The Entire Predicament (18 page)

We didn’t go inside until it got dark. We sat on the steps, and she leaned her briefcase against the house, took her jacket off, and pulled her shirttails out of her trousers. She took her rings off and put them into a compartment of her briefcase and then leaned the briefcase back against the house. She took her shoes off and then she took her socks off, stuffed them into the shoes, and futzed in the dirt with her toes. I took my sneakers and socks off and looked at my shredded stockings for a while. She rolled her trouser legs up to midcalf and unbuttoned the cuffs of her shirt. She was wearing an undershirt, so then she just took her button-up off altogether. She took her sunglasses off and put them in another compartment of her briefcase and then leaned the briefcase against the house again. She stretched her legs out, leaned back on her elbows, and closed her eyes.

First my arm moved in an arc, and then the bee burst and lay ruptured, opened, entirely unhuman on the kitchen floor, as if my body and my mind had nothing to do with me at all. Angela’s allergic. My wife, too. But I know what I look like. Go ahead and do your worst when you put me in your imagination. I am a large and ugly man, but I not deserve to kill anything.

Moments later, looking at the black body against the blackness of the dustpan I saw it was not even a bee, but an ordinary housefly.

Meanwhile, my mouse epic raged.

“Live and let live,” I told Angela and my wife.

“Dog eat dog,” my wife said back.

We regarded the sounds in the walls. We agreed we had nothing against mice and sharing the wealth. But still, I could see there’d come a point.After a month the dog stopped tracking, and soon enough, if he lifted his head he did so as he would were it me, or Angela, or my wife skating the baseboards,
burrowing through blankets, trailing pellets, leaving urine residue behind, and finally what it comes down to is that grossness overwhelms the overall adorableness of mice. I try to resist, but in the end I just won’t let them take over my stuff.

I know there are bears on a mountain in what—Montana? A bear is bigger than me. A moose is bigger than me. A moose gets mad but eats grass. This is what I considered at my desk at work, my office bulging light into the hall through its open door. Outside I knew sunlight smacked itself against the tower walls, still somehow leaving the windows gray. “Come on in here,” I could say to any of the people who worked up and down the hall, but I didn’t. “Take a look at this, see what you think,” I could say to Mike, who I did like to talk to, and then he’d come in with the whole bundle of his life experience strung through his weird body.“Pull up a chair, Mike,” I could say and run anything by him. Mike had a nodding chin and his own mousy affect.

Is this about germs and the smallest of life-forms?

Have I mentioned how huge I am?

I am a sort of opposite of life-under-microscopes. Life under microscopes is celestial, and I am the hairiest sort of American.

At home, my wife was focused not on me, not on mice. Mice were between us, one thing made of its duplicates. Also between us: sad air pulsing from her newspapers, humming from her monitor, springing from the television. Mice, and news of the world, and who would hold out longest within his or her perspective. My wife held out longest, even after
one leaped from her boot, even after one galloped around the tub as she bathed and one trotted across her keyboard as she read. It was I who said, “Goddamnit, they could stay if they’d be civilized like all the other animals who live in this house!” Angela still wore diapers, which stretched my point a bit. She walked with a rattle in her fist, this thigh-high Godzilla, not quite a baby and possibly slow. Godzilla, I’m insinuating, was no Mr. Stephen J. Einstein. Darling blob of potential. What could she become? I pictured, with warmth, a fireman.

But a couple months later you really couldn’t cook using pans like that, and a family’s gotta eat, and they dragged stuffing from the couch, and a family wants a nice couch, so, okay, I decided to get rid of the mice, but I wanted to do it right, right with God.Well, if you’ve tumbled off that cliff, you know where it goes.

I went ahead and told Mike at work. “I’ve been through this very same thing,” he said in his nibbly way. I knew from the past that he was raised in the woods, played a lot of bow and arrow with his twin brother. Primarily homosexual. All around way closer to nature than me, as nature mostly came to me when I looked in the mirror and thought, What the fuck?! They burn the fields at the edge of town every year and mice run into the complexes, so he had experience. Mike recounted, fingers in his lap, going to the store and picking glue traps, thinking, I can only imagine, that if you don’t actually kill the mice that’s the better way to go. “There are many available options,” he said.That little man spent the next week washing glue off mice, shampooing mice in his sink, rubbing them down with a terry cloth. “Remember I missed a meeting?” He had to get the last of the crap off the last of the mice
from the weekend and drop it, smelling like apples, back in the smoldering field on the way to work. He got a flat tire out there. Came in with his knees smudged from the carbon on the ground.

God, that idiot, Mike, he’s the nicest of anyone you ever heard of. Nice, nice, and with integrity. I gazed at my reflection in the sleeping monitor as he spoke, stars going by. I was so brown and far away.

So with this in mind, down I go to the local Saw This and stand at the rack, try to imagine myself as a hero, sacrificing one noble thing (sanctity of all life) for another, the one where I will do anything for my family. I studied the packages of mouse-poison pellets: cardboard cheese-shaped wedges on which were drawings of a mouse, flat on his back, tongue hanging out, feet in the air, Xs for eyes. Like mice are
blind
, I thought, sarcastically, as if someone, the world maybe, were watching me think. Like mice can’t
see
that picture. I thought of the rodents and bugs in commercials, their conversations about their fear of death.There must have been a seamlessness between me and the commercials to make me believe in mice this way.

What a variety of methods hung before me. I had been known to call our company hotline anonymously to discuss my ethical concerns. Also, when I pictured myself as a hero, do you know what it included? It included that long trip down the dark hall of my office and into the false light that bulged from my open door.

I chose no-kill traps, gray boxes with sliding lids, no larger than mice, but I pictured them in action, a small black hole in the night, and remembered that mice feel fine going into
small holes. In the pet department the local shelter displayed puppies and cats, adoption forms, and bumper stickers. My orange basket swung from the crook of my crag of an elbow, and I felt effeminate, which naturally I rarely feel. In cartoons, the mouse lifts the hole from the stone wall of photographed ink so that the monster chasing smacks into it. I let the handle slide into my fist. Small plastic boxes jiggled in my basket. “Set them up with peanut butter in the bottom,” said Mike at work. “They can’t resist,” he said, and wiggled his fingers as in he can’t resist either.

A long time ago, and present in my mind with the mice, was a shot in a movie we were watching, me and my wife, a movie about the future, back before anything had happened to us.The hero, this guy in this fix, looks on the computer at a picture of a cornucopian street market filled with beggars and shoppers. The shot shows him swooping the view around, and looking close-up at parts of the picture. Whoosh, whoosh, the baskets of flowers, the glossy bins of fruit and fish, an old man’s hand grasping, a ragged girl’s rags ragged, the windows in the background kaleidoscopic with reflections. Then, in the corner, is someone’s sleek white arm with something along it, peculiar, which he zooms in on. It’s shiny and metallic, the barrel of a gun held by someone outside the frame, and he zooms in on it until he’s filling the screen with the grayscale sheen—this is the key motion, this rhythmic
going into depth
—and reflected in the barrel is the convex face of a woman in sunglasses (a spy!), so he zooms in on her with the infinite mechanical perception possible only in this land of the future because back
in Antonioni it was photography, not video, making this same move, so the image grew increasingly close and increasingly particulate at once, both more and less visible, because to see anything up close meant you had to have been there for previous, more distant shots in order for this new image to make sense, because meaning came from perspective, it came from context and from history, otherwise up close all you had was an abstract shape or pattern—well—at least that’s how it was in the days of photography.

But here in the future and reflected in one lens of the lady spy’s sunglasses is a shiny wall, so he zooms in and it’s a whole city reflected in there, a crystal palace of towers bursting with light. This city of light is divine, you can tell by the way it fills the screen uniformly, making time seem to hover, here in this clarity, as the hero’s vision continues to move—forward, closer—pushing and then expanding, from one clarity to the next, into depth with perpetual vision. Now the reach is limitless, and the scene stops only when he finds what he’s looking for.

Sunk in the dark in the movies, a midnight show,back before Angela even twinkled in our four movie-going eyes, which, if you looked at them, held the movie in them, I looked at my wife who was not even my wife yet, she was just someone I wanted to fuck, and I could see that nothing at all was happening to her as she watched except maybe she was worried about the guy’s problems, whatever they were. She could just have it: that pure uncluttered connection. But for me, it was like I was watching the shape of everything, because I could see now that everything had infinity going on within it, which I sort of knew already, but here, infinity was suddenly this thing
I could
move into
when I had never thought about doing that before.

I didn’t do it. I didn’t move into infinity. Not back then. I mean, how do you do that? I mean, it was only a date. But I could see it. I could see it happening.

I got home with the traps and my wife was watching TV in the dark in the bedroom and eating a popsicle, something I actually don’t find sexy and I knew she was going to drip. I took Angela to the kitchen and sat her on the counter. I could hear talking heads and explosions. I took the peanut butter out of the fridge and let her try to unscrew the cap while I tore the box traps out of their packaging. Just as she was about to cry because she likes peanut butter so much I opened the jar for her and let her have some on a spoon.Then I scooped some out with another spoon, and it was cold, and the stiff natural kind, so I rolled it into a ball and dropped it into the little plastic box. Angela showed no interest but I still felt like a hillbilly loading a gun. I felt dumb in my muscles. I stood there in front of Angela so she wouldn’t topple from the counter while she ate her peanut butter, watching her moony eyes as they wandered the kitchen within the world of what she was tasting, and then I lifted her down, took both our spoons, and washed them. I wanted the mice to go straight for the traps as soon as possible and not get sidetracked. Angela sat on the floor. I put traps along the countertops and in the cabinets and set their dainty lids.