Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [27]
This turned out to be an excellent system of removal. Although feeling the unexpected weight of the creature at the end of the tube made me queasy. But I was able to hoist it out of the water, dripping, and then place it into a paper-sack–lined shopping bag.
It made a heavy, wet “smack” sound as it hit the bottom of the sack. I willed myself not to focus on the sound, because I knew if I did, I would pass out, then throw up and choke. So I steeled my brain and thought instead of very happy thoughts: the luscious glass of a Leica fifty-millimeter lens, the clean smell of a new air conditioner, green M&Ms.
As I learned forward to depress the drain switch, my seven-hundred-dollar Armani glasses slipped off my face and into the water. No splash, just a plunk.
I paused, looking at their distorted form on the bottom of the tub.
Then I reached into the water with my gloved hand and removed the glasses, placing them into the sack along with the rat/thing. There would be no possible way I could ever wear them again. Not after they’d made contact with the infected water.
I peeled off the gloves and placed these as well in the trash bag, which I then secured at the top and brought downstairs to the curb.
After a quick trip to the store, I returned to the bathroom and filled the tub with four gallons of bleach and hot water and let it sit while I called in sick to work and watched daytime television for the next five hours.
Then I used an abrasive cleanser and a sponge to scour the entire tub as well as any of the tiles that would have been within visual range of the rat/thing. I wore normal yellow kitchen gloves for this, as my biohazard level was lower. Next, I used an S.O.S pad, which stripped some of the porcelain away. I wished I could have scrubbed ALL the porcelain off, as it was all rat/thing infected now. Forever. The rat/thing’s soul was in my bathtub, and I’ d just signed my lease for another year.
I wanted to cry, and I wanted to move. I wanted to move into a thirty-story Upper West Side apartment building even if it cost me my entire paycheck. I did not belong in the East Village with the “live-and-let-live” animal-loving NYU students. I belonged uptown with the surgically youthful moms who paid two thousand dollars each year to an exterminator to insure they didn’t have so much as an ant in their kitchen.
I called a friend who dates a plumber, and the plumber called me back (I paged him) and told me the most horrifying thing I had ever heard in my life: “Vermin sometimes climb up into the plumbing and get trapped in the shower head.” Which meant that I may have been showering, may still be showering, may someday be showering with piping-hot water filtered through a dead rat, without even knowing it.
This meant, naturally, that I would be unable to take a shower again for the rest of my life. Only sponge baths with Evian.
I now associated my entire bathroom, all cleaning products, and my eyeglasses and the distinctive smell of Raid with the rat/thing. Worse, I would think of it every time I showered for the rest of my life. I would be standing under the stream of hot water, and I would be checking my skin for hairs and whiskers. I could never take a bath again, either. Not with the very real danger of seeing a rat slip out the faucet into the tub of bubbles. These things happen to people “all the time,” the plumber said.
Also, I would now probably become sick with hantavirus.
I knew that one of the identifying traits of serial killers is that many of them tortured animals as children. The difference, I needed to believe, was that I was no longer a child. This had to count for something.
After a horribly long day, I needed a mental break. I threw on my parka, with the raccoon fur around the hood, and I went to see a movie.