Of Mice and No Men

Things are pretty bleak.  I'm healthy and all - physically at least, and I'm not in crisis per se, but since returning from winter break, life has quickly gone from an episode of Hope and Gloria to Dr. Zhivago.   You might be wondering why this is so.  Seasonal blues?  Maybe.  Stress at work?  Not really.  I'm unreasonably theatrical?  Yes, but the distressed state of my life does correlate to specific happenings, which are ongoing and worth complaining about.

Bliss and I returned from Texas over a month ago to find that we now share the apartment with creatures.  Mice, to be specific.  Tiny, baby, disgusting mice that have the audacity to show themselves at all hours of the day.  Not having dealt much with indoor rodents (I never envied my friends who were allowed to have hamsters), I always imagined mice to be sort of like burglars in the hours they kept.  People who break and enter generally wait to get their work done until the inhabitants are gone or blissfully unconscious.  It's common courtesy to quietly ransack a house at night, allowing the subsequent horror of home violation to be diffused by the natural light of morning.  Mice, I have found, do not honor the code.

After two days of horrifying observation, Bliss and I felt confident that two baby mice had taken up residence in the apartment during our absence.  Not ones to go without placing blame, we naturally decided to hold the lady we are renting from solely responsible.  Given that she is currently living in Israel and has been for the last two years, we could do nothing but shake our fists at the Middle East and yell like lunatics any time one of the  mice made an appearance.  Picture for a moment the uncontrolled screams of, say, Marion Crane in Psycho.  This is comparable to the scene Bliss and I were now living except that Marion toned it down a little.  Never have I moved so sprightly to a sofa or cursed so loudly toward the holy land.

Clearly it was time for murder.

It turns out there is no humane way to kill a mouse.  Wanting to be clear on our choices, research told us exactly what we already knew: that our collective hate-vibes probably wouldn't do the trick.  We discussed briefly the idea of asking our neighbors for insight.  Surely they had experience in this area?  But since the upstairs neighbors spend their evenings playing what we call "furniture hockey" and the downstairs lady is straight out of a Fellini film, Bliss and I decided it would be best to tackle this on our own.  Our options  included traps that snapped down on the mice, the traps that glued them in place, or obtaining a cat.  We gave the last option no consideration at all.  The first option made me think of all the Tom and Jerry episodes I watched as a kid, and therefore, it seemed too tame.  I didn't want to cartoon-kill these mice.  I wanted them to be real-life dead.  This left option number two: gluing the mice to plastic.  I do realize that this option does not kill a mouse immediately.  I also realize that there are many people who see this option as cruel.  In fact, it might be the least humane way to solve our problem.  But luckily Bliss and I had already adopted a "by any means necessary" strategy, so there was no way we were getting dragged down by mercy or compassion.  Plus, we had practice operating in this mindset at our Lubbock house, where wolf spiders became the target.  For those of you who know anything about me, you know that I would rather summer in a communist work camp than come within twenty miles of a visible spider.  With a phobia held dear since childhood, I spent my time in that house visiting Daniel, an employee in the gardening section at the Walmart on 4th street.  Daniel introduced me to Bengal roach spray, and for that entire year, I all but wore it as perfume.  Bengal spray effectively killed anything that crawled past me, and I took to sleeping with it that summer.  (With the lights on.  If a spider has it in its agenda to crawl near me at night, I'm sure as hell going to see it doing so -- and then kill it before it can).

Back to the present and current overreaction: since Bliss silently shook her head at my fear of harmless spiders, I was relieved to find us both on the same page when it came to harmless rodents.  That page being utter terror leading to rage leading to annihilation.  Four glue traps and one block of cheddar later, we went about our Saturday with the false confidence of people who don't have vermin living in their space.  "That's done!" we thought with a high-five.  "Oh look!  Empire Records is on."  

I suppose I gave no thought at all as to what would happen next.  I knew the mice wouldn't immediately die, maybe, but the traps alone served as a buffer between us and them.  It was a way of telling them, "okay.  You're in here now.  But if you want to stay, you're going to have to die."  And that was enough for that day.  I suppose I also thought that because tiny mice have even tinier brains, both of them would be overwhelmed with the tantalizing scent of processed cheese and fight over each other as they scrambled toward their respective death trays.  I gave them each twenty four hours to perish, and I felt happy with that timeline.  We would have our apartment back and could stop sprinting through the kitchen and vibing Israel.

As almost every good medical examiner knows, with death comes disposal, and that was the next quandary of this situation.  Bliss and I were relieved and appalled to find that one of the mice did in fact glue itself to a tray in the middle of the night -- relieved because it's what we wanted and appalled because there's really no getting used to a live mouse being cemented to a trap under the couch in your living room.  We heard the mouse squeaking before we actually saw it, and that was sad for a few seconds.  I turned on a light and bent down carefully to get a look and quickly wished I never had.  Shrieking as though the mouse had a gun, I jerked backward and hyperventilated.  "What's happening?"  Bliss asked me while hopping in place, careful to only let each of her feet touch the ground for .2 seconds at a time.  "It's trapped!  It's trapped, but it's moving!"  Sure enough, the mouse (no doubt in an attempt to get away from my screams) was dragging the glued half of its body toward the exit.  This scenario terrified me for more than one reason, but Bliss remained calm.  "Surely it can't get too far" she reasoned, and the best option proved to be isolating the mouse in the living room by shoving towels under the door.  "Deal with it tomorrow" became our new strategy, and we went to bed.

Tomorrow became today, and Bliss conveniently left for work very early that morning. Unable to get ready with a dead mouse nearby, I unconvincingly told myself I could handle this alone and equipped myself with three pairs of winter gloves and a broom.  I will spare you the majority of the disposal details -- let's just say that the mouse was not as dead as one would have hoped, and let's also say that this surprise led me to hurl the mouse tray across the room (discus-style).  After my initial scream and collapse to the floor, I sat whimpering in the opposite corner of the living room, shaking my head and repeating the word "no" out loud.  This lasted several minutes, giving me some time to replace the guilt I felt over slamming the mouse into the wall with anger at the creature's apparent immortality.  Not only did we have mice, but the trick candle version at that!  Recovering to the point of standing, I suddenly hoped that the other mouse was watching.  "That's right!" I said to the living room.  "You come into this apartment, and you'll probably get thrown into a wall!"  Hoping my insanity passed instead for confidence, I continued my speech while working on an action plan for getting the glued mouse out from behind the TV stand.  Several false starts later, I finally did complete the disposal process.  Exit Mouse One.  

I'm almost tempted to tweak the details and write a fictional version of these events where both mice went to join Old Yeller on the same day.  That would be a good story with a happy ending.  But as I said, life has become a relentless, never ending black-and-white film where, in the place of a Bolshevik revolution, Mouse Two takes over our lives.  

So rather than change the details, let me close out this entry with a picture of what we have been up against since early January:

Since the first mouse's demise, Mouse Two has carried out an intricate system of psychological warfare.  After my threatening speech to M2 during the disposal, I went from feeling triumphant to wondering if the surviving mouse did hear me and would now come into my room at night to eat my eyes.  I gave up sleeping to figure out an effective way to kill M2 as scenes from the film Willard played themselves out in my mind.  Over the following weeks, we found the traps to be completely useless against M2.  Not only is the glue skillfully avoided, but Bliss and I often wake up to find that the traps themselves have been moved out of the way, and the food we placed there is gone.   After observing this twice, I determined that M2 is most assuredly a female.  She is resourceful, cunning, careful and like any girl, she prefers to seek revenge through mental torment, as opposed to physical aggression.  I no longer fear her killing me in the night because it is public knowledge that she is wearing me down just as effectively in the waking hours.  We won't hear from her for days, and as we slip into a false state of mouse-free living, she will provoke a panic attack by running (in broad daylight) from under the stove to the radiator in the living room.  It's here behind that radiator that she has truly proved her staying power -- because it is in this wall that she has worked tirelessly for weeks on what can only be tenement housing.  Even now, as I lose sleep to her influence, I hear M2 inside the wall, redecorating.  I imagine her smugly creating apartment spaces for her entire mouse posse.  We killed her mate, and now she is leasing out our apartment to her closest friends and relatives.  Now, we haven't seen the other mice moving in yet, but it's only a matter of time.  Killing M1 only proved the futility of fighting.  All we can do now is wait for March, when we will officially give the apartment to M2 and move to a new place.  

A small part of me still wants to see M2 join her lover, but she's smarter than me, faster, and she definitely gets more sleep.  Forget it, Jake.  It's Chinatown.