Chapter 11

The next day at Bob’s Pets was a busy one. People had actually seen the fliers and were eager to find out if it was a practical joke. Many were genuinely surprised to discover the creatures weren’t animatronics.

Selzer counted the cash as it flowed in. David had never seen the man smile like that. It was some mix of happiness and greed, and it was a little scary. Selzer’s teeth actually seemed to get sharper as the day went on.

It was a crazy day for the store. David was a little disappointed when he noticed the Glowie Fish tank was empty. Having them at the store was almost like owning them himself, only he didn’t have to make room for an aquarium in his apartment. David wondered if he could put in an order for more to Vyo-GenetiX, or maybe he could get some bored undergrads to make the fish. It didn’t seem like a complicated creature to produce.

The customers purchasing sea monkeys also bought the store out of decorative aquarium castles, but it was easy to order more of those.

David was exhausted by the time his shift ended. He hadn’t realized how tiring profits were; making a profit required actual work, like customer service and restocking. Money might be the root of all evil, but it was definitely the root of an aching back and sore feet.

He returned home, grateful that his couch wasn’t covered in junk so he could just flop down and rest. Maybe he would even sleep right here tonight. Fuck the bed; it was way over there.

“David!”

Amanda sounded really excited, so David knew his evening of well-earned relaxation was about to be ruined.

“I have some great news!”

Oh god, it was even worse than he thought.

“Look, I know you said you weren’t ready, but I showed a few of your drawings to a friend and she loved them.”

“Oh, that’s, er… That’s great, hon,” David said, trying to keep a smile on his face.

“I hope you don’t mind, but Beth saw the portrait you drew of me and, well, I didn’t think it’d be a problem, so… I told her you could draw one of her, too.”

“Um… sure, yeah,” David said, uncertainty growing in the pit of his stomach.

“Great! She’s coming by tonight with the gallery owner—“

The uncertainty burst into a tidal wave of horror. “Gallery owner?”

“Yeah,” Amanda said. “Beth showed your work to Jessica who showed it to her boss, the gallery owner.” Amanda paused, confused. “Didn’t I mention that?”

David couldn’t hide the shock on his face as he shook his head no. He looked like a deer in headlights, if the deer had also been doused in cold water at a surprise party and then shot in the gut.

“Sorry, I guess I got ahead of myself,” Amanda said. “But isn’t it exciting? Beth and Jessica are coming by tonight, and they’re bringing the gallery owner along to see more of your work.”

Mano listened quietly from his bed in the corner, smiling inwardly and keeping his thoughts to himself.

David’s exhaustion was gone; in its place was pure, unbridled panic.

Don’t worry, don’t worry, he told himself. This is nothing new. It’ll be just like all those times you drew stuff for Amanda and Mr. Selzer. It’ll be fine.

Mano remained silent in the corner.

Hey, Mano, David thought at the rabbit. I know tonight’s not your night, but…

No.

It took David a moment to realize Mano hadn’t said “no problem.” His heart skipped a beat.

What? But, Amanda’s friends and a gallery owner are on their way here and—

No.

I don’t understand. What do you mean, “No”?

I mean I’m not doing it.

David’s pulse had caught up with the conversation and was now pumping at what felt like 300 beats a second.

Fine, David thought. Fine, I’ll figure it out myself. I don’t need—

Reality hit him mid-sentence, which is better than post-sentence but still not as good as pre-sentence. His heart rate increased to 600 beats a second. Panic ate away his stomach and was working its way up his throat.

Please, David thought. Please, I need you.

I told you before: I’m not your trained monkey.

What do you want? You can have it! Whatever it is, you—

I want to date other women.

David swallowed hard; his throat felt raw.

I can’t do that.

Mano shrugged. There was a knock at the door.

Oh, God, they’re here. Mano, I need—

I told you my terms.

I can’t do that! Something else, anything else. Come on, I let you have Amanda, you don’t need—

I’m bored with Amanda.

Jesus Christ, I—

The guests were inside the apartment now. Amanda stood by the door greeting two young women and a much older lady. Everyone was smiling. Everyone was expecting to see David perform magic. He felt like he would drown in cold sweat any second now. Could they tell?

“Oh, David,” Amanda said kindly. “You don’t need to be nervous. Come, let me introduce you.”

Yeah, they could tell.

He stood up, smiled, and tried to hear the introductions over the heart beat pounding against his ear drums.

Please, Mano, please.

I’ll say yes when you do.

People were taking their seats. They expected David to perform.

You just want to date other women, right?

That’s what I said.

David struggled to swallow. His vision was blurry. He felt like he might die of a heart attack any second, and part of him hoped he would.

Okay.

What was that?

Okay, you can date other women. YOU CAN DATE OTHER WOMEN. Now please, help me!

Mano made the switch. David’s body was a mess of nerves, but he calmed it down with ease and performed his magic for the audience.

Rule Five in the Art of Negotiation: Be a cutthroat sonuvabitch rabbit with a genius IQ and no morals.

Mano spent hours charming the guests. When they finally left, it was because the evening was growing late.

“Wow, you were amazing,” Amanda said, kissing him on the cheek.

“I know,” he said, giving her half a hug. Mano told her he was tired and urged her to bed, telling her he’d be going to sleep shortly. He relaxed on the couch and drank a glass of scotch. When he knew Amanda was asleep, he let David have his body back.

David took a minute to acclimate himself to being human before he turned his attention to Mano. He almost said something, noticed the scotch on the coffee table, and chose to have a drink instead.

After half a glass, David decided he was ready to talk. “So, what happened?”

“Mrs. Vincent loves your work,” Mano said. “I agreed to produce some art for her to feature in her gallery.”

David nodded. “That’s great,” he said, his voice flat, devoid of any emotion. He took another sip of his scotch.

Silence filled the room while David finished his glass.

“I’m not doing this anymore,” he said at last.

“What?” Mano said calmly.

“I’m done,” David said. “I don’t need you. You’ve drawn enough—“

“What are you going to do?” Mano interrupted him. “You can’t just rip out the pages in your sketchbook and hang them on the gallery walls, you know.”

“What?” David’s spine froze into a straight line. “Then why haven’t you been drawing something I can use? It’s not like you need to draw in the sketchbook for practi—“

David’s last two sentences circled in his head like a broken record until his voice returned. “Oh, God… I’m so stupid.”

Mano refrained from agreeing; he didn’t want to be a bad winner. Instead, he stayed on task. “You think you can buy the proper materials, or should I?”

David leaned over and rested his head in his hands, staring down at the carpet under his feet. “I… I don’t know,” he said.

My relationship, my entire future… What have I done?

David shut his eyes against the world. “I don’t know what to do.”

Mano’s voice remained emotionless. “I guess I’ll be doing the shopping, then.”

David remained in that position for a few more minutes before lifting his head and pouring himself another glass of scotch. And another. And another.

David almost went to work without Mano before realizing the store would probably have more customers today. David was a naturally better salesman than Selzer, but Mano had the inside information that made David a great salesman. He silently admitted defeat and took the rabbit with him.

David had never before gone to work with a hangover from drinking alone. It was decidedly worse than the hangovers he got from drinking with Rodney. Something about the inherent despair in drinking alone made the next day’s headache worse.

David let the rabbit guide him in selling to the customers, but the two had nothing that even remotely resembled a conversation. David fed Mano and the other animals in silence, ate his own lunch in silence, and felt his innate hatred towards his boss in silence. His thoughts were less like complete sentences and more like black vapor obscuring any glimmer of light; even the Grim Reaper would consider David’s pitch-black mind excessively dark.

David went straight from work to the bar. He had no intention of being sober that evening. Maybe not the next evening, either. Or the next.

You can’t stall forever.

David ignored the backpack at his feet and drank his beer.

“All right, what’s the score, man?” Rodney finally asked, about five beers into the night.

“A gallery owner wants to feature my work,” David said, his head swimming enough that he accidentally said what he was thinking.

Rodney assumed David was joking and laughed; he stopped just short of tears when he realized David wasn’t laughing with him.

“Are you serious, Vid?”

It was then that David realized he had never mentioned his newfound artistic talent to his best friend. He wasn’t sure if that made him a good friend, for not lying, or a bad friend, for not sharing his success. David decided it made him an average friend and left it at that.

“Yeah,” David said. “Yeah, I am.”

Rodney didn’t demand proof (though he wanted to), but David went to the car and retrieved his sketchbook, anyway.

Rodney stared at David’s new drawings. “Unreal.”

For the first time in years, Rodney was genuinely impressed with his friend. It would have felt better if it was actually David’s achievement, but beggars couldn’t be losers or whatever the saying was.

When Rodney was done mentally filing away the female figure studies, David dropped the sketchbook into his backpack. It missed landing on Mano by an inch, though it certainly wasn’t David’s intention to miss. Mano ignored the failed attempt at homicide (well, maybe not homicide; more like an unpleasant bop on the head); at some point, David would reach the final stage, “Acceptance.” Until then, the boy could pout however much he wanted.

Rodney tried to convince David that the pressure would get easier to handle as time went on, especially after his first successful gallery showing. David couldn’t really tell him that it wasn’t the pressure but the manipulative talking rabbit in his backpack that was the problem, so he nodded and drank and tried to act like Rodney was helping him so that at least one of them would feel like a good person.

By the time David stumbled home, Amanda was already in bed asleep. David collapsed on the couch and removed Mano from his backpack. He held the rabbit in his hands and looked it in the eye; his blurry double-vision actually made this a great effort of will.

“Can we please discuss our deal?”

“What about it?”

“I don’t want to do it.”

“I don’t want to be an artist,” Mano said.

“But you’re good at it.”

“You’d be good at running Bob’s Pets,” Mano said, “but you don’t want to do that.”

“That’s different…” David mumbled.

Mano shrugged.

“You’ve been having a shit ton of sex with my girlfriend,” David said, his voice sounding even sulkier than before. “Why can’t that be enough?”

“I’m a rabbit,” Mano said. “Rabbits are horny, and they are not monogamous.”

“But—“

“Haven’t you heard the expression ‘fuck like bunnies’?”

David desperately wanted to say no, but what was the point in lying to a mind-reading rabbit?

The flow of customers at Bob’s Pets remained steady, and David continued to put off his agreement with Mano. Mano was surprisingly amiable about it.

“This feels like a lot of extra work with no benefit for me,” David grumbled one day during his lunch break.

“That’s your own fault,” Mano said.

“I’ve tried to ask Selzer for a raise,” David said. “He just pats me on the shoulder and says a job well done is its own reward.”

“You can’t negotiate for shit.”

When David’s lunch break ended, he took an extra five minutes to sulk before returning to his post behind the counter. Selzer noticed and decided it was time to carry out his bossly duties of being a total and complete dick.

“David!”

David’s face froze in an expression that seemed guilty of something more than just being a few minutes late. Selzer’s whole body was awake at the prospect of finding out what his employee had done wrong and just how much he could dock his pay for it.

Before Lawrence Selzer could say another word, something interrupted him.

Lawrence, the voice said, reverberating in his head.

“Hmm?”

Lawrence! Now the voice was bellowing.

“Who—?”

I am your god, and I am very unhappy with you.

“I—”

Don’t interrupt. You are a terrible boss; the only reason this store has customers is because of David, so you will stop giving your employee a hard time.

“Uh—”

And you will give him a 60% raise.

“What?! No, I—”

The animals in the shop began screeching , clawing at the walls of their cages.

“I can’t!”

The screeching got louder. Were the lights flickering? His heart pounding in his chest,Lawrence became worried he was having a heart attack. Were flickering lights a symptom of heart attacks? Maybe it was a stroke.

“Fifty percent. I could do fifty!”

The animals went quiet, and his heart slowed back down.

Fine.

“Do I… Do I have to it right away?”

The voice of God roared in his head.

“Yes, got it, right away. Right away is perfect.”

Good. Now go back to your office and behave. If I have to talk to you again, you won’t like what happens.

Lawrence Selzer looked like he was about to speak for a moment, but after a few seconds’ hesitation he gave up. Turning hastily, Selzer scrambled back to his office. When he was out of hearing range, David looked down at the rabbit sitting on the counter. Something obviously had Selzer flustered, and David had no idea what. All he’d seen was his boss standing in the store, going the color of sour milk and breaking out in a cold sweat at apparently nothing.

“What did you do to him?”

“Oh, nothing,” Mano said. “Just put the fear of God in him.”

David returned home that evening and told Amanda the good news. Earning 50% more money meant he was 50% more attractive in her eyes, which he hadn’t thought about when he said it and regretted the moment she began tugging at his clothes.

David realized he hadn’t had sex with her since Mano started borrowing his body.

Mano!

…What?

What do I do?

Have sex with your girlfriend?

But, I—

I’m not drawing you a diagram, if that’s what you’re asking for.

Goddammit, Mano!

I thought you didn’t like me fucking your girlfriend? You should be thrilled.

She’s going to be disappointed.

Great, then it’ll be just like old times for you.

It was true. When David and Amanda were finished, the look on her face was clearly one of a girl trying to hide her disappointment; David remembered that expression well.

The thought of asking a rabbit for pointers made his stomach curdle.

With more customers came more attention. Bob’s Pets had attracted the notice of those people who think animals have inalienable rights and should be allowed to vote. The store being private property meant they couldn’t be bothersome inside, so instead they stood on the sidewalk with clever signs like “Cages = Prisons” and “Animals are people, too.”

At first, the protesters attracted more attention to the store, but soon potential customers decided it was too much bother to push through the dense mob of noisy do-gooders.

“Don’t these people have jobs?” Selzer said, watching the dramatics from behind the glass door.

“I don’t think so, sir,” David said. “That person there misspelled ‘DNA.’”

“They shouldn’t be allowed to protest something they can’t even spell.”

Selzer tried calling the police to break up the growing horde only to be told bothersome acts of non-violent griping were protected by freedom of assembly. Selzer asked if throwing a brick through a window counted as an act of violence (which it does), but the police hung up on him when he asked where the nearest construction site was located.

“That was rude,” Selzer said.

David didn’t respond; he didn’t want his boss to decide that it was his job to find said brick and encourage its trajectory through the window. Doing something like that seemed like a bad idea given that cameras and cell phones had been combined into a device that was now an extension of the human hand.

“Maybe it’ll rain,” Selzer said after a while.

“Maybe they’ll get bored,” David said.

Maybe Hell will freeze over, Mano added.

They were thankfully distracted by a truck at their back door. Selzer and David were so busy watching the protesters they had forgotten about the new shipment arriving.

The cargo included sea monkeys, eleven-legged snakes, hooved seahorses (Why would you even make these?), and a crab-clawed octopus that David decided to call a Kraken. The Sea Monkeys were a big seller (and relatively easy to care for), so David was happy to have a new supply. These looked slightly different from the previous ones, slightly more aquatic and slightly less monkeyish; the scientists must have been trying to make the perfect Sea Monkey, though for what purpose David couldn’t even guess.

“Why eleven legs?” David wondered as he watched the snakes continuously run into the glass walls of their new home.

“Because it’s more than ten but less than twelve?” Mano ventured.

David wasn’t sure if that meant anything or not, but it was a better reason than any he could concoct.

After work, David took his car to a nearby auto shop, Chop Shop Automotive—their motto was “If It’s Not Broken, We’ll Fix It,” and they were the kind of place to stay true to their word—to get it repaired. They offered to fix some of the other minor problems with his vehicle, and he offered not to pay them a dime if they touched anything he didn’t approve. David would be able to pick it up the next day, and finally, finally, he wouldn’t have to get up an hour earlier to catch the bus to make it to work on time.

Amanda seemed a little less disappointed about that night’s performance. David’s bout of sexual prowess was beginning to seem like a dream: a wonderful, amazing—but ultimately dead—dream.

Amanda knew it was possible David’s sex drive was suffering due to other stress in his life, but she decided now was a good time to add to it, anyway.

“David?”

He looked cautiously at his girlfriend. “Yes, hon?”

“Mrs. Vincent is wondering when you’ll have something more to show her.”

“Mrs. Vincent?”

“The gallery owner,” Amanda said.

“Oh…” David didn’t know what to say. “Um…”

He could feel Mano smiling at him all the way from its bed in the living room.

Amanda’s eyes filled with worry. “Is it because of the pressure? Maybe you should try going out more. You know, for inspiration?”

“What?”

“Well, don’t artists spend a lot of time at parks and zoos and stuff?”

David swallowed hard. “You want me to spend less time in the apartment?”

“Yes!” she said, happy he understood. “Your art is so amazing, but you haven’t done anything new since you talked to Mrs. Vincent. Oh! I think the aquarium expanded their shark exhibit—“

Amanda was still talking, but David’s ears seemed to have stopped working. He’d waited so long to start working on pieces for the gallery that Amanda was worried she was hindering him.

The fact that Mano could read anyone’s mind, not just David’s, suddenly seemed like something he should have kept at the forefront of his thoughts.

So stupid…

Patience is a virtue.