Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,83

making sure it’s unreligious, The Saturday Evening Post. It opens to an article in which the author, who from the photograph looks Italian, tells how he took his wife and four children and mother-in-law on a three-week camping trip to the Canadian Rockies that only cost them $120 not counting the initial investment of a Piper Cub. His mind can’t keep with the words but keeps skidding up and branching away and flowering into little soft visions of Janice screaming, of the baby’s head blooming out of blood, of the wicked ridged blue light Janice must be looking into if she’s conscious, if she’s conscious Eccles said, of the surgeon’s red rubber hands and gauze face and Janice’s babyish black nostrils widening to take in the antiseptic smell he smells, the smell running everywhere along the whitewashed walls, of being washed, washed, blood washed, retching washed until every surface smells like the inside of a bucket but it will never come clean because we will always fill it up again with our filth. A damp warm cloth seems wrapped around his heart. He is certain that as a consequence of his sin Janice or the baby will die. His sin a conglomerate of flight, cruelty, obscenity, and conceit; a black clot embodied in the entrails of the birth. Though his bowels twist with the will to dismiss this clot, to retract, to turn back and undo, he does not turn to the priest beside him, but instead reads the same sentence about delicious fried trout again and again.

On the extreme edge of his tree of fear Eccles perches, black bird, flipping the pages of magazines and making frowning faces to himself. He seems unreal to Rabbit, everything seems unreal that is outside of his sensations. His palms tingle; a strange impression of pressure darts over his body, seizing now his legs, now the base of his neck. His armpits itch the way they used to when he was little and late for school, running up Jackson Road.

“Where’s her parents?” he asks Eccles.

Eccles looks surprised. “I don’t know. I’ll ask the sister.” He moves to get up.

“No no, sit still for Chrissake.” Eccles’ acting like he half-owns the place annoys him. Harry wants to be unnoticed; Eccles makes noise. He rattles the magazine so it sounds like he’s tearing orange crates apart. And flips cigarettes around like a juggler.

A woman in white, not a man, comes into the waiting-room and asks Sister Bernard, “Did I leave a can of furniture polish in here? I can’t find it anywhere. A green can, with one of those pushy things on top that makes it spritz.”

“No, dear.”

She looks for it and goes out and after a minute comes back and announces, “Well that’s the mystery of the world.”

To the distant music of pans, wagons, and doors, one day turns through midnight into another. Sister Bernard is relieved by another nun, a very old one, dressed in dark blue, signifying some mysterious inferiority of holiness. The two whispering men go to the desk, talk, and leave, their crisis unresolved. Eccles and he are left alone. Rabbit strains his ears to catch the cry of his child somewhere deep in the hushed hospital maze. Often he thinks he hears it; the scrape of a shoe, a dog in the street, a nurse giggling—any of these are enough to fool him. He does not expect the fruit of Janice’s pain to make a very human noise. His idea grows, that it will be a monster, a monster of his making. The thrust whereby it was conceived becomes confused in his mind with the perverted entry a few hours ago he made into Ruth. Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it had driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.

Mary Ann. Tired and stiff and tough somehow after a game he would find her hanging on the front steps under the school motto and they would walk across mulching wet leaves through white November fog to his father’s car and drive to get the heater warmed and park. Her body a