Orwell's Luck (12 page)

After school, we bounced around a basketball and a few ideas.

"Do you like rockets?" I asked.

"Not much," he said.

"Me neither," I said. "What about an experiment with seeds and plants?"

"Wouldn't that take a long time?" he asked.

"You're right. How about filtration? A filtration experiment wouldn't take very long," I suggested.

"Filtration? Of all the fascinating areas of science there are to choose from, you're interested in filtration?"

"What about weather? It's interesting."

"Too many variables," he responded.

"Maybe we should do something with food," I suggested.

"Now you're talking. Let's go check out your refrigerator."

"Really? You want to do a food experiment?" I asked, happy to have worked things out to his satisfaction.

"Of course not," he replied. "I'm hungry. Let's go eat while we figure out something that's never been done before. That's what I want to do. A scientific breakthrough! With nachos on the side!"

We passed my father sleeping on the couch. The newspaper was laid neatly across his chest. A headline caught my eye:
GLOBAL SITUATION CHANGES AGAIN—FUTURE UNCERTAIN.
This,
I thought,
is what the newspaper business is all about.
Everything changes every day. The people who work at the newspaper simply write it down.

In the kitchen, we found Orwell leaning against the dishwasher eating lettuce. He looked up eagerly when we arrived.

"That's a cool rabbit," the tousle-haired boy said. "How did you teach him to stand up like that?"

"I don't teach Orwell. Orwell teaches me," I replied, popping some chips and cheese into the microwave oven.

"Huh?"

"Orwell is a very special rabbit," I said proudly.

"Sure," he said. "And your cat is a very special cat and your dog is a very special dog and these nachos, also very special, are soon to be history. Got anything to drink? Juice? Soda? Chocolate milk?"

I poured us each a big glass of orange juice, and with Orwell in the room listening without objection, told the tousle-haired boy everything I knew about the rabbit, his medical history, his language skills, his influence over games of chance. When I had finished, he pushed his empty plate aside and leaned across the table, his face just inches from mine, so close I could smell the lingering fragrance of the soap he'd used that morning.

"Now that's what I mean by scientific breakthrough," he whispered, beaming. Then, quickly standing up straight and combing his fingers through his hair, he added, "Assuming, of course, that what you say is true."

"Don't take
my
word for it," I said. "There are others around here who can convince you."

From over by the dishwasher came the sound of one paw clapping.
Tap-tap-tap-ta-tap!

"When is a door not a door?"

"When it's ajar," I replied automatically. "That one's older than I am."

The tousle-haired boy and I were sitting on the curb, reading the comics in the early morning light as Orwell enjoyed breakfast on the lawn.

"It must be hard to come up with something new every day," he suggested.

"Well," I continued, "I never thought it was funny in the first place. Nobody I know ever says 'ajar.' Doors are either open or they're closed, you know? There's no middle ground."

"OK, let's try another one," he said. "When is a rabbit not a rabbit?"

"Let me see that!" I said reaching for his section of the paper. "That sounds like a message from Orwell! Or did you make it up?"

"I'm just trying to figure out what you've got here," he said, gesturing to the rabbit who was now walking upright, his head down, his arms behind him, inspecting the lawn like the old-time comic movie actor Groucho Marx. "Maybe he only looks like a rabbit."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean," he said, "that our bodies are not who we are. We're stuck with them, of course, but inside, we're completely different. Don't you think so?"

"I never thought about it," I admitted.

"Take you, for example," he continued, "Just because you look like a monkey doesn't mean you are one." He looked up from the newspaper and smiled, his brown morning hair wilder than usual.

'"Thanks a lot,' said the kettle to the pot," I replied.

"Don't mention it," he said.

Neither of us spoke for a while. I traded him the sports section with its colorful weather page and prediction of another pre-spring snowfall for the two pages of comics he'd just finished.

"Maybe he's your guardian angel," he said.

"Orwell?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "Everybody has one. Few people know what they look like, though."

"Do you have one?" I asked.

"Sure!" he said, as if I'd just asked him if he had a heart or a brain or feelings like other people.

"Do you know what your guardian angel looks like?"

"Not really," he said. "I used to think he might look like my father, but then I figured that would be too obvious. Angels are masters of disguise. He's probably found some other body to be in now. Maybe even yours."

"Oh," I said.

I put my hand on his shoulder and looked out at the streaks and cracks in the street that separated his house from mine. Except for the birds and squirrels and one distant dog walker at the far end of the street, we were the only creatures up and about.

Orwell arrived noiselessly and sat down between us as the sun rose in a magenta sky. After a long and reverent silence, the tousle-haired boy stood up, brushed off his jeans, and announced, "We better get ready for school."

Constructing the experiment for the science fair presented the tousle-haired boy and me with a number of problems, the first of which was its classification. We had been given three categories to choose from: physical sciences, biological sciences, and Earth/space.

I thought our project should be listed as biological, since it featured a living rabbit, but the tousle-haired boy said he thought it should be physical, since the actual experiment we intended to conduct would be performed with inanimate Scrabble tiles.

Then I changed my mind and said maybe it ought to be Earth/space, since we were dealing with possibly unexplained phenomena, like UFOs, the ultimate Earth/space connection.

My partner said that was possibly so, but what we really had was a fourth category, a super category, one that governed all the other categories. He suggested that we solve this problem by checking all three boxes on the District Science Fair and Festival official entry form.

"A single classification is too limiting for something this big," he said.

The next problem we had to confront was the problem itself, that is, the statement of the problem, posed as a question, that would permit us to construct a scientific experiment that would yield a clear and persuasive answer.

I suggested, "Can a rabbit change your luck?"

The tousle-haired boy said that wasn't specific enough. He suggested, "Does the presence of a lucky rabbit change the outcome of a game of chance?"

"That's what I just said!" I responded.

"No," he explained, "what I said was more scientific than what you said."

"Do it your way," I grumbled. "It makes no difference to me."

We decided to skip over the recommended step of reviewing all the published scientific literature in the field, because, as my partner pointed out, "What literature? How many rabbits like this can there be?"

This saved us a lot of time.

The next step was to express a hypothesis. Since I'd been living with the experiment's one and only variable for some time, I came up with this one. It was, "It is hypothesized that when a lucky rabbit enters the room, the laws of probability go out the window."

"Very creative," my partner said to my great satisfaction, offering no changes or objections.

We decided to conduct the actual experiments over a number of days. We wanted to be sure that we didn't wear out Orwell with too much work at once, and we hoped to eliminate the possibility of the outcome being affected by a lucky day, which everybody has now and then.

Since smile faces on horoscopes never run more than four days in a row, I figured five days of experiments ought to be enough to eliminate the lucky day variable.

My partner said he thought it was possible to be lucky forever, but, even so, five days of doing the same experiment over and over seemed like plenty. He also mentioned that he'd like to fix himself a sandwich.

We abandoned planning for the day and prepared PB&J on wheat bread with potato chips and fat-free devil's food cookies. We washed it all down with tall glasses of cold milk.

"Next time," he suggested, wiping his lips with a paper towel, "we should fix the food before we start."

That weekend, my mother finished painting the master suite, and with the help of my sister and myself and our three new neighbors from across the street, my mother and my temporarily hobbled father moved into their elegant new quarters.

Since I am the firstborn child, I was offered my parents' old bedroom first, but even though it was a bigger room and faced the front, I declined this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I like my L-shaped room with its view of the entire backyard and the neighborhood park beyond. I like the way it divides itself with a perfect right angle into two distinctly different parts. I like the way my furniture and my possessions are arranged, offering, at a single glance, a history of my life and interests.

My room suits me just fine.

My sister was very pleased with my decision. Having unexpectedly been given title to a much bigger storehouse, she quickly made it her life's mission to fill it up.

That the master suite was finally finished after so many trials was remarkable enough, but events, like the weather, keep changing in surprising ways.

When I asked my parents what their plan was for the room my sister had abandoned, they shared a sudden, conspiratorial look. My father, obviously unprepared, cleared his throat as if to speak, but it was my mother who hesitatingly spilled the beans.

"We're going to fix it up for the new baby," she said.

New baby?
Holy smokes!
I thought. What next?

This was a prolific time for Orwell, too. The tousle-haired boy and I had decided to perform six pairs of experiments on each day of the five-day series. Each experiment would include placing all the Scrabble tiles into an empty mayonnaise jar, shaking it thoroughly, then removing seven tiles from the top, one at a time, carefully recording each letter in a notebook.

First, we would perform it without Orwell. Then, we would invite the rabbit into the room and repeat the experiment just as before. We would do this six times a day, twice in the morning, twice after school, and twice before bedtime, until we had recorded the results of thirty identical paired experiments, a number sufficient, we believed, to persuade all skeptics.

As it turned out, it was also an opportunity for Orwell to advance his publishing career.

The first seven letters extracted from the mayonnaise jar were
DYRAOGT.

"Well, that's useless," the tousle-haired boy said. "Now let's try it with the rabbit."

"Wait a minute," I said. "If you rearrange the letters you can make it say
GOT YARD.
"

"And?" he asked impatiently.

"And that might be meaningful," I insisted.

"I don't think we should rearrange the letters," he said. "That would be interfering with the results."

"It could also be
RYG TOAD,
" I said. "Or
TYG ROAD
or even
ARTY GOD.
"

"We have a school bus to catch," my partner advised. "Get the rabbit."

I never had any doubt that Orwell would be able to demonstrate his unique abilities, but some people, and at least one rabbit, seem to do more with opportunity than others. Orwell is among those who are destined to exceed everyone's expectations.

The collection of wooden rectangles clattered cheerfully as I shook them up and down in the big glass jar. One by one, my partner removed seven letters from the top and laid them side by side until he had spelled out the word
SIXTEEN.

"It's a number," I said excitedly.

"Interesting," the tousle-haired boy observed.

"Maybe he's going to give me another chance to win the lottery!" I cried.

"Let's continue with the experiment," my partner advised.

I asked Orwell to step outside the room while we did another drawing
sans lapin,
without rabbit. This time the random results were
EHAEEER.

"Nothing there," my partner said.

"There sure are a lot of
E
's," I observed.

"That's to be expected," he replied. "It's the most common letter in the alphabet and the most common letter in Scrabble by far. There are twelve
E's
in the game, three more than I and twice as many as
T, R,
or
N
. This is consistent with the laws of probability. Now bring the rabbit back in."

I found Orwell in the living room visiting the cat. "Can you come back in, Orwell?" I asked him politely. "We need your influence over the universe again."

In no time, Orwell's presence had produced the word
MAGICAL.

"This is so cool," the tousle-haired boy announced.

That afternoon Orwell added two more words,
RABBITS
and
WEARING.

The rabbitless control experiment turned up the blank tile plus
IMOLSG
on the first round and
MIIPTIL
on the second.

"Maybe we should have removed the blank tiles," I said.

"Well, it's too late for that now," my partner said. "Once it's started, we can't change the procedure."

After dinner, we conducted the third group of experiments. Orwell seemed to be enjoying himself, giving us
SCARLET
and
FLOWERS.