Doctor Rat (7 page)

Trample them and go free! We turn, surrounded by fiery light that strikes us. We whirl in a ring, held by the fire, struck by the light. Run, steers, run!

“Fellow rats, please, if you have any legitimate complaints write them in a paper and submit them in triplicate to the Newsletter.”

“WE WANT OUR RIGHTS!”

“Fellow rats, you are protected by Public Law 89-544 of the Eighty-ninth Congress of the United States, and I quote, to wit:
‘The Secretary shall establish and promulgate standards to govern the humane handling, care, treatment, and transportation of animals by dealers and research facilities.’
You see? You’re protected by the great law of these wonderful United States.”

“They dug out my eyes with a spoon today.”

“The better to see a scientific fact, my friend. It was essential.”

“They made some kind of horrible crust grow all over my face. It burns!”

“My stomach!”

“My spine!”

“My dear fellow rats, you’ve simply misunderstood Section 13 of the above-mentioned act, and I quote:
‘The foregoing shall not be construed as authorizing the Secretary to prescribe standards for the handling, care, or treatment of animals during actual research or experimentation by a research facility as determined by such research facility.’
You see now, don’t you? Once you’re here in the lab, the law allows our Learned Professors to do whatever they feel like with you. It’s a law with teeth in it, I’m happy to say.”

“Shove that law up your ass, Doc. We want humane legislation.
NO ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION!”

“Humane, humane, always harping on humane. My fellow rats, do you know what the American Medical Association calls those who harp on this word humane?
Humaniacs!
Yes, that’s what you are—half-assed Humaniacs!”

Ignoring me, the rebels start spinning their exercise wheels again. The wheels blur, hum, and once again here come the intuitive signals out of the whirling depths. I’ve got to jam these rebel broadcasts.

Perhaps if I slip over here to the laboratory television set I’ll get a nice innocuous program to distract the attention of these revolutionary rats. Maybe an exercise program from poolside in sunny California.

Clicking it on with my tail, waiting for it to warm up. Yes, a few deep knee bends is what we want, and some jumping jacks to slim the waistline, all done to quiet music. Here comes the sound…

“…special bulletin. A large pack of wild dogs struck at the stockyard approximately an hour ago, swarming over the unloading platforms and precipitating a mass stampede of cattle destined for the slaughtering pens. All motorists are requested to remain away from the area. Any spectator activity is said to be extremely dangerous. I repeat: A large pack, of…”

Lord love a duck! (family
Anatidae)
I’ve got to switch this program fast…

“Hold it right there, Doc!”

“I’m sorry, fellows, but—”

“Grab the Doctor! Kick his ass!”

I see it would be wiser to retire from the TV set. These rebels have started freeing each other from their cages and I’m rapidly being outnumbered. Very well, I withdraw, but only temporarily, my friends. Doctor Rat is not to be trifled with.

“Take every man from Sector 8 and blocks off those streets…

The TV picture is an extraordinary one—police cars converging on stampeding cattle and howling dogs. The camera swings dizzily for a moment, and a steer charges toward us as the footage abruptly ends.

“This is Barry Nathan. We switch you now to the…”

“Send for the dogcatcher!”

“Sit down, Doc, and shut up.”

“Yeah, down in front…pass the rat chow, please.”

I’ve got to do something about that TV set. The news is too incendiary, and the rebel rats are running around excitedly, opening all the cages. My move must be daring and swift.

The double-panned weighing scale is just below me, in the shadows, with a lead weight upon it. We ordinarily use this scale to weigh newborn rats or those on special deficiency diets, but Doctor Rat is going to put it to more dramatic use tonight!

The angle of trajectory seems right. I leap!

Down through the air I drop, a counterespionage commando landing secretly behind enemy lines, on the scale, driving one pan down and the other up, launching the lead weight into the air toward the TV screen.

I flatten out as the weight strikes, shattering the screen! Glass flying everywhere! Perhaps now these rebels know whom they’re dealing with—the dynamic Doctor Rat!

But how bright the exercise wheels have gotten again. And the dog is turning his treadmill at a terrific rate of speed, running for all he’s worth. Light is emanating from the turning treadwheels and from the exercise wheels. The atmosphere is incredibly electric. I haven’t felt anything so powerful since I had my last sublethal dose of insulin (see my paper, “Average Lethal Dose for Rats,”
Phar. Mag.,
1971). I’d like to get about fifty of these rebel rats together and give them a Maximum Lethal Dose of strychnine in their pressed biscuit. That’d shut them up in a hurry!

But how bright the exercise wheels are, glowing now with frightening intensity. The rats are racing, making an opening in the intuitive band, and our laboratory is filled with expanding points of light, light merging with light, wheel merging with wheel. The entire room is shining with whirling light and I can see a face emerging from the vortex!

I was born in this big room. Never have I been outside it. At either end of the room come the winds, mechanically produced. There are, above our heads, harsh lights. I wonder what’s beyond this room.

Our bodies are white and fat. We have no exercise. I never walk more than the length of my little cell. The days are so monotonous and my existence so pointless—often I feel that I don’t exist at all, that I am just a dream.

The great room is divided into these low cells. Each of us has one; we’re separated from the other inmates by a board wall over which we can barely see our neighbors. If anyone attempts to enter my cell, I will kill him. The law here is, Keep your own cell and let no one in. There is no friendship. Our cell is our life; we protect it with our life.

“Come on there, you! Come on!”

The guard has come for me, driving me out of my cell with shouts and kicks. I try to walk, but movement is difficult; my muscles are weak. He drives me toward the cold female.

I’ve been with her before. She has no warmth; she smells like a female. I never see the whole of her body. I see the tail end.

“Get in there. Go on, get to it!”

I smell a female. Where is her life? She stands motionless; she awaits me. I mount her.

You are cold. You never speak. I love you. I love you, here in the room. I love you, though you are still as death. They watch me closely. I grunt and cling to your cold body. I have learned to do this, to drive myself into you. I drive into your body, slip and fall and rise again, entering you once more. I hang clumsily, puffing, strained, excited. They jeer at me, as I struggle to fill you. It rises up through me. It rises to the top, it goes out of me. I leave it inside of you. I love you; cold and silent.

“All right, move!”

He strikes me and drives me away from her. Our meetings are always like this—brief and silent. Sometimes I dream of you; your silent, hidden body.

I return to my cell. Food has been put out for me and I eat it down. I’m always eating. I’ve nothing else to do. I’ve grown so fat I can hardly stand.

What am I?

If I could get outside this room, I might be able to learn something. Once I saw a great many of the older inmates leave the room and they never returned. Did they learn something?

Where are they now?

There is so much I don’t know. Why do they lead me to the cold female? Is this part of their great understanding?

They must know so much, for they go outside the room.

I feel that my life here is not permanent; I firmly believe that one day I too will leave the room.

I stare into the corner of my cell. There is straw and water. The voices of the other inmates float in the air, but none of them has an answer. None of them knows the secret of the room—how it came into being, why we were born here, and where we are going.

I must have slept. I sleep a great deal and eat a lot. The inmates are whispering and grunting about something. Occasionally one of us has a nightmare or some little thought that seems brand-new. It quickly makes the rounds of all the cells and then fades into obscurity. Which of us could ever say with certainty: I know what’s outside; I know what awaits us.

Nonetheless, we listen to this latest dream. One of the inmates has had a wild vision. My neighbor grunts the substance of it through the walls of his cell. He dares not come too close to me or peer over at me, for he knows I will strike at him with all my clumsy might if he does.

“A vow has been taken.”

“A vow?”

“A powerful creature has taken a vow. He has sworn to save us.”

“Who is he?”

“I feel him in my sinew. His strength is great. It’s a fiercely knotted power.”

A jumble of images invades me, memories that are my most sacred possession: a little patch of green grass and a bit of a winding path. I saw these once, when the great doors swung open. And I see them now, once again, in my mind. For that’s what a savior would mean to me—the green grass and a little path struck by warm gentle light.

But the savior is just the mad vision of one of our inmates. There have been many strange dreams here. They come and go, but the mechanical winds are constant. They soon blow away all dreams, all visions, all saviors.

“Come on! Get out!”

The guards! The doors!

Everyone is moving. We’re all being moved. Weak-kneed, stumbling, we walk. Waddling, falling, I make my way toward the door. There is the grass! There is the little winding path! Has the savior really come?

So this is the day! The day, the streaming light, the little winding path. My heart leaps—look how far the eye can see. Look at the distant green!

Vast! Tremendous! Beyond believing—the world is large as a hundred rooms! In the air there hangs a great blazing light. What a room this is!

“The vow has been fulfilled!”

“We’re free!”

“Look! How much we can see!”

Along the little winding path we go. The path is soft and so wonderful to look at. Walking is difficult, but even so, even so…

“Go on! Get up there!”

The path has ended. A ramp lies before me, leading into another room, a little darkened room. No!

“Get in!”

They push and prod us up the ramp, into the dark little room. Our bodies are quickly pressed together. Our hearts pound one against the other. The doors slam shut. The room begins to rumble, to shake. We fall against each other, we crash against the walls. I’m ill already; I’m gasping for air.

Have I slept? Am I awake now, or dreaming? We’re caught all together in the dark rumbling room. The world is impossibly strange. I can’t comprehend any of it. The path was so wonderful and already it’s gone. This dark room is horrible. I’m standing on someone’s face. I think he’s dead. What does it matter. The world is confusion; nothing is certain. Why was I born? Am I a slave? Did I commit some unremembered crime?

Am I real? Do I really exist at all?

Yes, yes! I do exist. I am some sort of being—fat, suffocating, plunged in ignorance—

I am me!

But what is it to be me, this ball of fat in the halls of darkness? Who can answer me in my dilemma! I’m terrified! I see through the cracks in this rumbling room. I hear the rumbling and I hear the cries of those who are jammed in here beside me.

I am the thing in the dark; yes, that’s it, I’m this thing in the dark—frightened and fat. I mustn’t lose sight of that. That is my precious self.

Confusion, confusion. Help me!

What of these others? Are they real beings like me? Are they aware that they exist? I hear their cries; I feel their hearts. They’re like me in every way—eyes, ears, nose, mouth. I believe that they too know themselves.

They are suffering just like me. The only one of us who didn’t come today is the cold female. She stayed behind. I don’t know if she knows herself. I think perhaps she has no real existence. Never did I feel her thoughts or her pounding heart.

But I feel all of you! I feel you with me here! We exist!

Don’t we?

Blood is trickling out my nose. It bubbles up from my throat. My insides are all shaken and undone. If I weren’t real, if I were some sort of unfeeling mechanical creature, then my blood would not now be bubbling so painfully. I feel pain. I know that I’m suffering.

So I must be real!

I seek these assurances, over and over, as the room rumbles. I want my reality to be ascertained beyond any doubt. Flung into existence, I know that I live.

Are the guards educating me? Is this what the rumbling room is supposed to do? Does it make me realize once and for all that I am real?

Are the guards my secret benefactors?

My life is spinning madly. I crouch in the darkness, crouching in the selfness of my self. I huddle against other bodies, huddling with myself. There’s the floor; there are the cracks.

There are the other faces. I know this. The room is rumbling.

There’s a being, there’s a being, undeniably a being. He is here, in the darkness, he is here, he is me. Undeniably me. I stand in the rumbling darkness, undeniably a being. My breath. My heaving belly.

Can anyone deny this?

No one denies it.

It can’t be denied. I am in a rumbling room. And the rumbling has gotten less violent.

The rumbling has stopped.

I’ve learned something. I exist, without any question. The rumbling room has taught me that. The guards are therefore my benefactors. The condition of our existence is markedly this: We must learn that we’re alive.

Very well, I know it now. The rumbling room, though it has caused me to bleed and caused some of the others to die, has taught me that I am an individual creature. That is an important lesson.