KATHARSIS (Chapter Twenty-Two)

        The first time I saw a rat in the house it was so large I thought I was hallucinating. I wasn't high or withdrawing when I saw it but I'd fallen asleep on the living room couch, sitting there on the same dusty blue and white cushion I'd flipped over after a girl Alex brought home left a shit-looking period stain in the middle of it, and when the floor creaked I snapped out of it to find my cigarette burning a hole in the armrest and an ash-colored rat the size of a Labrador retriever crouched in the threshold to the hallway and staring back at me like he, too, wasn't sure I was really there. We stared at each other for a minute, a literal minute like at least sixty seconds, neither of us moving at all or making a noise until I finally said, "what are you doing here, rat?" and he turned around like a car does, backing up, then moving forward, then backing up again, until finally he was facing the right direction, then he scuttled and thumped his way around the corner, out of sight and down the hallway.

        I stood up, still half-asleep and unconvinced I was awake, crossed the green palm trees on the grimy beige carpet, tossed my cigarette butt toward a Solo cup on the table but missed, and when I got to the hallway opening I peered around it to make sure I wouldn't walk right into the rat, who probably could have killed me or at least seriously injured me in a scuffle, if it came to that. He wasn't there though, he had disappeared, maybe into the pile of old luggage underneath the staircase or maybe he hadn't been there at all, but in any case I decided I ought to go to bed then, lest I fall asleep on the couch again and wake up to a dog-sized rat gnawing on my leg or eating the half a sandwich I'd saved for tomorrow's breakfast or lunch.

        To get to the door to my room I had to leap past the luggage pile in the nook under the staircase the same way I used to leap onto and out of my bed as I child, hoping I'd be out of reach for any boogie man or similar monster trying to reach out and snatch me by the ankles. When I made it to the door I realized it wasn't closed all the way, and for a moment I was scared the rat might have gone in there instead of the luggage pile or the kitchen. I hadn't heard the usual clunk of my door hitting the frame though, and when I got into my room I didn't see it or hear it anywhere amongst the heaps of clothing or stacks of unfinished paintings encircling the room. I was about to shut out the light and climb into bed but I remembered my half a sandwich sitting there, utterly vulnerable on the kitchen counter, and while the rat was possibly too obese to climb up there I didn't want to take that risk.

        I took an old green tennis racket I'd bought for five dollars at an estate sale around the corner, and I set out hesitantly for the kitchen, hushing my footsteps so as to listen for the intruder. I didn't hear anything and when I got to the kitchen there was nothing there he could have fit behind or underneath, and my takeout box was still resting undisturbed on the countertop next to some spilled cranberry juice, mine, and an empty bottle of Burnetts vodka, also mine. Evidently someone had been making drinks without asking me, yet again, because the last time I'd seen it the bottle had been half full. I took the takeout box off the counter and turned around to put it in the refrigerator, but in the middle of the motion a blob of grey in the laundry room caught my eye and I jumped and nearly pissed myself thinking it was the rat lying face up on the floor.

        But it was only Alex, passed out on his back with his ridiculous grey suit-vest on, arms crossed in front of him and a spatula in his hand, looking like HG Wells's time traveler if he'd landed in the worst possible place and decided to lay down and die. The spatula in his hand meant that he'd lost his keys again and tried to jimmy the lock on the door to his bedroom, which in my mind was still Buddy’s bedroom, Buddy’s tomb. Too drunk to jimmy it properly, he'd finally given up and passed out on the floor. I put my food in the fridge and considered leaving him there, as an offering to the rat and punishment for drinking my vodka, maybe even sprinkling on him some of the shredded cheddar cheese that'd been sitting in the fridge since god knows when, but I thought better of it and nudged him with my foot, then slapped him a couple times in the face until he mumbled something irritable and incomprehensible, then opened his eyes and looked at me about the same way I imagine I'd looked at the rat, glassy eyed and uncertain.

        I took the spatula from him and started to jimmy the lock, while he groaned and twisted on the floor behind me and eventually thrust his torso up into a hunched over, seated position. The room had been broken into this way so many times that the metal part on the doorframe was loose and it was very easy to squeeze the spatula in there and force the handle. It only took me three tries before the door swung inward and the pink light from the fluorescent bulb in the ceiling fan came pouring out. Alex was on his feet now and the first thing he said was, "do you have any more vodka?" and he started to smile. I said "nope I'm all out" then tried to guide him toward his bed but he staggered past me into the room and collapsed into a wicker chair with an already-broken leg, which now broke completely and sent him spilling over the back of it onto the paint-covered maroon shag rug in the center of his floor. Before I could offer to help him up he was pulling a sweat-stained cigarette out from behind his ear and lighting it, facing the pink glow from the ceiling fan.

        "I have a story idea," he said.

        Alex had starred in a short film called Amigo del Schizo, written and directed by a girl named Keenan who lived in New York, doing whatever trust fund babies do, which is usually fashion or art of some sort. The same was true of Alex, who, in addition to being nineteen and inexplicably wealthy, had only come to Charleston to work on his art, which varied week to week between photography, chaotic bourbon-fueled painting, and script ideas that caught hold of him like a fever but never amounted to anything. I had told him I was a writer, or at least trying to be a writer, and ever since then he’d assumed it was destiny that we’d met. He, the creative genius with an inconvenient case of borderline illiteracy, and I, the competent but impressionable writer who could wrestle his wild ravings into a coherent narrative. Before we left this house, he had insisted, we were going to make the greatest movie the world had ever seen.

        Unlikely, but as I was genuinely hoping to be a writer some day it was nice to have someone I could bounce ideas off of, and no matter what I said he’d be as excited about it as I was. What if the main character is the villain and he doesn’t even realize it? That’s brilliant! Write that down! Good God, the movies we postulated would be bad enough to make Ed Wood or Tommy Wiseau say What the hell were you thinking? but we’d be so fucked up we had no filter, and for my part I had become so hopeless with the direction my life was taking that I was happy to pretend, just as he did, that it was fate that brought us together, that we really would make the greatest movie of all time, and that even if the Katharax had wiped away much of the last two months then it was just a part of the creative process, a self-flagellation to make me worthy of all the great things that were coming to me.

        So I stood there wobbling in the doorway with the pink light it my eyes, watching Alex lie on his back and blow smoke up and swirling toward that same screeching ceiling fan that’d Buddy had watched in death, and as I lit my own cigarette I said, “Alright, so what’s this fuckin’ brilliant idea of yours?”

        He cackled like a maniac and kept laughing way longer than you might consider normal, and finally he stopped long enough to say, “You’re gonna love it. It’s called—“ He paused then for dramatic effect, looking over at me with the cigarette held out in front of his mouth.

        “It’s called... Cave 81.”

TO BE CONTINUED