Come Forth, Go Back
Greg Yoder
Steve’s lab partner, Beth, kills their rat. Steve doesn’t want to deal with it. It’s the last day of their lab class and they have spent the entire semester until today dealing with organisms that were too small to be seen without a microscope. Organisms with only one cell. They have killed these organisms, but only through a process that mirrored natural selection. They had added something in or taken something out of various culture media to find mutations of the organism that could live in the presence of an antibiotic or could get along without some nutrient that is normally vital to the existence of E. coli. It has never bothered Steve, or anyone else, that only about one in a million of the protozoans would survive the procedures. Steve has been indifferent not because the survivors would quickly reproduce to create an entire colony with an equal, or greater, number of organisms hardier than the ones they replaced, but simply because E. coli don’t warrant any sort of concern. One has to draw the line somewhere, and Steve, although he hasn’t decided exactly where he draws the line, draws it far, far above E. coli. He remembers the time one of the teaching assistants had seen them grinding up some E. coli as the first step toward purifying an enzyme and said to Steve and Beth, ‘I used to work in a hospital lab, and I think you should all be required, at least once, to culture E. coli from its original source,’ and when Steve asked, ‘What’s the original source?’ the TA had responded, ‘Shit.’
Ordinarily, the death of a rat would be at least a relief to Steve. He thinks back to the time last fall when the physical plant people poisoned the dumpster across the street from MacGregor House. On two successive days, Steve had watched a rat crawl slowly across the sidewalk, and die on the grass, only a step or two from where Steve stood, frozen.
But these are young albino rats, much smaller than the wild rats he’s seen; they’re almost cute. Fortunately for Steve, Beth has no sentimentality about lab animals, and she efficiently dispatches the rat so that the two of them can begin the dissection. Steve finds the dissection slow, difficult, and uninteresting. He regrets having decided to participate. It’s an optional session; mammalian dissection lies beyond the scope of the course. Other students are quicker and more ruthless with the dissections. Steve looks around at a woman who has single-handedly removed all of her rat’s organs except for parts of its circulatory and pulmonary systems. She is now alternating, with apparent glee, between making the rats lungs inflate and making its heart beat. CPR for entertainment.
At the end of the session, everyone says goodbye and have a good summer to people they may or may not see again in the fall. Steve and Beth are putting their dissecting tray and other materials away when one of the TAs announces that they have two extra rats if anyone want to take one. If no one takes them, the TA says, they’ll just be etherized. Morally, Steve had no discomfort over dissecting a rat, but it bothers him that two rats will die just because two of the students who’d said they wanted to participate failed to show up. Steve still believes in the concept of a meaningful death. Someone else decides to take one of the rats, which leaves a single doomed rat and, in Steve, a familiar feeling of guilty responsibility. When it arises, he knows that it’s absurd, but he also knows that it has him cornered, compelling him to act. Beth looks at him as if he’s crazy, ‘Don’t you think you should check with your roommates before you take that rat, LP?’ LP is short for lab partner, and Beth has been using this nickname for Steve for most of the semester.
‘Oh, I’ll just keep it in my room; besides, how much trouble can one little lab rat be?’
‘It’s going to get bigger,’ Beth tells him.
But Steve has made a decision, so he picks up the cardboard box that the rats came in and that now holds his one rat.
‘What are you going to call him?’ Beth asks.
‘Oh, I don’t know. How about Lazarus? It’s sort of appropriate,’ Steve responds, smiling.
‘You know, there’s some Chinese proverb that says once you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for him after that.’
Steve laughs, ‘Do you think it applies to rats?’
Beth smiles, ‘I don’t know; I’m not Chinese. Well, I gotta go. Have a good Summer, LP.’
‘Have fun at Stanford. I’ll see you next fall.’
‘I’ll write and give you my summer address once I get there,’ Beth calls to him as she disappears down a hallway. She has an MIT summer research grant to work in a lab at Stanford. Steve helped her rewrite her application after her advisor had said it wasn’t good enough. When she got the grant, she told Steve that the grant committee had praised the writing in her proposal. This had not surprised Steve: at MIT, most students think that their ideas erupt pure and fully formed from the creative genius; they don’t see a need to communicate effectively to others what is evident to themselves. Other students occasionally ask Steve to read technical material that they’ve written. If Steve says that something is unclear to him, other students invariably tell him, ‘Well, it’s intuitively obvious,’ and, having concluded that the defect lies in Steve’s intellect rather than in the descriptions, they don’t change what they’ve written, and they don’t ask him to read anything else.
Steve picks up the box containing Lazarus and heads for the dormitory. He has an old aquarium on a shelf in his room. His friend Paul tried to keep fish but gave up after a few months because of an algae problem that did not yield to a number of attempted solutions. Steve took the aquarium and has been using it as another place to hold his stuff; he worries about having more and more disorganized stuff than other students have, but sometimes it’s hard for him to throw things away. He cleans out the aquarium, shreds some newspapers for bedding, and puts Lazarus in. Steve goes to the kitchen and puts some water in a small plastic salad bowl, which he sets in front of Lazarus, who takes a few swallows as Steve strokes his fur. Steve thinks that Lazarus looks bored, so he picks him up and puts him down on Steve’s bed, where Lazarus walks mourned a little. Steve continues to pet him.
Paul walks into Steve’s room, says hello, and then, noticing Lazarus, ‘Where did that come from?’
After Steve explains the story, Paul says, ‘You can’t keep that here.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Steve responds ingenuously, has he continues to focus his attention on Lazarus.
‘Because you won’t take care of it, Steve. The aquarium will get dirty, the rat will get hungry or thirsty; pretty soon it will just die, and then you’ll have to dispose of it. Honestly, do you thank about these things before you do them or does someone just show you a rat, and you say ëHey, why not’?’
Steve sees Paul’s point, but, instead of addressing it directly, he responds, ‘Oh Mom, can’t I keep him? Please? I promise I’ll feed him, and I’ll take him for a walk every day, and I won’t let him chase the Wilson’s cats or run after cars on the highway, and I’ll take him outside when it’s time for him to make ka-ka.’ Steve picks Lazarus up and holds him toward Paul, ‘and isn’t he cute? Isn’t he, Mom?’ Steve feels a sudden dampness on his hand and switches to his Tweety bird voice ‘Ooooh, Wazawus, you just wee-weed on my wittle hand; I betta put you back in your wittle aqauawium.’
As Steve goes to the kitchen to wash his hands, Paul just looks upward, signs, and leaves the room. He knows that he’s done all he can: there’s no point in discussing if further, and when the situation will have proven to be more than Steve can handle, Paul will know that there’s no point in saying that he told Steve so.
Steve walks over to the east end of Cambridge, near Lechmere, where he remembers having seen a pet shop. He wanders around the store for a while, looking at the tropical fish, the birds, the kittens and the puppies. Steve thinks of his beagle, Max, whom he found lying dead in his backyard one morning last summer after coming home from working all night. For most of his youth, Steve had had a beagle for a pet, first Prince and then Max. They were both devoted to him, following him everywhere, always happy to see him. Steve spends some time looking at leashes and collars before buying a bag of bedding, some food, an exercise wheel and a water bottle for Lazarus. He brings them all home and spends a fair amount of time rearranging the aquarium until it seems more or less suitable. Not unlike the dorm room the aquarium seems a bit on the small side to Steve, but he figures it will just have to do. Steve sits on his bed, next to the aquarium, and for a few minutes watches Lazarus run on the exercise wheel. It needs lubrication.
Paul stops by after hearing the squeaking. ‘He looks happy enough, I guess.’
Steve stops looking at Lazarus and looks at Paul, ‘Well, it certainly beats being k-i-l-l-e-d by e-t-h-e-r.’
‘I don’t think it can understand what you say, Steve.’
Steve inhales, straightens his spine, and fixes Paul with a superior look, ‘Lazarus is an exceptionally bright animal, aren’t you Laz?’ Steve taps on the glass, Lazarus stops running on the exercise wheel, and Steve says, ‘Yes you are.’ Paul sighs again and goes back to his own room to play a record.
A few days later, Steve moves from B entry to a fourth-floor room in F entry for the summer. F entry is in the low-rise portion of MacGregor, and the high-rise portion, which has elevators and includes B entry, will be used to house alumni who attend reunions over the summer. Around MacGregor House, he became known as ‘rat man’, and for a few weeks people stop by his new room to see his rat. But since Lazarus doesn’t do any tricks, there isn’t much activity to see. There is, however, a good deal of Lazarus to see. The rat grows, with amazing rapidity, and as his bulk increases, Steve finds it harder and harder to consider him cute. The novelty associated with owning a rat also vanishes. Steve no longer lets Lazarus run on Steve’s bed, and he rarely picks the rat up or even pets it. He still talks to Laz occasionally, mostly when he’s giving it more food or changing its water bottle. It seems to Steve that he has to feed and water Lazarus, and change the bedding in the aquarium, much too frequently. Steve does try to keep the aquarium as clean as possible, but even with regular cleaning, a smell begins to develop in the room. It’s not identifiable the smell of any sort of waste product, but the smell says ‘animal’ all the same. Lazarus eats and drinks quite a lot, and he doesn’t exercise as much as he did when Steve first brought him home. Worse still, when he does exercise, it’s almost entirely at night, and even though Steve has oiled the wheel and eliminated the squeaking, he can still hear a low whirring as he’s trying to fall asleep. He has frequent dreams of begin accused and incarcerated for something he can’t remember having done.
Compared to the school year, the Summer is a time of freedom. Steve works from nine to five, and he has no homework, so his evenings and weekends are entirely his own. On Saturday mornings, he walks to Haymarket and spends an hour walking among the fresh fruits and vegetables and the low-price cheese shops. He experiments a great deal with cooking, mostly successfully, but with a few notable failures. He tells his parents that he still goes to church on Sunday mornings, but he doesn’t; he gets the Sunday Globe, spreads it out in the suite lounge, and reads it leisurely. He spends a lot of time in Harvard Square, buying too many books and going to revival movie houses. He reads for pleasure, and he lets the indolence of the Summer work away some of the anxiety of the term. He goes out to dinner with his friends. He saves less money than he’s supposed to save, but he doesn’t worry about it.
One evening, Paul tells Steve that one of the other computer scientists he works with owns a rat. Paul reports his co-worker’s opinion that the exercise wheel will soon be too small for Lazarus to use. The recommended substitute is for Steve to close his door and let Lazarus run around the carpet. Paul comments, ‘You’ll have to keep your room cleaner so that you don’t lose Lazarus among the ruins.’ Paul also tells Steve that it’s normal for rats to hoard their food, and that’s part of the reason why Lazarus appears to consume at such an alarming rate. Steve thanks Paul for the information although knowing why Lazarus’ food disappears so quickly gives Steve no comfort, and he certainly will not let the rat run around on the floor of his room. He want to keep it as shut up as possible.
Steve knows that rats don’t have emotions, but he senses them in Lazarus anyway. At first, he thought Laz was grateful, then happy, but after a few weeks, Lax seemed to slide through diffidence and into angst, or perhaps ennui: Steve could never entirely differentiate the two, and even if he could, he probably wouldn’t be sure which one he was imagining that Lazarus was experiencing. In the first days of living with Steve, Lazarus had seemed to enjoy being picked up by Steve, but now Steve thinks that Lazarus is looking at him in an odd way. It takes Steve a while to figure out what he thinks it means, but eventually he decides that it’s the look of terminal patient staring down a doctor who refuses to turn off the life support. Steve can almost hear Lazarus saying, ‘My life has become miserable, but I can still get some small satisfaction by lying here in pain and knowing that my very presence reminds you that you made me suffer like this.’ Steve realizes that his current guilt exceeds what he would have felt if he’d just let the rat die in the first place. Why had he listened to his guilt so impulsively instead of thinking through the consequences? If he had let the rat die, he thinks, how would have completely forgotten about it by now. It’s almost as if he fell for some vicious plot designed by Lazarus specifically to maximize Steve’s guilt as part of some unethical psychological experiment. Steve sees himself alternately as Lazarus’ oppressor and victim; he can’t decide which role he dislikes more.
Other students are only too happy to offer solutions to Steve’s problem, even though he hasn’t complained to anyone about Lazarus. The most common suggestion is ‘Nuke him, rat man.’ Some people have gone so far as to offer to take Lazarus to one of the microwave ovens next to the vending machines in the middle of campus and explode Lazarus on Steve’s behalf. Steve knows that some of these offers are sincere, but he pretends not to take them seriously. Aside from the oppressive barbarity of the suggestion, he knows that simply executing the rat would not be enough for any of these people. They would feel compelled to do something unusual (Steve decides not to imagine what, specifically, that might be) with the remains, and Steve does not intend to become an unwitting accomplice in yet another puerile MacGregor House practical joke. Besides, he doesn’t have any intention of killing Lazarus, he’s just got to figure out some way to make the rat a little happier. Maybe a bigger cage or something. He makes an effort to talk to Lazarus more, in a kindly manner, and he pets him every day. But Lazarus seems to barely tolerate the petting, and when Steve tries to pick him up, Lazarus backs away from him into one of the aquarium’s corners.
Despite his genuine attempts at reconciliation, Steve’s animosity toward Lazarus continues to grow. He rearranges the room so that the head of his bed is as far as possible form the aquarium. On some nights, he sleeps uneasily, aware of the other nocturnal presence which seems to be observing him, sometimes dispassionately, sometimes contemptuously; his dreams continue to become more troubled, and the lack of sleep makes him tired and irritable during the day. Steve becomes more and more sensitive to the smell; finally, he even begins to fantasize about humane ways to do Lazarus in. He would try to give Lazarus away (‘Free to a good home, large, emotionally troubled albino rat . . .’), but surely, he thinks, there aren’t two people on this campus foolish enough to take a condemned rat.
One Saturday evening, Paul and his girlfriend Rachel stop by Steve’s room to see if he wants to go to the on-campus movie with them. Steve goes, and they all have a good time. After the movie, they go to Toscanini’s for ice cream. They meet up with some other guys from the dorm. Some have dates, some don’t. They all walk back to MacGregor together, then head for their separate entries and suites. Steve says goodnight to Paul and Rachel. He’s in a pretty good mood, now, and he’s whistling something form the first movement of the fifth Brandenburg Concerto. He’s trying, with pleasure but without success, to imitate a harpsichord trill when he unlocks and opens his door. The smell assaults him, and he stops whistling. He turns his head down and away in a moment of disgust. He cleaned out the aquarium yesterday, but the smell seems worse than ever to him. Still, he’s had a good time tonight and he manages to shrug off his annoyance and open his window, which should help. Steve goes to the aquarium where Lazarus is quietly chewing on a sunflower seed until he sees Steve and freezes. Steve sneers at the rat and pulls out the water bottle to refill it. ‘I ought to fill it with whisky,’ he mutters, but he’s not entirely serious, and he doesn’t think Lazarus would drink it anyway. Steve goes to the suite’s kitchen and fills the bottle. When he takes it back into the room he sees that Lazarus has not moved and is still frozen, looking at him. Steve looks away at once, as if he knows that he can’t stare Lazarus down. He replaces the water bottle, but Lazarus continues to pierce him with that stare. He knows that the rat isn’t really capable of contempt, but he feels it in the look anyway; it must be coming from somewhere.
Steve walks quickly out of the room and back to the kitchen. He’s shaken. He opens the refrigerator and takes out a large bottle of apple juice. It’s nearly empty and Steve removes the lid and drinks the last of the juice directly form the jar. He closes the refrigerator and leans against it, sighing. After staying in this position for about half a minute, he moves to the sink and rinses out the jar and lid. He’s steadier now, and he goes to throw the bottle away. From where the trash sits, he can look directly into his room. When he turns his head, he sees Lazarus, once again nibbling on the sunflower seed.
Instead of throwing the jar away, Steve takes it into his room and sets it on its side right next to the aquarium. ‘Come on, Lazarus,’ Steve says in a voice that tries to be friendly; it’s a transparently dishonest voice, but Steve doesn’t care. Lazarus puts up no struggle as Steve picks him up in both hands, turns him around, and directs him head first into the wide-mouthed jar. Lazarus crawls around in the jar, and when he gets to the bottom of the jar, Steve slowly rights it so that Lazarus is sitting on the bottom.
Steve picks up the jar with one hand and the lid with the other. He takes the jar to his doorway, looks carefully around to see that the doors to the suite and to all the other rooms are shut, and walks quietly to the sink where he sets the bottle beneath the faucet and opens the tap. The water pours into the bottle, slowly at first, startling Lazarus. As Steve opens the tap further and the water flows in more quickly, Lazarus floats toward the top until, as he is almost in the throat of the jar, Steve suddenly claps the lid on and closes it tightly. Lazarus is paddling to stay afloat, and Steve rushes back into his room, closes the door, and puts the jar back on its side on the shelf. He sits on his bed and watched intently.
Lazarus continues to paddle, faster and faster. The movement begins to look like the unconscious last struggle for life, but it keep going, churning the water inside the amber bottle, for several minutes, throughout which time Steve sits on the bed, clasping his knees to his chest in a chill of terrified glee.
Eventually, the paddling slows, and a few moments later, Lazarus stops altogether. His head sinks into the water and floats, motionless, as the water continues, briefly, to move back and forth over him.
Steve begins to let go of his knees, but before he can relax, a feeling - something nameless, something like dread mixed with shame but several orders of magnitude worse, something like the disapproving hand of God - descends on him. Without thinking, he jumps up, grabs the bottle, runs to the sink, dumps the water out, runs back to his room, wraps Lazarus in a towel and tries to rub him dry. He lays the towel and the rat on the floor of the aquarium. Steve is shaking again, but Lazarus remains still. He rubs the rat with the towel for another half-minute before he stops again, looking down on the lifeless body and thinking, ‘How am I going to live with myself after this?’
Another minute passes, and Steve begins to come to grips with the situation. He starts to think about the best way to dispose of the body when the body begins moving again. Lazarus shudders, sneezes twice, rolls over onto his feet and looks around him.
Steve’s head drops forward onto his chest. ‘Oh, no,’ he moans, thinking that this can’t really be happening. ‘Well, Lazarus, I guess you really have earned your name now,’ Steve says to the rat. He wonders if after Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead, he ever looked at him and said, ‘Oh my God! What was I thinking?’ After Steve realizes what he’s just said, he worries about the consequences of blasphemy for a few moments, but his faith in the God of his upbringing is almost entirely gone; only the guilt remains. He puts some quarters in his pocket and goes downstairs for a long session of late night pinball.
After the juice jar incident, when Steve looks at Lazarus he senses fear, rather then contempt, from the rate and at first this seems to be an improvement, but a pet that cringes every time you approach it is as least as bad as one that hates you, Steve thinks. He keeps thinking about a quote from King Lear about flies, gods, wanton boys and killing for sport, and he realizes that he and Lazarus cannot coexist peacefully.
The next Monday evening, Steve sits in his room and tries to think of various ways of disposing of the rat, but he can’t come up with one that is satisfactory. He doesn’t really want to kill Lazarus; he just wants Lazarus dead, or at least gone. As he lies on his bed, not coming up with a solution, he grows more and more agitated. Agitation proceeds quickly for Steve, and after about fifteen minutes he’s had almost more than he can take. He sits up, looks at the rat, and says, ‘Why don’t you just go away?’ But there’s no response. Steve didn’t expect one, of course, but the silence makes him angrier. He goes to the window, opens it, and looks into the courtyard below.
Steve look back at Lazarus, shakes his head and sighs, ‘Damnation.’ He walks over to the aquarium, lifts off the lid, and reaches for the cowering rat. Lazarus continue to shiver in Steve’s grasp as Steve walks to the window and tosses Lazarus out. Lazarus disappears in the trees beneath Steve’s window and Steve goes to the kitchen sink and washes his hands. ‘I’m a coward,’ he thinks to himself, ‘but at least I’m a coward without a rat.’
The next morning, Steve walks to work, feeling better. He has a job for the summer in the MIT Student Employment Office. He spends his weekdays processing personnel forms for students who work on campus, posting jobs descriptions he receives over the phone, filing and doing other general office work. Steve likes the job: he has a nice boss and the other students who work there are fun to talk to. The job also represents freedom: because he works here, he doesn’t have to go home for the summer.
At about 11:30, the telephone rings and Steve picks up the receiver, ‘Student employment.’
‘Is this Steve?’ the voice on the other end inquires.
‘Yes, this is Steve,’ Steve responds, politely.
‘Steve, this is John at the MacGregor House desk. Is this your rat?’
‘What do you mean?’ Steve asks, just a little bit too quickly.
‘There’s a big white rat in the doorway between the house entryway and the courtyard and we were wondering if it was Lazarus.’ John sound bemused, but concerned. ‘I’m coming back at lunch; I’ll take care of it,’ Steve responds rapidly and hangs up the phone. The initial sense of panic has already passed and Steve just sits there, wondering how many tries it’s going to take before he gets this right. He’s been through the moral implications too many times. The situation has become so annoying that the question of whether Lazarus has rights has become irrelevant; even Steve’s guilt has become irrelevant: the only thing that matters is getting rid of that rat.
At lunch, Steve walks west to MacGregor House, where in front of a laughing front-desk staff, he picks up Lazarus, takes it to his room and puts it in its aquarium. ‘Don’t get too comfortable in there, rat,’ he says. Steve goes to the kitchen, opens the cabinet under the sink and pulls two large green trash bags out of their box. After he takes them back to his room and shakes them to open them up, he grabs Lazarus and tosses him into one of the bags. He grabs the plastic far down on the bag, so that the part holding the rat is quite small. He twists the top of the bag a few times and knots it, then he folds the open part of the bag back around the closed part so that the inside is out and he knots it again, pulling tightly. He places the first bag inside the second and knots the second bag. After he’s pulled the second knot tight, he twists the bag again, goes back to the kitchen and puts a yellow twist-tie around the outer bag. Then he leaves MacGregor House and walks to the corner. He waits until there is no traffic and walks across both directions of Memorial Drive and the wide median between them. When he is all the way across right next to the Charles, he places the package in a Metropolitan District Commission public trash can next to the river. He hopes that he has not been noticed, but his principal feeling is elation. ‘I will never see that rat again,’ he says aloud as he turns and walks back to the dormitory.
And he never does. For a week or so, a few people ask what happened to his rat, and Steve just says, ‘Oh, it’s gone,’ and changes the subject. After another week, Lazarus has been more or less forgotten by almost everyone. Its empty aquarium still sits on Steve’s shelf until one day Steve decides it’s time to get rid of it. When he picks it up off the shelf and walks to his door, Paul sees him and says, ‘I think you should keep the aquarium, Steve. It might remind you not to do something that stupid again.’ Paul starts to walk away.
Without missing a beat, Steve retorts, ‘Hey, maybe I should fill this thing up and get some fish!’ Although he’s usually proud of his quick wit, this time the humor gives him no lift. He returns the aquarium to its place on the shelf and sits on the bed to stare at it. All that agony over a lab rat. The longer he thinks about it, the less sense it makes to him. And he doesn’t really want to make sense of it; he doesn’t want to acknowledge the existence of whatever there is in him that could propel him through such an unfathomable stupid course of events; above all, he doesn’t want to think about how much he enjoyed playing God.
