Pico Zell was gonna get married. None of his friends could wrap their heads around it, but that was Pico – full of surprises. This was a guy who had “retired” from law school two days before graduation to join the Peace Corps. A man whose love for hitchhiking defied all modern convention. When he got back from the Peace Corps, Pico went a year without speaking – not to a single person or even to himself – to win a $100 bet. He nearly went insane, got fired from his job and learned to use sign language (which rarely paid dividends) but he held his end of the bargain. The money was framed, right next to a postcard from Amsterdam that he once sent to himself while on vacation – Dear Pico I don’t miss you cuz you’re here – on his fridge.
Married?
Pico Zell loved a splotch of Bushmills in his coffee, conquering or being conquered by big waves up and down the California coast and staying out late smoking copious amounts of marijuana as he cooked up schemes that rarely turned the corner from fantasy to reality. Yes, he had loves. But to love a woman, with all his heart, ‘til death do him part?
Pico had tried many things in his illustrious years of living somewhat dangerously, but never that.
The wedding would be held in November, not many invited.
Kate was elegant and forthright. Poor thing had no idea what she was getting into. You can’t know everything about a person after just six months but what the heck, Kate had thought.
She was 33, not exactly young, and her heart was like a porcelain doll teetering on the edge of an antique maple desk in a creaky old room. One false move, one unfortunate fall, and a crack that would open the door to oblivion was likely to appear. Kate had fallen from grace when Jack, her former fiancé, left her for a ski instructor. That was six years ago.
Why had she not been able to recover? Why did it now seem impossible to regain her standing as a confident, erudite woman of substance who also happened to have a Masters in Marketing from USC?
To be fair, Jack didn’t leave her at first. No, the pristine little coward tried his hand at two-timing as he strung her out, the wedding date lingering like a dark and swollen rain cloud in the distance, drifting slowly in their direction like a cancerous tumor. When questioned, Jack categorically denied any and all accusations, causing Kate to doubt her powers of perception first, then the very essence of her being when the nightmare came to fruition.
It was over, she was shamed, and Jack married the bubbly blonde ski instructor with the chiseled quads and forever ass. She spent hours crying over the Instagram post, Chablis after Chablis down the gullet as she doomscrolled the comments, staring helplessly at their hands clasped in holy union with Lake Tahoe, blue and serene, in the background.
It felt like a hot knife piercing her spine, looking at the photo, then came the nightmares.
Kate was a wounded animal, blinded by layers of emotional pain, self-doubt and the agony of knowing that she could be headed for a future that was every bit as bleak as her past. Kate was a deer in a meadow, the translucent infrared beam of a hunter’s scope forever shadowing her.
Life had gone from being a strong, sturdy percentage play to a game of poker, and Pico was the river card she had gone all-in on.
He was different. Strange maybe, and not exactly stable, but also gentle, with poetic eyes and a lot of good hats.
They moved in together the day after Pico popped the question. They had hiked down to Land’s End in the fading light of a foggy Friday evening. Seaspray and the marine layer, a magic coastal California cocktail. Bare feet licked by the undertow, Kate peered out across the turbulent grey waves, intent on knowing. When she turned her attention back to shore, Pico was on one knee. A gallant knight in a rugged wool sweater, brown eyes and weathered cheeks, beneath her.
She was whole again.
It was still August and hope sprung eternal. You could even smell it in the streets. Hope did as hope pleased. If hope wanted to howl at the moon or get drunk and suck face in Alamo Square Park, hope did so. If hope wanted to spend $350 on sushi and sake before having sex in the driver’s seat of Pico’s leased Tesla, hope did that too.
Pico parked his car and walked up the steps to his apartment. The sun slanted west, and he noticed that the fog had once again kicked it up a notch. The nightly battle for supremacy, which always ended predictably, with the fog having its say and the cities’ denizens promenading around as if they were braving a Milwaukee winter. A city cloaked in white, foghorns ringing out from the tankers passing beneath the Golden Gate. Pico looked out over the rooftops and the Pacific and thought to himself: life is good.
Checking the mail in the lobby, Pico tossed the junk into the recycling bin and hopped up the stairs with a shiny New Yorker tucked under his arm. He kicked off his shoes, tossed his keys on the coffee table, and stepped into the bathroom, his wool socks sliding on the cool tile.
Suddenly there it was – a rat.
Not in a trap. Not running for cover. Over there. In the god forsaken toilet! But how? No screaming, no hissing, just a lifeless grey mass with a tail too big and too grim to comprehend. That tail. It curled around the bowl and looped the feral, mangy body of the lifeless looking rat, wet, ruddy and desperate.
Pico had intended to piss, but that was now off the table. Surely he could not piss on the rat. Some may have a stomach for such debauchery, but not Pico.
The groom to be stepped back from the bowl cautiously, his thoughts racing too quickly to interpret, and kept his eye on the toilet bowl, willing the rat to be dead, or asleep, or simply to remain in whatever state it currently was in, with its giant serpentine tail coiled like a python.
A silent, uncomplicated death? That would have been far too easy. Now he heard it. That shrill squeal. A desperate cry for help. Good luck with that, Pico thought. He tried to laugh but couldn’t muster the proper emotion, couldn’t get his face to contract into a smile. How could he laugh? He had a squealing rat in his toilet!
And now it was moving. It had shifted. Just there! He had seen it – and seen enough. It was Pico’s cue to bolt, like a coward, doused in terror, fleeing the bathroom with a quickness previously only reserved for racquet sports and swatting flies. Oh, the gnarly beast! It had beady eyes that glowed like Halloween lanterns, a thinned-out brown-grey coat like a floor mat from a ’96 Nissan and gnarly, akimbo teeth.
The soon to be married man slammed the door behind him and heard Kate’s hairdryer fall to the floor. That fucking thing, couldn’t she ever put it in the drawer?
Pico sank to the floor, his corduroys melding into the hardwood as he contemplated his new reality. There was nowhere for the rat to go. Yes, it was alive, and it could potentially gather strength and rally itself up out of the porcelain bowl, but then what? It was either the bathtub or the tile. The window was shut, the door also.
It was six. Kate would be home at seven. There wasn’t much time, but he had to solve this problem like the married man to be that he was before his betrothed came up the steps and shimmied through the door. He couldn’t allow the illusion of his knighthood to shatter. He wouldn’t.
Pico took a deep breath and thought about the Vikings, how they unfailingly went into battle with gusto. They would sail into coastal towns and raid Christian monasteries, excelling in hand-to-hand combat. The Norseman probably encountered their fair share of rodents back in the day. Pico imagined them swinging rats by the tail with one hand and wielding axes in the other.
I’m no Viking, Pico thought, but I could play one on stage perhaps. He wondered if humor could be a panacea of sorts in a moment like this, but doubted it. More traumatized by the minute, Pico wondered if he had the stomach to kill this rat. Or trap it. Or to get married, for that matter. Perhaps he was too weak for all of it, for this life and the problems that get folded into it like mushrooms in a frittata.
Perhaps this was the world’s way of telling him to run and never look back.
The Vikings had vast arrays of swords, spears, clubs and those iconic helmets with curved horns protruding. They were quintessential bad asses. What would Pico’s weaponry even consist of? He got to his feet, rolled up his sleeves and found some old kitchen gloves and an N95 mask. He tucked his sleeves into the rubber kitchen gloves, which reached halfway up his forearms, and cursed his fate.
Maybe a coffee would help take the edge off? He took off the gloves and the mask and put them on the kitchen table and put a pod in the Nespresso.
Then he thought of Kate.
Kate in the front seat of his Tesla with sushi on her breath. The benevolence of this warm-hearted woman, glaring down at him, her motherly warmth emanating, filling the dimly lit vehicle with a golden halo. Her sloshed tongue, her hips plastered into that lucky denim. The thin leather belt, unbuckled. He remembered the bra she wore, the sliver of hair that dangled and interfered with their kissing before she giggled and swept it away. With it she had swept his loneliness away, swept his slate clean and recharged the nine-volt that powered his heart.
He thought of the windows that fogged up and the plush leather seats. He could almost taste it, all of it. The wind blew trees on Hayes St. and it started to rain. He remembered crying in her arms, and she wept as well.
The wait, so unbearable, had ended. This was it, the beginning and the end.
But what promise had he made that he couldn’t take back? The coffee hot and strong in his hand, Pico thought of past lives, of future deaths, of freedom and the art of happiness. What if he crushed Kate’s heart and put her out of her misery once and for all, ended the charade that was really nothing more than a loaded gun, a craven desire for debauchery, not from the heart but from the blackness of the loins, not from the angels but from a devil in despair.
Kate was lovely, but she lied to herself just like he lied to himself. A temporary savior maybe, a cure for boredom, sure, but a wife? Pico knew in that moment, as he drained the black coffee into his black gullet, that he would have to leave her. That deep down, he was meant to leave her in despair, just like he found her.
He went into the bedroom, gathered as many of his things as he could into a travel bag, plopped his laptop and tennis racquet on top, and zipped it up. He slung the bag on his shoulder and walked down the hall, pausing at the bathroom door to listen for the rat.
He heard nothing but a plague of silence, and continued down the hall, stopping only to put on his shoes and snatch his keys from the hall table.