Carpet Bombing
I have cancer.
I also have a rat in my back yard. I see evidence of the rat’s, or rats’, activities in all the component parts of my carefully curated and landscaped deck. Wires to the patio lights and irrigation hoses are damaged, wooden fencing is chewed, holes are dug in the planters and there is that distinctive smell of rat piss.
All this is circumstantial. The creature and accomplices could argue that it wasn’t them, that I am reflexively accusing the wrong species, that my rodentist prejudice is distorting my judgment. Crows have been known to drop food debris on the back of the deck and I hear that squirrels are getting more carnivorous as they adapt to an increasingly damaged environment. But twice I have seen a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye, too fast to call it scampering, too low to indicate anything with wings and with a profile that is too tightly-defined to allow for the possibility of a bushy tail. My awareness that I am prejudiced against rats does not mean that I have to be blind to their sins.
Rats are ever-present in the city. The odd bit of chewing or digging just comes with the zip code. But that should just be background noise, the sort of urban contextual phenomenon that is both irritating and somehow a gratifying reassurance that you are living in the center of the city, a busy neighborhood where other people want to be. It is the escalation that you must fear, and we are there. Chicken bones have appeared under the patio chairs and so it is clear that the creature, alone or as part of a team, has found the confidence to scour nearby city gutters for discarded chicken wings and bring them back to enjoy in the quiet safety to be found at the back of my house, taking advantage of the respite from the crowds that I designed the deck to provide. The slope of the infestation graph has turned up sharply, signaling that the rats are now running the show and something very bad will happen soon, something that is orders of magnitude worse than the odd bits of rat crap next to the side table. Maybe much-loved shrubs will die as their roots have been chewed into fragments by all the tunneling, the TV and the WiFi might stop working once the work of gnawing through the cables under the deck is finally complete, the car could develop that awful and unforgettable smell of roasted creature if there has been some rodent breast-feeding on the engine block or, worse, perhaps lunch guests will see unambiguous evidence running over their feet that their host’s domestic hygiene standards are not at the level that they had previously assumed.
Over twenty years in this neighborhood has taught me a lot about killing rats. It all starts with a question of location. If you have found the burrow and can be confident that the rats are resting at home then then there is a simple, if sneaky, option. Dry ice is available from some local supermarkets and if it is inserted by a brave person with a thick glove deep into the burrow, and if the entrance is quickly covered with plastic or more dirt, then the sleeping rats are suffocated by carbon dioxide. I don’t aim to be needlessly cruel, but I am beyond caring whether the creatures have an upsetting end to their short and horribly fecund lives.
If they are not conveniently waiting to meet their doom in their tunneled home, then spring traps can work if they are located somewhere near where the rats tend to run and if baited with a piece of Long John smoked sausage. There is so much dropped food available at the rear of the many restaurants around here that rats have nothing but disdain for old style baits of cheese or peanut butter. Traps only work of course if the entire colony is squashed and luckily, despite the many assertions that rats are distinctively intelligent, they do not seem to be deterred from nibbling disastrously at the sausage in a trap alongside a newly slaughtered relative.
Trapping and gassing assume that you know exactly or approximately where the rats are nesting. Poison bait boxes are generally offered as the approach if you don’t. The idea is that black boxes, stuffed with allegedly tempting poison, which allow rats but not children or dogs to enter will attract the creatures to eat their last meal. You don’t need to know where exactly to place the boxes – just somewhere in the affected area. In reality, bait boxes are just pest control theater, providing something to look at which is suggestive of purpose and activity but which achieves little. If the odd rat is so foolish as to nibble the bright blue poison rather than the array of half-eaten big Macs which are usually within scuttling distance along the back alley then they will die, but they will die secure in the knowledge that their extended family was not as stupid as them. The only way that poison could deal with a neighborhood rat infestation is if the surrounding streets and yards were carpet-bombed with the stuff. And anyway, they will return.
After an initial cancer diagnosis, the prostate, this particular cancer’s home burrow, can be removed by surgery or destroyed by radiation. However, the level of Prostate Specific Antigen in the blood can provide evidence that the cancer is still preparing to damage, chew or dig into some of the key component parts of an aging but perfectly functional body. The odd drop of PSA is like a low level of biochemical noise, nothing to be concerned about. It is the escalation that matters. If the angle of that clinical slope becomes steep enough to indicate that the PSA is doubling in less than 6 months, then worry is very appropriate. Something bad might well happen. Rapid doubling of the PSA suggests that the cancer sneaked out of the prostate before the prostate was removed or destroyed and maybe it established a microscopic cellular forward base from where it is planning a surprise attack on bones, lymph nodes, or even the liver or lungs.
In this case, finding the cancer can tricky. There are scans of varying kinds where, essentially, some sort of radioactive stuff is squirted into your bloodstream which decays in a particular way when it comes into contact with cancer cells, alerting the high tech machine to its presence. The slope of my PSA graph told me a few months ago that it was indeed time to worry and the scans worked out exactly where worry was to be focused. Then some long needles were placed into the offending areas producing extreme cold at their tips and the cancer was ablated, frozen into oblivion. The trap was sprung and the cancer was squashed.
Except it wasn’t. The PSA graph continued its upward march but the various scans could not now find where the cancer was lurking. No further freezing or radiation is possible if there is nowhere in particular to freeze or to fry. Without a particular target in mind, the only remaining option is to deprive the sneaky cancer of the hormone, testosterone, that it so likes. There are various medical euphemisms for this but it is essentially non-physical castration, carpet bombing your body, poisoning your entire system with chemicals that suppress the hormone that has been fundamental to your maturing into the man that you are. It will work for a while but, like scattering poison across your entire city block to deal with some rats that you cannot locate precisely, it entails ravaging your entire body to address a few malignant cells that have not let you find them. And it will not work for too long. Suppressing the cancer at this stage will last about as long as killing one generation of neighborhood rats. The cancer will mutate into a more virulent form that does not care whether there is testosterone or not. The rats will return.
Nick Manning:
I am a clock-mending, stained glass window-constructing, family and dog-loving, British/American man, living with my husband, dog and, sometimes, stepson in Washington DC and New York.
I retired from the World Bank a few years ago. My earlier career was as a social worker and researcher in London. I am the author of a large number of distinctly dry technical books and papers about governments and their dysfunctions, an output which kept me busy for most of my career.
My first work of fiction was published last year when, my short story, ‘Rules of the Road: a Fable’ was included by Unleash Press in the ‘On Rules’ anthology and ‘Fergie Matthews Last Theorem’ was published in the Baltimore Review. Other short stories, including ‘I Made Him Soar’ have been published on-line by UnleashLit. ‘Free At Last’ is included in the anthology ‘America’s Future’ recently published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House.