“What are we gonna do now?” Chloe said.
Something about her voice sounded strained. I looked down at her hands on the steering wheel. She was squeezing hard, her knuckles tight and shiny. It didn’t happen often, but I could tell that Chloe was overtired and heading into a kind of light manic state.
I’d seen her like this before. I wasn’t the only one with an obsessive personality issue connected to the game.
* * *
—
A few years after we met, there were rumors that something big was happening with Rabbits, and we were all trying to figure out if the next iteration of the game had started.
Chloe had been chasing some clues related to a missing coast guard officer, and had somehow ended up stranded on the northern anchor of the Aurora Bridge. While she was up there looking for something that was supposed to be carved into the stone, she’d slipped and almost fallen to her death.
When I finally caught up with her and helped her off the bridge, she was severely dehydrated and hadn’t slept for days. I had to track down and pay Chloe’s alcoholic mother fifty dollars in order to get her to call the hospital and have her daughter taken off the hospital’s involuntary hold list.
Like most of us consumed by the game, Rabbits was a way for Chloe to temporarily enter another realm—a place where everything wasn’t exactly the way it was in real life.
We each had our reasons for wanting the fantastical world promised by Rabbits to replace the flawed emotional narrative of our real lives. For Chloe, escaping into a mysterious world meant that she was able to forget her family for a while and focus on something exciting that she was really good at.
For me, Rabbits was a way to try and hang on to the sense of mystery and wonder I’d been obsessed with as a kid. But it was more than that. I’d always imagined my obsession with the game was somehow helping me get over the loss of my parents.
But what if the opposite were true?
I’d always believed I was following patterns and looking for connections related to the game because I was trying to stop thinking about my parents, but what if I’d been drawn into the world of Rabbits specifically because I wasn’t ready to let them go?
* * *
—
“What are we going to do now?” Chloe asked.
“Now, it’s bedtime,” I said.
“For real?”
“It’s almost two in the morning.”
“So? Don’t two in the morning me. What about The Children of the Gray God? We need to know all the fuck about that.”
I wanted to know all the fuck about that too, but I was worried about Chloe. She needed to sleep. I needed to sleep.
Fatman Neil’s porn store basement wasn’t more than fifteen minutes from my place, but Chloe was distracted, and after missing a couple of turns, she’d managed to turn it into a half-hour drive.
“We’ve been warned off Rabbits by Russell Milligan, the Magician, Crow, and now Fatman Neil,” I said. “Maybe we need to take a step back, just to regroup.”
“Wait, so you’re the voice of fucking reason now?” Chloe snapped.
“Hey, we ‘voice of reason’ each other. It’s what we do.”
“I can’t believe you can just go to sleep with all that’s happening.”
“You’re going to go to sleep too, okay?”
“Fine.”
We drove in silence for a few blocks.
“Sorry, I’m a bit…edgy. It’s just that I’ve been thinking a lot about Baron,” Chloe said. “It’s so fucked-up. What if we can figure out what happened?”
“We know what happened.”
“I mean what really happened.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Come on, K. Baron’s dead.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Baron’s dead and I don’t want you to be next.”
We drove in silence for another block.
“It’s because you dig me so hard, isn’t it?” Chloe said.
“Maybe,” I said.
I did dig Chloe, a whole lot, but at the moment, I had no idea what was going on with the two of us. I had a bunch of questions like: Would this version of Chloe’s interpretation of events over the past couple of months match my own? Was the strange shit I’d been experiencing some kind of weird dimensional flux, or was it something far more mundane?
What if I was in the middle of some kind of mental or emotional breakdown?
* * *
—
Chloe dropped me off at home, and although my body was exhausted, my mind was too wired to sleep. I turned on the television for the first time in ages （I kept my cable subscription for the Seahawks）。 I thought I’d try to find something that might help unwind my brain enough to let me fall asleep.