Three Years with the Rat (11 page)

With my free hand I pry at the edges of the box, desperately, until one wall panel lifts up. The cracks allow light to flood inside and reflect off the mirrors.

Instantly the vise releases my wrist. It slides out of the rubber-lined hole, leaving a ring of blood behind, until my hand and Buddy finally emerge. I switch Buddy to the other hand, hold him in the air, and inspect him. There's a little blood on him but it seems to be mine. And although his whiskers are twitching rapidly, he seems fine otherwise. My right arm, however, is ugly. The metallic thing that cut me was sharp enough to draw blood but coarse enough to scrape the surrounding tissue. The pain is both acute and throbbing. I wrap my arm in the extra scrub shirt I brought with me and the fabric sticks to my skin instantly.

There is still more left to do. The computer screen blinks with some new error, namely that Buddy's telemetry device's
transmissions have fallen out of synch with the computer's receiver. I select
Save data
from the menu and record the file on my flash drive.

It occurs to me that the note is no longer taped to Buddy's back.

I have more than enough time to get ready for the young researcher's return with the security guard. They make a beeline through the rat colony and into the procedure room, not noticing that I'm slumped behind the stacks of cages in the dark colony. The procedure room door swings closed behind them and I rush out, shoulder first, and pin the door shut with my body weight. Then I slide the wooden wedge in place with my foot, under the crack of the door, and kick it as hard as I can, two, three times. I don't wait to see if it works but instead grab Buddy from the shelf and dash out of the lab. The researcher and the guard thump against the door as I leave, jamming the wedge even farther and locking themselves in place.

I weave down the hall as fast as I can without jogging. In the men's changing room I kick off the hospital scrubs. My makeshift bandage sops with blood. I leave it all on the floor, change back into my disguise, and Buddy happily scuttles back into the pouch of the hoodie. My shoes take a few seconds longer to slip on than I'd like, due to my trembling hands. Blood from my right arm drips and smears everywhere, but thankfully it's difficult to see on the black fabric of my shoes. My disguise is intact.

It takes only a few moments to cross through the security barriers and get to the foyer. No passwords are needed to exit. I walk confidently but without rushing through the lobby. I hear the guard behind me stop talking mid-sentence and stand up, the chair rolling out from under him.

“Excuse me,” he says, and his voice cracks a little. He's just a university security guard and has likely never dealt with something like this before.

I walk faster, push through the last two doors and feel the autumn wind nip at my face as I enter the outside world. The security guard shouts at me again, this time more forcefully. I break into a sprint.

No one notices me running past the shoppers and panhandlers and university students. The sweat that covers my body takes little time to chill and soon I'm cold and clammy. My right arm screams as it moves, raw skin brushing against the rough fabric. Buddy and the electric razor bounce against my belly with each step. But all of this only faintly registers. Instead I'm focused on dodging pedestrians, jaywalking, avoiding the bullet-shaped streetcars, and returning to the brown stone building in front of which I parked my car.

I stop running, fold myself in half from all the wretched bodily feedback, and groan with sick apprehension.

My car is gone.

Two possibilities come to mind,
towed or stolen
, but neither is a solution to my current problem. I need to disappear. There doesn't seem to be anyone following me when I look back toward the animal facility, but there's also no reason to wait for them. I straighten myself out and jog west, to the corner of Bathurst.

Shifty's is nearly wall-to-wall windows across the storefront and purposefully layered in graffiti along the exposed bricks that border the windows. Even the glowing sign above and the sandwich board out front carry the same scrawled, hand-painted motif of skull and crossbones. Through the window I can see the appropriately tattooed and dishevelled crowd, my crowd. I enter the restaurant and head straight for the stairs, down to the men's washroom.

I choose one of the dirty stalls and lock the door behind me. From the pouch of the hoodie I take Buddy, the flash drive, and
the electric razor, and place them all on the back of the toilet. Then I peel off my top layer of clothes, hoodie and track pants, and put the bundle on the floor. Now I look like a patron of Shifty's, with my black pants and long-sleeved black T-shirt revealed. I should feel relieved without the top layer of clothes but in actuality a thick, viscous grime of perspiration has replaced it. There are pangs where the salt of my sweat seeps into the wounds on my arm, and when I look at it, I can see no pattern. The skin is crudely damaged, as though I was attacked with the sharp end of a rock, and if I don't get stitches my arm will become a network of bubbled scar tissue.

I glance at Buddy, who is sampling the dank basement air, and then at the innumerable messages written on the walls of the bathroom stall. One note, hashed in black permanent marker, catches my eye:

Trouble loves Danger.

It is such a sad reminder. When did I write that?

And suddenly I'm a step removed from myself. I'm Nicole looking at me from a distance. And I see a bloody, sweaty man, no longer a
young man
, in a filthy toilet stall, mangled arm, shaking limbs, winded lungs, hiding from the people he's just robbed. Loveless, friendless, sisterless. My eyes get glassy, my cheeks get tight, and my jaw clenches. It's not fair. My breath whistles through the grimace of my teeth. My nose is running.

This is the thing I have become.

I want to wallow but there's one last step to removing my disguise. Aloud I say, “O.K. Enough.”

I lift the seat of the toilet, vision still watery thanks to my brimming eyes, and grab the razor. The electric blade removes the beard without any trouble, and ruddy tufts of me float down into the toilet bowl. Without a mirror, I have to use my fingers to inspect
my work. I start making sideburns for myself but then, in a moment of impulse, turn the razor upwards and shave the rest of my head. In a few minutes, my skull feels like a misshapen ball of stubble.

I flush my hair and leave the stall, pausing a moment to inspect my image in the mirror. My face is arresting, thinner, like my idea of a prison inmate. They're the same eyes but my shaved head makes them stand out even more. I toss the hoodie and track pants in the garbage, palm the electric razor in one hand and Buddy in the other. Buddy's long tail dangles against my leg and bobs as we make our way up the stairs. The flash drive is in my back pocket.

A slightly smaller figure almost bumps into me at the top of the stairs. At first I mistake her for a short man but there is something just a little feminine about her hips and stance. The moment throws me into confusion: in front of me, her short hair swept to one side, is certainly the tomboy from the show at the Fortress, but she's wearing heavy boots and a dark uniform with a bulky belt, a holstered pistol, and a metallic badge glinting from her breast. The realization finally comes to me.

“Officer 2510,” I say.

She gives me a crooked smile. “Long time no see.”

My hands instinctively move behind my back. “You, uh, used to have long hair.”

She slowly, firmly shoulders me out of the way and starts down the stairs. She says, “And you used to
have
hair. Things change.”

My mind races. She isn't looking for me. She doesn't know.

I cheat my body toward her, hiding Buddy and the razor, but it's ultimately for no good reason. She doesn't even look back at me. “Why do I get the sense I'll be seeing you soon?”

She doesn't wait for an answer, rounding the corner and disappearing into the women's washroom.

Back inside my apartment, I look up all the city towing depots. None of them have any record of my missing car. Buddy doesn't protest when I put him back in his cage, and as a reward for a hard day of work, I give him a slice of cheddar off the brick.

With no computer at home, I create my own
tabula recta
from memory, then alternate my attention between it and John's notebook:
The street where I grew up led to a dead end. MOIJX­+NEW-­T*HHV­XI/NR­RX+NY­UWIFM­WVH-H­IDQBQ­W*ZMX­RWLDI­YG/RR­P
…There must be a relationship between the table and the code, a way to unlock the one with the other. I try shifting all the letters by a fixed amount, so that
T
equals
A
,
U
equals
B
,
V
equals
C
, and so on. I try letter substitution, with
T
as M, the first letter in the code,
H
as
O
,
E
as
I
, and so on. I try nonsensical things, follow hunches about diagonals in the
tabula
, circle letters of the sentence and the code. For an hour or two I get nowhere with it. And then, as I'm on the verge of passing out from exhaustion, the solution reveals itself to me all at once, unravels so completely that at first I doubt it can be so simple and also correct.
MOIJX
becomes
THERE, NEW
becomes
WAS, T
becomes
A
, and
HHVXI
becomes
LARGE.
I decode thousands of words, hours of effort, but eventually I flip a page and the solution no longer works. For now, the rest of the notebook will remain unsolved. I pick up what I've decoded and read, read it again, again.

The street where I grew up led to a dead end. There was a large, flat, reflective diamond signalling all cars to stop, but more importantly, it warned us that even crossing the threshold on foot was forbidden. Beyond the dead-end sign was undeveloped land, an impossibly large expanse of greens, greys, and browns all knotted together into something relatively wild for the suburbs. The plan was always to continue the road once development had filled that area with unremarkable houses like our own, but the street was never extended. No one would remove the sign from the ground.

The dead end did have a hint of a footpath, soft and exposed between the dried leaves and branches. But in all the secret mornings, sprawling afternoons, and held-breath evenings I spent wandering those streets alone or with childhood friends, I never once saw a person using that path where one world bled into the other.

This dead end offered one of many possible ways to enter what was, to the neighbourhood children at least, a vast forest
designed to satisfy our imaginations. It bordered the edge of our subdivision to the east. I cannot count the different games we played in those woods, the allegiances that were made and broken, or the secret places and paths designated throughout the forest. What I
can
count is the number of times we used the dead end to enter or exit the woods, which is precisely zero. We found other ways to the woods, over our fences, through our backyards. The woods may have been bliss for our suburban souls, but the dead-end sign was a border forbidden and completely unrelated to the forest.

Developers finally sank their teeth into our woods, late into my high school years. By then the forest was a place to nervously try our parents' liquor and talk about girls. Construction snuck up and took the trees in what seemed like a single night, and soon there were only dirt piles and machinery that kids would climb on when the contractors had left for the day. Remarkably, the dead end remained and so did its sense of foreboding. Children, teenagers, and construction workers alike avoided crossing that boundary between the undeveloped land and our neighbourhood. It was a brilliantly, collectively, unconsciously unbreakable rule that we didn't even know we knew.

We found a different park for drinking and hanging out, over by the rich neighbourhood, and I would have happily continued to be ignorant of the dead end's hidden rule if we hadn't been busted drinking rye one night. We liked to imagine ourselves as no-good teenagers who were lowering the real estate prices and soiling the lawns we were hired to cut during the summer holidays; in reality, we were the dregs of our peer group, an awkward cadre of comic-book aficionados, “nice boys.” Our underage drinking was a way of inflating our self-defined cool, and thus we enjoyed the threat of authority even
when we knew none was present. So that moonless evening, when a cop car cornered and pulled close to the park, probably completely at random, we were prepared to bolt.

I swung ninety degrees, legs stiff like a corpse's, and leapt off the slide I'd been sitting atop. My friends dashed in all directions and I pointed myself west, toward home. My comfortable alcoholic haze was now a frustrating fog I had to cut through if I didn't want to get caught. I imagined my father, with his Christian Korean conservative values, would have another heart attack if his only son were brought home in a cop car.

I ran. My legs took care of themselves and my arms flailed for walls and fences. I could swear I heard someone right behind me, their breath hot on the fine hairs of my neck. I hopped four fences and shimmied between a few houses before I made it to the construction zone that used to be our woods.

Everything was suddenly clear and vivid. My shoes, wet from the summer night's grass, were collecting the dust from the construction site. I could smell stale water and damp air. There was perspiration in the webs between my fingers. The saliva in my mouth was acrid from the rye. I skipped and skidded to a halt, just for a moment looking around, long enough to know that I was exposed in an open field and leaving tracks in the loose dirt under my feet. And again I knew someone was just behind me, their cold, dry fingers reaching out to grasp me and never let go. I dashed for home.

And with that looming threat behind me, some monster more menacing than adulthood or authority, I aimed myself at the dead end and crossed the threshold. The effect was transitory, just barely perceptible, but in that instant I could swear I saw light ripple and bend around me, a distortion in the world like looking into a fishbowl or a funhouse mirror.

My shoes transitioned from slippery dirt, almost mud, to the harsh friction of asphalt. I pulled around the first house on the left, our house, and tried to breathe as quietly as possible in the hopes that my pursuer would run past me.

Nighttime makes the suburbs strange. The high street lights have an orangey, vibrating tint to them that makes everything well lit and still somehow very dark. Standing in the small space between our home and our neighbours', I could see my reflection in the big bay window of the house across the street. The street was wide enough for the reflection to be distant but near enough to get a sense of what was mirrored in the glass. There I was, my hands on the bricks of my house, but somehow embedded in that window. I looked thin in that reflection, ghostly, dark holes where my eyes should be. I crouched down, and of course so did my image.

No one ran by the house. No one was chasing me.

I took the opportunity to catch my breath, stare at my filthy shoes, and think about how I would casually walk into my parents' house and pretend I was perfectly sober and not rattled from crossing that threshold. Why did it feel like I had done something wrong? Finally, when I was calm enough, I stood up and prepared myself to enter the house.

And that's when I caught sight of my reflection again in the window of the house across the street. There I was, my mirror image, one hand against the bricks and the other on the back of my neck. There was my house and my neighbours', in opposite arrangement. But in the reflection, between them, was something else. A mass of silhouetted people were in the image, standing, facing me, facing my back. Where there should have been a fence between our houses, there was nothing but the outline of people looking at me. A whole world that wasn't my own was in that window.

I forced myself to turn, slowly. Nothing was behind me but a dark night and our fence. I turned back to the reflection across the street and it was still full of countless people, not so far off in the distance, but clearly restless and shuffling around. Their outline gave nothing away of their faces or bodies. I knew they weren't (but I hoped they were) another trick of the light, a distortion that would shortly vanish. Still, I could
feel
them right behind me, breathing on my neck and staring at my features. All the hairs on me were on end.

Squinting at the reflection didn't help, so I walked toward the house across the street, intent on getting a closer look. My feet felt gummy and my legs strained with lifting them. I walked carefully and slowly, never taking my eyes off the image in the window. There they were, who knows how many people, milling about in the glass and intent on watching my every move. I realized it wasn't accurate to call them simply a
reflection.

Finally, I was right at the window, my hands on the glass. I pushed on the pane with my fingertips and it held. Getting closer hadn't changed the situation; the group of shadowy figures remained back by my mirror house. I could see them no better here, and there seemed no way to get nearer to them. They were beyond close inspection, and I suspected they were happy to stay there.

Well, most were. One silhouette broke from their ranks and stepped onto the reflection of the street. I watched this in the glass and I didn't dare breathe. The figure was a woman, or a girl. I got an impression of her delicate figure and the careful way in which she walked. Then three things happened quickly.

She walked under the reflected street light, and I could see her eyes looking into me.

I looked up to my own reflection, and though the face was mine, I didn't recognize the person.

The curtains on the window swung open and my neighbour inside let out a scream when she saw me.

I'm not sure which of the three things caused me to fall over the neighbours' shrubs and onto my back.

While my neighbours were sure it was me creeping around their house (I was the only non-white kid on the block, after all), they could never convince the police or my parents of any wrongdoing on my part. In a sense, my spotless record with both authorities paid off. Of course, the neighbours never forgave me and were happy to see me leave for Waterloo. By the time university ended and I'd settled in the big city, my parents had sold our suburban house next to the dead end. And despite the occasional sensation of being watched whenever I was near my reflection, I thought my experiences with the unknown, the inexplicable, were past.

Years later I met Grace, and though she didn't recognize me, I knew I had seen her reflection once before.