Rat. A word that sends so many people running. Some would even say it’s an “ugly” word. To “rat someone out” is to be sneaky, to be untrustworthy and deceptive. “Oh rats!” An exclamation of disappointment. A “ratty” object is old and tattered, dirty and torn. Those that shun the rat may not see that there are two sides to the same coin.
One one hand, they live in the light. They are the squishy mascots of Facebook fan pages, soulful eyes beaming out from t-shirts bearing slogans like “Rat Mom”. Their pictures are featured on gallon-sized Ziploc bags of special food mixed just for them, the pieces different colors and shapes to encourage their natural foraging behaviors. There’s Rat Fancy magazine, and an issue of Critters USA boasts a large picture of a grey and white rat with the splashy text “Rats: The Pet To Have! Smart, Affectionate, Active, Cool”. Obviously, we rat lovers feel strongly about our companion of choice. It seems that the rat inspires strong reactions in everyone.
On the other hand, they live in the dark. They scrabble inside our walls and in our cold stone basements. They gnaw on electrical wires and chew the support beams of our homes. They carry diseases and fleas, brought up from the very underbelly of the earth. If a fiery pit to Hell ever cracked open, surely rats would be scurrying out of the opening. Bringers of doom, bringers of plague, people shriek at they quickly scuttle for shelter and whip their bare tails around. Could this be the same rodent that dwells in wire cages and glass pet store boxes? If they are the same, does the rat know it?
My mother and I found him in the PetSmart in Stamford, Connecticut. Not close to home, but not far, either. He was in a glass box with two others. They were hairless, not as cute, but he was white with one little black spot, and he was chubby and had a big twitchy nose. His schnoz, we called it. Boxed up in a cardboard carrier with air holes, he stuck his fat nose through each hole methodically. Sniffing the air, sizing us up. In the car, I held him in my hands. Trembling, a warm little ball of white fluff and pink skin, tiny chest rising and falling as his body worked overtime to process this new experience. Perfect little heart drum-drum-drumming away against delicate ribs, so small you could crush them with two fingers. A tail, long and scaly, sparsely haired, wrapped around himself to protect. The hands, each individual finger joint perfectly formed. How beautiful, how intricate, and on such a small scale. I feared that the small heart fluttering in my hands like a nervous butterfly would somehow be extinguished. It seemed like glass, too unstable to survive. Ready to shatter at a moment’s notice.
The glass did not shatter. He lived on, and I called him Yoshi. (Or little man, or Mr. Bobinski.) Far from the grassy fields and cool forest floors of his ancestors, and the concrete jungle and red-hot subway tracks like his brethren. His home was a two-story white wire cage, complete with purple plastic igloo and wooden chew toys. His sister Tsunami once lived there, before his time, and after he was gone, his sister Bubby moved in. Three share the same home, same mother, never overlapping. Loved equally, but differently. Sitting on shoulders, clinging to curly hair. Shivering after bathtime. Wriggling, warm bodies, wanting kisses and pretzels and hoodie pockets. So full of love, so misunderstood, here for such a short time.
On Christmas Eve, streetlights outside cast long shadows into my bedroom as I lay awake, dreaming of the perfect Christmas morning. I saw my little Yoshi boy standing up on the top level of the cage. He was gripping the bars tightly and looking at me, just looking. I wished him Merry Christmas from my spot on the bed. I told him I loved him. I always wish I had taken him out and held him then.
Christmas morning, my parents opened the flimsy door to my bedroom, their faces light and relaxed, smiling. Before she could say it, my mother caught sight of the cage in the corner. “Oh honey. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I screamed. I sprang up and there he was, stiff and cold, curled at the bottom of the cage. Glass wings beat no more. The little match flame I had so cautiously protected was snuffed.
It is terribly unfair that such lovely creatures, sugar-spun out of clouds and mirror shards and warm, pulsing fur, should not get to stay here longer. They deserve it most of all.
Out in the fields somewhere, a rat deftly weaves in and out of fallen plant stems and secures a tasty seed for her dinner. In the subway, rumbling deep underground, the rats scurry as the trains roar by and pass on the deep secrets of the underground, things only they have seen and only they remember. Above, in the perfect fluffy clouds, three rats sing songs and bake pies and play all day long, or so it has been told to me.
*
I’ve never been inside an animal testing facility, but I can imagine. Emotionless men click down the tiled floors past each other, clad in cartoonish white lab coats. Harsh fluorescent light beams down from rectangular panels in the low ceilings, rendering everything half well-lit, half cast in shadow. In the white light, you see the numbers, the papers, the stone-faced men shuffling past with clipboards and pens, and you see the results. Maybe blatantly, in the news or the science journals, or maybe indirectly, in your household products and toiletries. People are always running around, data is being created as we speak. People and numbers are constantly streaming in and out of this building. Brick and mortar lungs, breathing in, breathing out.
In the trenches of this prison, millions of souls are trembling. Move down the line, a latex glove reaches into each cell. A struggle, a puff of spray or the pop of injection, a squeal. Glove retracted, door slammed shut. Next. The victim retreats to lick his wounds. Naked tail curled around delicate, mistreated body. The little chest rises and falls, somehow, day in and day out. Is this life? I imagine the rat might wonder.
Somewhere, buried deep behind layers of days and weeks in this place, there was once warmth. A mother’s tongue tenderly licks her babies. They squirm, closer to her and to each other. This was safety.
Even deeper than that, there are pastures. Beautiful, green pastures, never seen by this individual but he knows they are there. A primal paw is extended- his ancestors are reaching, straining for him. He wants to be there in the lavender fields, to breathe the sweet air and to know safety. To know life as he is supposed to live it.
They do not know day from night, under the screaming lights, but when the men leave and the bulbs go out, they dream.
*
In a 2015 study by Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan, it was found that rats chose to save a fellow rat from drowning by pushing open a door that led to a dry platform. Amazingly, even after being given the option of chocolate or saving the other rat, 50 to 80 percent of rats chose to save their cagemate first rather than obtain the chocolate. What’s more, the rats that had already been in the water extended a helping paw more quickly, suggesting that they remembered being in that situation and felt empathy for the other. It’s long been debated why some animals exhibit altruistic behaviors. Peggy Mason, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, believes this adds to the mounting evidence of an evolutionary inclination to help others. She says, “Humans are not helping purely because mom taught us to help… In part—and to what degree remains to be seen—we help because it’s in our biology.”
Another study had researchers aiming to find the “tickle center” in rats’ brains. In the video, the plasticky glove reaches in again, but this time the rats squeal in high frequencies and jump for joy. They rocket around the cage like kernels of popcorn jumping out of the pan. The rats’ “laughs” are far too high for our ears to register, but played back and slowed down, it’s like a tiny bell, a series of bright sounds.
It reminds me of a question posed in an article I read a long time ago: “Can fish feel pain?” A stupid question, I thought, of course they can. I of course see the scientific value in experiments such as these, but it has always struck me as funny how we constantly need to prove what is plain to see to anyone with eyes. In the world of bioprospecting, so often new and exciting compounds are “discovered” in plants, plants that have been used for their medicinal properties by Indigenous people for thousands of years. The neem tree, for example, was used for all sorts of things in its native India, including medicine, lamp oil, and pesticides, just to name a few. The products were rooted in the culture of the people, and initially, Westerners dismissed the tree and its bounty as useless. If anyone had bothered to pay attention to the Indians, they would have known the tree’s immense worth. But only after some Western scientific research was conducted did the tree become legitimate in their eyes. Soon after, the WM Grace Company attempted to patent neem oil. So great was the uproar from Indigenous peoples that the company was forced to back down.
So when questions are posed such as “Do fish feel pain?” or “Do rats care about other rats?” or even “Do rats laugh?”, the obvious answer (to me) is “of course they do”. I would think that’s obvious- they are, after all, living and breathing beings, with nerves and synapses and brains just like us. Of course they laugh, as I hold Bubby in the crook of my arm and stroke her little head while she eats a Cheeto. Of course they feel pain, as I sob over the steel table in the vet’s office after the fatal injection. Of course they love, I think to myself, as she slips away.
*
We know that the lab is not “natural”. The rat does not belong here, not as subject or intruder. Its walls are too bright, its floors cast a sick waxy sheen. A rat might prefer an old creaking house instead, with wooden floorboards and peeling paint. Or maybe a sea-soaked vessel, encrusted in ancient barnacles, damp and dripping corners all swarming with roaches. Do they belong there? Maybe, maybe not. Most sailors and mothers would be inclined to say no. The rats beg to differ. Or perhaps they are city rats, hardly bothered by the hum of the machines, the din of human life.
*
Rats are desperate passengers. If they were people, they’d be the downtrodden mother pleading to board the ship with her children, even though they are late and don’t have tickets. They’d be the man squeezing himself onto the jam-packed subway car, somehow maneuvering through the minuscule air pockets between people to grip the grimy metal pole in the middle. If a rat wants to board, he will board, paying no mind to ticket fees or limited space or any other perceived obstacle. They will not try, they will simply do. And they are excellent travelers.
If you were to open the cargo hold in a 14th century ship, you’d see hundreds of beady, intelligent eyes shining back at you. Packed between boxes and the wall, inside bags of hardtack. The rats are a black liquid, expanding to fill every space as the meager light twinkles off their oil-slick fur. They use their large, doughy back feet to scratch an itch between their ears. Personally, I find this rather cute, but if I was a sailor way back when, I’d be singing a different tune.
They hitch rides on big, beautiful merchant ships that sail all around the world. Cutting through the deep blue sea like glass, these ships nor their stowaways knew what was coming. Another passenger was along for the ride- a deadly poison, the Yersinia pestis, ready to unleash on Europe like a lion on a gladiator. This bacteria was in the fleas, who were on the rats, who scratched behind their little ears and knew none the wiser. Before they knew it, the bodies piled up and rats went down in history as responsible for wiping out two-thirds of Europe. Clearly, they have been framed.
Rats are eternally creatures of the underbelly. They live amongst our muck and grime, and dwell in darkness. In our cargo holds and our basements, they only seek a little food and shelter. We did not trust them then, and we do not trust them now.
*
In the Above, men and women pound pavement both ways, never looking back. Everyone is on a mission. A man with thinning hair in a dark suit gabs into his cellphone about sales and paperwork. A beautiful woman in a red dress click-clicks across the street in matching patent leather heels, but you wouldn’t hear the clicking above the thunder of the footsteps, louder than an angry herd of wildebeests rampaging through the African ravines.
She’s radiant- golden ringlets stream behind her like sunshine as the sea of men in grey salivate, wild dogs that they are. This is a wilderness, too, but not the kind you’d see in nature documentaries.
My father rides the subway as it rolls ahead into the jungle. 85,000 pounds of burning metal screeches to a stop, and he steps off the train and into the hot, muggy underground. You might expect to see a dart frog or a scarlet macaw, hiding somewhere in this mist. The people here glisten. Everyone is too hot, and everyone is raring to go. A teenager shifts his weight from one dirty white shoe to the other as he anxiously waits for the train to unload. A man with his hood up leans against the grubby tiled wall next to the paper subway guides. My father, in his hi-vis vest and steel-toed work boots, grips his toolkit and heads to work.
While Dad lays the power lines and raises skyscrapers into the stratosphere, New York City’s second population hustles and bustles way down Below.
It is a miracle that the footsteps don’t shake the sky and make it rain dust down here. In the narrow, yellow tunnels, huge trains gallop by, spitting and snarling and hauling people who have no interest in the journey, only in their destination. They spill out of the beast like cattle, all heading towards the same exit, somehow rushed and bored at the same time. What they don’t see, or what has perhaps become too mundane to them, is the even hotter- the little balls of gas and fire that flit between the tracks when the trains roll by. They are born here in the mist, and they will die here someday, and be replaced by their fireball children.
These are the real bottom dwellers- not the riders of the subway, who are constantly streaming in and out, quickly released into the cleaner air of the Above. The rats breathe the same air all their lives. It has always been here, and it always will be. They understand that once, the great lions and wolves and elephants ripped across the plains, pure mechanical power, earth-shattering but organic all the same. They died, and their bones turned to dust and the dust turned to dirt. The plants grew, and the rats ate the plants. They understand, too, that Man is of the Earth, and the steel contraptions blasting through the hot underground airways will soon rot and rust, and turn to dust, and turn to Earth, and Man with them. They have seen it happen. The trotting horse and buggy are long since past. The great ships of earlier times lay in pieces on the ocean floor, crusted over in salt. Great Whites and blue whales swim past without a passing glance. It is just another set piece in the vast blue landscape.
When I go to the city, I travel deep underground into the dark and sticky Below. Waiting for my train to rumble by, I lean over the yellow stripe on the ground and look to my left into the abyss, miming a search for headlights. Really, I am scanning for “my friends”, friends of the rodent persuasion. I am thrilled as I see a blob of gray poke its head out of the hole in the side of the tracks and bravely venture over to a half-eaten bag of Cheetos. They are barely visible against the dirty brown background of the bottom of the tracks. Looking for movement is the key. Naked tails slither in and out of sight as they move, passing each other over and over. No place to be, but there is work to be done. I know better than to be fooled by their humble exterior- these are beings with great knowledge, the knowledge of the Earth and of history, of time itself. We will come and go, but they will always be here, even after the trains break down and the tiled walls fall apart. They murmur to each other, there is great work to be done, there is great work to be done.
