Three Years with the Rat

by Jay Hosking

  The crowd of my sister huddles around the dead end and shuffles to get a better view. I am watching multiple time points in my sister’s life all overlaid in one space on endless repeat. It’s staggering. The crowd of Grace starts to murmur.

  “What’s happening over there?” I ask.

  “Oh. You haven’t seen this.” She stands up and motions for me to do the same. From this porch we can see clearly to the dead end, about a hundred metres away. She says, “Watch.”

  A young boy flies out from behind the dead-end sign. He’s puny and looks Asian.

  “John,” I say.

  “I will this into being,” Grace tells me, proud. “I create the man that gives me access to this place. Don’t you think that’s impressive?”

  The young John runs between houses and crouches, moments away from catching a glimpse of Grace’s innumerable presence all around him, close enough to touch him. John will see her silhouettes and it will set everything in motion, steer him toward my sister a few years later, and ensure that Grace finds her way here.

  “You used him,” I say.

  “Don’t be self-righteous. Without this, he and I would have never met. What do they say? ‘It’s better to have loved and lost than never loved at all’?”

  Something catches young John’s eye in the window across the street. He checks his little hiding space but he’s blind to Grace all around him. He can see them only in the reflection and so he wanders out into the road and across the street.

  I step off the porch and approach John to get a better view. This Grace follows. Young John is standing in the garden and has his face practically pressed into the window. I get within a few feet of him and stop.

  “John,” I say. He doesn’t react.

  “This is my favourite part,” Grace says. “I remember when it was my turn to do this.”

  I know what’s to happen next. A lone Grace walks into the street, making herself clear and unambiguous to John. The importance of this moment is naked on his face. His life is changed.

  Then he vanishes without any pomp. He is simply there one moment and gone the next.

  The crowd of Grace gets louder for a moment, almost celebratory, and then dies down.

  “What happened?” I ask this version of my sister.

  “The cycle just reset,” she says.

  Grace is everywhere around us. She is talking to her past and future self. I see nothing but pleased faces from her, some smug, some happy, some calm.

  “Why?” I ask. “Why would you want to be alone like this?”

  She looks at me carefully. “In all my time here, I have never been in danger, never scared, never tired or hungry or stressed or sad. More importantly, I have never been bored, never been less than completely engaged, never challenged by an inferior opponent. I literally spend days talking things through with myself, playing devil’s advocate, refining my arguments. It’s almost pure subjectivity. It’s—it’s sublime. This is what peace feels like. It’s all I’ve wanted since I was a kid.”

  “Since Thornton,” I say.

  “This has nothing to do with Thornton.” She scowls. “John. I should have known that asshole would tell you.”

  “I figured it out for myself. I wish you would have just trusted me enough to tell me.” I shake my head. “And he isn’t an asshole. He’s been trying to save you this entire time.”

  “Unbelievable,” she says. She laughs once, cruelly. “I never wanted or needed saving. Don’t you get it?”

  “I get it just fine,” I tell her. “But you don’t get it. You don’t know what happens when you return.”

  She stares at me blankly.

  I say, “This consumes you. You come back and you’re all fucked up, standing near the side of the highway like a—and then a few days later, you run off again, do this looping thing at other entrances, lots of them. God knows how long you spend here. The next time you return to us, after Christmas in 2006, you’re even more fucked up. And then shortly after, you’re gone forever.” I move away from the houses. “For a while I thought you came back here for good, but now I understand. You really do go out into the woods or who knows where and kill yourself.”

  I’ve silenced her.

  I say, “So goddamn it, maybe it’s you who doesn’t get it, for once. Maybe it’s you who needs help. Maybe you should trust me.”

  There is a quiet moment between us. She looks at me and measures the weight of my words.

  From just down the street I hear a man’s voice say, “Grace.”

  I know what is happening before I see it. I look toward the dead end and there I stand, the me from less than thirty minutes ago, beside two of my sister. To Grace beside me, I whisper, “I don’t want to see this.”

  She walks down the street, away from the dead end. I follow her. Somewhere behind me I hear myself say, “Oh Jesus.”

  —

  She leads me down John’s suburban street and around the corner. As we progress we see more of Grace, so many that it’s busier than a night in the downtown core. But more concerning is the state of her, them. The farther we get from the dead end, the wearier these older Graces become, the less she converses with her prior selves. By the time we reach a nearby park, sunken and grassy, she/they sit or lie on their backs with vacant eyes and open mouths. It’s like a cemetery, if people didn’t bother to bury their dead. A mass grave.

  I turn to my guide. “If you know this is going to happen to you, then why do you stay?”

  The younger Grace doesn’t even look concerned. “Everything meaningful increases your chances of mortality. Fatty foods, alcohol, even rearing children if that’s your thing.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “It is exactly the same. It’s a cost/benefit analysis. What do I have to spend, and what do I get in return? And in this case, I get exactly what I want.”

  “I don’t think you’ll want it once you get it.” I’m thinking of what Officer 2510 said.

  She ignores me. We reach the edge of the park and Grace says loudly, “Who’s the ultimate?”

  Some of the bodies lift their heads from the ground and look around. Finally one puts up her hand and slowly crawls to her feet.

  “Well, this is as far as I go with you.” The younger Grace puts her hand on my shoulder, squeezes it, and quickly pulls it away. She turns to leave.

  “Wait.” I step toward her. “You could come with me.”

  “Looks like I will.” She smiles but it’s not real, non-Duchenne. “Now excuse me. I was in the middle of a conversation when you arrived.”

  I watch her weave through the rows of bodies in the park and ascend the lip of the grassy bowl. I turn to the oldest Grace, the so-called ultimate. She moves slowly but she doesn’t look much older than when she guided me here.

  “Let’s go, Grace.”

  —

  We take a route around the back of the suburban houses because I want to avoid the loop of myself. We see other time points of Grace’s life ambling, meandering, thinking, debating. I put an arm around the oldest Grace’s waist and she puts her arm around my neck. In this way we reach the dead end from a slightly different angle and cross back to the dark woods, my ears pricked for any sound of the hunter. I point the flashlight ahead of us and hum her the song from the mix CD. This time there are no whispers in the woods but I still feel as though we’re being watched.

  I feel it before I see it, tiny ripples along my sister’s forearm. I shine the flashlight on her arms and see the scars, not those that have lingered from adolescence, healed and flat, but newer ones, white and protruding and ugly from the lack of stitches. My sister never put her arm into a box, never saw the human-sized version, even. She never had a hunter. She was the one who made these precise cuts along her skin, who started doing this again after years. Maybe she never stopped.

  Only when we’re deep in the forest, far from John’s formative moments, does this Grace speak to me.

  “I’m feeling better now, thanks,” s
he says.

  “Why did you start hurting yourself again?”

  She stiffens, takes her arm from around my neck. “Isn’t the cycle interesting? I did an estimate once of how long I was in there. If each cycle is about a half hour, and there are roughly tens of thousands of me, that puts me in there for somewhere over a year. The best year of my life.”

  “Grace.”

  She’s testing her body now, bending at all the joints. “You know, this really feels much better. I should have left sooner.” She laughs. “I could just stay in the entrances for fewer cycles.”

  “Fine, don’t answer. But we need to go. We need to get in the boat and leave.”

  “And go where?” she snaps.

  “Back to the city, I think. Or where the city is on our side.”

  She’s full of life now. She’s her old self in some ways. “Why bother? You think there’s anyone there who would help you? They don’t stoop to our level.”

  “I think there’s one, yes.” I pull on her sleeve and lead us back onto the path. “She’s helped me before. She might have some ideas.”

  “Wait.” She yanks her arm out of my grasp.

  “We have to go.”

  “Wait.” She’s stopped walking. “One of them talked to you.”

  “Grace, come on.”

  “One of them talked to you.”

  “Fuck, Grace.”

  “What did it say?” She steps toward me in the dark. She beats against my chest with the bottoms of her fists and the beam of the flashlight bounces across the canopy above us. “What did it say, goddamn it?”

  I want to tell her nothing. I want to make something up. “She says you’re not capable of understanding how this all works.”

  She pauses. I shine the flashlight on her face and she looks thirteen years old. “You’re lying.”

  As long as she’s angry with me, she will follow. I pull away from her and continue along the path and she storms behind me. Soon the glow of the fire licks the trees. We reach John’s campsite but he isn’t there. Neither is the hunter.

  She’s pulling on my sleeve. “Why are you lying to me?”

  “He’s probably at the boat,” I whisper. “Come on.”

  I lead her down the path to the lake. The air cools as we approach the water.

  Grace had gone quiet behind me but now she speaks up. “You told me once that you see me again in Toronto. I appear and disappear a couple more times, you said.”

  “I just told you that,” I say. “Well, I just told it to an earlier version of you.”

  The wind is against us. It carries an animal smell. We are approaching something.

  “Did you stop to consider,” she says, “that if I come back with you now, I wouldn’t have appeared and disappeared a couple more times in your past? You wouldn’t have seen me again in December, 2006. That means I’m not going to leave this place with you. Whatever happens to me has already happened for you.”

  “Keep your voice down.” I roll it over in my head. Her statement is difficult to grasp.

  The canopy gives way and we find ourselves standing on the edge of the lake. The water froths on the rocks and my muscles cry out at the thought of paddling through this. I wave the light around.

  John stands next to the boat and leans on the paddle like a walking stick.

  “What are you doing here?” Grace says.

  His face betrays his confusion.

  “You’ve seen me here before.” She’s thinking out loud. “At other places like the dead end. So I do stay behind.”

  “You don’t have to,” I say.

  “Yes, you do,” I say. Only I don’t say it.

  John looks to his left. I shine the light and see myself. I am standing next to Grace but I am also standing next to John. The hands are not blistered and raw but the face is my own. In my double’s right hand I hold a heavy silver hammer, and in the left I have Buddy by the scruff.

  I am my own hunter.

  “Is this somehow another loop?” I say.

  “Try again, shithead.” My own face grins back at me. It reminds me of my reflection in the box, my fears and anger and frustration radiating from the image in the mirrors, all the things I chose not to bring with me.

  Officer 2510 said, You forced your way through, caused a fracture, sloughed off some nasty shit.

  The hunter says, “You’re asking yourself, ‘Why didn’t John warn me?’ ”

  “You’re another possible me. What I could have been.”

  “I’m me. You’re just an afterthought.”

  Grace moves toward John. I move toward myself. My mind is racing.

  “Say the word,” John says. He has the paddle in both hands, swings it from side to side.

  Think. Think.

  I speak, this me. “John, why can’t you cross back to the other side, to our side?”

  John says, “What? I stayed because I’ve been trying to win Grace back.”

  My sister laughs bitterly.

  That other part of me says, “He’s lying.”

  John says, “I have it under control.”

  That other part of me says, “Liar. How many times has he said that before?”

  I am circling myself now. I watch the hammer in my hunter’s hand.

  I say, “Please. Buddy has nothing to do with this.”

  Both parts of me look at the rat in his hand, my hand. Buddy is silent and submissive in the grasp. He probably never feared a thing. I watch that other part of me throw Buddy hard at the boat. The poor rat bounces off the hull, goes limp.

  “Stop,” I say to me.

  “Say the word,” John says. He’s on the periphery. He has the paddle high in the air.

  “When I’m done with me,” that part of me says, “I’ll move on to you two, for everything you did to me.”

  Think, you fucking idiot.

  The wind picks up. We leave prints in the sand and they are swallowed by the dark and by the waves that lick at our feet.

  “When I’m done with you two, I’ll move on to Nicole.”

  “So I intend to destroy my life and everyone in it.” A conversation with myself.

  “I intend to do whatever I want.”

  Think. Something nags at me. I say, “John, what happened to your hunter?”

  John takes a step back.

  “What happened, John?”

  His mouth hangs open but his arms remain taut, ready as ever for violence. And there it is. I know why John’s been stuck here. I know what he did to his other self, how his violence has trapped him here.

  And all at once I know everything. I make my choice.

  “Whatever happens,” I say to John and Grace, “don’t interfere. This is the only way back for you.”

  “I’m going to end this,” that other part of me says.

  I click off the flashlight. I step toward myself and hold my hands out in a gesture of peace. In the dark I can see that part of me winding up. I will not fight back.

  That other me swings the hammer. I feel it make perfect contact with my cheekbone. My legs give way and then the rocky shore is pressed against my face. Grace screams.

  Through a mouthful of blood I say, “Don’t interfere.”

  I try to lift myself off the ground. I feel the kick, my own leg, and then I’m on my back and pinned under a knee, my own knee. That other me grabs my right forearm. I feel the hammer break my fingers, the bones in my hand, my wrist. My hand is pulped. My hand is swinging the hammer.

  John is crying. Grace is silent. I am becoming an entrance.

  “This is it,” I say.

  I raise and drop a knee onto my chest, knocking the wind out of myself. And then I return to the hand. I turn the hammer around and swing with the hooked end. I hardly feel anything in the mess at the end of my arm. I will not fight back.

  “Grace, John,” I say. Consciousness is slipping away from me. “It’s time to go.”

  I dig the hook out of my hand and swing again, over and over, until the
limb is just strings of tissue loosely bound together.

  “All right,” John says.

  “I can’t,” Grace says. “There’s so much I can do here, still.”

  “Let’s go home, love. You don’t want this place.”

  “Don’t fucking tell me what I want, John.”

  “You end up killing yourself,” I say. I look for Grace in the dark, try to ignore my contorted face just above me, grunting through clenched teeth. “If you stay, you’re choosing to die.”

  She leans toward me and me. Quietly she says, “I’m choosing to live, little brother. I don’t want to come with you. I’m happy here. I’m just getting started.”

  That other part of me gets bored of mashing up the thing that used to be my hand. I crack myself across the side of the head. I see stars. I see my face twisted in anger. I slap myself to keep my eyes open. I haven’t taken one violent action against myself. I let myself destroy myself. I choose not to fight back.

  “You’ll want to see this,” I say.

  “Oblivion,” I say.

  I bring the hammer down as hard as I can on my face.

  THE OTHER SIDE

  GRACE’S BODY WAS DISCOVERED over Labour Day weekend in September, 2008. A pair of campers stumbled across her remains in a provincial park northeast of Toronto, near the Ontario—Quebec border. Cause of death was uncertain but authorities found a number of empty prescription bottles for clonazepam, imipramine, and fluoxetine as well as an empty 750 mL bottle of scotch, all of which were suspected to originate in her Toronto apartment. Her bones and the tatters of her clothes were found in a ravine. Judging from the fractured right tibia, authorities suspected that Grace deliberately consumed all the substances in an attempt to overdose and then fell to her final resting place. Her body had been decomposing for approximately twenty months. She had died before John had even started building the box.