The Commuter

            He was born blind in an abandoned supermarket. There were five others in his family, if that’s what it can be called, all of whom were born on the same day and at the same time. His eyesight came in about two weeks later, and he was no longer nude, though that’s not the right word for what he had been: bare might be better but not even that. After three weeks, he was grown up and ready to go out on his own, though both ideas were unknown to him, as were all other ideas.

            He had no name of course but it might be convenient or just amusing to give him one. Michael topped the list of male baby names last year, so why not, make it Mike. And give him a last name, too—Stevens, say, it’s typical and nondescript: the phone book was full of them in the town where he, Mike, Mike Stevens, lived, which was ninety miles north of New York. (People always give first names to those like Mike but almost never a last, perhaps holding off on conferring complete human status on creatures they’re already anthropomorphizing, hedging their bets, their pets, as it were. Though there’s sometimes that jarring moment when the prescription comes back from the druggist with the medicine the vet has recommended for, say, a dog, and it’s written out to “Danger Johansson” or “Sport Terwilliger,” a formality, maybe, but a funny-peculiar one.)

            Mike was not a dog, not even a pet, but merely a mouse, one whose formative weeks had been spent in the old Buy ‘n’ Fly, the empty one beside the Super one that went up next door in the same parking lot. He “came of age” where the pasta and sauce aisle had been and which was now just an empty space strewn with bits of paper, blots of dust, and hard pieces of linguini and penne that had fallen and been left on the floor. It was more than enough to feed Mike, his parents, and the other mice from his litter, and besides, they weren’t picky and would have eaten paste or soap, too, if they had to. (The word “picky” doesn’t quite apply, for it implies a quality of personality that none of them had, Mike being no exception.)

            The store was like a tenement for mice: dozens of them lived there, some on shelves that had been left, some—like Mike—on the floor where shelves had been. It was lucky for them that the landlord had been lazy about knocking down the old store when they put the new one up. As an adult, Mike could have foraged elsewhere for food but it had not been necessary: so much old yet edible food remained in the building. In fact, he might have stayed in this pleasant home—world—for his entire two-to-four-year life if it had not been for the event that took place right after he reached maturity.

            It started with an enormous noise, the sound of something crashing—being crashed—into the side of the store. There was more than one crash, though of course no one inside could count and the first one had been enough for nearly all of them, anyway. Mice scattered everywhere, though there was no place to hide; only the outside provided any escape and most, including Mike, did not know such a place existed.

            Within a surprisingly short period of time, the sides of the store began to collapse, pushed in on themselves by a machine of transport none of them could see or name. Soon the ceiling, unsupported, started to fail and then fall, in pieces at first and then in one great, deafening drop of wood and metal; it had been cheaply made in order to cut costs.

            Mice that were not killed by the walls were crushed by the ceiling or suffocated by the gale of smoke and dust created when they descended. All in the Stevens family perished, though Mike probably didn’t know it and how much he was aware of them at all anymore, being grown, was unknown. In any case, he was one of the lucky ones who scurried toward a light he could not identify but which the instinctive practicality of his kind told him was the thing to follow.

            He found himself in a parking lot at about noon, the rubble of the old Buy ‘n’ Fly behind him, a bulldozer ramming and eliminating the rest of it. It was an exposed area, without the protective darkness and enclosure he was used to. Covered in white dust, he could not blend his gray coat into the pavement as he had planned. He made the judgment that the other building nearby—a larger, brighter version of his original home—was his best bet for survival. After running as fast as he could, he swiftly discovered a hole in its side wall and burrowed within. For a terrifying minute, he was trapped in a hot and narrow space that smelled of paint and plaster. Checking feverishly from one end to another, he found a hole, tiny and a tight squeeze but which got him completely inside the Super Buy ‘n’ Fly.

            He was in the basement, surrounded by boxes—some discarded and empty, others full and awaiting unloading—and by broken handtrucks and shopping carts. Using his whiskers and small snout, Mike found and ate a small piece of not-quite-moldy cheese and a shard of a browning lettuce leaf. Then he realized he was not alone.

            Many mice were near him, most of them also eating—and fresher food than had been in the old store, though this was not an issue. Among them was a female mouse, which ease dictates be named, as well: Celeste Entenmann, for these were the product names on the boxes from which she was feeding. Mike, grown, having eaten, and still alive, mounted Celeste and then quickly dismounted, leaving his mark on the universe with an act about which he had no emotion, doubt, or even much comprehension.

            Within two weeks, in a cranny of the Super Buy ‘n’ Fly basement, Celeste bore Mike three children. All were, as he had been at first, blind and hairless. He dutifully brought them all extra food he found on the floor, the supply of which was always replenished, as boxes were frequently dumped downstairs by employees. The mice moved into shadows or hid in holes to avoid the humans, then reemerged when they were gone to take advantage.

            One day, the food left by the people was particularly tempting. It was peanut butter placed on pads set at differing distances from each other. By now, Mike and Celeste’s children could hear and see and were well on their way to independence. Still, they instinctively followed their parents and, on this day, their mother.

            Mike returned from seeking food; he was carrying a piece of tomato that he had bitten through a box to get. He found his entire family stuck to a pad where the peanut butter had been. All of them were flipping violently in an attempt to free themselves. One child had already knocked itself to death. The rest would soon follow, Celeste splayed on her back, her small mouth bloody, her belly crudely exposed. Around him were maybe a dozen other identical tableaux, mice piled immobile upon each other, in mass graves that smelled of peanut butter.

            Seconds after seeing this scene, Mike heard the door fly open. Three male employees loudly entered, the first holding a flashlight, the other two brooms and tennis rackets. Mike immediately made for the wall, desperately sniffing and twitching his whiskers to find an exit. Most of the holes had been filled in since he arrived, but at the last minute he found one and shimmied through it, just avoiding becoming a victim of a pogrom that in several minutes had cleared the basement of all of its remaining vermin.

            Not thinking—it’s unclear that he ever did—Mike rocketed across the parking lot, avoiding being crushed by the giant oncoming wheels of a car with the dexterity of the small and his kind. He kept racing until he reached a highway, more of the loud and mysterious mechanical monsters coming at him from two directions. Soon he sensed that the silent, unpaved area to his left would be more secure. He ducked into a field where high grass near a sign for an upcoming condo covered him. Up ahead, he saw an even better place to escape discovery: a pile of old lumber that to a human might have looked like a small collapsed house, but was a decent dwelling for a mouse.

            As before, he was not the first mouse to have this idea—or, more precisely, to exercise this instinct. A veritable village of them moved in and out of the wood, resting and reproducing there after finding and bringing back food from the field. Mike might have stayed faithful to the memory of his murdered family if he had had no opportunity to replace them. But among the many others was inevitably a female: she will be named Violet Field, in tribute to her surroundings. Mike entered and exited her even quicker, if that were possible, than he had his now forgotten “wife.” In two weeks, four of his offspring were being raised by Violet in the protective shadow of the lumber pile.

            Mike would have remained loyal to Violet, too, if he had had no way to do otherwise. But the large number of female mice in the field made it only logical that he would climb aboard and off of others. More of his progeny were soon stumbling blind in different areas of the grass and wood. He fed some and not others, not playing favorites, just doing the best he could under the circumstances.

            A few weeks after his arrival, the number of his children suddenly began to dwindle. While peacefully feeding nuts and insects to Violet and the micelings he had with her, a huge and furry arm was pushed into the wood pile. Using claws on the end of a paw, the intruder shoved aside weak wood to create a hole big enough for its head. It—a cat, a stray red cat—stuck its enormous face centimeters away from Mike and his family.

            In seconds, the smaller mice had been swiped out of the cranny that had been their home, the sharp nails of the cat’s claw stabbing them to death before the paw carried them like a grain elevator out of the pile and from Mike’s sight forever. As the hole grew larger, the cat finally pressed its mouth in far enough to bite at and then bite off half of Violet’s head. Mike frantically escaped through the same hole that had allowed his family to be slain.

            He emerged into chaos. Gigantic machines that mowed grass and eliminated ground were shaving and breaking into the field around him. The condo sign quaked in their wake, scaring off the mice that lived at its base. Mike ran farther along the field, veering through the heavy-booted feet of men and the treads of their destructive implements. When the field ended, he ran back on the highway before it became a road that led into the main street of the town. He followed where it went, heeding as ever only the need for forward motion as a way to escape violent death.

            He stopped inside a store in a mini-mall which—like the first Buy ‘n’ Fly—had been abandoned. But unlike that place and its cornucopia of food, this one (formerly named “Left Brain”) had shelves that contained only books and only a few of them at that. Never a gourmand, Mike ate part of a page of a diet bestseller before he fled, hearing the front door open and the steps of two people approach (a real estate broker and the representative of a frozen yogurt chain). It was his nerves—or whatever it was from his experiences—that now made him jump earlier and faster than before.

            He ran what seemed miles to another location, right next door. Drawn by smells, he careened around the back to an area of garbage cans that bordered a parking lot. The sign above it read “Formaggi’s,” an Italian restaurant above average for the county but which Mike felt was paradise on Earth—though he knew nothing of either place. He only knew that bits of cheese, bread and cake were strewn around it, a feast for a creature that while willing to accept virtually anything as food was glad to get a treat when it could get one.

            Others like him ate behind the restaurant, also, massing around the trash only slightly more clamorously than those inside waiting for tables. Among the mice was yet another female—Anna Leone, say, who was nibbling with tempestuous Italian temper a nearly petrified piece of ravioli. After a day or so, Mike had impregnated her and, two weeks later, their mixed union had produced five sprouts, the largest haul yet of Mike’s many families. They grew up in an idyll of Italian main dishes and desserts.

            One day, a shallow bucket stood at a small distance from the trash containers, looking enough like them to attract many of the mice. Smelling from it the most delicious meal yet—pork—some made the effort to scale the sides. There, balanced precariously on the edge, they saw a wire attached from one end to the other with a tin can punctured by two holes hanging in the center. Here was what smelled of pork, what had been smeared with it.

            With the agility of acrobats, they walked the wire until they reached the can and, in their excited attempt to retrieve the food, were spun mercilessly around until they slipped from the greasy tin and fell a thousand feet below into water. They were good swimmers, but the water was too deep; they soon grew exhausted, stopped, and sank into unconsciousness. They joined a pile of other drowned mice which lay like a gruesome gray seabed on the bucket’s bottom. It was to this wet tomb that Mike saw Anna and their kids consigned, though he only knew they had disappeared over the top of the bucket and never returned. He himself fled when the garbage cans were suddenly and rudely replaced by plastic bins with snap-on lids. He had been brutally pitched from heaven, though the restaurant itself continued to thrive.

            Mike, who had learned in his small way to be anxious, had now acquired a kind of caution. Alone again, his next stop was the back room of a bakery called Loafin,’ located in the town’s center. Here, with others, he thrived for awhile on the remains of raisin buns and walnut loaves. Before he could get too comfortable, let alone mate, a female teenage worker walked in and screamed loud enough to be heard upstairs, though her spoken word of, “Gross!” he could not comprehend. Killing traps were placed again, which almost tempted him until he remembered that what had once pleased him—peanut butter—had become his betrayer. World-weary—just weary—he left through the hole that had been his front door, leaving behind those less bitterly instructed as he had been by life, or whatever it was he felt he was experiencing.

            At a slower pace, he moved from the commercial district to a residential area, a place full of human families whose members had never suffered the kinds of losses he had. He continued to try to survive, eating from a bowl of dry dog food left in a backyard—until a skinny mutt (whose bowl it obviously was) stood on its hind legs and banged barking on a glass door above him and scared him away. Then, in an unmowed lawn, he suffered through a heavy storm, one in which sadistic winds broke branches off old trees and sent raindrops down like unending amounts of daggers to strike him. It left him soaked and seeming even smaller.

            The weather grew dry but not warm. Still dangerously damp, Mike saved himself once again, wiggling through a hole in a house made up of three apartments above a nail salon. He emerged in a heated room on a living room floor behind a camouflaging couch he did not know was a fold-up futon.

            To him, there was something different about this place. It may have lacked the amounts of food his other “homes” had, and female mice. But there was a calmness or just quiet that allowed him to rest while his fur began to dry.

            He assumed he would find something to eat (there were ants and flies, pizza crumbs in the rug a few feet away and pieces of plaster, if all else failed). This was a place of peace, a concept he perceived in his own way, taking it to mean physical stillness, something he had sought and not known lately (though not with the corresponding emotion of relief). To say the apartment felt “civilized” to him allows one to identify with Mike, but the word is imprecise, even absurd, and in a crucial way, untrue.

            He didn’t hear the fizz of a lemon-lime seltzer bottle being opened in a kitchen steps away, wouldn’t have known what it was if he had, and so didn’t know it was a threat. He had traveled a million miles, from one world to another. He had no sense of time, no idea that he was his own age (about a year). He had moved just to maintain life for himself and, for awhile, his families. He did not feel anger, hope, shock, disappointment, or grief about what had happened; he had only acted until disaster invariably struck and then acted after it had (though he did not call it disaster). A little worse for wear, having learned a few lessons, he would act and move again, if he had to. And if he did not have to, he would stay as still as he was now.

            He was better equipped to survive than all of the people in the town (than the man, pompous, spoiled, and vain, now walking in socks from the kitchen to the living room, carrying both a glass of seltzer and the means of Mike’s destruction: the weight of his own buttocks that would press on the futon and crush Mike against the wall) but he was too small to survive much longer.

            The man—Jeff, he doesn’t merit a last name—was exulting about his girlfriend or something that had happened at school or in a meeting where he worked. “What a day!” he said, which Mike only heard as noise, which was all it was.

            It did not matter to Mike. Before it happened, this last second of peace was an entire life to him, as the other, longer times of fear, hunger, and flight had been lives. This one was a happy life. Here was shelter; here was safety.

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