Three Years with the Rat (24 page)

“I don't think you'll want it once you get it.” I'm thinking of what Officer 2510 said.

She ignores me. We reach the edge of the park and Grace says loudly, “Who's the ultimate?”

Some of the bodies lift their heads from the ground and look around. Finally one puts up her hand and slowly crawls to her feet.

“Well, this is as far as I go with you.” The younger Grace puts
her hand on my shoulder, squeezes it, and quickly pulls it away. She turns to leave.

“Wait.” I step toward her. “You could come with me.”

“Looks like I will.” She smiles but it's not real,
non-Duchenne.
“Now excuse me. I was in the middle of a conversation when you arrived.”

I watch her weave through the rows of bodies in the park and ascend the lip of the grassy bowl. I turn to the oldest Grace, the so-called ultimate. She moves slowly but she doesn't look much older than when she guided me here.

“Let's go, Grace.”

We take a route around the back of the suburban houses because I want to avoid the loop of myself. We see other time points of Grace's life ambling, meandering, thinking, debating. I put an arm around the oldest Grace's waist and she puts her arm around my neck. In this way we reach the dead end from a slightly different angle and cross back to the dark woods, my ears pricked for any sound of the hunter. I point the flashlight ahead of us and hum her the song from the mix CD. This time there are no whispers in the woods but I still feel as though we're being watched.

I feel it before I see it, tiny ripples along my sister's forearm. I shine the flashlight on her arms and see the scars, not those that have lingered from adolescence, healed and flat, but newer ones, white and protruding and ugly from the lack of stitches. My sister never put her arm into a box, never saw the human-sized version, even. She never had a hunter. She was the one who made these precise cuts along her skin, who started doing this again after years. Maybe she never stopped.

Only when we're deep in the forest, far from John's formative moments, does this Grace speak to me.

“I'm feeling better now, thanks,” she says.

“Why did you start hurting yourself again?”

She stiffens, takes her arm from around my neck. “Isn't the cycle interesting? I did an estimate once of how long I was in there. If each cycle is about a half hour, and there are roughly tens of thousands of me, that puts me in there for somewhere over a year. The best year of my life.”

“Grace.”

She's testing her body now, bending at all the joints. “You know, this really feels much better. I should have left sooner.” She laughs. “I could just stay in the entrances for fewer cycles.”

“Fine, don't answer. But we need to go. We need to get in the boat and leave.”

“And go where?” she snaps.

“Back to the city, I think. Or where the city is on our side.”

She's full of life now. She's her old self in some ways. “Why bother? You think there's anyone there who would help you? They don't stoop to our level.”

“I think there's one, yes.” I pull on her sleeve and lead us back onto the path. “She's helped me before. She might have some ideas.”

“Wait.” She yanks her arm out of my grasp.

“We have to go.”

“Wait.” She's stopped walking. “One of them talked to you.”

“Grace, come on.”

“One of them talked to you.”

“Fuck, Grace.”

“What did it say?” She steps toward me in the dark. She beats against my chest with the bottoms of her fists and the beam of the flashlight bounces across the canopy above us. “What did it say, goddamn it?”

I want to tell her nothing. I want to make something up. “She says you're not capable of understanding how this all works.”

She pauses. I shine the flashlight on her face and she looks thirteen years old. “You're lying.”

As long as she's angry with me, she will follow. I pull away from her and continue along the path and she storms behind me. Soon the glow of the fire licks the trees. We reach John's campsite but he isn't there. Neither is the hunter.

She's pulling on my sleeve. “Why are you lying to me?”

“He's probably at the boat,” I whisper. “Come on.”

I lead her down the path to the lake. The air cools as we approach the water.

Grace had gone quiet behind me but now she speaks up. “You told me once that you see me again in Toronto. I appear and disappear a couple more times, you said.”

“I just told you that,” I say. “Well, I just told it to an earlier version of you.”

The wind is against us. It carries an animal smell. We are approaching something.

“Did you stop to consider,” she says, “that if I come back with you now, I wouldn't have appeared and disappeared a couple more times in your past? You wouldn't have seen me again in December, 2006. That means I'm not going to leave this place with you. Whatever happens to me has already happened for you.”

“Keep your voice down.” I roll it over in my head. Her statement is difficult to grasp.

The canopy gives way and we find ourselves standing on the edge of the lake. The water froths on the rocks and my muscles cry out at the thought of paddling through this. I wave the light around.

John stands next to the boat and leans on the paddle like a walking stick.

“What are
you
doing here?” Grace says.

His face betrays his confusion.

“You've seen me here before.” She's thinking out loud. “At other places like the dead end. So I
do
stay behind.”

“You don't have to,” I say.

“Yes, you do,” I say. Only I don't say it.

John looks to his left. I shine the light and see myself. I am standing next to Grace but I am also standing next to John. The hands are not blistered and raw but the face is my own. In my double's right hand I hold a heavy silver hammer, and in the left I have Buddy by the scruff.

I am my own hunter.

“Is this somehow another loop?” I say.

“Try again, shithead.” My own face grins back at me. It reminds me of my reflection in the box, my fears and anger and frustration radiating from the image in the mirrors, all the things I chose not to bring with me.

Officer 2510 said,
You forced your way through, caused a fracture, sloughed off some nasty shit.

The hunter says, “You're asking yourself, ‘Why didn't John warn me?' ”

“You're another possible me. What I could have been.”

“I'm me. You're just an afterthought.”

Grace moves toward John. I move toward myself. My mind is racing.

“Say the word,” John says. He has the paddle in both hands, swings it from side to side.

Think. Think.

I speak, this me. “John, why can't you cross back to the other side, to our side?”

John says, “What? I stayed because I've been trying to win Grace back.”

My sister laughs bitterly.

That other part of me says, “He's lying.”

John says, “I have it under control.”

That other part of me says, “Liar. How many times has he said that before?”

I am circling myself now. I watch the hammer in my hunter's hand.

I say, “Please. Buddy has nothing to do with this.”

Both parts of me look at the rat in his hand, my hand. Buddy is silent and submissive in the grasp. He probably never feared a thing. I watch that other part of me throw Buddy hard at the boat. The poor rat bounces off the hull, goes limp.

“Stop,” I say to me.

“Say the word,” John says. He's on the periphery. He has the paddle high in the air.

“When I'm done with me,” that part of me says, “I'll move on to you two, for everything you did to me.”

Think, you fucking idiot.

The wind picks up. We leave prints in the sand and they are swallowed by the dark and by the waves that lick at our feet.

“When I'm done with you two, I'll move on to Nicole.”

“So I intend to destroy my life and everyone in it.” A conversation with myself.

“I intend to do whatever I want.”

Think. Something nags at me. I say, “John, what happened to your hunter?”

John takes a step back.

“What happened, John?”

His mouth hangs open but his arms remain taut, ready as ever for violence. And there it is. I know why John's been stuck here. I know what he did to his other self, how his violence has trapped him here.

And all at once I know everything. I make my choice.

“Whatever happens,” I say to John and Grace, “don't interfere. This is the only way back for you.”

“I'm going to end this,” that other part of me says.

I click off the flashlight. I step toward myself and hold my hands out in a gesture of peace. In the dark I can see that part of me winding up. I will not fight back.

That other me swings the hammer. I feel it make perfect contact with my cheekbone. My legs give way and then the rocky shore is pressed against my face. Grace screams.

Through a mouthful of blood I say, “Don't interfere.”

I try to lift myself off the ground. I feel the kick, my own leg, and then I'm on my back and pinned under a knee, my own knee. That other me grabs my right forearm. I feel the hammer break my fingers, the bones in my hand, my wrist. My hand is pulped. My hand is swinging the hammer.

John is crying. Grace is silent. I am becoming an entrance.

“This is it,” I say.

I raise and drop a knee onto my chest, knocking the wind out of myself. And then I return to the hand. I turn the hammer around and swing with the hooked end. I hardly feel anything in the mess at the end of my arm. I will not fight back.

“Grace, John,” I say. Consciousness is slipping away from me. “It's time to go.”

I dig the hook out of my hand and swing again, over and over, until the limb is just strings of tissue loosely bound together.

“All right,” John says.

“I can't,” Grace says. “There's so much I can do here, still.”

“Let's go home, love. You don't want this place.”

“Don't fucking tell me what I want, John.”

“You end up killing yourself,” I say. I look for Grace in the dark, try to ignore my contorted face just above me, grunting through
clenched teeth. “If you stay, you're choosing to die.”

She leans toward me and me. Quietly she says, “I'm choosing to live, little brother. I don't want to come with you. I'm happy here. I'm just getting started.”

That other part of me gets bored of mashing up the thing that used to be my hand. I crack myself across the side of the head. I see stars. I see my face twisted in anger. I slap myself to keep my eyes open. I haven't taken one violent action against myself. I let myself destroy myself. I choose not to fight back.

“You'll want to see this,” I say.

“Oblivion,” I say.

I bring the hammer down as hard as I can on my face.

GRACE
'
S BODY WAS DISCOVERED
over Labour Day weekend in September, 2008. A pair of campers stumbled across her remains in a provincial park northeast of Toronto, near the Ontario—Quebec border. Cause of death was uncertain but authorities found a number of empty prescription bottles for clonazepam, imipramine, and fluoxetine as well as an empty 750 mL bottle of scotch, all of which were suspected to originate in her Toronto apartment. Her bones and the tatters of her clothes were found in a ravine. Judging from the fractured right tibia, authorities suspected that Grace deliberately consumed all the substances in an attempt to overdose and then fell to her final resting place. Her body had been decomposing for approximately twenty months. She had died before John had even started building the box.

I'm not sure who organized her funeral because I was still in Toronto-Bathurst Hospital. An ambulance crew had responded to a distress call and found a young Asian man carrying his mangled friend and a bloody rat away from the Oshawa beach. This was in mid-August of 2008. When my state was no longer considered
critical, I was transferred from Oshawa General Hospital to Toronto. John was detained for no small amount of time, and detained again when Grace's remains were found. There were more questions from the police than I could answer. There was no one on the police force who recognized my description of Officer 2510, and I was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. By the time Grace's funeral was arranged, both John and I were under careful, regular investigation but otherwise free to go about our business.

Despite Grace's utter lack of spiritual belief, the service was held in an Anglican church in the suburban town of our youth. The number of attendees was small: my mother and father, in separate pews; Lee, Steve, and Brian; Nicole; myself and John; and unbeknownst to everyone but me, Buddy the rat. Although I didn't make it to the wake a few days before, I was told that a number of classmates and coworkers from the lab had come to pay their respects.

After the service, I thanked all my friends for coming.

Lee seemed shocked by my calm. “Take care of yourself, Scruffy.”

Steve stood beside her, searched for the right words, failed, and just gave me a light hug. That was good enough.

When they had wandered away, Brian asked me, “You gonna be all right, dude? You need anything?”

“Nah,” I told him. Steve and Lee were down the aisle, having a quiet argument, the end of their relationship in full swing again. I looked back to Brian. “Things are going to get weird for you three very soon. Just know that I support you all, no matter what.”

He smiled but I'm not sure if what I was saying made any sense to him. He said, “Give me a fucken break, man. Shit's gravy compared to what's going on in your life.”

I put out my arm to shake his hand before it even registered that I didn't have a right hand anymore. I shook with my left instead.

John and I hadn't actively avoided each other and we also hadn't sought each other out. But when I found Buddy stiff and cold in his cage, dead for apparently no reason, it was John I called. This was in October, 2008, and by rat standards, Buddy had lived a very long life.

That night we dug a hole for him beside the graves of Little Grace and Little John, in the park just north of Bloor. Buddy had been through so much that it seemed such a waste to die now. And while I hadn't been able to cry at my sister's funeral, for some reason I found myself wrenching out hot, angry tears for my lost companion. John stood behind me, an arm on my shoulder, and said nothing. Buddy had been a good rat.

Later we grabbed some mashed potatoes and a beer at Features. John seemed healthy, if not well. His face was thickening and his clothes were beginning to fit again.

“How's the new apartment?” I asked him.

“Definitely new,” he said. “It's fine. I imagine it'll be just fine.”

“What's your plan?” I carved out a hole in the side of the potatoes and let the gravy spill out.

“Finish the degree. The school is quite forgiving of some issues. After that, I was thinking of getting into something based a little more in mental health. Maybe counselling or clinical.”

“And Grace? The other side?”

“I wanted to think I knew what I was doing. Taking things to their logical conclusion.” He pauses for a moment, closes his eyes, frowns. “But look what that led me to do, to become.”

He drifts again, then sighs, then faces me. “No. I'm done with all that. Everyone made their choices clear. And now we have to live with them.”

We ate. We drank. John asked the waitress for scotch and she looked at him as if he was speaking a different language.

“Do you think it could have gone differently?” he asked.

I remembered the strong, confident man who played patriarch to our little social circle. Now all that remained was some sort of animal indifference in his gaze, a lingering trace of his self-ruin. In my head I could see who he had been, the shadow that he now was, and the man he wanted to become.

“I don't know,” I told him. “Maybe not for us. But there are a lot of possibilities for the present.”

“Do you think,” he said, and stopped. He drank. He wiped his mouth and his eyes and laid his hands too hard on the table. “Do you think that she loved me?”

“Yes. I think she did.”

We sat in the window at Features and watched the traffic on Bloor Street pass us by. The silence was enough for us. There was almost nothing left to say out loud.

He said, “Thank you.”

We exchanged our farewells and made our promises to keep in touch. It was a goodbye.

Back in August it was Nicole who first visited me in Oshawa General Hospital, even before John or my mother. I'm not even sure how she found out. Her face was puffy when she arrived and she said she was only visiting once. She was back a few days later, and then again, and when I was transferred to Toronto-Bathurst Hospital she was there every day.

She asked me to open up to her and for once I explained everything. I started at the beginning and it took a very long time. At times I had to repeat sections and at other times I had to convince her with a satisfactory level of details. I started at the start. I told her how I failed Grace, how Grace had failed herself. I have never
talked so much in my life. Whether she thought these things actually happened or not was secondary.

When it was all said there was just the emptiness in me and the piece of meat all bandaged up and lying next to my side. I hated that part of me and Nicole was the one to defend it, to beatify it, to remind me that I had in fact chosen it. We fought. We had always fought and so this was comfortable for us. But when the fights ended we were better and I felt safe, just the two of us sharing a shitty hospital cot in the suburbs and passing the afternoons in the sunbeams from a filthy window.

She told me about the new man she was dating almost right away. She told me about his habits, his smoking, and how he was arrogant in a sort of pleasant way. She told me and I raged when she wasn't around, writhed in the bed claiming that the stump of my arm was causing me discomfort. When I got to Toronto-Bathurst she told me that the new man had left her life. I wanted something to come of that, and once or twice it did, furtive moments of our old passion behind a hospital curtain, and later in her bed, after I'd been released. But it was different. We reached and grasped for something that no longer existed.

I told her everything there was to tell about me. I spent every word on her. And she told me that when I met the woman I was going to do right by, I could start with that level of openness. I hated her and I agreed with her conditions.

In December I received word from the University of British Columbia that I could re-enrol in classes, provided I showed a minimum grade point average over the next semester. I called ahead and sublet an apartment near False Creek in Vancouver.

By then I was practising kayaking a few times a week indoors. The double-ended paddle was easier to manage with a prosthetic. I quit my job and bought a fourteen-foot touring kayak made of composites and with a fin on the bottom called a skeg. That boat was a beautiful thing.

Of course I told my mother about Vancouver and she was proud, maybe. I went to some shows with Steve and Brian and Lee, although not all together, and they were sad to hear I was leaving the city but happy to hear I was doing something. John and I took a day together and drove around the suburbs of Toronto, to the beach in Oshawa, and finally to Grace's grave. We didn't say much. He gave me a nice bottle of scotch to take with me. But it was Nicole who saw me off in the end.

I strapped the kayak to the roof of my car and packed the backseat and hatch with a few belongings. The rest I had sold or given away. Nicole took some of her books back. She told me some nice things. She said she hated me for being a better man now than I'd been when I met her. She slapped me when I told her I'd see her soon. She might have kissed me. Then I drove north and west until the city was nothing, a time that I could neither change nor control but simply carry, three years of my life I would often hold up to the light and inspect.