Escobar

Sometime around July last year, I came back from a trip and walked into something not quite right. There was this… smell, like six six-hundred-pounds souls had spent one good year farting into this one jar, then sealed the jar tight and buried it for a whole millennium. It was like these tired ghosts had risen, jar in hand, and had decided to offload their offering right in my very own living room.

I walked through my house with half my face in my palm. On my way to the bedroom, I noticed something strange. The bottom of its door had been chewed out, the carpet beneath it lay in tatters. Very cautiously I poked open the door. It was in the exact state I had left it in, except that my mirror now had a jagged line across it. 

My first thought was “thieves”, but I dismissed it for its high unlikelihood. I lived in a secure place. Besides, what kind of thief had nothing better to do but chew wood, destroy carpets and break mirrors? Still, I looked around to be sure. I searched the drawers. Watches and chains were intact, and so were hard tokens and bank cards. Nothing was missing. Not in that room, not in the other room, not anywhere.

If nothing was missing, but someone had gotten in, then I had cause to be fucking worried. Common sense and true crime shows made certain of that.

But so strong was that smell that even my worries couldn’t distract from it. I opened the windows. It took a while, but it finally began to disintegrate.

I slept with an eye open that night, torch at the ready, thinking about the damage to my carpet and my strange, unknown visitor – whoever he might have been.

. . . 

AN ENEMY HATH DONE THIS

I sleep in my living room as I always have. For some reason I find it most comfortable. I like to think that the discomfort keeps me alert and instills discipline, but that’s not entirely true. Truth is, sometimes I just start a habit and stick with it, no matter how unreasonable. (Reminds me of a time in my young life when I took on the habit of being a stammerer. That shit caught up with me fast – and my mother beat it out of me fast.)

At about past midnight I woke up with a start because I had begun to hear sounds. They were soft patters, like bare little feet running on a linoleum. I got up and listened closely, but it had stopped, like he/it/they knew that I was trying to listen and trace them. A little while later I began to hear an entirely different kind of sound. Unlike the reckless first, this sounded more controlled, maybe guarded. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the kitchen.

I crept up. Tiptoed and switched my torch on at the direction full blast, but he/it/they had disappeared. What I saw instead was the edge of the carpet (leading to the kitchen) in tatters… and that bloody smell. When I pushed open the door, I noticed splinters of wood on the floor and teeth marks.

An enemy hath done this, I said.

. . . 

C FOR CONFIDENCE

The identity of the enemy revealed itself shortly.

This one night I was afflicted with a hot, flashing streak of heartburn. I’d been having the signs, but had been too lazy to go get water. Now, I knew that mortality was close if I didn’t have something. I raced to the kitchen, switched on the light and saw something that stopped me dead in my track. It looked something like a black, three-month-old puppy. It leaped from the sink, clambered over the heap of plates obstructing its path, slid down the gas pipe, and finally scurried along the edge over to a hole which it finally squeezed through and disappeared into.

Boy, o boy, I wasn’t even feeling any heartburn anymore. I just stood staring because, by God, this was the damn biggest rat I had seen in thirty-seven years.

But that was hardly the shocking thing. What was was the fact that in all of these movements – the leaping, clambering, sliding and scurrying – there was hardly any sense of urgency. In its mind I was more a disturbance than it was an intruder.

I took a look at the sink. That black bastard had consumed every tidbit of food I’d left in the plates, leaving all bare. That made me sigh and smile. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about doing dishes the following morning.

. . . 

GIVE A RAT AN SQ…

The only things I go out of my way to kill are cockroaches (In 2017, one raced the full length of my back like a Ferrari on an F1 RACETRACK. I declared war on all of them from that point). The rest, I let live because at best, I consider them misguided, and at worst, fucking stupid.

So, when this rat and all its shenanigans began, I hardly saw a reason to have it murdered. My main concern had been whether a serial killer was on my heels. Now that I’d confirmed its identity, I let it go. Of course, there was still the problem of the smell (which I’d kinda gotten used to anyway) which I countered with air purifiers and fresheners.

But give a rat a square foot and he’ll have your house. Which is exactly what it did.

At nights it would chew on my door, chew on the carpets. It was strange. Rats didn’t eat wood. It would later become clear to me that it did that because it was trying to create a hole to squeeze through – and look for more food in the living room. I would wake up at night and go to the kitchen only to see it leap from a dish in my sink. Sometimes it was down the wire behind my fridge. In a few short weeks it had become obese. It wasn’t a puppy no more. It was now a damn boar.

It gained entry into the living room, of course, and would sometimes climb the curtains, like a swing. Now, I saw shit on my dining table. Saw shit on my sink. These wasn’t pea-sized shit. This was fist-sized shit.

It wasn’t even running anymore. Whenever it saw me now, it winked. Sometimes it doffed its hat in salute. The day I knew enough was enough was when I saw it on singlet and a pair of boxers. It had moved in. Next thing would be a wife, kids, a whole community and a quit notice letter.

It had to die.

. . . 

VENGEANCE. 

I thought rats were blind and stupid. I was wrong (at least as regards this one). This one was Maradona. This one was reeeeeeeeeaaaaaal badman.

We had deployed rat poisons and chucked them in fish. It will eat the fish and perish, I thought. It didn’t. Matter of fact it stopped showing up altogether. Peace had returned but this was suspicious, ominous peace. I wasn’t wrong. It came back this time with a vengeance. To mark its return, it chewed through the gas pipe and shit all over the oven cooker.

We replaced it.

It chewed through again.

The third time it did that, I ran mad, punching walls and cussing at the skies.

The noise still continued at night and the smell had taken on a fresh and further variation.

It was hell.

. . . 

THE RAT’S ROUTE

The next in our arsenal was rat gum. The power of rat gum is unparalleled. Back in the day, two million rats terrorized us in our little shack. This rat gum didn’t only catch what we asked for – rats. It caught lizards, birds and, once, a small thief called Ahmet Dinubu.

So, I bought the toughest rat gum in the whole of Abuja called Miracle Catcher Gum: Kill your rat one time! I bought it from one Fulani nigga (because I heard they happen to know a few things about killing things). I got about five of those, strategically placing them on the rat’s route, then I waited. But one day, two days, three days, there was no sign of a rat. On the fourth day, however, I saw about three of the gums displaced.

That was the moment I knew I wasn’t dealing with an ordinary rat anymore. No. I had Escobar on my fucking hands.

This was no longer pest control. It was now a battle of brute and intelligence, and the rat was winning. Cause how the hell does a rat sense poison and avoid it, then step into a gum and step right out of it, taking it along? How?

. . . . 

Force hadn’t worked. Gum hadn’t worked. Poison hadn’t worked. My house was getting decimated. Piles of shit were always on my table. Visitors would visit and I’d see them trying to decide if it was their nose or if I was a pig. My mother visited once and put her heap of meat out there. By morning, there were bite marks all over the choicest parts.

We blocked every hole in sight. We reinforced the doors. It came to our notice that perhaps, Escobar wasn’t coming from outside, that he was actually staying in the house, so we did a fumigation. It was just a waste of time. Maybe that nigga had a mask on or something because he survived it. Escobar could not be killed. Escobar could not be caught. Escobar could not even be inconvenienced. At this point I began to wonder if what I was wrestling with was even flesh and blood. It called for prayer, but when I began to pray, I felt so ridiculous I burst out laughing.

Then one day my cook, Ogwuche, came. He had a small smile loitering at the corner of his lips.

Dembele gave me this, he said quietly, holding up a small, transparent cup in which there was a pill.

Escobar will die! The confidence with which he said that was creepy.

I watched him grind it and mix with water, then sprinkle a few drops on a piece of bread and toss it behind the fridge, I remember scoffing. I wasn’t scoffing much a few hours later. Escobar had died, stiff, fat, and drawn out. More astonishingly, he had died just a few steps from that piece of bread.

To this day, I do not know what that pill is. Also, it didn’t seem like anyone called Dembele had given him shit. It seemed, instead, like he had used it on someone. A man cooking my daily meals and knowing of such a thing didn’t seem like the kind of person I wanted anymore.

Yes, Escobar was dead, and I was glad. But that evening, I fired him.