I Am the Rat

The bird landed on the roof across the yard. I heard him before I saw him. I hear most things before I see them. He was passing something on. He had been carrying it since the woods, he said, and had not found anybody to leave it with, and asked if I would take it.

I said I was busy. He said everyone says that.

Then he left, in the direction all of them go at this time of year, and I stayed where I was. This is where I am now, and where I will be for most of tonight.

There is a pipe behind this wall that stays warm until the middle of the night. I am against it now.

I did not ask for it.

They built the wall. They put the pipe through it. There is a kitchen on the other side and bins in the yard, and every night at closing somebody carries out what is left. Some nights there is almost nothing worth going for. Some nights there is rice, bread, fish skin, something sweet. Tonight there is fish. I could smell it before the second bin came through the door.

I will go later.

There are three ways from here to the yard. The shortest runs along the skirting, behind the freezer, through a place where the plaster broke away years ago. The second goes down and comes up beside the drain. The third is not really a route. It is what is left when the other two are no good.

I know every one of them in the dark.

I see very little of any of this. My eyes are not the point of me. What I have is the wall — the length of it, the temperature of it, the place where the mortar has gone soft, the corner where the smell of the drain begins and the smell of the fat ends. I have the floor above me and what comes through it. I have the yard by its sounds: the door, the crate, the wheels of the bin, the man who always drops the lid.

There used to be another one who slept against this pipe. My brother. He was heavier than me and always took the warmer place, so I had the part nearer the corner. Then one night he went into the yard and did not come back.

After that I had the warmer place.

That is often how places become available.

From outside, this would probably look like almost nothing. From inside it, it is extremely detailed.

───

None of it was made for us. That much is obvious. The warmth, the walls, the tunnels under the road, the light that stays on all night, the grain in sacks, the water in pipes, the bins in the yard, the food arriving every morning and leaving again every night — all of it was made for the people who come through the doors. We came afterwards.

And yet the building suits us very well.

That is also obvious.

Sometimes one of them sees me crossing the yard and makes a sound. The sound is always larger than I am. Then there are feet, a broom, something thrown, sometimes a door slammed hard enough for the wall to tell me about it.

I wait. Eventually the building becomes itself again.

I eat what they were keeping. I go through things they would rather remain closed. I gnaw. My teeth do not stop growing, and sometimes what I choose matters to somebody upstairs.

There are things in us that can make them ill.

That is true.

Mostly none of this needs thinking about. The wall is warm. Food appears. Something moves in.

───

I am not from here. Not from this city, not from this country, not from this half of the world.

I did not know that for a long time. Why would I? The first place is simply the place where the smells begin.

But things reach the wall. People talk while they smoke in the yard. Screens stay on after everybody has stopped watching them. Words return often enough that eventually they become attached to things.

And birds know far too much.

As far as humans have been able to work out, my kind began in cold open country a very long way east of here — the steppes of northern China and Mongolia. Plains, riverbanks, burrows, water. No kitchens. No drains. No warm walls. Then some of us went west. And then farther west. And then almost everywhere.

We did not make the roads. We did not build the ships.

We went in the holds. In sacks, in ballast, between timbers, through ports, along every route that opened. We arrived on islands whose names meant nothing to us, and in cities the first of us never saw.

There is apparently a map of where my kind spread and when. Somebody on a screen once said that if the dates are laid over the old shipping routes — the eastern trade, then Europe, then the Americas — the two maps almost become one.

I like that. Not because I understand maps. Because I understand routes.

I did not arrive.

I was cargo.

Later they gave us a name that points toward a country most of us had never seen — Norway — because somebody decided that was where the ships had come from. The ships were not carrying us on purpose. There were other things in the hold.

We were simply very good at staying aboard.

───

There is something new against the skirting tonight. That is why I have not gone for the fish.

I noticed it from the far end of the wall, before I could see it, because it is in the part of the run where nothing is ever different. Small. Black. Against the plaster at the corner. Exactly where I go.

I stopped three body lengths away. Then I backed up.

I have another route. That is not the problem. The problem is that yesterday there was nothing there.

I will not go near it tonight. I will not go near it tomorrow either. In a few days I might pass it at a distance. Later I may pass closer. At some point it may stop being the new thing and become part of the wall.

That is not courage.

That is time.

They have written this down about us, apparently. They have a word for it, and have worked out what to do with it.

I have watched what happens next, so I know that they know.

Sometimes a new box appears and nothing happens. Food is put inside it. The first night nobody touches it. The second night perhaps somebody smells it. Days pass. One of the younger ones goes nearer than I would, and nothing happens. Later somebody goes inside and comes out. Still nothing. Then the box becomes part of the route.

Then, one night, it is not harmless anymore.

I have thought about that more than is probably useful.

The fish is still in the yard. I can smell it. I am staying here.

───

There is one smell I will not go near.

I first met it when I was young. Something had been left beside the bins. It smelled good enough. I ate some and went back along the wall.

Then I became ill. Not quickly. That would have been easier. It took time.

I remember the dark more than anything else. A place behind a board where nobody could reach me, my body doing things I did not understand, thirst, the floor moving although I knew it was not moving. I stayed there until the smell of the yard changed twice. Then I came out.

My brother came close once while I was there and left again.

I lived. Obviously.

But I have never gone near that smell since. It is not a decision. I do not smell it and remember being ill and then choose to turn around. The smell and the illness are one thing now. By the time I know it is there, my body has already gone the other way.

That was many seasons ago. It has made no difference.

I have heard that humans know this about us too, and that it is one reason poisoned food becomes less useful. A rat that eats a little and survives may never touch the same smell again. Sometimes others learn around it too.

They are very good at changing what is in the food.

What they keep meeting is what happened before.

───

There are rats I know before they enter the yard. Not by sight. By everything else.

There is an older female who comes through the drain. She puts her front feet down harder than she needs to and has done so for as long as I have known her. There is a young male who comes from the station wall and is always too fast. There are others whose smell belongs here.

And there are strangers. A stranger can pass three walls away and still change the night.

Apparently somebody once found this worth testing.

At a place they call the University of Chicago, in rooms they keep for finding things out, somebody decided to see what a rat would do if another rat was trapped.

They put one rat inside a tube. Not a large one. Enough to hold him and no more. Another rat was left loose in the same room.

The loose one worked at the tube. Not once. Again and again. Eventually he found how it opened. After that he opened it faster.

They tried an empty tube. He left it alone. They put an object inside. He left that too. They arranged things so that opening the tube would not let the two rats touch. He still opened it. Then they put something sweet in another container. Most of the time, he opened both. Sometimes they ate afterwards.

Apparently that surprised people.

Then they kept looking. That part interests me more.

What they found was that it mattered who was trapped. A rat from the group, one known to the loose rat, was much more likely to be freed. A stranger often was not. They looked at what was happening inside the brain while this was going on. Whatever in the brain responds to another rat in distress responded to the stranger too.

So the stranger was not invisible.

Something knew.

The tube simply remained closed.

There is nothing especially mysterious about that from this side of the wall. The older female from the drain is not the young male from the station. Neither of them is a stranger.

That matters before anything else does.

───

When I was small, there were six of us in the first place I remember. Warm bodies. No space. Someone always climbing over someone else.

We chased each other through a broken crate when we became large enough to leave the nest. There was a gap through one side that only worked if the one in front did not stop.

The one in front always stopped.

There was biting, rolling, pushing, returning, doing the same thing again for no useful reason.

I had forgotten about that until I heard something on a screen.

Somebody, at some point, decided to handle young rats quickly around the belly, the way rats touch each other during play. The rats made sounds. Humans could not hear them, so they built something that could. The sounds were very high — above human hearing — and the people listening decided that what they were hearing was something like laughter.

Something like.

That is usually how these things reach me.

Something like.

───

The pipe is beginning to cool. Not cold yet. Another hour, perhaps.

The kitchen has been quiet for some time. The man who drops the lid has gone. Somebody upstairs is still moving chairs. The new box is still at the corner. Nothing has touched it.

There is a place I have never been. Rooms somewhere else.

I want to be clear about that, although there is nobody here to be clear to.

Everything I know about those rooms came sideways — through walls, off screens, out of conversations in yards between people smoking, from the sort of thing they say when they think the only thing listening is a bin. The rats who have been inside those rooms do not come here afterwards and explain them.

So this is what has reached me.

In one of their countries — the United States — there is a law about animals. It says how certain animals must be housed and fed, what may be done to them, and what must be recorded afterwards. There is also a part of the law that says what the word animal means there.

This is the part I heard twice, because I thought I had misunderstood it the first time.

Not birds. Not mice of the genus Mus. Not rats of the genus Rattus.

Bred for use in research.

I know what a rat is. I do not know what a genus is.

Apparently I have one.

I am told the wording has remained that way for most of a human lifetime, and that when people tried to change it, the exclusion was kept.

So in those particular sentences, the word animal goes around us. Not everywhere. Just there.

Because of that, the numbers are not recorded in the same way as for the animals the law covers. People who have tried to estimate how many mice and rats are used each year have produced figures ranging from around ten million to a hundred million.

I cannot picture ten million rats. I cannot picture a hundred million either. I can understand that there is a very large space between the two.

We are, apparently, most of the animals used in those rooms. Dogs are counted. Monkeys are counted. We are not counted in the same way.

That is all I know about the law.

There is one other thing.

They found that a rat will work to free another rat from a tube.

For twelve days, they put one rat back in the tube.

Twelve days I understand.

───

The pipe is cold now. I move away from it.

There is a stretch between the pipe going cold and the first light when the whole building changes. The air from the street begins to move differently through the grating. Machines switch off. Other machines start.

The yard belongs to us for a while.

The younger male from the station has already been through. I know because the smell at the drain is fresh. He has gone toward the bins.

Let him.

The box is new. The fish will still smell like fish tomorrow.

Above me, a screen is on. There often is. Tonight it is the one about the rat who cooks.

I know this one. I have heard it more than once, which is how I know people like it. They do not usually put a thing on twice if they are only getting through it.

There is music at the beginning that I recognise now. Then talking. Then more talking. Somewhere in the middle everything becomes loud and something falls over. Later the music comes back.

The title is the name of something they eat. The one everybody is pleased about is a rat.

Ratatouille, they call it.

I have never seen most of him. Sometimes I see light move along the floor above me. Sometimes I hear his voice, though I cannot tell which voice is supposed to be his.

Apparently he is very good at cooking.

Down here, along the skirting, exactly where I usually pass: the box.

Same building. Same night.

I have no explanation for it.

───

There is another thing that follows us. This one is much older than the film. I know it because even people who know almost nothing else about rats seem to know this.

A great dying. Cities. Bodies. Ships. Fever.

And rats.

The strange part is that the rat in that story is not me.

That was the Black Death, and it happened here centuries before my kind became common in this part of the world. The rat in that story was the one that climbs. The black one. He was in their roofs and their ships long before we were.

Not us.

That does not seem to have mattered much to the story.

More recently, I heard that some of them have been digging in the places where all those people died. In some places there are not many rats in the ground. Not where there should be.

And nobody at the time seems to have written about streets full of dead rats. When that sickness comes through rats, apparently, rats die too. A great many of them.

There should have been bodies.

And there is something else. It moved faster than rats move.

So now they are arguing about it. Some still say rats carried it. Some say much of it may have travelled on things already living on people — in their clothes, in their seams, close to their skin — and from one person to another. Some say it was different in different places. They have not settled it.

The story, meanwhile, has had nearly seven hundred years. That is a long time for any story to find somewhere to live.

I do not think about it often. Mostly I think about the next corner.

Stories do not usually matter much down here. Until somebody carries one into the yard.

Then sometimes they matter a great deal.

───

It is getting light.

I have come along the back of the wall to where the yard meets the street. Not by the short route. The box is still there. I took the drain.

The older female passed me halfway through. She stopped. I stopped. We knew each other. That was enough.

Now I am under the grating, where nobody would look who did not already know there was somewhere to look.

The station is opening. First the gates. Then footsteps below. Then the first people come through. Not many. Then more. Then enough that the sound stops being made of separate people and becomes one thing.

They come out of the passage below and up the steps. Along the same line. Past the same corner. Through the same doors. At almost the same speed. There is a light that changes and they stop. It changes again and they move.

Some of them are running.

Nobody has put anything new in their way. Nothing has happened. They are simply moving through the passages, quickly, in the building they made, along the routes they already have.

I stay beneath the grating.

The fish in the yard is gone now. The younger one, probably. There will be something else tonight. There usually is.

At the far end of the wall, the pipe will become warm again. I know when.

I will move when I need to.

— Karim

Chapter six of The Other Inhabitants — the series in which each chapter hands the microphone to one animal. If you are new here, it begins with the preface, I Am Not Your Bird, and runs through I Am the Bird, I Am the Horse, I Am the Cow and I Am the Wolf and the Dog. Tell me what they got right.

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