Three Years with the Rat

by Jay Hosking

  I’m not sure who organized her funeral because I was still in Toronto-Bathurst Hospital. An ambulance crew had responded to a distress call and found a young Asian man carrying his mangled friend and a bloody rat away from the Oshawa beach. This was in mid-August of 2008. When my state was no longer considered critical, I was transferred from Oshawa General Hospital to Toronto. John was detained for no small amount of time, and detained again when Grace’s remains were found. There were more questions from the police than I could answer. There was no one on the police force who recognized my description of Officer 2510, and I was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. By the time Grace’s funeral was arranged, both John and I were under careful, regular investigation but otherwise free to go about our business.

  Despite Grace’s utter lack of spiritual belief, the service was held in an Anglican church in the suburban town of our youth. The number of attendees was small: my mother and father, in separate pews; Lee, Steve, and Brian; Nicole; myself and John; and unbeknownst to everyone but me, Buddy the rat. Although I didn’t make it to the wake a few days before, I was told that a number of classmates and coworkers from the lab had come to pay their respects.

  After the service, I thanked all my friends for coming.

  Lee seemed shocked by my calm. “Take care of yourself, Scruffy.”

  Steve stood beside her, searched for the right words, failed, and just gave me a light hug. That was good enough.

  When they had wandered away, Brian asked me, “You gonna be all right, dude? You need anything?”

  “Nah,” I told him. Steve and Lee were down the aisle, having a quiet argument, the end of their relationship in full swing again. I looked back to Brian. “Things are going to get weird for you three very soon. Just know that I support you all, no matter what.”

  He smiled but I’m not sure if what I was saying made any sense to him. He said, “Give me a fucken break, man. Shit’s gravy compared to what’s going on in your life.”

  I put out my arm to shake his hand before it even registered that I didn’t have a right hand anymore. I shook with my left instead.

  —

  John and I hadn’t actively avoided each other and we also hadn’t sought each other out. But when I found Buddy stiff and cold in his cage, dead for apparently no reason, it was John I called. This was in October, 2008, and by rat standards, Buddy had lived a very long life.

  That night we dug a hole for him beside the graves of Little Grace and Little John, in the park just north of Bloor. Buddy had been through so much that it seemed such a waste to die now. And while I hadn’t been able to cry at my sister’s funeral, for some reason I found myself wrenching out hot, angry tears for my lost companion. John stood behind me, an arm on my shoulder, and said nothing. Buddy had been a good rat.

  Later we grabbed some mashed potatoes and a beer at Features. John seemed healthy, if not well. His face was thickening and his clothes were beginning to fit again.

  “How’s the new apartment?” I asked him.

  “Definitely new,” he said. “It’s fine. I imagine it’ll be just fine.”

  “What’s your plan?” I carved out a hole in the side of the potatoes and let the gravy spill out.

  “Finish the degree. The school is quite forgiving of some issues. After that, I was thinking of getting into something based a little more in mental health. Maybe counselling or clinical.”

  “And Grace? The other side?”

  “I wanted to think I knew what I was doing. Taking things to their logical conclusion.” He pauses for a moment, closes his eyes, frowns. “But look what that led me to do, to become.”

  He drifts again, then sighs, then faces me. “No. I’m done with all that. Everyone made their choices clear. And now we have to live with them.”

  We ate. We drank. John asked the waitress for scotch and she looked at him as if he was speaking a different language.

  “Do you think it could have gone differently?” he asked.

  I remembered the strong, confident man who played patriarch to our little social circle. Now all that remained was some sort of animal indifference in his gaze, a lingering trace of his self-ruin. In my head I could see who he had been, the shadow that he now was, and the man he wanted to become.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe not for us. But there are a lot of possibilities for the present.”

  “Do you think,” he said, and stopped. He drank. He wiped his mouth and his eyes and laid his hands too hard on the table. “Do you think that she loved me?”

  “Yes. I think she did.”

  We sat in the window at Features and watched the traffic on Bloor Street pass us by. The silence was enough for us. There was almost nothing left to say out loud.

  He said, “Thank you.”

  We exchanged our farewells and made our promises to keep in touch. It was a goodbye.

  —

  Back in August it was Nicole who first visited me in Oshawa General Hospital, even before John or my mother. I’m not even sure how she found out. Her face was puffy when she arrived and she said she was only visiting once. She was back a few days later, and then again, and when I was transferred to Toronto-Bathurst Hospital she was there every day.

  She asked me to open up to her and for once I explained everything. I started at the beginning and it took a very long time. At times I had to repeat sections and at other times I had to convince her with a satisfactory level of details. I started at the start. I told her how I failed Grace, how Grace had failed herself. I have never talked so much in my life. Whether she thought these things actually happened or not was secondary.

  When it was all said there was just the emptiness in me and the piece of meat all bandaged up and lying next to my side. I hated that part of me and Nicole was the one to defend it, to beatify it, to remind me that I had in fact chosen it. We fought. We had always fought and so this was comfortable for us. But when the fights ended we were better and I felt safe, just the two of us sharing a shitty hospital cot in the suburbs and passing the afternoons in the sunbeams from a filthy window.

  She told me about the new man she was dating almost right away. She told me about his habits, his smoking, and how he was arrogant in a sort of pleasant way. She told me and I raged when she wasn’t around, writhed in the bed claiming that the stump of my arm was causing me discomfort. When I got to Toronto-Bathurst she told me that the new man had left her life. I wanted something to come of that, and once or twice it did, furtive moments of our old passion behind a hospital curtain, and later in her bed, after I’d been released. But it was different. We reached and grasped for something that no longer existed.

  I told her everything there was to tell about me. I spent every word on her. And she told me that when I met the woman I was going to do right by, I could start with that level of openness. I hated her and I agreed with her conditions.

  —

  In December I received word from the University of British Columbia that I could re-enrol in classes, provided I showed a minimum grade point average over the next semester. I called ahead and sublet an apartment near False Creek in Vancouver.

  By then I was practising kayaking a few times a week indoors. The double-ended paddle was easier to manage with a prosthetic. I quit my job and bought a fourteen-foot touring kayak made of composites and with a fin on the bottom called a skeg. That boat was a beautiful thing.

  Of course I told my mother about Vancouver and she was proud, maybe. I went to some shows with Steve and Brian and Lee, although not all together, and they were sad to hear I was leaving the city but happy to hear I was doing something. John and I took a day together and drove around the suburbs of Toronto, to the beach in Oshawa, and finally to Grace’s grave. We didn’t say much. He gave me a nice bottle of scotch to take with me. But it was Nicole who saw me off in the end.

  I strapped the kayak to the roof of my car and packed the backseat and hatch with a few belongings. The rest I had sold or given away. Nicole took som
e of her books back. She told me some nice things. She said she hated me for being a better man now than I’d been when I met her. She slapped me when I told her I’d see her soon. She might have kissed me. Then I drove north and west until the city was nothing, a time that I could neither change nor control but simply carry, three years of my life I would often hold up to the light and inspect.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks first and foremost to my teachers and mentors: Lee Henderson, who gave some neuroscience guy a shot in his fiction class and nurtured that guy’s love of “the enigma”; Steven Galloway, who always found space in his workshops for this impostor to better himself; and Annabel Lyon, who graciously offered her encouragement and masterful eye in refining this novel at both the structural and technical level. I am deeply grateful for all the effort and time you invested in me.

  There would be no Rat book without Martha Webb and Nicole Winstanley. Martha, agent extraordinaire, was instrumental in smoothing out the manuscript’s kinks, as well as knowing exactly whose hands in which to place this book. She also managed to be unfailingly warm and patient with me. Nicole, editor and publisher of my dreams, worked tirelessly to make this book more of itself; she embraced the weird and sloughed off the unnecessary. Oh, and she did this all without compromise while on her maternity leave. She’s a phenomenon. Thank you both for believing in me and in the Rat book.

  Thanks also to Nicole’s team at Penguin/Hamish Hamilton for all your hard work and for, in a very real sense, knowing this book better than I do. Special thanks to Lara Hinchberger for her incisive, specific guidance in the revisions of the manuscript; it was invaluable.

  My two preliminary readers, Jen Neale and Kevin Lee, were endlessly supportive throughout the drafting process, giving me feedback after each chunk, helping me understand the readers’ responses to each element and character, pointing me toward what worked and away from what didn’t. I’m a lucky guy to have dear friends and creative peers like Jen and Kevin. Please go read their fantastic fictions!

  Thank you also to early readers of the book for all their feedback and help: Keith Maillard and the other members of his fiction workshop; Chris Gilligan; Brendan Harrington; Paul Cocker; Dave Cayley; Mark Meeks; and Amy Kenny. You’ve all got good karma coming out the wazoo.

  Finally, a round of gratitude to all my friends and loved ones who provided enthusiasm, motivation, and support while I finished the book. Specifically, thank you to Ken and Jan Hosking, the Hosking clan, Mair Cayley, my Toronto gang, my Vancouver gang, and Zoë Miles. I owe you all.

  ESSENTIAL LISTENING MATERIAL

  These are the albums I played on repeat while writing the Rat book. Most are instrumental and evoke specific moods I wanted to capture. Please take a listen, and if you like what you hear, support the artists by buying their incredible records.

  William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops

  The Field, Looping State of Mind

  A Winged Victory for the Sullen (self-titled)

  Disasterpeace, Fez OST

  Rachel’s, The Sea and the Bells

  Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, The Social Network OST

  Gregor Samsa, 55:12

  Battles, Gloss Drop

  Constantines, Shine a Light

  Charles Bradley, No Time for Dreaming—The Instrumentals

  Land of Talk, Some Are Lakes

  Ladyhawk, Shots