MOUSE
Mouse
I spent the first two years of college permanently stoned. This doesn’t seem particularly unusual or out of the ordinary. I suspect that 94% of college kids spend their first few years of college in this manner, unless they attend MIT, in which case they spend the first few years of college in some sterilized dungeon basement brewing their own meth and sobbing. I mention this only to account for the fact that when I first heard the scritching noise of a mouse coming from somewhere below the 4-foot high piles of filth that crowded my tiny Alphabet City apartment I didn’t panic or climb up onto a chair squealing like some deranged poodle-skirt-wearing virgin, I simply pulled a red knitted throw blanket over my head and turned up the volume on the record player. The soothing sounds of Yes invaded my brain. What mouse? I was living in a cavern on Mars, populated entirely by bald, muscular dwarves.
My roomates were completely in-sync with my lifestyle. We all lived on tacos which we ordered from a restaurant run by Chinese gang-members. Their fries tasted like wontons and their delivery men looked fugitive and streamlined, like they were from the future. So when Jan, my roomate with the biggest room in the apartment, heard another mouse the following afternoon, she had an equally lethargic response, mostly involving moaning. The problem with me is that my degree of laziness is matched equally by a paralizing tendency towards neurosis, manifesting itself mostly in hysterical internal monologues and the need please everyone I meet, including strangers and homeless people handing out chick-tracts. After the haze wore off, I found that I couldn’t get the mouse out of my mind. How many more mice were scrabbling about under our sink, making homes in my padded bras, or nibbling the crumbs of leftover 99 cent black and white cookies? I spent a day curled up in a canvas chair, staring with psychotic intensity at the space under our refrigerator, willing a little rodent face to peer out at me so I would have a legitimate excuse to scream. When my two roommates arrived home that evening, I put it to them. It’s the mouse or me, I said, the two of us can’t co-exist here. I pay a million dollars a month, rent, and that little fucker is squatting.
So obviously my roommates, who in truth really wouldn’t care at all if I left and never came back, decided it was easier just to buy traps from the bodega downstairs and deal with the problem at hand. This take-charge attitude was soon seasoned by a healthy dose of THC, which added an Indiana-Jones-esque adventure quality to the whole undertaking. Three rugged heroines out to conquer the biggest rodent infestation that New York has ever seen. I’m pretty sure if one of us had owned a machete, we would have brough it along.
The long-suffering bodega owner, who had finally been convinced that none of us was going to sleep with him even if he gave us free beer, looked on with yellowed-eyes as we prowled conspicuously down the aisles of his store. We found the traps, inconguously, next to the feminine products. So great, we can kill the mice and stock up on maxi-pads, which will come in handy if one of us gets injured in the process and we need to sop up arterial blood. Then came a question. Humane traps, or not. I was all for inhumanity at this point. Kill the fucker, I said loudly, waving the tiny cardboard box around. My roommates were not convinced. Killing something is so….my roommate searched for the word. Final? Vicious? Terrifying? An exhillarating display of our latent animal desires? Disgusting, she finally came up with, her lip curled like a disappointed food critic. No. My roommates would not have any tiny corpses on their hands. For god’s sakes, Jan said, backing away and blinking rapidly with a prissy, tight expression on her face. We don’t need to kill it, we just need to get it out of our fucking apartment. We can release it into the wild, she said, obviously living out some abstract Disney fantasy in her mind. Ok, I said, picturing us gently releasing the creature out into the bleak semen-stained cement of our front stoop. We’re not animals! We shop at Whole Foods. We recycle. We won’t have any killing in this house.
So we bought the humane trap and two six-packs of beer.
Back upstairs, it was clear that the trip to the market had taken its emotional toll on us. We sat around the living room, demolishing the beer and sucking down smoke like deprived refugees. The whole room was tinted red because I had decided to decorate for the occasion, which meant removing the knitted throw blanket from under the couch and placing it over the lampshade. The whole atmosphere was womblike and vaguely spiritual. Candles were burning and Cream was on the record player, but very softly. A mood had to be set of mouse-catching. We didn’t want to scare the tiny fucker with our loud rock-and-roll ways. We all sat watching the corner of the room with red, itchy eyes. We couldn’t see the trap, which we had baited with a tiny piece of Egg McMuffin. But we sat and waited, in total silence and semi-darkness, to hear the sounds of little squealing.
I should mention that as we were waiting, our doorbell rang, and Marty, my other roommate (her room is slightly bigger than mine) careened out of her chair skidded to the door, which she opened very slowly, only a few inches. Our upstairs neighbor peered in tentatively.
I locked myself out of my place, she said, trying to push our door open and walk in. She must have noted the fact that Marty was wearing a mechanics jumpsuit and Jan had donned a green poncho with cat ears for the occasion, but she didn’t mention anything. Can I walk up through your fire escape, she asked, inching slowly away from us down the hall.
Sure, I said, but be quiet.. We’re engaging in a tricky maneuver, here. Don’t fuck things up for us.
She turned and walked fast, like she wanted to break into a run. In a few seconds we heard the window close, and relaxed back into our positions.
I’m almost sure that we weren’t there for hours, exactly, waiting for that mouse, but it was some long stretch of time, and we were getting restless and there was some talk of forgetting the whole thing and watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory again and maybe ordering some of the scary tacos, when we heared a soft click from under the counter, and then a continuous, wailing squee. It was alarmingly loud. Oh shit, I thought, our humane trap has caught the wrong thing! Could child get under the counter somehow? A cat from the neighborhood?
Jan, who is more intrepid than I am, peered under the counter and I stared dumbly over her shoulder. Suddenly she jolted back and knocked into me, like we were in some comedy routine from the 30s.
Oh Fuck! We caught it! The mouse was on its back, struggling with tiny, alien looking little feet and making obscene noises. Jan said, Ok, now you pull it off the trap and we can take it outdoors. Yeah fucking right. I would’t touch that squirming mouse if I were dead and had cold corpse hands. As it was I was standing in the extreme far corner of the room, making small noises and digging my fingers into my palm. The mouse looked furious, rabid and capable of damage. I saw its little black eyes look through me, and I knew that he knew me. You, his eyes said to me, you’re the little pissant druggie who has it out for me. I’m coming for you, you little cunt, the mouse said to me.
I’m not doing it, I said firmly. Marty? Hows about it?
You’re dreaming, Marty said, and I had a momentary urge to tell her that it came along with having the second-biggest room in the apartment. That fucking thing probably has the plague, Jan said, sitting back down. No way in hell.
We all sat there, trying not to look at the imprisoned little thing on the floor. Its our duty, I said to myself. I wanted the thing out, and here it is. Look at it. Its in pain. I’m like a modern day rodent Josef Mengele. That creature is going to invade my dreams. I should be locked up. I’m a terrible person who profits from the pain of other living things.
I stood up. Ok. I’m going to need some rubber gloves, I said, moving calmly around to the kitchen. I picked up a pair of industrial-strength thick yellow gloves. They looked strong enough to protect my hands from acid burns. I felt better with them on. In control. I felt like a doctor about to perform a surgery that would save someone’s life. This feeling lessened when I neared the mouse. It turned its small head towards me. I’ll get you, bitch, it said. I know where you live. I’ll come back and bring my friends and they’ll find you two weeks later with half your face gone. I thought for a second about throwing myself out a window. Bursting into tears. Instead, I turned and smiled at my roommates like a gigantic deranged Kelly Ripa, and firmly grasped the warm wriggly body in one hand.
If I wasn’t sure, before, that this was a bad idea, feeling that animal move in my hands pretty much sealed the deal. I screamed and let go, but the fucker just HUNG there, attatched to my glove with the same sticky stuff that attatched it to the trap. I wailed, shrieking, and threw my hand around, trying to dislodge the mouse. The tiny thing swung like a rubber band, and snapped back, the green goo of the trap stretching and retracting with horrific elasticity. My two roomates were galvanized into hysterical, completely ineffective action. They ran around, yelling, as I spastically yo-yoed the mouse back and forth, frothing at the mouth, completely out of my head. I didn’t think at all of just taking off the glove, I just furiously shook my hands, smacked them into the wall, stunning the mouse and chipping my knuckle. Jan had regained some sense during all of this and brought me a big jar of water.
PUT IT IN THERE, she yelled, trying to get me to pay attention. JUST TAKE OFF THE GLOVE AND DUNK IT IN.
I did. I shuderingly peeled the glove off, and the whole works-the mouse, the glove, the trap, sank slowly into the water.
The mouse was weighed down by the trap, and, under the shivering rubber of the glove, I watched in horrified silence as it spasmed, and died.
We all sat there for a moment, and then Marty spoke. What are we going to do with that? She asked, indicating the jar which now contained a tiny corpse, a rubber glove, and a humane trap, which sat uselessly at the bottom, smugly humane, under the dead body.
Jan walked stiffly over to it, took it up, and then walked over to the window, opened it, and poured everything out the window. Then we all watched it thud wetly on top of a police cruiser which happened to be parked below because we lived next to a station. There was nothing to say.
I sat down with my head in my hands. Clearly I had just ruined my life and become a killer. A monster. I imagined telling my shrink, at age 45, why I was incapable of forming close relationships, keeping jobs, leaving my house for small errands.
Jan started laughing, but it was a strangled, uncomfortable sound. Then there was silence again, except for the soft sounds of Eric Clapton wailing on the guitar in the background.
I moved out a year later.