Three Years with the Rat (21 page)

She wandered through the apartment and inspected all her belongings as if she'd never seen them before. She left an overpowering trail of smell everywhere she went. “All of this seems so strange, now. Pointless.”

“Let's get you cleaned up,” I told her.

“What are you talking about?” She looked back at me, and her face became a cruel grin. “You don't get it. I'm not staying. I just thought I owed you a goodbye.”

“Come on. Don't talk like that. John will be here soon.”

“John doesn't matter.” She kept moving through the apartment, occasionally running her hand along the wall or stopping to look at her possessions. I followed her closely. In the washroom, she pulled the bottles of pills from the medicine cabinet and took her time reading the labels. She carried them with her into the second bedroom, past the giant mirror.

“Don't bother trying,” she said. She stared out the window but seemed to be following some other logic in her head. Then she let out one awful laugh. “It's a pointless thing to say, of course.
Everything's already set in motion here. You're going to try, and you're going to fail, and you're going to suffer horribly for it.”

“You're my sister. Of course I'm going to help you if I can.”

“I'm not talking about right now. You think you're helping? You're so myopic that you can't see the operant chamber you're in, or how everything you do is being quantified and manipulated. You don't even feel that detached interest scrutinizing your every idiot move. How could
you
ever help anything? The only people who could have let me in—well, they made it abundantly clear that they had no interest in doing so.”

“Grace,” I said, “you're not in a good state.”

“There's nothing wrong with me. My head is clear. I've just had my fill of being alone.” She walked to the large mirror and looked carefully. “I'm tired. I was tired of you all a long time ago. I'm tired of things being inescapable, incomprehensible. I'm tired of getting what I want and I'm tired of not getting what I want. At least when I'm dead I won't have to be tired anymore.”

“Don't talk like that.”

She shook her head, glanced at me briefly, then looked back to her reflection. “You know, things would have been really different if you'd come with me instead of listening to Nicole.”

And without warning she slammed her hand into the large wood-framed mirror. It shattered instantly, a ripple of cracks radiating out from her fist. She twisted her arm and I could hear bits of broken glass grind into her skin.

“Jesus Christ!” I yanked her arm away from the mirror. A few shards fell but most stayed in the frame. Then I ran to the washroom, soaked a towel under the faucet, and brought it back to the bedroom.

My error was instantly clear. The room was empty. Behind me, the apartment door was ajar. I rushed back to the window in the second bedroom in time to see Grace running west on Bloor and veering north up a side street. I didn't bother to close or lock the
doors behind me. I sprinted along the path she'd taken until I wasn't sure which way to turn. If there'd been a snowfall I would have been able to follow her tracks.

I never caught up with her.

That night, after John and the police and everything else, Nicole held me close and asked me about what had happened. Grace's last words had burrowed into me and kept repeating in my head:
Things would have been really different if you'd come with me instead of listening to Nicole.

I told Nicole I was tired and would rather talk about it in the morning.

HERE WE GO
.

It's been four months since I last crawled into this box but the sensation is identical, a saturating darkness. Before I even have the flashlight out of my pocket, the temperature drops and my breath no longer reverberates off the inner mirrors. The smell of wood and glue gives way to something musky and damp.

I click on the light and for a moment I'm blinded by my reflection. Foreground, background, everything in between, the illuminated and the obscured, all of it is me. Infinite self-repetition, a line that extends from me to some indistinct haze that fills all space. It should be bright inside the box but instead it's dim. No matter where I turn I see myself. It's surprising how varied I appear. Fear, hesitation, anger. Am I making those faces? My features are contorted in threat, menace.

Buddy scuttles from one shoulder to the other and back again, all the while tapping at me with his forepaw. He curls his tail around my neck to steady himself. I don't doubt his resolve even if I doubt my own.

The hairs on my arms rise. The sound of my heartbeat swells and fills my ears.

There is something approaching and it intends to do harm. It is hunting me, preparing to draw my blood again. I remember how it felt, painless at first and then an intolerable burning. This time it will cut deeper. It will take more of me. It will hollow me out until I am nothing but a husk.

I spin in circles and shine the light. The space inside the box is now enormous. The air is gelatinous and suffocating. My reflections are all sneer and enmity. I am afraid. I am afraid of pain, of dying. I am afraid of the thing that is hunting me.

You'll always find what you bring with you.

I close my eyes, breathe slowly. Think of Buddy on my shoulder.

The hunter reaches me. It snorts its hot, heavy breath onto the back of my neck.

Eyes still closed, I click off the light. Think of Grace when she was eight years old, my earliest memories, what a happy shithead she had been, how brilliantly she shone. I knew I would never excel and I knew I would never burn bright like her and I knew it didn't matter. I was just happy to be on her team.

The hunter circles me. It grunts. It smiles in the dark and I can hear its teeth. It's deciding how to annihilate me.

Think of John's confident handshake and the way he welcomed me into their little social world. His loyalty to my sister was unwavering, despite her best efforts to reject him. He tried to protect us all.

The hunter places a weight against my spine, something heavy and sharp. It wants me scared. It runs the weapon down my back and the edge catches the fabric of my coat. Claws? A knife? Then the weight is gone and it draws back, poised, a pause before it strikes.

Think of Steve and Lee, always just trying to be good to each other, and of Brian, who must have been tormented with feelings for his best friend's girlfriend for so long.

Think of Nicole and how empowered she had been when we met, how empowered she'd become again since we broke up.

Think of how they all tried to be good people and how, sometimes, I helped them with that. Think of them.

And then there is nothing.

More specifically, I sense nothing. There are no sounds, no blades puncturing or cleaving me. I open my eyes to a complete black, but there is nothing hiding in it. It is just darkness. I've avoided its attack for now.

My muscles ache, remind me I'm still crouching. I click on the flashlight and it projects into empty space. My reflection is nowhere to be seen. The emptiness disorients me and so I put a hand down to steady myself.

Grass between my fingers.

In the sky, tiny pinpricks of light appear and disappear as I move my head. At first they are unfamiliar to me. Stars.

I sweep the light to the ground and find grass and earth. There is no sign of the box at all. My eyes are adjusting to the low light and now I understand why the stars are appearing and disappearing: there is a canopy above me that hides most of the sky. It's almost too high for the flashlight to reach but I see the unmistakable outline of branches and leaves.

I squeeze the grass gently in my hands and stand up.

Buddy climbs down the front of my coat and drops to the ground. Without his tapping, I had forgotten he was on my shoulder. He scurries so fast that I lose him immediately with the light. I take a few steps to follow him and tall trunks of trees appear in the beam of the flashlight. Dead branches and leaves make a crisp sound under my feet.

This is a forest. My knowledge of natural things is terrible but I can tell it's nothing like the temperate rainforest I saw near Vancouver. I imagine most of these trees have names like oak or birch. Very little grows along the forest floor and so it's open enough to walk.

Wherever I am, this place has rules I recognize. It is night. There are trees and stars and earth and air. The ground below the trees has a steady incline in one direction and a steady decline in the other. I may be lost but these rules are consistent with my reality. That suggests there is a way out.

“Buddy?” I call. My voice doesn't carry in these woods. I whistle. I make kissing sounds. I have no idea how to summon a rat.

He hasn't gone far. The arc of my flashlight eventually lands on two reflective green beads on the forest floor. It's amazing how a black and white animal can be so camouflaged on a green and brown surface. I bend forward to pick him up but he runs out of my reach. I take a step toward him and he runs ahead again. We repeat this process a few times more before I recognize the pattern.

I am being led.

“Point taken,” I tell him. “Let's go.”

The decline is subtle but in my legs I can feel us gradually moving downhill. I walk slowly and with an arm outstretched to avoid branches and tree trunks. Buddy stays always a few feet in front of me, his short legs busy, his fleshy tail trailing behind him. John once told me that in the wild, rats can run for kilometres a night.

And this is wild. The number of trees is uncountable. There is no sign of human life. This place is unspoilt.

Buddy leads for so long that the scene begins to change. A deep green appears in the sky and soon running water is trickling nearby. There is nothing to precisely measure time but I imagine we've been stumbling through these woods for an hour or so. I'm beginning to grow accustomed to my surroundings, less fearful of them.

And then branches and leaves snap behind us. I freeze and listen. The water is closer now but that is all I can hear. Buddy has wandered almost out of sight. Then I hear it again, something at least as big as a man, but strong, forcefully making its own path through the woods. It's coming from the direction in which we started. It is the sound of something following us. The hunter.

“Let's get the fuck out of here,” I say to Buddy.

Faster than before we make our way through the forest. Now I can hear water on either side of me and it drowns out any noise of our pursuit. The sky is changing from a green to a greyish blue. The air is dewy. Buddy dips under fallen branches, around mounds of earth, between old and dying trunks. Day is almost here and I turn off my flashlight to save batteries.

We race through the woods, down the slope of the hill, until I can see nothing in the distance. The trees seem to be swallowed up by an impenetrable white background. Buddy rushes ahead. I trust him. I follow.

The dense white gets closer and closer, the trees end, and my feet lose their traction. I slide but don't fall. The ground is now stones, slippery and small. The sound of water is everywhere but the white presses in and makes it impossible to see more than an arm's length away.

Fog. A morning fog, billowing off a body of water. A few more cautious steps and waves are lapping at my feet. I crouch and can see water rolling over the stone shore. I dip my fingers in and then taste them. Not salty. Buddy stands next to me with his paws in the water.

Behind us, the hunter is snapping branches with its feet, nearing the edge of the forest, about to break onto the shore.

Buddy looks back toward the trees. He sniffs and his whiskers dance in the air. He doesn't give me a glance or warning, simply bolts back toward the woods like a soldier heading to battle.

I hold my breath. I wait. I want to run but I can't leave him behind. The forest is now silent.

Then for a moment it is blinding white. The sun has risen above the forest and fog. Still I crouch and listen but there's no longer anything except the gentle sloshing of freshwater onto the shore. The fog dissipates until I can see ten, then twenty feet around me. There's still no sign of Buddy. Nor of the hunter.

Near me is a wooden pole plunged vertically into the ground, and tied around, hanging from it, it is a heavy rope. This is the first thing I've seen resembling human activity.

I can see now that this body of water is very large, certainly not a pond or even a small lake. The narrow shoreline goes off straight in both directions to where the fog crawls into the trees and back out across the surface of the water. The sun is to my left, making the lake to the south.

Out on the lake, there is a repetitive, gentle splash against the water. Ripples spread out across the surface and something dark emerges from the fog. I see the front of a small wooden boat, then a paddle criss-crossing from one side to the other, then finally its pilot.

Officer 2510.

“Well, son of a bitch,” she says. She pulls the boat to shore and the bottom of it scratches against the stones. “You made it. Get in.”

“I need to find my rat,” I tell her, almost a whisper. “There's something in the woods.”

“Can't do anything about Buddy, for the moment.” Her hair is longer again, tied back, and her clothes are simple, dark, and fitted. “Got to trust me on this one. Now get in.”

I take one last look toward the fog around the tree trunks and
push the boat back into the water. As it glides off the rocks, I hop in and nearly upset its balance. Officer 2510, or whatever her name is, uses her paddle to keep steady and turns us around. I sit in the front and face her as she propels us into the lake, back to wherever she came from.

“When did you last see me?” she asks.

I've heard this sort of question before. “About a month ago. November, 2008. How long has it been for you?”

“Definitely longer than that. You're getting scrawny. But hard to say how long, exactly.” She dips the paddle into the dark water on one side, then the other. “Tricky question for creatures like me.”

“ ‘Creatures'? Not ‘people'?”

“Not as you know them, no.”

I consider that for a moment. “Where are we?”

Her eyes are grey stones and fixed on our path through the water. The fog is pulling farther back and it's clear the lake is enormous. She says, “ ‘The place where the water meets the trees.' ”

Somewhere deep in me I knew this already. “Toronto. This is the city, only there's no city. Is this the past?”

She says, “Just another present.”

“And how many are there?”

“You can't count that high.”

She paddles quietly for a few minutes. I look back to the shore and think of Buddy facing down the hunter, whatever it may be. I turn forward in the boat and look south. The last of the fog has cleared and the Toronto Islands are a few hundred metres in front of us. They're covered in trees, same as my reality, but there are also small wooden buildings along the islands' shore. There is no smoke or sign of human activity. It looks like a ghost town.

Officer 2510 steers us slightly to the east and asks, “Don't you want to know about us?”

“I didn't come here for you or your friends.”

“No need to be pissy.” She gives me a lopsided grin. “I get it. John and Grace. But don't you remember what I told you?”

“I heard you just fine. This is a bad idea, I should quit,
et cetera.
But here I am.” I point to the simple settlement on the islands. “Now is that where John and Grace are?”