At four in the morning I heard a scratching that sounded like someone was trying to break into our new home. J. and I were not yet fluent in the house’s natural yawning and moaning—the way it sighed when stretching its pilings and beams, or grunted against a pummeling Florida gale, or shuddered when thunder clapped—and I often startled at sounds, trying to discern which ones required attention. And I’d recently been diagnosed with partial hearing loss in my right ear, which meant I couldn’t make out certain sounds but also imagined noises that weren’t there.
In the predawn dark it was hard to tell if my tenuous hearing was playing tricks on me. Then I felt a paw press my calf. Arrow was awake. The dog had heard it too.
I got up to ensure the windows were locked. Outside, a gentle wind stirred the mango tree’s canopy. A distant streetlight flickered on and off like a lighthouse beacon.
J. groaned and rolled over. “What is it?”
“I heard something.”
Arrow growled, jumped off the bed, and began sniffing along the baseboards, moving the length of the room. When he galloped down the stairs, J. and I dutifully followed.
Arrow stood by the back door, ears up, eyes on us. Everything was just as we’d left it. Everything was silent—until it wasn’t. A scraping so violent it made my fingernails ache issued from a corner of the dining room. Afraid of scaring whatever it was away, J. eased open the back door, and the two of us stepped outside.
Frogs chirruped. Something—a bird, a fish, a single, lonesome alligator—shattered the glassy black surface of the pond. J. ran a flashlight over the siding, the eaves, the roof. Nothing.
“It’s already inside,” he said.
“Squirrels?”
“Maybe.” He sounded unconvinced.
“Not squirrels,” said the pest-control specialist who came later that morning, after J. had left for work. Squirrels are daytime animals, he explained. They sleep at night.
I hoped he would say opossum. I hoped he would say, even, raccoon. Either would have been inconvenient and unpleasant but more easily remedied—a Havahart trap, a relocation to a nearby nature preserve, a single hole to fill. Instead he said exactly what I didn’t want to hear.
In the Chinese zodiac, people born in the Year of the Rat are shrewd, fickle, creative, thrifty, and wise. They are a litter of cowardly, hot-tempered, picky musicians, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and writers. They may be plagued by a weak constitution and prone to head colds and other viruses. I was born in the Year of the Rat and, coincidentally or not, possess many of these characteristics. Though I’ve always considered myself hardy, my partial hearing loss—the cause of which doctors were yet unable to explain—suggested otherwise.
Each year of the Chinese zodiac has a corresponding element. Mine is water, which makes me a water rat. Water is an element of hiding and suggests an inability to choose something and stick to it. At times I’ve been true to my watery nature, having been accused of being unable to commit to a job, a person, a responsibility. My initial ambivalence about moving to Florida supported such accusations, and buying a house with J. was my attempt to act against type.
Still, I hadn’t counted on real, live rats. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard them before,” said Rat Guy #1, as he came to be known. “From the looks of it they’ve been here a while.” He wore a utility belt below a belly like unproofed bread dough. As he walked, his belt jangled with keys, flashlight, laser pointer, measuring tape, Swiss Army knife. He sweated beyond what was socially acceptable, even by Florida standards.
I hadn’t heard them before, but it turned out other people had. J. confessed to noting some rustling when he’d been up late a few weeks earlier. And my brother said he’d heard something when he and my sister-in-law had stayed overnight. Earlier in my life I might have been surprised, angry even, to learn they’d withheld the truth, but by then I’d come to believe it was human nature to look away, to plead ignorance. That was precisely what I’d done for months when my ear had begun to alert me, persistently, that there was a problem.
“I’ll close up the entry points,” said Rat Guy #1. “Set traps, fog the attic.” The fogging, he assured me, was safe for humans and canines—so safe, in fact, that it wouldn’t even kill the rats. Instead it left behind a perfume they found intolerable, driving them away.
This was my introduction to the pest-control business, and over the next several months I discovered that exterminators each have their own predilections, their preferred baits and traps, their brands of flashlights and trash bags in which to dispose of their prey. I also learned that, along with sound machines promising to transmit high-frequency pitches detected only by vermin, fogging is a scam.
Criminal or immoral tricksters are called “dirty rats” or “rat finks,” but Rat Guy #1 didn’t strike me as either of these. For one of what would be many visits, he arrived with his octogenarian mother who had been “bored outta my gourd” and “wanted a look-about.” Our generally discriminating dog loved him. When his truck appeared in the driveway, Arrow wailed at the front door, anxious to be let outside to spastically run circles around the man with an excitement he rarely demonstrated for anyone else, including J. or me. This was the most persuasive argument in favor of trusting Rat Guy #1.
Sloppily concealing his insecurity behind hyperbolic assurances, he just wasn’t slick enough to be a con man. His apparent lack of confidence was more than a little endearing, and something I imagined we had in common. It didn’t cross my mind until later that he may have made his own assumptions about me, a woman and a new homeowner who constantly asked him to repeat himself.
Around our neighborhood, winds from the Gulf of Mexico shook the jacaranda trees, loosening their blossoms so they blanketed roads and lawns in violet and periwinkle. Bougainvillea grew like kudzu. While Rat Guy #1 spoke, I watched blue jays and grackles hunt the anoles that sunned themselves on our patio furniture. One particularly proud bird waved its lunch at me, the tail of some unfortunate reptile waggling in its beak. Rat Guy #1 closed up what he told me were twenty-three entry points into our house, asking if I’d noticed them before.
Shamed, I shook my head.
“Well, they’re closed up now. And I set traps.” All that was left to do was fog the crawl spaces. “You’ll see.” Rat Guy #1 winked. “This’ll do the trick.” On the bottom of the bill, just below his signature, he wrote “LIFETIME GUARANTEE.”
When J. came home from work, he examined what Rat Guy #1 had written. Though my spouse was born in the Year of the Horse, an animal inclined to hope for the best, he said, “I’m not sure this will hold up in a court of law.”
The Chinese zodiac is cyclical, and you might be surprised to learn the rat is at the beginning of the cycle. The legend goes: The Jade Emperor announced a competition to determine which of the twelve animals in his kingdom were best suited to be royal guards. The sooner an animal passed through his heavenly gates, the higher its ranking. The race was on.
The rat ran into trouble when it came upon a turbulent river and feared it would be swept up in the current. It was contemplating how to solve the conundrum when the ox arrived. The rat decided to ride atop the ox, who was tall and strong enough to cross unharmed. Once the animals arrived on the opposite shore, the rat decided to stay put. After all, the ox was larger and faster. On the threshold of the heavenly gate, however, the rat leapt to the ground and dashed to the feet of the Jade Emperor, making it the winner.
The narrative has one glaring flaw: Rats are good swimmers. So good that in one astonishing case, an especially determined little guy swam a quarter mile across the Pacific Ocean, dodging predatory fish and birds to get from one island to another.
Rat Guy #1 confirmed this the next time he came by. The rats were coming for the pond, he explained. “They drink, they bathe, and then they sleep in your house.” The fogging did nothing. Within days the rodents began tap-dancing over my head, this time during the day. Even with my partial hearing loss I recognized the sound well enough to know it wasn’t a noise my brain had made up.
Ducking his head into the crawl space, Rat Guy #1 withdrew a spring-action trap heavy with its victim. “A female,” he said, holding it aloft so I could get a good look. “Fortunately it doesn’t look like she had babies recently.”
Female rats have a gestation period of twenty-one days, begin procreation within months of being born, and continue to reproduce for much of their lives—which can last up to three years. Litters are between eight and fourteen kittens. Up to six litters per year. The math was terrifying.
I didn’t ask how Rat Guy #1 knew the rat hadn’t had babies. I was too transfixed by the animal’s eyes, which were not beady and cold but inquisitive, intelligent, feeling. I hadn’t thought about the rats’ gender or roles as parents, or the charges I might be responsible for orphaning when I killed them. Yet here was this possible mother. Her mouth was open a hairline. The bar of the trap had snapped precisely behind the base of her head, severing her spine. Had she suffered?
“Unlikely,” said Rat Guy #1. “She didn’t know what hit her.”
He sounded just like the ENT who’d told me it was highly unlikely I’d lose my hearing in both ears. The doctor had no evidence to support his statement, just as he’d been unable to explain why I was experiencing hearing loss in the first place. There was no way for either of these men to know anything with certainty, and Rat Guy #1’s answer did little to absolve the overwhelming guilt I suddenly felt.
Since moving to Florida, I had become preternaturally sensitive to the lives of the nonhuman population. Unlike in the urban landscape I’d occupied in the North, nature was impossible to overlook here. Eagles nested atop a nearby power station, and ospreys on streetlights. Otters taught their babies how to catch largemouth bass in the pond. On my morning jogs I encountered armadillos, raccoons, opossums, and the elusive coyote. I shooed geckos out the back door and repositioned spiderwebs I’d unwittingly walked through. The mystery of my recent hearing loss contributed to my sense of the tenuousness of life. Yet here I was, hastening the deaths of other creatures.
Rat Guy #1 dropped dead rodent after dead rodent into a plastic bag emblazoned with the logo of the grocery store where I shopped. I wasn’t sure what disturbed me more: that he was using a container that had once held food for him and his family to consume, or that a body of anyone who’d been so vibrantly alive could be dispensed of in it.
He secured the bag in a knot and looped the handles over his wrist. Before closing the attic, he asked, “Do you see all that?” The flashlight’s beam followed a discolored track dotted with specks of hardened shit in the insulation. “They built pathways.”
Another tall tale is that rats are blind. They just have poor eyesight, compensated for by a keen sense of smell. They urinate and defecate along their preferred routes to make navigation easier. They’re also excellent listeners, their hearing superior to dogs’.
“You can smell that, right?” asked Rat Guy #1.
I grimaced.
“They sure are stealthy,” he said.
And shrewd, I thought, and creative, and wise. I, on the other hand, felt only cowardly, dumb, and increasingly victimized: by the rats who would not go away; by Rat Guy #1, who had failed to fix our problem; by our realtor, who’d convinced us to buy what I’d begun to believe was a money pit; by the home inspector, who’d overlooked the infestation; by the medical professionals who prescribed medications and reduced-sodium diets and stress-reduction techniques but could offer no reassurance that any of it would help me recover my hearing.
“I’ll double-check for more entry points,” said Rat Guy #1. “Maybe I missed something.”
“What about the fogging?”
He cleared his throat, beckoned to Arrow. “How do you mean?”
“You guaranteed it would work.”
“It does,” he said, keeping his eyes on our dog, “as long as the entry points are closed.”
I began to see my own naivete. Rat Guy #1 knew from the start that the fogging did nothing. The only thing that worked was preventing the animals from getting in. As if reading my mind, he hastened to add, “You might want to look into the plumbing. If I closed all the entry points—and I really think I did—that would be another way they’d get inside.” A leak in a drainpipe—that’s all it took.
After he left, I called a plumber. “Do you smell septic?” this man asked. “Are your water bills through the roof? Is there a rat swimming the backstroke in your toilet bowl?”
No, I said. No. No.
“Trust me,” the plumber said. “It’s not your plumbing.”
Another famous rat folktale: “The Pied Piper.” It turns out the story may have been inspired by true events. Hamelin, the village where the events are said to have taken place, is real. Though historical records dating from the 1300s say nothing about a mysterious stranger with a magical flute who cured the town of an infestation, they do indicate the simultaneous departure of more than a hundred children. Some speculate they left for the Crusades. Others wonder if the “departure” was metaphorical, the children having sloughed off their mortal coils after contracting a virus like the one the ENT now suggested had caused my hearing loss.
“Which virus?” I asked.
The doctor said there was no way of knowing.
“Can’t we treat it?”
He shook his head. Unlike the common cold, some viruses never leave the body. They are latent squatters waiting for an opportunity to attack a compromised immune system. And even if the doctor were able to rid me of this particular virus, it was too late to do anything about my hearing loss, which he had now determined was permanent.
Sitting on the examination table, I wondered: What was the point of going to doctors who offered no solutions, only more questions? And yet, before leaving, I dutifully scheduled a follow-up appointment.
I also kept calling Rat Guy #1. Each time, my useless pied piper came when summoned, never once charging me beyond the initial fee, but never offering a remedy. Perhaps he was the world’s worst rat fink.
“Let’s try someone new,” said J. “Do you want me to make some calls?”
I told him I’d handle it.
But I wasn’t handling anything. I don’t know why. Maybe it was inertia. Maybe it was because I’d fully comprehended that rats are living creatures, not unlike myself. I’d become ambivalent about destroying them. Didn’t they, like I, deserve a happy, healthy life? Or maybe I stuck with Rat Guy #1 because I wanted to trust in the goodness of others.
People, as a general rule, don’t like to tell you the truth. You must press them and listen closely to what they say, something made more difficult by my hearing loss. In a society that insists all limitations are self-imposed, the American who can admit defeat is a rare species indeed.
Plumbers, however, appear to be among them. “I can’t help you, lady,” said the second one I called. His directness was harsh but also refreshing and, dare I say, inspiring. After hanging up, I called Rat Guy #1 and announced we were through.
So began a long line of suitors who promised to make my life better. I, a Penelope, unraveled my story from scratch each time.
Rat Guy #2 (young, fit, tidy franchise uniform) offered to lure the animals into eating food containing a dye that would make their feces and urine glow. If he detected glowing poop in the attic, it would mean the rats were coming in from the outside. I pointed out that I already knew that.
Rat Guy #3 clomped over our roof and investigated the crawl spaces, circling the house inside and out so many times I began to wonder if I’d misheard him when he’d said the first inspection was complimentary, and he was charging me by the hour. Eventually he appeared at the front door, scratching his head. “I’m stumped,” he said. But this wasn’t enough to prevent him from trying to sell me an exclusive poison and some exterior traps that he would regularly empty for a monthly fee.
Rat Guy #4 wore gold cuff links and a signet ring on his pinkie. After dragging his fingers across the kitchen countertops and poking behind the stove, he stood so close to me the cloth of his shirt brushed my arm. I’d had to lock Arrow in the spare bedroom before letting this man inside my house. Now, as I stepped away to gain some space, I wondered if that had been a bad idea. Handing me his card, he said I should call when I wanted to set up a time for “servicing,” his eyes drifting from my chin to my breasts.
These men left traces of themselves behind like markings: treacly cologne, the tracks of a heavy work boot, tinfoil wrapping from a stick of gum. The house felt slightly less my own after they’d gone, as if they’d asserted their entitlement to it in a way I never would.
At my next ENT appointment, the doctor reminded me that hearing loss isn’t uncommon. “People adapt.” Easy enough to say for someone with good hearing.
How could I tell him that sounds—even unwelcome ones—were now unbearably precious to me? To lose my hearing even partially was to live just a little bit less.
“What about my other ear?” I asked.
“You don’t have to worry about that,” the ENT said. “It’s perfectly healthy.”
It is now, I thought. But what about later? Birdsong and wind, Arrow’s nails tick-ticking, J.’s singing, rain. As long as I had hearing in one ear, these remained accessible to me. But to lose the use of both ears would feel like the first handful of dirt tossed on my casket.
The ENT recommended I get a hearing aid. They’re not great, he warned, but they can help. Despite my hearing loss, the resignation in his voice rang sharp and clear.
Cut down your fruit trees, neighbors and friends advised. Get rid of your compost pile. Don’t grow a vegetable garden. Buy a rat-proof garbage bin. But the houses surrounding ours had their own fruit trees, gardens, and garbage, and rats are oblivious to property lines.
Strong-willed survivors, rats are too often scapegoats for the rest of the world’s ire. Well-worn pieces of clothing are called ratty. “Rats!” declares Charlie Brown every time his life doesn’t go according to plan. To rat someone out is to tattle on them. But rats weren’t always considered dirty or base. In ancient China they were symbols of good luck; the Year of the Rat is known to be particularly fortuitous.
“I get it,” a friend said, “but you can’t live with them in your house.” We’d been on a video call when the rats had interrupted our conversation with their skirmishing.
Maybe, I suggested, J. and I would learn to cohabitate with them.
My friend laughed. “You can’t be serious!”
“There’s just so much death,” I said.
In addition to the attic traps, we’d set more outside, but the problem was you had to be vigilant about emptying them. One morning I heard a pop like a gun firing. A gray squirrel had been caught but not killed, and a front leg, shoulder, and the side of its rib cage were crushed. When I attempted to release it, the animal screamed and pedaled its hind legs as if it were riding a bike, its claws leaving desperate scratches in the earth. “It was awful,” I told my friend. “And all my fault.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself,” she said. Collateral damage was inevitable. And gray squirrels were nearly as bad as rats. She reminded me that living with rats exposed me and J. (not to mention Arrow) to health threats, including viruses not unlike the one the ENT believed had caused my partial hearing loss. “Remember the Black Plague,” she said.
“Technically that was the result of fleas the rats carried.”
“My point is, the fleas needed the rats. And they can inflict serious damage to your house.”
This was true. Rats are capable of chewing through wood, soft metals, and cement, and many unofficial sources—most often pest-control companies trying to terrify you into hiring them—identify rats as a common cause of house fires because they may gnaw through electrical wires.
“You have to get rid of them,” said my friend. “Killing is the only way.”
Several days after our call I woke one morning to an empty bed. Downstairs, J. sat on the couch hugging a mug of coffee to his chest while Arrow napped draped over his lap.
“You’re up early,” I said.
“I couldn’t sleep. They kept him up too. Didn’t you hear them?”
Once a light sleeper, I now experienced the deepest, darkest silence if I turned my good ear to the pillow. I hadn’t heard a thing.
“It sounds like they’re moving to different parts of the house,” J. said. “There seem to be more of them.” He held up his phone. “The internet is telling me they might be digging their way into our living space.”
I sat down.
“I found this company,” he said. “You want me to call?”
I shook my head. “Give me the number.”
After J. headed to work, I made yet another call.
The latest Rat Guy distinguished himself enough to earn a new name. The Professor wore wire-rimmed glasses and spoke in a soft, assured baritone. Before entering the house, he wiped his shoes on the doormat and placed plastic booties over them, ensuring he’d leave no trace.
He took a genuine interest in the wildlife among which J. and I lived. Noting holes in the ground around our deck, he murmured approvingly. “Black racers.” The snakes would eat infant rats, helping with population control. So, too, would the owls and hawks in our oak trees. The Professor also debunked some of the information the other exterminators had provided. When I noted stains on the siding others had told me were evidence of rats, the Professor raised a skeptical brow. “I think those are from Cuban tree frogs,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Just look.” He peeled back a piece of siding darkened with stains. A goggle-eyed, anxious green face blinked back the sudden light.
The Professor said cutting down fruit trees wouldn’t do anything to dissuade the rats from entering the house. “They’re staying inside for protection,” he noted, “not to eat. Even if they were coming for fruit, all your neighbors would need to cut down their trees too.”
Finally: logic.
“I’m not going to waste your time,” he said. “I have no idea how they’re getting in. But I have a friend who can figure it out. If Angelo can’t help you, you might want to put the house back on the market.”
“Maybe we should sell the house,” J. said after I told him about my morning with the Professor.
J. had known my reservations about homeownership. Houses were black holes, sucking away your savings. Weekends spent mowing lawns, endless trips to hardware and home-decor stores, negotiations with insurance companies and banks. No one I knew who owned a house had ever made it look desirable. From J.’s perspective, my fears about homeownership had materialized in the rats. “You shouldn’t be spending your days this way,” he said.
People who know me might believe my instinct is to fight. I love a good argument, a plate thrown at a wall. But in truth I scare easily. Since moving to Florida, I’d spent most days resisting my flight instinct—an instinct my hearing loss had only strengthened. Determined not to give in to fear, I said, “He was only joking. And anyway, it’s irrational to sell a house whenever we have an issue with it.”
An hour later my telephone rang. It was Angelo. “I hear you have a problem I can fix.”
For a man whose specialty was rats, Angelo’s presentation was immaculate. Compact and wiry, he wore his hair trimmed close to his scalp and moussed, and his uniform was a brightly colored polo shirt tucked into belted cargo shorts—more golf caddie than angel of rodent death. His sneakers were so new I could practically smell their fresh-from-the-box scent. When handling traps he wore latex gloves and used pincers. In his truck sat an oversized bottle of sanitizer that he pumped generously into his hands, the antiseptic odor trailing behind him.
Unlike the others, Angelo was ignited by the challenge. After half a day’s worth of inspections and a smoke test through our pipes that proved the plumbers right, Angelo pounded elatedly on my front door. “I’ve found it!”
Pushing back birds of paradise and trampling the ferns, he led me to a spot outside the guest bedroom window. He held a mirror on the end of a telescopic pointer near where a panel of siding hovered a few inches from the ground. “Look at the reflection. Do you see that?”
I crouched down, squinted.
“There.” He pointed at the glass. “That spot.” A thin black crescent in the wooden beam. An opening. The rats had chewed their way in, he explained. This was their entry point.
“How can you tell?”
Angelo showed me the tracks in the dirt around the opening, the black pellets I’d mistaken for the excrement of anoles and geckos. The rats wiggled in and out of this narrow aperture each night, scrambling up the beam that led directly into the attic. That’s all it took: a space the size of a quarter.
Angelo mixed cement and used it to fill the hole. As he set traps in the crawl spaces, I considered the exposed roof beams stained with moisture, the sharp ends of roofing nails that pierced through plywood, the pink insulation that buckled off the walls. For a structure meant to provide shelter, it struck me as flimsy and easy to invade—the same way I felt about my body.
“I’ll come back in a few days,” he said as he removed his gloves, “to clean and reset the traps.”
“But if they’re not getting into the house . . .”
“They’re in your house now. They sleep here during the day.” At night, he explained, they’d leave and search for food, but if the spot he’d closed up was their entrance, it was also their exit: They’d have no way of getting out. “You probably won’t sleep for a few nights. They’ll get hungry and cave to the traps. And then they’ll start to eat each—”
I held up a hand. “I got it.”
“It can get pretty nasty,” Angelo admitted. “The will to survive.”
For a week we didn’t sleep, not even when I lay on my left side to block the sound. The rats’ footfalls ran along the wall behind our heads as they searched for an escape. Their digging went on into the early morning. We ran the fan, used a white-noise machine, and played meditative music, but the hysteria that grew as they comprehended their entrapment seeped through the ventilation system and into our exhausted brains.
Every two days Angelo returned to clear the traps. One day he insisted on showing me. “I know it’s terrible,” he said, “but it’s proof your problem is nearing its end.” Wedged between metal bar and wood platform was nothing more than a long gray tail. “They’re like that snake, that symbol.” Angelo snapped his fingers. “You know what I mean? Eating its own tail.”
“The Ouroboros.”
“That’s the one.”
He didn’t seem to register the obvious: The only thing that hadn’t been eaten was the tail. Given the circumstances, a symbol of regeneration didn’t strike me as the appropriate analogy.
On the seventh night, we slept undisturbed. The next time Angelo visited, he found a whole dead rat untouched in the jaws of a trap. Just to be sure it was the last one, he left it for two more days. When he returned and it was still intact, he declared our infestation over.
At his recommendation we waited two more months, listening for signs of reentry. When none returned, we determined it safe to call a cleanup company Angelo had recommended. Underscoring that the animals, dead or alive, posed a health risk, the crew wore banana-colored hazmat suits and full-face respirators. They ran a large tube from the attic, down the stairs, and into the front yard, where an industrial vacuum sucked the soiled insulation out. It would need to be taken to a special facility for hazardous waste.
Afterward the men scrubbed and sprayed and fumigated, only then installing new insulation. Just before leaving, the workers assured me they hadn’t found any additional openings. Everything seemed solid, sealed up, secure. “But it’s Florida,” one of them said. “There will always be rats.”
Sometimes at night, I woke startled from dreams. Not quite nightmares, they troubled me enough that I was unable to fall back asleep. I stared into the darkness, listening as best I could. Sometimes I thought I detected a great horned owl hooting, a rain cloud unleashing rain, something scrambling across the warped boards of the balcony. Eventually listening exhausted me, and I sank into a murky, swamp-like sleep.
The next morning I couldn’t recall the dreams or what it was about them that had woken me, but I’d recall what I worried, against all evidence, might have disrupted them. My fear trumped rationality. After testing to make sure the hearing in my second ear was still intact, I grabbed a flashlight and screwdriver, climbed the stairs, and opened the utility-closet door.
Where once I’d been confident, now I no longer felt certain about anything. My life from here on out would be lived in a fog of doubt. I removed the panels from the walls and held my breath. I shone a light across the dim space.
The air was warm and aseptic, the insulation the color of clean, healthy lungs. There were no signs of intruders eager to dismember my home. All was quiet. All was untouched.
