Three Years with the Rat

by Jay Hosking

  Then, almost immediately after, she spoke again, only this time in my other ear and her voice seemed smooth, calm. She said, I’m sorry for all of this, John. It isn’t simple, here. I miss you.

  I was delirious, exhausted. I began to shout: Where are you? What do you want from me? Why did you go to the dead end? Why are you doing this to me? Please come back to me.

  I fumbled over my words and I pounded my fists against the floor. I had kept my mouth closed for months and now I couldn’t stop screaming. Please come back to me. Please come back to me. My parents came to my room, shouting at each other, What is wrong with him? When I finally quieted, my mother looked at my father and said, I told you that girl was trouble. Before her, he had a good job. Remember?

  I calmed myself, told them I’d had a nightmare and sent them back to bed. When I was sure they were asleep, I packed my belongings and walked the five kilometres from my parents’ new house to the neighbourhood where I had grown up.

  It was dawn when I reached the dead end. The sign still stood where it always had, a defiant diamond just out of range of direct sunlight. A small, dirty patch of land remained undeveloped between our old subdivision and the new one, and it seemed remarkable that no one could acknowledge the absurdity of a dead end between two finished communities. Its secret remained kept even after all these years, except to Grace and me. A few times, I had visited this site to collect tiny samples of earth, to secretly supplement Grace’s rat research, and it had felt harmless. This time, the threat of the place was palpable.

  I walked across the empty street, stepped from the curb, and approached the threshold of the dead end without hesitation or pomp. Something around me lurched and turned over as I stood next to the sign, caused light to briefly bend and shimmer around me. Something was furious with me, with my desire to cross. And it dawned on me, although I was more tired than I had ever been: if I crossed that threshold, I would be at the mercy of those forces. I might find Grace on the other side but I would be powerless. This was someone else’s entrance.

  And that was when the plan started to form, a simple variation on the research with the rats. If I built my own entrance, I could cross to the other side on my own terms. I could control this phenomenon. I couldn’t use the earth from the dead end anymore; I had to find another solution. I walked away from that threshold and took the next train back to Toronto.

  —

  It’s been a false start, of course. Those first nights back in the city, I stayed up waiting to be terrified and comforted by the ghost of Grace. She didn’t come. I took to walking the streets until dawn, trying to tire myself sufficiently to sleep, but no amount of walking could suffice. It was with horror that I realized her absence was worse than any awful thing she could have said to me, any scare she could have delivered. What little grip I had on waking life slipped completely.

  I knew better than to try sleeping pills, knew their harmful and cumulative effects, but try them I did. I tried them and tried them and tried them. Then one evening I awoke. I was so happy to have slept that at first I didn’t realize I had been hospitalized. Someone had found me in the hallway of our apartment, face down on the stairs. When the nurse came to my hospital bed, she tried to comfort me by telling me that no one had stolen my possessions while I was unconscious.

  The emergency team quickly decided I needed the mental health team, and a few referrals later I found myself here. Each night I sleep more than the previous one, and it has been glorious. I spend days looking through the window. Outside are lovers, wanderers, streetcars, and the first hints of summer. I tell my psychiatrist about the distance I feel between everyone and how I don’t want to believe it’s right or normal. For a time, Grace was here and that distance was closed, and even her apparition (or hallucination, as I describe it to the doctor) was better than no Grace at all. I make instant coffee five times a day, and I sip it from the plastic spoons the ward provides. I build my strength each day by degrees. I write these fragments of my life to remind myself that they were real, not simply some manifestation of my grief, and I encode them so the doctors can’t read them. I listen, and I wait.

  There have been no unusual reflections, no whispers in the night from Grace. In fact my world has become much more mundane. Her brother visits me in the hospital from time to time, and I can’t help but pity his need for approval from those he thinks more intelligent than himself. Like a puppy, he’s loyal and eager to please, but his presence makes me lonelier than I thought possible. I can’t decide which is worse: being absolutely known by the unknown, or being absolutely unknown by the known.

  Each day I tell them all I am feeling a little better, and in a sense it is true.

  I can’t wait to leave this place and start building my entrance. I can’t wait to have control. And I can’t wait to see that other side with Grace.

  2007

  THERE WAS NO BLOW-UP, no defining moment, just a few more scattered arguments and then nothing at all. One morning I awoke on the couch again and realized Nicole hadn’t come home the previous night. I wasn’t sure if she had been home the night before that, either.

  Her things began to disappear. I got back to the apartment after work each day and something new had vanished: clothes, shoes, make-up, books. One day the nice pots and pans were gone. Another day it was the bookshelf, then the night table and alarm clock, then the art from the walls. One afternoon she took her pillow. It’s amazing how sad a bed looks with only one pillow on it.

  We had each other’s telephone numbers. We didn’t use them.

  One day it simply stopped. I found her key in the mailbox. When I entered the basement, many of her things were still there: couch, cutlery, bed, linens, and an assortment of books scattered about the apartment. She had successfully removed me from her life but had left her own removal incomplete. I considered throwing out her belongings, buying new furniture, maybe even a houseplant. Then I started sleeping in the bed again and leafing through the books. I lived with the remnants of her.

  —

  John called me at work one afternoon. I’d been ignoring him since the attack on Thornton, uninterested in his extremes or his empty promises. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see the police show up at my door. So when he called my work, I told him flatly that I was busy and would get in touch when it was convenient. The next day, my bosses left me a note that John had called while I was on lunch. Without Nicole at home, I’d found myself working longer hours and this had proved a boon for my employers. They likely tied this new-found motivation to my “mugging” and the black eye I’d received, and so they were suddenly forgiving about things like personal calls to the office.

  I didn’t return his calls.

  A few days later Lee showed up at the office. She reminisced with my bosses, went for coffee with them downstairs, and when the social call was finished, she came to my desk. She wore no denim, had wrapped her coarse hair tightly into a bun, and looked nothing at all like she did in her free time.

  She planted one hand on my desk, previously her desk, leaned in and spoke quietly. “Scruffy, are you ignoring John?”

  “Hi, Lee.”

  “C’mon. Don’t you think you’re going to hurt his feelings? The big guy loves you.”

  I leaned back and shrugged.

  “Let’s try this again,” she said. “You’re the soft guy, the fixer. He needs you. You’re his shoulder to lean on.”

  “He’s been leaning a little too hard,” I told her.

  She smiled and stood up straight. Her posture was as professional as her outfit. “I get it. He hasn’t made it easy to be his friend this year. But when was the last time you saw him happy? Big man’s practically manic over some sort of breakthrough at work. Wants to celebrate.”

  “I don’t know, Lee.”

  “Don’t worry. Nicole won’t be there.” The look on my face must have been obvious because she laughed. “She and I lived together for years. You think I wouldn’t know what’s up with you two?”
<
br />   —

  That night a blizzard hit, grinding the city to a halt, and over the next day the temperature sank and turned the snow into a sheen of hard, slippery ice. The weekend came and against my better judgement I trudged through the streets to Shifty’s. I looked through the window and saw John, Lee, Steve, and Brian sharing a couple of pitchers. John noticed me through the window and rushed between the tables to greet me at the entrance. He hugged me hard, lifted me off my feet.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said.

  It was a nice greeting from everyone at the table, equal parts cheer for John and sympathy for my breakup. John acted like a true master of ceremonies and ensured that everyone was engaged in the conversation. Even Steve put aside his morose attitude and got involved. Of course everyone could see how thin John had become, how his teeth pushed against the skin around his mouth. But it seemed that the gang was eager to find him back to his old self, even if they had to ignore details that suggested otherwise.

  The beer went to my head. I caught myself smiling in conversation and felt immediately annoyed at my good spirits.

  “So what’s this big news?” I asked John. They were the first words I’d spoken to him all night.

  He beamed, a skeleton with a sheet of skin pulled over it. “It’s complicated.”

  “Just for once, John, why don’t you try? I’m not a fucking idiot.”

  My tone must have caught the ears of the others, but they didn’t speak up.

  John’s face stiffened. He said, “I got Grace’s project up and working again. I just needed to try a technique I had abandoned.”

  It wasn’t a complete surprise. “The rats. Subjective whatever. And Buddy?”

  This made him smile again. “He’s a star. A hero for science.”

  “Is he all right, though?”

  I didn’t get an answer. A large group of people had entered the restaurant and John’s attention shifted to them. The server led the group to the same area as us and as they approached our table, they all went silent. They were young men and women, mostly unkempt, not particularly stylish or consistent in their dress.

  “Holy shit. John?” One of their group stepped forward. He was spindly and his voice was a little unsteady but he seemed more confident than the rest. “Are you kidding me? Do you have any idea the friggin’ trouble you’ve caused?”

  “Hey, just ease down there, eh?” Brian said.

  John’s face was frozen and unreadable. “I suppose there was a risk of this happening. Hi, Will.”

  The group’s spokesperson, Will, kept weaving forward and back as if he’d been drinking. “Where the hell have you been for three months?”

  Suddenly their group made sense to me: they were graduate students.

  John said, “It’s none of your business, Will. This is why I’ve been avoiding places like Shifty’s.”

  Some of the grad students frowned and shook their heads, and others muttered to one another.

  Will, though, was bold in his disgust. “Do you think this is funny? Trivial? Not only does our supervisor have to deal with you disappearing, but you take the rats out of the lab? Some of them had friggin’ telemetry devices in them. She’s still knee deep in crap! She could lose her job. Have you gone insane?”

  John stood up slowly and his body looked wide but hollow. His hands were tucked into fists and I couldn’t help remembering what had happened in the school parking lot.

  “You better sort this mess out right now,” Will said quietly. He didn’t back away but clearly John’s physical presence diminished him a little.

  John stepped around the table and toward the students. He looked coiled tight and ready to spring, and they could see it.

  “You’ve been unbelievably selfish,” Will said, his voice faltering.

  “You’re right,” John said finally. He sounded calm but not apologetic. He took another step forward. “I have acted selfishly. And I’ll have to pay for it. Now leave us alone.”

  Will involuntarily took a half-step back, then looked at the scared group of students around him and mustered his courage. He said, “Grace was a bad influence on you. She was the lab’s biggest mistake.”

  I was on my feet. I resisted the urge to strangle that little bastard and instead looked to one of the others, a young woman with a ponytail.

  “Take your friend away,” I told her. “Right now.”

  She pulled on Will’s sleeve and it broke his attention from the scene. He backed off and they all made their way to the back of the restaurant instead. For a moment, nothing happened at our table. John and I still stood. Lee, Steve, and Brian watched from their seats.

  And then John let out a sigh and said, “Excuse me for a moment. I need to use the washroom.”

  I sat down again.

  “He lied to us about the lab,” Lee said.

  “Dude’s had it rough this year,” Brian said.

  “I’m not really good with these kinds of situations,” Steve told us. “I should’ve known better,” Lee said. “Just look how skinny he is now. What are we gonna do?”

  In the end there was no point in wondering. John never came back to the table. I checked the washroom and the grad students’ table at the back but there was no sign of him. He’d left Shifty’s without even bothering to take his coat. We went to his apartment but the lights were off upstairs and we couldn’t get inside. We tried his phone but he didn’t answer. There was no sign of John for a week.

  —

  Then one evening my cell phone rang.

  “I need to see you,” he said.

  I skipped my prepackaged dinner and went straight to his house. The front door to his building was wedged open with a rock and he was inside the apartment, sitting calmly on the couch.

  He looked different. His hair was cropped short and his T-shirt and pants looked new. They were tight on his diminished body. Layers and layers of warm clothes were piled next to him, and he was wearing heavy winter boots. His eyes were so sunken that his brow cast a shadow over them, but there was resolve and focus on his face.

  His right forearm was heavily bandaged.

  “I wanted to say thank you and goodbye before I go,” he said.

  He gestured to a seat and I took it but sat on the edge.

  “Go where?” I asked. “Where are you going in this state? Where the hell have you been? What happened to your arm?”

  “I’ve been getting things ready,” he said.

  “Ready for what, goddamn it?”

  He took a moment, then said it slowly. “I’m going to find Grace.”

  I shot out of my seat and paced the room. I wrapped my arms around myself to prevent them from lashing out at the wall or throwing small objects.

  “If Grace wanted to be found,” I said, “she would have left a fucking address or some way to get in touch. But she didn’t. She wanted to leave us behind, like we were pieces of garbage to be discarded. Just like her clothes, her degree, and the rest of her life. Remember?”

  “Maybe she didn’t have a choice,” he said.

  “And maybe you’re wrong!” The frustration was so powerful that I actually laughed, one hard note. “I can’t do this anymore. What do you know? Yeah, yeah, you two were in love. Wow, you lived together for a few months. But she was my sister. Mine, not yours. I knew her my whole life. How long did you know her, John? Jesus Christ. You don’t get to be the only one who’s grieving.”

  Something hot and angry pressed against the inside of my throat. I could feel a headache coming on.

  John stood up and faced me. He put out his thin arms and rested his hands on my shoulders, his manner peaceful. He said, “All right, maybe I need to think about this a little more, figure out a next step. You’re right. Would you mind giving me a day or two to consider what you’ve said?”

  I wiped my face with my sleeve. “You’re going to leave and not tell me. I’m so tired of people leaving without saying goodbye.”

  “I won’t. I just want some time to evaluate my op
tions.”

  “I’m going to call you tonight.”

  “Checking in,” he said. “Sure. Now please go.”

  My body was numb all over when I walked out the door. I took the streetcar to my house. I waited. I called John and he did not pick up. Hours passed, then a day. I made my way back to the apartment but the front door was locked and the lights in his windows were out. I buzzed for the better part of an hour and no one answered. My hands wouldn’t work anymore in the cold and so I left. He had lied to me again.

  That was the last time I saw him.

  2006

  THE LIGHTS WERE ON in the basement apartment when I got home, but at first I couldn’t see Nicole. I found her in the washroom. She sat on the counter, feet in the sink with the faucet running, hot water splashing from ankles to toes. She was wearing a very small sheer dress and brushing her teeth. Her legs were folded up, bare and smooth, and I could practically see the rest of her through the fabric.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m cold,” she said through a mouth full of toothpaste. She kicked her feet lightly in the sink and splashed water onto the counter.

  “You’re only wearing a nightgown.”

  “I prefer negligee.” She smiled. “ ‘Nightgown’ is thoroughly too frumpy a word.”

  She spun her feet out of the sink and pointed them at me. She made a face that was pleading and joking at the same time. I folded the towel around her feet and rubbed them dry.

  “In any case,” I said, “it’s not exactly a good fit for the season. Why wear it now?”

  She rinsed her mouth and gave me another look.

  “Oh,” I said. I lifted her up with one arm under her knees and the other arm around the small of her back. Then I carried her to bed.