Mike Papoosie, 14, often doesn't know what to do once the library closes at night. He doesn't want to go home just to stare at the wall in his tiny bedroom, he says, because it will make him crazy.
Instead, Mike (whose name was changed for this story in order to protect the health of a minor) and his friends wander the icy roads of Clyde River, Canada, migrating like a pod of narwhal. In Clyde, this is one of the most popular activities for teens. They trudge along the snow-packed gravel, joking and talking and scanning the sky for northern lights. If they reach the end of the road, where snowy tundra takes over, they turn around. There is no destination in mind, anyway. They just try to stay moving, to keep some momentum in their lives. A new kind of nomadism.
"This town," Mike says. "It drives some people insane."
Bunnies, of course, are sites of whirling semiotic complexity. They are children’s-book staples, with starring roles in “The Runaway Bunny,” “The Velveteen Rabbit,” and “Goodnight Moon,” not to mention the myth of the Easter Bunny and the tales of Beatrix Potter. Linked to infancy, these creatures have enormous eyes, twitchy noses, floppy ears, thumping feet. They look soft and cuddly and innocent and defenseless, a suite of attributes warped to sardonic effect by the movie “Donnie Darko.” As pets, bunnies evince zero edge and exude a whiff of basicness. At the same time, they have served as sex symbols since long before the phrase “bunny girls” first hopped into Playboy, in 1960. The cliché “fuck like a bunny” goes back at least to 1978; “fuck like rabbits” dates to 1897. As the language blogger John Kelly recounts, the rabbit synonym “coney” inspired associations with “cunny,” a slang term for the vagina, as early as the fifteen-hundreds. (Mike Pence might be fascinated to learn of the linguistic ties between “cunt” and “country.”) In the wake of “Sex and the City,” a rabbit may also summon thoughts of the character Charlotte’s temporary vibrator addiction. BOTUS takes his place in the tradition of lusty, naïve leporidae. Only a bunny could be at once so pure and so dirty—so perfectly suited to square the Pences’ blandness with the subversions of “Last Week Tonight.”
Oliver’s Marlon Bundo, bashful and lovelorn, deploys these contradictory energies brilliantly. His job is to show readers that gay romance is adorable and appealing; it is also to rib Pence’s base via a lingering sense of taboo. (“I’m very, very fun,” BOTUS assures his audience, hula hoop in hand. He’s right.)
Once upon a time, artists had jobs. And not “advising the Library of Congress on its newest Verdi acquisition” jobs, but job jobs, the kind you hear about in stump speeches. Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring “The Waste Land” (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work, then handing them over to his secretary to transcribe at the insurance agency where he supervised real estate claims. The avant-garde composer Philip Glass shocked at least one music lover when he materialized, smock-clad and brandishing plumber’s tools, in a home with a malfunctioning appliance. “While working,” Glass recounted to The Guardian in 2001, “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
And so, though I might not have realised it at the time, all those health memoirs I’ve devoured over the years have helped fortify me for the obstacles life was waiting to hurl my way. They have made me a better reader, and they have upped my resilience at a time when resilience is what I needed most. Being able to write Get Well Soon feels nothing less than a privilege, and the response from readers and medical practitioners has been humbling.
Of course, I hope I will never find myself in the position of being able to write another one – I’ve had my sickness quota, thanks; all plain sailing from here on in – but I do know that I will continue to reach for them. “I think the more curiosity we have about how people deal with their own misfortunes, the better,” says Rentzenbrink. “The momentum I find in the best examples is very affecting. Every time I read one, I feel better for it. Don’t you?”