Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [26]
The little fucker.
Then with hideous, calm precision, I locked the drain and turned the water on full blast and scalding hot. I did this automatically, dutifully, without a trace of emotion. I was simply a nurse administering pain medication to my comatose patient, an electrician changing a fuse. I was somebody from PETA handing out a brochure on the street.
I was going to drown the rat/thing. And while I was at it, I would boil it, too.
I watched as the tub filled with steaming water. “Calgon, take me away!” I joked. This was at approximately eight-thirty in the morning. At nine, it was still swimming. The Raid had made an oil slick on top of the water, and the rat/thing paddled through it like a furry little ice breaker. Even more alarming, the water level had brought the rat/thing closer to the top edge of the bathtub. Eventually, the rat/thing would be able to flip itself out onto the floor.
It was simply unkillable.
I needed to think fast.
My Maglite flashlight was by the front door. I could see it if I learned forward and peered around the open bathroom door.
Instinctively, I ran out and grabbed it, then came back into the bathroom and turned off the light. It was a crazy idea that came to me out of thin atmosphere. I didn’t question it; I only complied.
I turned on the flashlight and made a dancing pattern on the water, disco tub. I turned the light on and off, on and off. I made the light zigzag across the water, and the rat/thing began to tremble. It began to seize.
I choked a laugh out, surprised, thrilled. “Oh my God,” I said. “The light is doing something to it.”
I began making vigorous, complex patterns on the water. I drew crosshatches made of light. I made figure eights. I shined the light into the rat/thing’s eyes, then flicked it off and on again like a strobe.
Miraculously, beautifully, the rat/thing became confused or epileptic. It had what I can only assume was a heart attack. Twitch, twitch, twitch, the little body shaking while the skinny whiskers tapped the air.
And then it died.
Automatically, it rolled over on its back and floated in the oil slick on the surface. I watched, mesmerized. And very gently, it bumped against the side of the tub and then drifted back out to the center.
I said out loud, “Mom? Are you okay?”
Then suddenly mortified by my inhumanity, my seemingly instinctive knowledge of how to kill, I left the bathroom and went back to the porch to breathe fresh, cold air. How had I known that would work?
What was wrong with me that I couldn’t have simply placed one of those humane, nonkilling traps in the tub and then freed the thing outside, in a patch of grass, like a human being instead of a killing machine?
I was filled with sickness, as though I’d just killed somebody and had their body in my tub, limbs waiting to be removed with my mother’s good carving knife. I truly was Jeffrey Dahmer’s long lost twin brother.
I decided to throw on some clothes and go downstairs and have an espresso. I needed to get out of the apartment.
Only in Manhattan can a person go downstairs and find a market that serves espresso twenty-four hours a day, along with bags of freeze-dried peas and squid, for snacking.
After I got my coffee, I leaned against a STOP sign and sipped, pretending it was a normal day and I was only up this early so that I could go running and not because I’d just been on a killing spree.
Across the street was a hardware store, and it occurred to me that I would need to go to this hardware store as soon as it opened. I needed a pair of industrial rubber gloves so that I could remove the rat/thing from the tub. I also needed steel wool to clean the tub.
I returned to my apartment and checked on the rat/thing. It was still dead, the air in the bathroom now warm and moist and toxic.
I turned on the television and watched a little QVC.
As I watched the host demonstrate the George Foreman grill (which actually does seem incredibly easy to clean), I thought about how I would remove the rat/thing