Killing a Mouse
KESSLER, JASCHA
The Young Generation—5 killing a mouse By Jascha Kessler Last night I killed a mouse. A simple domestic event. No doubt. Yet this morning, in the middle of my walk to the bus stop, it occurred...
...Killing a Mouse," says Mr...
...He didn't need anxiety because he should have had enough to do learning about poetry...
...He seemed to use either of two runways on each side of the sink to break for his goal...
...I set the springs (the silly pup curious about it all) and baited them with a sprinkling of the food he liked so much...
...I hoped he wouldn't stick either...
...The dog and child, we had reasoned, would get along wonderfully...
...I have it...
...Kessler, "develops no such great moral dilemma—these are, after all, the Fattening '50s and there seems to be little need, and less time, for thought...
...Then I went back to bed...
...my mouse is a gentle, domesticated creature...
...He squeaked when I wiggled the wire about...
...I didn't know for a while that I even had a mouse...
...What can I do...
...He didn't come back...
...maybe he was just keeping very still...
...I reach in with the pliers, pincing subtly...
...I must do something with this dilemma now: I am freezing in only my pajama top...
...Fortunato lives still...
...After all my guilty imaginings, he's only a tiny, really tiny, little, little mouse...
...If I release him, he'll only rush for his hole, lame or not, and I'll have to hunt for him again...
...I wondered if it was a mouse...
...Shivering in pajama tops, my feet cold in cold slippers, without my glasses, I steal back to the kitchen and turn on the light...
...It is chilly at 4 in the morning...
...But wolves are wild and free...
...Yet, a year ago he'd given up his sad lyrics to worry about the blurred image of his own face in the age-speckled mirror of his Barrow Street tenement...
...I became a little anxious...
...I asked myself suddenly: Who needs an enemy to engage his life, when he has friends enough to do it for him, let alone himself and his domestic menage (a double redundancy) ? Why should that wee, sleekit, timorous, cowerin' beastie have thrust himself upon me, too...
...I pushed them carefully up his two narrow runways...
...my hope is that the dog will act up if he smells another mouse some time, though of course he must be as used to the smell as the mouse was to his...
...His bright black beady eyes are rolling...
...I dreaded his coming back—it has happened...
...I must have my shirts clean, my food clean...
...Of all centuries to play it safe, and with a mouse —we who have bombs and Strontium 90 ticking in our marrow, 30-second nerve gas (odorless, colorless, tasteless), and virus rarities to drop in the enemy's mailboxes...
...The rattling comes, desperate now, from behind the stove...
...He would be neither cautious nor safe...
...Maybe he was dead...
...He The previous writers in this symposium—Norman Pod-horetz, Wallace Markfield, Arthur Cohen, Daniel Bell— provided analysis and commentary...
...I didn't want him swimming about in the bowl—too much to allow even Fortunato—so I plunged the trip quite down...
...My wife turned over in her sleep, embracing me, never noticing how cold 1 was from the waist down...
...As he hit cold water he squeaked for the last time...
...He would not be warned by the human smell on the trap, living among us people as he did...
...But he didn't...
...One trap was nowhere to be seen...
...Even then, he ran so fast I thought I saw just a blur out of the corner of my eye...
...There would be reasons for this heart to find: Even to eat rice we must kill paramecia, hence...
...The sudden lock of the trap was accompanied by a series of small shrieks of pain and anguish...
...Not a tragic case, certainly...
...What will I have suffered for then...
...I hold up the trap...
...Here we present a more sentient approach, cast in the form of a parable...
...Sanitarian and utilitarian...
...health gone ascetic, unreconciled to the necessary fist, pride and power restrained from their imperatives...
...Squeakings...
...I'd pour the dog's cereal into his dish at dinner time, and there'd be drippings on the floor...
...The dog curled up at its foot, yawned once and fell asleep...
...And I cared—I didn't need him...
...What was I doing with 70 pounds of black poodle...
...I held him under for a few more moments as he gave his last twitches...
...But as it turned out the best laid plan is not as simple as one hopes...
...my wife asked...
...But what could I do...
...He probably had mice aplenty because he left his garbage around for weeks...
...and the landlord saying...
...I waited...
...A philosophical dogma to rationalize the luxurious waste of youthful strength on dreams of equity: This liberal adolescent will be stunned soon enough by the unexpected depression of his Thirties...
...0 youth...
...I would even call this madness a reverence for life...
...But the third time it happened I saw there was a real cause: a neat bullet-sized hole in the bottom of the bag...
...I might, being so rapt with my sensibility, even say, "Go on about your mousy affairs, mouse, you too must live as best you can...
...I have a wife, a child, a dog, yet I stand here with a doomed mouse who hangs upside down, his heart ticking faster than any bomb, dangling from a pink hind leg with its pink little fingers of toes, miniscule human-seeming toes, from a dirty little trap, the trap from a pair of pliers, the pliers from my steady hand...
...rattlings of chains...
...He'll dry out, I think, he won't smell, he'll crumble to dusty fur and little dry bones, he'll be just a ghost of himself...
...In the middle of the night, journeying through a light, agitated sleep, I awake...
...But 1 know it really was...
...they strip flowers and break branches from trees to make sure nature still retains her fabled regenerative powers...
...But being where I am now, today, what did I do...
...His heart is beating quickly, a panicky pittapatta-pitta...
...He came for the dog's cereal, a tasty wheat and corn and soya preparation in five-pound waxed double bags...
...She didn't like that...
...Why did he come...
...For fifteen cents I got two simple snappy things...
...I went to see the result...
...Empirical boys drop cats from sixth story windows to test their reflexes...
...I took a deep breath, composed my mind, and forgot about him...
...What are you going to do now...
...I fetched a wire clotheshanger, unbent it and poked it up the runway...
...It was a frightened little sound—For the love of God, Montresor...
...There wasn't much air in him...
...Why didn't you gnaw it off, the way wolves do...
...I said...
...My wife didn't want any part of the filthy job, though she'd been quick enough to ask for the traps...
...The dog approaches softly, wary, curious...
...The answer is simple and domestic...
...yet before doing what I shall do, a few alternatives no longer possible come to mind...
...Jascha Kessler, 27, writes poetry and fiction that has been published in Poetry, Encounter, Accent, Chicago Review and other journals...
...In his last years, Dylan Thomas woke fretful and sick in the morning...
...And I thought, Poor Fortunato...
...The child in her room slept right on...
...Best, he would never know what hit him...
...When I was in college a friend of mine, a beginning poet, used to read Kierkegaard and talk about Angst all the time...
...I went to the bathroom, opened the toilet...
...Has he gone back to get at some cereal for his last supper...
...Finally, when there was no more response, I gave up poking...
...There was a frantic rattling and squeaking...
...Only little bubbles blew from his mouth, a tiny stream of bubbles issuing...
...Suppose I were not so young, but adolescent, I might pretend to be religious, a Jainist perhaps...
...So I went for a trap...
...It seems it makes no difference: He had no choice...
...Decision is the only answer...
...I pull gently, and with the trap, scrabbling futilely on the linoleum for a hold, squeaking in terror, comes my poor Fortunato...
...And he struggled, he tried to come up for air, his little paws dabbling upwards...
...A boy might take down a kitchen knife, summarily hack off the mouse's head or pierce for the heart...
...I say he, though it might have been a pregnant she, because I think of him as a bachelor...
...Answer: I had a wife, and a new child...
...What, I puzzled, could that apocryphal tycoon have meant in pronouncing that a better mousetrap would bring the world to your door—could anything be simpler, cheaper, or more effective than this little piece of wood with its delicate tripper and its smashing spring...
...Who the hell puts mice down a toilet...
...I was excited, and full of repulsion...
...Yet this morning, in the middle of my walk to the bus stop, it occurred to me it was enough to hang a case on...
...Flay...
...I didn't want the plumber coming to fish him out...
...Carefully bending down, and peering round the corner of the gas-range, I see the edge of the trap showing...
...Only one thing could be responsible, but for a few days I wavered, loathe to draw that deduction, until my mouse (a city mouse) was such a damn fool as to dash out of the cupboard across the kitchen floor in the middle of a Saturday afternoon...
...I was surprised at my clumsiness...
...About 4 the next afternoon, we were all in the bedroom playing together when—snap...
...He could have been more patient or less guilty or braver...
...All the same, they took him away a few months ago and gave him a round of shocks...
...seemed to be dragging the trap after him, unable to wriggle into his hole...
...The 20th century is pitiless: I can't risk touching him, for the lice on mice may be as fatal to me as I shall be to him...
...But he didn't care...
...But he didn't care, and not caring he shouldn't have had his anxiety—at least not according to his classically modern thesis...
...He wriggles terribly for a minute, then relaxes because the blood has rushed to his head...
...He was struggling back there behind and under the sink where it was impossible to get at him...
...in a few hours I have to get up and go to the office...
...thus the compassionate heart is hemmed in by hygiene...
...A mouse would know little about the pleasure principle: He would be all hunger and desire, unable to pass temptation by in the middle of his journey to paradise without stopping to take what he could get...
...At that age, I'd still be so stark scared of death and of living's impractical imperatives that I would grasp at any opportunity, relevant or not, to assert the right of all things to go on...
...But it offers - glimpse of one moment of the strange '50s, a moment of moral, even religious, decision...
...A pseudoheart, generous, full of fresh blood, seeking charity for suffering in the name of love's absolute, and in this lovingness agonizing over the mouse...
...What is the pain-crazed creature thinking of...
...But I need my sleep...
...No real cause for fear and trembling...
...Nor would I—and that is the best way to do a domestic killing...
...Then I released the spring bar of the trap and flushed him down...
...Where else in the middle of the night, where the hell else...
...I sighed, I shivered...
...Suppose I were very much younger, say an unhaired boy, I might play scientists...
...Simple and domestic—wived, childed, and dogged...
...I search for a pair of pliers...
...I looked at myself, my householding self that groaned in its chains like the sea...
...He had his mouse...
...What to do...
...But after all...
...Introducing this piece, he refers us to "Shooting an Elephant," in which George Orwell describes how, as a young man, he was forced to kill a tame elephant against his inclination...
...Caught by his left hind leg...
...I let him sniff the mouse without violating its helplessness...
...I think before long I must have fallen asleep too...
...I went back to the bedroom and explained that he must be dead...
...Once, twice, again...
Vol. 40 • April 1957 • No. 14
