Blame NASA, I guess.

No, that’s not fair. Blame the government, just know I’m not talking about, like, congress or the judiciary.

Long story short, Pinky died. Dad and Dean fed him to a snake. Dean communicated to me, after detailing Pinky’s final thoughts, that Pinky didn’t want me to be sad - “Don’t cry, boypup, don’t cry.”

Pinky was tired, you see, old. He was so bored of life that the novelty of being digested alive by a python was preferable to living another day in a cage cleaned once a week by a prepubescent boy. I use the term loosely.

Maybe it was a boa constrictor.

I did love that rat. I thought he was my special friend. I brought him to school once and the teachers freaked out. He crawled across my arms and over my head and into my shirt. I wanted to keep him with me all the time, but Dean said that Pinky said it was too hot inside my pockets, which is where he would have had to stay if he was going to hang with me all day at school.

The gubment keeps people in mazes and cages the way they kept Pinky. I am one of them. I’m sure that’s why Dean introduced us. He wanted me to understand what was happening when I was old enough.

He was a fucked up dude, but he was good, in that way. He wanted people he cared about to be aware/prepared.

So, I know how to throw a punch. I know where to put a knife, if I’m fighting with one. I know resources are the most important factor in warfare. I know not to trust anyone.

I know it is possible to live long enough that one can be excited about being eaten alive by a snake.

Good thing I’m too big for a snake to eat.

Yeah that’s too disturbing a note to end on.

Rats are conscious, animals are conscious, the world is consciousness. If we facilitate communication, maybe there will be fewer mazes and hungry snakes.

Best thing to do when someone tries to put a needle in your arm is to break theirs.

I’m not being antivax, I’m being anti forced-medication. I’m being anti rats of NIMH type experimentation. It’s the kind of thing I’m not sure you can understand unless you’ve been picked up by the tail and swung around.

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I talked Sam into naming his rat Toad like a toadstool, mostly because I’m a huge fan of mushrooms. You might say I’m a:

Fun guy.

The other reason was to get a reaction out of Arnie, which it did. Arnie likes things a certain way and with fuckers like that, especially little fuckers like that, it’s super goddamn important to make sure they almost never get to have things a certain way. It’s good for ‘em in the long run.

So, instead of Pinky and The Brain, they were Pinky and Toad, the unlikeliest of duos, country mouse and town mouse, one cage, one wheel, one conspiracy.

Wouldn’t be a conspiracy if I told you what it was.

I tell people I’m a computer engineer because it’s just easier. Hell, it’s the truth, but I’m a lot of other things too. Mostly I’m a kind of a sonofabitch.

So the boys named their rats. Sam, like his older brother, made a pact with his rat which he fulfilled in due time. Pretty open and shut for Sam, we had his path all figured out by the time he was born. We had Arnie’s too but, like I said, Arnie is a little fucker. He never makes things easy.

Sam was easy. He made good on his pact as soon as he was old enough. If you’ve caught a packrat in your house, barn, or garage in the past ten years, you can thank Sam. Please be kind to them, though. No lethal traps or poison. Catch them and drop them off at the park or nature center nearest you. They’ll either make a new home there or get eaten by an owl or something.

That sounds harsh, but if you talk to any rat, or any animal for that matter, very few of them resent being eaten. They understand it as part of the natural order, an inevitability. They would much rather die by tooth or claw than by trap or poison.

Compared to traps or poison, being consumed is an act of compassion. At the very least, it serves a higher purpose than killing a thing and denying it the privilege of reintegration into the food chain.

Most people kill pests and throw them in the trash where they end up in a landfill or incinerated. I suppose eventually they make their way back into the circle of life, but it takes a lot longer.

Feed the birds instead of the machine, partner. Catch and release your pests in a compassionate manner. If you don’t, I know a man who will make your life very difficult in ways I doubt you can imagine.

Unless you believe in mental telepathy and/or magic.

Yeah, that’s about it, partner.

Dean’s not their uncle, he’s more just a friend of the family. He is a computer engineer, a real one. He works for the government. He does all sorts of stuff.

Don’t tell him, it’ll kill him and I might have to kill you if it does, but the oldest boy isn’t mine. I don’t know whose he is.

Alright he’s mine in that I raised him, I did the work, but I am not his biological father. I didn’t find out till a few years after he was born. I’d say it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t as far as he and I are concerned. It matters for the story.

The oldest not being my boy is why Dean takes an interest in my kids, I’m sure that is the reason. I leave it alone because it has been nothing but beneficial for them so far. He hooked them up with an old Commodore64, he made the rats happen, he teaches them stuff I don’t know so much about. It’s a good thing, and I’m always around when he’s here, so, it’s fine.

The talking to animals thing, it’s just a kind of bluster. He is a smart guy, and he understands communication, that’s all. Every animal communicates, they just do it with their eyes, or tails, or whatever. He’s just trying to get the boys interested and if it means they don’t grow up to be the type of teens who mutilate cats and rip the legs off bugs, then he can talk all the hoo-doo he wants.

Hoo-doo isn’t necessarily a bunch of bullcrap, either, if you want my opinion.

I just realized you probably think the oldest boy is Dean’s. He’s not. Dean is impotent, has been for as long as I’ve known him, longer, even. Nobody knows who the real father is, not even my ex-wife. She still insists, to this day, that he is mine.

Which he is, just not biologically.

Alright, wrapping things up here, the boys named their rats while I listened in the kitchen, and smoked, and read some McEwan, and stayed alert for any pauses that might indicate Dean was molesting either of my children.

And said a quiet thank you that I didn’t have to deal with any of my second ex-wife’s bullshit that night. Friday was her night to close at the burger joint.

Sam stayed quiet in the boys’ shared bedroom, definitely overthinking on a name that would end up being something like Brownie or Packy.

In the living room, Dean explained to Arnie that the albino was called One-With-Fur-Wet-From-Licking in the rat language. This was because the albino rat was the first in his litter, and his mother licked his fur while she labored with the others.

Dean then expounded on how this was just like Arnie. Arnie was the firstborn, and firstborns get most of the attention.

Dean wasn’t wrong, Arnie always got more attention, still does, but no father likes to hear his son compared to a rat, especially a lab rat.

Even his adopted son.

Arnie didn’t like that name. He said it was a good rat name but he couldn’t introduce the rat to his friends with that name. What would they think, he asked.

This made me chuckle and I lost my spot in Black Dogs.

Dean suggested they go back in the bedroom and ask the rat what type of name he’d like. Arnie sounded skeptical, which he always is. I taught him that, but he said sure, why not try it.

Dean asks Sam if he’s picked a name yet, Sam says not yet. I can tell he’s stressing because he says it around a couple fingers in his mouth and he sounds sullen.

Dean says, that the rat says, he’s happy with any name Arnie might pick, so long as it is not a cruel name. Arnie asks what a cruel name would be. Dean translates back that a cruel name would be something like Shitfur, or Pissdrink, or First-to-be-Pulled-From-the-Cage-by-His-Tail.

Arnie says, no, he was thinking of Pinky, because the rat’s eyes are red and his fur is white, and if you mix those colors together, you get Pink.

The rat says he doesn’t know what red or pink look like, but if that’s what humans see, then it is a good name for one who is meant to befriend humankind.

Real cute, Dean.

Sam is calling bullshit now, because even I am aware of the kid’s show with the two lab rats who try to take over the world. Pinky and the Brain. Sam calls out his older brother, a fight ensues, Dean breaks it up and says he’s sure that’s not what Arnie was thinking. Besides, in the cartoon, wasn’t Pinky the dumb one? THIS Pinky is NOT dumb.

I can tell just by listening, that we are spot on. Arnie was thinking about the show and now he feels bad for insinuating that his new friend is dumb.

All Arnie says is: I was thinking of both at the same time.

That tells you everything you need to know about Arnie.

I can be very gentle. Now.

Dad got us pumped up about our new pets. He told us if we did a good job taking care of the rats, we could try out one that requires more responsibility, maybe a cat. And if we did a good job with the cat, then, maybe, we could get a dog.

Dad has always been good about showing us a pathway to more responsibility.

Thanks, Dad. Thanks a lot.

Uncle Dean got us even more pumped up about the rats. For some reason, he knows a lot about them. More than you’d expect a computer engineer to know. Maybe he’s not a computer engineer at all.

Who cares?

First, he explained-

Sorry, I think you want me to actually write the dialogue or something. I don’t really feel like doing that so you’ll have to make do with a dry recounting of all this. Maybe when Uncle Dean takes over he can spice things up. It was all his idea anyway. Well not all, probably he had an accomplice or a rival or-

Who cares?

Uncle Dean started off by telling us that these weren’t just your average run of the mill boring house rats, or sewer rats. No way, man. The white one? He was an albino. You can tell because he is all white and his eyes are red. That albino one is a lab rat, and not just any lab rat. That lab rat right there, the one trying to put his nose to yours through the glass? Why, he’s the smartest lab rat the world has ever seen!

That little bastard was used in experiments involving mazes. The little shit is the best at it. Every maze, they threw him in, he found a way out. He even surprised the scientists by climbing over the walls a couple times and escaping the maze that way! He’s a smart little sucker, just like you, baby boy.

I’m not sure why uncle Dean always called me baby boy. He never called my brother that, only me. It wasn’t, like, some pervy thing. The only time Uncle Dean ever touched me was when he was showing me how to fight, putting my fingers in the right place to make a fist, making me punch his hand till I knew to extend through my target, not stop when I made contact. Stuff like that.

He was a weird dude, though. Said he could talk to rats.

The other one, he said, the grayish brown one, was a Wood Rat, or Packrat.

He’s from the wild, from the woods! They caught him out there. See, we’re gonna do an experiment. These two rats are from completely different habitats! You know what a habitat is, from school, right? Okay, baby boy, later you can fill your brother in about habitats, he hasn’t had as much science as you, huh.

The point is, they are like the Odd Couple, no, wait, too young for that, uh, they’re like the country mouse and the town mouse! Polar opposites, couldn’t be more different. We’re gonna see if they can get along in the same cage and you two are going to help them. You guys are both gonna spend time with them, socialize with them. If you spend time with them, together, all four of you, a couple times a week, I think they can be buddies. Don’t worry, your dad will help while you’re at your mom’s.

How do you get ‘em to socialize? That’s easy, first you gotta figure out names for ‘em.

Number Two, (My uncle called my little brother Number Two, which I always thought was sort of shitty.) you stay in here and try to figure out a name for the brown one, for the packrat. I know, the white one’s got red eyes and that’s really cool, but your brother is going to name that one. They’re gonna make a pact and maybe you can make a pact with the brown one, but, well, your brother’s gotta take the white one. It’s part of the plan, okay? Gosh you’re a good kid, come on Baby Boy, I gotta talk to you in private, top secret like, you dig?

I dug alright. That motherfucker. He brought me out into the living room and we sat on the couch. Dad was chilling in the kitchen underneath the stove fan devouring a book and a cigarette.

Here’s the deal, baby boy, you know how witches have familiars?

I did.

Well, it’s not exactly like that, but this rat wants to make a deal with you. He’s smart, real smart. The smartest rat that ever lived, so far. I know because I can communicate with rats. Not just rats, all types of animals, but it’s the rats that need the most help right now, bud. Do you want to help?

I did, but I’d have rather helped, like, a wolf or something. I mean if we were talking about pacts and familiars and communicating with animals. Wolves are way cooler. I did want to help, though, and I was a pretty good kid, just like my brother, and you don’t refuse to help someone just because they are a rat instead of a wolf.

I’m being a little generous to my younger self, here, referring to the rat as some ONE. I didn’t have the respect for animals then that I do now, but that’s kind of the point of the story.

A friend in need is a friend indeed, right, Baby Boy? This maze-raping cocksucker needs your help dude. Him and his whole freaking subspecies, they’re counting on you. Will you help them?

Too stupid to ask with what, too young to be shocked by his swearing, just wanting to be exposed to whatever kind of magic Uncle Dean was trying to sell to me vis a vis talking with animals and shamanistic bonds, I said sure.

Sure Uncle Dean, I’ll help the rats.

The caps are too much, but I don’t know how to write in a rat voice. I thought it would work but it is too much. Can you just, sort of, read it as though it were in caps? Rats don’t use language and they would have only the barest sense of how we see the world. This is all so silly.

This is a strange notion. Sire is usually away. Sire is usually hunting.

No, seeking, or FINDING THINGS, hunting isn’t quite the right- The Uncle insists on the word hunting. Yes, he’s here, they all are, sort of. As much as they can be. The sense of this is that it isn’t the sire’s, or, father’s role to, uh, communicate much with the young. His role is to seek, and protect, and teach, a little, when the young are old enough. This whole process is more pronounced and complex in natural born mice. In laboratory mice, well. There’s usually not much for them to do. This is not the fault of science it is-

They want me to get on with the story.

The boypup communes with his sire using a DEADTHING connected to the wall of his cage with something that resembles a curly tail. This tail has much more spring and bounce than a rat tail and it does not taste like a FOODTHING. Things that are not FOODTHINGS are usually DEADTHINGS.

Dead in the sense of being inanimate, not in the sense of having ever been alive in the first place.

The sire is WELLFED (That is, happy, content, full, rested, ready to engage in seeking behavior. Another way to say this would be he is excited or happy.) The sire wants the boypup to meet a new friend when the boypup and his littermate come to visit the sire’s home at the end of SEVERALDAYS.

Jesus, this is tedious. The idea of offspring only seeing their father occasionally makes a lot of sense to rats, who spend most of their time with their mother until late adolescence. Uh, SEVERALDAYS is anything more than one day. Rats, some more so than others, have a pretty good general sense of one day, anything past that gets fuzzy for them. In this instance, SEVERALDAYS means at the end of the week, or, the weekend, which we would use if rats could keep track of that much time and now the Uncle is breathing down my back saying rats have an excellent sense of long term time, it’s just that lab rats do not benefit from the environmental cues that rats in the wild get to enjoy.

The Uncle is not wrong, but this is tedious.

The boypup reciprocates the sire’s enthusiasm and they cease communing by hanging a piece of the springy-tailed-deadthing onto the walls of their respective cages.

The boypup spends the rest of his SEVERALDAYS wondering what kind of animal this new friend will be. As he lays in his nest at night, he imagines a PREDATOR.

As he engages in SEEKINGHUNTING behavior in a bigger cage, the next day, with many other boy and girl pups, he imagines other PREDATORS, prowling ones with liquid tails, large ones with loud paws and lolling tongues.

In the evening when he feeds, he imagines all manner of NOPELT animals. NOPELTS with flicking tongues and unblinking eyes, NOPELTS with hard, DEADTHINGS on their backs, NOPELTS with sharp claws that jump into the air and never come down.

More PREDATORS.

If you’re not getting the picture, almost every animal besides a rat is a predator as far as a rat is concerned. I’ve used the verb imagined here because even the Uncle can’t think of a better way to say what a rat does when it thinks. We both agree ‘imagine’ isn’t quite the right word for it. They don’t imagine the way you and I do. They are capable of conceptualization but such conceptualization is tricky when the ‘thing’ is not actually present.

Maybe a good way to think of this section of narrative is we are writing it the way a rat would try and communicate it to another rat IF the rat had actually witnessed these events, which he didn’t.

Yet.

At the end of SEVERALDAYS the boypup travels to his sire’s cage inside of a much smaller cage that moves on top of four wheels.

Everyone present agrees that rats know goddamn well what a wheel is, and, furthermore, that a rat would be amused by wheels that actually go somewhere.

Okay, now it’s getting depressing instead of tedious.

The boypup bursts from the WHEELCAGE and runs to the sire’s cage with his littermate in tow. The sire follows, carrying many soft deadthings that are almost like fur, if fur were removable.

Inside, the boypup and his littermate scurry into a section of the cage and press their oddly-shaped snouts into the side of a much smaller cage.

Inside is one white rat and one gray rat.

In unison, the boypup and his littermate make MILKNOISE.

Okay that one sounds weird. Rats make all kinds of noises, mostly inaudible to human ears. The boys are shocked and a little disappointed that their father is surprising them with a couple of rats instead of, say, a tarantula, or a dog, something exciting. This is the equivalent to a type of whining which a rat would associate with lack of food, especially lack of food for a rat pup, hence, MILKNOISE.

The Uncle says that sounds a little kinky, but he thinks it fits. Okay, my part is over.

Okay, my part is over, for now, say the Uncle and the Boypup, who is not a boypup anymore. Definitely not a boy, and definitely not a pup. He looks like Boo Radley if Boo Radly were a foot shorter with wild brown hair and a bit of paunch.

He does have the eyes, though.

This is a story about, well, I guess it’s my job to be as literal as possible here, this is a story about a rat, and a boy, and the boy’s father, and the boy’s uncle, and I guess a little bit about me, but mostly it is about the rat and how he and all rats deserve a little more of your respect.

I, uh, I’ll say I disagree with much of what will be asserted later on here, but I was asked to contribute to this project and I don’t know how much you know about the lab research world, or science, or academia, or the world in general, but there’s no such thing as bad press and if even one person takes a look at even one of my papers or books as a result of this, then, well…

Playing along with all of this is a no brainer. Plus, I am fond of rats, I just don’t think they can talk.

I study, well, I study many things, but quick way to say it: My area of expertise is mammalian evolutionary neurology. So, not just the brain itself, but how it evolves over many multiple generations. As I always say, it’s about where we’re going, not where we are at, and as far as I can tell, we are going toward some amazing adaptations as far as the human brain is concerned…

In about a hundred more generations. Hard to imagine something that far in the future, right?

Now you know, at least in some small way, what it is like to be a rat.

Okay! Part: The First! This is where the boy meets the rat. The catch is, they want me to narrate it, uh, they want me to narrate it the way the rat would. Frankly, the Uncle would be a better choice for this, he has a better imagination, but this is what they asked me to do and I need grant money, so, here it goes: