On Killing Mice
♠
I read once that one of the differences between mice and rats is that rats can climb vertically, but mice can’t. If you were to, say, stand on a chair because you saw a rodent, a rat could follow you up, but a mouse couldn’t. So when we saw a mouse in our apartment, I said, it’s ok. It’s not like it can get into our beds or anything. But, like so many of the things I read once and then believe forever, it was a lie, a big, fat lie. Yesterday, I found a trail of mouse feces leading from my floor to my bed. I’d like to know, please, if mice can’t climb vertically, how one got into my four-foot-high brass bed, made himself comfortable, and used the bathroom. Perhaps a rat came by and gave him a lift.
My roommate saw the mouse before I did. She said she could see things running by in her peripheral vision and I told her she was crazy. Partly, I thought she was crazy, and partly, I couldn’t bear the thought of having mice. I just couldn’t deal with it. It reminded me of talking to my mom about when I was a kid and our house was foreclosed on. My father had been laid off, we didn’t have any money, and we were being thrown out of our house. My mother had planted trees in planters in the floor, and when municipal workers came to rip them out, they said that it was a code violation because it would lead to a roach infestation. My mother screamed at them, “We don’t have roaches! We don’t have roaches!” They said that was fine, it was just a precaution. But she says she couldn’t stop telling them we didn’t have roaches. She chanted it, like a mantra, like a protection against everything else. It was all of the pride she had left, and she wasn’t about to let it go. “We don’t have any fucking roaches,” she said, and they said, “Ma’am, we know, its ok.” But it wasn’t ok, because she needed someone to recognize that although everything had gone wrong, she had done things right.
I don’t have a child, and I’m not losing my apartment, but I couldn’t handle the fact that there was one more bullet to add to my short list of reasons why life wasn’t working out. I remember telling people, “Well, it’s not a good area, but we don’t have bugs or mice or anything.” Now what was I supposed to say? “I know it’s a bad area, and I know it’s inconvenient, but come by sometime. It’s totally worth it, you’ll see, it’s beautiful, if you just ignore the fact that everything is covered in shit.” Because that’s what happens when you have mice, you spend your entire life cleaning up shit. It’s nearly unbearable to have life become so frustratingly literal, an actual logistical shitstorm. I come home, I find the red sponge (our system: red means stop! Don’t clean the dishes with me!), and I clean all of the feces off my kitchen counter. Then I wash my hands with bleach. Then I make myself a drink, during which time, Eben often comes into the kitchen.
I don’t know why I named our mouse. I suppose it was because, originally, I really wanted to believe we just had one mouse. Eben, Ebenezer, our mouse. Like a pet, really. That was how I wanted to think of him. I had never had rats or mice in a home before, but I had pets throughout my childhood, including rodents like hamsters. I even found myself thinking that Eben was sort of cute when he wasn’t flashing by and sending me into epileptic fits of terror.
Then we started seeing two at a time. We decided that Eben had taken a wife. We named her Deben. It was easier than admitting we had an infestation, that our quotidian existence was touched by the filth of a mouse colony. Just Eben and Deben, those crazy kids! I would stand in front of our oven, cooking, and watch them play across the kitchen floor. I would yell at them, and stomp my feet, but other nights, when I was lonely, I found myself talking to them. I would stand there, smoking a cigarette, and they would sit in the middle of the floor, having a snack, a conversation, a marital argument, whatever. I would tell them about my day, my job, my disappointments and my frustrations. And they would just sit there: tiny, quivering little mammals. They didn’t run away at the sound of my voice. They were only frightened by my footsteps, so as long as I just stood there, talking and smoking, they listened. I started to find them comforting.
My roommate was disgusted by my naïveté. “These aren’t our friends, these are our enemies!” she would yell at me. “Do you want friends who shit all over you? Literally?” She hadn’t grown up with pets, but she did have rats when she was a kid, and as far as she was concerned, my anthropomorphizing was not only silly, but downright destructive. She knew better than I that we were losing time, a tactical error that could eventually ruin us.
Then we noticed that there were smaller, differently colored mice in the apartment. Children. We called them the Debevens. Whereas Eben and Deben were content with the kitchen, the Debevens ran rampant through our apartment. They came into our rooms. “Are you happy now, Nero?” my roommate asked me. “Ready to put down the fiddle?”
Yes, I was. The jig was up. There is nothing charming or pet-like about being woken up in the middle of the night by a cabal of mice-children holding satanic rituals under your bed. We decided the Eben family had to go, so I bought an electronic mouse deterrent. It’s a box that plugs into the wall and emits an electronic signal that, while silent to the human ear, is supposed to be anathema to mice. This seemed to me the humane way to go, which was still important to us, to me at least, as I remembered my late night conversations with Eben and Deben with a certain perverse fondness. The box said, “may see increased mouse activity for the first few days.” Essentially, the goal was to drive the mice insane to the point where they left the apartment of their own accord, ideally moving in with our upstairs neighbors and distracting them to the point where they no longer had the energy to blast music at three a.m. It seemed like a win-win situation. For the first few days we did, indeed, see increased mouse activity. Success!
But the rosy glow of victory soon faded from our optimistic faces. I should say that we were partly successful. We did, indeed, drive our mice insane. But rather than migrate upwards to the den of sin waiting for them one flight up, they stayed, spiraling deeper and deeper into madness. It was like ‘
In the days following the installation of our ‘humane’ rodent solution, we found increasing evidence that the mice were not all right. For one thing, something so paltry as a human presence was no longer enough to send them scurrying for cover. They ran in confused circles around our feet, then over our feet. They also seemed to be turning on each other, and while this originally gave us a sort of schadenfreude glee, it soon became terrifying. Having mice was one thing; having genocidal mice bent on destruction was a fresh hell. I kept expecting to hear one of them squeaking “The horror. . . The horror . . .”
And while I had given up on my more sentimental mouse views, I really did feel for them at this point. Living in
We bought new traps, standard ones, and baited them with peanut butter. Days passed, and nothing. Apparently, we had the evil geniuses of the mouse world living among us. So we bought more traps, high-tech ones. These traps contain a panel that electrocutes the mouse when it walks inside, and the box says that it meets “international standards of humane killing.” My roommate said that if she knew where to buy the mousetraps outlawed by the Geneva Convention, she’d get those instead. Still, nothing. Now we were getting desperate. You see, it’s not hard to catch a mouse. People have been doing it for centuries, and even those ninety-nine cent wooden traps boast an eighty-eight percent mortality rate. So how, why were we failing so miserably? Months had passed, money had been invested, and we had not one trapped mouse to show for it. Actually, that’s not entirely true. One night a mouse fell in an empty trashcan and I threw it on the street, but I’m fairly certain it made its way back into the apartment later that night. Why shouldn’t it have? It had managed to avoid the best-laid traps of man; I’m sure it could manage the stairs.
I’m now willing to do anything to kill the mice. We discussed bait, and cats, and bait/cat combinations, although we nixed this idea because given our luck, the cat would eat the bait and we’d come home to find a furry corpse being frolicked around by a group of super-mice, who by that point would probably be drinking cocktails and discussing the moral implications of their victory. Regardless, the point is that I now feel no compunction about battling the mice through any means necessary. My sentimentality towards Eben and Deben has been effectively eliminated, leaving only the cold desire to annihilate them. If I could, I would kill them with my own two hands. Not really, that would be disgusting, but that’s the metaphorical level of hatred I have reached.
But I do question how quickly my attitude towards the mice shifted. I found myself remembering a restaurant I worked in a few years ago, which, like ninety-five percent of all restaurants, had mice. One day, the dishwasher laughingly told me to look in the trashcan, where I found a mouse stuck to a glue trap pathetically struggling in between pieces of wilted lettuce and chicken bones. I screamed. The manager came in. “What?” she asked me impatiently. I pointed. She picked up the piece of paper the mouse was stuck to and had us all follow her outside. She put the piece of paper on the ground, mouse side down, and stomped on it. You can only imagine what ensued. She turned to us and said, “We’re all going to show a little humanity around here, ok?” and then she glared at my friend the dishwasher and went inside. The episode was somewhat unsettling, as any episode involving an exploding mouse would have to be. However, I was also fairly disgusted with everyone involved. The dishwasher, so willing to laugh at the suffering of a living creature, the manager, so cold hearted and crude in her swift justice, and myself, a hapless bystander, feeling vaguely that I should intervene on the mouse’s behalf, but feeling equally squeamish and eager to be away from the whole ordeal. I’m sure I could have saved the mouse, had I taken the time, but of course I didn’t. I also could have provided it with a less ghastly death, but I didn’t do that either. Directly between the dishwasher and the manager I sat, neither indifferent nor effective, full of questions of humanity and doing nothing: exactly the pose I struck when mice reappeared in my apartment. I didn’t want to kill them, or hurt them, but my last shred of pride wouldn’t let me live with them. That is why, at first, I did nothing.
And now that I have taken action, I am surprised by how cold-hearted I can be. At first I was worried that some piece of my humanity, some aspect of my personality had been killed off by the constant stress and long hours of city life. Maybe I am just too tired to feel compassion anymore. I do think that that’s part of it; I am a colder me than I have been in easier times, more willing to be selfish and lazy in regards to other concerns, be they friends, family, or mice. But if my heart is harder, it is also stronger. We finally caught our first mouse, but of course not successfully. He was merely wounded, although it seemed fatally. I didn’t scream and I didn’t run for help, I simply crushed his life out, trying to spare him a few moments of pain. And to assure myself my heart hadn’t completely hardened, I told Eben I was sorry as I threw his body in the trash.
—CEP