Orwell's Luck

by Richard W. Jennings

  "HELLO?" I called again, peering around the corner.

  The radio continued its unwelcome noise. I took two more cautious steps in its direction.

  "What are you, a burglar or something?" a voice behind me asked, startling me.

  Embarrassed, I turned around to face the tousle-haired boy. He had his arms folded across his chest. He looked angry.

  "Oh, hi!" I said. "I tried knocking."

  "I could have you arrested, you know," he said.

  "I'm sorry," I replied sheepishly. "I just wanted to welcome—"

  "And you'd probably have to go to jail, maybe even do hard time. You know what hard time is?"

  "No."

  "It's where they put you to work until your sentence is up."

  "Oh, look, I'm really sorry. I just came over to—"

  "But I'm going to give you a break," he continued. "Instead of calling the cops and going through a trial and everything, I'm going to let you start serving your hard time right now. Do you know how to operate a vacuum cleaner?" His stern face broke into a big smile.

  "Actually," I said, returning the smile with relief, "I've recently become something of an expert."

  Shooting the breeze

  When the people across the street won the lottery that was meant for me, I thought, What rotten luck. But now that they were gone and the tousle-haired boy had taken their place, and he'd begun shooting baskets with me in the driveway, I thought, What great luck!

  The thing about luck is you have to stay tuned to see how it all works out.

  I had even started to think that possibly there's no such thing as luck at all. If everything happens because of something else, if everything is connected end to end, then what looks like chance is really the result of countless individual decisions all taking place in a universe subject to the same natural laws.

  The tousle-haired boy called it "destiny." He said things are meant to be. And the more we talked, the more I liked to hear what he had to say and the way his voice sounded when he said it.

  I was in the driveway discussing Orwell's disappearance with my new neighbor, hopeful that two brains would have better luck at finding a rabbit than one.

  "He's probably around here somewhere," he said, bouncing the basketball off the backboard into the net in a quick, clean one-two from the edge of the sidewalk. "Probably just doing what he has to do."

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Well, look, it's nearly spring, and, according to what you've told me, he just suddenly got up and walked out the door. Except for him walking like he was wearing snowshoes, that sounds perfectly normal to me. For a rabbit, anyway."

  "You think he had no choice?" I asked, puzzled.

  "Try to think about it like a scientist instead of a pet owner and you'll understand. Rabbits can't help being rabbits, you know."

  "I don't get it," I said.

  "Where'd you say you kept his cage?" he inquired.

  "In my room by the windows," I answered.

  "So he was able to see outside, right?"

  "That's why I put it there," I said. "I can see the whole backyard from my windows."

  "And anything that might have hopped into it," he added, sinking another one with a near-silent swishing sound, signifying a perfect nothing-but-net shot.

  "Oh," I said. "I think I'm beginning to understand."

  "I'll bet there are lots of rabbits around here. It's a rabbity-looking kind of neighborhood, don't you think?" He smiled at me, then, with an effortless leap, arced the ball high into the air, where it looked like it was going to overshoot, but at the last moment it stopped, fell, spun around the rim and wobbled through the net.

  "Well, I have seen other rabbits," I admitted.

  "Didn't you tell me that cottontail rabbits only like to be with other rabbits when they're feeding or when—"

  "Or when it's time to start a family!" I interrupted. "Of course!"

  "Bingo!" he exclaimed, surprising me by missing his next shot by more than a foot. He nervously combed his hair with his fingers and grimaced. "Ooops!" he said. "Your turn."

  A crash course in philosophy

  Everything not only changes, I realized, everything must change. It's the Law of Commonplace Events. My plans for my personal career now included becoming a philosopher.

  I chose this new path for several reasons. First, being a detective was getting me nowhere. Not only had I not figured out why Orwell came into my life, I had managed to lose the mysterious little rabbit in the process.

  Second, I realized that I enjoyed thinking about things more than I enjoyed actually doing things. Some people might call this being lazy, but only because they can't tell how hard my brain is churning while the rest of me is sitting there looking comfortable.

  Finally, recent developments in my life had put pressure on my philosophy to undergo some changes, too. This required additional thinking time, time that could most easily be freed up by abandoning my mediocre career in private investigations.

  Non regret rien. I have no regrets, I told myself, demonstrating my revised way of looking at things. Such changes are not only inevitable, they are improvements. If we just paid closer attention to the details of our daily lives, nothing that happens to us would surprise us.

  Take my father's accident, for example. In hindsight, it had to happen. How long did he think that he could stand on top of a ladder, ignoring the warnings clearly spelled out in orange and black letters on the top step just beneath his foot, and ignoring, too, the natural force of gravity?

  "I find it interesting," I told him, practicing my philosophy as I sat beside him in the ambulance en route to the emergency room, "that only one letter separates 'paint' from 'pain.'"

  "Please be quiet," my father said.

  While my father's foot was being bolted back together, I checked out the hospital cafeteria. Surprisingly, I found it to be a cheerful place, brightly lit, not too crowded, with clean, plastic-topped tables and lots of good food. But, since I hadn't taken much money with me, I had to settle for a little box of Lucky Charms and a half-pint of milk.

  I knew when I turned the box around to read the back, as I always do when eating cereal, that I had made the choice destiny had earmarked for me. Under the heading "Lucky You" was a drawing of a big-eyed comic leprechaun wearing a green top hat, shiny green jacket, green buckle shoes, and a huge, almost frightening smile. He was dancing and holding a pot of gold on which were written seven rabbitlike words:

  HAVING A WONDERFUL TIME. BE BACK TOMORROW.

  Unlike the silence surrounding his sudden departure, this time Orwell had thoughtfully sent me advance notice of his migrations.

  My rabbit was coming home!

  In books, stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In real life, they go on forever, because one thing always leads to another.

  After proving that he could hobble around on crutches, my father was released from the hospital with a cast on his foot and a job offer in hand, having shared a room with a newspaper executive who was sympathetic to his injury and impressed with his credentials. My father had accepted his roommate's offer with the explanation that he couldn't start until he could walk, an outcome that could be some weeks away. The newspaper executive, whose nose was packed with cotton and covered with white tape, replied in a muffled voice that he understood completely and would be pleased to wait.

  I am convinced that such a lucky turn of events is not a coincidence, if by coincidence you mean something that is unusual. Everything about our lives is based on such a coincidence. If what was going to happen were limited to what is probable, then not a single one of us ever would have been born. The odds are always against it. Evidently, unseen forces rule our lives.

  One of those unseen forces tried to sneak back into the house.

  As my father swung his damaged foot awkwardly beneath his crutches, struggling up the steps to our front door, a small, brown, upright rabbit-shaped creature wearily emerged from beneath the bushes besid
e the porch.

  "Orwell!" I shouted. "Where have you been?"

  Slowly and side by side, the two disabled mammals stepped into the house to join a family grateful to receive them both.

  My father collapsed on the sofa and went to sleep, while Orwell, obviously worn out from his nights on the town, climbed slowly up the stairs and into his cage where he, too, curled up and summoned the train to slumber-land.

  "Mister," I whispered softly, lest I disturb the rabbit's rest, "you've got some explaining to do."

  Spilling the beans

  To assist him in preparing for his new career, and to give him something to do while lying on his back on the couch with his foot propped up on pillows, my father instructed my mother to reinstate our newspaper subscription.

  I resumed my ritual dash across the front yard each day to retrieve the paper, lingering in the increasingly bright mornings to read amid daffodils who waved their happy yellow heads at every passerby. But although I examined it closely every day, I found nothing in the paper that I could attribute to Orwell.

  School also started up again and, with it, my interest in the science class I attended with the tousle-haired boy from across the street. It was strange how easily things worked out when it came time to choose partners for the science fair. I chose him and he chose me. Nobody laughed. Nobody teased. Nobody complained.

  After school, we bounced around a basketball and a few ideas.

  "Do you like rockets?" I asked.

  "Not much," he said.

  "Me neither," I said. "What about an experiment with seeds and plants?"

  "Wouldn't that take a long time?" he asked.

  "You're right. How about filtration? A filtration experiment wouldn't take very long," I suggested.

  "Filtration? Of all the fascinating areas of science there are to choose from, you're interested in filtration?"

  "What about weather? It's interesting."

  "Too many variables," he responded.

  "Maybe we should do something with food," I suggested.

  "Now you're talking. Let's go check out your refrigerator."

  "Really? You want to do a food experiment?" I asked, happy to have worked things out to his satisfaction.

  "Of course not," he replied. "I'm hungry. Let's go eat while we figure out something that's never been done before. That's what I want to do. A scientific breakthrough! With nachos on the side!"

  We passed my father sleeping on the couch. The newspaper was laid neatly across his chest. A headline caught my eye: GLOBAL SITUATION CHANGES AGAIN—FUTURE UNCERTAIN. This, I thought, is what the newspaper business is all about. Everything changes every day. The people who work at the newspaper simply write it down.

  In the kitchen, we found Orwell leaning against the dishwasher eating lettuce. He looked up eagerly when we arrived.

  "That's a cool rabbit," the tousle-haired boy said. "How did you teach him to stand up like that?"

  "I don't teach Orwell. Orwell teaches me," I replied, popping some chips and cheese into the microwave oven.

  "Huh?"

  "Orwell is a very special rabbit," I said proudly.

  "Sure," he said. "And your cat is a very special cat and your dog is a very special dog and these nachos, also very special, are soon to be history. Got anything to drink? Juice? Soda? Chocolate milk?"

  I poured us each a big glass of orange juice, and with Orwell in the room listening without objection, told the tousle-haired boy everything I knew about the rabbit, his medical history, his language skills, his influence over games of chance. When I had finished, he pushed his empty plate aside and leaned across the table, his face just inches from mine, so close I could smell the lingering fragrance of the soap he'd used that morning.

  "Now that's what I mean by scientific breakthrough," he whispered, beaming. Then, quickly standing up straight and combing his fingers through his hair, he added, "Assuming, of course, that what you say is true."

  "Don't take my word for it," I said. "There are others around here who can convince you."

  From over by the dishwasher came the sound of one paw clapping. Tap-tap-tap-ta-tap!

  The riddle of the day

  "When is a door not a door?"

  "When it's ajar," I replied automatically. "That one's older than I am."

  The tousle-haired boy and I were sitting on the curb, reading the comics in the early morning light as Orwell enjoyed breakfast on the lawn.

  "It must be hard to come up with something new every day," he suggested.

  "Well," I continued, "I never thought it was funny in the first place. Nobody I know ever says 'ajar.' Doors are either open or they're closed, you know? There's no middle ground."

  "OK, let's try another one," he said. "When is a rabbit not a rabbit?"

  "Let me see that!" I said reaching for his section of the paper. "That sounds like a message from Orwell! Or did you make it up?"

  "I'm just trying to figure out what you've got here," he said, gesturing to the rabbit who was now walking upright, his head down, his arms behind him, inspecting the lawn like the old-time comic movie actor Groucho Marx. "Maybe he only looks like a rabbit."

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "I mean," he said, "that our bodies are not who we are. We're stuck with them, of course, but inside, we're completely different. Don't you think so?"

  "I never thought about it," I admitted.

  "Take you, for example," he continued, "Just because you look like a monkey doesn't mean you are one." He looked up from the newspaper and smiled, his brown morning hair wilder than usual.

  '"Thanks a lot,' said the kettle to the pot," I replied.

  "Don't mention it," he said.

  Neither of us spoke for a while. I traded him the sports section with its colorful weather page and prediction of another pre-spring snowfall for the two pages of comics he'd just finished.

  "Maybe he's your guardian angel," he said.

  "Orwell?" I asked.

  "Sure," he said. "Everybody has one. Few people know what they look like, though."

  "Do you have one?" I asked.

  "Sure!" he said, as if I'd just asked him if he had a heart or a brain or feelings like other people.

  "Do you know what your guardian angel looks like?"

  "Not really," he said. "I used to think he might look like my father, but then I figured that would be too obvious. Angels are masters of disguise. He's probably found some other body to be in now. Maybe even yours."

  "Oh," I said.

  I put my hand on his shoulder and looked out at the streaks and cracks in the street that separated his house from mine. Except for the birds and squirrels and one distant dog walker at the far end of the street, we were the only creatures up and about.

  Orwell arrived noiselessly and sat down between us as the sun rose in a magenta sky. After a long and reverent silence, the tousle-haired boy stood up, brushed off his jeans, and announced, "We better get ready for school."

  Scientists at work

  Constructing the experiment for the science fair presented the tousle-haired boy and me with a number of problems, the first of which was its classification. We had been given three categories to choose from: physical sciences, biological sciences, and Earth/space.

  I thought our project should be listed as biological, since it featured a living rabbit, but the tousle-haired boy said he thought it should be physical, since the actual experiment we intended to conduct would be performed with inanimate Scrabble tiles.

  Then I changed my mind and said maybe it ought to be Earth/space, since we were dealing with possibly unexplained phenomena, like UFOs, the ultimate Earth/space connection.

  My partner said that was possibly so, but what we really had was a fourth category, a super category, one that governed all the other categories. He suggested that we solve this problem by checking all three boxes on the District Science Fair and Festival official entry form.

  "A single classification is too limiting for some
thing this big," he said.

  The next problem we had to confront was the problem itself, that is, the statement of the problem, posed as a question, that would permit us to construct a scientific experiment that would yield a clear and persuasive answer.

  I suggested, "Can a rabbit change your luck?"

  The tousle-haired boy said that wasn't specific enough. He suggested, "Does the presence of a lucky rabbit change the outcome of a game of chance?"

  "That's what I just said!" I responded.

  "No," he explained, "what I said was more scientific than what you said."

  "Do it your way," I grumbled. "It makes no difference to me."

  We decided to skip over the recommended step of reviewing all the published scientific literature in the field, because, as my partner pointed out, "What literature? How many rabbits like this can there be?"

  This saved us a lot of time.

  The next step was to express a hypothesis. Since I'd been living with the experiment's one and only variable for some time, I came up with this one. It was, "It is hypothesized that when a lucky rabbit enters the room, the laws of probability go out the window."

  "Very creative," my partner said to my great satisfaction, offering no changes or objections.

  We decided to conduct the actual experiments over a number of days. We wanted to be sure that we didn't wear out Orwell with too much work at once, and we hoped to eliminate the possibility of the outcome being affected by a lucky day, which everybody has now and then.

  Since smile faces on horoscopes never run more than four days in a row, I figured five days of experiments ought to be enough to eliminate the lucky day variable.

  My partner said he thought it was possible to be lucky forever, but, even so, five days of doing the same experiment over and over seemed like plenty. He also mentioned that he'd like to fix himself a sandwich.

  We abandoned planning for the day and prepared PB&J on wheat bread with potato chips and fat-free devil's food cookies. We washed it all down with tall glasses of cold milk.