Dead Rat
There is a rat. And a city. And it is dead. The rat, not the city. Look, there are a lot of ways to start this story but I think it has to start with the dead rat, not the city.
This rat is 10 feet from the front door of my apartment building. Just off the pavement and on the asphalt. It’s splayed open and its intestines are falling out, as one does when one is a dead rat.
The first time I encountered the rat I almost stepped on it. After the screaming stopped I forgot about it until I encountered it the next time I came home, albeit with slightly less screaming this time. Slightly. The third time was while I was getting ready to leave my apartment as I wistfully wondered what had become of the rat; who had “taken care” of it. The fourth time was immediately thereafter when I realized that nobody had, and wistfully was not the adjective to use with a rat, perhaps ever.
Whose jurisdiction is it anyway? Apparently not the Sysephean dog piss porters of my building who diurnally hose off the sidewalk. Nor apparently the street cleaners, which…are there street cleaners in Manhattan? Were there? Have there ever been? Maybe that’s just a long lost token of my pre-pandemic life I’m misremembering. Certainly no well-meaning neighbor has stepped in. As the season finally turns to summer and the rat is still there, one recalls Langston Hughes’ deferred dream, and whether or not this was the Metaphor Not Taken.
For a while now New York has been a place where you can walk home at 4 a.m. in a miniskirt through what felt like the entirety of the island without your spidey-sense tingling too much. If it wasn’t fully safe it was safe enough. My favorite activity has and will always be just walking around the different neighborhoods, much like all naturalized citizens of the city obsessed with gatekeeping what it is to be a true New Yorker. But that’s no longer such an easy thing to do - my friends have been attacked on the street multiple times (including one aborted attempt that truly could have killed him) in the recent past, and regardless of how much he has it coming to him none of the people who targeted him knew that. Horrific acts of violence have been visited on innocent denizens of this city in a definite change, a definite break, from the before-times. A walk is no longer a walk, it is a survive.
And while it’s becoming harder and harder to leave your apartment, rent increases are making it harder and harder to stay. Just who exactly is able to move in to New York at this point? Those who want to are too young and priced out, easily. Those with the money for the exorbitant on top of exorbitant prices of the New New York chafe at the inch thick paint on the walls, the retro 70’s appliances (not a design choice), the closet-like apartments with nothing closet-like, the pure stubborn inability for any angle in an apartment to actually be 90 degrees, and the bathrooms that truck stops tell their children about to frighten them. Oh yeah, and the dead rats.
If you’ve been paying attention, this story is about more than just the rat. But it’s also definitely about the rat. It’s about what’s already here, at our doorstep, that we are disgusted and affronted by, and yet when we see nobody has stepped in to take care of the problem we simply complain and write a long essay about it to send to the New Yorker. Real action takes hard work, concerted effort, and leaving your zone of comfortability and privilege aside to actually address what’s going on with tangible steps and actions.
And since I will be so very busy doing that perhaps someone can please just throw away the rat?