Introduction
I knew I was dead, you know.
I remember the glass, the lights, the rapid beeping of the EKG machine, but at that moment of tango between the afterlife and the wake I'm not sure I cared. There was nothing to lose at that moment. I think I even felt relieved; I wanted Death's cruel arms to welcome me to what everybody so essentially called the resting place, a 'better' place.
I forgot who I was for a brief moment. I had forgotten that I had even lived (or lived at all) in California or had gone to Hampton. I had even forgotten the Greek Class and the string of unfortunate events that lead me to live the way I do.
I was on a train after that rapid progression of limbo-like events(which, for a while, was hard to break down in my years of confusion and disorientation). I'm not sure what we—a man with the familiar broad stature and coolness of Henry, was sitting across from me—were passing through but there was a dark tint to everything. The train was a little of like a painting slowly being made; strokes of the canvas multiplying and making everything a little more detailed with each passing second(minute? hour?).
The inside of the train was dark and barely any light had made it's way through no matter how bright the sun—or perhaps it were the stars, or city lights—shone from beyond the train. Everything felt a little transparent, alike to how I faded in and out of consciousness in the hospital, numb and unfeeling. In fact, it was like we were passing mere photographs of time, still and yet so clearly had been alive. Photographs were funny like that. It tries to capture an essence in time with so little yet so significant distortions. I had felt, in a way, that was what my memory was like, photographs.
Henry and I had fallen into a strange yet somewhat familiar silence. In fact, it had reminded me a little of our time in the winter as we tended to our silent obligations of chores in the house. We didn't need to regard to each other as we did them because there was no need to.
Henry was smoking a cigarette between his index and middle, the cigarette of which were his usual Lucky Strikes ('Lucky Strikes Again! '). He neither looked alive or dead and my theory is that my projection of Henry, the familiarity and the memories of which built Henry to be how I thought he was, had manifested itself to him, or rather his form. There was that familiar bullet hole I had seen in my dreams and that inscrutable gaze. It's a little hard to explain, but it was of a confined subsection of a sonder-like feeling, where you had been suddenly stricken with the fact that you don't truly know someone as one would know itself—from birth to present—despite being with them for a long time, and that how you saw the person may not be true and in fact just may be a hologram of who they truly are.
I also knew that Bunny was in the train too, somewhere. I don't know.
"I thought you had an appointment?" I finally said after what felt like years collapsed in a matter of seconds.
Henry didn't answer for a while, blowing out smoke. I think he answered sometime during the ride (I had not been able to remember) because afterwards he asked, as if I hadn't even said anything yet, "And you? Where are you headed to?"
"I was going to Plano." I said. It was the only remnant of my death I could properly remember before somehow, my life as it was, slowly dissolved, or faded, not into nothingness but into somewhere, with everything else that had disappeared in life. I had been heading there. I think I was just desperate to see somebody I knew, somebody that hadn't appeared only later in life and had 'known' me through childhood, whether that person was my mum or a lost childhood friend.
"Was?" Henry questioned, not with much of a tone with curiosity as it was just wanting—not so much a want as it was a mission to collect information—to know.
"I don't know what happened."
Henry looked at me, expressionless. I couldn't decipher or gorge out any feelings of worry or care or anything at all through that face; a successful wall excluding emotion.
"Where's Bunny?"
"He's already where he needs to be." Henry answered calmly and as if relaying information from a piece of paper.
"That doesn't sound right." I say. And it didn't. Bunny was the first out of all of us to get onto this train, yet him leaving before us, all of us—though he would leave, in some fashion, I knew, but I felt a surge of doubt within me—sounded so untrue and even a little offending to think about. Offending in his honour. Bunny was stubborn (whether that trait was admirable was up to anyone, really, but over the years I had come to find it endearing as it made Bunny who he is) and would wait for us, though not before giving us some complaint of sore feet and springing into a story of how it was such an abysmal experience to be on the train. It could be been anybody that departed with the train. But it was Bunny.
"No," Henry took a drag, a plume of smoke, like a slow-motion explosion from a movie, had built itself up to the opposite direction we were heading to, "No. It doesn't."
He glanced at me once more, "But yours doesn't sound right either."
Back then I didn't know what he meant. He had disappeared when we entered a tunnel and everything had turned into a flash of darkness. At some point, I knew I had to leave and I did.
That's all I remember (of the edge of death and the start of living) before my life started again. Maybe it was the longing or the countless desires every night to change fate, to go back in time, that did it.
But like all wishes, it came with a price. I was born very distinctly sick. The doctors didn't know what it was, a type of MODS they said. Everybody thought I wouldn't survive the night but I did. And I survived another and many more.
During the first weeks of my birth I had to stay in the hospital with tubes and doctors and a glaring light shining at my face. It was much more different than my original life, and I wondered if this was some type eternal divine punishment until they gave me my name. John Richard Papen.
I couldn't believe it but I recognised my parents and our little house in Plano (bottles towering menacingly over my child self, raggedy old armchair my dad sat at, and all the amazing highlights of childhood one with a drunk father could get). I was here again. My childhood shaped similarly to the one I had, but this time a little more different due to my MODS. My dad was a little more pointed with his reasons for anger, and I had not only been excluded from everybody in school but pitied.
During that time I had meticulously planned out how I would avoid the future. And, with little thinking, I thought of Bunny. The bacchanal and the farmer's death was one thing but Bunny's death, and the weeks of constant outbursts that built up to it, had set the stone to our inevitable descent down his rabbit hole.
I felt so confident in doing everything again, and yet so scared. I had seen the Greek Class at their worst. I had seen a side of them they would have never shown otherwise. I knew them front—facades, little smiles, all the joys—and back—murder, highly regarded ideals, breakdowns. In a way, the power of this knowledge made me just a bit overconfident in how I'd handle things but when I began to get into more detail in how it would go, I realised just how hard it would be to save Bunny.
I couldn't prevent the bacchanals as I would be too late and new to do so(joining Hampton before I was 20 felt too bare. I wouldn't even know what to say to them with the unfamiliar string of events), and I doubted Henry would listen to me. I couldn't prevent Bunny knowing about the murder during the trip to Italy as, well, why would they invite me? So my choice, though rather dull and bare, was to prevent Bunny's teasing, the little things that drove everybody crazy; 'I have an appointment in town.' 'With a lawyer?' and so on.
I also felt that I should avoid the Greek Class when I arrived at Hampton college. I wanted to just avoid them until the moment in the library. I wanted to come not as the one that asked to come into the Greek Class and was rejected before the second time, but rather as the one who had helped them in their Greek work. Accepted at first try.
*
The party was loud and fierce, music of some band orchestrating the thumps of heartbeats like a drum and the lights in a daze of colours giving everybody's silhouettes only small yet clear definitions of their face.
Richard had only a few sips of his drink. With his condition, it was not advised to drink alcohol but, he thought, as long as he took little bits it wouldn't make a difference. After a while though, he threw it out and just drank some non-alcoholic fruit punch somebody brought to the table of the party.
The floor was weirdly sticky and crowded with bits of confetti from party poppers Jud and Frank brought—though not to the amusement of the girl, Veronica Hutches, that hosted the whole thing—from the party aisle at a store.
Unlike the last party with Judy from his first life, she had not left him in the care of her friends, probably because Richard immediately wandered off to do his own business, rather be alone than to burden someone with his organ troubles. It was just a party after all, and he could goof off as he'd like (not that he would as he was in a bad state to be taking drugs or dancing or the sort) as the Greek Class couldn't possibly be here.
He could see so many familiar faces. In fact, Cloke and Spike were somewhere in the crowd, amongst others who Richard had known once before, but had not found significant to remember.
A group of people were huddled around a wooden table, red Styrofoam cups with beer filled a little over halfway. A light was more obvious there, as somebody had brought a very old black lamp that pointed yellow light to the table. The light wasn't very good though having a setting of which you could turn it brighter or lower with a few flicks. They were playing beer pong or something.
Richard had carefully moved away from that table as they were using pool balls instead of actual ping pong balls and he was dangerously close to their aiming range. He stood in the dark corner near the stairs for a little while, soaking up the social atmosphere of the party; girls laughing, drunk men singing together, and drums being beat wildly.
Richard then felt a nudge at his feet. Thinking it was purely his imagination, he didn't bother responding.
That nudging had turned into a lean, and whatever was on him was pressing against the sides of his shoe.
Finally, looking down, Richard found a horrifyingly familiar set of blonde hair and wire-rimmed glasses.
Bunny? Richard thought to himself. And it was him, with that tweed jacket of his. Bunny was clearly passed out, mouth open as if snoring but unable to omit any hearable sounds over the music. His feet was against Richard's right shoe.
Quickly, Richard looked around, as if having not seen Bunny at all. He wasn't supposed to interact with any of the Greek Class, but with power alike to how he rebelled his parents, he felt the strong urge to keep Bunny safe, to protect him. It's been so long that it seemed like a harsh hallucination conjured by his guilt. He feared that if he looked down again, he won't see a drunk passed out Bun, but rather broken glasses, a neck snapped, dirt under fingernails, and pale, bruised skin.
"There you are." Judy popped beside him. She no longer wore the lacy black skirt—this one Richard recognised from his last life after Bunny death—she came into the party with ('It just wasn't the day for it.' Judy would come to say after Richard saw the lace poking out from her bag).
Luckily, Judy had kept a change of clothes; leather pants with a white noodle-strapped shirt, rhinestones fluttering the upper part into a downward pattern of a V, right to her naval, where a studded belt lay on her hips.
"God, is that Bun?" Judy peered over Richard, knudging Bunny with the point of her red painted toenails. She was wearing bold red heels, which highlighted her crimson lipstick and red drugstore-bought nails (apparantly she still used it). Richard only nodded, still in disbelief at seeing Bunny.
"You'd better go get one of his friends. Veronica's not gonna be nice about having him on the floor, you know, she exploded when Jud passed out so she's a bit uptight about that shit." Judy said, rearranging a strand that fell out of her hair when she looked down, "Which is pretty fucking ironic because she gets shit-faced at these parties a lot. Me and Laura were in this bar, not the shitty ones with the watered down drinks, and she told me that Veronica got on a table and went absolutely wild, screaming and laughing and apparantly Cloke, you know him, gave her some of the good stuff."
Noticing Richard was blanking out again, brown eyes—strangely canine-like, with a sort of almond shape, eyelids down a little tiredly, though Richard would never know—staring at Bunny's drooling face, Judy raised a finely-arched brow, "Well?"
Richard blinked, snapping out his train of thinking, a train of which always managed to depart whenever Judy talked a little longer than what he deemed acceptable, "What?"
"Are you going to get someone to pick him up? I mean, the party just started a few hours ago but he looks like he could use a bed." Judy said, lips pursued, leaning her weight onto one hip, stepping back after seeing Bunny's dreaming form twitch and move, "Trust me, he's not going to want to wake up sore with a fucked hangover and a woman screaming at his face."
"Umm..." Richard looked around, trying to scan for someone Bun knew. Cloke, maybe. But an oh-so-brilliant idea popped into his head all of the sudden, "How about I do it?"
Judy glanced at him for a moment, "I thought you had that organ thing? And I don't mean it rudely, but Bunny's a big guy. I don't think it's a good idea."
"No, I think I can handle it." Richard said, lingering on Bunny's form. If he looked away, the hallucination might fade, but it's been too long. He wanted to see Bun, no matter how badly he protested within himself.
Of course, it had been reasonably difficult forcing Bun out. In the haze of drunk crowds and flashing coloured lights in the dark, though, this seemed like a normal day. Cloke may have spotted him, but didn't say a word, and everybody else just seemed to get irritated at an interruption (of which Richard mumbled sorry more times than he can count) caused by a painstakingly slow man, a silhouette really, moving somebody else. There must've been at least half a dozen confetti stuck to Bunny now.
*
Bunny was in my room, snoring loudly, mouth agape and drool already sliding its way down to my bedsheets. The lights were closed, but the curtain was open and moonlight lit Bunny's face with a white-blue sheen. He looked painfully peaceful, so unaware of what can happen in the future, and I felt a little jealous.
I had not fully realised just how much of a burden it'll be, for me to know everything about the Greek Class, of how these little things can escalate into what unfortunately is our destiny. I wanted to do everything right. Maybe all of us will retire in Francis' country house, bathing in each other's presence. Old friends, good friends, friends 'til death-do-us-part.
This childish dream had crawled back into my mind so quickly that it made me recoil, remembering how I, bitter, felt nauseous thinking I had to be stuck with them. Oh how I wished to be naive again, to be ignorant, to not know.
I slept on the floor when my eyelids grew heavy and I began to get tired while looking at Bunny. Out of all of us, I figured that it was Bunny who was innocent. Thrown away like trash; murdered and buried. Another star in the night sky burnt out, and yet, to others, so insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
He was just Bunny, I thought to myself. He might've had a better chance to lay still or hide, but there's always that prey-like urge to run away. Not that that choice would change anything related to his fate. The wolf always wins, and soon, claws will be plunged deep into the rabbit in one singular motion, death apparant.
The wolf though, will always be hungry. And I felt my throat close up, and my eyes shut tight.
Run, rabbit, run.