In the Walls
The noise comes from the walls. I put my ear above the cold radiator to listen to the sound of pencil writing, of steel pens on an EEG. Scritch, scritch. Then it moves, this scritch sound, and my ear moves with it, drawn like a magnet. I can make out a flurry of digs behind the plaster and lathe. Tiny sharp claws. Mice. The realization hits me, and then I am on my knees by the bathroom sink, hands shaking and snatching at the Lorazepam I’ve spilled. Panic hits this way, like a revolver fired to your head from behind. The doctor calls it an attack, so I swallow these pills in self-defense. Does this explain? The panic waits by roadsides, along highways, and finds you in your car (I remember mine, green with a stick shift and pinstripes, left to rot in the garage). Better to stay in the house where you are safe, but then there is this: mice in the bones of the house, eating away insulation, wiring, wallboard, shelter.
Sometimes, the panic gets in your house.
Sometimes, you are not safe.
I hold out against the night curled in the recliner, and at first light find Arrow Exterminating in my phone and dial. My day was to be given over to stuffing envelopes with offers for discount funeral insurance, only a dollar a week, and a free rain gauge with every inquiry. I take a vacation and turn on the TV. A nature show, alligators and muck-water and Spanish moss. Commercials for cat food and adult diapers. When the knock comes I check the peephole, that fisheye world outside. There stands a woman in a red cap and a gray jumpsuit. Her truck sits parked on the street, a giant black plastic spider on the roof. I open the door to let her inside, praying to this khaki saint, Rid me of this.
Her name, Lee Ann, is stitched in red on the jumpsuit. She carries a canvas bag and a clipboard thick with pink sheets.
“You’re Mr. Casselman,” she says, looking at the clipboard. She has a cigarette voice full of Midwestern twang.
“Yes,” I say. “David is fine.”
“And it’s rodents, David?” she says, still reading her clipboard. “More specifically mice?”
“Yes. I need you to destroy them.”
“That’s what we’re paid for.” She looks at me. “Kill, kill, kill.” She smiles, revealing gold bridgework and lines around her mouth. The left side of her forehead and ear are covered by a port-wine stain the color of ripe plums. The stain disappears into the collar of her jumpsuit. She’s tall and bony and strong.
I lead her to the bedroom, past the boxes of envelopes stacked in the living room, boxes and boxes of envelopes and rain gauges.
“You moving?” she asks.
“Not likely,” I tell her. I look around at the furnishings that have been here since forever. Dark mahogany chairs, tobacco-brown lampshades, maroon rugs, knobby glass candy dishes. After my mother died, my father added a skylight to the middle of the vaulted den ceiling, the only change he ever made to our house. At night he’d lie on the rug listening to Orioles games, drinking wine from the bottle, staring at the stars through the plexiglass. In the winter he’d do the same thing, but instead of baseball he’d listen to the cassette tapes he ordered through the mail, watching snow or frost cover his skylight. He didn’t talk to me much after she was gone. On the day he dropped me off at college, he pulled up to the curb by Old Main, nodded, said “good luck,” and patted me on the shoulder. As I was gathering my bags from the back seat, he popped one of those cassettes — Perry Como Gold — into the player of his Chrysler, then drove off. Just as he rounded the corner, I had my first panic attack, and I was back living here a week later. He never asked me about any of it. By now the skylight is covered by dirt and scratches, the light that filters through the color of weak coffee. I can still see him there, though. A ghost in a house of ghosts, and me among them. I only think about this because of the rare occasion of a stranger standing in my house, and I wonder how much of everything she can discern by the just the feel of things, the tilt of a chair in the corner, the handprints in the dust on the stereo. Did I mention I haven’t left here in 23 years?
From her canvas bag Lee Ann withdraws a stethoscope and spreads it to her varicolored ears, holds it against the bedroom wall where I heard the scritching. She listens, her eyes cut to the side, her breath a slight whistle through her nose. She straightens and lets the stethoscope loop around her neck. Her fingernails are long and blood red, her hands muscular.
“Not here,” she says. “Nothing.” She shrugs.
I feel my face heat up. Among the several manifestations of my problems, I do not include hallucinations.
She looks up at me. “How long have you been growing the beard? It’s wrong for your face shape. I used to be a cosmetologist.”
I scratch at my whiskers. My last shave, my last look in a mirror, when?
“I …”
“Not flirting,” she says. “I have a wife. What are you, maybe forty-six, forty-seven?”
“Fifty-two,” I tell her. “And don’t tell me I didn’t hear anything. I know what I heard.”
She closes her eyes. “I’m sure of that,” she says. “We’re in your home, Mr. Cas — David. But these walls are only a passageway, they’re not…” She stops in mid-sentence, and I’m left waiting for her to finish. For a minute she stands there, then begins whispering, so I have to lean in to hear her.
“If I were a mouse, mus musculus,” she says, “where would I feel at home, where would I trust my instinctual sense of safety?” Her nose wrinkles.
“What are you talking about?”
She grabs my forearm and pulls me toward the kitchen. This touch is rare. The warmth of her palm soaks into my skin like a drug. She listens with her stethoscope along the floorboard, at the back of the cabinets.
“Fifty-two and no missus,” she says. “Lucky or loser?”
I give her a polite half laugh.
She stands up, tugs the stethoscope from her ears, then lifts her nose and sniffs. “You smell that?”
“The mice?”
She laughs. “You can’t smell mice, David,” she says. “The harbor. You’re lucky to live so close. I have to drive in from Glen Burnie. Every damn day.”
This is the smell I’ve always breathed, blown in off Baltimore Harbor. Fish and oil, diesel and humidity, arc welds and salt.
“The odor of my childhood,” I tell her. “Part of me, yet I hardly notice it.” My voice comes too loud, too fast. This sentimentality grows on me like fungus. On the worst days I will talk, spilling out words, to delivery boys, salesmen, bicycle Mormons. There’s a kind of thirst, you see.
“Good news, bad news,” she says. “My guess, you got wharf rats. The big guys, the one-pounders.”
My stomach seizes. “There’s good news in this?”
“Well, they scare off all the mice.” She laughs. “And you got me to get rid of ’em.”
But she can’t get rid of them, not today. She writes up an estimate for the job and promises to return the next day to begin.
I read over the estimate, two-hundred dollars for poisons and procedures.
“Will this kill them?” I ask.
“You can’t kill them. Not all of them. Too big and too mean. Put it this way, you see any of these boys, they’ll look at you like you’ve invaded their house.”
“I can’t live with this,” I say, and it is not melodrama; what remains for me other than this house?
“They say there’s one rat for every person in Baltimore County,” she says. “So if you see one, then okay, maybe it’s you, your rat.” I just shake my head and she looks at me like I am another order of pest with which she has dealt: panickus homeownerus. How much panic, she can’t possibly know.
“Listen,” she says, “don’t think about it. Go on down to Maude’s, grab a beer, and let Jose shuck a plate of oysters for you. Take your mind off things.”
“Maude’s?” The name pulls like thread around the edge of my memory.
“You ought to be a regular, living in walking distance. You ever go? Wednesday happy hour is oyster shots for fifty cents. Thursday nights, karaoke.”
“It’s been a while,” I tell her.
More than a while. Fridays after school my mother would take me there to meet my father, his work in the McCormick spice factory over for the week. Fish on Friday back when every Catholic had to, clams and scallops and oysters dipped in drawn butter, too good going down to feel like penance. Wooden tables bolted to the cement, bare bulbs hung from frayed cords, sawdust on the floors, newspaper spread out on the tables, the iced tea leaving rings in the print. My father, his brown jumpsuit full of the smell of cinnamon and ginger, his fingernails dark, would tell me I ought to check my half-dozen oysters for pearls.
“Maude’s is still there? I can’t believe it.”
“Where have you been? They put this big marker plaque outside. I go to down a few brews and feel like a tourist display. And they don’t want people eating oysters anymore. Red tides, lead poisoning, bacteria, you name it, right? I’ll take my fucking chances.” She shrugs, nods, has me sign some papers, then leaves. I watch her drive away with the big plastic spider on her roof, leaning out of my door, stepping onto the sidewalk, until the first wave of nausea draws me back.
* * *
Night comes quickly this late in October, and with it, this time, the scritch scritch in my walls. The noise of it keeps me awake, and for a time I stuff envelopes and watch the Home Shopping Network with the sound off. Once or twice I have called and ordered something I didn’t need—a talking alarm clock, Disney Christmas tree ornaments. The idea appeals, someone like myself as a vehicle of commerce, locked away in my home yet causing assembly lines to roll, trucks to make deliveries, orders to be filled. Amazon, Door Dash, Grub Hub, Instacart. The world has made easier my particular brand of crazy. But tonight I need silence to hear the rats, the big boys, moving through my walls.
I go into the bathroom to look at my face, to see if it is wrong for the beard I’ve sprouted. This room too carries signs of its age, stamped tin ceilings, ornate radiators. Much of the silver backing on the gilt-framed mirror is gone, worn away by the years. It doesn’t make for much of a mirror. My face looks antique, the high-collared visage of some attic trunk relative captured in daguerreotype. At some point in my history, my hair began graying, falling away on top.
It’s hard to recognize myself, lately. I wonder why. But then, I think, I lack context. If I died and remained here to haunt this house, would I know? Would it be any different? Can you haunt a memory of yourself?
“Just rats,” I say to my reflection as I pick up my razor. “What are you afraid of?”
I wrestled in high school, at 185. I had a girlfriend and a Camaro. I wasn’t afraid of anything. I had plans and a future. What do you do when your fearlessness retreats in fear? When your mind turns on itself? When years are really decades?
In the kitchen I drink milk from the jug while dark shapes move in the corners of my vision. Maybe I’m seeing things, wanting to see them, to stare them down. Then leftover Chinese, so I’m not taking Lorazepam on an empty stomach. I stand in the near-dark kitchen, listening to the sound of construction still happening nearby, the deeply grounded clank of a diesel hammer driving piles into the earth. Then there is another noise. Or is there? A shuffle and scratch along the row of cookbooks on the kitchen counter near the coffee pot. Click of claws on formica, the rasp of fur against paperback books. I freeze, wanting the sound to vanish as my dark imaginings had, but this is unmistakable. I hear them, picking their way along, living here. My effort to look at the sound makes my eyes pulse, flares of deep red and purple against an etching of black. I leave the light off and get out of the kitchen. As it happens, I don’t want to see him, don’t want him to be me, my rat, because I know he will look like any other in this county of a million, and I will want him to be dead.
***
When Lee Ann returns the next morning, she looks the same except that she has traded her Arrow Exterminating cap for a Baltimore Orioles cap, the little cartoon bird swinging a baseball bat. Across her shoulder she carries a larger canvas bag. She asks me to sign some more papers and to write a check for down payment. Money is no problem, with the settlement that came after my father died under a fallen bundle of plywood at the lumberyard where he worked after McCormick’s closed. But still I think to ask what it is I’m paying for, the rats still alive in the bones of my house.
“We’re going to run the three cons,” she says. “Contain the rats to a part of the house, confine the feeding area, convince them to get the hell out of here.”
“You can’t kill them?”
“A few of the short-bus ones. But it’s mostly like I said. We’ll make them not want to be here, move them along, make them somebody else’s problem.” She nods at me and the stain on her head shifts.
“Job security,” I say. She laughs and I smile.
“Think of me as the mob,” she says. “Kill enough to send a message.” She says this in a throaty Marlon Brando voice. I laugh and she smiles, an exchange. I remember now, how this was, the currency of conversation.
She opens the bag and listens for a while with her stethoscope. Her head nods while she does this, her eyes closed. Then she withdraws a turkey baster from the bag and begins pumping powder into every crack and crevice she can find, behind the sink pipes, along the floorboards. She stuffs bigger cracks with torn pieces of steel wool. She follows the same pattern in all the rooms, spraying powder and plugging holes I never knew were there.
“You shaved,” she says, looking up at me.
I rub my jaw. “Just a trim.”
She smiles. “Looking a little more human, there.”
“Will this work?” I ask her.
“Should confine them, but you can’t tell,” she says. She holds up the stethoscope. “You ever listen to your heart?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her. “Can’t say I have.”
“This sounds strange, but it’s how you learn to listen for rats, termites, wood borers, you name it. Hidden monsters. If you concentrate you learn to find the noise your heart makes between beats. This little whoosh, is all it is. Then you know you got your ears trained.” I look at her trained ears, purple and pink.
“How did they get into my house? The rats?”
She withdraws from the bag what looks like a black plastic ashtray. “They get in wherever they want,” she says. “A few blocks over you got road crews tearing up by Camden Yards for some new whatever, digging up the streets, putting a big hole in the ground. Rats are like anybody, don’t want to be disturbed.”
“First they close McCormick’s, now everything else, I guess,” I say. It’s just something to say, a used piece of small talk. McCormick’s closed when I was a kid. And I have no idea what Baltimore looks like now, except what I see on TV.
Lee Ann shrugs, searching through her black bag. She takes a handful of pellets (“dog food,” she tells me) out of the bag, loads it in the tray, and sprinkles the food with some white powder. “History is just whatever happens,” she says finally. “It’s not like it’s carved in gold.”
As she heads to the basement, I think of my mother every morning finishing the newspaper over black coffee and cigarettes lit one on another, devouring The Sun, then opening the door to the basement and tossing the paper down the dark stairwell. Decades of that, and when she died I went down into that dark, the papers three-feet-deep in the narrow basement. I climbed across them with a snow shovel and a carton of lawn bags. On top I dug into George Bush, Hurricane Katrina, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 9/11, Kurt Cobain, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, down through the LA riots, Oklahoma City and the Berlin Wall, OJ, Spice Girls, and the death of Diana, before the blade scraped the concrete floor. Everything, all of it, got bagged up and thrown away.
“Now this is where the customer starts to feel ripped off,” Lee Ann says. She has returned from her work in the basement, where my father’s bag of golf clubs still leans against the wall.
She stands with her hands on her hips. “They see me throwing around trays of hot food for the boys, stuffing steel wool around the floorboards, they start thinking `I could’ve done that.’ But I know the enemy, is the difference.”
“The three cons.”
“Look at you … catching on.” She smiles at me, then takes a screwdriver from her pocket, removes the forced air vent on the wall, and shoves a tray of poisoned food into the ductwork. The stain that marks her left side and spills into her jumper top no longer seems ugly to me. It’s more like the makeup women wear, there to highlight her gangly, big-boned beauty. For a moment I can see her at Maude’s, her boots in the sawdust, her elbows on the table, square face bent over a pile of silvered oyster shells. She slurps down another one. Red tide flickers in her mind. She’ll take her chances.
“Rats mate for life,” she says. “They got regular habits. We know that for fact, so we have to use it in running the three cons.”
“They mate for life?”
“Get married, have fifteen hundred babies, settle down, move into a nice house.” She laughs at her own joke.
“Yeah, my nice house,” I say.
She looks around. “You decorate this place yourself? Or the missus? Or do you just collect antiques? Am I being nosy?”
“No missus, like I told you,” I say to her. “My mom decorated the house, and I just haven’t really changed much. Most of the stuff came from her parents, so I guess they are antiques by now. Hadn’t thought of that.”
“That a working fireplace? Looks like a working fireplace,” she says.
“Works if you work it, I guess,” I tell her.
She nods, still looking around. I wish I could explain how it’s not possible to buy different furniture. I mean, yes, they deliver, but what I feel in my bones is that the house is a thing that exists as it is, as it always was, that I could no more change the furniture than I could change the bricks that make up the outside structure. But there is no way to explain it, because there is no real logic behind it. I try to imagine a life that is not imposed from outside or grown from deep inside, a life composed of choices. I try to imagine the rail yard gone, or what Oriole Park must look like by now, all modern and fancy. I try to think of change that is not merely a wearing out, an old house settling on its foundation, falling in.
“Hey, is The Dizz still there?” I ask her. “Since you mentioned Maude’s”
“You don’t get out much, do you?” She loads another tray of poisoned food and slides it behind the refrigerator. I shrug.
“The Dizz is long gone,” she says. “McCormick’s site is some fancy place with a dance club. The wheel of time,” she says, but I don’t know exactly what this means. I picture my father punching the clock and walking the docks, buying dollar beers after work. Let time pass, let my father die, let the factory close, let the city change its face. Now bring in people dancing, moving against one another, finding a night of sex where once cinnamon bark and clove pods and basil leaves were hung to dry. I want to ask Lee Ann how it is that the world trusts itself to such easy newness? The memory of what’s been lost to time wears away, like a shine dulled on old silverware.
“At some point,” she says, “you’re going to hear a sound that’s not pleasant to most people. You ever hear a rabbit cry?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“The rats run the walls at night, okay? At some point one of them gets hold of some of this bromadiolone, and soon as they eat it they figure what’s what. Fuck around and find out, right? Internal bleeding. You’ll hear ’em running and crying back to their mates that they been had, done for.”
I look at Lee Ann, shaking my head.
“What you want to remember,” she says, “is that’s a good sound for us. It means we’re winning, we’ve turned the tide. So, if you hear that sound, you remember. Death just means we’re closer to being free of this mess.”
Lee Ann finishes her work and puts her poisons and tools back into the canvas bag. She says that within a week my walls will likely be silent, the rats moved on, the only noise that of the old walls creaking, sounds I know.
“You ought to get out for a while, till they’re all gone,” she says. “Find a motel.”
I pretend to consider the idea. “I guess I’ll stay on here,” I tell her.
“Well, at least go on out to happy hour at Maude’s, before they go and change it to another disco club.”
I laugh at her joke. Somehow, I feel an enormous relief well up through me. “I think Maude’s will still be there a while,” I say.
“I like to think so too,” she says, “but let’s be real.”
When she opens the door there is a burst of afternoon light, the noise of the city, of families that live beside me along Chamber Street. I wave, watch her start the truck and drive away.
***
Two days of rain and TV. This afternoon I have sat for three hours, trying to stuff enough envelopes to meet my quota. I strain my ears for the sounds in the walls, the scritch or the crying or the silence that means the three cons are working. I think of Maude’s again, my mother grimacing at the raw oysters my father and I ate, the short beers he swallowed with his head tipped back and his Adam’s apple moving, the sticks of cinnamon bark he chewed to get the fish off his breath. Cold nights in winter, the early dark, buoys clanging in the harbor, all the windows fogged over. I am five blocks away from where that tiny restaurant has always sat, in this house where I have always lived. Nothing has changed, nothing is changing. A good song to sing while you grow old and stiff in your joints, while the world dies and fades around you.
TV off, I try again to listen for the noise of the rats, my big boys. But listening is impossible. With my ear pressed to the wall, every little sound a house will make gets reinvented. I wish a stethoscope for my untrained ears.
Lee Ann promised to return in five days, to check our progress.
I try again to work for a while. I wonder sometime if anyone has ever responded to any of these funeral insurance ads. They never tell me, but the boxes keep arriving. By now I guess that some of my imaginary customers have died, cashed in their insurance…or, their families have I guess. I never had this thought before, and I wonder why I’m having it now.
***
Near one in the morning I go to my front door and open it, letting in the cool odor of the harbor, the suppressed noisiness of a city at night. At Maude’s they are sweeping the dirty sawdust, spreading out new, folding the old papers into the trash barrels, karaoke still going on as they approach last call. Lee Ann is there, with her wife, and I know this because I can see it so vividly in my mind. They are singing a duet. Islands in the stream … They are laughing and a little drunk. People are clapping. A cool wind blows across my face, plays with the edges of my hair. I step out onto the front stoop, one stair, two stair, three stair — a child’s book on counting, a child’s game of lava, my heartrate rising, each step a hundred miles. I slow my breathing, staring out at the chasm of Chamber Street, fingers quivering on the iron handrail. To anyone but me, I’m just a neighbor enjoying a fall night.
***
Two more days pass, then three. It has been years since I’ve noticed the passing of days. Why? Why have I not? I ponder the question while I watch nature shows and resist buying a folding ladder on HSN. For the first time in a decade I open my laptop and watch porn, something generic and over-lit, which inspires only a brief erection, a shrug, and a feeling I used to label loneliness. To what end? Imagine you are on a guided tour in a museum. There is a diorama of some indigenous person, early man in loincloth and war paint, tending his orange cellophane fire, maybe, this mannequin, or forever chipping flints for arrowheads, surrounded by plastic plants and encased behind glass. You watch his silent and eternal work. Your tour group is moving on without you. Then you, an adult, raise your hand to ask the tour guide, “Is he lonely?”
Live long enough, you reach a point where loneliness has no context for itself.
I put on one of Father’s cassettes, Tony Orlando and Dawn’s Greatest Hits. I close the laptop and lie back on the floor for a while, looking up at the opaque skylight. The songs are bouncy and everything is about love. Always love in these songs. Love or loss, which is itself love. Years ago I would sometimes dance around the living room until I was sweaty, flinging my arms, a twist of my hips and knees. No romance in it, just exercise. The pretense of fun. Now it’s just a toe-tap, a head-bob. Pale light diffused through the plexiglass. I’m old now, I guess. I wonder how I might look to myself passing by the window outside. A heart-attack victim, a piece of furniture.
I can’t do this.
It has been five days and several hours.
I get up off the floor, head to the kitchen, dig a screwdriver out of the junk drawer, undo the wall vent, reach in for the black plastic ashtray dish of poisoned dog food, and throw it in the kitchen trash. Same with the baseboard dish, the refrigerator dish. Gone.
I dial the 24-hour emergency number for Arrow Exterminating.
“This is Mike,” a voice says, surprising me that it’s not Lee Ann. Of course it’s not.
“Is Lee Ann there? She was supposed to come back.”
“Sir, do you have an emergency? This is the emergency line.”
“Yes,” I tell him. “There’s one in the house, in the walls.” This is a lie….I haven’t heard scritch scritch since the second day after she left, only Tony Orlando and Dawn, only my own shuffling and murmurs, the stuffing of envelopes.
“One what, sir?”
“Can you send Lee Ann?” I look up where a leaf is stuck to the skylight, wetly flapping in the nighttime breeze.
“Billy is on call tonight. I can send Billy.”
“Can you send Lee Ann?” The leaf makes a sound I can barely hear, only if I close my eyes.
“She is no longer employed here, sir. She works at another company,”
My mouth is moving but no real words come out
“Where?” I finally manage.
“Sir, I don’t know. Couldn’t tell you if I did. Do you want Billy to come out?”
I hang up the phone.
It’s Thursday night, and there is karaoke at Maude’s. I open the door, stand on the stoop of my world, as it exists. Somewhere, down the block, a baby cries, a car door slams, porch chimes tingle in a creosote breeze. Then into my hearing comes a small, sharp whine. I stand in the doorway and tilt my head to better hear it, close my eyes to find its source. A rat in my wall has found the poison, has found panic at his own dying, has run crying to its mate? Or this: the noise is outside, an ambulance somewhere in the city, tracing the grid to find some victim. I don’t know how to recognize the sound, how to know what I am hearing. With the door wide open, the sound pouring in, it could be almost anything.