Aholaah Arzah
The Mouse
Startled, I am forced to sacrifice the first hot draught of my morning coffee to whatever demon (identifiable by a disconcerting shift in my peripheral vision) inhabits the living room. Too often in these early hours I meet my fears in the form of vague apprehension, forgotten bills, unfulfilled obligations, a sense of the days relentlessly repeating themselves and an artistic inertia that even a late in life graduate degree has not dispelled. This morning the demon chooses to represent itself as a small innocuous mouse whose silver-gray fur looks as soft as a gosling's down. While it is possible that it is just a mouse; an official determination cannot yet be made. I no longer have the brazen if erratic confidence of my youth. I have to go with my gut, with imperceptible even if imagined manifestations, with some basic instinct for alarm and indignation.
*
Alarm and indignation are not getting me very far in the business sector. I will acknowledge that. This most recent promotion to a position of greater responsibility, this accidental career achievement isn't anything I ever aspired to. I was a relatively content malcontent in my former worker bee anonymity. At this level, no one seems to appreciate my let's get to it, get the job done, just spit it out and get the hell out of my office work ethic. There is entirely too much task organization and approach strategy, a pseudo nurturing of the grunt staff. Never mind all the bogus lifestyle training and mind set persuasion, if you really want to nurture people; pay them more, give them better benefits, give them a little respect. No one is really fooling anybody. I'm not fooling myself. Right about now I should be an adjunct professor in a small peninsula college infusing other late bloomers with expurgatorial zeal. Here in this corporate for-profit pseudo social services position, I am only occasionally appreciated to the extent of a unified relief that no else has to undertake the overwhelming number of odious, overly complicated and redundant tasks that comprise my position. Did I say appreciated? I should have said grudgingly acknowledged. I am a large stone in the middle of a stream. All the seasonal flotsam passes to either side in its current drawn floundering confusion while I remain fixedly engaged in my duties. I am accused of being emotionally remote, blunt and abrupt to the point of rudeness but I get the job done. The flotsam floats flailing on and I yet remain.
*
The hot brown slosh from the swaying cup of coffee burns my fingers and the tops of my bare feet but it is not entirely unpleasant this early in the morning. I thought I heard the squeal of the mouse in the blustering kettle and a chorus of squeaks when I settled into my chair. I can easily imagine a nest of naked young mice tucked deep into the wood and wire frame of the old leather chair, tenants of the same formerly grand establishment as myself but making their entry through the poor door of torn lining. If even while you live well within the city proper, you deliberately dwell apart from its civilities in your rustic cabin near a lagoon surrounded by blackberry brambles where raccoons keep condos and coyotes sing, and you refuse to mow the section allotted to you as your lawn, it is I suppose reasonable that field mice will eventually make their way through the tangles of long grasses and into your home.
*
When I decided at fifty-seven to make a last grasp at owning my secret identity as an artist and pursue a Master's Degree, I was envisioning all the pieces falling into place, a part time teaching position leaving sufficient hours for me to furrow my brow over the drawing board leaving a sticky patina of coffee stains and paint smears. No one had yet mentioned the glut of MA degrees being cranked out by colleges, that the degree would soon be as meaningless as the BA had become, that a legion of shiny much younger MAs would go forth every year to readily fill any adjunct positions available.
*
I could be a good sport and participate in the office culture, its latest farce and with a return memo, assure everyone that I do in fact enjoy regular sexual gratification, something which ironically the greater portion of them in their predictable and staid relationships, I surmise do not. Then I could deliver the punch line, unfortunately for you this has little effect on my personality. The truth is, I am just not that kind of conflicted. I have lived through a sad assortment of relationships defined and constrained by socially distorted expectations and have found that I most enjoy the intimate company of others in small sporadic doses; the wild lusty whim of a blustery day on the beach or the smoky bourbon desire of low jazz under a rain rattled roof. Most nights I prefer to succumb alone to the warm swaddle of my dreams. I am, for the most part, happily self-contained. The pathetic office exchange is just too sad, like that enormously fat man that sits at the bus stop with his pendulous, sweat-panted belly hanging almost to his ankles, tossing condoms and innuendos.
*
I eschew my co-workers and their memos, I eschew group participation. I prefer to amuse myself making my little sketches and notes on the conveniently ruled extra sticky note pads that I order in excess for this purpose. During lunch break I perused the art gallery on Taylor and was assaulted by the four-foot-high sculpture of the misaligned hinges of a broken clam shell represented in cast aluminum. It was obvious to my eye that the artist completely failed to see beyond the immediate attraction of the vulva like folds and contours and left those suggestive fragments imitated in the broken stunted forms in which he no doubt found them. On my little piece of paper, I let the essence of what was once there, what could be there, flare into life. I let the silvery metal extrapolate into undulations of clear cast glass that flutter out in the form of wings, of cloud wisp, of breath. I am annoyed by that artist's hackneyed attempt. I am further annoyed by the gallery owner's pathetic appreciation but I am also seething all day with my self-imposed limitations. The purpose of the job is to afford the shelter of the cabin, the purpose of the shelter of the cabin is to house my creative endeavors. The job sucks all energy and creativity; my body is housed but the point of my life is dulled to a nubbin.
*
I confess that I consider sucking the mouse up in the vacuum and even go so far as to pursue it around the baseboards of the living room with the nozzle but I stop after the first terrible thwump of something more sizeable than a dust bunny. It could have been the mouse, but it could have also been any number of other things as well; an old sock, a crumbled clot of tissues, the missing bottle of fingernail polish. I was relieved when I later heard the creak and shift, the heavy furniture moving sounds in the next room. The old house has always been a variable symphony of creaks and shudders, small shiftings, tiny snaps and crackles. It is possible that the mouse and I have been cohabiting for years. Odd how the furtive actions of small things have such reverberations.
*
It may be that I am not so much a rock as something much more porous such as sandstone and therefore particularly vulnerable to friction. I seem to be eroding. Sometimes it is difficult to remember why I have allowed myself to become so entrenched. Originally there must have been a timeline, five-year plan, a personal escape clause but I seem to have lost sight of any other purpose then the completion of a pattern of days. I drudge on even while convinced that the job is killing me, is hastening the inevitable physical and mental decline, fraying the last nerve ending, settling its dark pallor over each aspect of each new day. Isn't it enough that autumn is impending and the chill is creeping its way in through the cracks in the seams? At various points in the day I am completely arrested by the honking cacophony of geese. There is a strange vibratory migratory fluttering within my chest that is so alarming I consult the doctor a little desperate with symptoms. The nurse hooks me up to the EKG and the doctor brings me a sheet of paper illustrating the regular beats of my heart. When I observe that this is probably intended to reassure me in times of panic she nods. And throughout the day when I locate my pulse on the inside of my wrist my heart does seem to be beating regularly enough.
*
A single minute speck of dust or a single stray crumb from an egg McMuffin deposited on the scanner bed of the printer results in a black line marring the copy, marring all the subsequent copies. A scattering of such particles creates a bar code effect. Sadly, I have occasionally taken a certain mental refuge in the pristine perfection of a new copy still warm from the printer. I don't understand why others cannot. The site managers' sloppy copies with their careless distracting lines go forward into service to be stained with rings from their coffee cups, recopied, smudged and recopied again. The to-be-completed-forms-in-progress live on the floors of their vehicles, stuffed in the bottoms of their bags, crammed into notebooks and folders to make their wrinkled, soiled way back into my inbox. The once perfect forms are now as crumbled, yellow and calligraphied as old maps. I smooth them out on my desk and scrutinize their markings but they are becoming undecipherable, these maps to nowhere. Here be a fugue state, here be a disconcerting genetic fingerprint, here be a whirlpool of resistance subsuming the tiny flailing swimmers.
*
As consolation, I have cultivated the company of some crows in the tree outside my office window with the generous distribution of garlic and butter crackers. I have my camera propped, angled and focused. A ruffled and impatient youth caws insistently for the attention of the custodial crow parent. Click. A large drop of rain plops directly on his disheveled head and he ducks. Click. Looks up curiously. Click. It has been an exceptionally mild spring stretching into a fine gulden summer. Still it cannot be possible that here in the northwest on the same peninsula that is home to a rain forest that this young crow has not yet known rain. It would seem that the repetition of some predictable experiences might in the right circumstances still invoke wonder.
*
In the evening, I drag myself home, curl into my chair and stream some mindless drivel on Netflix until I fall exhausted to sudden and deep sleep. I wake much too early, abruptly in alarm, to a mental recitation of fears, to the frantic throbbing of my heart, to the sounds of gnawing, of chewing in the dark. Loud and close, too loud to be the mouse even if the mouse were right under my bed, chewing at the portfolio of abandoned artwork gathering its fatal felt of dust. I suddenly fear not a mouse but a rat, a legion of rats, a complete and utter infestation. I am afraid to place my feet on the floor to flee. Huddled in my bed, gradually I come to recognize the sounds as movement through long grass, something large with substance enough to thump against the exterior wall of the cabin, to mimic a gusty breeze in the bamboo, something large enough to bite with authority and chomp a low echo into the night. A deer is eating the last pears from the tree.
*
It is getting colder in the mornings. I imagine I hear the squeal of the mouse in the stiff brakes of the morning cars on the hill. When I open the drawer for some aluminum foil there are two mice looking back at me. There is really something very sweet about how trustingly they gaze up at me. They have thoroughly shredded the cheesecloth, string, some parchment paper and plastic bags and are making themselves comfortably at home, making themselves a nest. There ought to be a color called mouse foot pink, that lovely, lovely hue and another for the soft silvery fur and an adjective specifically for those disproportionately large eyes, those dark reflective orbs. Right before the last co-inhabitor of the cabin was ejected or made his escape (I have never been certain how this actually played out) he went on a small spree of buying fancy cooking utensils; spatulas made of a stiff red plastic and tongs with the same rubbery coated tips. Now they seem the perfect tool for extracting a mouse. I carefully pluck one mouse up with the rubber coated tongs and deposit it outside in the overgrown grass of my backyard. The other mouse, now tong savvy, flattens itself and shimmies through the space between the drawer and cabinet. I'd like to think that it is off searching out its mate and soon reunited they will be deciding in tiny mouse communication to relocate to a safer environment; the shed for example, which I have entirely given over to whatever wild creatures care to take shelter there.
*
When I share my mouse stories at work, I am told that there are concerns: the chewing of wires, electrical fires, the contamination of food stuffs, the potential for multiplication, for disease. I am persuaded there is a need to take action. The mouse ignores the garish green plastic no-kill trap in the shape of a small cabin, after all this larger cabin is conspicuously more spacious and diverse in textures. Neither is the mouse fooled by the small chunk of cheese conspicuously displayed in the center of the glue trap. It is the regrettable propensity for mazes and their implied promise of a reward earned for clever effort that proves irresistible. There is a growing area of funk near the refrigerator and I pull out the shelving there and run the small circle of light carefully over the area. I am expecting a small corpse lying in a shroud of dust but there is just the tiny one turn mouse maze I placed more as a talisman than an intended solution. Perhaps I had imagined that the clever mouse would give it a suspicious sniff, a wary nibble and leave, scurry off to an as yet inviolate cranny. It seems disproportionably tragic to find it there, wedged dead in the maze with its nose to the poisonous reward.
*
Autumn has always been my favorite season; the vibrant clear blue skies and the brilliantly glowing foliage in warm yellows, oranges and reds. Everything on the verge of transition yet still distinctly, beautifully itself. Chill mornings and warm afternoons, the spicy funk of leave mulch, the colorful squash and pumpkins, all the best of summer tempered by impending cold. The apples are finally ripe and fragrant on the trees. I heard the coyotes last night and now the low tones of the ships sounding their horns in the morning fog and neither of these or nor anything else I value is really dependent on that lousy job.
