"Commentary on the Gospel of John" by Addison Zeller
Someone I barely knew messaged to say he was living out of his car and did I want his rats.
It was move-in time for a lot of people, and move-out time for others, him included. I didn’t have a mattress yet, my room was tiny, I could hear a roommate in the shower and another on the john.
I slept on it, or tried to. I looked at his profile. For two weeks he’d posted videos of himself reading poetry in his car. Sometimes he gave updates, undetailed ones, of his personal status, the situation he was in. I knew that under the left-hand corner of the screen, riding shotgun, was a cage of rats.
When I scrolled down, I saw around a dozen photos, the rats piebald and narrow-looking, like they slept in packing tubes.
I had nothing in that room, just a body pillow, blankets, and a bunch of empty corners.
“Maybe,” I wrote. “Is it hard taking care of rats?”
“No,” he replied, “but it would be a big help.”
He showed up before noon, grinning tragically. “Wow,” he said. “Not a lot of space here!”
His eyes watered abruptly.
“Well,” I said, “let’s see those rats.”
We went out to his car, an old black Toyota. There were curtains in all the windows. A box of granola, a bag of sweatpants, a shape of probably a plant – that’s all I could see. When he opened the passenger door, a commentary on the Gospel of John fell out, covers sprawling. He squeezed his shoulders in, expanded his gut to shield his possessions from my eyes, and retrieved a pink cage containing a water bottle, a wheel, and a couple handfuls of rats.
“You sure?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said.
He gazed sadly at the rats. He must have had me pegged. My whimsical, humanitarian motives. My inability to say no.
“I wanted to set up a GoFundMe for them,” he said. “But I already got one.”
“Fuck, man.” I tapped a rat through the bars.
“Quality of life. A small apartment’s better than a car. Just for exercise even. Right now, they’re riding up against my coffee maker. Anytime I turn it on, it kinda shoots them around.”
For a while he sat at the kitchen table, showing me everything and grimacing at the rats. “Bye,” he kept saying to them. He stirred them around with his fingertips, rubbing their bellies and their heads. I left the room so he’d feel free to do whatever.
When I came back down, he was lying on the floor, letting the rats crawl on his chest.
“Look, man,” I said.
“No, I get you, man.” He scooped a rat off his belly and gently thumbed its head. “Better get hauling. Gotta drive out to – I don’t know. Not sure why I’m going.”
He had the expression of someone who wanted to think out loud. I sympathetically but emphatically slotted a rat into the cage.
“Offer you a beer?” I’d tried to avoid it, but figured it’d help to give him something he could finish.
“That’d be cool, man.”
“One for the road.”
Midway through the beer, he said, “Why don’t I – so how about this? Why don’t you keep this beer and – like – contribute the value of this beer, which you offered me, to my GoFundMe page? Just out of friendship?”
I said I would. He looked skeptical, so I told him to message me the link. “Already did,” he said.
I stood there and gave him twenty bucks.
“Can I say goodbye to my rats now?” he asked. I left the kitchen and went discreetly upstairs.
An hour later, when I came down, the rats were bathing themselves on the table. A jug of food had been left with instructions taped to the cap. His beer was gone.
The rats were quiet and still when I set the cage in the corner. They did not look at me. I closed my bedroom door and went down to smoke in the parking lot. The Toyota was still there, curtains pulled. It drove off when I waved.
I went back in once, to grab my Wendy’s uniform. “Hey sir hows it going with the rats,” he messaged. My instinct was to ignore him, but it ate at me the whole shift long.
“Wonderful!” I wrote when I got in. “Acclimating to their new environment!”
I sat on the floor, reviewed his instructions, and filled their dishes from the jug. I even slipped them a few dollops of yogurt as a kind of welcoming gift. They clustered together. They looked at me.
I lay on my pillow and contemplated the light fixture on my bedroom ceiling. It was clogged with bugs.
“Pics,” I added later, attaching two images of the cage in its new corner.
In the morning, the rats were chirping to each other in the dawn light.
“Better without those curtains,” I told them, gathering up my uniform to iron.
After my shift I let them out. They seemed relieved, if nervous, and each did the same thing: lifted one paw, sniffed the air, trotted forward. I practiced picking them up with the aid of a YouTube video while they huddled against the wall. Be firm, it directed. Brace them against your chest.
They squirmed through my fingers and ran for the door, but it was closed and I just scooped them up.
He requested to FaceTime the following night, so I popped open a beer and sat on the floor, shifting the cage around until nothing else was on camera. With the curtains, you couldn’t see what kind of place he was parked at, or make out the shapes behind his seat. One by one, I held up the rats so he could talk to them.
Addison Zeller is a translator and editor living in Wooster, Ohio. His fiction has appeared in Olney Magazine.
