by Bret Lott
I took him into the second room, and put him on the metal rack over the sink. I touched a finger to his chest. The pulse was slowing down even more. I had to work fast, I knew, to start perfusion before the heart stopped completely. The heart had to be pumping in order for the fluid to be taken up. Perhaps I’d given it too large a dose; perhaps, with the jab of the syringe, I’d startled it too much, its adrenalin rushing its heart rate, the dose taken up too quickly. I had to move.
And I felt nothing, no remorse. I wondered at this; each first rabbit I’d ever named I’d felt sorry for, felt pained by this point at having to put the thing to sleep.
But now. Now I was cold, my hands smooth-moving and unhesitant as I flipped the rabbit onto its back, pulled its forelegs up and to either side and tied them to the rack with small pieces of nylon rope, pink now from so many sacrifices. I tied its forelegs down, and did the same with its hindlegs, pulled down and to the side and tied off so that the animal lay on its back, limbs pulled taut and away, ready for the next step.
I touched the chest. Slower still.
I went to the metal shelves in the other room, got a paper surgeon’s mask from one of the boxes, put it on. Then I got a pair of surgeon’s gloves, pulled them on, and picked up a pair of surgical shears, a scalpel, a clamp and two hemostats, and the Rongeurs shears.
I went back to the sink, turned on the water, let it run as I uncoiled first the tubing from the saline jug, next the tubing from the Formalin bottle. I connected the tubes to the juncture, a Y-shaped piece of tube that would allow me to feed through the same tube and into the animal first the saline, then the Formalin. I made sure the clips that held the tubes closed at the base of the jugs were tight so that no liquid would escape until I let it. I turned to the animal.
I took the scalpel and made a small cut just below the sternum, right into the pink skin and fur.
Still I felt nothing, only watched my hands move in their calculated, practiced manner. I watched as my hand put the scalpel on the stainless steel countertop next to the sink, and picked up the shears.
The shears were small, sharp, and I held them open, pushed the bottom tip deep into the incision, and I started cutting, moving up through the sternum, through that small, flat bone, and on up through the ribcage, each snip of the shears laying open the chest of that animal, more blood with each cut, the bones so fragile and thin I could have been cutting through thick paper.
Then I was finished, and rinsed the bloodied shears off in the water, the red only faint in the bottom of the sink. I placed the shears next to the scalpel, fixed the hemostats in place to clamp off the blood from the flesh, and with both hands I pried open the ribcage, pulled it open wide to reveal the chest cavity.
Before me lay first the lungs, wings of soft pink barely moving, surrounded by red, bloody tissue, the ribs blue and red. Below the lungs lay the diaphragm, the thick membrane wall that moved too slowly.
I peeled back the lungs to the heart, nearly buried beneath other organs—the liver, the stomach, the pancreas. It was still beating, a regular but weak jump of maroon muscle, blood still pumping through it, the animal still alive.
I wriggled a finger down below it, pushed back organs to expose the descending aorta like a red worm, and I got the clamp from the countertop, closed it on the aorta so that, now, all the blood was circulating up into the brain.
I picked up the scalpel, held it, poised above the heart.
I wanted to stop, to stare, to wonder at the moment of death and the act of deciding which moment it might be; and I thought of my own brain, wondering which neurons would fire into which synapses to start the chain of firings on down from inside my skull through my muscles until the endpoint, some particular muscle in my forearm, would contract, and the scalpel would sink into the tough muscle of this animal’s heart. I felt something then, too, some sharp pain at the center of my head, some show of something going on there that made me want to cry, and I thought that this was emotion, that it was in me after all, my feelings for a rabbit, for Chesterfield, hidden and buried under all the dead tissue of my life, hidden under my dead womb, under my dream of being pregnant. I wanted to cry, to let the pain in me go, but suddenly, as if out of reflex or some unrecognized instinct, a muscle in my forearm contracted, and the blade, sharp and glistening and silver, sank into the heart, that thick red marble; sank into the left ventricle at precisely the correct spot, precisely the correct depth, precisely the correct length. And just as suddenly, just as precisely, my hand and the scalpel moved lower on the heart, made another incision in the vena cava, just a small slip of the blade, and the moment of wonder in me, of awe, of wanting to hold back from this task, was gone.
I let the scalpel go, watched it slip down between bars of the rack and heard it clatter at the bottom of the steel sink, then took the tube leading from the juncture and pulled back the clip from the saline jug to let the liquid go. I hesitated a moment, looking at the chaotic order of organs open before me, the animal splayed, limbs tied back, heart pierced, and I placed the loose end of the tube, saline solution flowing, directly into the ventricle, slipped the tip into the heart, let gravity and muscle bring fluid into the body, pump it through.
This was perfusion, flushing the animal’s body with liquid while it was still alive, cleansing the system of blood, preparing it for the Formalin, a substance that would harden the veins and arteries and, of course, the brain of the rabbit, turn all that tissue to gelatin so slices of its brain could be examined microscopically.
My job.
The saline started flowing, coursing through the arteries and veins, and I stared at the animal, watched as the body cavity began to fill with blood, drowning those organs, its own heart.
“Happy?” Sandra said from behind me.
I was startled at her voice, the only other sound in there the running water, and I flinched, though I did not look at her. I would not look at her.
“Happy?” she said again, this time louder.
I stared at the body cavity, watched as the blood rose, now covering the lungs.
“About what?” I said. My teeth were clenched, the muscles in my face and neck tight. I did not want to talk to her, hadn’t, I realized, since that day in the computer room, not since she had given her problem to me and yet asked for no help. She had let me know she wanted no help. I would give her none.
“Don’t kid me,” she said. I tried to imagine what gestures she might be making, whether she were standing with her arms crossed, or hands on her hips, or hands in pockets. But, again, I could picture nothing. I could only hear her voice, the familiar pitch and timbre, and recognize the meanings of her words.
I said nothing.
“You can’t be that cold. You can’t be that dead.”
I said, “I must be.” Still I watched the rabbit fill with its own blood.
“Let me tell you, then,” she said, her voice gone flat, dead. “Let me fill you in.” She paused a moment. “Let me tell you,” she said, her voice almost lost, washed out by the running water, “that Mr. Gadsen’s dead. He’s dead.”
Blood broke over the edge of the cavity, trickled through white fur in a thick red line down the left side of the animal and toward its back, and I watched as the blood first dripped, then evolved into a steady stream into the sink, where water washed it out, diluted it, made it seem less significant than what it really was: what kept the animal alive. And I thought how similar we were, this rabbit and myself. We were both having life washed out of us, me with the primitive trick of the moon and the shedding of the walls of my uterus, the animal with the trick of advanced science and technology. We were both alike, both of us nearly dead.
“What do you want me to do?” I said, my voice an imitation of hers, inflectionless and remote.
She said, “I wouldn’t want you to do anything. Nothing at all. I’d expect only what you’ve done all along. All along since the rabbit bit you. Just forget him. It’ll be a lot easier for you, too, now that he’s dead.�
�� She paused. “And you can just keep on the same with us, too. With me. Just keep going the same with me.”
Now the blood was thinning out in the cavity, the saline working its way through, flushing the body, clearing out arteries and veins and capillaries, the whole system. The liquid pouring from the animal, leaching into its fur, was losing its bright-red hue, its thickness, duller now, pink.
I looked up at the saline jug. I’d put through about a half gallon. Still a half to go before the blood was gone.
“You’re doing just fine,” she said. “You’re doing just as I’d expected you would.”
“I didn’t want to let you down,” I said. I was looking at the rabbit now, the cavity filled, the organs gone beneath the surface.
“Oh,” she said, and she moved closer behind me. “Oh,” she said again, right behind my ear. “You didn’t,” she whispered. “You didn’t let me down at all. But you let someone else down. You let down Mr. Gadsen, just an old man who was about to die anyway. Who’d been waiting for it for years. Who’d been only passing time doing what he knew best how to do. Just working.” Her whispered words were cold on my ear, and I shuddered suddenly, completely, my spine, I felt, almost whipping through me.
Water in the bottom of the sink was only a pale, pale pink now.
“Yeah,” she went on, speaking now, her face still just behind me. “He’d been dying for a long time now. Will knew that. Nobody else. That’s what he was telling us just a few minutes ago in Wendy and Paige’s. You just pausing at the door as you go by.” She stopped. “Nobody else knew because there wasn’t anybody else. He had no kids. He had no wife. He had nobody. Just a bunch of academic bastards he supplied animals to. That’s it. So now, who knows what will happen. There’s a farm somewhere up in Leverett where there’s all these animals, and there’s going to be no caretaker for them. That’s what Will was telling us, too. That there’s no caretaker up there, all these animals sitting in cages in rows, and they’ll just get put aside somewhere.” She paused. “Probably get bought up by that shithead in Worcester, and they’ll all die of enteritis because he doesn’t know how to take care of them properly. That’s what will happen.”
She stopped, and took a deep breath. I stared at the rabbit. Just a carcass. The wash in its cavity was now only a faint pink, the organs now visible beneath the surface. The white fur, drenched in pink now, clung to the body, the carcass thin, insignificant.
I reached up, pushed in the clip to the base of the saline jug, and then I reached over and pulled the clip from the jug of Formalin.
“And you, because you got bit, and because the rabbit was pregnant, and because you’re so preoccupied with feeling sorry for yourself because you two can’t have children, you wouldn’t let him apologize to you like he wanted, do what he could for you.”
“It’s not that I didn’t—” I said, but I stopped. The pain was there in my head again, a shard digging into my brain, but I held on. I watched the rabbit, watched as the Formalin took its path into and through this thing, watched as the effect took place: the rabbit, spread open as if to reveal itself to me, to show me how it worked, began to jitter, just barely shake, the paws moving, and then the head and neck shook, too. The rabbit quivered as though—after exposing itself to me, giving its heart and its brain over to me in all faith I would do it no harm—it realized I intended to kill it. As if it were afraid of me, quivering with the jolt of Formalin, its muscles constricting as the substance settled into veins and arteries, already hardening, already turning that all-important brain, that jewel, into gelatin.
My knees were shaking.
“And me,” Sandra said, oblivious to the quivering. She’d seen rabbits die this way often enough. But, I realized, I’d seen even more. Maybe, I thought, I’d seen enough. “No,” she went on, “you didn’t let me down. You didn’t let me down at all, because you know what?” She stopped. Her voice, those last few words, had taken on some different tone, some different pitch; her voice, I realized, was quivering too, as though she and I and this rabbit were all three dead, all three shot through with Formalin, all three of our bodies giving over to the constriction of muscles. Her voice shivered.
“You know why you didn’t let me down?” she said. “Because you couldn’t have. I’d already let myself down. I’d already let myself down long before the day in the computer room when I told you I was pregnant, and I told you I wanted to keep it. I lied to you. I lied to you, that’s how I let myself down.” She was almost crying now, and I heard her sniff, take in another deep breath.
The shivering of the carcass slowed down as the Formalin set up, the rabbit’s limbs now stiff, the neck twisted back at an ugly angle. Still my knees shook, and the pain dug in.
“I lied to you,” she said, “not about wanting that baby, because I do. I want it. I want it to love and to care for and to feed and to share the world with. The same things you feel. Those same things, I know. But I lied to you. I lied. By the time,” she said. “By the time I talked to you that day, by that time—”
I reached up just then and shoved the clip back onto the Formalin jug tube, picked up the rack, and as roughly as I could, as violently as I could, I banged it once on the edge of the sink, and turned it sideways to let the Formalin and saline in the body cavity pour out into the sink, the liquid now clear, now clean, devoid of any life. Of anything.
The rabbit hung there on the rack, its head held in place at that angle by thick, dead tissue stiff with Formalin.
As quickly as I could, I lay the rack back over the sink, untied the cords, then removed the hemostats and the clamp, and dropped them on the countertop.
I wanted her out of here. I wanted her out, because I knew what she was going to say next.
The rabbit loosened, I turned around. Sandra was right there, and I did not acknowledge her, did not even look at her. My shoulder pushed into hers as I went for the far corner of the green-tiled room where, washed and shiny and ready, sat the guillotine.
The guillotine. It was precisely that, a guillotine, a small one built for exactly this moment, this job. For chopping off the heads of rabbits.
My job.
It stood about two feet tall, the blade-edge at the top of the carriage angled down, surgery sharp. The base had a small cutout half-circle in the steel, and a handle that, when pulled, brought the blade down and through the neck. It was, after all, the head we were after, the brain inside. Chopping off the animal’s head was the next to last step before staining and mounting that brain.
I pulled the guillotine to the middle of the floor, positioned it next to the drain at the center of the room so that when I was finished I could rinse it off, wash down the drain any blood and saline and Formalin that might issue from the rabbit.
Guillotine, I thought. Not a word like sacrifice, but a word that hid nothing. It told precisely what happened, and for some reason I liked the fact nothing was veiled about this instant. The machine did what it had to do. It had a name that hid nothing. There were no secrets.
I glanced up from the guillotine as I centered it perfectly before the drain, and I saw Sandra there, her back to me. She hadn’t yet moved, still faced the sink where I had been, but her head was down now, her hands in front of her.
This was when the heat started up in me, the shard in my head now several pieces of broken glass, something in me that wanted out, and I thought of the blood still coming from between my legs, blood for no reason, an empty symbol, and I thought, Isn’t that enough from me? Isn’t that enough for me to let go? This blood in me? But the pain grew, and the heat, and I had to blink back the pain in my eyes, because I knew she was about to say it, and I knew what would happen when I heard it.
I stood up, my knees wobbly, not from having squatted, but from pain creeping down into me, into the rest of me. There was sound now, too, a high rush of undefinable sound, and I made my way to the sink.
I picked up the carcass. It was stiff now and growing more so each second, its brain nearly ready
to demystify the world with what it would tell us, and I turned, went back to the guillotine, my knees shaking more.
Then, as I knelt there, placing the rabbit into position, twisting its head around so that it faced forward, I heard her move, even through that increasing din in my ears, a sound that was no sound. I heard her move around, so that now my back was to her again.
I reached up to the lever on the guillotine with my left hand, and through the yellow-white, opaque surgeon’s glove, I could see the ridges of that scar, the little mountains pressed into the latex glove.
And in that moment, the rabbit in place, my left hand on the lever, my right hand cupped beneath the head, ready to catch it as it fell, I wondered whether or not this was an empty symbol, my left hand, my scarred hand bringing down the blade that would decapitate Mr. Gadsen’s best rabbit ever, Mr. Gadsen now dead.
The pain was seeping into my shoulders, seeking exit, but I would not allow it. I pulled hard on the handle, watched as the blade moved down through the tracks and into the pink, drenched fur of the rabbit’s neck. The lever gave just a moment’s hesitation as the blade severed the neck, and the head fell into my hand, tumbled forward, the long, soft ears flipping over like thin, white fingers, and I held it in my hand, the head upside down, its lips drawn back slightly to show its incisors, those fangs.
It had weight. It seemed significant.
I picked up the carcass by the scruff of the neck, that same scruff I had jabbed with a syringe only minutes ago. Its limbs were still out to its sides, and from its body cavity poured more liquid as I brought it once again back to the sink. I lay the head on the counter, and pulled out the garbage can from beneath the sink. I took off the lid, and dropped in the carcass, the body swallowed up in the green plastic bag. I pushed the can back under the sink.
Now was the last step, and I knew I had only seconds before the pain—now at my elbows, at my ankles—might envelope me, my job demanding to be finished, to be completed with no emotion, no caring. And I was doing that, the head in my hands nothing, only the head of an anonymous animal from a dead handler.