoke a cigarette. I felt sorry for her at the time.

Outside my window, I imagine there’s a train leaving the station, moving along the seafront with the water going right up to the tracks, and in one of the cars there’s my brother and his Argentinian girlfriend, their butt cheeks unscathed. I think of my brother and his girlfriend and of all the brothers and all the girlfriends on all the trains whisking lovey-dovey couples away.

We were supposed to go to the city together, I whisper, one of those pointless things you say to yourself without realizing it right before you fall asleep. Night-night sweet peas gasping for water on the dresser. Night-night hysterical grown-ups in line at the bakery. Night-night dumb town where nothing good ever happens.

In the dark of early morning, I wake from a half-baked dream with an uncomfortable fullness tenting up my shorts. I drag myself out of bed to take a piss, thinking about how life in this town is humdrum the majority of the time, full of ordinary, day-to-day humiliations meant to keep you in your place. When who should I run into in the hallway but Susanna Sorprendimipiccola.

“Old Man! What is Susanna doing here this early!”

“Your Old Man let me spend the night,” Susanna says, getting in my way.

“I don’t remember being asked.”

“Your Old Man and I have a very special relationship, Bunny.”

Susanna is one of those people who loves to get a rise out of you. Everything that comes out of her mouth is a scandal or a blatant lie, and the worst part is that the Old Man seems to find it amusing. What’s the point of entertaining a washed-up old windbag like him? It just reeks of desperation. 

“You just eat our food and waste our time,” I say. “That’s the only relationship you have with anyone in this house. Don’t call me Bunny.”

“Your Old Man showed me his big, firm, heart-shaped California King. You should’ve seen us rolling around on it like a couple of lizards!”

“Shut up! Don’t make me puke!”

“Rolling around like a bowling ball of passion scoring a strike on ten pins of hanky and panky and rubby and squeaky and ohh la la!”

“I said shut up! Have some respect for yourself! It’s disgusting!”

“We were like two people trying to put on the same pair of pants in the back of a runaway car that’s going off the side of a cliff!”

“Shut up shut up shut up shut up! The Old Man wouldn’t go near you! My brother doesn’t even want you! He’s got a new girlfriend! She’s from Argentina! She’s a chess champion!”

Susanna goes quiet, for a moment. But it’s a non-committal silence, like she’s about to order something at a Chinese takeout.

“What am I, chop suey?” she says.

“Do you think you sound cool when you say things like that!”

“Most things are a mystery to me,” Susanna says. “I don’t give it much thought. Every day we say things that have nothing to do with anything. Like the other morning, when I shouted out to my Ma that I was going to work or school or the moon, even though I knew she was still lying down snoring like thunder. Maybe the dog heard and turned over in its sleep. It’s like that: everything is just something we say in a dog’s dream. Anyway, I’m taking you to school on my scooter. Old Man’s orders!”

“Old Man! I am not going to school with this psychopath!”

“Yes, you are, you little brat!” Susanna leaps, swinging me out the door by the collar of my shirt. “I will beat you until your brains leak out of your ears! Now do you want to do this the easy way or the hard way!”

And then, in the hazy light of dawn, I’m on the back of Susanna’s scooter, fumbling to put on my helmet when we take off so fast I think I’ve left my soul behind. Sayonara, ugly grey house full of memories I have little reason to remember.

Backstreets, alleys, train tracks, culverts, stair landings fly by in a blur. We narrowly miss a procession of orphans led by a nun, cause a pile-up on the expressway, scatter a gang of alley cats in the middle of their poker game. I shout for Susanna to slow down and choke on wind as we plummet down the hillside, floating weightless above the saddle, hanging on by our fingertips. I have no choice but to throw my arms around Susanna’s waist for dear life. She’s shockingly warm, like the dog when he’s been asleep all day, and you wake him just to give belly scratches for no reason other than that you don’t know what else to do with yourself. We cross the steel bridge and Susanna makes a sudden turn in the opposite direction we’re supposed to be going.

“Hey, this is the wrong way!” I shout. “School’s that way!”

“We’re not going to school, Bunny!” Susanna laughs maniacally. “We’re going to the city!”

She throttles the engine and the scooter’s front wheel leaps up like a spooked rabbit. Then she screams and the engine screams and I scream and we’re shot right through the forehead of the world, turning everything in our path into spaghetti.

Susanna takes us all the way to the station, where the train’s waiting at the platform, and we get on; besides us, the train is empty. Off we go, with a gentle rumble of the carriage. Hasta la vista, junior high school, full of desperate, horny teens who will never amount to anything and will never know any better. Susanna marches noisily around the car, throwing her things all over the place.

“You ever been to the city, Bunny?” 

My brother and I were supposed to go to the city together, I think to myself. We were going to take the train. Whoosh! Like the wind, blowing our sleepy little town far, far away.

“Whoosh! Like the wind,” I say.

“I grew up in the city,” says Susanna. “Things got a little hairy and we had to leave. I can’t wait to see the look on everyone’s faces when they see me! Sound the air raid sirens! Call in the army! It’s Godzilla!”

I can picture it. Susanna returns to the city having grown absurdly since the last time they saw her, at least ninety meters high in flats, you couldn’t see all of her from the twenty-eighth floor of your office building, only her collarbone, the pale green lipstick, the row of slightly crooked teeth as she makes a sensational remark clearly intended to push your buttons. People flee the streets in terror. The enormous amount of property damage she causes alone amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars, not to mention the eventual therapy bills for all the trauma inflicted. She’s back to wreak havoc, out of spite for a hateful and misguided humanity that inadvertently created her when they split the atom. 

Susanna sits down beside me, as talkative as ever, but I’ve gotten used to it. There’s a certain rhythm to her words, which, if I close my eyes, synchronizes with the swaying of the train car. In the gauzy light, exactly when I’m not sure, I fall asleep, my head somehow finding its way into her lap. She smells like ozone. The light filtering through her hair flashes pink and yellow in the membranous darkness of my eyelids. 

I dream one last time of being in the city with my brother: we barrel down the street in raucous laughter, cheer on some kids on skates as they pants a cop from behind and glide away between rows of flashing arcade games, flipping the bird. We watch graffiti artists spray DayGlo Mona Lisas on the marble facade of the big bank, and go to an underground punk rock show behind a big metal door outside of a dingy neon-soaked alley. Then we take the elevator up fifty-two stories to the sky deck and see it all glittering like a galaxy below.

“You shouldn’t have left,” I tell him. “Do you know what it’s like to be stuck there in that house with the Old Man? He’s totally useless!” But my brother doesn’t have anything to say to me, because it’s just a dream.

I sit up to find that Susanna is gone, the place she was sitting in still slightly warm. But I’m not alone; where did all these other people come from? It takes me a moment to wipe the sleep from my eyes and concentrate: the train is full of Susannas. Or rather, it is full of young women who at first glance cannot be distinguished from Susanna, except when they turn and look you dead in the eye, and then you realize that one has a more delicate nose than Susanna, or another has braces or a mole or an eye patch. Then it occurs to me that they are all accompanied by a teenage boy, exactly like me, one for each Susanna.

As the train enters the station, they’re already prying the doors open, and a wave of Susannas and their boy companions crashes onto the platform from every car, dragging me out with them. I shout Susanna’s name like a beachgoer who’s gone out too far in the water, but it’s no use. There are too many of them, all talking at once, boisterous, sing-song, call-and-response. They shove me from left to right, back and forth, up and down, I don’t even know which direction I’m going anymore. Our whole ungainly mass surges forward in unison, down into the square, like a great lumbering beast with too many legs.

The true extent of our numbers is revealed in the square. We fill the entire city, so many of us, in some places four or five kids high, falling over garden walls, clinging to the tops of streetlamps, swinging wildly into open second-story windows where someone is soaking in a bath or lathering their cheeks for a shave. Every other kid is holding a picket sign. JUSTICE FOR THE BOY WHO WAS SHOT—WITH HIS BACK TURNED—IN THE BUTT CHEEK—AND COULD HAVE DIED, one sign reads.

I watch a group of children take down a policeman and strip him to his boxers in the middle of the street, where they tickle him mercilessly. He’s making faces and convulsing with laughter, but the children don’t let up. They are unstoppable, full of moral clarity and righteous purpose. A few more seconds and suddenly, in a puff of pink smoke, the cop goes pop and a bright green parrot flaps frantically away from the scene of the crime.

Hesitating at first, I lend a hand to the children. We set the zoo animals free, torch a police car, and chuck bricks through the window of a department store. But my heart isn’t in it. The sun is already low in the sky, and I’m afraid I won’t find my Susanna again. When who should turn up but Susanna herself, her clothes soiled and torn, her hair matted and full of debris. She’s dragging one foot behind her and bleeding from the nose, but is all smiles.

“Where were you, Bunny?” she says, still out of breath. “You missed the show. We did it. We burned it all to the ground.”

I take Susanna’s hand and we walk across the square, the air around us full of the flapping of parrots’ wings. Somewhere in the distance an oil refinery blows up.

“You having fun, Bunny? This is almost as fun as mooning cars on the overpass. Your brother and I used to do it together. We’d sidle up to the fence and on the count of three pull our pants down for the world to see. It was a marvelous feeling.”

At that moment, we break into a run, until we come upon a policeman who’s blowing his whistle and trying to pull out his pistol, which he finds is suddenly a balloon animal. And we count down together. One! Two! Three! A united front, we turn and drop our pants. It’s wonderful: the look of complete and utter shock on the cop’s face. Another green parrot soars into the wild blue ether.

“I love you, Susanna,” I blurt out.

Susanna laughs in my face, and it begins to pour.

Published November 3rd, 2024