Free Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs Page B

nonkilling traps in the tub and then freed the thing outside, in a patch of grass, like a human being instead of a killing machine?
    I was filled with sickness, as though I’d just killed somebody and had their body in my tub, limbs waiting to be removed with my mother’s good carving knife. I truly was Jeffrey Dahmer’s long lost twin brother.
    I decided to throw on some clothes and go downstairs and have an espresso. I needed to get out of the apartment.
    Only in Manhattan can a person go downstairs and find amarket that serves espresso twenty-four hours a day, along with bags of freeze-dried peas and squid, for snacking.
    After I got my coffee, I leaned against a STOP sign and sipped, pretending it was a normal day and I was only up this early so that I could go running and not because I’d just been on a killing spree.
    Across the street was a hardware store, and it occurred to me that I would need to go to this hardware store as soon as it opened. I needed a pair of industrial rubber gloves so that I could remove the rat/thing from the tub. I also needed steel wool to clean the tub.
    I returned to my apartment and checked on the rat/thing. It was still dead, the air in the bathroom now warm and moist and toxic.
    I turned on the television and watched a little QVC.
    As I watched the host demonstrate the George Foreman grill (which actually does seem incredibly easy to clean), I thought about how I would remove the rat/thing from the tub. I wouldn’t be able to touch it, not even with industrial rubber gloves. I figured that what I could do was remove all the paper towels from the role and then flatten the tube and use this to lift the rodent. Of course, I would wear the rubber gloves while I held the tube.
    This turned out to be an excellent system of removal. Although feeling the unexpected weight of the creature at the end of the tube made me queasy. But I was able to hoist it out of the water, dripping, and then place it into a paper-sack–lined shopping bag.
    It made a heavy, wet “smack” sound as it hit the bottom of the sack. I willed myself not to focus on the sound, because I knew if I did, I would pass out, then throw up and choke. So I steeled my brain and thought instead of very happy thoughts: the luscious glass of a Leica fifty-millimeter lens, the clean smell of a new air conditioner, green M&Ms.
    As I learned forward to depress the drain switch, my seven-hundred-dollar Armani glasses slipped off my face and into the water. No splash, just a plunk.
    I paused, looking at their distorted form on the bottom of the tub.
    Then I reached into the water with my gloved hand and removed the glasses, placing them into the sack along with the rat/thing. There would be no possible way I could ever wear them again. Not after they’d made contact with the infected water.
    I peeled off the gloves and placed these as well in the trash bag, which I then secured at the top and brought downstairs to the curb.
    After a quick trip to the store, I returned to the bathroom and filled the tub with four gallons of bleach and hot water and let it sit while I called in sick to work and watched daytime television for the next five hours.
    Then I used an abrasive cleanser and a sponge to scour the entire tub as well as any of the tiles that would have been within visual range of the rat/thing. I wore normal yellow kitchen gloves for this, as my biohazard level was lower. Next, I used an S.O.S pad, which stripped some of the porcelain away. I wished I could have scrubbed ALL the porcelain off, as it was all rat/thing infected now. Forever. The rat/thing’s soul was in my bathtub, and I’ d just signed my lease for another year.
    I wanted to cry, and I wanted to move. I wanted to move into a thirty-story Upper West Side apartment building even if it cost me my entire paycheck. I did not belong in the East Village with the “live-and-let-live” animal-loving NYU students. I belonged uptown with the surgically youthful moms who