My boyfriend is going down on me when we find the first rat. I mean, “we” are not all present at the physical sighting of the thing, but I frame it as a group effort because the sex is interrupted in a way that nevertheless makes me acutely aware of the rat. His sister is the one who finds it in the traditional sense, in the kitchen. She knocks on the bedroom door, says “Guys, we have a problem.” My boyfriend freezes, looks at me with something confused between fear, apology, mirth. I swallow. We hold gaze.
“Okay, we’re coming,” I decide to the door. He wince-mouths “sorry” as we throw on our clothes. Rat.
We are at his father’s father’s cabin in Sparrow Bush, a hamlet somewhere in the Bermuda triangle between New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. It’s the second act in an escapism from splitting up, one that has finally translated into literal flight. I assume we’re over upon the governor’s first Stay Home order — instead, we find the loophole of moving into his bedroom. He’s planning to go take care of his parents, though, and by day fifteen or so I’ve gathered the vocabulary to end it again. But my folks live in the same cardinal direction and there’s space in his sister’s car. And why not take a week at their ancient family cabin along the way, just to make sure we don’t bring anything back?
The highway message boards between Michigan and New York are lit up gold with alternating “LIMIT TRAVEL / STOP THE SPREAD / OF COVID-19” and “PRACTICE / SOCIAL DISTANCING / STOP COVID-19” tercets. A local bowling alley stays relevant with an electronic street sign depicting an animated infection curve that spikes and flattens, spikes and flattens on loop. A man is thrown out of the ice cream shop for not wearing a mask, cannot believe they won’t accept his patronage. A woman at the gas station awkwardly asks me to remove mine when I put a six pack on the counter. She can’t tell if I’m old enough.
When we finally get to the cabin we drop our stuff, look around, and promptly figure that if we’re taking one week we might as well do two. Seven more days. Long live limbo.
***
In our heart of hearts, we know the rats are there well before the kitchen sighting. We hear them in the walls on the first night, a rasp that flutters from room to room like a heart palpitation, lassoing the floor plan in erratic loops from 8 to 10 PM. We ignore this until the interruptive kitchen sighting, which puts the nail in the context. The noise becomes unbearable when we can no longer deny that it’s rats. Mixed with anxiety, the once-fluttering begins to take on the unnatural tempo of a cheap horror movie, or porn. If it’s too loud my boyfriend will turn on the bedside lamp and curl the top of his head into the small of my back. In the other room, his sister will play the same crooning Jacob Collier song on loop until she falls asleep, its delicate thin-air refrain spilling over into my lingering insomnia and forever commingling with rat.
One morning my boyfriend decides to run with me, something he has always talked about in Ann Arbor but never followed through with. He couldn’t have planned on running with me in Sparrow Bush, either, because the only shoes he’s packed are a pair of heavy-duty hiking boots. But boredom makes us bold, and he ends up hitting the road with me — shirtless — in rolled-up long johns, wool hiking socks, and his sister’s Velcro strap sandals. We plod down the country highway, his sandals slap-smacking the pavement with each gangly foot stroke and leaving me winded with laughter. Our last mile is a slow burn, but I grew up running hills and start to break away. My boyfriend, surely held back by his footwear, gallantly waves me ahead. I’ve got about a hundred meters on him when a behemoth of a truck pulls up, slows down. A massive white arm twists out the window and I brace for something gross. But the arm is followed by a toothy smile, and its thumb playfully jerks backwards as this goliath stranger tells me “If yer tryna run away from him, yer sure doin well!”
We’ve been advised to be careful when hiking the backyard woods because the cabin shares land with the local hunting club. One afternoon we find a deer post up in the trees, a shoddy platform connected to the earth by the inviting ribbon of an aluminum ladder. I’m halfway up before I make the decision to climb, my boyfriend yelling resigned cautions into the canopy. There’s a portable lawn chair folded into the corner at the top, as if someone were about to crack open a cold one 20 feet into the air on their lonesome. I peer out over the half-wall on the edge of the platform and take in the panorama of an expansive copper pond, the heart of a network of streams that seems to tie up the area’s water in one still spot. At the same time, all of the details of this peculiar, petite space coalesce into one image: the hunter unfolds the lawn chair, puts their feet up, and waits for an unassuming deer to take a drink before sniping it from the sky.
The cabin is old, the heating is old, and a single-degree twist of radiator throws our bedroom into extreme hot or extreme cold. My boyfriend and I change our minds on which end of the binary we prefer every night, typically just the opposite of the previous. But eventually we settle into a learned comfort with the cold. We start the night under a single sheet or blanket. When the chill becomes unbearable around 3 AM, we half-consciously grope for our respective sleeping bags. While waiting for them to heat up, we inch toward the body heat of one another, curling up like rodents at a pet shop. We wake up in this wormlike embrace, the yin-yang ferrets my father used to scoff at through the plexiglass at Petco, “disgusting.” Warm.
A week goes by.
***
My boyfriend has gotten into the habit of yelling “NO RAT” into the doorway of whatever room he enters after 8 PM. This is a personal exercise more than a preventative one — the rats scurry about whether we yell at them or not. But it feels good to make some sort of countermove in the cabin soundscape. Their noise isn’t our silence! And if we walk around more confidently when we toss this futile phrase through the in-betweens, then it can’t be completely futile. Right? By the time we leave, all three of us are yelling “NO RAT” to ourselves at every odd noise and entryway in the cabin, a refracted reassurance quick on its way to platitude.
There are limited cooking utensils at the cabin so I end up cutting all genres of food with the same little serrated steak knife. I’m struggling to chop a sweet potato one morning and end up going through the vegetable and into the pad of my ring finger, which immediately begins to buzz with shock and red. I try to staunch the flow but the blood keeps coming, and between compressions I notice not one but two punctures, each on diametric ends of my fingertip. The idea that I unknowingly stabbed clean through my finger turns a on a low ring in my ears and I approach my boyfriend’s sister for help. She expresses befuddlement at the exit wound but calmly adds pressure and wraps it in duct tape, our only medical supply. Across the table my boyfriend has his earphones on, oblivious.
The night before we leave the cabin the Pentagon releases videos of possible UFOs, rapidly moving aerial objects captured on infrared camera by some Navy pilots a couple years back. My boyfriend finds them on Reddit and watches them on repeat as we’re going to bed. “Do you think there could be really be aliens? On Earth, right now?” he asks softly. I look up and find tears in his eyes, whisper something like “oh my god” and pull him close, confused. He smiles and continues to lightly weep. “This can’t just be about aliens,” he says, in reference to his tears, equally perplexed.
The next morning, driving through town for the first time in two weeks, we find that the seasons have changed. Young leaves and flowers dot the trees with innocent color. A wrinkled man smokes a morning cigarette on his porch. A band we follow just released a new album, somebody puts it on the aux. We were living under a rock — the world is really alive, new. We excitedly point out houses and buildings we didn’t notice when driving in; we hold hands.
In the distance, the curve outside the bowling alley spikes and flattens.
I say goodbye too quickly when he drops me off in my parents’ driveway. I should have held him longer. I didn’t know. I don’t know. When.
***
We call a few nights later, begin the long and cliché process of fathoming that time, that place in growing rearview. I tell him I miss it, even though it was cold and infested and had no cutlery and made me go a little insane.
“I even miss the rat noises, to be completely honest,” he adds. Pauses. Then yells, “NO RAT.”
April turns to May.
Verity Sturm || Sparrow Bush NY || April 2020