FOLLOWING THROUGH

                       I can hear rats dying in the wall beside me.  When the sound first reached me I was in the middle of sending an email to a coworker two stalls down.  “Like birds getting stuck in the blades of a fan,” that was how I first described the noise in the letter.  It was a series of high-pitched chirps, followed by startled, frantic screeches.  Her response was swift: “OH NO!,” she wrote in all caps, “It’s the rats.  They’re poisoning the rats!  I thought I smelled something earlier… You can hear it?  I’ve got to come over.  We should free them!”
            Her customary salutation, tagged at the end of the note, couldn’t have been less fitting for the situation.  She used a tiny red heart with cursive lettering below that read: “Sandy Trotter.”  I was surprised to learn that it was rats and not birds, but it made sense.   Two days earlier a meeting had been called in the cafeteria.  They were having rodent problems, it was explained, and would be taking action this week.  “Please bear with us as we undertake this tricky endeavor, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”  I had all but forgotten the words of precaution.  Things like catastrophe don’t usually happen in my general area.  I’d never seen a tornado before, never been in a car accident, and never coped with a serious injury or dealt with infestation of any kind for that matter. I had expected the proceedings to take place somewhere far off in a remote corner of the office.  Originally, I had passively pictured disgusted female employees trying to hold back certain yelps and guffaws.  Maybe they’d try covering their noses or breathing into bags when the stench got too bad.  I didn’t figure the sounds would be audible, and so no images of women placing fingers in their ears had been conjured up. 
            But this fascinated me.  When Sandy limped around the edge of the cubicle and entered my workspace, I was kneeling on the ground with my ear pressed to the wall.  Eep eep, eep eep eep… eeeeeeeeeeeeep.
            “Shhh,” I said when I saw her.  “It’s … tinny… It sounds more like whistling now.  A dog whistle, maybe… but you can’t even hear those…”
            “What are you doing?”  Sandy asked.  Sandy was a thirty-year-old woman with a fleshy scar just over her right eye.  It was long and vessel-like, and it ran straight back, almost to the center of her skull.  She only showed it to me once, but it was enough to explain the constant wearing of various scarves or bandannas.  She was husky and lumbered unevenly when she walked.  I’m not positive, but there’s a good chance that the car accident could have somehow left one leg shorter than the other. 
            “It’s so strange,” I said, cupping a hand around my left earlobe and scooting closer to the wall, “It sounds like they’re racing closer, trying to find a way out.” 
            “You’re nuts,” lisped Sandy.  She always spoke slowly, her jaw drooping medically to one side as if she’d recently been given a shot of Novocain.  “What time are you going to lunch?” she asked.  When I didn’t answer her she started to giggle, then nudged me in the behind with one of her steel-toed boots.
            “Oh…Uh, one o’clock,” I said, distracted, dismissive.
            At first glance, it’s nearly impossible to tell that Sandy Trotter once went to the University of Chicago on a full scholarship, but it doesn’t take long to get to know her.  I’ve been a member of the Henry Swanson Library staff for about two weeks now, and have managed to get tied up in about six conversations with her, mostly over a lunch hour that she now constantly mirrors.  My position involves proofing newsletters and writing event schedules for the monthly flyers.  Sandy was quick to point out that we had something in common.  She majored in linguistics with a minor in literary classics (1992-1994).  Nothing about her gives it away: not her high laced, black boots, not the tight, stonewashed jeans, not the “bike week” T-shirt that hangs like an apron around her saggy middle, and certainly not the furrowed, surfeited divots around her eyes and forehead.  There are ghosts of something more on her desk: a book called The Professor and the Madman, one called Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, and a “Christian Science Monitor” magazine stacked Lincoln-log style at the corner of a filing cabinet.  She will occasionally use big words; like when she mentioned, during our second conversation, that the young man in the picture stapled to the board in back of her computer (a bald, oval faced tattoo artist with a cigarette in his mouth) was “decapitated” and “supine” when the paramedics arrived.  Yes, sometime during her junior year at U. of C. her boyfriend, the boy pictured front and center above the computer, had drunkenly slammed his Honda Civic into a parked car at a torrid speed, sending him dashing through the windshield.  As Sandy put it, in the only pity stricken, attention-dripping manner she knew how, “I was there.  I was there all covered with blood, and I held his body in my arms when he died.”
Later, during the same lunch hour, she told me about the time she and her boyfriend had been fooling around in the bedroom one night.  They had both decided to get different body parts pierced at the same time that afternoon and couldn’t wait to try them out.  Sandy got a tongue ring and Joseph—I believe that was his name—settled on something called a Prince Albert piercing?  I had no idea what that was, but as always it took no time at all to get a howling, choreographed explanation.  Apparently a Prince Albert is a “penis piercing!”  As hard as I tried not to, I had this fixed image of the two of them slumped over in candy red swivel seats—Sandy with her sticky tongue wagging as a man in surgical gloves clamped the tip in place, and her boyfriend reclined and splayed out in a star shape, biting his upper lip as the artist ducked tight inside his legs with a sharp needle. 
It got worse.   Apparently, what had started out as a bit of kinky foreplay quickly turned into a nightmare.  Halfway through a tricky follatio experiment, the opposite medal parts got stuck, entangled… something.  As she lowers her voice and leans in across the table, I tune out, maybe even blackout for just a moment.  As the story meanders on, and all the words run choppily together, I’m trying to stay focused on her flashing eyes and lips—the oblong speech patterns and the rest of her bodily proportions, almost porpoise like in manner—but I can’t stop thinking that with a bit more foresight, there really could have been a Porky’s part IV.  She makes biting gestures as she talks, making her voice sound even more like a wind-up toy.  She then slides down in her chair and sort of pretends to flip herself over.  She starts pumping her heels out to the side in rabbit kicks. All this to help aid the description of how she managed to knock on her neighbor’s wall with her feet.  The medics arrived just in time to save each organ, but again, as she proudly pointed out, another scar had resulted.  In showing me, she tossed her head back and stuck her tongue out in a clownish, dental display, then "ahh, ahh, ahhhed" at something with her forefinger in the middle.  Slamming her mouth shut, she suddenly looked across the table at me with some sort of mock bashful, fluttering, puppy eyes, and just when I thought she might grab my hand under the table and squeeze, she said, “I used to be beautiful, you know?” 
At lunch this afternoon, I found myself once again stuck in the middle of one of Sandy’s gut wrenching fables.  We were seated across from one another in the cafeteria on the top floor of the library.  She had finished her lunch and was licking the tip of a moist, bulbous lollypop.  The grape end was still smooth, tracked by initial tongue-lashings.
“Does this turn you on?” she asked me. 
What I wanted to say was, “no, not in the least!” but what came out was a sheepish reply that must have reflected just how uncomfortable she was making me.  “Um, oh yeah, it’s really hot,” I said, immediately looking down and away, tugging at my collar as if it was beginning to make my neck all too sweaty or itchy.
“I was walking to the train yesterday after work,” she said, popping the candy out of her mouth with a smack, “and I was sucking on a lollypop just like this one, and I see this guy on a bike peddling his way toward me and he sees me sucking on this lollypop.  So, I decided to put on a little show.  I started rolling the thing around in my mouth,” she began swishing it around inside her mouth, knocking it against her teeth, “and he couldn’t stop staring.  Then, just as he was starting to swerve all over the place, I winked at him.  Then, all of a sudden, I hear him screech on his brakes and I just watch him go flying straight into a parking meter!”  She hysterically mimed the arch of the biker’s descent with one bombing arm wave. 
I don’t remember what I said about the incident (what could you say?) but it was probably the usual fair, something that might hopefully, adequately pacify her.  A foxy, “wow, that’s great,” and shake of the head usually sufficed.  I had a hard time picturing a young man being seduced by a wobbly, pudgy woman in combat boots, but it made her happy to think that I could easily imagine how every detail accurately fell into place.  Until the next story that invariably sprung from the momentum of the previous.
“Yeah, I hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time,” she said.  “But I stopped laughing quicker than I usually might in a case like that.”
“Why?” I asked, “Was he hurt?”
“No, not too bad.  It’s just that I suddenly remembered what happened to me last time I laughed at somebody’s misfortunes.  About a year ago,” she began, resting the lollypop inside one big cheek, “I was on the train platform with a couple of friends and there was this bum up there with his pants down.  He was just swishing around up there with his pants down around his ankles. He could barely walk without tripping over the belt or the elastic waistband.  Well, when I first saw him, I don’t know what happened, but I had this massive laughing attack.”  She squinted her eyes and removed the lollypop. “I was laughing so hard, tilting my head back, holding my gut…I mean, just losing it completely, when out of nowhere a huge glob of something falls from the sky and lands directly in my mouth!”  She winced at the visceral impact of the memory.  “It was all white and slimy…” she paused, made a bitter face, “it turned out to be bird shit.”
I’m certain that she wanted my most sincere pity, but I could muster nothing more than a meek frown.  I gathered my trash and, deciding not to finish the remainder of my roast beef sandwich, threw everything away and returned to my cubicle for the afternoon.
Nu·ga·to·ry, pronounced phonetically as (new-ga-tory) was the word of the day on Monday morning.  I had taken to supplying my fellow employees with a new vocabulary word each weekday morning.  I’d send it along with the definition to everyone’s email addresses first thing.  It seemed to be something everyone got a kick out of, and I’d sometimes even be able to illicit a chuckle from some of the more uptight workers when I’d slip the word into casual conversation. 
Sandy was slowly approaching my desk area just as I was about to press the send key. 
“Good morning,” I said.  A question mark was always implied at the end of every sentence when dealing with Sandy first thing in the morning.
“No it isn’t” she retorted in a congested tone.  Her eyes were puffy and blackish purple.  Her skin was oily and covered in soft wisps of hair. 
“Awe, come on, what’s wrong?” I said.  “I know it’s another crappy Monday, but here, I have a new word of the day for you.  Maybe it will cheer you up.
She leaned over my computer and read the definition directly from the screen.  “Trifling or worthless,” she mumbled lowly, “ineffective or futile.”  She raised her head up.  “That’s my middle name,” she said drowsily, “useless, worthless, good for nothing…” her voice was filled with deep intonations of self-sympathy. 
“Alright, that’s enough,” I said, finding myself reaching up and rubbing one of her shoulders, “Stop it.  This is just meant to be some foolish, genteel game to keep your mind off troubles for a few seconds.  Let’s not let it turn into something it’s not.”
“Well,” Sandy said, leaning her full weight against the edge of my table.  She let her loose, bulky breasts rest just above my head, pretending not to notice what she was doing. “You try being chipper the morning after your boyfriend left you.”
“Oh, damn, I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yeah, I was up until 5 in the morning drinking Jack Daniels and coke.  He’s moving out of the apartment this weekend and he says he’s not paying his share of this month’s rent.  I almost killed myself.” 
It wasn’t the first time she’d uttered those words.  She told me she contemplated suicide all the time, especially after she cradled her dying ex-boyfriend in her arms, and later when her mother made her go see a shrink and he made her go on anti-psychotic medication.  But it was always delivered in a sort of you know I’ll never do it, but I’d still be really overjoyed if you showed me an extreme amount of attention over the whole ordeal kind of way. 
“I was going to hang myself this time with a bed sheet,” she continued.  It was the first time she’d ever mentioned a direct method.
“Awe, Sandy, don’t say that,” I said, surprised to still feel my hand massaging small circles onto her shoulder.  “It will be okay.  I’m sorry you had such a rough night.”

I was beginning to hate Sandy Trotter.  That evening I sat at my kitchen table and thought about how badly I wanted to shout at her, “go away!  Get away from me you solipsistic, selfish, attention starved, ugly, crab apple bitch!”  She was ruining my days.  I couldn’t go more than fifteen minutes without her coming up to me and giving me a hug, or caressing my back, or resting her breasts on my head.  She never had anything positive to say, ever.  Her stories were make-believe, sick, sorted, and deranged.  Did she think I had a wonderful life?  Huh? Did she think I loved being stuck in the backroom of a library, fact checking all day?  Do I love coming home to an empty apartment, barely squeezing by on lousy pay, and never being able to go out because I don’t make enough expendable income?  I’m having a fucking blast!  But I can’t just go to work and blend in.  No, I have to baby sit.  I can’t just lose myself in the precision of proofreading and copywriting, I have to be intruded upon by the sloppiness… the carelessness, the uncouth warblings of a juvenile.  That’s why she’ll never be able to do it.  She’ll never be able to kill herself because she’ll never be able to do it right.  She’ll mess it up.  I’d somehow get a phone call in the middle of the night.  She’d be lying on the floor with about twenty stab wounds, none of which landed anywhere close to a major artery.  She can’t even place a semi-colon in the right place!  I imagine her lying naked in her bathtub covered in scattered punctuation markings: a question mark on her forehead, an exclamation point on her chest, and open and closed parenthesis on each chunky thigh.  It’s a vision that manages to bring the first legitimate smile to my face in many days, even if it is a bit unsettling and Cheshire. 

The air conditioning stopped working Tuesday morning.  Everything in the office was covered in crystal pools of condensation.  Even inanimate objects without the proper ducts, secreted tears of sweat that sat like steam from boiled water atop business papers and desktops.  My tie had become an embarrassing sop rag for my forehead, neck and cheeks.  Sandy clamped a small pink fan at the edge of her desk and pressed her face against the cool cage.  I could hear her reverberated moans and syncopated whines coming out the other end as she patted her face with chubby fingers.  And then I heard her stand up and come my direction. 
I immediately stopped what I was doing and fixed my eyes just above the edge of the cubicle where she was soon to arrive.  It was my hope that I had channeled a dogged enough expression, one that would outwardly exude the fact that I was in no mood to deal with harrowing matters.  Her face was flush with the humidity of the room.  Her uncovered hair was swept up in front, caked wave-like into a mess of dark wet curls.  She had not picked up on my mental distress. 
“God,” she fumed, “it’s a hell hole in here.”  She looked directly at me, and I at her, each of us trying to convey our intentions.  She seemed to be saying, “what?  I need to cry.  What could possibly be more important?”  I was trying to let her know that her crying would be best done in the confines of her own trashy area, away from me, two cubes down. 
“This is the last straw,” she said.  Her hands inched up her legs and landed at her hips.  “This sucks.  First they cut my hours, then they kill rats in the wall beside me, then the air conditioner breaks…  I’ve really got to quit this shit.”
“So why don’t you?” I asked, still staring apathetically just below her sleep-deprived eyelids. 
“I need the money.  I don’t know what I’m going to do now.  I tried talking him into staying last night.  I was on the phone until three in the morning.”  She paused to see if I was softening.  When she saw that I wasn’t, she continued.  “Do you know how bad it is to mix hard liquor with anti-psychotics?” she said.  I may have shrugged ever so slightly.  “It can kill you.  Let’s just say that.  It can kill you.”  This time, in the silence, the sound of poisoned, frenzied rats returned.  I rolled my chair toward the wall.
“Jesus,” I whispered to know one in particular, “it’s getting worse.”
Sandy was stone faced.  I could feel her staring at the back of my head, motionless.  Out of sudden paranoia, I turned around and watched as her features slowly loosened, her mouth dramatically sagging to form a frown. 
“I swear to god,” Sandy said.  “I am going to free those rats.  I swear to god.”
With the first sign of any empathy or acknowledgment, I looked at her and nodded my head several times.  Sandy blinked multiple times, settled on eyes closed, and finally opening them again, walked back to her computer. 
The rats were being fried; set free inside the maze of walls to burn alive.  I needed a cigarette. 
Outside, the air was non-existent.  It was masked and suffocated by whatever blanket the heavens felt fit to cover us with.  The library looked like a billowing factory, smoke rising from the brick in parts facing the sun.  Outside, in that intense heat, I thought about Sandy Trotter.  I had left to escape her and I couldn’t.  She was getting closer to it.  I’m not sure if that meant suicide, quitting, freeing the rats, or simply keeling over from stress and anxiety, but something was coming.  Maybe she would kill someone else.  Her boyfriend, perhaps.  Something needed to happen with her.  One dead boyfriend, one emotionally on his way, a worthless job, health problems, a knack for getting under people’s skin and staying there… if she didn’t have someone to confide in, if there were no luminous best friends, family members, clergy, or coworkers who cared to give her the attention she so badly craved then something had to end.  She reminded me of those patients that Dr. Kavorkian so mercifully aided in suicide.  She’d be a prime candidate—one that, even if I hadn’t had first hand experience with the case, would have cheered as a just and worthy scenario in the following morning papers. 
But she would never be able to do anything on her own.  I could never be her Kavorkian.  She has no Kavorkian.  That is sad.  This woman will go through the rest of her life clinging to people.  She’ll pray that one day a person will be able to cope with all of her baggage, and inevitably someone will come along.  And then they will leave.  Come and go, leave and leave and leave.  This is her lot in a horrible life.  If the stories are true, if her life has come to this agonizing, insomnia-laden future of drugs and abuse, then maybe I do feel sorry for her.  But I am not her Kavorkian.  My prayer is that she changes things herself.  I hardly believe in god at all, and so something must happen soon. 
Just as I was about to take the final drag on my cigarette, I heard it: the distracting noise of poisoned rats.  Up above my head there was an alcove: a narrow pathway between two buildings that led to a courtyard out back.  It was barely big enough to squeeze two human bodies past one another, and it was clustered with growing vines and green ivy.  I brimmed my hand over my eyes and got closer, craning upward for a better look.  One stray power line lay between the brick walls, and upon it sat dozens of pigeons.  They were loud, and seemed agitated, each one trying to be heard above the next.  It even appeared that some of the more audacious birds were pecking at smaller members of the party.  Just to the left and slightly north of this action was a window.  I counted the floors, using the tops and bottoms of frames as earmarks.  Third floor.  It was my cubicle.  I was certain of the location only after seeing my coffee mug on the bottom of the inside ledge, and the smoldered blinds cracked the allotted four inches above the sill.  It was stunning, and I smiled half out of hysteria and half out of enlightenment.  Birds.  Rats may or may not have been dying by the fistfuls somewhere in the dankness of those white walls, but what I, what we, had been hearing was nothing more than bellicose birds with mild claustrophobia.
 I couldn’t wait to tell her.  Maybe that was it.  Maybe this was the way all of her stories were spawned, well-meaning, well-intentioned bits of estimation and quick reflexes—her need for knee-jerk reactions.  They weren’t lies necessarily, just exaggerations meant to drag a steady predicament closer to her irrational state, into her mad worldview, an atmosphere where things needed to be slanted.  
When I exited the elevator and entered the stifling office area, Sandy was nowhere to be found.  Her cubicle was vacant, the screen asleep and bleating.  I had wanted to sit in her chair until she returned, but as I started to take a seat, my boss, Katherine, appeared.  Katherine was a lanky, straight pole of a woman.  Her face was shrunken and taut, her face a nearly transparent blue and pink.  She always looked fragile, fidgety, and malnourished—today was no exception.  Her gait was reminiscent of someone balancing on shaky stilts.  
“Roger,” she said, seemingly happy to see me.  “I need to talk with you.”  Her features turned stiff, more like austere composure.  “We are losing business.  I’m going to be honest with you.  We may not need you much longer.  It isn’t so much that we won’t need you really, we just won’t have resources to keep you on.  I’m going to have to ask that you take a cut in hours… hopefully just until we can figure something out.”  Her eyes were the largest, most alert part of her ailing body, and they looked at me now, pleadingly.  “We are asking everyone to take on different shifts.  I’d really appreciate it if you’d agree to work the night shift.”
“Well,” I said, and the only thing working inside me was the desire to keep making money at any cost, “I’ll give it a shot, if it’s what you really need.”
“Thank you,” she said, relieved that she not only had enough lapse of pride to make the statement, but that she had an accommodating employee.  “I’ll let them know.  It’s a five o’clock to midnight shift.  That’s okay with you?”
“Yeah, I suppose so.  I’ll do what it takes for now.  I really hope something can be worked out.  Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
“Sure, I will.  Thanks again.”
My need to keep speaking was borne out of the long weeks I had spent previously searching for any job that might offer me something above minimum wage.  “Have you told Sandy yet?” I asked.
Somewhat reluctantly, she answered, “Yes,” and her face soured slightly, “I’m not sure if she’ll be staying on.”  And with a modest nod of the head she thanked me again, then turned away to go find other amicable workers, hopefully. 
I remember the coming now like a fleet of soldiers stepping in cadence.  It could have been the lingering remarks of the sturdy, top-heavy boots on tile, the echo of a slamming utility closet door, the swinging tool scraping against painted walls, or the growl of a woman poised to attack.  In hindsight, it was the culmination of all those things, and of a thousand different cords of energy preparing to unwind. 
Sandy told me to stay where I was. 
“Don’t move, Roger,” she said.  And no one in the office would have dared.  Crossing fully into our department, I could hear the kinetic shuffle of her shoes as they moved from hard surfaces onto the beige carpeting.  She saw me sitting in her chair, and when I spun to see what she was doing, she smiled.  I heard her cough loudly, then watched while she laboriously hoisted her weapon, grunting deeply as she lurched toward the wall inside my cubicle.  Forgetting her command, I stood and almost ran to the spot, hungry to see more.  Sweat beaded up around her forehead and ran like drool down her blonde cheeks.  Katherine had stopped walking and now stood in the doorway with her hands at her side.  Her perfectly round, blue eyes were darting back and forth, searching for a large body to prevent any incident.  From neck down her body was arrow straight and thin, like a painting I had seen in a 1950’s New Yorker—Caricature of a Prim, Rich, Befuddled, Suburban Housewife on Canvas. 
The faces of ten or so doleful employees pitched upward, frozen, paralyzed and pale. 
“This is it,” Sandy screamed.  Then, raising the balled end of the hammer, and releasing her grasp with one hand, she landed a weak blow against the wall beside my computer.  It was a large hammer, old and dull with a splintered wooden handle.  Huffing, she squared her shoulders again and swung fast this time, continuing on, rapidly.  They were swift, staccato cranks, each of which bounced off the wall, recoiling and vibrating into her soft arms and wrist.  Two hands, baseball slugger’s stance now…  And I wanted to say something, tell her that they weren’t rats at all, tell her they were only birds!  But she spoke before I could.
“I’m.  Getting.  These.  Fucking.  Rats.  Out,” she panted, still reeling back and unleashing blows against the wall.  “Out.  Of.  Heeere!”  It was about to give.  The strikes were beginning to sound muted and breath-like—a sure sign that the plaster and drywall were ready to crumble. 
I wanted to stop her.  I wanted to cheer.  I wanted to apologize.  I wanted to see her give up.  I wanted to see her succeed.  But in the end, I was only a spectator to her vicious sport.  If I was a fan, one way or the other, I had to pick sides, stand up and say something.  I cupped my hands over my mouth.
“That’s it!  That’s it!” I hollered.  “This time really let her have it.  You’re almost there.  Get your waist involved, pivot!” I coached.  “Follow through this time, follow through!”
And maybe it was my encouragement that pushed her over the top, maybe it was her own bottled up, brute determination that I never thought she had, but the next and last heave made contact with a near palpable gusto that no one was prepared for.  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” she screamed. 
The hammer left a crooked divot, a diamond shaped berth resembling a womb.  Somewhere on the other side I heard the noise of startled birds lifting and spreading their wings—chirps, flaps, the settling of power lines, and then nothing.  It was all for nothing. 
Sandy was squatting, the hammer pressed firmly in her fist, resting hard against one knee.  Flakes of paint and board fluttered and hovered in the thick air before making their way to the ground.  When she finally caught her breath, she bent down and peered inside the hole.  If she could have got one leg in, I have no doubt she would have disappeared all the way inside of it.  As I watched her investigate, oddly calm in her poking and listening, I had a perfect plan for someone like Sandy Trotter.  It was just as feasible as anything else and every bit as good of an end.  If only… If only, I thought, if only it could all be like Alice in Wonderland for her.