People tend to be dismissive of irrational fears because
they’re ridiculous, which seems fair enough. There are plenty of things that
are legitimately scary. Why waste time worrying about clowns or elevators in a
world that has guns and Rick Santorum?
I had a lot of time to think on this subject during the
three days I spent barricaded in my bedroom after I saw a mouse in my
apartment. We’re talking towels stuffed under the door and desperate runs to
the bathroom where I’d rummage through the medicine cabinet like a looter in
the zombie apocalypse. Probably I would have foregone the bathroom altogether
and just made do with empty water bottles if I hadn’t thought that would attract
more mice.
I am, in many ways, a courageous, capable, and independent
person, so it pained me to be brought low by my own stupid fear. Let’s just get
this out of the way: I’m not a prissy princess. I more or less lived in a squat
for a few months in my early twenties. I kill bugs with a vigor so unsettling
it makes me wonder what else I’m capable of. One time I screamed at my muggers
until they ran away, empty-handed.
I have been camping, for god’s sake.
Still, for no reason that anyone (including me) understands
or respects, I am really REALLY afraid of mice. Which is why, when this mouse
confronted me not once, but twice, thundering through my apartment with what I
perceived as an air of defiance, I flapped out into the hall, where I would remain for close to two hours, sobbing and calling at least half the people I
know for advice and support.
About an hour into all that, Peter,
my eccentric neighbor,
came home. As he stepped over my crumpled splotchy figure on the stairs, I
tried to act casual and asked if, by any chance, he had seen any mice at his
place.
“Well, yes,” he said. “Actually, there have been some living
in my bean drawer.”
My brain whirred into action trying to parse all the
weirdness packed into that one little sentence. “Some” is plural, meaning more
than one. “Living” implies residence, so these mice had been in his…bean drawer
(?)…for heaven knows how long. Some questions remained, but it seemed pretty
clear that whatever was going on over there was a full-blown Situation.
“I used to work with mice in a lab,” he said. “They don’t
bother me.”
I was still processing this new information in the relative
safety of the hall when my father called, audibly drunk. “I know you’ve only
seen one, but there are probably more,” he said, slurring his words. “They’re
prolific animals.”
“Dad, please, this isn’t helping,” I said, trying to recall
the deep-breathing exercises I had learned in a long-ago yoga class. “I’m
feeling really fragile right now.”
“You need to get some traps, is what you need to do,” he
said.
“Yeah, I know. I just need to work up the nerve to go back
inside for my coat and my wallet.” The breathing thing was making me woozy, so
the time seemed ripe. Dizzy was about as close to brave as I could hope for.
“Did you say you’re on the top floor? Yeah, boy, your
building is definitely infested.”
“I’m hanging up now, dad.”
I grabbed an armful of shoes from the hall closet on my way
into the apartment, shrieking and throwing footwear in front of me as I slowly
worked my way toward the wallet. It was lying on a table in the heart of the
danger zone, a mere three feet away from the mouse’s last known whereabouts.
That accomplished, I went to the grocery store for some
much-needed beer, which I would soon drink on my friend F’s couch as she
scrolled through photos of orphan cats on our neighborhood’s pet rescue blog.
But before I could drink the beer, I had to face the rodent aisle of the
hardware store, which is no place for the sober and faint of heart. After ten
minutes of inspecting an array of medieval devices emblazoned with sinister
graphics of the dead and dying, I still couldn’t find the live traps my friend
A wanted me to get. Where was the package with the smiley mouse?
An elderly employee decided to help me out. “No-kill traps,
that’s nice,” he said. “You’re like a gal I used to know; you’ve got a tender
heart.”
“Not really,” I said. “I honestly want it dead. But my
friend who’s doing the traps is a better person.”
This made the old man chuckle. I guess he decided I reminded
him of someone else, because then he told me about his friend who shoots rats
with a rifle. You know, for kicks.
(When you’re freaking out about mice, people love to trot
out their most deranged stories of violence against rodents. I long for those
innocent days when I did not yet know that N once speared dead rats with a
stick as he was cleaning up after a flood; that D had a neighbor who stabbed
mice in his sink; and that my own brother-in-law bludgeoned a baby mouse with a
broom.)
Later that night, A came over to set up the no-kill traps.
As he inspected the dark reaches of my kitchen with a flashlight, I gathered
provisions to take back to the bedroom.
“It’s like you’re going camping or something,” A said.
“Haha, I know!” I said. “But seriously, do you see my phone
charger anywhere?”
A gave me an appraising look that fell somewhere between
amused and concerned and announced he was going to add extra peanut butter to
the traps. He didn’t want the mouse to get hungry if he wasn’t available to
come rescue it right away.
The next morning I went to my landlord’s office dressed like
I was going for a job interview. I wanted to convey an air of authority and
dedication to hygiene. But
before I could even broach the subject of the bean drawer, my landlord was
like, “I’ll bet the problem is Peter.”
Turns out this wasn’t Peter’s first time at the rodeo; he
has been on special hoarder lease probation for nigh on a decade. The landlord,
who found the whole thing to be a real hoot, gleefully recounted a long string
of strange and disturbing Peter incidents, culminating in the time a few months
when a masonry guy working outside Peter’s window reported he thought someone
might be dead in there.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “What did this worker see,
exactly?”
“Don’t worry, I don’t think he’s dangerous or anything,”
another employee said.
“No, he’s harmless,” my landlord said. “Disgusting, but
harmless.”
Back home in my bedroom, despondent and unable to focus, I
spent the day cleaning out my closet and watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. I work
from home, so a certain amount of reclusion is built into my lifestyle, but
this new extreme lockdown was tough. Over the phone, Z had no patience for my complaints.
“You need to take back your life,” he said.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s how this
works,” I said. “Did you SEE the picture of my mouse barricade on Facebook? You
can’t just talk yourself out of that kind of crazy.”
Mouse barricade (NB: still operational)
Around happy hour, dad called to check in. “Well, honey,
it’ll probably get better before it gets worse,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh, wait. Okay. Maybe it’ll get worse before it gets
better.”
“Dad!”
“But probably just for a little while. Don’t worry.”
“Um, thanks. I guess.”
That night, as I prepared to bed down, I felt the first
strange stirrings of hope. Perhaps I will spend a few hours outside the bedroom
tomorrow, I thought, as I rubbed a soothing lotion onto my psychosomatic rash.
Maybe I’ll even go in the kitchen and treat myself to a Diet Coke instead of
taking Excedrin. I went to sleep feeling cautiously optimistic.
Day three of my confinement, as I walked the green mile from
my bedroom to the bathroom, I spotted a mouse corpse in the middle of my dining
room floor. It was visibly dead—fat (off beans, presumably) and stiff with its
legs sticking out, like a cartoon—which was comforting in one sense. In every
other sense it was extremely unsettling, because seriously WTF. On my sliding
scale of nightmares, a mouse in a trap seems almost okay. With a free-range
carcass, there were too many questions. What happened? Was it sick? Did I kill
it with the bad vibes coming from my bedroom? Had it been staggering through my
apartment for days before it finally perished under the chair? What if I had
stepped on it? Back in the bedroom I went, where I would remain for another 24
hours—do not pass go, do not collect your Diet Coke.
The super showed up around noon. My
irrational fear disgusts him, so he likes to have a little fun with it. He
picked up the corpse with his bare hands, threw it off my balcony, and set a
new THWACK trap right next to my no-kills, all without washing his hands. He
licked the peanut-butter bait from his fingers, with relish. Then he stuffed
steel wool into the cracks and crevices around the baseboards in my kitchen,
explaining in vivid detail how the metal cuts their lips so they bleed to
death.
But the horrors of that conversation paled in comparison to
the one I had with Peter that night. On my way out for the evening, I had
started down the steps when he emerged from his lair to report on his progress.
“I’ve been cleaning up my kitchen the last few days,” he said. “They really did
go to town in the bean drawer! I had to wash out all the droppings in my
bathtub.” We compared notes on traps, and he shared his technique of not
cleaning up the “splatters” of his dead as a warning to other mice.
Unbidden, the mental image of tiny heads on spikes around
his kitchen’s perimeter washed over me.
“Okay, Peter,” I said. “Thanks for the update.”
The next day life went back to normal, la-la-la.
