I AM a rat. Naturally, you are not accustomed to being spoken to by rats--do not despond; I mean you no hackles. Moreover, my newfound usage of yr. words might come off like stone rain (it burns my throat and ears and testicles to even think in these forms), but this tickling inside has no resort but to be bubbled out. The goose within is an encounter we (the Luxor, myself, Betty and Lenny and Sparkle et al.) have had with the most extraordinary daguerrotype to ever shuffle out of yr. warzones; you would call him a monster. To us, he asked that we call him Horton.
Horton B. Underfoot.
Listen: this man, this writhing pent-up powerhouse of pentecostal anima, brimstone and peonies first darted into our territory on a sunny fine day in the cool of early September. You must know first off that nobody comes here. The Luxor--tha's our rez--is a neo-Romanesque gig caught from the early 19th century that's got a lot of chunks cut out of it due to an accidental self-shelling from one of it's more eccentric occupants round about Gatsby time. Course the area would have been paved over (is this not the human mantra we see? Grow and pave, grow and pave, grow and pave and pave some more?--not to be didactic--just noticin', y'know) long ago if back in the fifties they hadn't built a now unused nuclear reactor right in it's backyard. Which is why nobody comes around anymore. Nobody except Horton . . . and the men in white suits.
We're not too sure what they do--they set themselves up years ago in a mini-array of deluxe trailer suites a half mile down the road. Mostly they play music loud and have extravagant parties--leading to the most sumptious barrels of trash you ever saw--we're talking pudding, sirloin, peaches, watermelon, coffee grinds (zoomzoom!), hummus, pancakes, sausages, eggplant, pasta, cheesecake, fish eggs, cupcakes, ice cream, spanokopita, choco-mints, oatmeal and on and on and on. They only occasionally leave in their roaring metal monsters and come back with more food, wine, and prostitutes. Every half year or so they put on their oversized white suits and go into Hankford (the nuclear place), look at some black boxes, and come out again. Sparkle swears he saw a few of them leaning over a table once and snorting lines of baking soda into their nostrils, but you know Spar--no, you don't, but he's not one to empirically lean against, if you know what I gander.
So we were all quite agape when-- [Betty, leaning over my shoulder has told me to get to the story. "His story is what you have to tell them!" she sez. "I am! I am!" I blurt out, "Now leave me alone!" She looks at me with eyes asunder: "Why, yer a closet windbag, ain't ya? Expecting a call from the Ed Sullivan Show after this comes out, are ya?" I courteously inform her that Lenny just discovered an entire hotbed of maggots off near the southwest rotunda and she hurriedly scampers off, stomach roiling; now where were we? . . . ]
We had been discussing Tom & Jerry when the interloper crept up.
It was Sparkle's conjecture that, well let him tell it: "That show was written by a rat, I tell ya!"
"And given to the show's human writers via what . . . a burning hunka cheese?" Lenny asked, grinning.
"Oh come on now," Sparkle argued. "We all know linguistic contact has been made with the human species before,"
"Most notably the Rodent/Exterminator Accord of 1886," puts in Nancy, our scholar and the one I usually favored at bedtime.
"But Tom was a mouse, Sparkle!" I interject.
"Sure!" he shot back. "A distant cousin--but the work against rodent discrimination, usually expressed in terms of ruthless slaughter, has gotta start somewhere!"
"Well, whoever it was that wrote Tom up," Lenny sez. "Eris bless 'em."
"Most probably," Nancy begins, and we can tell by her dry tone she is about to go books: "The heroship of Tom the mouse is merely an extension of the human kinship for the underdog. One step away from the human story--most favored among them of course--is the anthropomorphizing of animals, that is: merely humanizing other species in order to provide metaphoric commentary on their own dull race. And within this: the simple underdog story. Cats and human bullies always win in real life. In stories, and especially comedy, the people like to see the underdogs, in this case the mouse--win. It's that simple."
"A rat wrote it." Sparkle sneers, obstinate.
"Believe what you will," Nancy smiles, all mater. "Whatever gets you thru the nite."
"Don't patronize me!" Sparkles sputters, predict.
"I'm not." Nancy sez, all eyes: "Everybody's got to have their beliefs which let them grab some r.e.m. Why, for instance I once read that Louie Armstrong used to--" And with that a massive thump hits the deck; we all look at each other in wonder: a human clomp! In Luxor! Our home! Our nest!
We race upstairs from the basement, dizzy with stun. I remember what it was like to live in cities, centuries ago--sentries were always posted outside the outcroppings we squatted in. Dual functions they provided: 1) to warn the rest of us of impending encroachments wielding boots, claws, or fangs; and 2) if the approaching alien were, say, a little girl in pigtails, the sentry could then run across it's path featuring a prominent, twittering roach in his mouth and scarethem away. [Some entreprenurial rats took this ancient trick a farthing further by appearing in their toilets! Swimming and showing lotsa teeth!] But we had no sentries here as the last homo sapien visitor to cross our threshold was . . . well the last owner some nearly eighty years ago.
"Only sounds like one at least!" put in Lenny, as we all raced thru our secret cubbyholes within the walls trying to track it down, for it was moving fast.
"Sounds big, too," offered Betty, breathless as the rest of us.
Whatever it was had already made a full circuit of the entire first floor and had found the staircase leading to the second when we got our first glimpse from the back: it wuz dressed entirely in black, carried a long dark chest at least twice the size of it on it's double-prone back, and moved with the speed of a gypsy lobster. It was up and into the top tier of our longstanding home in a whoosh of mysterious air.
Thumpthumpthump rattled the floorboards, long disused to this ill uncomfort; ribbons of plaster dust eschewing the air. We hardly had time to blink at each other (now secretly excited by the drama of it all), before we quickly followed soot, yet carefully managing to stay just out of it's peripherals . . . which wasn't too hard considering the differing ratio of our paces and the pointedness of it's hidden agenda.
We holed up in a master bedroom closet just to be sure and waited for it to stop. Betty felt me up in the dark and I swatted her away, grinning. Suddenly our breathing lept into our ears; the thudding had ceased. "Lucy's room," Sparkle whispered, and we were off at his heels.
We came out facing a peephole just over and across the room from what had been Lucy's bed. [Lucy had been a buoyant, ruddy-faced 8 when the shelling had stolen her life way back when; I'd tell you about her but this isn't a ghost story, for cryin' out cadavers. She had been in a front room unfort. when the explosions occurred . . . before she was pre-humously bomb-sharded.
Physical remnants of her room remain: the viney pink wallpaper, now faded; her tiny twin bed with one mattress on a white wooden frame; a few broken porcelain doll parts strewn about; and 2 cracked framed prints still doggedly hung--one a severely romanticized child with her horse and another of a Degas bather, very tasteful.] "Ugh!" Lenny cries upon seeing the foisted guest, which has now flopped onto the bed with the leaden gravitas of lumber.
We all take turns at the hole. Indeed, it's face looks like a rotten, misshapen potato after the four of us have taken a whole meal off it then kicked it around only to have it end up in a brimming cesspool tub. We knew even humans would run from it.
Which was when Sparkle put forth the possibility that maybe it wasn't human, anyway--after all, what did we know? We certainly hadn't traveled off Luxor much, and all the books left over from it's library are hideously outdated. Last we heard, marijuana was being touted as the 'killer weed', hardy har har har . . .
But then it did something which was inscrutably, unarguably, no-doubts-about-it human: it leaned forward, put it's head between it's knees, and started to sob.
Me and Lenny and Betty and Sparkle didn't have to say anything else to each other that day. We all just looked at one another and knew what the other had already internally tested: this one was all right . . . we'd let him stay.
"MY MOTHER was a Thalidomide baby, my father a rapist from the zoo . . . and I am the killer of evil men." --so begins the story of Horton, as told by Horton . . .
I give you this in order to appease the one currently breathing on my neck--["Imbecile!" Nancy thumps me on the shoulder blade with her hind leg. "You're just now starting that?" --"Go away, Artaud!" I reply mockingly, and: "How were the maggots?" She crawls off in a huff. I don't know what that bitch's problem is; I think perhaps she is angry that hers was the only nay when the proposition to launch Horton's story into the world (therefore unleashing our own cognitions, and whatever reactionary detritus that might entail) wuz democratically assessed . . . and takes it out on me, the one elected to do the scribing. [a pseudo-author, as in Lenny's Tom & Jerry hypothesis, seemed out of question due to the believability factor--who else but a buncha rats would live in the Luxor?] However, she does have a point . . . I will get to Horton's story, as told by himself, over the following narrative bridge I feel is necessaire::]
>>deep breath<<
We never would have established communicatory contact with him in the first place--as we had all initially, unanimously agreed--had our curiousity over his subsequent doings not nearly clawed us to death. The elements of his chest, his extended forays to the outside world and back again, his constant overhangs of darkness and foul moods (more bouts of tears, new accompaniments of haunting arias via black battery-operated boombox--all plucked the heretofore hidden violin chords of the Luxor to the likes of which none of us had ever seen before) . . . we were choking with question marks. We decided a nonverbal gift would best broach our white dove intents . . . and when his furtive hawkeyes first spied the fresh bottle of St. John's Wort (secreted from the men in white suits, natch) sitting primly atop his trunk which sat on the floor next to his bed upon returning from one of his trips --his hand came up with the Glock in a flash and he spun around as silent as paper, searching the room. He then made a most exhaustive survey of the Luxor while we discussed amongst ourselves what to do next--for this had not been expected. "We shoulda left a note, dummies!" Lenny said. He had a point.
We were still scratching our chins when the man returned to his room and muttered under his breath, "Must be the rats,"--whereupon Lenny lept with initiative and knocked a small board against a beam. The man spun with the gun again, but his certain knowledge that nothing as big as a human was there squelched his fire, his already knotty brow furrowing deeper.
"Rats?" he asked the wall.
Lenny, now covered in sweat, tapped again.
The man lowered his arm to his side. "Well," he said. "Well, I'll be damned."
It was the first we had heard his voice come out in anything other than a wretched saltwater cue; it was quite sonorous, actually--Betty told me later her loins even reverberated from it.
Suspicion once again arose to his eyes and his gun went back up. "If you are a rat, show yourself, then . . . I won't shoot."
I was nearest to the peephole and Betty nudged me. I stuck my head thru it, feeling silly. "Well," he said, arms going back down. "And you understand english, too?" Lenny knocked again, now with quite a big goofy grin on his face (Betty told me later).
"So there are more than one of you?"
Knock.
He sat down on the bed, apparently half-bemused and half-befuddled. We waited, my head still poking out and me feeling ridiculous. What if he was an exterminator? What had we done? Had we sacrificed our entire wonderful home and way of life just for the possibility of the story of a misshapen figure with a whole in his heart?
After more than a few tremulous moments he stood up and very cordially said to my head: "Well, why don't you all come down and join me for a nice round of hot cocoa?"
We did.
He had whittled out for himself in there a cozy place: several Tibetan tapestries hung from the walls next to prints by Matisse and Egon and Mondrian; a tiny portable generator of unknown power origin fueled his aforementioned combo cd player and radio, reading and mood lamps, space heater, hotplate and small fridge. He went to the latter and started busying himself with preparations while we the five of us shyly creeped out from behind our hiding place and attempted to hang out as casually as we knew how under the circumstances, forming a loose semi-circle in front of his bed.
He went about his mini-kitchen with such fervor and warmth that it seemed he relished the company. He even started to chatter: "Hey--did you guys know that in one eastern country you can get sent to jail for 80 years mandatory just for having a modem?"
Lenny showed his resourcefulness again by nosing up a small box full of child's letters; we put together the question: "What's a modem?"
Horton came and gently sent down 5 teacups filled with cocoa and a plate heaped with sauteed mushrooms, spicy Indian dahl, marinated tofu, goat cheese, cilantro and avocado. We nibbled and lapped and pretty soon we were all warm with sudden bonhomie, Horton included--now sitting on his bed resting against a pillow propped up against the wall looking completely comfortable in his red satin pajamas.
"Well," he asked. "What would you like to know?"
"Everything." we spelled out, and he heartily laughed.
"Very well," he said, face now going sober, and then he began:
2. I N A B L A S T O F B U L L E T S
I'll tell you this story the only way I know how: in a blast of bullets . . .
TO BE CONTINUED . . .