Thinking the Unthinkable
Warning: Rodents, Violence, Death, All Around Complicated Feelings
“I trapped a whole litter.” My neighbor, Anush tapped lightly on the filter of his cigarette. He watched the ash flutter to the bottom step of his stoop.
Anush’s rodent problems had been an ever-present topic of conversation for months. Together we had strategized mouse-proofing, traded names and numbers of experts in the field along with rodent facts that repulsed us both. Through our conversations we talked about the toxicity of their poop and the sounds of scratching that could keep a person up all night with the lights on.
New Yorkers live with all kinds of vermin that horrify the average person. I’ve heard stories of tenants battling the trifecta- rodents, roaches and bedbugs- that made a Floridian yell, “HOW CAN YOU LIVE LIKE THAT?”
Go home to your Palmetto bugs- that’s just a Florida name for roach!
“So, what happened?” I urged.
Anush screwed up his face in discomfort. Before he said anything else, I knew his original plan for humane live trapping and relocation had gone awry. Anush had a new baby, Ella, his first. I didn’t know his wife Renée very well, she had some high power job and Anush was the hustler in the family. He owned a furniture store, a take out joint and a bodega in the neighborhood. It was his smoking habit and my dog walking duties that had made us neighborhood chums.
“I trapped a mom and her pups.”
“Oh…”
“There were like…” Anush gulped, “ twenty of them.”
“Twenty!”
From our previous conversations, both Anush and I knew well that mice can have multiple broods each year because their gestation time is pretty short. The prevailing wisdom is that for every mouse you see there are five to ten others than you don’t see.
“So what did you do?”
“Don’t judge.”
“Anush!”
“Look, I thought about bringing them to the waterfront or to a vacant lot or something, but then they would just invade someone else’s house or business.”
I nodded, “How did Renée take it?”
“I swear. I don’t know who she is anymore!” Anush laughed. “Before we had Ella she was all ‘those poor animals are just trying to live!’ but then we trapped these guys and she went crazy! ‘Those filthy little shit boxes aren’t going to give Ella asthma!’”
He gave a sad chuckle and looked down at his shoe. I remembered my own reaction when Tom, Sullivan and I moved into an amazing apartment with a rat infested backyard. I’d had such respect and love for all the world’s creatures until I thought about them pissing and shitting all over the place where baby Sullivan played. I stayed up nights worrying about the moment they would try to invade the house, if they hadn’t already. It eventually escalated to me sneaking into the yard at dusk to smoke a cigarette and wait with a pile of bricks to throw at the squeaky little bastards when they came out to play.
I love you, but that love ends where you endanger my kid.
“I get it. It’s funny that trapping them was her idea.”
“I know.” He said and then imitated his wife’s honey-coated voice, “But glue traps are so cruel, baby!”
We both laughed. Then I waited. I knew if I waited he would come clean.
“I drowned them in the toilet.”
“All at once?”
“No.”
I gramaced. “Wow.”
“I did the mom first. I didn’t want her to watch all of her babies go.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“That was awful. I grabbed her by the tail and I thought I could just dunk her and that would be it. But she fought so… I ummm…”
He bit his lip. I took a deep breath and steadied my face so that I didn’t look horrified or judgmental even though I definitely was both.
“I figured out that I could whip her by the tail and knock her out on the bowl before I drowned her.”
“Oh… god…”
“I know. I cried. So hard.”
“Aw, Anush…”
“But here is the thing that is harder to take… it got easier.”
“Oh.” I was legitimately surprised.
“After the third or fourth one, I stopped crying. I didn’t even hear them squeaking for their mom anymore. I just pulled them out one by one, whapped them on the head, dunked them in the bowl. Like a machine. Whap. Dunk. Easy. Then it was over and I had to figure out what to do with all the little bodies.”
Anush put out his cigarette and then reached forward to pet my dog.
“I didn’t know it would get easier. Now I know and I wish I didn’t.”
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Some 15 years later, I still think about that conversation with Anush a lot.
This morning I watched Ordinary Men: The Forgotten Holocaust on Netflix and it had me thinking about Anush and those mice. To be crystal clear, killing 20 mice is not the same as 6 million Jews. However, Ordinary Men asks us to examine and challenge our own perceived limits and our judgments.
Our first excuse is the fear of being shot for disobeying orders… but there is evidence that these first killing squads had the choice not to participate. Some didn’t go. They stayed behind to clean latrines and do menial tasks. Their worst punishment was ridicule and exclusion.
Those who feel that ridicule and exclusion are nothing have probably never experienced it.
You may think that you could withstand exclusion for the sake of your deeply held moral beliefs. You may think you are smarter than these men were. But the real horror story isn’t that these men were born monsters (or “deplorables”) but that they weren’t. They were educated, cultured, family men. Some of them were not even sympathetic to the Nazi cause. They identified as “patriotic Germans” whose defense of the fatherland was total and unquestioned. Their intentions do not absolve them but that is not the point of examining those intentions.
The examination is for us.
There are all of these pictures of these German death squads carousing, singing along with a band, clinking beers and sharing a nice meal after having exterminated 1500 human beings and then left their bodies in the forest or in a large pit. It is easy to look at these images and think these men were demons having macabre celebrations and, to some extent, they are. What the pictures do not tell you is that when the SS realized the constant face to face killing was taking an emotional toll on their soldiers they began medicating them will alcohol and music. Then they found a better, more efficient, less personal method of killing so they could protect the stamina and mental fortitude of their officers.
This is repulsive, but it was also successful.
It worked. It bought compliance. It bought camaraderie. It knitted these men together and it made killing easier.
Whap. Dunk.
The deeper these men went down this murderous path, the more twisted their logic became. It turns out that our brains will do anything to protect us from pain, including convincing us that we are the ones being victimized. One soldier commented that he suffered way more than his victims did because he had to live with the pain of taking their lives. Another soldier would only shoot children. His logic was that they would not survive without their mothers, therefore he was being merciful.
It is easy to sit in judgment but that is also a protective mechanism that keeps us from imagining how we might be convinced to commit horrors ourselves. As long as we protect ourselves in this manner, we might fall into compliance without question and still think ourselves just and right.
That will be for someone else to judge without self examination. And the cycle will continue.
Unless…