The Entire Predicament (19 page)

I don’t think there’s a single political thing that my wife and I disagree about. The difference is that my wife, at least then, liked to know the specifics. Every new instance of brutality astonished her; every unveiling of corruption took her breath. I knew her to pace through the night.

Far away, in the kitchen, I thought about how Angela had come from me, but only in this totally counterintuitive way, via my wife. My wife, who looked at images of people and saw reflections of herself.

Come closer, I kept trying to say. Come over here so I can see you.

I could feel myself negotiating whether or not to feel this other person’s unhappiness. So what if you feel it. It’s still there, but now it’s spreading.

We are all unhappy enough.

Then I looked at Angela and it felt obvious: here she is, as if I am made of her. Here she is, obviously, and miraculous.

Took a week, but we caught one. I put Angela and the dog into the car and we drove with the plastic box to the edge of town. My wife stayed home. She said she’d prefer not to come as she was fine with the mice, being, naturally, a generous and compassionate person.

“You mean unsanitary,” I said.

“I mean fuck off,” she said and went back to stuffing herself with news.

I unloaded everyone. We were all really excited: Angela was moving up and down at her knees and saying, “Huh, huh, huh,” wearing a bunchy pink sweater, and when I lifted the lid, the mouse sprung into the air with all its limbs loose and flailing, its fingers spread like a cat pouncing on life itself.The dog lunged on his leash and the mouse bounce-bounce-bounced into the black and gold field. Clouds puffed around the super-blue sky. I laughed. I looked at Angela, thinking we were
sharing this moment of freedom, but she peered at the ground as if this one piece of ash was exciting in a way that the others were not. It doesn’t matter, I thought. She feels it in the air.

But in the evening I did the bills at the dining table and one ran across my foot. I could see it through the glass top, looking exactly like the one I’d released. I realized I’d sort of imagined only one, maybe two. Mice are so identical, appearing on one and then another side of the room as if by magic, moving through walls. All that damage. Now they could be filling the walls and if I slit one with a machete they’d spill out like organs, or like corn from a sack. This could make the species more impressive, or less.

My wife had been taking a long bath with the paper. She came out in my robe and stood behind me. She put a wet candle from her bath on the table near the bills. I could feel her presence changing the air.

“Are you trying to be romantic?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said.“Maybe. Sort of. I’m going to bed.” I shifted my bulk so I could look at her, trying to gauge her tone. I could see the atrocities she’d consumed shining behind her eyes, as if she’d been hollow before. She had not been hollow. I remembered.

But even in the times I remembered, she might have been sad.

Next when I checked the traps and a lid had closed, it was raining out and I was on my way to work. I shook the trap to be sure there was something in there but I wasn’t sure. I put the trap on the counter and it didn’t move. Then suddenly it moved, tilting and rattling. I put the trap in my coat pocket and kissed Angela where she sat in her mother’s arms. At our
feet, the dog swept his tail across the floor. I said, “Honey, I don’t have time to take him out if I’m going to stop at the field and release this mouse.”

“Okay,” said my wife, and I could tell it actually was okay, although it could just as well have not been okay, so I left. The moment warmed me a little. Good dog. I felt a little rise of hopefulness. But then it was cold out, and the rain hurt. The field looked like a Beckett play. I felt like a giant. I mean I could really feel my enormity, shoulders holding the coat wide, how imposing my hat looked on my head, how moodily my eyes squinted and scanned. My nostrils felt cavernous, pulling in the air and giving it the shape of my body. Densely black crows pecked in the field and lay against the gray sky like holes. I took the trap from my pocket and opened it, but nothing leaped out. I tipped the box and a tiny mouse fell from it and landed in the cinders, very young, with just enough soft brown hair that it was clumped and wet from sweat or urine, shivering, pink limbs and tiny blind face, curled like my thumb. I don’t know, what was I going to do? I looked at my boot, the boot of a man who knows how to weld, which I did for fun once a long time ago with an artist friend. I rushed to the car and pulled out of there like a coward.

What happened with Mike’s arrow is one day he shot his brother in the back. The boys were six. Their parents didn’t believe in toys. Nature was their toys.

I read a book where all that happens is a woman kills a cockroach, a translated book, from some place where “cockroach” might have a nicer name.You go through space and history in
the woman’s mind while she considers killing it. She’s a maid. I kept reading, but I didn’t like it. I say this because mice had taken over, implying everything, including the feeling of being in one room with my wife in another room and I’m not sure if she hates me, or just everything but I’m nearby. I felt haunted by her and she wasn’t even dead, just across the wall from me. I felt this a lot, and especially in the kitchen, especially if Angela was already in bed so it was just me and my wife awake in the house, usually me in the kitchen producing the assertive clinks and patters of home, calling to her with the dishes and the turning of water on and off, the dull percussion of drawers, all this SOS.

I felt something else, too, a feeling like I was evolving. But evolution’s such a funny thing, as if it has a direction. It really only has the direction you’re looking in.

In the bright kitchen, when I closed my eyes, I saw the box traps encircling me from the darkness inside the gleaming cabinets. In the light I imagined the dark, and within the dark, dark holes where mice might go. With my eyes closed, I imagined my wife in her den. What made me go in? I knew the dog lay at her feet and I felt so alone once my daughter was asleep.

“Honey,” I said. She was sucking on a strawberry licorice whip in the shadows. Most of the computer was filled with text, but the corner of the screen held a photo that I did not want to actively take in. I stood behind her, above the blur of her hairline, the soft curling hairs that didn’t make it into her ponytail. I said, “I wish you’d stop eating that stuff.”

“
Reading
, babe. We call it ‘citizenship.’”

“Honey,” I said. I put my hand on her shoulder, which
twitched. I tried to leave it there for her to relax into, but the shoulder didn’t relax. Under my hand her muscle was a separate animal in her body and something rose in my gut as I stared at it. My hand on her shoulder, her shoulder refusing my hand. In my mind I pushed back on what rose.

“I’m a citizen,” I said. I said, “We call it ‘the working man.’” I could see the side of her face shift but I couldn’t tell how.

“The
Man
, maybe,” she said. Still, I could not read her tone. I reached with all my capacity and I just couldn’t tell if she hated me or if she believed we were amused at the same thing. I wanted us to laugh at me together. I wanted, perhaps, also, to laugh at politics.

I mean war.

And then I didn’t want to be the sort of person my wife laughed at.

I had to muster something in order to move forward in the conversation.

It was so hard to push the moment forward. I am so huge, and it was so hard to make anything move.

“It’s just that it’s hurting you,” I said.

“Not like it’s hurting
them
.”

I could feel her mind swoop behind her and see through me. She exhaled sharply and then clicked her mouse (her mouse! I almost retched from humiliation at this connection) and then boom! the image filled the screen: a bombed open-air market, bodies, babies, blood, rust, burst animals and fruit, a soldier with his rifle slung over his shoulder, holding an arm in one hand and a chunk of bloody hair in the other, probably from a person I could see part of, caught under the rubble, who the soldier might have harmed, or might have been trying
to rescue. The soldier looked blank, paralyzed, lost in this gory plenty. I saw all this in an assault, as if she’d bludgeoned me in my sleep, and I had to pull back with my mind, assert the flat haze of the photo’s history, its multiple reproductions, and register the texture of its transference from medium to medium, reiterate how far it had traveled and how that movement had coated it in layers to help separate me from it, life and death to camera to newspaper to internet, all that travel, resting now under the skin of her laptop.

I tilted her chair back into me so I could look down on her face.

There was her face, which I know.

I let myself relax into this perspective. I let myself enjoy it in a way that tickled the edge of cruelty.

She let her head drop back into my stomach. She took the licorice from her mouth and laid it on her desk next to her pencil. She let me look at her.

I know what I believe. I knew what needed to happen. Get a cat, Mike said next day at work, as if that’s a mature thing to do is get another living being to do your dirty work. Anyway, Angela’ s allergic. I went back to the Saw This. I looked at the guys and the lesbians loading lumber onto a truck in the rain. I went in through hardware and to the garden center. I bought those old-fashioned smacky spring traps. I bought like ten.

At home was a note. My wife had taken Angela and the dog on errands. First I cleaned the kitchen, keeping an eye over the breakfast bar and through the dining room window for them to come home. My cleaning was exhaustive and exhausting,
but there I stood, heavy in the sparkling white room, and still they hadn’t come.Then I sat on the linoleum and set the traps. I put three of them under the sink, where I thought mice were getting in near the pipes. I put peanut butter on some, cheese rind on some, and pushed them into place with chopsticks. Then I waited. I stretched out on the clean floor on my back. It felt nice. It felt cool. I could see some of my nose, past that some of my belly, and past that, if I lifted my head, my furry toes. I let my head fall to the side and looked down the slope of my arm to my fist. I was a clod of dirt.Where the fuck were they? I thought. Evolve like what?

I woke when the door banged open, and as if I weren’t there I heard the panting dog trotting to his bowl, the rhythmic clanging of his tags against it, the huge noise of water, toenails, wet breath moving his mouth flaps. Angela made her babbling noises and my wife—I could hear her putting stuff on the dining table and pulling out a chair—made happy little noises back at Angela. If you don’t talk to her in actual words she’ll never talk back! I wanted to say but then I felt overwhelmed with the happiness I heard in their voices. I moved my eyes around and everything I could see was white or shiny. From this perspective, on the floor behind the countertop, their voices and the whiteness were singular, synthetic, and filled everything. I supposed, perhaps blithely, that I felt like the mouse and mice I’d been imagining.