What the Dormouse Said

By Bruce McAllister

If you were aliens wanting to visit without being noticed, there were times and places in human history really good for that. The endless carnival nightlife of Renaissance Venice would have been excellent, and so would the bread-mold mass hysterias of the Middle Ages.

But that decade in America would have been good, too. The 60s, I mean. You could hide a lot in that cannabis smoke and psychedelic strobing.

At the tiny men’s college I attended for much of that decade —one known for training Future Leaders of America but one that had a policy of admitting occasional fringe members of society for the sake of variety— I spent a lot of time in that smoke and strobing resisting all efforts to make me a leader. I had long hair and wore baggy white Levis without a belt, looking, I now realize, like a longhaired stoner version of Ron Howard in Happy Days— but skinnier and paler with just a hint of my mother’s Chickasaw genes in my eyes. I hung out with the other “resisters”— the aliens of the campus. We'd all read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and knew what Bokonism was, how you could find your soul mates by touching feet. We never went that far, but, hey, it was a good metaphor. There was my dorm roommate, who had a bizarre Dutch surname, was a bi-sexual "song leader" from Berkeley High. And our suitemate James, a walleyed viola protégé from Detroit who’d been raised by loving beauticians— and for whom sexuality, he confessed, was an "idea," but not one you should ever take seriously. And an occasional member of our group, "Scary Gary" —our campus guest— a trucker who liked to read Kant and Kesey and spent more time on campus than in his cab. He was "scary" because you never knew, when he started frothing or seizing, what he'd popped or shot up. “To call the paramedics or not to call the paramedics?” we’d ask ourselves. It was scary.

Our leader was a paraplegic from birth named Emmett, who, in his wheelchair, had more charisma than any Kennedy and may have been channeling FDR without knowing it. His girlfriend, Josie, the hottest girl at the women's college across the street —and the least stuck-up— treated us all like brothers. We would have touched feet with her any day, but, though she found us all charming in a puppy-dog way, was a one-guy girl, old-fashioned. Emmett was her man.

Max “The Magus” Bennett —who had the longest hair of any hippie we knew— wasn't an official member of our group, but we'd visit him every day. He was "enlightened" —we were sure of it— or at least as enlightened as Chris, the Phi Beta Kappa, Harley-driving math-and-philosophy major who wore his white sherwani to class because he'd spent two years in India after high school and had, the rumor went, dropped acid with both the Beatles and Ravi Shankar. Max would be sitting in the middle of his small house across the street from the college, on his little Persian rug, fingers in the yoga "seal of wisdom" position while the record player played Gregorian chants and the Reverend Ike.

First time I met him he looked up at me, didn't move, and said, "I ain't judging you, man."

"Great," I said, not knowing what else to say. Sometimes you just didn't.

On the day in question, I'd gone to Bennett’s with another member of our tribe —Adam Silver— a guy who could do all the Black dances on Soul Train because, he told us, he was part Moorish. "You know, Northern Africa. My people were Sephardic, from Spain, from where the Moors were.”  You know….”

Again, what do you say? James, the viola virtuoso, had already told him he was full of shit.

Adam was in the back talking to Bennett’s chickens in their cage. He'd dropped acid —which still scared me, so I stuck to weed— and I was sitting on Bennett’s sofa, staring stoned at his incredibly long, black hair, which somehow seemed to fill the universe, and listening to the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit."  I'd heard it countless times before —who hadn’t?— but this time a motion caught the corner of my eye.

One pill makes you larger, etc. etc.

I turned, and there was the rabbit. For a real rabbit, it was huge and looked even bigger because it was standing on its haunches, forepaws in perfect bunny pose, nose twitching. I couldn't look away. Was it real? It sure looked real. What hallucination twitches its nose like that?

"It's real," a voice said.

"What?" I answered, not looking away.

"The rabbit's real."

"Oh."

I'm not sure that helped. I was remembering a film my dad had loved —Harvey— the Jimmy Stewart one about a man who can see a human-sized white rabbit when no one else can. Maybe I was disappointed that it was real? That it was only three-feet-tall instead of five or six?

It looked at me, and I swear it winked as it raised its nose and took a long, deep sniff. If a rabbit could grin, it would have grinned. That's what it felt like, but then it was a normal again. No sniffing, no winking.

I kept looking —it's hard not to stare when you've smoked as much as I had that morning instead of going to British Lit Survey— but the eyes, pink as roses, just blinked once and looked away. Why it wanted to stand up like that, I had no idea, but some rabbits like it.

I looked away, too— this time to Bennett, whose eyes were closed, fingers on his knees, as he meditated or pretended to.

"So, you've got this rabbit for mind-fucking purposes," I said. "Get people stoned and blow their minds with the Airplane."

"You're being very hostile, Brad. Your ego is feeling it needs to defend itself. Where is the attack that justifies this defense? 'In my defenselessness is my safety,' Brad. Besides, I didn't 'get him.'  He hopped in one day from the backyard. The chickens told me he was coming…."

"Fuck you, Bennett."

I got up and left, and, when I glanced back at the rabbit at the door, it hadn't moved. It was watching me, and I swear it did one of those man-to-man head nods, but how would I know. I was stoned as hell and mad for some reason. Maybe I wanted a rabbit, too. What a sensuous creature, that rabbit, a voice was saying suddenly —what a gorgeous creature— how much you want to hug it, really want to, right? I knew I needed to get out of there.

Two days later Aafjes, my roommate, looked at me and said, "Don't worry."

I was looking anxious, he told me later, and he misunderstood it.

"What?"

"You're not my type."

"What are you talking about?"

"You've been acting weird. Like we shouldn't be roommates. Like my sexual orientation perhaps worries you."

"For God's sake, Aafjes. I haven't been thinking about you at all."  He had a firm belief that he was an Adonis and would have done well in ancient Greece. He quoted Aristotle and Aristophanes constantly. His curly blond locks did make him look like David, but I was straight and not interested. I was still dreaming every other night of Josie and waking to profound guilt. Emmett deserved better than my lust.

"What is your type, Aafjes?"

"Rabbits."

"What?"

"Big white rabbits."

He was usually so high on himself that he didn't need the daily tokes some of us did, and his eyes did look clear, and he didn't have a box of Oreos in his hand. He was dead serious.

I just shook my head. I was thinking of Bennett’s rabbit, and I’d been smoking. The entire thing was getting way too weird.

A week later, outside the dorm, one night, I saw Aafjes step from a hedge. He wasn't buying from strangers. He could get anything he needed from Curt, the dorm RA who was a sixth-year senior and looked as old as our fathers from the Ritalin he’d been taking since he was a kid.

In the shadows of the hedge, disappearing into the darkness, I could see what I thought was someone in a badly-tailored rabbit suit. Blue in the moonlight, but clear enough.

What else could it have been?

There were two kinds of students at that college. The prep-schoolers who'd learned to mix drinks at ten and were already more savvy about how the world functioned than the rest of us would ever be. And us— maybe 20% of the population. Scholarship kids and assorted other hippies who didn't know a blue blazer from a herring bone, and had no idea what "Bass Weejuns" were and why it was cool to not wear socks with them. Paul fell between the two groups. Wealthy father, but an artist's temperament— or at least a Hollywood version of it. He'd never be a Future Leader of America and it didn't bother him. He wanted to be a film director like his uncle, who was a Paul, too.

I was interested in film, or thought I was —I'd already been through four majors and obviously had a lot more to go— so I dropped by his dorm room in the upper quad. He spent a lot of his time in LA, forty-five minutes away, with Tinsel Town people, and really didn't have a Bokonistic urge. Finding him in wasn't easy.

"Hey, Brad, you want to help with a film? You write well. We need some publicity. My uncle is giving me $20,000 to do a low-budget remake of Harvey. His friend works for Universal, the legal department, and if we keep it a non-commercial project, a student film at forty-five minutes, Universal will ignore the rights thing as a favor to my uncle. ‘Non-exclusive single-use with a right to buy.’  Bitchin', huh?"

"Why?"

"What do you mean why?"

"Why Harvey, Paul?"  Suddenly rabbits were everywhere.

"My uncle suggested it. He likes rabbits. He spent college summers working on a farm in Iowa —for college units, I think— and there was this tame rabbit he says was the Da Vinci of rabbits. It would work with him on the farm, digging if he dug, arranging objects on the ground with its paws— things like that. He also had an imaginary playmate, a rabbit, when he was little. His favorite imaginary playmate, he says. He had many. Hell, everyone likes rabbits, and who hasn't had an imaginary friend? The friend at Universal has one too —an imaginary bunny playmate, I mean— or so he claims. He’s a kissass, so who knows?”

I just stared.

When Paul announced a week later that he was going to have an audition for actors —they had to be dressed in white rabbit suits— I smoked two joints, big fat ones, in a row. I needed it. I smoked them that night, in fact, with a friend from Disneyland. We were busboys summers and holidays, the lowest of the lows— wearing our little black bowties and wielding our brooms and trash-traps like ballerinas from a surrealist play.

Keith —my friend’s name was Keith— had a crewcut (engineering major at UCLA that he was), but was also the Magic Kingdom's main hash dealer. I smoked those two fat joints —”Super-Doobies,” we called them— on the drive to an art film house on Sunset, where there was a film he really really wanted to see. I didn’t care what film we saw. I smoked them with the longest roach clip you can imagine, hands on the wheel.

"The movie Paul is making. It’s Harvey. The famous Jimmy Stewart movie."

"I'm not cognizant of that cinematic work," he said. He always ended up sounding like an English professor with a 2X4 up his ass when he got blasted. Usually, it was amusing. Not tonight. He needed to see a giant rabbit? What was wrong with him?

What was wrong with the world?

"There are three of us from the Magic Kingdom, Master Brad, who will be auditioning, in fact."

"What?”

"We've been practicing for months now. We wear our rabbit costumes —which are white as snow and which are indeed dear on a rental basis even from a costume shop in El Monte— at the Magic Kingdom whenever we can."

"You didn't tell me this. You can't do that. You'll get fired."

"The patrons and supervisory staff don't know who we are. They think we're in the park's Talent Inc. union. Supervisors watch us from the Matterhorn with their expensive binoculars, but assume we are characters. Alice. They're doing a remake, you know— Disney, I mean. There's no official White Rabbit yet for it, so we have no park-employed competition, and no one suspects. Why would anyone —especially if the three individuals who seem to know each other and obviously mean no harm, interacting charmingly as they do with the youngest visitors— dress up as white rabbits unless said endeavor were sanctioned by the staff of Mr. Disney as he drinks himself silly in his office overlooking Main Street. We have free reign of the park. We have, in fact, been joined, as of four days ago, by three more individuals in white rabbit suits. They have, it would seem, vowed silence —members perhaps of a Hari Krishna group with Jainist leanings— but their silence is not a problem. None of us speak while we interact with the children, entertaining them and bringing smiles to their innocent cheeks. We bow, we hop, we do modest dances, we offer our big paws, and that is what visitors to Mr. Disney's theater want, yes?"

"Besides," he added, "management is having enough trouble trying to figure out where Peter Pan, the Big Bad Wolf and the Three Pigs get their acid— if indeed it is acid that accounts for their behavior. There have also been complaints from young women about the Three Pigs, the snouts, the excessive affection demonstrated by those snouts in Fantasyland, up against the walls. We're the better dream, Brad. White rabbits, politely comported even if just as lustful…."

Lustful? What the hell was he talking about?

That night, in the car, was the first time I smelled the perfume. It didn’t come from the car. It was outside, in the southern California air.

I had to see them. I went that weekend, on a Saturday —Keith said they’d be there— and there they were. By Fantasyland II, the fast-food concession; and the Peter Pan ride (“All right, everybody, here we go!”); and Sleeping Beauty (“Have an apple, Dearie!”). Hordes of “guests —the scowling, exhausted grown-ups and their manic kids— were wolfing down hamburgers like quaaludes to get a grip, and Keith and his two friends, so white in the sun you needed Ray-Bans to look at them, were having their Kodak and Polaroid pictures taken with any boys and girls who wanted it. The three of them didn’t say a word. They just waved at the kids, gave them a come-hither with a big pink paw, and patted them on the head.

But where were the other three— the ones who’d joined them?

I saw a flash of white and followed it onto the bridge into Fantasyland. Before I knew it, a big white rabbit —one with clean fur, long eyelashes and sensuous pink lips, smelling like that perfume I recognized from that night in LA, one that made me weak in the knees— had me up against the stucco wall near the Mad Hatter. People were around us, but seemed not to notice. How was that possible? Were they blind?

I felt stoned. Whoever it was in the costume, “she” was stronger than I was. I couldn’t get away. Her paws held my arms. My knees were getting even weaker.

It was a female voice that whispered to me suddenly, or, I know now, a great imitation of one. They had learned to sound like whatever they needed to sound like, just as they’d learned how to tamper with their bodies to, well, accommodate ours. And of course to look like rabbits so we wouldn’t mind so much what they wanted us to do. They hadn’t looked at all like rabbits to start with. We know that, but, all these years later, we still don’t know exactly what they looked like— except that it probably wasn’t all that cuddly.

“Wanna make out by the dumpsters back-stage?” she whispered, whiskers ticking my nose, voice as hoarse and seductive as a dockside whore from San Pedro.

I kept trying to figure out what it was really holding me— I mean, not the paws, but something else. I couldn’t even move. I didn’t know the term “super-pheromone” then. I thought it was some acid I’d dropped and forgotten, or some glitch in my brain from too much pot— something in my drug-wimpiness I’d always feared.

None of this is real, right?

I don’t remember going to the Fantasyland II dumpsters with her, or crouching down between them, or fussing with our clothes and costume. But I know we did because when we were back on the castle bridge again, I was feeling that way you feel after doing it, my belt needed buckling, I could taste something strange on my lips, and her big eyes looked bright and shiny.

I do remember teeth— her teeth, bucked like a rabbit’s, as they hit mine, but that would have been the first kiss, right?

After that, I stumbled around the magic kingdom for hours, seeing more and more white rabbits. The crowds paid no attention, except to ask for autographs and photographs, somehow thinking, I guess, insane as the idea was, that the hundreds (yes, hundreds) of white rabbits were just Talent Inc. employees in Alice in Wonderland suits.

Was it that perfume again? I could smell it in the air everywhere.

I kept looking for my rabbit, but they all looked pretty much alike, and none gave me a second glance. I remember thinking: Maybe she doesn’t need to look at you again, Brad. Maybe your usefulness to her is over, and how sad that would be….

I was starting to tear up, but that was their plan, too.

How I got back to campus, I have no idea. I drove, sure, but how I made it back on Harbor Blvd. through the oil wells of Brea, I don’t know.

The next morning, which was a blur, too —at the audition for Paul’s movie— there were dozens of guys wearing rabbit suits, or that’s what we thought. Guys. Guys auditioning. What nerds. Dressing up without the director telling them to.

After that, it got worse. Rabbits everywhere. I mean everywhere. That strange smell that made your knees wobble but didn’t interfere with other things, and guys doing it with rabbits wherever they could. Doorways in city alleys, benches in parks, sofas in banks, in supermarket produce sections. A Kama Sutra of positions and venues, rabbits and guys. And the police didn’t seem to be giving out tickets for it.

That perfume….

I saw Aafjes with a boyish rabbit in the same bush. I saw James, sans viola, talking to a rabbit when James never talked to anyone. I saw Bennett dancing in his little house, pot smoke everywhere, with two rabbits as tall as he was, “White Rabbit” playing at full volume.

Paul’s movie got derailed. His own rabbit got to him of course and kept him busy, and, besides, there were just too many rabbits auditioning for his film, wave after wave of them— “Fluffle after fluffle, colony after colony,” he’d report later. The newspaper and TV stations were by now talking about the hordes of people wearing rabbit suits, but it was strange— the media talked awfully calmly about them, and not for very long at a time. Little feature stories. Nothing end-of-the-world. Barely front page. Matter-of-fact. And less and less coverage by the end. As if the perfume had reached them as well— which of course it had.

Everything felt normal, and that meant at home on vacations, with family, on road trips with friends, or dates, on trains, planes, busses, cars, and city life. Everywhere. No exception. On campus, we studied (or didn’t) and were college kids and you took the rabbits for granted because, well, the rabbits wanted us to.

At about the time most people realized it wasn’t human beings in ill-fitting rabbit outfits (people can’t hop that well or twitch noses like that, or make a costume’s ears stand up at will), it had happened. The “Mur-Pianos” —that’s what they claimed later they called themselves, though they were probably lying— had arrived, and they had us: We liked furry creatures just too much, as they’d learned from observation light years away in their peripatetic, playful starship roaming of the Milky Way. Or so they said when they finally started answering questions.

I soon heard that “Moorish” Adam, busting a move (the Freddie or the Frug— I don't remember) found his rabbit —or should we say his rabbit found him— at a Soul Train audition in LA. Just after that I heard, though it may have been rumor only, that Scary Gary had found his at a truck stop in Wichita on a Dristan bender. Paul found his on campus, of course, in the editing booth he’d built in in his dorm’s basement, and Keith his one night during a hash deal at Hollywood and Vine.

Emmet never found his rabbit because, we heard, Josie artfully kicked the ass of any Mur-Piano that tried to approach him. But Emmet, perfume or no perfume, was a one-woman man, bless his soul, and the rabbits finally learned this, too.

Then, much faster than humans would have, the rabbits began to show. Plump rabbits of all heights and weight and shades of white, lengths of ear, pinkness of nose, got plumper still, and the litters were born. That’s what the media called them —litters— and that’s indeed what they were: A dozen tiny human faces, human hands, furry bodies and floppy ears. What’s not to love?

You’re all we’ve got, Brad, Prilla says to me these days, eyes big as ever, eyelashes and nose and lips a little older, the fur grayer (which is fine)— sometimes with spoken words, sometimes not (though the “not” can give me headaches, so she keeps it to a minimum). At least that was what we were supposed to say, Brad. As a species, you’ve no doubt gathered, we’re not known for our honesty; but when we’re “in love” —that is, when a creature does us a favor and we’re grateful for it, like agreeing to make babies that will completely take over their world— we do sometimes tell the truth. Like now. Like me. We told you at the start, “Our world is dying. You humans are our only hope.”  That may not have been be true —it probably wasn’t— but, as you’ll notice, Brad, your world is still functioning. So what’s a few Bokonistic fomas—a few ‘untruths’—to get things rolling? You’ve taken us in and we’re a part of you now. You like us in our bunny form (which took a lot of what your scientists now call “CRISPR work”) and you’re so very caring as a species about babies —all kinds— and cute round faces with big eyes, just like mine. You were also into “free love” back then, so we knew what needed to be done. And—  She took a deep breath and sighed that endearing sigh, just a little sad, she knew always got to me. —as your erudite if pompous friend Keith put it so long ago, “I would propose that in these turbulent and quite possibly apocalyptic times of ours, we do our concerted best to make love, not war.”  Am I right, Brad?”  

She’s right. She’s always right, and I never argue. Ever.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not looking for ways…ways to stop it…the invasion, I mean. Ways to resist, I mean. On some days anyway. I imagine myself organizing our litters. I see myself creating young-Mur-Piano “cells” with those furry, impressionable great-great-grandkids of ours. Using classic revolutionary indoctrination. (The manuals of Che and Mao.)  I give motivationally loud, heartfelt speeches in our living room. If necessary, I bribe them with their favorite treats— chocolate and tubers and beetles. But mainly I deliver solid “parental modeling.”  (Just because I don’t have fur doesn’t mean I’m not their great-great-granddad.)  I do all of this, of course, when Prilla is away at her day-long Mur-Piano meetings at a neighbor’s house, and the kids aren’t at “litter school” in the big city buildings appropriated for this, and I have them to myself, nanny for the youngest, for a weekend day. On days like this, everywhere I go in the house they look up at me with those big, blinking eyes and haloes of fur and they seem to be waiting for me to do something, to teach them something, as any good human father should. Something about the world. And justice. And Truth.

I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t at least try, right?