Three Years with the Rat
Read Three Years with the Rat Online
Authors: Jay Hosking
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of Penguin Canada Books Inc., a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
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First published 2016
Copyright © Jay Hosking, 2016
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Jacket design: CS Richardson
Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Hosking, Jay, author
Three years with the rat / Jay Hosking.
ISBN
â9780670069378 (bound)
Ebook
ISBN
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NOW ONE COULD SAY
,
at the risk of some superficiality, that there exist principally two types of scientists. The ones, and they are rare, wish to
understand
the world, to know nature; the others, much more frequent, wish to
explain
it. The first are searching for truth, often with the knowledge that they will not attain it; the second strive for plausibility, for the achievement of an intellectually consistent, and hence successful, view of the world. To the first nature reveals itself in lyrical intensity; to the others in logical clarity, and
they
are the masters of the worldâ¦.It is almost an intrinsic part of our concept of science that we never know enough. At all times one could almost say that we can explain it all, but understand only very little.â¦That the end sanctifies the means has for more than a hundred years been the credo of the sciences; in actual fact, it is the means that have diabolized the end.
âErwin Chargaff, “A Grammar of Biology,”
Voices in the Labyrinth
THE PHONE RATTLES
its way off the little square table and stings the hardwood floor. I shrug an arm from the sheets and bring the phone toward my face. The little panel across the back of it flashes between the time, just before noon, and a number with no associated name. I consider turning it off. Instead I roll onto one side, flip open the phone with my thumb, and graze my ear with the receiver.
My pillow smells like the grease from my hair.
“Hello?” My voice struggles.
“Eh, where is John and Grace?” It's a man's voice, accented, and there is something both distant and familiar about it. I can hear traffic in the background.
“I don't know where they are,” I say. I clear my throat. “Who is this?”
The blinds on the window cut the sunlight into shards, bright fragments scattered across the dirty clothes covering my floor. The light causes a stab of pain along the back of my head. I squeeze my eyes closed.
The man's accent is probably European. “He gave me this number.”
“What?” Suddenly my body is lurching awake. “John gave you my number? When? Who the hell is this?”
“The cheque bounced,” he says. “I call them all week and nothing.”
John and Grace's landlord. I don't say anything and he continues.
“I bang on their door and nothing. Another day and still nothing. I don't like nothing. I think maybe there's a problem and look inside. There's a note from John and it doesn't say âHere's the rent' or âI'm sorry.' It says call you and remove their things. So now I call you.”
I writhe under the sheets, my guts turning over and over. How long would it have taken for John's bank account to run out of money, for his post-dated cheques to bounce? How long has he been gone? I count backward until I reach last December. Eight months, more or less. A year and eight months for Grace.
I clench my stomach and pull up my knees. The sheets scrape my skin. My jaw aches as if I've been grinding my teeth in my sleep.
“Hello?” he shouts.
“I'm here.”
“What's wrong with you?”
“Hung over.” It's an excuse but also strictly true.
His voice gets deep and sharp. “Eh, I don't give a fuck if you're dying. Get over here and clean out the apartment.”
I can taste bile but I don't say anything, only hang up.
I stall. Kick the clothes into one large mound in the corner of the room. Pull the blinds and crack open my tiny windows. Stand in the shower until the water runs cold. Select the least dirty clothes and put them on slowly, slowly. Sit on the edge of the bed, breathe, try not to be sick. My stalls run out and I leave. I have to duck a little to get through the door of my basement apartment.
Outside it is almost a proper early August day in Toronto. These last few months have been unchaÂracteÂristiÂcally cold and grey, but today the sun is out and the breeze carries warm air. The neighbours' kids look like apes as they shake the hell out of my landlord's persimmon tree. They stop and stare when they see me shuffle up the concrete steps to ground level. I grin and stare back, another dumb ape.
My car sits on the street in front of the house. It is unwashed, matte from years of abuse, and rusted around the wheel wells. A flood of hot air hits me when I open the driver's side door, and I'm glad to sink into its murky heat and shut the door behind me. I sit for a few minutes, thinking, then throw all the passenger-seat garbage into the back. The engine turns over disappointingly quickly, as if the car is urging me forward.
At least there is no good way to drive from my house to the apartment. My street is a one-way and forces me into traffic. In this city, drivers are eager to complain about public transit but always polite enough to yield. I turn left onto Dundas Street, eastbound through the Portuguese and Vietnamese neighbourhood, and left again onto Bathurst, northbound past the neuropsychiatric ward of the hospital.
On the other side of the passenger window, people walk around in shorts and skirts, much of their skin bare and tanned. I am overdressed, jeans and a hoodie, and there is no air conditioner in my car, but still I am not hot.
Thoughts of John and Grace keep crashing in, unwanted. I turn on the stereo and Grace's mix CD starts playing. I turn it off again.
My car grinds its way past College Street and Shifty's, and at the gaudy, bulbed storefront of Honest Ed's I turn right. Traffic is just as slow on Bloor as I pass the dingy entrance to the Fortress. Just past the club are the two sushi restaurants and above them, one window still covered with cardboard, is John and Grace's apartment. My destination.
I find parking on the next side street, but on the way back, I stop at Features and order coffee and mashed potatoes. The potatoes come in the shape of a volcano, gravy pooled in the crater. I sit at a bench along the front window and feel my hangover ease. A stream of people moves along Bloor Street, couples smile and touch, friends carry bags of books or records and shout their opinions at one another. Everyone is so goddamned vital and happy in this neighbourhood. I finish my coffee and eat away one side of the potatoes, gravy spilling out onto the plate.
Only then, when I can't possibly delay any longer, I make my way to the apartment.
“You get in touch with them?” the landlord asks.
He is paunchy, stained, and graceless. He meets me at the apartment door, between the two sushi restaurants. He does not recognize me, likely on account of my beard.
“I don't know where they are,” I say. “Haven't seen them in a long time.”
“Why he asked for you in the note, then?” The landlord's finger extends, pokes toward me. He wants to press it against my chest but he is shorter than me and he isn't angry enough yet.
“I don't know,” I say.
“I have an idea. I think they don't want to pay rent. I think maybe they found another place.”
“Maybe,” I say.
He smiles, unfriendly. “And I think they send you to clean up. Because they know me. They know I don't take the bullshit.”
I say, “Look. I'm tired. I'd like to get into the apartment. I'd like to help you.”
His mouth hangs a little and his finger curls in. He pulls a ring with two keys from his shirt pocket and hands it to me.
“End of today,” he grunts. “That's it. I'm gonna paint after that.”
“Sure. Sure.”
He scuttles up the stairs and I follow him. The only light in the stairwell comes from a window above the front entrance. At the top of the narrow steps is the door. I unlock the door, enter, and lock it behind me, leaving the landlord in the hallway. And for the first time in eight months, I am inside the apartment.
The drapes are closed and only a little pale light filters in around their edges. I can see down the front hallway into part of the kitchen and living room. A blanket is neatly folded over the edge of the couch. Everything is tidy and unused, but it smells stale and musty and dead.
I take a few more steps. Grace's Bachelor of Science degree, framed on the wall. The standing coat rack, still buried under Grace's jackets and shawls and scarves. The homemade shelf lined with their indecipherable textbooks. The only photograph John kept, its kitschy frame taken off the wall and now resting on the coffee table. And a flashlight sitting next to the photo.
It quickly becomes clear that the apartment hasn't been occupied in months. The refrigerator is a dank shock of rotten, twisted shapes and jars greening with mould. The garbage can is still full of John's bloodied bandages. Though the apartment has been tidied one last time, the front closet remains jammed with newspapers. Bedding for the rats.
It takes me a couple of minutes before I realize what's wrong with the space. My attention is narrowed, grasping for strangeness
in the tiny details, and the obviousness of it only comes to me when I sit on the arm of the couch for a moment. I breathe in sharply.
The door to the second bedroom is open by a few inches.
I stand and walk to the door, press my fingertips against the wood. The oversized key is in the deadbolt. John installed the lock and I strongly doubt he would have provided the landlord with a key. Why am I still holding my breath, trying not to make a sound? I push my arm out and the door swings open, bumping into something soft before the knob hits the wall. The toes of my shoes are on the threshold of the doorway. There is a faint division in the carpet, with the pile in the living room lighter than the bedroom. I step inside.
The room is very dark and the light switch next to the door doesn't do anything, so I flip open my cell phone for light. My eyes can't understand the shapes inside. Some large piece of furniture dominates the centre of the room, all right angles and hardwood. I make my way around it to the covered window, peel the duct tape from the wall, and pull away the cardboard. Daylight floods in and for a moment I cannot see.
In the centre of the room is a wooden box that is large enough to house a person, perhaps five feet in every direction. I circle it. The box is made from six identical, sanded pieces that seem to fit together without nails or hinges. The only noticeable feature is a handle at the bottom of the panel that faces me. Otherwise it is a perfect, symmetrical cube without any knots or imperfections in the wood. I have seen the materials of this box but never imagined what it might be when put together. It is a marvel.
The rest of the room is no more comprehensible. A smaller version of the box, another perfectly sanded cube of wood, sits atop a TV-dinner table in one corner of the room. Instead of a handle, one of its sides has a hole lined with black rubber, and an additional slat leans against the table. Piled on the floor are little cloth
pouches, their openings drawn tight with strings. They look like bags of marbles. Between the door and the wall is a large burlap sack with something dark spilled on the carpet around it, and next to it are some discarded tools.
And last, I see the small table near the door. On it is a hardbound, sky-blue notebook, and resting on the book is a handwritten note. It is John's writing.
I'm sorry to put this on you. It was my fault, all of it, and it was supposed to be mine to deal with. Don't stay in there too long. Take the photo, the light, and one of those pouches with you. If you don't see anything right away, it can always be taken apart and put together somewhere else. This is the only way back for us. Thank you.
Some vague story begins to thread its way through the last two years of my life.
I put down the note and look at the large wooden box next to me. I reach down for its handle, first pulling outward without luck, then upward. The side of the box slides up a little and creates a crack of darkness at the bottom. I look down into that space, see movement, and jump back. A moment later I realize that it's reflected light. The floor inside the box is a mirror. I tug on the handle again and the slat slides up by a few feet. The interior of the box is empty but completely covered in mirror, without frames or borders, the edges of the glass connecting seamlessly with one another. The entire inside of the box is reflective surface.
I leave the second bedroom, pace the living room, open and close the fridge, sit down, stand up. I look into the master bedroom, then the washroom, but my thoughts are only of the box and John's written request. I curse at myself and wring my hands. On the coffee table is the framed photo, John and Grace on the
day they moved into the apartment. They are smiling without reserve and I can see myself among the friends in the background of the picture. I grab the photo and flashlight and walk back into the second bedroom.
I work swiftly. The picture frame comes apart without difficulty and I pocket the photograph in my hoodie. I pick up one of the small pouches and it is full of some malleable material. A quick inspection of the large sack on the floor reveals that it's full of soft dirt. The pouch goes in my other pocket. I glance into the box, and after brief consideration I go back to the pile of tools. There I find the hammer, silver and shiny, and feel calm with its weight in my hand. I take one last breath, a pause to consider whether I am doing the right thing.
