Orwell's Luck (13 page)

Without him, we drew
PIPERVL
and
IRNALLE
.

"Aren't those the names of towns?" I asked.

"What?" he replied.

"Isn't there a place called Piperville? And Iranelle?" I asked.

"Give me a break," he said. "The rabbit is spelling out perfectly comprehensible seven-letter words. Look at this:
SIXTEEN MAGICAL RABBITS WEARING SCARLET FLOWERS
. Incredible! Meanwhile, the mayonnaise jar is coughing up gibberish. This is Nobel Prize-winning stuff. Don't mess it up."

"It was just an observation," I said, my feelings bruised.

"You know what your trouble is?" my partner said. "You think too much."

The amazing Orwell resumed his performance on Tuesday, the second day of experiments, by adding the words
DANCING, QUIETLY, BENEATH, EMERALD, SHOWERS
, and
RAINBOW
to the output the tousle-haired boy and I recorded in the notebook.

At the same time, his randomly produced competition came up with
YFHSLI
blank,
ENOLAIW, OEATIID, ZUOROOC, ITUISOU,
and
YD
blank
OO
blank w.

"This just gets better and better," my partner said, happily munching on a carrot stick he'd swiped from a bowl that I'd set out for our test subject.

On day three of the Orwell experiments, as the tousle-haired boy and I shared a stack of pancakes in the kitchen, I said, "I think Orwell is showing off. I think it's because of you and all the attention he's getting."

"Maybe he has an unrequited urge," he replied.

"Huh?" I said, accidentally putting my elbow into a blob of syrup, an oversight that later caused me to board the school bus with a napkin stuck to my denim jacket.

"You know, a need to write this stuff," he explained. "Driven by his inner voice."

"If you say so," I said.

Orwell's experiments that day produced
RABBITS, TURNING, LIGHTLY, WISHING, SINGING,
and
TELLING.

The control experiment yielded o blank
SVGSW, XEITDEN, RMFSIUO, DLEEFLW, ODFRKRC
, and
IA BLANK ERWN.

"That's the second time he's used the word 'rabbits,' " I said. "It must be important to him."

"Duhhh!" the tousle-haired boy mocked, gently scratching Orwell's head as the rabbit slept in my partner's lightly freckled arms.

Thursday's entry included
HOPEFUL
and
STORIES
and the number
SIXTEEN
again, followed by
BASHFUL, BAFFLED
, and
RABBITS.

This was a sharp linguistic contrast to
IRDYOH
blank,
IUIHRDP, STNOEMR, DRNIEDS, RZASTGO
, and
RONLOIT.

"What if Orwell is controlling both sides of the experiment?" I wondered aloud. "You know, in order to make himself look better."

"So what?" my partner replied, ketchup dripping from the crisp, brown French fry he held between his thumb and his forefinger. "It just makes us look better, you know?"

It was a good thing that Friday was the last scheduled day of the science fair experiments. The pace of the testing and the excitement generated by the results had worn everybody out, humans and beasts alike. Orwell responded to our morning summons by dragging himself listlessly into the room.

"That bunny looks like he's had it," the tousle-haired boy observed.

"Maybe we pushed him too hard," I said, worried.

The results, however, suggested it was worth the effort. Whereas the unassisted, random drawing had created
ANQNENR, NDDUDTE, IYYAAHD, HRESEOE, OREAOLI,
and
HDG
blank
OJN,
Orwell's last words from the mayonnaise jar were
SMILING, BRIEFLY, BETWEEN, SHADOWS, KNOWING,
and
NOTHING.

Outside, a thin sliver of a moon was visible through the kitchen window. A star, or perhaps it was a planet, glowed nearby like a child's night-light. The wind, quiet all day, had picked up until it was gusting intermittently, randomly rattling a loose window screen.

Seated at the kitchen counter leaning over the spiral notebook in which we had painstakingly recorded our week's work, my partner pushed his unruly brown hair from his forehead and smiled.

"Your rabbit has written a poem," he announced. "In thirty consecutive attempts, without missing a beat, this amazing creature has produced a beautiful poem consisting entirely of seven-letter words."

As he spoke, Orwell leaned against the wall, crossing both his arms and his feet in a pose of modest abandon.

"Listen," he said, reading to me in a most pleasant and soothing voice:

SIXTEEN MAGICAL RABBITS
WEARING SCARLET FLOWERS
DANCING QUIETLY
BENEATH EMERALD SHOWERS.
RAINBOW RABBITS TURNING LIGHTLY
WISHING
SINGING
TELLING HOPEFUL STORIES.
SIXTEEN BASHFUL, BAFFLED RABBITS
SMILING BRIEFLY BETWEEN SHADOWS
KNOWING NOTHING.

"Man!" I said.

"Usually," my tousle-haired partner responded. "But in this case, it's definitely rabbit."

St. Patrick's Day, the first day of spring, my sister's birthday, my parents' thirteenth wedding anniversary, the one hundred ninety-third anniversary of Lewis and Clark's departure from Fort Clatsop, marking the beginning of the intrepid explorers' long journey home—time tripped along on many milestones.

Intrigued by my rabbit's artistic achievement, I began to read poetry in my spare time, hoping to figure out what Orwell's feat was all about, if, indeed, the poem was his.

Had Orwell done this?

Choosing Scrabble letters from a jar, had Orwell constructed coherent verse from thirty words of equal length? As preposterous as this would seem to someone just arriving on the scene, I had no other explanation.

If the newspaper is to be believed, stranger things are happening every day. And if the many histories recorded in the Bible have it right, the extraordinary has been commonplace since time began. Clearly, there is a point at which the improbable becomes inevitable. But who is responsible for a poem?

Is some great creative life force the author, using a man or a woman, or possibly even some lesser creature, as its instrument? If so, is this true for every poem, or only for the good poems?

Is Orwell's poem a good poem, or is it only a good poem for a rabbit? Is Orwell inspired, or is he merely clever? As my afternoon dabbling in French had taught me so well, there is always more than one way of looking at things.

My personal career as a philosopher was off to a trying beginning.

Whatever else the poem may have been, it was also a turning point for Orwell's communications with me. As had happened before, his messages stopped. This time, however, proved to be more than an interruption. It seemed the little rabbit had shot his wad. Although we continued to understand one another's wishes and moods, that day Orwell's secret seven-letter messages ceased forever.

His life's work apparently complete, Orwell retired, becoming, by every appearance except his peculiar gait, an ordinary rabbit.

"I can't believe it!" the tousle-haired boy said angrily, using a phrase that reminded me of my mother in earlier days. "This is so irritating!"

In his hand my partner held a four-page judging form from the District Science Fair and Festival. Out of a possible eighty-eight points, we had received a miserable fifty-six, a score equal to a letter grade of D.

All things considered, it was not a very good showing.

"They didn't believe us!" he wailed. "They said, listen to this, 'Rather than adhere to the scientific method of inquiry, your experiment seems to ridicule it.' What jerks! This makes me so mad!"

I looked at the score sheet. The only thing the judges really liked was the artistic presentation and workmanship of our exhibit.

I had drawn a picture of Orwell in his distinctive, upright pose, with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes. Together, the tousle-haired boy and I had painstakingly colored it in with colored pencils. We had glued on actual Scrabble tiles so it looked like Orwell was standing on them. But we got clobbered on our hypothesis, our procedure, and our conclusion, and were served big fat goose eggs for our missing review of literature and our nonexistent bibliography.

"This is so typical!" my partner ranted on. "You make an authentic scientific breakthrough and nobody believes you! What's the use?"

"Well," I said, staring at the row of zeroes on the last page. "Maybe if we'd read up on it first.
'Il faut étudier pour avoir de bonnes notes.'
It is necessary to study in order to have good grades."

"You're defending them?" he snapped.

"No," I said. "Just trying to see it another way."

Of course I was disappointed, but I could understand why people would be skeptical of a versifying, fortunetelling, moonwalking rabbit picking letters from a jar with his brain.

"I think people look for what's familiar," I suggested. "If it's different, they figure something's wrong with it. "

"Maybe you're right," he said. "Maybe we're just ahead of our time."

"The first explorers," I added.

"With only a rabbit to guide us," he said, laughing.

During the week that led to Easter, red-and-yellow tulips bloomed in the backyard garden over the grave shared by the goldfish and the frogs. Tiny green leaves no bigger than a rabbit's nose twitched in the breeze that wafted through the branches of the hedgeapple tree.

At school, to our complete surprise, the tousle-haired boy and I were advised that we were to share first-place honors in the annual District Young Writers' Competition. Orwell's poem had been entered on our behalf by a sympathetic science fair judge, who, unlike her colleagues, had found another way of looking at things.

So far, the pipeline that runs underneath the fields has not blown up, at least not in that spot, but an item in the newspaper that landed in my front yard reported that a pipeline
had
exploded hundreds of miles away, in a place where few people lived, shortly after suppertime. No one was hurt, but a seventy-year-old man who witnessed the accident was quoted as saying, "It was like the day of reckoning."

My father recovered fully from his accident. When he started his new job at the newspaper, my mother quit hers to prepare for the arrival of the new baby.

Since everything is connected end to end, the woman who was teaching me French quit to take the job my mother gave up. The last words she taught my class were, "
Tout est bien qui finit bien,
" which means, "All's well that ends well." This is a useless phrase, as far as I'm concerned, since nothing really ends, it just keeps on changing.