Three Years with the Rat

by Jay Hosking

  The dead end did have a hint of a footpath, soft and exposed between the dried leaves and branches. But in all the secret mornings, sprawling afternoons, and held-breath evenings I spent wandering those streets alone or with childhood friends, I never once saw a person using that path where one world bled into the other.

  This dead end offered one of many possible ways to enter what was, to the neighbourhood children at least, a vast forest designed to satisfy our imaginations. It bordered the edge of our subdivision to the east. I cannot count the different games we played in those woods, the allegiances that were made and broken, or the secret places and paths designated throughout the forest. What I can count is the number of times we used the dead end to enter or exit the woods, which is precisely zero. We found other ways to the woods, over our fences, through our backyards. The woods may have been bliss for our suburban souls, but the dead-end sign was a border forbidden and completely unrelated to the forest.

  Developers finally sank their teeth into our woods, late into my high school years. By then the forest was a place to nervously try our parents’ liquor and talk about girls. Construction snuck up and took the trees in what seemed like a single night, and soon there were only dirt piles and machinery that kids would climb on when the contractors had left for the day. Remarkably, the dead end remained and so did its sense of foreboding. Children, teenagers, and construction workers alike avoided crossing that boundary between the undeveloped land and our neighbourhood. It was a brilliantly, collectively, unconsciously unbreakable rule that we didn’t even know we knew.

  We found a different park for drinking and hanging out, over by the rich neighbourhood, and I would have happily continued to be ignorant of the dead end’s hidden rule if we hadn’t been busted drinking rye one night. We liked to imagine ourselves as no-good teenagers who were lowering the real estate prices and soiling the lawns we were hired to cut during the summer holidays; in reality, we were the dregs of our peer group, an awkward cadre of comic-book aficionados, “nice boys.” Our underage drinking was a way of inflating our self-defined cool, and thus we enjoyed the threat of authority even when we knew none was present. So that moonless evening, when a cop car cornered and pulled close to the park, probably completely at random, we were prepared to bolt.

  I swung ninety degrees, legs stiff like a corpse’s, and leapt off the slide I’d been sitting atop. My friends dashed in all directions and I pointed myself west, toward home. My comfortable alcoholic haze was now a frustrating fog I had to cut through if I didn’t want to get caught. I imagined my father, with his Christian Korean conservative values, would have another heart attack if his only son were brought home in a cop car.

  I ran. My legs took care of themselves and my arms flailed for walls and fences. I could swear I heard someone right behind me, their breath hot on the fine hairs of my neck. I hopped four fences and shimmied between a few houses before I made it to the construction zone that used to be our woods.

  Everything was suddenly clear and vivid. My shoes, wet from the summer night’s grass, were collecting the dust from the construction site. I could smell stale water and damp air. There was perspiration in the webs between my fingers. The saliva in my mouth was acrid from the rye. I skipped and skidded to a halt, just for a moment looking around, long enough to know that I was exposed in an open field and leaving tracks in the loose dirt under my feet. And again I knew someone was just behind me, their cold, dry fingers reaching out to grasp me and never let go. I dashed for home.

  And with that looming threat behind me, some monster more menacing than adulthood or authority, I aimed myself at the dead end and crossed the threshold. The effect was transitory, just barely perceptible, but in that instant I could swear I saw light ripple and bend around me, a distortion in the world like looking into a fishbowl or a funhouse mirror.

  My shoes transitioned from slippery dirt, almost mud, to the harsh friction of asphalt. I pulled around the first house on the left, our house, and tried to breathe as quietly as possible in the hopes that my pursuer would run past me.

  Nighttime makes the suburbs strange. The high street lights have an orangey, vibrating tint to them that makes everything well lit and still somehow very dark. Standing in the small space between our home and our neighbours’, I could see my reflection in the big bay window of the house across the street. The street was wide enough for the reflection to be distant but near enough to get a sense of what was mirrored in the glass. There I was, my hands on the bricks of my house, but somehow embedded in that window. I looked thin in that reflection, ghostly, dark holes where my eyes should be. I crouched down, and of course so did my image.

  No one ran by the house. No one was chasing me.

  I took the opportunity to catch my breath, stare at my filthy shoes, and think about how I would casually walk into my parents’ house and pretend I was perfectly sober and not rattled from crossing that threshold. Why did it feel like I had done something wrong? Finally, when I was calm enough, I stood up and prepared myself to enter the house.

  And that’s when I caught sight of my reflection again in the window of the house across the street. There I was, my mirror image, one hand against the bricks and the other on the back of my neck. There was my house and my neighbours’, in opposite arrangement. But in the reflection, between them, was something else. A mass of silhouetted people were in the image, standing, facing me, facing my back. Where there should have been a fence between our houses, there was nothing but the outline of people looking at me. A whole world that wasn’t my own was in that window.

  I forced myself to turn, slowly. Nothing was behind me but a dark night and our fence. I turned back to the reflection across the street and it was still full of countless people, not so far off in the distance, but clearly restless and shuffling around. Their outline gave nothing away of their faces or bodies. I knew they weren’t (but I hoped they were) another trick of the light, a distortion that would shortly vanish. Still, I could feel them right behind me, breathing on my neck and staring at my features. All the hairs on me were on end.

  Squinting at the reflection didn’t help, so I walked toward the house across the street, intent on getting a closer look. My feet felt gummy and my legs strained with lifting them. I walked carefully and slowly, never taking my eyes off the image in the window. There they were, who knows how many people, milling about in the glass and intent on watching my every move. I realized it wasn’t accurate to call them simply a reflection.

  Finally, I was right at the window, my hands on the glass. I pushed on the pane with my fingertips and it held. Getting closer hadn’t changed the situation; the group of shadowy figures remained back by my mirror house. I could see them no better here, and there seemed no way to get nearer to them. They were beyond close inspection, and I suspected they were happy to stay there.

  Well, most were. One silhouette broke from their ranks and stepped onto the reflection of the street. I watched this in the glass and I didn’t dare breathe. The figure was a woman, or a girl. I got an impression of her delicate figure and the careful way in which she walked. Then three things happened quickly.

  She walked under the reflected street light, and I could see her eyes looking into me.

  I looked up to my own reflection, and though the face was mine, I didn’t recognize the person.

  The curtains on the window swung open and my neighbour inside let out a scream when she saw me.

  I’m not sure which of the three things caused me to fall over the neighbours’ shrubs and onto my back.

  While my neighbours were sure it was me creeping around their house (I was the only non-white kid on the block, after all), they could never convince the police or my parents of any wrongdoing on my part. In a sense, my spotless record with both authorities paid off. Of course, the neighbours never forgave me and were happy to see me leave for Waterloo. By the time university ended and I’d settled in the big city, my parents had sold our suburban house next to the dead e
nd. And despite the occasional sensation of being watched whenever I was near my reflection, I thought my experiences with the unknown, the inexplicable, were past.

  Years later I met Grace, and though she didn’t recognize me, I knew I had seen her reflection once before.

  2007

  ON GRACE’S THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY, the summer before she shaved her head, she invited ten or so girls to the house. My parents, in a drawn-out argument as per usual, kept out of the way, but Grace insisted I be present for the party. I mostly sat in the corner of the living room, using my old toys to recreate crime scenes from the detective book I was reading while I listened to the way the older girls talked to each other. It was a different language, one that matched their tights and make-up, but Grace, in jeans and a boy’s button-up shirt, didn’t seem to speak it.

  Grace left the room for a minute and one of her friends, I think named Laura, came over to my corner.

  “What are you playing with?” Her hair was thick and golden and hung to the middle of her back, and she smiled when she looked at me. Something had happened to Grace and her friends recently: they were all beginning to look like women.

  I showed her my action figures and she made a little ooh sound to appreciate them. I could hear her friends giggling, as if from some great distance, but Laura looked at me so genuinely that I was beaming from the attention.

  “You’re so sweet,” she said. “How old are you again? Eight?”

  “I’m ten,” I told her, eagerly.

  Her smile was so broad I could see her gleaming teeth. She said, “Wow, you’re old! Do you have a girlfriend yet?”

  My face and my neck got really hot. I could faintly hear one of her friends say, “Oh my god, look at him! He’s blushing.”

  “What are you doing to him?” Grace said. I had no idea she’d returned to the room. My attention finally broke and went to my sister.

  “Nothing,” Laura said. “He’s just such a sweet little kid.”

  “Leave him alone,” my sister told her. “He’s not a baby.”

  “He’s ten and he still plays with toys,” one of the other girls said, laughing.

  Grace spun around and snapped, “The only reason I invited you is because Laura asked me to, as a favour. She felt bad for you.”

  There was a momentary hush as everyone took in the insult. Then the girls spoke up all at once, high-pitched and pleading. They broke off into plaintive little groups, some moving to the stairway and front hall while others tried to make things right between Grace, Laura, and the other girl. I stayed where I was and my face and neck continued to burn.

  The party didn’t last much longer, and eventually my mother burst into the room. She said to me, “What the hell happened? What did she do to them?”

  Later, Grace came to my room and sat with me on my bed.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “For what?” Her eyes were puffy.

  “For playing with toys. I know I’m too old.”

  She smiled and sniffled and cried all at the same time, then punched me lightly on the arm. “Don’t be an idiot. I like who you are. That’s why you’re on my team.”

  —

  I awoke to the memory of those words, That’s why you’re on my team. Nicole was already out of bed and from the kitchen came the sound of the kettle and the smell of frying onions. I lay there and played that memory over and over. In bed I could let myself feel the loss of Grace, away from the demands of an increasingly erratic John, away from the need to smile through it all with friends. In bed I could breathe the smell of oranges off the pillows and not worry about whether Nicole and I were getting along or not. In bed I could wallow. I heard Nicole humming to herself, the pads of her feet making a slight sticky sound as she danced along the tiles of the kitchen, and like a miserable piece of shit I pulled the sheets over my head.

  Next thing I knew Nicole was lying next to me, her orange hair swept to the side, our noses almost touching. We both smiled in that way that we did after a fight, after extended fighting. Then she kissed my forehead, lips barely pressed against my skin, and pulled me out of the bed.

  She sat me at our tiny table and plated me a breakfast: eggs Florentine, her Hollandaise sauce from scratch, potatoes and onions, apple cut into chunks with the skin left on, coffee with cream. These were things I loved, and I felt loved when she served them to me. What had we even been fighting about?

  Eventually she took a seat next to me with her own plate and a black tea.

  I cut a piece of muffin, egg, spinach, and sauce and forked it into my mouth. I had to chew with my eyes closed. For a moment it was all so perfect.

  Then she touched the lip of my mug and said, “It’s instant.”

  I cocked my head. Of course she knew that instant coffee was Grace’s favourite. My mouth was full with another bite so I didn’t say anything. In fact I chewed slower.

  “Please,” she said. “This is me asking you to open up. I need more than just snatches from you.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. I swallowed some instant coffee and it tasted horrible.

  “Please,” she said again. “You’re going to lose me if you can’t tell me what’s going on inside your head.”

  She hadn’t touched her food, hadn’t even picked up her cutlery. Her face was kindest without make-up, without any sort of defence to it. On mornings like this she could be beautiful without being alluring. She hung there, practically floating above her chair, and waited on what I’d say next. I wanted to open up, but I knew that once I started talking about Grace, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

  “Look, it’s fine,” I told her. “I’m fine.”

  I dug into my food, tore through it with renewed attention, and didn’t look away from the plate. When I looked up, she was still staring at me.

  “What?” I asked. “I’m just sleepy.”

  She sat next to me silently for a minute or two more. Then she stood, showered, and left the apartment without another word. I stared at the wall and drank my bitter coffee, twisting everything tight, hands, eyes, guts, and cursing myself for being a fucking idiot. And when she was gone I made my way back to bed, replayed that memory, and fell into a fitful sleep.

  Nicole left the city to see her family for an early Thanksgiving dinner, an invitation that had been only half-heartedly extended to me. I avoided the calls from my mother, and instead I got in touch with John. He suggested dinner at his place and mentioned that he had a surprise to show me.

  The rats were sitting on the kitchen table in a translucent Plexiglas cage with a wire lid, our dinner displayed on the table around them. There were three of them, each with black fur on their heads and down their spines, and white fur on their bellies and haunches. They had protruding, shiny black eyes, pink paws with sharp clear claws, and awful tails that were as long as their bodies and covered with scales. They were inquisitive, the three of them coming to the front of the cage and twitching their thick whiskers at me when I approached the table, but they were also lanky and repulsive.

  Over dinner, John explained that the rats were a present to himself. They were from the lab but no longer needed for research, and so John had snuck them out and brought them home instead of retiring them. Though we both actively ignored the topic of Grace and her disappearance, I didn’t doubt that these animals were meant to console John in some small way. I imagined that he and Grace had bonded over lab rats early in their relationship. John was still thin, perhaps even thinner, but at least his spirits were higher. I felt hopeful when I left the apartment that night.

  I spent much of October at John’s place, avoiding arguments with Nicole, keeping an eye on him, and over that time I grew fond of the rats. In a way, they reminded me of dogs: they were furry, curious, established relationships, and seemed to have distinct personalities. Once I got over my initial revulsion, John taught me how to pick them up and how to appease them with a gentle scratch of their bellies or ears. Eventually I even let one crawl up onto my
shoulder, its nails like little pinpricks across my skin, its whiskers and nose tickling my neck. I dreamt of that sensation for days.

  One evening, while relaxing over scotch and popcorn, I gave one of the rats a kernel. It held it in its forepaws and ate it thoughtfully and I couldn’t help thinking it was happy.

  “Why rats?” I asked John. “I mean, why are they the lab animal of choice?”

  John had the others in his lap, two balls of fur. “Well, plenty of other species get used. Slugs, snails, flies, monkeys, mice. Each is good for a different kind of research.”

  I held the rat up to my ear and listened to its chewing and light breathing. They were mostly noiseless creatures, despite films and TV portraying them as squeaking all the time. “And what are rats good for that mice aren’t?”

  “Behaviour,” he said. “Mice are morons, really. Put two mice that don’t know each other in a cage and one of them will end up dead. With rats, they may scuffle but most of the time they’ll get along in the end. Rats are inquisitive, stubborn, resilient. They’re successful, evolutionarily speaking, because they find a way to deal with whatever you throw at them.”

  The door to the second bedroom stayed shut during that period, and John never asked about our group of friends, but in some strange way I felt we were getting back to a normal life, just us and his new pets. Eventually John even named the rats: the largest of them was Little John and the fat one with the fewest black markings was Little Grace. Although all three were male, we still referred to Little Grace as her and she. John offered to name the third rat, the runt, after me.

  “Not a fucking chance,” I told him. “Call him Buddy.”

  —

  The first of the rats to show signs of distress was Little Grace.

  It was a particularly bad day. I’d fought with Nicole in the morning, a pointless row that escalated to me shouting, “What the fuck do you want from me?” Between that and skipping breakfast, I was weak and unmotivated at work. My bosses gave me grief, heatedly from the husband and coldly from the wife, over forgetting about a funding deadline. And on top of everything else, John hadn’t answered my calls for two days. I was nauseated over the noodle lunch I brought back to my desk, alternately dialling John and Nicole, tumbling between feeling concerned and apologetic. Neither answered my calls.