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Authors: William Kotawinkle

Doctor Rat (8 page)

BOOK: Doctor Rat
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The doors swing open.

The light! Am I now to enjoy it? Now that I have truly ascertained that I exist, am I to enjoy my new awareness?

They prod us, they pull us, they drive us down the ramp. The light is mine for an instant—and gone!

We’re in another room. It doesn’t rumble. I smell a jumble of smells. They push us forward, we crash against each other. Those who fall are trampled; we move over their squirming bodies.

Many lights, many shadows. Long narrow hallways. Straw strewn around.

A guard approaches me, grabs my ear, pierces it!

And now a red tag hangs down beside my eye, swaying to and fro as I walk. My ear is hurting, but I have a tag. I am singled out in this way. The proofs of my individuality are mounting. The guards don’t seek to deny me; no, they mark me with a tag. I see it flopping from my ear.

I hear the sound of running water. Are we to get a bath?

Perhaps they will clean us and then present us at long last to the ruler of all rooms. For I feel that there must be some sort of great overseer, who guides me along, who tags me, who wants me to be clean. There is purpose behind all this.

Purpose is the one thing I’ve never had. The mysterious guards all have it. They have it today. It is their power.

None of us has any purpose. We eat, we sleep, we loved the cold female. My whole purpose could be fulfilled just by standing on the little winding path all day, and looking at the grass and the sky. I wouldn’t ask for more.

But I hear the sound of mechanized things. I feel the intricate purpose of the guards. They move us along again. Wooden ramps and lights. The smell of blood. Many of us must have bled in the rumbling room.

We turn a corner. The guard leans over. Yes, I’m real. You fed me and tagged me. You…you tie a chain around my leg. I feel it. I’m me. Is this my lesson? I submit myself to your teaching. I would like to learn the great purpose of all this; I’m frightened, but I exist and that’s the essential thing. I exist and I know it.

Wrenched upside down! One leg in the air! My fat pulls against the chain. I’ve split open somewhere…

Split open inside somewhere. Hanging upside down, swinging. They swing me along, and I squirm. There’s some mistake…don’t you see…you wouldn’t want to do this to me…to the one who knows the little path and the sky…no, you don’t realize that I’m completely awake…completely…

The walls slip past me. I bump them and move, swinging, my leg stretched horribly…horribly…and the others are hanging beside me.

I can see the white stone walls. I can see the guards. My legs run in the air, kicking the air. I want to tell the guards about the little path and the cracks in the rumbling room. They’re my proof…of…me.

The guards have taken hold of the one beside me. They have hold of his head. He squirms but they hold him. The guards have a bright shining thing. They pass it into his neck! He quivers—a gushing of blood, a gushing! I see his nerves, his inner throat, it’s all exposed, it’s bursting with blood, and his head flops crazily, barely attached.

They take hold of me. No, you wouldn’t do that to me! Let me go! No, not to me! If you knew me…if you knew that I am me…if you only knew…

…passing through me. Red path shooting. Room cut in two. This way and that.

 

21

The goddamn rebel wheels have suddenly stopped. The whole lab has been silenced. I can feel a quick command passing through the rebel ranks.

Suddenly their wheels are spinning again, in the opposite direction! What does it mean!

Cyclometers clicking, wheels spinning wildly, drawing my learned gaze into the whirlpool, into their depths. I cling to the Reward Ladder and turn my head away. But the whirling lights attract me; the rebels are shifting intuitive gears, another revolutionary scene…

…but how strange. All I see here are ladies in white uniforms, sitting by some machines. Nothing revolutionary in this. Just ordinary American industry, somewhere in the good old USA.

Rebel cameras are panning… Here comes a young man into the scene, pushing a cart full of pig’s guts. Nothing unusual in that. The ladies in uniform flirt with the young man as he dumps the pig’s guts at one end of the machinery. He makes a little joke, the ladies smile.

This is just an ordinary working day. I don’t get it. The rebels must be losing their intuitive focusing powers. There’s nothing incendiary here. The parts of the pig’s body are being fed into the machinery…

Now the camera zooms in on the other end of the machine. Out pop little sausages, all wrapped in plastic. They sort of squirt out the end of the machine. All in neat little links. Twelve links to a package.

Lady wraps them, tosses them in a bin.

Sausages, hot dogs, beautifully produced. It’s a comical machine, the way it squirts out those frankfurters, twelve to the minute. But what does it have to do with the revolution? The revolutionary directors must have forgotten to edit the footage. Camera panning again, and the door opens once more.

Live pig in the other room, staring around wildly.

Door closes. Back to the sausage machine, twelve to the minute.

CUT

Christ, this rebel cinema is jerky. Where the hell are we now? I seem to be under somebody’s chair. You don’t expect rats to be first-class union cameramen, but this is ridiculous!

Quick dissolve going on here, camera jerking around, I see somebody’s head or something and…focus this fucking thing, will you! Hey, projectionist!

Close-up of an ordinary American family having their dinner. Man cutting up the sausage.

CUT

Back in the meat-packing plant. Rerunning the door-opening sequence. Door opens, there’s the pig, staring around wildly.

Sound track finally coming in, scratchy, not well-recorded. This rebel equipment…

“You…you tie a chain around my leg… I feel it…  I exist and I know it…”

Mouth opening. Sausage on end of fork.

THE END

The exercise wheels slow down, and I dive away from them before they start to turn again.

This revolution needs a good advertising agency to put its shit together. But who am I to suggest?

Slipping through the shadows, I pick my tail up in my mouth and chew on it softly. My god, what’s that horrible rattling and banging going on above me?

Quietly I slip out from the shadows and take a peek:

Oh no! The rebels have started turning the Great Central Exercise Drum. Every rat in the lab is crawling into it and running his tail off. Look at it go! I’ve never seen it spinning so fast. The intuitive lights flashing out of it are fantastically brilliant. The Drum is humming; up rises a whirling disc of light from which hideous laughter emerges!

 

22

I, the hyena, watch the entrance of the imperial bird. He comes, majestic in chains, down the road of our great prison. His head is white and he has the tremendous wings of his kind, and these are certainly impressive, but most impressive of all are his eyes, which burn with an intensity I have never seen before, not in man, nor beast, nor bird. These eyes, brilliant and strange as they fall upon mine, give no personal recognition; they’re sovereign, beyond relationships, the eyes of heaven, and the overwhelming energy in them sends me into a fit of nervous laughter as the keepers wheel him by in his cage.

Nearby, the leopard springs up with a howl, suspending himself for a moment by his claws upon the wire mesh. The eagle turns his head but slightly, hardly acknowledging the greeting. As his eyes come back to my view, I see only one consideration in them—flight.

So intense is the entrance of the Emperor of Heaven that animals far distant in this wide-flung prison send up cries and howls. The lions on their vast open field—a sunken field from which they shall never leap—emit their superb guttural roar. Various birds begin a squawking racket, some of the voices cynical, some sad, most of them wretched.

Indeed, the atmosphere of our prison is always marked with gloom, and the capture and imprisonment of a great king such as the Imperial Eagle drives in upon us as never before the wretchedness of our kingdom, with its bars and walls and insufferable oppressiveness. Now, with such a High One amongst us, our despondency must become still greater—I can feel it passing from cage to cage. We spend our idle hours dreaming, dreaming of those who are far from here in the ancient native lands. And our dream of freedom helps us to bear our confinement. For we are part of them, and they are roving, right this moment, on the far-off plains and in the deep sweet valleys. But with the entrance of this Lord of the Sky, I can feel our dreams fading. That one so wild, whose nature is of the freest and most high, that such a one should be taken and brought here fills us with the terrible reality of our situation, that we are prisoners to the end of our days and no power on earth or in heaven can ever save us.

Thus does the gorilla, deep within his glass house, pound on his chest in frustration and hammer on the glass that walls him in. I hear his stamping and banging, we all hear it—the eagle certainly hears it too, but at the moment he’s being transferred to his permanent cage and, thinking that the door which has opened before him might lead to freedom, he makes a mad dash. But he meets only heavy wire, on four sides.

I am fortunate enough to be just across the road from his cage. Of course, the daily sight of him increases my personal anguish tenfold, but at the same time I am so totally fascinated by his presence that my suffering seems like nothing, especially when compared to his, for the wilder the creature the greater is his anxiety when he comes here. The rodents, for example, have adjusted fairly well to prison life, for they have certain domestic qualities in them. But passing only a few steps upward, to the fox or the raccoon, one finds a growing grief over captivity. And when one hears the burning cry of the wolves, and observes the incessant pacing of the jaguar, day in and day out, one comes to know the true depths of despair. It is boundless misery, and it is madness. Certainly, we are all half-mad here.

They have put a branch of wood on the floor of the eagle’s cage. He stands upon this branch, clutching it with his long gnarled talons. From time to time he opens his wings like a huge black cape, and flaps, going nowhere, his wing tips striking on either side of the cage.

And then he paces, back and forth upon the branch, closed up in his cage, deep in concentration, as if his pacing will somehow free him. But his steps carry him only from one end of the small cage to the other. Really, they’ve given him a space far too small (as if any barred space would be sufficient), but of course they don’t understand his nature.

In summer, which comes to torture us with smells, the visitors naturally are many. The Imperial Eagle is a great attraction, and children bang at his cage. He has no time for them; he paces, back and forth, opening his wings, raising himself aloft for a beat or two and descending again on his dead branch, far above the jeers and ridiculous questions of those who mock him on the lawn. I recall one moment in particular, which seems to me most loathsome: A woman stood in front of the Sovereign’s cage, and from a leather bag she removed a piece of glass, in which she caught the rays of the summer sun, reflecting them directly into the King’s eyes. I howled with indignation, but he simply stared into the glaring light. He, who had flown so high, who had so often climbed straight toward the sun, was not tormented by the flashing glass.

I cannot forget the woman, and yet I understand; she wanted to attract the attention of the splendid bird, wanted something of his powerful spirit to touch her. I too seek that exalted gaze each day, and watch it grow ever more intense. I fear a fever will develop and destroy him, for how could such intensity continue without burning itself to ashes?

He never weakens for a moment. At night I can hear him still moving, back and forth, and in the moonlight I see the shadow of his wings sweeping against the cage. It was on such a moonlit night that I first received his signal, which struck me so hard I thought it was I who had taken a fever. My body grew hot, my ears roared, my fur stood on end. This peculiar phenomenon repeated itself, night after night, when most of the other animals slept.

As I became familiar with it, his signal ceased to alarm me, and now I have begun to perceive its special nature. Over and over through the night I hear inside my head:
I
rise. I always rise.

All of us, in our own way, have bent under the heel of our captors; even the lions have learned pettiness in their sunken field, finding little ways to endear themselves to their attendants. But never does the eagle bend or fawn, never is his vigil less than complete. Blood, bone, and feather are always on the alert, every sinew, every fiber of his being ready at every moment for ascension to the heavens.

With such an example, we have all straightened our backbone a little. We have taken up the Imperial cry; we too would be free upon the heights of jungle mountain and forest cloud. Somehow we will make an inspired dash, tear our cages to bits, and escape.

The air has become ever more electric, singing with the energy of our souls. Our great conspiracy is spreading from cage to cage, and our captors have become aware of it, for they’re having difficulty cleaning our cages and feeding us. Our teeth are always bared, our tails are up, our ears back. And suddenly it’s they who have become nervous and oppressed, while we grow stronger and more fierce.

And always the Chief is pacing, back and forth upon his gray dead branch, which rocks as he moves upon it, sending out a thumping message through the night. I am certain that if he allowed himself to rest for a moment, he would perceive the hopelessness of his position and instantly die of suffocation. As it is, I see his naked fury ever rising, as if he were gathering into himself our newly awakened will, just as we have all been touched by his soul of steel.

Our primal fire is once more burning, and some of the more delicate frames have not survived its heat. The red fox, with a howl that pierced to every heart, dropped dead in the moonlight. The Imperial Eagle’s rocking branch was silent for a moment, and then rocked on, thumping out the cadence for the fox’s fleeing soul.

BOOK: Doctor Rat
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