Then, on the first day of school in the spring, the boy got lost on his way home. It was the same path he had walked every school day for the past six years, a distance he could cover in ten minutes, fifteen at most.
A neighbor found him sitting in the middle of the road, dazed from having wandered around the vicinity of the school for a long time. The boy smelled terrible. The neighbor who brought him to his mother, embarrassedly mentioned that the boy seemed to have soiled his pants, and she turned around and quickly walked away before the boy’s mother could even recover from the shock and thank her.
The boy’s parents took him to see a doctor. Their local pediatrician recommended they take him to a larger hospital. But even the university hospital in the city could not find anything wrong, this being a time before MRI scans. The pediatrician at the university hospital did observe, however, that the child’s eyes seemed unfocused as he rocked back and forth mumbling unintelligibly, and that he had peed himself where he sat. The doctor recommended consulting a psychiatrist. His chair fell on its side as the child's father jumped to his feet and cried, “Are you suggesting my son is mad!” His face turning crimson, the father screamed the most wretched curses at the doctor as he pushed aside his pleading wife and swept up his child in his arms before leaving the hospital. The blameless mother tearfully begged the doctor for his forgiveness as she bowed several times before following her husband out.
The child’s condition only grew worse after their visit to the university hospital. The child could no longer recognize his parents’ faces, repeatedly soiled his trousers, could not walk properly, and kept muttering to himself but no longer formed meaningful words. He spent most of his day lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling with unfocused eyes, gurgling now and then, but the one thing he consistently did was obsess over the bunny lamp. The bunny lamp was moved from his desk to his nightstand, and the child, while mumbling at the ceiling, turned to look at the lamp from time to time, which seemed to reassure him, and he became anxious and screamed whenever anyone else tried to touch it.
While he slept, the child would sometimes wriggle his nose, nibble, or flick his ears like a bunny, but none of the adults around him noticed. In his dreams, the child sat under a tree with a white rabbit with black-tipped ears and tail, pleasantly eating away at his own brain. The more he nibbled away at it, the narrower the child’s world became until he was unable to leave the little bit of land he shared under the tree with the bunny. By then, he could not comprehend anything except for his delight in being with his friend.
As the CEO’s grandson slowly died on the bed next to the bunny lamp, the seasons changed, as did the government and the world. The people who had enabled the CEO to monopolize the liquor market with his cheap and tasteless spirits lost their positions of power. The company, for the first time since its founding, was hit with a tax audit.
By that point, the invisible bunnies had shredded the company’s performance reviews, account books, financial statements, and daily memorandums. Every operating profit notification, every record of taxes paid to the National Tax Service, everything was in pieces and completely illegible.
The bunnies had moved on to the wallpaper of the office building, leaving teeth marks on the walls and doors. The company’s important documents were now nothing but a pile of hamster bedding, and the building itself began to look shabby. It was clear to the workers that the company, both inside and out, was falling apart. But the CEO refused to acknowledge this and continued to turn a blind eye.
For a long time, the CEO’s grandson lay in bed staring up at the ceiling with unfocused eyes, breathing and doing nothing else.
Then one day, the child stopped breathing.
Returning home from the elaborate funeral they’d held for his son, the father locked himself in his dead son’s room and wept for a long time. He placed the bunny lamp his son had loved so much on his lap and wailed his son’s name again and again as he stroked it.
The National Tax Service determined that the company not only had to pay back all the taxes it had skillfully avoided in the past but even the taxes it had actually paid, plus interest. No matter how desperately the company tried to prove they had paid the latter, the company didn’t have a single legible document to submit as evidence.
When whispers began that the company’s operations and financial documents had vanished, its debtors insisted there was no proof they owed the company anything and refused to make payments. At the same time, the company’s creditors demanded they pay up immediately. The CEO was livid. He went to a secret safe where he kept a notebook that only he knew about, a record of all of the company’s assets and bonds and debt documents. But when he opened the safe, he found his trusted secret notebook torn to shreds, chewed to pieces—a pile of useless pulp.