Rat In The Wall

Rat in the Wall 1. The odor had been with us for a few days, until our curtains and plants and even some of our furniture smelled faintly of decomposing meat. Jenna asked me if I knew where it came from and I said, no, I didn’t. “Well,” she said, are you going to do anything about it?” Her tone of voice suggested that she was upset. “Come on Keith,” she said, motioning to the couch, “will you please get up and help me?” We searched our apartment and decided that it was coming from the wall behind the kitchen sink. Before it spread the smell was perceptible only if you stood there washing dishes or chopping onions at the counter. Later, the first wave would hit you halfway up the stairs — we lived on the third floor — though on the landing it didn’t seem distasteful. But when the door opened it was hard not to gag. Waking up in the middle of the night or in the morning before anything else your nostrils tensed, a thin tendril of nausea creeping up from your intestines. A couple of more days passed and the smell persisted. Jenna said it was like a rum cake left out to rot after a party. It must be a rat, I said, it must have crawled behind there and died. 2. Around that time I wasn’t busy at the office so I flirted with the Colombian woman we’d hired because of the shape of her legs. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two, and she favored tight dresses through which the line of her panties was always visible. She was a temp for one of the junior lawyers and her cubicle was around the corner from the office I shared with several other certified paralegals. We had been skirting around our mutual attraction for several months. Typically we talked by the paper shredder, our conversation just loud enough to be heard over the buzz of the machine. She had these black, bottomless eyes, and she called me “Keet.” “Keet,” she would say sweetly, “can you help me with these depositions?” And when I obliged by pointing out the correct file she’d blink at me and say “Oh you so nice, when you have a party I come to your house.” “For real?” I’d say. And she’d respond: “For real.” But I could never bring myself to ask her out. I never even asked her about her childhood, or how she came to this country. Then, about the time we first noticed the smell, I found myself in the office standing by the shredder as she approached. I was nervous and imagined her wrinkling her nose and catching the animal’s scent on me so I went back to my desk without saying a word. I also told some colleagues at the office about my predicament.

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“We think something crawled behind there and died,” I said. “We don’t know for sure. I don’t know how we would. It’s possible it could be a gas leak, a break in the line somewhere, or maybe the garbage got stuck in the chute.” There wasn’t much sympathy. That’s New York, they all agreed, nodding and somewhat bored. Nobody seemed very impressed by the urgency of my situation, and no one was willing to offer a solution. I went home after lunch that day, hoping on the way that the smell would be gone. On the subway home I convinced myself that Jenna and I were making a big deal of it, and that when I got home it would be barely noticeable. But it was still there, greeting me as I opened the door. Through some kind of olfactory trick the stench became less rancid after a few minutes, and then it almost felt comforting, the way a painful wound will scab over and slowly turn into a kind of pleasure. I was listening to music and drinking a vodka tonic, waiting for Jenna to get home. Our living room was well lit, with a deep, comfortable couch facing a metal tower on which we’d placed our television and stereo. We’d also suspended a few nearly dead plants from the ceiling. I guess you could say we were fortunate. Both of us earned good money, we had friends and after a couple of years together we still found one another attractive. There were parties, movies, and the occasional good meal. My thin body carried only the beginnings of a paunch. All in all the dead rat, if it was a dead rat, was a minor problem. To tell the truth I had begun to find the idea attractive … our own very New York-style pet. Admittedly the animal was dead, but it was safely ensconced behind the sink, and it would not lose sleep over remote access connections or a girlfriend’s wet panties hanging from the shower nozzle. Its worries must have declined precipitously as its options were removed, one by one, disappearing as its personal space contracted … I imagined its fevered wanderings between the wall and the final turn, taken between a gas line and a circuit box, leading to a hospitable dead end. I put myself in its place. What would you do? You just stayed there waiting to die, insulated, with the added benefit of still being in New York, technically speaking. Eventually your snout would fall off, or a tail. But what would you care? Jenna was coming up the stairs, the sound of her feet recognizable after a year of cohabitation. We first met because of a mistake — I put my arm around her pleasing hips, thinking she was another woman I’d accompanied to the bar that night. She simply looked at me and waited until I realized my error. We got to talking and it felt easy, the banter came with no effort and at some point after that we passed a kind of unofficial boundary and started going out. She liked to buy me small gifts — nice socks or leather-bound organizers — and for my birthday she always presented me with a card she’d made herself, writing a long and heart-felt note on our happiness. The sex was pretty

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good and for a while our relationship was healthy, I believed that. We kept busy; work days we’d get up about the same time and take the subway from Brooklyn Heights into Manhattan. When I closed my eyes and thought of her, I always saw her straight and glossy black hair, her slightly crooked lips, and her energetic fingers, which were alive and curious whenever we made love. Usually one of us showered first, while the other stood in the bathroom, so that half my mornings were spent bleary-eyed, listening to water drumming on translucent plastic, waiting, just waiting. One morning six months after Jenna moved in she reached out to me just as the alarm sounded and worked her fingers inside my shorts, and I saw her smile as I woke up in her hand. We kept our night clothes on and moved against each other and later, as she emerged from the shower, flushed and satiated, wet hair clinging down the length of her back like ivy, I realized that it had all been a mistake. The door closed and locked. She was surprised to see me. “Are you feeing OK?” “I’m fine.” I shook my glass, rattling the ice cubes, which looked sick and gray in the clear liquid. I sighed. “How was it coming up the stairs?” “Not too bad, but it’s been four days. More, even. Don’t you think it’s time you did something about it? Like call the landlord?” “Maybe a whole family of them died back there.” She made a face and put her backpack up on the coat hook opposite the front door. She pulled off her shoes, open-toed medium heels, and sat down beside me. Her feet were swollen and her thighs, bare under short dress, quivered with recently gained weight. “Anybody call?” “Tip called.” “Tip? You haven’t heard from him in a while.” “Well, that’s friendship.” “Uh, no, it’s not. What did he want?” “To see how I was. He wants to catch up, maybe have a drink sometime after work.” “I didn’t know Tip had a job.” She got up and moved about the apartment, picking up stray papers, a week’s worth of bills and junk mail, staying away from the kitchen where the rat lay, resting. She didn’t look at me. I got a sudden image of the rat crouching behind the wall, whiskers quivering and teeth clicking on a piece of exposed wire. “Yes, Tip works. We all work somewhere.” I glanced out the window. Only a corner, the slightest wedge of the East River was visible. We paid five hundred extra dollars a month for that wedge, which never appeared blue like water in paintings or movies or water from years ago that older people speak of so fondly. It was always grey and fatal, a garbage river, and I wondered if our rat had died trying to get there. I put my drink down and stretched. Looking at Jenna I noticed that her jacket was still on. “You know you should be nicer to him, you really should try.”

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“Keith sweetheart, I would be I really would be nicer to your friend Tip,” she said sarcastically, “if I’d seen him in the past six months.” “So he’s busy. So what?” “He’s a cokehead. I don’t like you being friends with him.” I said “cunt” under my breath and either she didn’t hear it or she let it go. The drink was back in my hand, my fingers tight on the glass, and I drained it, the vodka shooting down my throat like a cold bullet. “Jenna,” I said, “there’s something we should talk about.” 3. Being alone in an apartment you are used to sharing can be a very liberating experience. The sense of freedom can leave you giddy and you can imagine how the Poles felt when the Wall came down. That’s how it was when Jenna left; one world passing away followed by another, as if I’d placed little statues of her in my bedroom and bathroom and then torn them down with ropes. She cried a little bit, and mentioned our plans and how now they were all over. It was true, we had made a lot of plans. We were going to move to the West Coast, we were going to leave the city and buy a house somewhere, start a family perhaps and find contentment in domesticity. They were good plans, if you studied them honestly. I pointed out that Jenna had made most of them when she kept saying she didn’t understand. It doesn’t matter, I wanted to say, no one understands anything, and this is just life happening, nothing more or less. At some level we just need to accept that. But instead I tried to be a gentleman and I offered to help her pack. Eventually she stopped crying and, silent and avoiding me, she packed some things in an overnight bag and left, probably to a friend’s apartment. Her departure was noisy and over the next few days the silence grew heavy and choking. At some point she came back and got the rest of her things. In the meantime I got used to the smell. Although by the time Jenna left for good it had infused the living room, I honestly did not mind it any more and thought of it as a kind of stimulation for the olfactory nerve. New York was rampant with weird and exotic smells, and these often lingered in the back seats of taxis or in those strange shops that sold trinkets from Eastern countries, but this was an odor I could call my own. Still, the finality of Jenna leaving bothered me, and I guess even I couldn’t forget our life together so quickly. She’d been gone an hour when I began to pace the apartment, lingering over the couch where we’d often had sex, the kitchen where we cooked meals together. Without thinking I went to the sink and kneeled, closed my eyes and tried to imagine what he looked liked behind the wall. I saw the snout and trembling, bristling hairs, the pink ears pointing

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away from the head. I imagined his death throes, which must have come after days without food or water, during which I was sure he tried to gnaw at one of his limbs. Then the rat was gone, replaced by the recent memory of Jenna and her final exit. This was upsetting. I tried listening to music, hoping it would calm me, but I grew bored so I went to bed very early. I took off my clothes, got under the covers and drank vodka until I fell asleep. That night I dreamt that Jenna and I were fucking on the stoop of a sagging walk-up in Alphabet City. We were covered in grime and newspaper bits but our hearts were pounding and our breath came in ragged spurts. She placed the palm of her hand on my chin and forced one salty finger through my lips, then another, and smiling she showed her teeth. The phone woke me and I waited to answer until the fourth ring. “Keith,” the voice said, “what about tonight? You in?” I was groggy and felt a little sick, the images from the dream still lingering and almost floating before me when I closed my eyes. I had not eaten dinner and had an ambitious day ahead of me at work. A faint, invisible taste of rat almost made me throw up. “Sure I’m in,” I said, “I’ll shower and be there in an hour.” 4. Ninth Street was misnamed; the bar was actually on 3rd Street between B and C. I guess that was partly the point, though no one who went there, myself included, ever guessed what the point was. We just liked drinking in a dank horseshoe bar, and on Thursdays there were cheap cocktails until midnight. Even by East Village standards, the place was dark. Its darkness was comforting, precisely because Ninth Street was not the kind of place where you would see old friends or drain pints in collective camaraderie. Could there be anything more horrifying? I used to believe in that, in clinking glasses and the backslaps of friends, I used to let those ideas comfort me, but I’ve lived in the city for almost ten years and it’s the darkness of Ninth Street that comforts me now. Tip saw me right away. He held a cocktail in each hand and pressed one into my palm and closed my fingers around it. I’m really fucked up, he said, almost whispering. His eyes were fixed and bloodshot and he’d bathed in cologne. I backed away to find the space to breathe. Tip was taller than I was, lanky, with a nearly shaved head, and he had the stare and posture of a storm trooper for some future fascist state. He did some kind of writing or editing for a television network and for as long as I could remember he’d lived alone. Usually his favorite topic of conversation was substance abuse: how much you could take, how far you could go before you crossed some near fatal threshold. Tonight he steered me to a booth and we sat down gingerly on the swaying wood. “So how’s life in the Heights? How’s the wife? You pushing a stroller along the Promenade yet?”

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“Life there is like life anywhere. You know.” “OK. I guess you don’t want to talk about the girlfriend. That leaves work, which I don’t give a shit about, or chemicals, which if I remember right don’t interest you. Let’s just shut up and drink then, that sound like a fucking plan?” “Come on. That’s not fair. You know I didn’t want this to be drag so I thought I wouldn’t mention it but … I may as well. Jenna and I. It’s not working out. Or, it already hasn’t worked out. I asked her to leave on Monday and she finally left for good today.” He smirked and leaned forward, acting as if this news was a kind of victory for him, which in a way I suppose it was. He had never gotten along with Jenna and I know he thought I had made a mistake by asking her to move in with me. “Right on. Me, I’ve been fucking this temp from Queens who likes to post videos of her orgasms on her website. That’s something you’ve gotta see. You want the URL?” “No thanks.” “Too bad, you’re missing out on the future.” Tip looked at me, his eyes focusing for a moment. He wiped his mouth with his hand sucked phlegm up his nose and I suddenly realized that I’d known him for about half my life. “Well,” he said, “I’m glad you’re through with Jenna. I never thought she was all that good for you. None of us ever did. Sorry to break it to you now but you know how it is.” “Sure. Who’s us?” “Us is us, man. Your friends.” Here they came, slowing fading in from the farthest reaches of memory … my friends seemed to exist in warrens dug deep into the streets and they emerged only in times of crisis or great debauchery, ready to make the crisis worse before disappearing again. “Remember your friends?" Ted laughed and drummed his fingers on the table. I tasted my drink, which was strong and made with cheap gin. “God, that’s horrible.” “Of course it is,” Tip said, “they make it with bottom shelf booze and flat tonic. No wedge of lime, either. How else do you think they can afford cheap cocktails?” “I’m going to get a glass of water.” “The water’s worse,” he said, and winked. When I got back Tip was leaning to one side in the booth, sleeping. “Tip,” I said, shaking him by the shoulder, “come on, wake up.” He didn’t move and I sat down and looked around the bar. Ninth Street was almost full now and a gaggle of lovely people floated through the murk. Somebody was laughing loudly and another person kept repeating I can’t believe you know her again and again. The water was lukewarm with a faint tinge of oil but I forced it down to cleanse the taste of gin. Tip was snoring. A girl with thick lips sat down across from me at a corner of the bar. I tried staring at her but she didn’t see me. Suddenly I

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realized that it had been a good two hours since I’d smelled the rat and I found that I missed it. In a way the memory of the smell was almost as comforting and the darkness around me. I kicked Tip under the table. He woke up slowly, his body straightening as if pulled by a string. He drained his drink. “You need one too?” he said, getting up. “No, I’m OK. For now. I was thinking, though … do have anything else?” The familiar, slow smile marched across his face. “I got everything you need, but right now you need a drink. I’ll be back.” When he left I tried to find the thick-lipped girl but she was gone. I was surprised to see that a woman I knew, a lesbian, had taken her seat. She was someone I’d met several years ago, in a bar like this, and we had fooled around, casually groping one another with more or less intensity over the course of several nights during a week in which we’d found ourselves between relationships. So I stared at her, but either she didn’t remember me or was feigning ignorance because she never caught my gaze. What was her name? I tried to remember and instead another memory came … this same woman, after our week together, and probably in an effort to get rid of me, had set me up with a girl who, she claimed, really liked to party. The woman in question was from Texas originally and had short black hair. A date was arranged, and the night I knocked on her apartment door she answered wearing red lipstick and tall leather boots. We drank and chatted, snorted coke and later I realized she hadn’t shaved her legs since Dallas. Her thighs scratched my waist like sandpaper. 5. Tip lived in the same studio he’d rented since first moving to the city. It was a typically barren space on Fourteenth Street that did not betray the number of years it had been occupied; a table and chairs, a futon lying flat on the floor, a pristine kitchenette. The walls were the dingy off white you often see in the city, the paint ancient and the perfect partner for the light of a naked, low-wattage bulb. I sat on the futon and Tip sat Indian style on the floor, cutting up lines of coke on a scavenged mirror. “I found this on the street the other day. Perfectly good mirror sitting in a bag of filth. People will fucking throw away anything? Did you ever walk down Second Avenue around Sixth Street late on Sunday night?” “Not lately.” “Dude … that’s the entrepreneurial spirit at its finest. The sidewalks are filled with all manner of crap, and the street people selling it will harass you until you walk away with a bag of used videotapes or sneakers three sizes too small for you.” He bent his head down and came up. “Aaahhhhhhh.” “I hope you washed it.” “Sure I washed it. I’m not a slob. You think I’d snort this good shit off a dirty mirror?” He rubbed his nose and then lashed

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his gums with a finger. “All I’m saying is that you can find anything on the streets.” We blasted away for a few hours, listening to music on the radio. Outside the rumble of traffic and the voices of people walking the streets reached our ears and we felt like we were out there, sleeping in the middle of it all, dreaming of more cocaine. “Are you bummed out about Jenna?” Tip asked. “A little. I liked her … we had a good time for a few years anyway, but you get sick of it after a while, sick of the effort … what annoyed me the most, I have to confess, what drove me crazy, was getting up every morning and saying hello. Scary, isn’t it? Such a little thing but it just didn’t seem to be worth it. “What? What wasn’t worth it? What are you talking about?” he said, apparently confused. “Us,” I replied. “Love. Cohabitation. Whatever you want to call it.” “Oh,” he said, waving his hand. “Fuck all that.” He did another line. “I’ve got to get a new TV,” Tip continued, “mine gave out the other day and I want to watch that cruise show. The Pleasure Yacht, or some shit. You hear about that?” “A little.” “Something about real people stuck on a boat together in the middle of the ocean. The fact that there’s no escape. I think it’s brilliant.” We were both silent for a while as the clamor below his window continued, mercilessly. It was about three a.m. when Tip spoke again. “Keith,” he said, “I’m going to hook you up. I copped some horse the last time I was in Chicago and there’s a little left. We can chop it out right here.” “I didn’t know you did horse.” “I don’t shoot it or anything. You remember Jim Prince? I went to visit him in Chicago and he took me to a dive in Whitaker Park. I think it was called Tuman’s Gin House. Some big nigger he knew sold him some. He seemed like an all right guy but fuck what a sketchy place. We were the only white people there.” Tip produced a plastic bag that held a pinch of beige powder. He opened the bag and some of it fell on the mirror; after he divided the powder into small mounds like little hills of dirt he passed the mirror to me. “There you go,” he said. “But be careful, you might get sick.” 6. When I threw up Tip said not to worry. He magically produced a broom and swept my vomit to a corner. Stomach cramps came next, but then so did the feeling of pleasure, and I curled up on his futon and was wrapped in warm bliss for the next several hours. At some point I must have fallen asleep. I woke up to a rare sun and Tip snoring from the spot on the floor where he’d fallen. It was fitting that we were in the

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studio, a kind of coffin with plaster walls; at the moment sleep ended I had no memory of anything, no awareness of anything but the desire to breathe and eat … an elemental life that was unbearably attractive. On the subway I almost threw up again, and at the height of my nausea the desire to rush out at the next stop was nearly overpowering. But the train clattered on to Brooklyn and I made it home … The air in my apartment was thick with rot, worse than ever before, only now it possessed a moist, warm quality, so intense that opening the door made me nearly pass out. I went to the kitchen and felt the air burn — the oven was on and had been on for God knows how long. I didn’t remember turning it on, though I had been in the kitchen before I left to meet Tip. I cracked a window and opened the oven door to make sure no animal, a raccoon or maybe more rats, had crawled in and been roasted alive. I could see the apartment becoming a halfway house for dead vermin, the bodies collecting, and rodents with tiny curled claws escaping from the sewers and city streets to find comfort and rest here in my kitchen. But there was nothing. I turned the oven off and opened the window as wide as it would go. Sweating and queasy, I removed my shirt and sank into my empty bed. My last thoughts before sleep: I had forgotten to call in sick that day, the lingering pleasure of heroin stroking the back of my neck, and the Colombian woman, whom I would have to approach as soon as possible. But not before I called Tip again … and the rat in the wall. All things considered I was in fact very happy. 7. Jenna called eventually, her voice like a faraway bird over the static, and though we talked about getting together it never happened. We’d hint at meeting, obliquely, but neither of us ever followed through, and I got the sense that we were both content with how it had ended. One morning while showering I remembered the day we moved in together. She wore a stupid wide-brimmed hat, adjusting it every few minutes as she walked amid the maze of unopened boxes I’d just moved up three flights of stairs. It was powder blue and yellow and at least one size too big for her. Jenna said it was her grandmother’s hat; an accessory the old woman had put away and never wore again after she’d acquired it during the war. I never liked the hat and Jenna, sensing this (because I never actually came out and told her), had stored it underneath a pile of blankets in the bedroom closet. Still dripping water, I walked to the bedroom and rummaged at the bottom of the closet, half-expecting to see the hat and partly hoping that it was there — then I would have the satisfaction of burning it. But it was gone and the only thing I found underneath the blankets was dust.

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Finally I propositioned the Colombian woman — Camilla, that was her name, and she agreed to go salsa dancing. I thought of her dark skin every night until our date, imagining how it might taste after a night on the dance floor in a crowded club. When the night came the Club Meringue was packed with shaking bodies and after dinner and drinks we took the floor. Camilla’s movements were liquid, enormous black eyes shining. She turned into me and let her fingers graze my chest, and then smiling she pivoted away with a fluid flick of her hips. Watching her dance aroused me and our steps grew faster as band sweated and increased the speed of the music. Under red and yellow lights I pulled her into a turn and pressed up against her ass as she went by. “Fuck you, Keet!” she said, smiling widely and squeezing my hand. Now that Jenna was gone I saw Tip more frequently. In fact I saw more of all my old friends. They came back to me, emerging from dark corners to buy me drinks and suggest activities to take my mind off the break-up, films to see, parties to attend. We ran in large groups of six or seven or more, shuttling through the city on the subway or in cabs. My friends had never left — in fact I had been the one who left them, and to a man and woman they were all surprised at how much I’d changed when Jenna came into my life. I was truly lucky to be so loved. “That’s all over now,” I told them. “This is the new old Keith. I admit I lost my way for a few years there, but I’m in a good place now.” This declaration was met with nods and backslaps, hugs and kisses on the cheek, and prolonged embraces from the women I wanted to impress the most. So life now was like it was before. Alone, working, working out, eating, and exploiting everything the city had to offer. The ups and downs of the economy didn’t seem to affect me, though I was concerned when it contracted and was pleased when it surged. There were parks and subway rides, coffee shops at Union Square. I saw movies with friends, participated in brunch, made and spent money, took drugs. I kept my apartment dark and recorded television shows when I was out for viewing at a later time. Camilla drifted in and out of my life, and she began seeing one of the lawyers but generally reserved Thursdays and some Fridays for me. On my nights she liked to lie naked on the bed and tease me with her exotic toes. I was so impressed. I also met women at bars and sometimes I took them home. Sometimes they took me to their place. Other nights, alone, I’d return to the apartment, high on something, and masturbate, always remembering to catch a glimpse of the river from the window. The last time I spoke with Jenna I blurted out how happy I was; she began to cry, cursed me, and hung up. But I maintain she never understood me. You see I liked living within these walls, enclosed in this city, that kind of life

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provided me with the only certainty I knew or wanted. I liked it and wished it would last forever. I was as sure of that as anyone could be of anything. Riding in a cab one evening, just as it took the ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, I turned and took in the glittering towers like jeweled teeth … they looked impregnable, immortal, and I was happy that once again the city was mine. But back to the rat. There was one chink in my newfound happiness, one weakness — I had to see what he looked like, before another week of work, before another night. Which meant that the sink had to come out. OK, fine. I was reasonably fit and with a little research I was sure I could figure out just how to do it. I purchased some tools, a large hammer, a crowbar, I didn’t know, I wasn’t handy that way, and I thought they would be sufficient. The Korean at the hardware store laughed at me. He was skeptical because I’d only ever bought light bulbs and cigarette lighters and he didn’t think I was up to the job. But what did he know. I was ready. I was sure of it. In the night I could taste him, see his yellow teeth. The rat was there. He lived. I gagged, gripped the hammer, raised it above my head and swung. Carmine DeLuca September 2009