—for Bruce
From whatever’s missing, we gather their livelihoods—crumbs I haven’t swept that disappear. Dog food, bagged nubs the color of liver. My husband’s socks, raptured
from a room above our heads. We call that room the Rat Room, first for the white rats we caged there: White Chocolate and Rat-A-Tat-Tat, our son’s. Confined, luxurious, they lived to old age, turned on their sides, and died. Then we pinned copies of Korean rat art on the wall. Each rat a diagonal of dark ink on a white background, tails curved parenthetical beneath.
Can we blame them if they found this an invitation? Roof rats, not the same as the ground ones, boreal: at their end a long loose filament of tail. There are rats everywhere this year, my neighbor told us. The weather’s changed, they can’t stop breeding.
They’re having keggers, we say. We’re stuck with a rat fraternity. Skittering through the left wall, closest to us, through dinner. Scritch and patter, crashing through the crawlspace while we sleep. We hear them, but never see. One night a sound of something hard, rolling and rolling. Are they bowling up there? At night they keep us up, so we picture their lives
restless, distinct, mammalian.
From the noise it’s clear that we’re outnumbered. The food eaten over our heads, the socks chewed to a thready nest, black and blue.
We let men who do this job leave traps, baited with poison. With rats, the men tell us, there’s no kindness. Squirrels you can save. These: too intelligent, too good with their teeth, they just return.
But first the walls kept stealing, and the reason something we couldn’t
begin to imagine. Like scientists working on the problem of the universe’s missing matter, the baryonic problem, an itch in its math that physics for decades has tried to scratch. Baryonic meaning whatever in this world is made of mass, atoms and molecules. What we call substance, or ourselves. or the rats. Mass is inconsequential in the universe, Rolf the German physicist told me. Four percent of the total, that’s not relevant, not anything at all.
Still our science could find only two percent of that mass, measuring it through the cosmic microwave background, first light spewed by the Big Bang, and still here. Seekers calculated twice as much mass as they could find. The universe has this logic, nothing’s ever finished, but it must be numbered, and accounted for—
Then a scientist in Orsay, France, found filaments between the galaxies, gas strings taut with the missing matter. In the universe, yet out of it, running through the walls. Stuck from the edge of our Milky Way
to the next galactic block. Spiderweaves; or laddered lines like runs in an old stocking. Those who detect the filaments can’t coordinate
how they imagine them. Static, they guess, but we can’t know. These wires could be their own galaxies, with their own unthinkable ways of being, of crashing through their spaces. Measuring our presence with their instruments, feeling it as what they’ve lost.
My husband and I are strangely close, in France too that October, when news breaks of the filaments. We flew there to see cave art, crowding out a grief that had settled baryonic, somewhere inside we couldn’t reach. Most cave paintings closed to visitors, our breath, our human gasses, fading them.
Guides led us in, flashlight on reindeer, woolly rhino, mammoth, drawn smoke-edged and perfect and free. No context, the guide said—no grass or sky, nothing to back them, hold them up. Just mammals, floating, running along the rock, outlined, engraved, or blown from the artist’s mouth through the bones of birds. Done fourteen to twenty thousand years before us. We longed to touch these paintings, touch the artists who crawled into caves and found the deepest spaces they could
to make their world live again. It’s a mystery, why they’d choose these caves, the guide said, no one could live here. Many of the passages barely allow one body, only taut and sideways can we move. But the beauty expands from these hid unlikelihoods—the mammoths with their arced too-long tusks, the dagger-snouts of the rhinoceros. A chimerical creature with one horn, a cat face, a bison’s haunches, all seamed, jammed together. Frankenstein of the Paleolithic, angel or terror or totem, we’ll never know.
I picture the artists, I picture telling them of the inter-galactic filaments: inconsequential, they might say, in their world of the huge, the shagged, and the horned.
And the boy we love in the hospital. Who once ringed my hair around his thumb and sucked it, his black hair swirling, his face softening into sleep. I’d lean in, tethered till he dropped off. I’m loosed now, smoke on a smeared horizon. His face, his voice, small and held in the little phone. We can’t help, so we go where we can think of existences other than our own. And hear from home that the rats haven’t taken the bait, still crashing into whatever it is they’ve made into
a cupped place to hold them. So much smarter than we are, at least, more persistent. And resembling us more than most of our universe, all of us the mass, the inconsequent, not airy
like photon or neutrino. I could come to love the rats, so willing to transform what we don’t care about, our nothing to their all.
