Orwell's Luck (6 page)

But deep beneath the ground, under a row of bright yellow warning posts, ingenious engineers have laid a pipeline, a highway for natural gas, extending from the oil fields of Oklahoma to the car factories of Detroit. Millions of tons of volatile, explosive energy surge beneath the feet of children at play, and no one's worried. No one, that is, but me. I think about it every time I stand there.

I think that I am standing on a bomb.

This is where I was standing and what I was thinking when I handed the handmade valentine to the tousle-haired boy from class.

"Here," I mumbled. "This one's yours."

"For me? Thank you," he responded as he climbed into a mini van waiting at the curb.

I had constructed it the night before using a pale yellow notebook divider and a page from a glossy magazine. Cut into a traditional heart shape, it showed a hilly countryside in full bloom, with a thatched-roof cottage in the distance and a young girl picking flowers in the foreground. At the last minute, I had decided to write the message in French, thinking this would make the valentine both more special and, to the casual uninvited eye, more private. "
Les enfants aiment se moquer d'un singe,
" I had penned in purple marker across the top, intending to say, "Kids like you are a world of fun." My hope was that he would think the same about me.

Fate would have been kinder to me if, at that moment, it had blown up the pipeline in a boiling ball of flame. The phrase that I had so hastily and ineptly assembled from the worksheets in my notebook did not say what I thought. As I was to learn to my profound dismay in French class the following day, what I had expressed so earnestly to the tousle-haired boy was, "Children like to make fun of a monkey."

I went home to my silent rabbit in shame.

Forget being a private detective! I decided. Forget weather! Forget basketball and trombone playing and veterinary medicine! I was now interested only in the world of dreams, in the science of them, in discovering how they work.

There are principles that apply to motion and matter in dreams, just as there are scientific laws that rule our waking lives. The only problem is that with dreams, no one has ever figured out these principles.

With ordinary earth physics, if you step from the edge of a cliff, you fall and hit the rocks below. Nine times out of ten, you're history. But in dreams, if you step out into space, you never die. You're always transported safely to someplace else. No matter how many times you dream of stepping off the edge, you're always saved. This is dream physics at its finest.

In my dreams, my mother and my father do not fight, my father has a job that he enjoys, the tousle-haired boy at school is my friend, and Orwell can hop like other rabbits.

For a while my favorite place to be was in bed. I went to school, of course, and fulfilled my obligation to care for Orwell and the family dog. But I did little else but lie upon my pillow and think about the science that applies to dreams.

I wondered if there might not be some project I could do for the science fair this year. Some dream experiment. I knew from all my hours of thinking that thoughts can stick to things. A dream fact that was forgotten when you stepped into the bathroom suddenly comes back when you return to bed. That's because thoughts swirl around like smoke. They attach to objects, like smudges, like grime, like dust, and thus, on contact, this memory dust can be stirred back into consciousness, or something close, before it goes away.

This was my theory. My hypothesis was that if you changed your pillow, you would change the content of your dreams. Old pillow, old dreams. New pillow, new dreams. A brand-new pillow would work to clean the windows of the mind, making dreams fresher, more vivid, clearer. A new pillow, I conjectured, would be a fresh start for the subconscious. And did I ever wish for a fresh start!

Everything that happens in our lives is connected to everything else. It's all strung together end to end. First this, then that. Fetch the newspaper, find the rabbit. Find the rabbit, receive the messages. Receive the messages, then what?

I didn't know.

But messing up on the lottery and the valentine put me in bed thinking about dream science, and that, in turn, got me to wishing I had a new pillow, and the act of asking my mother to get me a new pillow caused the next thing to happen.

Who can say if it was luck or fate?

Who really knows the difference?

My grandmother is as healthy as a horse. Even so, once a week she goes to the doctor, just as once a week she goes to the hairdresser and once a week she attends the sale at the department store at the mall.

Shopping for bargains and getting her hair done and going to the doctor are weekly rituals that are as important to my grandmother as going to church is for some people. Without these routines to get her out of her maintenance-provided condominium, my grandmother would be as much of a shut-in as my paraplegic rabbit.

Years of specializing in being a patient, a department store customer, and a beauty salon regular have produced some interesting results, some obvious, some less so.

The most conspicuous result of my grandmother's routine is her hair. It doesn't look like real hair at all. It is thin, stiff, and slightly pink, more like cotton candy than human hair. When the wind blows, it does not. When it rains, she becomes anxious and wraps her head in a plastic bag.

Less obvious than her unusual hair, but also a crown of sorts, is my grandmother's great status at her doctor's office, where she ranks among this businessman's most valuable customers. All he is required to do for my grandmother is keep a few current magazines in his waiting room, ask her about her two grandchildren, and give her some pills to take home.

Finally, my grandmother's limited but repetitive activity has given her an incredible knowledge of manufactured goods. If it is for sale in a department store, she knows everything there is to know about it.

So it was only logical that when I asked my mother for a new pillow, she, in turn, being conscious of expenses now that my father was unemployed, asked her mother for advice on what kind of pillow to get.

Naturally, my grandmother wanted to know why I needed a new pillow and why her firstborn grandchild was spending so much time in bed. After a long and increasingly tense conversation with my mother, my grandmother concluded, somewhat erroneously, that I was merely moping over the condition of my run-over rabbit.

"But what else can I do?" my mother lamented to the woman who had raised her almost single-handedly from the moment she was born.

"Simple," my grandmother, the fountain of child-rearing wisdom, snapped back. "Fix the rabbit and you fix the girl."

And this is how I wound up one day after school waiting with Orwell to get an MRI.

MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging. It used to be called nuclear magnetic resonance imaging but the "nuclear" part scared everybody so they changed it. What MRI is, is a way of taking pictures inside your body using a giant magnet and radio waves. The pictures that you get are better than X-rays.

Getting these pictures, however, is a lot more complicated than X-rays, and the more complicated something is, the more expensive it is. That's why most people just get X-rays even though the pictures are not very good. That's why Orwell just got X-rays even though when the veterinarian looked at them he couldn't see what was wrong.

Fortunately for Orwell, he was now associated with me, and I was associated with my grandmother, who had connections with a successful doctor who had invested in an MRI facility right across the street from his office where my grandmother hung out every Thursday morning, rain or shine, plastic bag or no plastic bag.

"We sometimes get people with teddy bears," the technician said, ushering me into what looked like a storage room for big metal parts. "But we've never had anybody with a rabbit before."

"His name is Orwell," I explained.

"I hope he's not claustrophobic," the technician said.

"Why do you ask?" I replied.

The place was beginning to remind me of my one and only trip to the emergency room, when I had gotten a raisin stuck up my nose. I was a lot younger, of course.

"We have to put you in there and it takes a while," the technician explained.

"In there" turned out to be a metal tunnel as big as a Volkswagen. "A while," I was soon to learn, meant forty-five minutes. And "you" did not simply mean the injured Orwell, it meant me holding the injured Orwell.

Nobody had mentioned this part to me.

"You have to keep him very still or the pictures won't be any good," the technician said.

It's noisy inside an MRI machine. It clatters and bangs and burps. When it's doing what it is supposed to do, it sounds just like it's broken. And when it stops, and you think it's over and you're going to be freed, it starts right up again.

Like luck stuck on going from bad to worse, the cycle keeps repeating.

Despite the noise, or possibly because of it, Orwell snuggled down into the cavity in my chest, like a rabbit in a grassy nest in a meadow, and went to sleep.

"Rabbits are not put together especially well," the new veterinarian said. "They have very weak backs." A younger man than I'd expected, he had thick, dark hair, a bright smile, and a surprisingly clean-smelling office.

When my grandmother and I had first arrived, there were no other patients in his waiting room. A receptionist not much older than I am, with short red hair and a round red face, had given my grandmother a form to fill out while I looked around the room.

The waiting room was about as big as our family room, but much tidier and more restful-looking, with green upholstered chairs, green-striped wallpaper, and green and tan carpet with no visible stains. On the walls hung two nearly identical watercolors of a country garden in full summer bloom. Beneath them, three brass lamps glowed on dark wood tables. At one end of the room, a people-sized wheelchair was folded up against the wall.

"That's for some of our patients' owners," the receptionist explained when she saw me staring. "They're not all as young as you."

The new veterinarian greeted us warmly. He gently lifted Orwell from the plastic travel cage I'd borrowed from my sister's cat, scratching the rabbit's knobby head, just like I do.

"With such weak backs, hind limb paralysis is fairly common among rabbits," he continued. "Many times, it's environmental. Toxins in their food and water. Viruses. That sort of thing. But we see a lot of trauma, too."

"Orwell got hit by a truck," I explained. "At least, that's what I think happened."

I handed him a brown envelope that was as big as a briefcase. It was labeled
MRI FILM PLEASE DO NOT BEND
. Inside were six sheets of black film, each about the size of the poster board you'd use to make a science fair display. On each sheet were fifteen different negative images of Orwell's insides. One by one, the new veterinarian held the pictures up to the light.

"The MRI is the single greatest advance in medical diagnostics," he remarked appreciatively. "You can get a 3-D picture of anything!"

"Can you see what's wrong with Orwell?" I asked.

"It looks like there's been a shifting of the vertebra," he said. "See here, where it narrows?" He pointed to a picture on the sheet in his hand, but I couldn't tell exactly what on the picture he was pointing at. "It didn't show up on the X-rays because the muscles had put the vertebra back together. Unfortunately, they didn't do it well enough. The spinal cord is inflamed."

"What can we do?" I asked him.

"We can take the pressure off and we can pin it back together," he said.

"And that will work?" I asked.

"If we're lucky," he replied. "It all depends on how much damage has been done to his spinal cord."

On the way back home, my grandmother stopped to pick up supper for the family at the Imperial Garden. I went in with her while Orwell waited in the car.

Even though everything on the menu at the Imperial Garden has different names, when it is served, it is all pretty much the same food. That's why I always get sweet and sour pork. It's a little different from the rest of the food. It is oranger and it is sweeter.

While we were waiting for the food to be prepared, I noticed a poster announcing a party in celebration of Chinese New Year. It said that the new year was called the Year of the Rabbit.

"Wow! But I thought New Year's Day had already come and gone!" I blurted out.

"There is always more than one way of looking at things," the proprietor explained. "Instead of the sun, the Chinese calendar goes by the cycles of the moon. The Chinese lunar zodiac is inhabited by twelve animals, each with its own characteristics. Each year is given a name of one of those animals."

He handed me a place mat from an unoccupied table. It had pictures of all the different animals. In addition to a rabbit, there was a tiger, an ox, a rat, a boar, a dog, a rooster, a monkey, a sheep, a horse, a snake, and a dragon. Listed beside these animals were their special years and the effect they were supposed to have on those years.

The place mat explained that because the rabbit is such a gentle animal, the Year of the Rabbit would be one that is peaceful and prosperous. Of all the signs to be born under, the place mat said, the rabbit is the happiest. That's when I saw that not only was the new year the Year of the Rabbit, but the last Year of the Rabbit was the year that I was born.

"Now isn't that a coincidence," I said. "Wait until I tell Orwell!"

That night after polishing off the rice that was left in the square white cartons that pile up like autumn leaves after an Imperial Garden meal, I shot the breeze with my ailing little friend. His operation was scheduled for the following week and I didn't want him to worry.

"Why is it, Orwell," I mused, "that nearly every single day has some sort of special designation? Take this month, for instance. Already we've had Groundhog Day, Valentine's Day, Presidents' Day, Chinese New Year, Ash Wednesday, and so many anniversaries of important historical events that even my teachers can't keep them straight. It's like there's no room for something brand new to happen, such as Rabbit Surgery Day, for instance, because we're too busy commemorating all the stuff that has happened before!"