Three Years with the Rat (2 page)

Then I crouch and step inside the box, using my fingertips to gently lower the open face until I am enveloped by an overwhelming, total darkness.

It takes only a click of the flashlight to see the care and precision that have gone into designing this space. I have stood between two mirrors before, in an elevator, and seen reflections of myself curving off into the distance, the mirrors not being exactly parallel. This is not what the box is like. By the pale beam of the flashlight, I can see that copies of my reflection are not turning but rather absolutely, perfectly straight in every direction. No matter where I look I see myself, hammer in one hand and light in the other. In the distance are some abstract and indeterminate forms that are probably still composed of parts of me. There is no background to reflect, only reflection that dilates space itself. It is geometric and infinite.

And something is changing. The temperature seems to be dropping and I feel the ache of wet, damp air. The sound of my small,
shuffling movements enlarges within the box, just like my reflection. I have no free hands so I clear my throat to make noise, and it sounds as though I'm standing in a field instead of sealed in a tiny mirrored box.

Fear seeps into me. In this space is movement and breathing, so much that it could not possibly be mine alone. I am being watched. I turn around and around but see the same thing in every direction, my mirror image threatening and tight. It isn't clear what I should do next.

I jam the hammer under my arm and pull the photograph out of my pocket. My toes are becoming numb. I am sure some
thing
is drawing close to me but I can see nothing but myself in the mirrors. John and Grace look at me from the picture and they have nothing to offer. I fumble and drop the photo, but instead of retrieving it I pull the hammer from under my arm, test its weight again in my hand.

Here it comes.

And then I feel it, as though someone is drawing a rough, curved line down my back. I shout, I twist around, but there is nothing behind me. I can feel the sensation where the arc has been made across me, and soon that touch on my back becomes an itch. The itch becomes burning. The burning becomes vivid pain. My shirt begins to stick to my back. I turn and scour the mirrors but again there is only my own image, my face calmer than I would expect. My legs become uncoordinated, weak. The pain is now torture and something wet is pooling in the small of my back. Worse, I can feel that thing approaching.
Here it comes again.
I do the first and only thing that comes to my mind.

I swing the hammer at a wall.

In an instant, the temperature jumps up and the space in the remaining mirrors compresses to reflections of wood and shattered glass.
I try each wall until I find the one that slides up, toss the hammer and flashlight onto the floor in front of me, and crawl out of the box. When I reach my arm around to feel between my shoulder blades, I bring back a hand covered in blood. My body tries to vomit but only a little coffee and gravy come up. I wipe my mouth with my clean hand, bite my lip, and try to stop shaking. A sound catches my attention and I turn.

A black and white rat is standing on the floor of the box, docile, peering out, his pink nose sniffing up at me. I know this rat. Buddy.

This is the only way back for us
, the note had said.

I find the rat cages stacked in the closet of the master bedroom, below some of John's clothes. I remove my torn hoodie and replace it with his black jacket. The blood is already sticky along the wound, painful to the touch, but at least it only comes in waves. I return to the second bedroom with a cage and pick Buddy up as John taught me: thumb and middle finger pinched just behind his front legs, index finger lightly on the back of his neck. Buddy seems calm, happy to be back in his cage.

Next I remove the handled slat of the box and the piece opposite to it, the one with the shattered mirror. I use the hammer to clear the half-broken fragments from the wood and lean the two walls of the box against the couch in the living room. With the broom from the kitchen, I sweep the bits of broken glass into a corner. Then, piece by piece, I disassemble the rest of the box. John used grooves and notches rather than nails, so the whole thing comes apart neatly.

I move the walls of the box, the blue notebook, the smaller box with the rubber hole, the sack full of earth, the pouches, the hammer, and Buddy's cage down the stairs and to my car. The wooden pieces are far too big to fit in the interior so I strap them to the roof using bungee cords from the trunk. I stack the six pieces of
wood carefully but still worry that the mirrors will break. When I'm finished, the little car is nearly as tall and wide as it is long.

Last of all, I pluck the photograph of John and Grace from the bits of glass and put it in my back pocket, careful not to spoil it with my blood.

The landlord comes up the stairs as I'm preparing to leave the apartment for good. My head is foggy and the line down my back screams to be mended.

“Done,” I say.

The landlord looks inside the apartment, looks at me, then back and forth again. “What do you mean, ‘done'? It's still full of their shit.”

“I've taken everything I can,” I tell him.

His lips pinch and his head lowers. “You clean the place, now.”

“I need to go to the hospital.”

“I don't care if you're dying—”

“Go fuck yourself,” I cut him off. “I've heard this story already. See you later.”

I begin to stumble down to the front entrance.

“I shoulda never rented to them,” he shouts. “I knew she was damaged goods as soon as I met her.”

I stop halfway down the stairs. The carpet is filthy with old bits of gum, flattened and black with time. I turn around to face him. My back sings with pain.

“What did you say?” I ask through my teeth. My hands are tight little balls of bone, one still coated in my own blood. “What did you say about my sister?”

His grin becomes nervous, hesitant.

I take a step up the stairs. Another.

“You go,” he says, crossing his arms. “You fucken get out. You think I want their trouble? You think this is no problem for me?”

“What did you say about my sister?”

He moves his mouth a little but all I can hear is my pulse in my ears.

By the time I reach the top step, the landlord has slid into the apartment. He closes the door and locks the deadbolt. I stand for a few seconds, spit on the floor, and make my way down to the car.

JOHN STARTED BUILDING
on the day I picked him up from the hospital.

It was too early for anyone reasonable to be calling, and besides that, I didn't want to wake Nicole, so I ignored my phone when it hummed. The beginnings of daylight were just starting to filter into the basement. When the phone buzzed again, buried in my jeans on the floor, I crawled out of bed and fished through my pockets. By then the call had gone to my voice mail but I could see that both calls were from John.

On the message he said, “Hey, stranger. I'm checking out today, somewhere around ten-thirty. It would be good to see you. Take care.”

Nicole didn't move when I got up, didn't open her eyes or stretch or smile. She just lay there, curled up and motionless. Her orange bangs rested on her forehead and her skin looked oily. The sheets were skewed and a lovely length of her leg was exposed. Her hands were bunched toward her chin, like a boxer, but there was no tension in her face. I thought that this would be the most peaceful she'd be all day. I thought that I enjoyed her company more
when she was asleep. I didn't like these thoughts and so I put on my clothes and left the apartment without saying goodbye.

The summer had been one of extremes, classic Toronto heat on some days and torrential storms on others. As I trudged up the steps to ground level, I could see that the mid-August sky was mostly grey, dark in the east, promising rain. The leaves had come late to the persimmon tree that year but now it looked lush in its little square of exposed earth. The tree would be thankful for the coming weather even if I wasn't.

The neuropsychiatric hospital was only three or four streets from my house, at Bathurst, a distance that people in Toronto sometimes call
a block.
John had been tossed between there and a centre for addiction and mental health over the past couple of months. Some days I'd visit and we would take a day trip across the street to the coffee shop, sip horrible, ashen swill, laugh hesitantly, and occasionally take long silences to grieve in our personal ways.

The neighbourhood was alive at ten in the morning. The Vietnamese grocery store already had its boxes of bok choy and peppers stacked atop milk crates. The Euro nightclub, now doubling as a punk and indie venue, had its storefront opened to air out the smell of beer and rotten limes. I could see through the fancy diner's windows that it was full of people having their weekend brunch. The manager had offered Nicole the head cook position there, but she said she didn't want to work so close to home.

Hospitals always made me think of that year Grace shaved her head, nights I would wake up, ten or eleven years old, and find that I was alone in the house, that everyone else was once again in the emergency room.

The hospital's atrium was just as busy as the street outside. I had no idea how to find John, and so I stood at a hygiene station and spurted sanitizer on my hands. That's how he found me, creating
friction between my palms, trying to speed up evaporation, foolish and awkward.

He hugged me and said, “You smell like rubbing alcohol.”

John's mother and father were born in South Korea. They had married and left for Canada in the 1970s, removing themselves from the politics of their home country at that time. They settled into a suburb about an hour east of the city, called Oshawa, and took over ownership of a local convenience store. They toiled for years, expanding into a few small businesses before even considering children. In the end, they had only one child, a quiet, hesitant boy who in no way resembled my future friend.

As John described it, his teenage life was split between working part time at his parents' gas station and reading comics in the basement. He had a few friends during his high school years, other spindly kids who shared his interest in noisy music or video games, boys who didn't seem to care or notice that he was one of the only “non-white” kids at the school. Most of these friends disappeared when he went to university.

His choice of the University of Waterloo was a message to his parents. By then his father had already suffered one mild heart attack, his mother was micromanaging the three businesses they owned, and John had no interest in following in his family's entrepreneurial footsteps. Waterloo was an hour and a half away from his hometown by car, just far enough that he couldn't come home regularly to work at the stores. He was outside the range of parental pressure, a space where he could exert his independence. His mother and father were disappointed he didn't go somewhere more prestigious, somewhere closer to home, somewhere like Toronto, but
they were glad his degree was in practical subjects like computer encryption and mathematics. He excelled in his courses and this kept his family relatively quiet.

The way he told it, John took this new setting as an opportunity to reinvent himself. He exchanged comics for swimming, social invisibility for live shows and dancing. Compared to his peers, John was charming and confident. He found a practicum placement in Toronto and spent half of each year in the city, contributing to a photo-editing application that was to be internet accessible. Newly groomed and living downtown, unable to visit Oshawa often because of his work, he began to make friends. When Grace first met him, she described him to me as “nice clothes, nice shoulders, nice guy.”

I broke off the hug and said, “O.K. O.K.”

He stepped back a little and smiled. His frame had lost a little of its muscle and there was a distinct crease under each eye, but he looked calmer than I had expected. His hair was neat and pushed to one side, and he was wearing his black spring jacket.

“So what's the plan?” I asked.

“I was wondering if you could take me to the hardware store near your place,” he said.

“Hardware store?”

He nodded and his smile remained.

I shrugged. “Do you need a lot of things? I mean, will we need my car?”

“If you don't mind,” he said.

The walk felt longer than it had on my way to the hospital. He started to approach the house when we turned onto my street, but I pointed him toward the car instead.

“How's Nicole?” he asked.

“Fine. She's fine.”

We got in the car and I started the engine. All the while he looked at me, his usual strategy to make me talk.

“You know it's shit with Nicole and me,” I said.

He nodded. “Beginning of the end or end of the beginning?”

“Who knows?” I laughed. “Jesus, you're the one who just got out of the fucking hospital. How are
you
? I have no idea how I'm supposed to handle this stuff.”

“You're doing just fine,” he said.

The inside of the hardware store was visual noise, a collage of textures, colours, and shapes. John pulled a wire shopping basket from the stack and indicated that I should do the same. He didn't rush but seemed to know exactly what he was looking for: wood glue, long steel nails, a chisel with a chunky blade, bits of sandpaper. I couldn't name some of the other tools he picked out. My favourite of his supplies was a heavy silver hammer with a black rubber grip. He put it in my basket but I picked it out and bounced it in my right hand while we shopped.

He discussed wood with the cashier and finally requested some balsa, for practice, and decided to pick up some mahogany later, for the real thing. What the “real thing” was going to be, he didn't say. There was some discussion about mirrors, whether the clerk had more than what was on the shelves, but John went disappointed. I didn't say a word in the store, only watched and waited for any sort of clue as to what John was planning. None came. His face remained friendly as ever, his calmness immutable.

When the supplies were loaded into the car and we were heading north, I finally spoke up. “What was all that about?”

“What do you mean?” He wore that same smile.

“I bet the last time you handled a hammer, you were in high school shop class.”

“I didn't take shop. I took home economics instead.” He chuckled. “New hobby. I spent some time on the internet while on mental vacation.”

I gritted, swallowed.
Vacation.
The word disagreed with me, in light of everything. In light of Grace.

Streetcars. Traffic. College Street. We passed Shifty's and I wished we were inside, eating, drinking, John and Grace making fun of me for not knowing the music, just one more gang of grown-ass adults in this neighbourhood pretending to be kids. We never really got to have our
good old days.

“I thought some physical work would do me good,” he continued. “Keep me from thinking about Grace. Keep the noose and the pills and razor blades out of my hands.”

He chuckled. I could feel my jaw rolling under the skin.

“For fuck's sake, is this some kind of joke to you?” I felt unequipped for all of this. Grace was the psychologist, not me. And moreover, I hated that he made me feel like the agitated one, the unstable one.

John said, “We should just talk about it. Out loud. What do you think?”

I scratched at my week's stubble, spat out the window. “Look. You first, then. Have you heard from Grace?”

“No. Of course not.”

There was an open parking space close to the apartment, right in the middle of busy Bloor Street. We pulled the supplies out of the backseat from the passenger side. John just stood on the sidewalk, pedestrians moving around him.

He said, “She's gone. And I think that's something you need to understand.”

I left him near the car, made my way to the apartment entrance, waited. His smile diminished from kindness to pity. He opened the door for me and I started up the steps, stomping.

“Gone,” I said. “What the hell is ‘gone'? Who just leaves and doesn't bring their cell phone or ID or credit cards or even a penny of cash? Who doesn't pack or even bother to warn their parents? Who leaves their brother to clean up their mess of a boyfriend?”

I put the shopping bags on the top step and sat with my feet hanging down the stairs, tired. John took the wood from under his arms and placed it on the steps, shifting his strong frame to sit beside me.

“I don't want to go inside,” I said.

He put his hand on the back of my neck. The hallway smelled like cigarettes.

“I can hear that you're angry,” he said. “You don't understand. You feel betrayed by Grace's actions, by my selfishness.”

“Yes. Exactly. I feel like you're both selfish assholes.”

“I imagine you're sad. You're pissed off. You're worried.”

“Stop with the psych-speak,” I said. “Stop shrinking me.”

He laughed quietly. “Sorry. It's been my lingua franca for months. But I'm being honest.”

We could hear life continuing on Bloor, its idling engines, the excited chirping voices in the sushi restaurants below.

“Let's call it by a different name, then,” he said. “Suicide. Grace committed suicide. She said as much to both of us.”

What an ugly word, the ugliest.
Suicide.

His face failed to register any emotion, kept its matter-of-factness. “And I couldn't handle it, couldn't cope. I felt like it was my fault. I did some serious self-harm, and in retrospect I can say that I was trying to kill myself, too.”

He took his hand off my neck. I had forgotten it was there. Then he stood and opened the door to his apartment.

“Come on,” he said. “This won't be easy for me, either.”

Grace was everywhere. A standing coat rack full of dark and coarse outer wear. Piles upon piles of her clothes in their bedroom. Her shampoo and toiletries littering all the free space in the washroom. An open bag of her pot on the table. Five or six different types of instant coffee all strewn across the kitchen counters and buried in the cupboards. She loved instant coffee.

But her legacy was most present in the second bedroom. The ruined framed mirror filled most of the wall, cracks circling out from the central point of impact. A small bookshelf was full of Grace's books, most with flaking spines from her rough handling.