Bribsy the Rabbit

CONTENT WARNING: EXPLICIT AND GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION
Bribsy the Rabbit is a very funnyfull rabbit who loves to hop hop hop. The fact that Bribsy the Rabbit “loves to hop hop hop” is objectively true on every level—Bribsy the Rabbit loves to hop hop hop—but that he is a “very funnyfull rabbit” is true only as a descriptive claim of how the world sees and reacts to him. Bribsy the Rabbit is funnyfull in that people think he is funnyfull. He is funnyfull in that when he comes around, people laugh. And they do not laugh to make fun of him: they really do think he is a funnyfull rabbit who is trying to be funnyfull! But Bribsy, in his heart, is a serious rabbit. He is a serious rabbit who likes to think about serious things—like international relations. He would like 5nothing more than to be perceived as the serious rabbit he believes himself to be.
Presently, we find our Bribsy moving through the aisles of Trader Joe’s, picking up his groceries for the week. He is wearing an oversized yellow dress shirt (billowed at the front and bought at Kmart), an oversized pink bow tie (nearly the size of his head and also bought at Kmart), and nothing else—an undeniably funny outfit, but poor Bribsy is oblivious to this; he believes the attire shows formality and exemplifies his serious, studious nature. He cannot stop hop hop hopping which causes some items to fall out of his basket. Children point and laugh. One freckled child says, “Bribsy the Rabbit! Oh, you are so funnyfull!” Bribsy frowns. He pictures himself hanging from a standard, five-blade ceiling fan.
The other customers tower above Bribsy and chuckle as they reach over his head to grab what they need. Not a rabbit-sized rabbit nor an adult-human-sized rabbit, Bribsy is about the height of an eight-year-old human child, an in-between height, a height which, unfortunately for our Bribsy, is about the most funnyfull height a rabbit could be.
Items continue to fall out of Bribsy’s basket while he hops, and he hops back to pick them up, and then they fall out again. Some items fall without him realizing. By the time he gets to the checkout queue, he has half the items he thought he did. He sighs. It’s the same thing every week. No reason to go back now, he thinks. Not to be subjected to their stares and laughs again. He attempts to comfort himself with the thought that ninety percent of his items are different types of carrots anyway.
All around him in line (and while he does nothing except stand), customers peek at Bribsy and laugh to themselves or to their companions. He squeezes shut his eyes and shakes his head sadly. Then, close to the end of his rope (this day being the latest in a long line of materially indistinguishable days that have now consumed almost the entirety of his rope), feeling that the public’s view on him will never change, imagining many different makes and models of ceiling fan, Bribsy suddenly overhears one woman, a few paces ahead of him in line, telling her friend about a recent trip she took to Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. He overhears as the woman tells her friend about the endless piles of shoes and suitcases, about the mountains of human hair, about the horrible silence of the gas chambers. He sees the friend’s face become grave, her skin pulled down almost into itself, her eyes close to tears. Then, a thought appears in his mind all at once. He is startled. He hops straight into the air and lets out a little high-pitched squeal, about two seconds in length and made up of at least three distinct tones. The others in line see this and explode in laughter: knees are slapped; bellies are held; some can hardly inhale as they heave silent howls, teardrops accumulating in their eyes and falling down their cheeks. The ones who saw tell the ones who didn’t, who then erupt as well. The bag boys and gals stop bagging and fall on top of each other, dropping celery and pasta and nuts and eggs to the floor. Bottles of beer crash and mix with the seeping egg yolk. The customers are too inconsolable themselves to mind; a considerable few even puke on the ground in their joy. Normally, all this would make Bribsy quite sad, but presently he perceives none of it. He is completely lost in thought, completely lost in his wonderful new idea: he will give a lecture. A lecture on torture. A lecture on labor camps, death camps, secret police, political and ethnic persecution, mock trials, all manner of oppression! He will discuss the Nazi and Soviet regimes, yes, he will discuss them in detail, but he will also speak on North Korea, Ba'athist Iraq, perhaps even Maoist China! Then they will see he is a serious rabbit! Then they will see him as he is! There is no doubt! I will dive into the darkness! thinks Bribsy. I will make Lanzmann’s Shoah look like nothing more than a family sitcom!
Our Bribsy has tried convincing the public of his seriousness before, but all attempts have failed. For a while, he attended various protests against wars and ethnic cleansings and other such terrible things, but the public just assumed he found himself at each one by accident, like a cartoon baby on a bomb factory conveyor belt, and responded with laughter. Bribsy then tried spending a whole day sitting on the sidewalk near the Beacon Theater, eating unsalted soda crackers and drinking water. He thought this would make him seem boring, and boring is only a stone's throw from serious. But passersby took one look at his little nibbles and literally spat out their coffee in delight. Another attempt involved livestreaming himself on Facebook while doing crossword puzzles silently. He would rub his forehead and look at the New York Times Saturday puzzle and say nothing. The public screenshotted and clipped almost every second of it, turning it into memes and captioning videos with things like, “So adorable!” and “When the puzzle hits hard,” and “Funnyfull!” And so, Bribsy had all but given up on changing how people felt about him. But now this. This, he thinks, this is sure to be my salvation! And who can disagree!
Bribsy pays for his groceries. His cashier giggles and says, “Oh Bribsy, you give me so much pleasure with your sillyfull acts.” Bribsy nods and smiles. No reason to fret. He knows the cashier and everyone else will soon see him as they should.
Once home, Bribsy immediately begins his research. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side which he pays for by making celebrity appearances every now and then at some new store or club or restaurant—-appearances he dreads. But being the only anthropomorphic rabbit in existence pays well, and Bribsy can often make half a year’s worth of rent for fifteen minutes of his time.
He spends the next few months isolated in his apartment. When necessary, he orders takeout to be left at his door: orange carrots, purple carrots, hay, yellow carrots, white carrots, red carrots, various leaves. He scours the internet, purchases tome upon tome on totalitarian governance—both primary and secondary sources—and devours their content. He writes his lecture, prepares PowerPoint slides, practices his pacing. He does not want to mess this up so he decides to hire a public speaking coach. The best one money could buy. Her name is Patricia. She is a forty-seven-year-old white woman with shoulder-length curly brown hair. She is a “professional coach” and a public speaking coach and she wears glasses even while she sleeps.
When Patricia enters Bribsy’s apartment her face lights up. Bribsy had used a fake name on his correspondence so she wouldn’t know his true identity until she arrived. The name he used was “Bob Bobward,” which he thought was very dignified-sounding. Bribsy’s spacious living room is cluttered with and made small by countless, precarious stacks of open and closed books. In the far corner is a five-foot by five-foot litter box. The entire place smells of ammonia.
“Bribsy, you jokester you! Oh fie! Don’t bother paying me, the prank is enough!” laughs Patricia. She heads for the door. Bribsy hops in front of it.
“Please, I need your help,” he says, gravely. (Bribsy’s voice and speaking pitch are—thank fucking god—unremarkable.)
Patricia wipes snot from her nose. “Oh Bribsy…” she says, reaching for the knob and beginning to pull the door open. Bribsy slams it shut.
“I mean it. I need you to help me prepare for a lecture I am planning to give on totalitarian governments and their horrors.” He continues to plead and plead but Patricia simply cannot take him seriously. Finally, he tells her to wait a brief moment and retreats to his room, returning seconds later with a suitcase. He opens the suitcase and inside is a check for seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. Patricia laughs about how there’s just like this small little check inside such a big suitcase, but she says that she would like the money. Bribsy says, to get the money, she has to help him and treat him like a serious rabbit while doing so. Patricia says she will help him and treat him as a serious rabbit, but only if he signs a contract that states in detailed terms that he understands she does not actually think he is a serious rabbit, but that she will only be pretending she does, as if playing make-believe with a child. Bribsy agrees. He knows this will not last much longer. Patricia drafts the contract. The contract is 987 pages long. From now until six minutes forty-one seconds into his lecture, Patricia must treat Bribsy as a serious rabbit and help him with his presentation in whatever ways she can.
They begin the training with urgency the following day. Imagine a 1980s-esque montage of Bribsy learning to do boring things. Imagine a 1980s-esque montage, except, instead of working out, Bribsy is learning to end his sentence on a down note. Bribsy is to place his hand like this when he says this and like that when he says that. She tells him his clothes absolutely must go and makes an appointment to get him fitted for a bespoke, midnight blue, single-breasted Huntsman suit. They additionally acquire John Lobb’s classic oxford shoes, City II, custom-fitted and made with the finest black leather, and, to finish the look, a Calatrava, 5227J, self-winding, yellow gold, alligator-strap-including, ivory-lacquered-dial-containing, caliber 26‑330 S C wristwatch. Both the suit and shoes require multiple trips to the United Kingdom, where Bribsy is measured and poked and prodded and made to sign many contracts with shoemakers and tailors stating in no uncertain terms that they truly believe Bribsy is a funnyfull rabbit, not a serious suit- or shoe-wearing rabbit.
Then, on a cold drizzly night, about a month and a half out from the lecture, Patricia sits Bribsy down and tells him that he absolutely must not, at any time, before, during, or after the presentation, hop. Bribsy can hardly believe what he is hearing. “What can be wrong with a hop?” he asks. She tells him hopping is an extremely funny way to move around, maybe the funniest—funnier than even the skip or the power-walk. Bribsy is beside himself. Can that be true? he thinks. Patricia assures him that yes, yes, it is true. Bribsy becomes frustrated and sad. “But I love to hop hop hop,” he says. Patricia says he can either be perceived as a serious rabbit, or he can hop hop hop, but he cannot do both. Bribsy rubs a paw over his face. He pours himself a glass of Jack Daniels (which Patricia bought to replace his previous nighttime drink: Yoo-hoo). The books are all closed and stacked neatly along the living room wall. The litter box is gone. The apartment smells of lavender. Bribsy sips. He thinks. He looks Patricia over; her face is a not-unhappy grimace of unflinching stone. He puts down the whiskey and says, with conviction, “I. Will. Not. Hop.”
Patricia says, “Fantastic.”
Bribsy says, “Fantastic.”
Then Bribsy says the only problem is he doesn’t actually know how to move except by hopping. Patricia explains how walking is done. She explains that you need to move one foot and then the other and then the first one and then the other again. They practice for weeks until Bribsy looks like he’s been walking all his life.
Patricia reviews his presentation script and slides. She tells him to cut out the fluff, to keep only the most horrifying pieces of information, to focus his presentation exclusively on the Soviet gulags and the Nazi concentration and death camps. She says the final five slides, at the very least, should consist of nothing but people being gassed to death. Bribsy edits accordingly.
The day before the presentation, Bribsy and Patricia share a splendid bottle of champagne. Hints of black cherry and raspberry, orange zest and thyme, dance atop their tongues. She asks him questions about the Third Reich and he answers in prodigious detail. While speaking, he cannot help but notice Patricia is really, in her own unique way, quite comely. Her wrinkles are sharp and deep and well-defined and, combined with her overwhelmingly pale complexion, this almost gives her the appearance of a Houdon. He did not notice this before but he notices it now, and it takes all his strength to keep from blushing. As Bribsy explains the shifting hierarchies of the SA, SS, and state officials, the duplication of offices within the Nazi regime, thoughts begin to enter his mind: thoughts like, perhaps Patricia, in spending so much time with him, in helping him through this process, perhaps she is no longer pretending, perhaps she now really does think he is a serious rabbit, perhaps, even, she has developed feelings for him.
Bribsy has never had a real relationship. Each time he’s made love, he’s paid for it. Not in any foreboding sense, I mean he’s paid United States dollars for it. He has never even had so much as a true friend. He does not know where he came from, and so he has no family of any sort either. As a baby, he was found lying in a pile of whoopee cushions, in an abandoned whoopee cushion factory; the whoopee cushions were all inflated too for some reason, and so each cry and wiggle from Bribsy emitted a chorus of artificial farts. He was found by a traveling circus made up exclusively of clowns, a clown circus, looking to nab themselves a free supply of cushions. The clowns almost died of laughter, and these are clowns we’re talking about, very experienced laughers, but the clowns almost died when they spotted little Bribsy whimpering atop the pile. They brought him along to New York City where they were performing their next show and abandoned him on some street or another—they couldn’t bear to look at him a moment longer for fear of developing hernias en masse, even if it would have been financially advantageous for their circus. Bribsy’s first words, spoken alone on that street corner, were, “From a Bayesian perspective, the preceding events still seem quite unlikely.” Two teenage girls overheard this while walking past and close to pissed themselves laughing and literally still talk about it today. That is how Bribsy came into the world. And as far as ways to come into the world go…do I even have to say it? But so now, after spending more intimate time with Patricia than he has with anyone ever, Bribsy cannot help but hope it’s real. He goes to bed with the thought that even if Patricia isn’t yet convinced, it doesn’t matter, she, and everyone else, will be tomorrow.
Bribsy wakes up three hours earlier than expected, with dawn beginning to break. At length, the day has come. He smiles while he makes his first coffee and he smiles while he makes his second coffee and he smiles while he goes over his PowerPoint for the thousandth time. He puts on his Huntsman suit and his shoes and his watch and rubs a luxury gel in his fur, meticulously placing each hair exactly where it should be, sleek and compact and with no one strand sticking out from the others. He mouths his professionally coached mantra into the mirror: “I am a serious rabbit who cannot help but be considered so. I am a serious rabbit who cannot help but be considered so.”
He steps outside and walks to the Beacon Theater, which has been reserved for the event. He feels a touch of nervousness but calms himself by thinking about one of his favorite topics: the current state of the economic literature on grain tariffs. It is two in the afternoon and a beautiful, sunshiny day. The streets are empty. Everyone is in the theater. Bribsy goes in the back door and talks with the event supervisors, who have also signed contracts stating they will make believe they think Bribsy is a serious rabbit. He stands backstage and compulsively checks his wristwatch. The nervousness is back. Slightly. But nervousness can be good. “Anxiety, nervousness, fear: these are the public speakers' most precious weapons,” he could hear Patricia saying in his mind. The sound of the audience chattering amongst themselves leaks into the backroom, a fog of indistinguishable noise. The sign is given by the head event organizer—a common, unadorned thumbs up, which Patricia and Bribsy workshopped for days—and our rabbit steps onto the stage.
The crowd is silent. They are confused at Bribsy's normal steps and respectable attire. He moves to the podium. He searches for Patricia’s face but cannot find her. No matter. She will show up, he thinks. She is contractually obligated to. Bribsy confidently pauses. He takes the clicker from the podium and navigates to the first slide of his PowerPoint, which flashes up on the IMAX-sized screen behind him. The slide shows a photo of fourteen men in a small room, sitting on a pole about the diameter of one of their arms. The men’s legs dangle below them. Bribsy clears his throat. He explains that according to Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in punishment cells such as this one in the Solovki gulag, prisoners were forced to sit like this during all waking hours, causing them immense pain and difficulty balancing, and if they had the misfortune to slip and fall, they were beaten viciously, or otherwise tied to a wooden beam and pushed down a stairway containing upwards of three hundred steep steps; while in other punishment cells, cells sometimes made of nothing more than a smattering of logs, prisoners were subjected to temperatures below negative fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and were often made to “undress to their underwear.” Some audience members begin to mumble to each other, looking grim and distraught. Bribsy notices this and chokes down a smile. He continues, flipping to the next slide, a photo of Polish Jews boarding a train to the Treblinka death camp. “Preeminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg estimates that approximately 750,000 Jews were murdered in Treblinka’s gas chambers from the period of July 1942 to October 1943,” says Bribsy, confidently. More mumbles. Sighs of low spirits. Shakings of the head. Bribsy’s heart feels light, like an uncaged dove. He clicks on, presently, to a slide showing various photos of Einsatzgruppen personnel about to shoot, or currently shooting, scores of Jewish men and women. “But let us not get ahead of ourselves, let us start first here, with the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing operations, and work ourselves slowly through time, in immense and graphic detail, to the death camps,” says Bribsy, confidently.
He begins in on describing just that when suddenly—for no apparent reason whatsoever, in response to no visible screw-up or mistake—a faint, slight chuckle, maybe half of one exhale of a chuckle, seeps out from somewhere in the hall. Alarmed, Bribsy breaks off his current sentence halfway (a sentence which began, “On October 15, 1941, Einsatzgruppe A shot and killed over one hundred thousand…”) and looks around the crowd, looks around the crowd for two, maybe three seconds, before beginning again. Only anxiety, he attempts to convince himself. But moments later, another, now full exhale, now two full exhale chuckle, rings forth from an altogether different location in the theater. Now another. And another. Now full-fledged laughs, screeches of glee. Audience members drop to the floor, holding their sides. Some smack at their own faces in delirium.
“Oh Bribsy, you had us for a moment there!”
“Oh Bribsy, you insurmountable prankster!”
“Oh Bribsy, you hilarious rogue!”
Bribsy tries to continue his speech, tries to focus his mind on the presentation, but starts spluttering. He attempts to begin a sentence with the word “it,” but he is so flustered that it comes out as “Iwot”—”Iwot”! No, Bribsy, no! A handful of attendees bite the seats in front of them in an effort to stop their convulsions, the pain in their abdomens overwhelming.
Bribsy’s mind and body feel like a Category 7 hurricane, a whole new category of hurricane, two steps above the previous maximum, that has picked up colossal electric generators, colossal electric generators that are broken and spit relentless charges into its winds. He is too anxious to even think to think about Patricia's quote about being anxious. He can feel it all slipping away. He claws at his face, begins shouting terms and phrases of grotesque horror. “Millions murdered!” he screams. “Small children thrown alive into pits of fire!” he yelps. “Mounds of emaciated bodies!” he shrieks.
Then, from near the back of the theater, a laugh louder than any of the others. A throaty, alto roar. The clicker falls from Bribsy’s hand as it trembles. He looks over and… oh god, oh heaven, oh jeez… emitting this primal cackle, standing up and leaning over, holding onto an entrance wall for support, stomping her feet into the floor is… the neighborhood librarian! The neighborhood librarian that doesn’t have much of a sense of humor so is really hard to make laugh generally! Oh, to lose even her! But—oh, god!—directly to the right of the librarian is none other than… Patricia! Crap!
But, wait… what’s this? Is it possible? Yes… Patricia isn’t laughing. She looks severe. A red hue rises from her perpetually colorless cheeks. “Enough!” she yells.
The crowd immediately stops, goes silent once again. People in the middle of full-blown chortles catch themselves and turn, quiet, towards Patricia. She stands up. She pulls her tawny swirls behind her ears. She points at Bribsy. “Standing on that stage… is one of the most interesting, erudite, and downright kind men I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.” Her eyes are moist and glisten under her thick glasses; her voice sounds like expensive sandpaper. “He is caring and sweet and can collaborate effectively on SMART goals and OKRs and takes professional development seriously in a complex business landscape. He is learned. He owns an abacus. He knows what the sixth most populated city in New Mexico is. He can recite the number pi up to 112,836 digits. He has strong opinions on the relative importance of the Devonian Period vs. the Isuan Period vs. the Ediacaran Period. He has written five to six unpublished academic essays harshly critiquing the framework of geopolitical realism. The essays contain more than 415 citations between them. He is not a mere plaything for your amusement! For your tee-hees and haw-haws! He is not a wind-up toy! He is not a laugh machine! He is not a means to your self-centered ends!” She takes a deep breath. The audience is engrossed. Our rabbit is crying. She continues, “He is a Bribsy! He is a Bribsy and he is deserving of our respect! He is a Bribsy and I lo—” An eardrum-searing alarm rings out. It is louder than a high-school fire alarm and somehow even more shrill. Patricia pulls a phone from her pocket. She swipes away the alarm and promptly begins to laugh uncontrollably. Bribsy’s heart thump thump thumps as he looks at his watch. It’s been just over six minutes forty-one seconds since he started his lecture. Her contract is up. “Ah!” Patricia yells, struggling for breath, looking straight at Bribsy. “You really are a funnyfull rabbit!” She jerks off her blazer. Then she falls to the floor and flops around like a fish. Her guffaws reach a volume even greater than that of the librarian. She tosses a folded-up piece of paper into the audience with one of her flops. The audience throws the folded-up piece of paper to Bribsy. Bribsy opens the folded-up piece of paper and it’s an itemized listing of out-of-pocket costs, including their shared Dom Pérignon Brut Rosé Champagne 2008, to be reimbursed in connection with her services.
Out loud, and completely involuntarily, Bribsy literally says, “Humina humina humina.” Total joyous mayhem descends. Imagine the previous scene of laughter at the Trader Joe’s checkout queue, but multiplied by one hundred in both size and intensity. A significant majority of audience members release feces into their trousers and do not even care. One attendee bites out his own tongue. A washerwoman throws her delicate laundry into the air with reckless abandon. A woman in her twenties knees an elderly man in the penis and the man says thanks. A man in his eighties swallows a young woman's left breast and the woman says outstanding. A sizable group on the upper balcony rub their inflamed and naked crotches to and fro and shout out ah ah.
Bribsy, while not consciously thinking in these terms, realizes that no matter what he changes and what he does, he will always be perceived as funnyfull—whether this is due to the snowball effect of a lifetime of perceived funnyfullness or some intrinsic property of himself, he does not know nor think about, but he knows there is no escaping it. Consciously, his thought process is something similar to “Fuck-GAWR, nooooooo, DIE, frootingg FRAHHHH, ceiling fan made of knives,,, shitttAHHHHHHHH frupahwoootanowr.”
He unleashes a classic rabbit scream, the terrifying scream of the North American cottontail, and he hops—moving now purely by instinct—yes he hop hop hops to a peeled-over security guard and grabs his loaded pistol and backup magazines. Presently, Bribsy turns and fires indiscriminately into the crowd! Oh Bribsy, no!
Blood splatters everywhere! The audience members look at each other in confusion! Bribsy shoots a still-flopping Patricia in the side of the abdomen! The crowd looks intently at Patricia! Patricia looks up from her wound and squeals in ecstasy! The crowd jumps up and down and whistles! Bribsy shoots more bullets! The audience members delight in every shot! Some fall over and die! Insides become outsides! A stench of gore and excrement fills the theater! Bribsy shoots a one-year-old baby in its mother’s arms! The baby’s skull explodes on impact with the Speer Gold Dot 9mm 124 grain +P hollow point bullet! The baby’s head becomes mangled flesh and bone! The mother screams, “What a hoot!”
The security guards try to arrest Bribsy but they cannot get up due to their contracting diaphragms! Bribsy reloads! Bribsy kills seven people in rapid succession! Bribsy pulls a corpse up on stage and says, “Is this what you wanted? Is this what you needed?” The corpse used to be a man with three children and one grandchild and another grandchild on the way! Bribsy stares at the audience! The audience bounces around gaily! Bribsy pushes the barrel of the gun up against his own face! Like straight against the front of his face, pressed upon the tip of his pink button nose! Stop it, Bribsy! Bribsy pulls the trigger! Bribsy is an unrecognizable mess! The crowd is laughing! Bribsy is dead! I do not find this funny in the slightest! If I had known this was the direction the story was going to go, I would not have told it! I apologize profusely! I distance myself from Bribsy! I disavow his actions! I would like to make it known that I support gun control measures! I would like to make it known that I rescind what may have come off as a sympathetic portrait of Bribsy for much of this tale! Imagine my, the narrator’s, head popping into view, taking up most of the visual lens, like the pig at the end of Looney Tunes, shaking my head disapprovingly while this continues on in the background! While things burst into flame! While people disembowel each other! While a young man attempts to stick his johnson into Bribsy’s head-hole! I will no longer narrate these events, beginning immediately, beginning presently, beginning now!