PEPPER AND LOOCHIE had been right earlier, that the second floor of the unit was surprisingly critter-free. No water bugs. No gnats. No rats. (Plural.)
There was one rat in the entire two-story. Pepper had seen it come tumbling from the ceiling in Glenn’s room. A single common rat roamed. His name was LeClair.
LeClair the Rat.
And he was old.
That point is less about his age than his inflexibility. LeClair had been at Northwest his entire life, four years. Now that might not sound so amazing, but the average rat life span is two to three years. So roughly speaking, LeClair had lived the equivalent of 120 human years.
He hadn’t seen another rat, though, in over a year. (That’s thirty human years.) Long ago, they’d bred on the second floor like, yes, rats. The females, called does, matured like rats everywhere do, reaching puberty at only six to eight weeks old. They went into heat every four to five days, for about twenty-four hours at a time. The average litter size was twelve. So you want to talk about a population explosion? If you’re talking about rats, it’s not even an explosion, it’s an expectation.
And yet the back spaces of Northwest were barren. Why? There were three reasons: 1) New Hyde Hospital didn’t make a habit of spending its money, as staff salaries and the profoundly wack-ass computer at the nurses’ station should attest; but there was one expenditure that did enjoy New Hyde’s enthusiastic financial support. Besides administrative salaries, which were astronomical at the very top, New Hyde paid for pest control. Nothing shuts down a hospital faster than vermin, so New Hyde paid for exterminators without hesitation. Practically had the trucks on standby. Northwest’s second floor got bombarded with nerve toxin–type poisons at least twice a year. (Don’t mention that to the patients on the first floor.) That’s reason number one for why the second floor was so lifeless.
2) Human beings weren’t the only living things the Devil stalked. It fed on warm bodies and fostered fear; rats would do just as well as humans. The Devil had been wandering these halls for years—longer than LeClair had been alive. Dropping down into a patient’s room was the main course, but a passing rat might serve as an aperitif. The rats even had their own name for the beast. Not the Devil. What do rats know of such things? They called him “With Teeth.” Named for the way he killed their kind. He became a kind of legend among the rats, a tale told to make children cower in the dark. But eventually, the rats grew tired of such haunted grounds. They decided to leave Northwest. To flee from With Teeth. A mass exodus.
(Spiders and roaches and all other small life following not far behind.)
So that explains why the rats fled, but not why LeClair the Rat remained behind. That’s because he—LeClair the Rat—was the third reason the other rats all left, en masse. To put it bluntly, nobody liked the guy.
LeClair the Rat was profoundly intelligent. Unfortunately, he felt it was terribly important that every other rat in the world know this about him. He was a real bore and a pedant, but worst of all he was just a weenie. But so what, right? Why not just ignore a rat like that? Why abandon him? The problem was that LeClair was also a good scavenger. He foraged food, rummaged nesting materials—but when he returned with the goods, he wouldn’t share them freely. Instead, he’d force the other rats to sit around and listen to him—all his brilliant thoughts—before handing over the precious materials. You say you just want to know if those kernels of corn LeClair discovered were edible? Plebeian. You’d just hoped to use these bits of shredded newspaper to line a nest? Troglodyte. Didn’t you want to hear what LeClair thought about newspapers? And the dangers of how humans artificially increased the size of their corn? And, while he was at it, let him weave in the history of …
The point here wasn’t that LeClair the Rat was hated because all the other rats were dull-witted, anti-intellectuals. (Though, of course, some were.) The point was that LeClair the Rat had ideas, and he divided the entire rat population into two groups: those whose ideas agreed with his and those who had none. He couldn’t fathom that other rats might simply value different ideas and methods from his own. (That possibility was void, as Mr. Mack would say.)
As time passed, the other rats grew tired of their lives in Northwest: dodging the exterminators and their arsenal of poisons, cowering as With Teeth plagued the second floor, avoiding the increasingly sanctimonious LeClair. Some of the elder rats told stories of another world, someplace beyond Northwest. Outside. Where they might procreate and forage and procreate and die. What more could a rat ask for?
And eventually the rats did leave. Some lived in the wilds of New Hyde’s poorly maintained grounds; others found their way to the main buildings of the hospital; and others reached human homes beyond the fence line and their descendants still live there now. (Sorry, but it’s true.) But none of the rats ever told LeClair that they were going. He’d heard them talk about that place, Outside, but dismissed it as a myth. (If it was real, he would’ve been the one to think of it.) And one day LeClair the Rat found himself living alone on Northwest’s second floor. Nearly alone. Him and With Teeth. LeClair at least knew enough to keep his distance from that one. (In fact, the day he’d come crashing through Glenn’s ceiling was because With Teeth had been chasing him, trying to take a bite.)
He tried to stay brave in the face of his isolation. He didn’t admit to missing his fellow rats; instead, he cultivated a growing disdain for them. And that helped him make it through the year of solitude. But today, LeClair the Rat had to finally admit the truth.
He was lonely.
He’d tried, one last time, to find purpose in his work. He’d boldly leapt out, in plain view of the humans, and annexed a box of sugared corn. He almost got clocked, one of the humans chopping at him with a broom, but he escaped. And returned to the second floor. He’d felt pride in his daring, but could share the story, and the cereal, with no one. That’s when he came to realize that it can be honorable to stand alone, arguing for a righteous cause. But sometimes “taking a stance” becomes confused with “just being an asshole.” It had taken quite awhile, but on this late night LeClair the Rat finally accepted that, long ago, he’d turned into a prick.
But today LeClair the Rat was going to change.
Could he really, though? Hard to say. At least he might try.
So that night he’d passed through every room on Northwest’s second floor. Surveying the discarded furniture where he’d made his nests, the wiring he’d chewed through, it was surprisingly difficult for him to give up the grounds he’d cultivated, no matter how barren and lifeless now. He might not have gone through with it, but then he heard the humans nearby. They’d found their way into his realm. Sure, there’d been the old woman, who sometimes sprinkled bits of food on the floor for him, but this night there were a dozen humans crashing around. Howling and battling and encroaching on his territory. This, finally, was what convinced LeClair to go. He thought he might make his way to that place—Outside—where the other rats had gone. Maybe he would find some of them. Or maybe he would die. But at least he wouldn’t be stuck in here, bereft, adrift, alone.
This is how LeClair the Rat came to be in a section of the air duct when Loochie appeared. She found that big old rat directly ahead of her.
Wow! She could scream. The only thing that shut her up was when the rat turned toward her. She thought LeClair the Rat might charge and bite off her nose. This threw her into a dazed silence.
She tried to turn around, or scoot backward, but pushing back only seemed to wedge her in tight. She imagined getting stuck here, unable to wriggle free, dying in a fucking pipe. She didn’t know what to do. She could slide her hands up in front of her, one at a time. At the very least she could try to guard her face. Bat the big rat back if it came at her.
But what did LeClair the Rat know about this human in front of him? Zip. As far as he was concerned, this body in the air duct might be kin to With Teeth. It hadn’t been able to catch LeClair, so it sent this smaller one. It wasn’t only Loochie who was smacked with a sudden case of fright.
Loochie watched the rat.
And LeClair watched her.
Finally, the rat turned away from Loochie. It moved again.
Loochie thought she’d wait long enough to let the rat disappear. That was what her revulsion suggested she do. But she had to admit that she felt lost. The air duct hadn’t just run a straight line out of the building. The air duct twisted here and there like bends in a road. She wasn’t entirely sure if, at the end of her journey, she’d be looking out on a night sky or just back into the second-floor hallway, where she’d started. Pepper hadn’t given her Dorry’s map after all. In here, she was on her own.
In her mind, she’d already retraced her path to the bus stop in front of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. (Or whatever it had been called.) She was already looking for the tree that leaned so far over that its leaves touched the roof of one home. She was already planning on the face she’d pull when she pretended she left her MetroCard at home and could the bus driver please just let her ride to the depot. She imagined the letter she would write to her mother, explaining why this, as wild as it seemed, was the sanest choice she’d made for herself in many years. For all her hesitation, her fear of hurting her mother, Loochie was already determined to leave.
Then Loochie thought about that rat. Like rats fleeing from a sinking ship. That’s the cliché, right? But the point of the line, really, is this: Life wants to live. She didn’t know her way around an air duct, but she bet that rat did. If she followed it, where would it lead? Right back into the building, maybe. But in that case she wouldn’t be doing any worse than she already was. But the rat might also make its way outside. And she would come tumbling after it.
Loochie followed the rat, at a distance. She could barely make it out ahead, its claws scritching on the air-duct metal as it moved. But she managed. And in this way, for once in his life, LeClair the Rat helped someone without being a prick about it.
Loochie reached the end of the air duct. The panel here had been knocked off by hordes of fleeing rats long ago. She saw the big gray rat slip right out. She saw the starry night ahead. She peeked out. A Dumpster sat directly below the duct, lid closed. A one-story drop. Dangerous but manageable. Even if she would have to go out hands-(and head) first.
Loochie watched the rat where it lay on the Dumpster. It surveyed the open parking lot. She shifted in the duct, making noise. The rat looked up at her. Then it shot off the Dumpster and ran into the parking lot. She watched it dart between parked cars and off into the distance. As silly as it sounds, she wished that big old rat well.
She slipped partway out of the duct. She inhaled the air, hoping it would be fresh, but nothing so poetic awaited her. She was right over a Dumpster. She smelled garbage. She hadn’t reached the last step, but the next step. She looked down at the drop. She tried to breathe slowly.
She would curl into a ball, protect her head with her arms. She imagined that was the best way to do it, but she’d never tried anything like this before. Unbidden, she saw herself falling at the wrong angle. Flailing. Her head smacking the Dumpster. Her body crumpled on the ground. Bleeding out, alone. Just some trash. She couldn’t stop imagining it now. She talked to herself, trying to calm down. But there is only so much that talking can do. She had to move. Right now. Right now.
Lucretia Gardner went out.