Wrapped up in something I don't completely understand: "Lagomorph" by Alexander MacLeod

Often when I'm looking at submitting a story to magazines, the editors will provide guidelines to writers that include a "what we're looking for" section. Unless this is very specific, like, "We are a magazine that is looking for queer stories by queer writers," these "what we're looking for" sections aren't very helpful. They all tend to come down to, "We can't explain it but we know it when we see it."

I'd criticize this, but as I was going through the 2019 O.Henry Anthology--their 100th such anthology--I decided this year I would only blog on those stories that I really connected with. This left me in the same, embarrassing boat as all those editors. Namely, what does it mean "to connect with" a story. To me, it really means nothing more than the feeling that the story landed. I mean landed like a punch lands. It left a mark on me, and I know, before I have to live the next ten years, that I'll come back to thinking about that story again at some point.

There didn't end up being that many stories in this year's anthology that landed. I only blogged about five, the one I'm about to do included. That doesn't mean there weren't good stories. In addition to the ones that "landed," there were several more I enjoyed, and I can't think of any that enraged with with their presence in a best-of collection. Maybe I'm getting cynical, or maybe I've just read so much short fiction in the last seven years, it's getting harder to land punches on me. I'm the same way with TV now. Here in the Golden Age of American Television, I'm often refusing to even start new shows, much to Mrs. Heretic's annoyance, because something about them just tells me they're not going to land. This is especially irritating to Mrs. Heretic, because I often can't really explain why I know they won't land; I can't even explain exactly what landing means.

Mystery as close as your nose

I indulge in this digression because "Lagomorph" by Alexander MacLeod is entirely about this can't-put-my-finger-on-it sense that accompanies all of us through life. It's the story of a pretty typical man who gets married and raises three kids, with all the accompanying sense of vertigo those years of running from work to van shuttle service bring. At one point, when the kids are all between the ages of seven and thirteen, "the moment just before they made the turn into what they are now," the family makes the milestone decision to get a pet. Because the wife is allergic to cats, they get a rabbit.

The story is written from the husband's point-of-view, and he's looking back after the kids are grown and he and his wife are amicably separated but not yet divorced. He's not quite sure what happened to his marriage. In fact, bewilderment is the narrator's main characteristic. Not in a wishy-washy way, but more in an open-to-the-mystery-of-life kind of way.

The symbol of this bewilderment is the rabbit, Gunther, the "lagomorph" of the title. Gunther is something of a fuzzy, cute incarnation of the mystery of life who sits on the narrator's lap to have its ears scratched. The narrator's description of the rabbit comes packaged together with a sense of disorientation and confusion from the story's first words:

Some nights, when the rabbit and I are both down on the floor playing tug of war with his toy carrot, he will suddenly freeze in one position and stop everything, as if a great breakthrough has finally arrived. He’ll look over at me and there will be a shift, his quick glance steadying into a hard stare. I can’t escape when he does this and I have to look back. He has these albino eyes that go from a washed-out bloody pink ring on the outside through a middle layer of slushy grey before they dump you down into this dark, dark red centre. I don’t know, but sometimes when he closes in on me like that and I’m gazing down into those circles inside of circles inside of circles, I lose my way, and I feel like I am falling through an alien solar system of lost orbits rotating around a collapsing, burning sun.

The rabbit symbolizes the ineffable enigma of existence partly because it's so hard to know what a rabbit is thinking: "Even when I imagine that I am reading him correctly, I know that he is reading me at the same time--and doing a better job of it."

Rabbits always have an ability to surprise

It isn't just the inscrutability of the rabbit's moods, though, that make it such a symbol of why life confounds us. In Moby Dick, the white whale is a symbol for something similar to what MacLeod is getting at in "Lagomorph." But the whale is a mystery partly because it is so remote and distant. It lives in the depths of the ocean. When it does meet with humanity, it's usually in a destructive way. Gunther, though, is a common mammal. The author--somewhat Melville-like--gives us a number of rabbit facts while telling his story, one of which is the fact well-known to folk wisdom about how prolific rabbits are at reproducing. The rabbit is as different from Melville's whale as an animal can be, and yet there it is, as inscrutable to MacLeod's narrator as the whale is to Ishmael.

What makes Gunther such a remarkable and surprising element in the story is that while he embodies life's unspeakable mystery as much as Melville's whale, the rabbit is right there next to the narrator throughout. "Our rabbit--my rabbit now, I guess--he and I are wrapped up in something I don't completely understand." The ineffable isn't a powerful god with knowledge it keeps hidden out of spite, it's a fluffy ball of fur next to us that's legitimately as confused as we are. It's wrapped up in the ineffable with us, a passenger on the same ship. The narrator points out that rabbits are altricial: they are helpless when born. They're like us, then, born into a world that is too much for them from the moment they enter it. Life may be, like a rabbit, a "fickle, stubborn creature, obsessive and moody, quick to anger, utterly unpredictable and mysterious," but it's also in the same boat. Maybe God faces limitations just like we do. The mystery of life is so profound that even whatever personifies the mystery of life is also confounded by it.

This is what makes "Lagomorph" so arresting. The narrator isn't undone by some outside force. The one outside force that threatens the narrator and the rabbit in the story ends up being something the narrator dispatches easily, and in fact he ends up feeling bad about treating the outside force as a threat, wondering if he can even justify his actions he resorted to out of fear. What undoes the narrator are the small things that are with him throughout the story, the marriage the fell apart even while he treasured it, the children that have no become themselves and don't live with him anymore, the rabbit that is both common and "a nearly unique organism in the history of the world."

The real punch of this story is that something doesn't have to come from the depths of the ocean to be other and mysterious and to knock us flat with a sense of how small we are. Life isn't just ineffable, it is ineffably sweet, and that is part of what makes the experience of it such anguish. The mystery is as close as the ends of our fingers, stretched across the couch.