do you have a norvegicus living in your house

map of rats (2016) - beatriz

Author's note: Living in the mountains of New Mexico, I tracked bobcat, elk, and coyotes, reading their stories told by paw and hoof in the dirt, spatters of blood and urine in the snow. Then I moved to Chicago. To cope with my general sensory shock of being in a city, I returned to my old hobby with the only wildlife available to me, rats. 

I tracked them through alleys, learned their habits and secret hideouts, knew which neighbors had infestations in their garages. From this research came the novel Map of Rats, which is not in fact about rats, but one character works for the Chicago Bureau of Rodent Control. This is her first chapter. 

The two main types of rat on mainland U.S. are Rattus rattus and Rattus norvegicus. For those eagerly interested in differentiating between the two and also close enough to count teats, note that Rattus has ten while Norvegicus has twelve.

Rattus rattus (not pronounced Radus radus; do not deprive yourself the labiodental delight of Rat-us rat-us), commonly known as the roof rat, black rat, and ship rat, was a traveler on early sailing ships and arrived in America as a stowaway. Rattus is most famous for what he carried through Europe: plague.

Rattus is prominent on the Pacific and Gulf coasts and in his global distribution seems to prefer tropical locations. He is also more aerial than Rattus norvegicus, thus roof, tree, vine-covered fence, or, when possible, sugarcane or citrus grove. He is occasionally found in sewer systems but rarely, seeming to disdain the lowlands.

I’ve always admired Rattus—aerial, dramatic, tropical—but here in Chicago we only have Norvegicus.

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What we can say for Norvegicus is that she is versatile. She has spread herself across the earth and through its bowels. 

She is an unbeautiful creature. Stocky and burrowing, commonly known as brown rat, house rat, barn rat, sewer rat, or wharf rat, she weighs on average one pound. She arrived in America the same year the Declaration of Independence was signed, via boats of Europeans, and has spread throughout the contiguous forty-eight states. She is found anywhere people are found and enjoys her close association with humans.

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I use the pill cutter to divide my 0.5 mg Klonopin into four equal parts. I titrated down to this over a year ago. I’m stuck here. When I go without it I’m fine for precisely seventy-two hours, then I become vaguely worried about whether or not I can cope without it. This quickly loses its vagueness and becomes an obsession, which next heralds in the sensation that the world is comprised of razors. By the end of the week, I’ve decided that I cannot afford to have a panic attack at work and who cares about 0.125 mg of clonazepam, so I take it again. It doesn’t make me feel any less anxious but at least I don’t feel anxious about it. 

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Do you have a Norvegicus living in your house? 

Her droppings are ¼ to ½ inch in length, capsule-shaped and shiny black. The hind foot track is ¾-1 inch and she will leave a long sinuous mark as she drags her tail between her legs. Dust the floor with baby powder or flour in areas of suspicion. Observe your alley after fresh snowfall.

Norvegicus prefers to gnaw on wood, but will also go for electrical wiring, to your dismay. Her burrows can be found along foundations of houses or beneath shrubbery and trash. Active burrows will be smooth, well-packed, and free of debris; she’s tidy, why did you assume she wasn’t? 

Norvegicus is an omnivore; when given a choice, she will select a nutritionally-balanced diet of fresh, wholesome foods, especially cereal grains, meats, fish, nuts, and fruit. Food items in household garbage offer a complete diet to the discerning rat.

She likes tunnels, basements, and the night. Peak times are crepuscular.

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Avid online forums re. Klonopin: my experience is extremely average. That seventy-two hour lag while the drug fully exits the body is due to the long half-life of benzodiazepines. Their theory, as a drug class: if panic attacks and anxiety are unnecessary mental activity, why not treat it as another iteration of excessive electrical activity of the brain—epilepsy. So they give you anti-seizure meds for anxiety, but the great joke is that even if you didn’t have epilepsy when you began taking benzos, you’ll get seizures if you try to go off them. More so with Valium; doesn’t happen as often with Klonopin but somehow it’s even nastier to quit, some say harder than heroin. But the worst is that its positive effects only last for the first few days you take it—mild euphoria, freedom from worry—after that, you still feel just as anxious as you did before, but now if you try to quit, your anxiety will be far worse than it was to begin with. The prospect of being without the drug presents you with a new, lower possible baseline, and for someone who was struggling enough with the interior of their own mind enough to consider going on a pharmaceutical in the first place, this is a terrifying prospect. So you stay on. Maybe you ask your psychiatrist how to get off it; they say titrate, but you’ve already titrated, you just can’t get it all the way out of your system without flipping.
	‘Try Cymbalta.’
	‘Will it help me get off Klonopin?’
	‘Perhaps in time. It’ll certainly help with the anxiety.’
	‘Klonopin was supposed to help with the anxiety.’
	‘Do you feel like you’re stable or would you like to try Cymbalta? It’s up to you. I’m happy to write you a script if you’d like to give it a go.’
	I do a quick search on my phone while he enters my data into his EHR. Duloxetine, a SNRI for nerve pain, anxiety, and major depressive disorder; may cause suicidal thoughts/attempts, haha. May experience dizziness, confusion, mood swings, diarrhea, ‘brief feelings similar to electrical shock.’ I continue down the list. 
	‘It says you shouldn’t mix it with alcohol,’ I tell the doctor.
	‘Are you a heavy drinker?’ He’s still typing, looking down at his iPad.
	‘I drink. Not unoften. Regularly. Irregularly.’
	‘Try not to while you’re taking Cymbalta.’ He hands me a slip of paper. A week later I black out for the first time in my life. I had a singular High Life and then woke up on the floor of Delilah’s with a small crowd around me and the bartender calling 911. I don’t blame my doctor for this but do admit a touch of dismay that the people in charge of diagnosing us are being paid out by those that benefit from a particular diagnosis and subsequent prescription, and these are the same people funding the studies to verify the efficacy and safety of these prescriptions. Lot of good my conspiratorial finger-pointing will do me though. Neurotics unite. Call we-of-the-panic-attacks up to the stand. This is the sort of arena where we really shine. 

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As a newborn, Norvegicus is hairless with unopened eyes. She grows swiftly. At three weeks she is eating solid foods and is shortly thereafter independent. By three months she is reproductively mature and comes into heat every four to five days. High breeding times are spring and fall, slowing for the swelter of city summer and often stopping altogether in the winter. The average female has four to six litters per year; litters are six to twelve young, born three weeks after conception.

Norvegicus is color-blind and relies on her excellent senses of smell, taste, and touch to find food and recognize other rats; her taste is so precise that she can detect contaminants in her food at levels as low as 0.5 ppm. Although ugly, she has prodigious physical capabilities. Her skills in gnawing, climbing, jumping, and swimming allow her to gain entry to seemingly impassible structures. 

She is unstoppable. She will be alive when the rest of us eat shit and die.

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I told my doctor my job.
	‘I have a great story about a rat,’ he informs me. He’s a very small very old Jewish man and I admit I like him, despite my ethical concerns about Big Pharma.
	‘Do tell.’ Everyone has a great story about rats. 
	‘So my wife and I are eating at our favorite Italian joint when suddenly everyone in the restaurant starts gasping and leaping out of their seats. I look over and there’s a rat—a big one—crawling across the floor, but slowly, slowly, he’s eaten poison and he’s dying, so he’s heaving, heaving himself across the carpet. The women, they’re shrieking. The men, at an even higher pitch. The waiters, they’re wringing their hands. People are standing on chairs. I say to the waitress, Do you have a broom. She fetches me one. I turn the broom over and beat the rat with the dull end. I have to club it a dozen times, maybe more, before I crack its spine and it finally dies. I put it in the dustpan and take it to the garbage. I say to the waitress, I hope I get a free pasta dinner out of this. She says, Of course, sir, certainly. My wife, she’s been sitting there calmly the whole time. She probably saw the whole three-ring circus coming the minute she noticed the rat. She knows how I am. She’s about halfway through her eggplant parmigian. She says, Marty, go wash your hands and come finish your dinner.’
	He agrees to take me off the Cymbalta after I tell him about the blackout incident. I say I guess I’m fine with Klonopin for now. He asks me if I want to try Wellbutrin. I say Nah. He tells me to try taking a walk in the sunshine every day and maybe some B vitamins. I thank him and leave. 

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Here in the world’s most rat-infested city and knowing everyone’s extreme hatred of vermin, I thought maybe my job would be perceived as public service. Like being a schoolteacher or someone who takes care of the elderly. Not so, it turns out. More like being the person who flips the switch for the electric chair; not your fault certainly, not murder, but still distasteful, reminding people of what they’d rather ignore. 

On the Chicago Bureau of Rodent Control’s webpage, there’s my picture. Beatriz Vega: Rat abatement services, Statistics department. I look about eleven years old. My mob of black curls nearly fills the frame. My eyes are huge. 

We developed an algorithm about rodent prediction. We got the idea from the police department; they were analyzing 911 calls to better map crime patterns across the city and in one case predicted a shootout minutes before it happened. The city then decided to turn its data weapons on its second most infamous problem. 

We have thirty-one variables, such as reports of overflowing trash bins or food poisoning in restaurants. Ideally, we respond to potential rodent infestations before a resident even spots a rat. Rodent pre-crime. That’s the dream. 

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How is the language of nature mapped onto the grid of a city? 

Rats communicate via smell. From the scent of another rat’s urine, they know its species, pack identity, gender, age, health, and reproductive status. Probably more too—what the other rat ate for lunch, if she’s afraid. Maybe they can send messages this way. Good food in this restaurant dumpster. Don’t go in that garage; there are traps.  

What information is encoded in rat piss on our sidewalks, in our subways, within the walls of our houses? What language is whispering all around us that we can’t hear?
I wonder if it’s the same for people. If we really smelled one another, what would we know? We cover it up with perfume, lotion, deodorant, shampoo. We talk with our mouths and our hands only. We don’t want anyone to know our secrets.


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another Map of Rats tidbit - Thirsty John
another Map of Rats tidbit - Condorella

From Map of Rats (2016).

Image by author; whoever painted the mural and whatever sick genius put a rat trap there: unknown