A Quick One Before the Worm

8/8 - 8/25

We found a little rabbit at the end of the driveway last night. He tried, but he couldn’t even crawl. We think his legs are broken.

We put him in a big U-Haul box in the garage, with towels to rest on and a bowl of water. We haven’t named him, in case he died in the night. There wasn’t any blood we could see, and Gwen pointed out if there were internal bleeding he would’ve been visibly closer to death than he was. Working with animals is hard because you just wish they’d understand your words and that you want to help. But I guess help isn’t really a huge part of, I don’t know, the Wild. Especially for rabbits. The little things.

I guess it’s originally spoken in The Night of the Hunter (love and hate and a big bad wolf), but it’s Nicolas Cage’s variation in Raising Arizona that has repeated itself often and random in my head; “sometimes it’s a hard world for small things.” The baby-hunting biker from Hell or Elsewhere is “hard on the little things - the soft and gentle creatures.” The entire film floats and occasionally barrels on this soft-spoken and desperate narration, the calmly confounded observations of a man who simply wants normalcy, a neutrality of existence where everything simply happens without this looming need to escape or solve or save the world, save his world. 

To be neutral is a choice, often made for the sake of personal comfort. I know I choose that silent preservative purgatory every day. Neutrality demands a denial of yourself for the affirmation of, most often, shit people. Cruelty is as much a choice, and a cowardly one. By action or inaction; cruel action, the very word “cruel,” necessitates an imbalance of power. To take a cruel action is to hurt something that never stood a chance so that you can feel strong. A cruel inaction, indistinguishable from neutrality, is to avoid the chance of harm to yourself at the direct and certain cost of a smaller, weaker, or reasonably distant thing. 

In the film’s ending, H.I. and Edwina McDunnough return the oblivious infant and kidnapped surrogate-to-be, Nathan Arizona Junior, to his wealthy parents. After fighting for so long to keep the kid and even vanquishing the Devil Maybe to bring him back to their own arms; after fleeing from police, criminals, a demon, and a foreman, they clamber back into the bedroom where it all began and quietly bid farewell to the child who could never be theirs. And yes, while the act is one of self-preservation, it is also an act of understanding. An understanding that to rob anyone of that vessel for love and joy, the surreal and indescribable joy of creating something from yourself that will exist and create one day for itself, to try and claim their joy and declare it yours is impossible and cruel. The act of kidnapping was cruel, and the un-act of keeping the baby and creating their son was cruel. It would be cruel to claim control of any of these lives in this way. And what of the grand irony, that this act of kindness, this empathetic epiphany, is only possible because of their own cruel actions at the film’s beginning? 

Is a pragmatic kindness any less kind than the elusive True Kindness?

It’s the human element that makes remorse and forgiveness possible. These are the only things that allow for the concept of cruelty at all, that create new facts of the world. Nature may be cruel; for the longest time nature was all there was, we argue all the time about nature as the arbiter of law, the shepherd that fences humanity in the pasture of existing. We are separate, we exist in this section of a larger thing, but everything that occurs in our sector is defined by the facts of that larger thing. 

Doesn’t the fact that we describe nature as cruel, in opposition to something kind, mean that we have made our own rules? We have made possible actions that render “nature” malleable? 

I am not a philosopher. I’ve maybe made many leaps in logic here, but where is the logic, where is the structure, where is the blueprint and the foundation anywhere in nature? Is the foundation the absence of one, other than the non-specific food chain? I get that every life can end at any time, and that terrifies me, and I’m only twenty-three years old. But is that the frame that we use to describe with logic why someone must die? Is that how we rationalize the death of people who can speak about their own fears and frustrations where animals can’t? It’s just the circle of life. It’s a big world, people die, people are killed. 

It must seem melodramatic, too; to dribble some half-awake thought droppings on the nature of death and the Grand Pattern out of some goofy movie that I really like. But there’s a rabbit in a box in a garage who may or may not be dead and who we, who I, may or may not have helped, who I may or may not have hurt. To see it squeak and squirm (because it couldn’t thrash) as my partner gently lifted him from the pavement, good god, can you imagine? The rabbit in the box in the garage probably doesn’t know kindness. Animals can know love, but a wild rabbit, one of those small things, knows mostly fear. There are rabbits all over my neighborhood, and whenever I see one, it always knows its being perceived, and all it can do is shrink or run. And imagine having those two options stripped from you, imagine losing them and being grabbed by one of the big things that is always out to get you and it’s so dark outside and it’s so dark in the box and everywhere you used to look for food disappears, your evolutionary and lived knowledge of the order of the universe is gone and you are more aware than ever of your own inconsequence, but you obviously still don’t want to die because you’ve spent so long running from it in the first place.

You can’t know that the big things are terrified for you; that their own selfish happiness, their own function in whatever they must do when they aren’t hunting and running you and your fellow small things ragged, all of this depends on you merely surviving. You can’t know if they sleep at all, and you can’t know if they have lost sleep. You can’t know if there is a plan for you or if you will bleed out slowly in the dark, starving and thirsty and too afraid and too broken to do anything about it.

You can’t know what they mean, you can’t know if they have helped you or hurt you. You can’t even know if they tried.

In 15 minutes, I’ll call the nearby Wildlife Rehab Center. If they’re full up, we’ll call another one. Until we have a certain place to take him, I won’t know if he’s alive or dead. For at least 15 more minutes I won’t know if the rabbit we tried to feed, picked up in our hands, and placed inside a dark box in a dark garage in a house that stinks of dog, of predator; for 15 more minutes, I won’t know if the rabbit made it through the night. I will never know how much pain it was in through the night. I’ll never know if it slept at all, unless it was to die. The fact that a living and a dying could be happening in my proximity is surreal, and the potentially never knowing if what we did helped or hurt isn’t exactly terrifying, but it is surreal. All of these things always happening, all of these tiny shocks and confusions that threaten to destroy your mind and your safety, despite their inconsequence. Right at this moment, when it feels your only options are to lean into your day job until you forget you ever hated it, or start fighting the people around you who are evil, who are cruel. The people whose first instinct when a moth lands by their feet is to stomp on it. And all the while, the rabbit could be dying. Death in your home, death by you, death apart from you. Or it could be living, to be released, living by you, and living forever because of you, living apart from you; all apart from you and right next to you. 

Two hundred dollars being drained from your bank account without warning. The rhythmic grinding under the hood of the car that reminds you of its tool-ship, that makes it feel ten years older. The car you have to sell to a stranger off the internet. The job you have to work, the life you want but don’t have. The apartment you hope you can find. The doctors you have to see. And the broken, wide-eyed rabbit you try to save.