Three Years with the Rat

by Jay Hosking

  We stepped into the next room and an animal smell hit me. The room had no overhead lights, so as the door swung closed behind us we were enveloped in total darkness. Without my vision, my ears became extremely sensitive and I could hear the soft rustling sound of small animals. Grace was silent. I imagined her standing still a few steps in front of me, smug, letting this moment of pure darkness linger. Soon the animal rustling became scratching and then clanging on metal. The experience was disorienting and I reached out for the cool comfort of a wall. I still couldn’t hear Grace or even sense her in the room.

  “O.K., enough.” My voice sounded feeble, as if it was swallowed up by the overwhelming blackness.

  I swear I could hear her smile, mouth open, teeth bared. Finally I heard her booties shuffle a few steps, and with a click the room was bathed in a dim red light.

  “Just like the darkroom in high school,” I said. Though it was still hard to see, I could make out the stacks of cages that filled the room. Inside each cage were two pairs of black, beady eyes that seemed to stare back at me. The sounds of the room made sense now: the rats were pushing against the lids with their forepaws, or chewing on the edge of plastic tubes, or digging through the soft bedding that lined the floor of their homes. The whole room felt alive, boxed but alive.

  “Funny,” Grace said from behind a stack of cages, “I never thought of that. The red light and photography. We use it because rats can’t see red. So we can turn on a light, and not screw up their circadian rhythms.”

  “Their what?”

  “Their sleep and wake cycles.” She slid a plastic cage from the rack. Both rats lifted themselves onto their hind legs and tried to sniff through the lid. “They’re nocturnal, active mostly at night, so we reverse their light cycles and work with them in the dark.”

  She carried the cage past me, into the final room of the laboratory. As I followed, I accidentally nudged the door and it started to swing closed.

  “For Christ’s sake!” Grace shouted, suddenly angry with me. She thrust her shoulder into the door and kicked a wedge out from under it. “The doorstop. It can get really stuck if the techs put it on the other side of the door, which they do way too often. My boss got trapped in here for an hour, once. He shouted the whole time and no one could hear him in the hall. It wasn’t until one of us was suiting up that we knew something was wrong.”

  She set down the cage and flipped on the lights of the procedure room. For a moment I was blinded.

  “Then why not get rid of the wedge?” I asked.

  “The door is a major pain in the ass when you’re running twenty animals.”

  I scanned the room: a black Plexiglas box in the middle, wires and computer equipment everywhere. I asked, “What is all this?”

  “My attempt to measure subjective time,” she said.

  —

  First she plucked one of the rats from the cage, where it had been standing in a pile of its own shit. When she noticed my disgust, she gave me that cruel smile and thrust the rat forward as if she was going to place it on me. I took a step back. She laughed and rested the animal on her forearm, where it seemed to stick like Velcro.

  As she booted and prepared the electronics, she explained a little but didn’t try to make it easy to understand. Objective time was easy, she told me: humans had been accurately measuring time with clocks for hundreds of years. Subjective time, however, seemed to require some trickery: evidence pointed to things like heart rate and brain activity as good shorthand for an individual’s experience of time moving forward. She kept using the word oscillation, describing patterns of delta and gamma without ever really explaining what those were. She had implanted a device in the rats that recorded these measurements and then transmitted them wirelessly to a receiver. Finally, by comparing the external clock to the internal measurements, she could say with some certainty when the objective and subjective significantly veered away from each other. Or at least it seemed like that was what she was saying. All the while the rat clung to her arm, occasionally walking in circles, and I couldn’t help thinking it looked a little fat, as though it had too much skin.

  “But how do you know?” I asked. “I mean, sure, you can measure these things, but how do you really know what’s going on for the rat?”

  She was hunched over the computer and setting up some program called Telemetrics when I spoke. A grin came over her face.

  “Oh, little brother,” she said proudly, “when I’m dead and gone you might end up a good little scientist detective after all.”

  “Not likely,” I said.

  She paused for a moment and laughed hard, once. We shared the same laugh. She cackled again and swivelled to me.

  “Remember that?” she asked. “ ‘I am the detective! I am the spy!’ You used to run around the house screaming that. Ha! You’d look through the bottom of a milk glass as if it were a magnifying glass. Sneaking around the house, detective books under your arm. I could have beaten the shit out of you when I found you under my bed, listening to me talking on the phone.”

  “I was on the case for a client,” I said straight-faced. “Mom.”

  Grace’s grin soured. She stepped away from the computer and placed the rat into the Plexiglas cube in the middle of the room. The inside of the box glinted as if it were made of metal or glass. She replaced one smooth panel of the cube with a wall that had a cylinder and some wires built onto the back.

  “So we talked about some of this before,” she said. “I can’t really know what’s going on inside your mind, let alone a rat’s. But I can make reasonable guesses. I could say to you, ‘Clap your hands every time you think five seconds pass.’ And, all other things controlled for and considered equal, I would have a good idea of how subjective time passes for you in relation to the objective world.”

  She gestured for me to look at the cube and the new panel she’d installed. Inside the cylinder were tiny yellow pellets that fed through a rubber tube into the box.

  “We can do the same with the rats,” she told me. “We train them to raise and lower their paw every five seconds, and the movement registers as muscle activity on our recordings. If they do it too early or too late, they get nothing, but if they’re very close to five seconds they get rewarded with a sugar pellet. And just like I guessed, their behaviour correlates extremely well with their elect­rophy­siolo­gical activity. Later we take away the time restrictions and let them press whenever they think five seconds has elapsed.”

  We went back to the computer and she hit the start button on the program. A number of sketchy, sweeping lines began to fill the screen.

  “Look,” she said, pointing to one of the lines, “he’s already started lifting his paw.”

  And in fact, I could see large, dense squiggles appear every few seconds. We watched the waves draw across the monitor until a thought hit me. It was my turn to laugh.

  “So what you’re telling me,” I said, “is that you’ve taught these rats to dance in exchange for candy? Grace, what the hell is the point of this?”

  She put both her hands on the counter and lowered her head. “Jesus, you really don’t understand anything at all, detective. You can’t see why this is useful? Think about things for once in your life before you speak.”

  “Clearly you’re the brains of the family, so why don’t you just enlighten me and save me from my crippling stupidity.”

  She bristled at my response. “Once we understand how to measure subjectivity, then we can manipulate it. Then we can manage a degree of control over it. Then we can begin to overcome the limitations of the objective world, escape these awful, incontrovertible facts of reality.”

  She turned, faced me, and spoke slowly. “Then, little brother, for once in our ignorance-congested, noise-saturated lives, we can be alone. We can have time and space to really think.”

  I didn’t hesitate. “What you’re saying doesn’t make sense. No matter how you manipulate these rats, you can’t take out the part where they all live
in the real, objective world.”

  She stopped the Telemetrics program and removed the rat from the cube, throwing it brusquely into its cage. Her every move was harsh and deliberate. She propped open the procedure room door with the wedge and shut out the lights before I had time to leave the room. I could hear her slamming the cage into the rack and making her way back to the anteroom. Why my last statement had made her so angry, I had no idea. By the time I caught up with her she had stripped off most of the extra layers, her gown in a hamper, the rest in the garbage. I followed her example.

  —

  We wound our way back through the corridors in silence. I phoned Nicole while I changed back into my street clothes and we agreed, in the hushed and excited tones of a young relationship, to meet at Shifty’s for a bite and whatever mischief might follow. Grace was waiting impatiently on the other side of the door, shawled again, shifting her weight from foot to foot, arms crossed under innumerable layers of wool and fabric.

  The sun had broken through the clouds by the time we left the animal facility, but it actually felt colder than when we’d entered. We made our way to College Street and headed west.

  “Look,” I said. “Look. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to insult your work.”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “You still don’t get it. Every other sense remains constant despite changes to the environment. Apples look red regardless of whether you’re in the sun or artificial light, even though the reflected wavelengths are totally different. John’s voice sounds the same on the telephone, even though all the fundamental frequencies are absent. And that makes sense, right? You want an apple, or John, to remain constant in every situation. You want to be able to trust your senses.”

  I shrugged and turned my attention to the street. A bicyclist was shouting into the window of a car at the intersection.

  Grace said, “So why is time the only exception to the rule? Why does time perception vary so wildly? Why do hours feel like minutes sometimes, or vice versa?”

  The light went green and both car and bicycle sped away as if nothing was wrong. We crossed Spadina, continuing west, and I spent a moment thinking about my sister’s question before speaking again.

  “I don’t know, Grace. Maybe time is difficult for our brains to measure.”

  “Or maybe there’s something fundamentally different between the objective and the subjective,” she said. Her voice became quiet and I struggled to hear over the noise of traffic. “If objective time is a one-dimensional arrow, maybe subjective time is a two-dimensional wave. Or a three-dimensional spiral. Maybe clocks are only measuring that movement in one dimension, its length, but our brains are sensing our depth and width through time.”

  “ ‘We’re living on a sphere of time,’ ” I quoted her, only then beginning to dimly understand what she’d been ranting about a month ago.

  “Yes,” she said. “Or maybe it’s four dimensions. Five. We don’t know yet.”

  Grace seemed calmer now, almost at peace.

  As we got close to Bathurst I could see Nicole smoking outside of Shifty’s. She wore a black-and-white striped dress, dark stockings, and her heavy wool coat. The angle at which she stood made the hair blow away from her face, and she took each drag of the cigarette coolly, without notice of the world bustling around her.

  When I turned my attention back to Grace, she was looking at me carefully. Compared to Nicole, she looked dishevelled, wind-whipped, and frightened. I thought about what she was telling me, about multi-dimensional time and subjectivity and the repulsive little rats she played with all day.

  “There’s still the issue of the real world,” I said. “How do you take experience out of reality? How can you use real-world measurements to measure things that aren’t in the real world?”

  Grace said, “You cheat.”

  We reached the corner of College and Bathurst but neither of us was ready to cross the intersection.

  “It’s John,” she said. “He hasn’t explained it to me yet. Refuses to tell me, in fact. When we implant the telemetry devices, he adds something else he keeps in a pouch. He made me swear not to tell our supervisor. The box, the telemetry recordings, most of it came from his—”

  Her gaze caught something behind me, and then her jaw dropped.

  “What the hell is she doing here?” Grace asked.

  I turned and saw Nicole crossing the street toward us.

  “You mean my girlfriend? The person I live with?”

  “I’m leaving,” Grace said.

  “For Christ’s sake,” I grunted under my breath. “Be friendly for two minutes before you run away.”

  I turned and embraced Nicole. She was warm and soft and smelled great. I put my mouth close to her ear and whispered, “Mmm.”

  “Good afternoon, Grace,” Nicole said when we separated. “Joining us for lunch?”

  “No.”

  “Hey,” I said to Nicole, “did you know that Grace is finding a way to separate subjectivity from reality?”

  “Oh,” Nicole said coolly to Grace. “Why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” my sister said.

  “Do you hate the world that much, Grace?”

  “Yes.” My sister, the shortest of us, kept her gaze on the ground.

  “And do you expect that solipsism will suit you better?” Nicole asked. “Or that you would even know what to do with it?”

  Grace gritted her teeth, said, “What do you know of knowledge? You prepare people’s food for a living.”

  Nicole didn’t hesitate, and in fact smiled. “I know my limitations. ‘I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.’ ”

  The way that Nicole spoke made it clear that she was quoting, but I didn’t recognize the words or even understand what she meant, at the time. Grace kicked at the ground and muttered something too quiet to hear.

  “I’m sorry?” Nicole asked. She arched her back and stood tall.

  Grace cleared her throat and looked up into my girlfriend’s eyes. “I said, fuck you, Nicole. You are intellectual and emotional poison, for all of us.”

  “Oh, you mean for the friends you haven’t bothered to call in months?” Nicole forced a laugh that sounded both cruel and hurt. “Or for the boyfriend you frequently chastise in public?”

  Nicole tried to hold it back, glancing at me, but her anger got the better of her. “Or for your own brother, whom you treat like an imbecile? I’m the one poisoning their loyalty to you? You’re not doing a good enough job of that on your own?”

  There was a long pause in the conversation, Nicole’s wrath spent, Grace huddled and defensive, my own jaw slack with shock. Pedestrians veered around us as the lights at the intersection went from red to green to yellow to red again. I should have spoken up, but I had no idea what I was supposed to say.

  Finally Grace looked at me, pressed her mouth tightly closed, and shook her head once. Then she turned and walked north.

  After watching her for about ten seconds, I turned to Nicole and pulled her close to me. I’d never see her eyes glisten before.

  “I love you.” I think it was the first time I’d said it to her. “But I have to go.”

  “I’m trying, you know, to be understanding—” she began but then her voice cracked. She nuzzled my cheek with her nose, squeezed my upper arms once, tightly, and then pushed me away. I ran north after Grace.

  When I returned home that night, Nicole and I had our first genuine argument, a shouting match that ended in mutual tears, apologies, and promises never to fight like that again.

  2008

  OFFICER 2510 RAPS her knuckles three decisive times against my door. I can see her through my small window, dressed in civilian clothes again, nothing but her tomboyish stance to suggest she’s any sort of authority figure. She looks bored.

  I crack the door open but block the entrance with my shoulders. “What kind of a police officer plays club shows with a band?”r />
  “This is the part where you let me in,” she says, “for your own good.”

  I consider the state of my apartment and how I must look to her. I pat some of the sawdust off my jeans and clap my hands together to clean them. Oh well. I go back into my apartment but leave the door open for her.

  She takes a moment to look around. The large wooden box is reconstructed and sitting in the middle of my freshly emptied living room. No doubt she saw my corner tables and couch outside, sitting at the curb. One panel of the box is missing and so she takes a slow, deliberate look at its interior. Then her attention shifts to the removed panel, the open plastic bag full of bits of broken mirror, and the fine sandpaper I was just using.

  “Arts and crafts?” she asks.

  “A machine with no mechanisms, I think. Like meditation, only more pretentious.”

  She looks to my bandaged arm. “Nobody told me meditation was dangerous.”

  “I’m supposed to be leaving soon. Mind if I go change?”

  I don’t wait for a reply. In the bedroom I crawl out of my clothes and wish vainly that I could shower off the grit that sticks to the sweat on my neck and causes my scalp to itch. I peel away the tape on the edge of the bandage to look underneath. It’s healing but still ugly. Officer 2510 is likely wandering around my living room and it won’t be long before she finds Buddy.

  She shouts from the other room. “I looked into your stolen car trouble.”

  “Oh, great,” I say.

  “Turns out you never owned a car. At least not with that VIN, and not in this province.”

  “That’s what your colleagues told me. You should tell it to my bank account.”

  I leave the bedroom, fresh clothes already feeling soiled, and sure enough she’s standing in the kitchen. She sticks her fingertips between the bars on the cage lid, and though Buddy noses at her, he’s sadly uninterested in taking a bite.

  “Considering pursuing a career in science?” she asks.