One of the many things Disney films lied about - aside from the claims that all step-parents are evil or that charming princes really into glass footwear can turn out be straight - is that mice are a cute sidekick. They are not; they are incubators of viral plagues disguised as a rat’s puppy, and people should know.
Last week I woke up at 7 am and began my now daily ritual of gratitude mediation. The birds were chirping, the sun was shining, and all was as well as therapy lets me believe these days. Then I walked into my kitchen to turn on the kettle and saw a mouse looking at me, brazenly judging me from my counter top. It took a pre-coffee minute for me to grasp what was happened, and when I did, I screamed loudly and without shame. As is the case every time that I am confronted with anything from the natural world, I tried desperately to remember survival techniques from long forgotten TV specials. “Make yourself bigger in front of a predator” is the only rule I really remembered. I rushed at the counter top, screaming louder still, arms raised high – my body in what was a rather imposing early morning stance.
I screamed. I screamed as it moved. I screamed as I brought a stick to cajole the trap out. I screamed as I used old chopsticks to push the trap to the middle of the room. I screamed some more when I threw it out the window, trap and all, into the alleyway where eventually darker creatures took matters into their own paws
But there the mouse remained, supremely unbothered, scratching his belly. It took another 15 minutes of me running around with increasingly large frying pans before he finally fled into the darkness under the sink. There I followed him, but he was gone and in his stead was a massive leak under my sink, which, although causally unrelated, feels like a part of the same trauma.
Side note, mainly to my mother: Mice are a common enough invader into North American homes, particularly in places like New York where people live in confined spaces, and even though my place is spotless…it can happen.
The last time this happened to me was the first time I had ever seen a mouse. It was years ago when I was at grad school, and first I thought the dark mark skidding across the floor was a shadow from a passing car. But shadows don’t run in circles I realized, and that began a seven-month ordeal where my roommates and I laid traps laced with peanut butter and waited with murderous anticipation to catch our fourth house-guest.
One day, weeks after I had even forgotten about the traps, I came back to the house and heard something moving in the space under the stove. When I looked, there was the mouse stuck to one of the traps, desperate to escape.
'Plague Dance of the Rats'
I screamed. I screamed as it moved. I screamed as I brought a stick to cajole the trap out. I screamed as I used old chopsticks to push the trap to the middle of the room. I screamed some more when I threw it out the window, trap and all, into the alleyway where eventually darker creatures took matters into their own paws. I screamed for so long and so loudly that the next-door neighbors called the landlord out of fear that my female roommate was being attacked.
“So, no good with mice?” Reza nodded, once I told him my history. He’s my building manager and had been sent to help me deal with the sink/rat travesty. He watched as I emptied the cupboard and together we laid glue traps for the new enemy of my state. While we waited, he began asking me where I was from. Hearing “Pakistan” he immediately perked up, which is unusual in a country where that declaration mostly elicits quiet fear.
“Me Muslim too!” He said, jabbing a stubby finger into his own chest.
Reza looks like a blond Viking and seeing my confusion he explained that he was from Albania. He’s been in the US for sixteen years, and had three daughters, one of whom has a best friend from Pakistan.
“But she born here,” he said.
Chatting to him took my mind off the mouse and I told him about Lahore, about the mountains and what the sea in Karachi looks like (“It’s...um…well, Clifton beach is a bit different than the Adriatic to be honest…”). In turn he took me through one of the deepest conversation I’ve had with anyone for a few years. We meandered through Communism, Slavoj Zizek, immigration reform, theocratic foreign policy and more. I was sad more than surprised when told me, later on, that he was actually a cardiologist by training, but had to give that up for plumbing when he moved to the US because the licences didn’t transfer,
“Let me finish that,” I said, trying to make amends for asking a cardiologist to fix my leaky sink, but he just laughed and shooed me away.
“Is not problem,” he said. “At least it isn’t rat. Women in next apartment has rat as big as cat. She from Pakistan too actually!”
