But when those friends suggested that he should sell the installation to some campaign for the protection of animals he just shrugged. Hadn’t the idea already been used? At heart, he thought that if it had occurred to him, he must have already seen it somewhere. And so he refused to allow anyone to consider his installations art. He was terrified by the thought of having an exhibition and people commenting that his works were just copies of someone else’s work. He wasn’t sure why he was so frightened of that particular critique when he didn’t actually believe in the concept of originality and often argued the point at great length, even if he were incapable of remembering the origins of his appropriations. Some other of his non-art pieces were: a mechanical flea circus inside a closet; a sandwich toaster made from two irons that he used to melt queso añejo into his guests’ hands when he had a party; a pile of books with twenty years of accumulated dust whose importance lay in the fact that the dust—by then dirtballs—contained the dead cells of his deceased relatives.

It was the hutch with its de-plushed dogs that gave him the idea of introducing rabbits onto the island to scare off the birds. He resolved not to stay overnight again: he was done with shouting. The tent could be left so he could observe the rabbits and take a nap. It was late fall, the clocks had gone back an hour, so it was no longer a wild idea to paddle to the island at four in the afternoon and enjoy the cool river air, although the water still stank as badly as it had in summer due to dry weather. He bought twenty rabbits—ten bucks and ten does—and they very quickly began to reproduce. Soon there wouldn’t be enough food for them on the island. The non-inventor had calculated that the new inhabitants would attack the nests at ground level when they had nothing else to eat. If the birds could no longer breed on the island, they would go to another one.

The rabbits were pure white, with long fur and red eyes. They had been more expensive than the gray or brown ones, but he deemed it important that they were the same color as the birds. He told himself that using them to populate the island was his way of continuing to inhabit it. Eventually he even allowed them into the tent, which they seemed to like, no doubt because, since the ground wasn’t suitable for constructing warrens, it provided protection from the sun. Inside the tent they gave birth to hairless little bunnies that resembled rats.