Part I
Part II
It is at this point that the story takes on a decidedly darker hue. Among the contributing factors to my new earnestness to capture the mouse was the activity of my upstairs neighbor. Now, he and I share a door. Our apartments are, in fact,
designed to work as a single unit, in case the school we work for ever found itself in need of a very large apartment for a family with several children. Like one of those connected hotel rooms with the door locked from both sides. He, his wife, and I, aren't enemies, but neither do we get along particularly well, and as such the door has remained permanently locked. What acts as a barrier for us, however, is nothing of the sort to this story's antagonist.
It was after several weeks of comfortable cohabitation, just prior to the aforementioned issues that developed between mouse and I, that I was walking the main dorm floor, fending off inane questions from freshman boys.
Just another day in the freshman dorm.
"No, Renting and borrowing are not the same thing. No, traveling circuses don't visit this part of Connecticut. Yes, this is going on your permanent record."
Amidst the general confusion of the common room, however, one of the older boys (a sophomore resident assistant, charged with trying to quell the rabble when no dorm parents are around) slid up to me in his usually sly style.
"Mr. Jackson."
"Hm?"
"Did you hear about the mouse in Mr. S_____'s apartment?"
"What mouse?"
"Yeah, well, that mouse is in HIS apartment too. He found out that you were feeding it and kept saying 'He's feeding it?' as if he couldn't make sense of the idea - why ARE you feeding it? - anyway, he and Mrs. S_____ chased it around their apartment with brooms but I guess they couldn't kill it. He says he's going to put out poison for it."
I was a bit taken aback by my neighbor's outright hostility towards mouse, an act I perhaps should not have been surprised by, given mouse's place in the food chain, I walked back down to my apartment with the realization that mouse was drifting between our two homes for food. Moreover, he was going to be served more than food the next time he landed himself upstairs. Some sort of evil karma must have infiltrated the building, because upon returning to my apartment I noticed something through the window, just outside. It was a large, rectangular trap. Investigating, I found a paper plate laden with raw (and rapidly transforming) chicken at the back of the cage. Five feet long and easily a foot square, this trap was for no mouse. It had been a few weeks earlier when Mr. S_____ had complained to me, and subsequently to the campus grounds keeper, that a raccoon had been filtering through our trash, late at night. This was no news to me. I live next to the trash bins and was aware of the raccoon’s devious attempts to steal that which we had already decided to throw away. Moreover, I had seen him many times, in the dusk of early evening, skittering into the trees when I passed by the area he seemed to like to inhabit. Mr. S_____, however, found his presence unnerving. As he told me, "That animal is dangerous. What if it bites a student? There's a serious legal case, right there. There shouldn't be a wild animal like that roaming about our campus." I retorted, "But, we live mere yards away from a major nature preserve. I think he probably considers this his territory. Besides, these kids get slaughtered on the ice and the field every day in athletics, and we’re worried about a raccoon? I don’t see any torn ACL’s or broken wrists as a result of his presence." "Yeahhhhh," Mr. S_____ returned, "but we still can't have it just walking around, carrying trash off." "You mean, like the trash-man does?" I thought to myself, wisely biting my tongue. My argument fallen on a deaf mind, I retreated from the field of debate. This trap, laid out next to the trash bins, was surely the culmination of my failure to dissuade Mr. S_____ from attempting to reign dominion over all he saw. My spirits sank as I thought of mouse and the raccoon, both condemned for living their lives as they were designed to, and I felt some kinship over the many traps I had evaded, and even those that I had fallen into, as I tried to be as human as possible. I didn't want mouse to be choked on poison, but if he was determined to share apartments with the both of us (which, I assumed, he also could not be dissuaded from), then he would have to go. Whether his method of "going" would be through death or displacement was a matter for the battling ingenuities of Mr. S_____ and myself to decide.
To be continued in Part IV...
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