免兔

           Hook your fingers near the roots, he said, peering up to make sure I was looking. My father was crouching in the center of our flat, less-than-emerald lawn, sweating in his wrinkled office shirt. It was mid-July in another less-than-suburb suburb and I was small, practically swimming in my Walmart tank top. He wrapped a rough palm around the throat of the weed, so tightly his ring finger bulged bloodless around his slim steel wedding band. I watched him yank upwards until tangled roots tore out of the ugly wet dirt. I remembered how he said, maybe even gently, with hands a mess of chlorophyll, your turn. This was all years ago, before he gave up on these smaller killings and just sprayed the entire lawn with commercial herbicide instead—before I knew better than to believe in death.

***

           The rabbits first appeared—in a who-knows-how-big cavity in the concrete foundation of the house, as my mother reported distressingly over dinner that evening—two weeks before my freshman year of high school in our latest hometown of the outskirts of Des Moines, when I had already started packing and repacking my bag in nervous anticipation.

           “Alright,” my father told her grimly, in Mandarin. “I’ll exterminate them tonight.”

           “Do they have to die?” I asked.

           He laughed. “Those goddamned”—he used the phrase 该死, “deserve-death”—“things don’t know how to do anything but live and multiply. If we don’t evict them now, they’ll infest the whole house. You wanna see what rabbit infestation looks like? Huh?”

           I stared at my noodles, the sliced-up ginger suddenly curdling into ashy fur, the Laoganma-smeared seaweed congealing into desiccated feces. I had the overwhelming urge to smash the entire bowl against our old table’s nearest burn mark, where Riley Watkins had overturned her plate of “disgusting” wontons during my first and only sleepover in fifth grade back in Cleveland.

           “No,” I said.

           After dinner, my mother showed my father where the rabbits supposedly lived. I went upstairs to rearrange my backpack again. Besides nerves, I had this thing where no folders of the same color could touch or I would start feeling weird. Except only the blue ones were on clearance this year, so I was improvising with textbooks as buffers, though I found it hard to focus with the words rabbit infestation echoing in my head. Several hours later, when my mother had to convince him to come back inside, the sky had darkened to the color of sink mold, and he was scowling, the heavy late-summer air that emanated like bad breath from the opened back door reeking of something that wasn’t herbicide.

***

           Over the next three days, my father’s efforts to remove the rabbits grew restless. Something about their nest being too deep. It was as if he’d been personally offended that they didn’t just disappear when he pronounced their demise.

           I didn’t like thinking about him getting offended.

           The second day, I’d decided to kill time watching pirated American high school coming-of-age movies on the family computer, in the tiny windowless study my mother had been so proud of being able to afford. But it was right next to the laundry room, and instead of forgetting about the whole situation, my head would swell with the idea of rabbits crawling into the plumbing and swarming out the mouth of the washer when I retrieved my wet clothes, until I, embarrassingly, futilely, became increasingly scared to actually open the machine. By the third day—again at dinner—I couldn’t take it anymore and blurted out my irrational thoughts, fully counting on even my father the rabbit-killer-hopeful to sigh impatiently, 哎呀，又瞎担心. Instead, he did something worse.

           He narrowed his eyes, as if seeing me for the first time, then slowly put down his plastic chopsticks and went upstairs.

           “Zheng Xiu! You gotta see this!” he screamed, moments later, over the unmistakable sound of frenzied animal squeaking. “I think the rabbits have gotten into the pipes!”

           There was no way.

           My mother, a 5’10’’ square-faced woman with a beauty mark tattoo from her college days, could’ve been a lot of things if I hadn’t been born in the middle of her astrophysics degree. For a moment, I saw her stormy expression and imagined her solving complex calculus equations on the Tsinghua University blackboards. Then she ran after him mechanically, like she’d been helping her husband with rabbit infestations her entire life, her frustrated wail mixing with the rabbit noises to fill my cesspool of guilt and horror to an overflow.

***

           After that, I had the same nightmare every time I slept.

           I was half-watching my clothes swirl around through the clear laundry machine door while rearranging the blue folders in my backpack. Fifth-grader Riley Watkins was singing the ABCs with wonton soup spilled down her Abercrombie & Fitch jean shorts. Every time, when the cycle seemed to be nearly done, I’d accidentally put two folders together, and look back up to my clothes to see a streaking red mess as the machine started speeding up again: my pillowcase, towels, and socks bloodied by serrated rabbit parts. Sudsy black eyeballs, leaky arteries, bloated sinews torn halfway off femurs, a shower of jawbones all clanging against the washing barrel as if trying to eat their way through—to feed a body no longer attached to its bite force.

           That wasn’t the nightmare part. I’ve thought about pretty scary things, like when I was eight and certain that my right ankle was rotting off my body. No; it was that my muscles would clench with the insane impulse to contain myself in the same washing barrel and feel this violent cleanliness as my last ever sensation, to permanently forget about the rabbits, to crack my brain into a million broken floppy disks. Seconds later, I’d be drowning in a mouth of polyester and bone, Riley’s yells of you gross little rabbit eater barely a tinny echo across the glass.

           I always woke in fear. From the dream, yes, but then almost immediately after, in preparation of what the newest version of the waking world meant for me. Every day my head would be bombarded with images of hordes of rabbits—in the cabinets, in the basement, in the walls of my room—and every day we found more rabbits in the exact locations where I’d pictured them. I knew like my mother knew physics formulas that it couldn’t be my fault. But I couldn’t convince myself to believe what I knew.

***

           Almost two weeks after the rabbits’ initial arrival, I woke up from another washing machine nightmare and realized I’d napped past dinnertime for the first time ever. I crept halfway down the stairs and peeked at the dining room, where my parents were indeed sitting in slumped postures at the table.

           “We’ve never had a problem with rabbits before,” my mother said tiredly.

           “Iowa’s humid and hot this time of year. I bet my nice cold house is heaven for them—” my father’s voice, cold and hard. My heart rate spiked.

           “What do you—” my mother hissed.

           “Or perhaps,” my father abruptly switched to English. “Someone’s been letting these—these creatures in, destroying this house so we can buy a bigger, cleaner one—”

           “Song Lan, you don’t seriously mean—not this again—”

           “Shut up, Zheng Xiu!” my father roared, slamming a fist down.

           She shut up. Seeing her furious yet terrified face, I would have given the world to let my father believe—know—it really was my fault, rather than indict my mother.

           As if sensing my presence through my thoughts, my father flicked his obsidian eyes up to the stairs. “We 宋s—freaking—tolerate it,” he spat, still in English. That word—tolerate—broke dangerously in his thick Mandarin accent. Right then my mother seemed about to argue that technically, she was not a 宋, but it didn’t matter. He was now definitely talking to me. “Don’t hide. Do you understand me? Tolerate like we always have.”

           His last statement almost threatened to light something on fire. I realized then that the dining room was practically doused with lifetimes of our toleration: my father’s, with each slick-suited employer who took advantage of his precarious work visa to lay him off; my mother’s, with each subsequent cross-state move in the old Toyota Camry, the neverending bartering with the USCIS; mine, with this irresolute, gnawing guilt.

           “Okay,” I croaked into the silence. “I mean, I understand you. Dad.”

           He breathed heavily, like the animals that eat rabbits in the wild, before getting up and stomping out the front door. As I walked down the rest of the stairs to help my mother clean off the table, I heard the car engine rumble alive and the garage door creak open.

           It wasn’t until I woke in the middle of the night, a faded Minnie Mouse XL tee I used as pajamas completely soaked through with sweat, that I fully understood what my father meant.

           He hadn’t just shut off the air conditioning. He had turned on the heater in the middle of August. He was going to steam the rabbits out.

***

           The new rules were laid down the next morning. The heater would stay on. Nobody would leave. My father had installed cameras both inside and outside the house while we were sleeping. He also hid the cordless landline phone. I numbly realized that I had no friends in this new town to call anyways, and neither did my mother.

           The now-oppressive heat inside the house seemed to make the walls sweat. My father’s weathered face was blotchily red, though his voice was still hard as chilled steel. My mother seemed on the verge of fainting.

           As he left to tinker with the cameras instead of going to work, I collapsed on the couch, unable to bear the burden of consciousness any longer.

           I didn’t have the usual nightmare. Instead, I dreamed of a memory, when I was maybe five years old and my father tried to teach me to write in Mandarin. In our Indianapolis apartment, from the other side of the tiny folding table, he talked in slightly slurred circles about stroke order as he demonstrated on a piece of college ruled filler paper. He was out of a job again. I was squirming away from his sharp musty smell that I only later learned was beer.

           “乖孩子,” he murmured, before frowning: “听话.”

           Then he got up and did something that in hindsight must’ve been remarkably difficult for a drunk man: he wandered into the broom closet and rummaged through moving boxes we hadn’t ever opened, eventually returning with a cracked canvas folder, a dusty bottle of ink, and a grin.

           “In China. I was, uh. A calligraphist.” He poured the congealed black ink into a condiment bowl like it was more alcohol—like he wanted to guzzle it down. “Your bàba—the best in Tianjin province.”

           Out of the canvas folder tumbled a frazzled calligraphy brush and several pieces of calligraphed paper. “The best,” he said. “Before… before all this. Even your—your yéye…”

           He looked at me as he talked, but I hadn’t looked my father in the eye since—well, since I was five, probably—so in the dream, his face was a blur.

           “Yue Yue,” my father said softly. “My little girl. She should have. Got her bàba’s talent.”

           To this day, I have no idea what compelled me towards what I did next. I grabbed the brush with both little toddler hands, plunged it into the ink, and stabbed the tip into the nearest piece of calligraphy.

           “What—what the fuck!” he yelled immediately. “Has water leaked into your head, Song Xin Yue?”

           He lunged forward to yank the brush away, and for a second I thought he would hit me. I think for a second he thought he would hit me too. He flinched. Very slowly, he sat back down.

           “What the fuck,” he repeated, now staring at his ruined piece.

           I’d wanted to cry. I just stared at the piece with him instead—at my wrongdoing. For the first time in years I remembered what exactly I’d messed up. With one unintentional blot, I had added the closing stroke turning an elegant 免—meaning “exemption” or “avoidance”—into a 兔, which meant “rabbit.”

           I don’t know what else he was doing drunk besides teaching me Mandarin, but by the fall we were in another state, me starting yet another school, and he never drank again.

***

           When I awoke disoriented in swollen darkness, I could hear my heartbeat above the impromptu late-night thunderstorm. I thought about Chinese stroke order and the way we all wipe our mouths after eating and whether the rabbits making a home of our house were a family, or just tolerated each other’s damage—I thought about the shelf life of opened ink. The living room clock tick-tick-ticked like a cardiac monitor as the rain jackhammered outside.

           Finally, I staggered upright and tiptoed to the kitchen counter, where the silver car keys glinted as if I was looking for them all along—I grabbed them because I wanted to live, or maybe I wanted to die. I didn’t think about why my father hadn’t hidden them too.

***

           From the driver’s seat, the Toyota Camry smelled like wet cigarettes.

           My bare feet were dirty from running across the concrete garage floor. My sour breath exhaled rapid and shallow. My sweat-stained Minnie Mouse sleep shirt was the consistency of a potato sack. I’d taken no belongings; my backpack still sat half-unzipped upstairs. Today was supposed to be my first day of high school.

           Somehow, my shaking hands turned the engine on, and I might’ve accelerated right into the garage door—if said garage door hadn’t rolled up at that exact moment.

           The whiplash of the sound of folding metal quickly subdued by the roaring thunderstorm made me hit the brake pedal. The car was now awkwardly jammed halfway into the open night; rain pounded the windshield. It wasn’t—he couldn’t have—

           He was there.

           Not lifting up the garage door, but at the very end of the driveway: a harsh silhouette pacing the perimeter of the lawn like a blinking, breathing data point. Before I could react, a lightning strike slammed onto the ground, illuminating the world for a split second. He whipped around and his frenzied eyes found mine in one try. Coatless, a drenched polo shirt sagged off his heaving chest. Curled tightly in his right palm was a slick black gun: not one of those spindly deer-hunting rifles, but a compact pistol with its muzzle up—pointed straight forward.

           The sky was tar again. The silhouette that was my father barreled towards me.

           I recalled what what he’d said eons ago about the rabbits around the dinner table, when I was still an almost-high school freshman, a student, a daughter: 该死. Deserve-death. The way a rabbit’s head twitches with terrible survival before it leaps away from slaughter. I knew then that death would never save me. I had been afraid for as long as I remember. I would be afraid for as long as I lived.

           By now my father had leapt onto the hood of the Camry. Gunmetal squealed against car paint. The last thing I saw before throwing my entire body weight onto the accelerator, into the cold, guilty future, was my father’s wild pupils distorted into inky dots through the rain-streaked windshield.