Ultimately, they hired me from the surprisingly vast pool of applicants because, in addition to my expertly-exaggerated extermination experience, I told the interviewer a rather riveting story about a rat encounter from my infancy. When I was three years old, I said, and you’re never going to believe this, a fat, greasy rat with a tail like climbing rope crept his way into my nursery. Now, I told the interviewer, we lived in the suburbs, far from the metropolitan rat-dom, in the territory of the field mouse, so this was more than an anomaly. It was quite literally unheard of. My parents, who were downstairs, assumed that I was safely sleeping, so I was left to confront the creature on my own. I rose from my flowered cot, defiant on my chubby feet, and looked down at the thing. It bared its yellow teeth and whipped its muscular tail, and yet, I was not afraid. Leave, I told the rat. Leave my room. And hearing something formidable, tyrannical even, in my toddling voice, the brute receded into the darkness with a snarl, never to be seen in that house again.  

Now, this was a lie. I am a storyteller by passion. The interviewer, however, was bewitched. 

“So, you were born for this job,” he said, eyes ravenous. 

“Exactly,” I assured him. “I was born for this.” 

*

I quickly realized that I was in far over my head. My past experience was as the remote manager of a mom-and-pop extermination company in the outskirts of another, much smaller and less dirty city. I merely delegated deplorable tasks to a team of thick-chested, green-bodysuit-ed men, then sat in my office texting my wife and munching on dye-orange cheese puffs until they reported back to me with their invariably positive results. My men handled domestic infestations, minor outbreaks. Small-time mouse crime. In fact, they often went the humane route, deftly capturing the animals in cages and then releasing them outside town lines. 

 In my new position as Executive Officer of Rodent Obliteration, the stakes were considerably higher. As the mayor of The City explained to me on my first day on the job, the rat population had been growing at an exponential rate for the past few months, and not only this, but the creatures were becoming more barbaric and unfettered with every generation. He stood at his ceiling-to-floor window, tremulous fingers parting the blinds, looking down on the world.  

“I remember when this place had values,” he lamented. “We were pure. We did things the right way. None of this filth and disarray. Now look how they swarm into our forbidden city.” 

“I understand,” I told him.  

My first impression of the mayor was that he was weak. The kind of man who showered in the dark, disgusted even by the natural processes of his own body. He lacked the stomach for his position, and he resented The City’s unsightliness. I knew this from the way he squirmed in his white, tailored suit, and the persistent lick of his tongue against his teeth while he spoke. He was a man parched of feeling, yoked to the purging pleasure of lack. 

“I’m counting on you to, well, do the dirty work for us, as it were.”  

He didn’t move from the window once during our meeting. It was as though he feared that if his back turned for a moment, The City itself would reach its rotten arm through the glass to throttle him. 

“That’s why I’m here,” I reassured him, though in truth my mind was turning apprehensively to my wife, who had been just barely convinced to move to The City in the first place and would not like the sound of any of this one bit.  

In the end, I’d been able to persuade her that my taking this job was a good idea for two reasons. Firstly, the pay was an astronomical improvement, many times more than our combined past salaries, and my pitch was that I’d quit as soon as was reasonable so that we could finally afford a nice vacation. Picture us in a year’s time, I told her, lounging in bikinis on some silk-white beach somewhere far, far away. Mojitos in hand, sunshine on our minds. Making out in infinity pools and jet-skiing into the tropical sunset and getting hot, oily professional massages. Oh, I painted quite the luxurious picture, conveniently leaving out the unspoken reality that the reefs were all bleached and most of the islands we could afford had descended into abject poverty, rendering them essentially barricaded resorts with hunger clawing at the gates. My other argument was that moving to The City meant that my wife could take a break from teaching middle-schoolers how to saw out Three Blind Mice and play in a real orchestra again. It had been years since she’d graced the stage, and I knew she missed it. The hush of waiting ears, that electric first descent of her bow. Unfortunately, the thrill of performance waned rather quickly.  

“I miss my students,” she said after three days, stabbing mournfully at her veggie burger. “I miss the field behind our old house.” 

“It’s not so bad here,” I reminded her while I listened for scuttling in the walls. I was always paranoid that the rats would find their way into our apartment, because I knew that would spell the end for our stint in The City and hell for me. 

“It’s dark and full of rats and everyone wears black all the time. And somehow, it’s always raining. Why is it always raining? It’s as if the sky is trying to flood the rats out.” 

“Not a bad idea,” I said. “But rats are actually spectacular swimmers.” 

She didn’t appreciate that information very much at all. 

* 

I had at my disposal a vast array of city-provided resources. A team of exterminators for each quadrant of The City, a multitude of poisonous cocktails, the latest innovations in pest-killing infrastructure. They needed the situation handled and had poured an intimidatingly hefty sum into ensuring the desired outcome. My job was to utilize said resources in the most economical and efficient manner possible to, as per my title, obliterate the rats. The problem was that I was woefully outnumbered. According to the most conservative estimates, The City at that time was operating under a four-hundred-to-one rat to human ratio. Now, this disproportion would have been a surmountable obstacle, if the rats and humans weren’t so thoroughly cohabitating. If the rats were the sole residents of the subterranean element, my men and I could have solved the crisis in a week by effectively nuking the subway system. Unfortunately, there were always millions of people underground. Because everyone lived in towering apartment buildings with mold-rotted ceilings and flimsy insulation, there was also no clear-cut way to mitigate the residential infestation. How do you fumigate someone’s home when their walls are hopelessly connected to miles-long channels of rodent highway? My wife’s stance was that the whole city should be razed to the ground or, better yet, abandoned. Let’s take all the funding for the extermination effort, she said, and use it to move everyone out of The City instead. Let the rats have the run of the place. Her economic assessment was lacking, but the logic was sound. She was right. The whole thing felt quite direly whack-a-mole.  

My plan of attack in the first week, therefore, was to educate the public. We needed to be on the same page, as a species, so that we could present a united front. In this way, my mind turned very quickly toward the militaristic. We were at war, you see, and I was our Alexander. Young in years and odds against me, yet determined, somehow, to conquer. This was what I told myself, because it lent a mythological status to my efforts and steeled my often-wavering nerves. I sent my teams out with flyers and paste. They took to the streets, plastering the sides of buildings and the bulletin boards in public parks with our PSA’s. LITTER = RAT FOOD, one sign read, with a graphic of a villainously-coded rat slurping lo mein from a dented Styrofoam container. In the fine print at the bottom: do your part; clean your trash. Another poster featured a plague of rats tumbling like larvae from the open wound of a felled garbage can. This one said, KEEP CLEAN OR THE VERMIN WILL COME. If any of this strikes you as alarmist, you must not be registering the magnitude of the crisis in which we found ourselves at that time. In addition to the prolific postering, I had my men go door-to-door in neighborhoods with especially nasty infestations to inform residents of the various ways they could answer the call for personal mitigation. I sent them in groups to the most decrepit housing projects and instructed them to deliver stern messaging. Wait to take your trash to the curb until the morning of pick-up, then hurry back to bring the bin inside afterward. Stop over-filling your bins, especially with food materials. Give up on any urban composting; it wasn’t making a dent, anyway. Fill every room in your apartment with the state-approved trapping devices which we delivered, complimentarily, to certain addresses.  

My mistake here was assuming that The City had retained any vestige of community care. Abandoned by the government to decades of depthless debts and the steadily growing rodent population, I doubted many citizens even knew their neighbors’ names. One afternoon, I saw a child no more than nine kick a rat corpse down the block like a soccer ball. The dense, gray body thwacked against his rainboot, over and over and over. No one else on the street seemed fazed, but I watched for minutes, wrestling, all the while, with a great and terrible feeling. 

*

After it became clear that I couldn’t rely whatsoever on public contribution to the war efforts, I was forced to adapt my methodology. 

My week-two strategy was a sequester-and-eradicate operation. Having identified, via thermal navigation, several of the rats’ most populous nexuses of underground activity, I mapped out the exact triangulation of highest rat and lowest human numbers. This left us with three mid-sized public parks as our starting points. We evacuated the homeless from their encampments, put up yellow tape, and waited until dark to strike, at which point my men combed the grounds, leaving toxic traps and spraying dead any rodents bold enough to face them. They then collected their kills and retreated. I waited outside the park’s gates, communicating with my team via walkie. I didn’t like seeing the bodies, which, after the ruthlessness of life, always looked rather delicate and sorrowful. In the end, the problem with this approach was, firstly, that we received an alarming number of complaints from pet owners about their pets dropping dead from tampering with our rat traps, and secondly that all we really accomplished was a temporary and minor lull in the rat sightings in those very few and particular parks. We weren’t even scratching the surface of the problem, and, in fact, I worried that we might have inadvertently made it worse. 

I began to rapidly lose my resolve while the mayor’s emails accumulated in my inbox, badgering me about my progress. He asked, in one email, what do you need from me to get this done right? I told him to be patient, that extermination was a multi-pronged and sensitive art. In another email, he informed me that I would need to give an interview soon reassuring the public. We cannot afford, he wrote, to sow the seeds of unrest any further. Of course, I replied confidently. I can squash any public doubt with a two-minute segment. Silver tongue, this one. 

The truth was I was beginning to believe The City was rotted beyond repair. 

*

My public appearance was less an interview than a pre-recorded, glossy broadcast. I showed up to a studio in the mayor’s towering building, where I was instructed to change into a starched suit and handed a script. After familiarizing myself with the speech, I was seated in front of a camera against a screened backdrop of The City as I’d never seen it in real life—this version was blue-skied and sun-bathed, the skyline significantly less crowded. The mayor was nowhere to be found. His assistant, a skittish woman in a white pencil skirt and enormous, black cat-eyed glasses, directed me. The only other people in the room were the lone videographer, whose face I never saw as he never once stepped out from behind the camera, and my wife, who stood against the opposite wall, swallowed in shadows, glaring at me. 

She disliked The City from the day we arrived. Even the park near our place, which was famous for being the largest and most variously treed public park in the country, disappointed her. We could get the real thing back home, she said. Real nature, minus the crowds and the rats and the litter. She hates littering, which she considers a crime punishable by hellfire. I don’t care for it either, don’t get me wrong, but I tend to have more of an everyman’s resilience about it all. This latest development, though, was enough to push her into full-blown resentment. 

Smiling into the camera, eyebrows sympathetically but capably furrowed, I delivered the PSA in one flawless take. Rest assured, I recited, we are doing everything necessary to eradicate this blight from our beloved metropolis and preserve your hard-earned quality of life. I do not take my responsibility as EORO lightly. After the extermination is complete, The City will be even brighter than before. From the ashes of this project, we will erect new monuments. 

After my interview, as my wife and I were walking home, a quartet of rats slipped from a sewer grate and crossed our path. The mayor had placed us in an apartment building in the least ratty quadrant of The City, but by this point nowhere was truly immune. These four rats weren’t especially large or especially fierce, and I remember thinking that they weren’t the worst rats my wife could have had for her first encounter. She, obviously, didn’t have such a glass-half-full mentality. One of the rats, the smallest of the pack, limp-footed and slice-tailed, slid wet and fast across her bare ankle. She screamed as if being gruesomely murdered and dropped her bag of groceries and violin case on the pavement. While I tried to salvage the packaged goods from the wreckage of eggshells and exploded juice, she began to cry. 

“We need to move,” she said. “I’m not going to last much longer.” 

“It’s just bad luck,” I told her. 

“No, if anything, it’s good luck that it took two whole weeks for this to happen. It’s going to start happening more and more and more until we both have boils and pustules and rat pox, and we can’t even hold each other in bed anymore because the pain of contact is too intense.” 

“That’s not true,” I said, hoisting her violin over my shoulder. “I’m going to get rid of them, and then everything will be beautiful.” 

She just looked at me. “This place doesn’t remember that word,” she said. 

* 

To the mayor’s surprise, my statement was met with public outrage. While complaints flooded my email and the internet tore me apart, the rats went full-feral. They overtook land and tunnel, tumbling amuck along the train tracks in tens and twenties and lurching furry and fast between pedestrian’s feet on the streets. The running joke was that you couldn’t get from point A to point B without the rats knowing. That night, my wife and I sat in our new apartment for hours poring over online comments and watching civilian interviews. Under news-clips from my statement, users hurled obscenities. Eat the rich and suck their b0nes, said bbykarl. This bitch isn’t even from here, commented freakyboy69. An account called SeizeTheMeans kept reposting memes of me against backdrops of burning forests and oil-drowned seabirds, as if I was somehow the poster child for every of the world’s ills. In amateur interviews, people of all ages and demographics shared similarly harrowing tales of toe-biting, trash-slashing, arm-lunging rat encounters. There were multiple people who opened the hoods of their cars to the TV interviewers, revealing cables and cartridges gnawed to shreds, the culprits long since absconded. Two old ladies clung to each other desperately while they recalled their experience being accosted by a veritable rat colony outside their local deli. We were just trying to get ingredients to bake our grandchildren cookies, the more talkative woman said, and now look at us. She held up her wife’s hand, which was bandaged heavily and appeared to be missing a finger or two. 

At this, my wife became quite upset. “That’s going to be us,” she said, burying her face in her hands. “That’s going to be us if we stay here. And obviously I would be the one to lose a finger, and then how would I ever play violin again. We’ll have to get some sort of animatronic finger for me, and even then, the sound quality would never be the same.” 

“You’re catastrophizing again,” I told her gently. 

“This is a catastrophe,” she said, gesturing to the computer screen. 

There had been several incidents over the course of our marriage that led my wife to believe in this fabricated dichotomy wherein I was lucky, and she was not. There was the fateful time we’d gone hiking on a trail a few miles outside our town, when she returned with three ticks in her right calf, one of which seeped Lyme into her bloodstream, while I emerged unscathed. I tried, in vain, to tell her this was only because I had been wearing two pairs of woolen socks. Another year, we were enjoying a couple of drinks at a bar when a brawl broke out. I grabbed her hand to lead her from the establishment, but on our way out someone hurled a beer bottle in my direction. I ducked, and it smashed against my wife’s head. Her horror only grew after witnessing my reaction, which was to take the scrawny man by the neck of his shirt and punch him repeatedly in the face. Instead of seeing these experiences as flukes, my wife used them as the basis for marital apocrypha. I was the prosperous ruffian, the brute force. I lacked a healthy communion with nature, and these blind spots exposed my sensitive and clear-sighted wife to danger. Since our move to The City, our dormant magma was beginning to flow again. 

She tired of the rat research long before me, heading to bed with a sniffle and clenching of her robe, leaving me sitting on our couch alone, face lit by my laptop screen, learning all that I could about the creatures’ habits with a fire in my belly. There was one interview that came to particularly haunt me. A young man with early-whitening hair, eyes bloodshot and wild, paced before the camera, cigarette in hand. He wore a long, tattered, black coat with an obscene number of pockets, and his greasy t-shirt bore a round, haphazardly painted symbol I’d never seen before. It looked, vaguely, like the world with an arrow shooting from its core layer, triumphing toward the sky. 

“What do you have to say about the crisis in The City?” The disembodied voice of the interviewer asked. 

“Which one?” The man grinned a rot-toothed grin. 

“The rats, I mean.” 

“I like the little fuckers,” the man said, flicking ash. He smiled. “Hey, will that exterminator lady see this?” 

“Depends how many views I get,” the interviewer said. “Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and—” 

The man grabbed the camera and held it to his face. He got close enough that you could see the bristle of his nose hairs and the bluish bite of frost on the planes of his cheekbones.  

“They will beat you,” he whispered, laughing erratically. “They all know each other. They all talk to each other. They are going to win. And then it will be you that’s buried deep within the earth.” 

*

After the failure of my public park efforts and the public outcry over my interview, my team and I were forced to take a less civilized approach. In my third week as EORO, I made the audacious call to take things below ground. We needed, I told my men, to burrow to the source. We needed to voyage to the diseased core of the matter, to excise the rot by hand. Privately, I thought of the man in the interview, his unsettling conviction. As we donned hazmat suits and filtered into the sewers, I tried to banish his laughter from my mind. I stayed on a metal ladder, several feet above the malodorous ground, and oversaw our efforts. Bravely, my men waded through a foot of rat-infested sludge, meticulously spraying everything in sight with toxic chemicals. The poison was fester-yellow and rose, grease-like, to the top of the sewage. I gagged and narrowly stifled an urge to vomit when the bodies appeared. Bloated and pathetic, they bobbed on the shining surface until my men collected them in pliant, plastic tubes and funneled them out of the water.  

We felt, briefly, good about our underground exploits, until we heard news that the rat population in the quadrant that we’d gutted had gone rogue. Every time I imagined we’d reached maximum terror, the rats managed to raise fresh hell. It was truly remarkable. Aboveground, there were reports of rats swimming laps in toilet bowls, leaping limbs-wide into pots of soup, snapping toes clean off unwatched toddlers. In one particularly devastating news story for me in terms of reputation and morale, the insurgents claimed the second-largest police precinct, streaming into the station from an unseen hole. They gnawed through entire rooms of evidence, sent traumatized officers panicking and misfiring into the streets, and held the grounds by rabid siege. It was as if they had organized a retaliatory attack after we massacred their neighbors and relatives. The situation seemed more dire than ever.  

On my way home from work that day, as I walked dejectedly over the bridge that led to our neighborhood, I paused to take in the vista. The river below me snaked thick and tempestuous toward an inscrutable horizon. Far skyscrapers severed the skyline, silver and malicious. A heavy smog enshrouded their tallest windows, and I imagined that the people working or living in those rooms must feel very alone in the world. I thought of the mayor, so sick with incompetence, so polluted by prestige, delegating tasks from his ivory tower. How lucky I was, I thought, that I was standing here on this bridge, watching all this calamity from a distance instead of living in its mouth. How lucky that I wasn’t stuck in a high-rise office in a noxious fog, clacking away on a computer into the void. How lucky that I had the sense to see it all for what it was, and the privilege to abandon it at will. Warm embers of superiority glowed, briefly, in my belly.  

Then, I remembered the rats. 

*

Another three days passed, during which I made a series of rapidly-broken promises to my wife. I’ll give my notice tomorrow if we don’t make serious headway today, I told her. I told her this three times. It wasn’t so much that I was such a determined city stooge, or even that I was so desperate for the money, although we really could have used it. It wasn’t that I didn’t miss our simpler, quieter life, in our dilapidated but cozy one-story home on the outskirts of town. In fact, I missed it very much, secretly, in the private chambers of myself that I couldn’t let my wife gain access to, lest she wedge my waning resolve wide enough to break. It was more that I couldn’t get them out of my mind. Where were they coming from? What was their prerogative? The more I studied the rats, the more I came to admire their complete and utter reclamation of every corner of The City. I became convinced that they somehow deserved it more than we did. They were fighting harder for it, weren’t they? They relished in The City that we abhorred and desecrated and festered within. We could no longer maintain ourselves. It seemed to me that the whole place had been lost to us a long time ago, that we were ghosts lingering in a land that no longer belonged to us at all. Maybe it never really had. 

Because of this, when my wife shook me awake one morning in a panic, and we rushed to watch the news, and the headline on TV said RATS OVERTAKE CITY HALL, FORCING EVACUATION, with footage of the mayor fleeing for his life, bald and diminutive with a mischief of rats on his heels, I felt a surge of pride. The rats swarmed the street in dizzying numbers, charging almost jubilantly onward. It was electrifying to see—that the many and small could so easily upheave the few and powerful. The rats were resilient; they were dedicated. They loved their lives, and they wanted to create a world where they could live them well. My wife, of course, had the opposite reaction. 

“We are all going to die,” she yelled, jumping from foot to foot in her bathrobe. Before I could protest, she took me by the shoulders with her cold, instrumentalist hands and said, “I’m leaving this week, whether you come with me or not. This place is going to kill me otherwise.” 

*

In the end, it didn’t matter that she wanted to leave, because I was fired the next day—that is, if a deposed official can even technically fire a person. The mayor called me personally from the hotel room outside The City where he was holed up, recuperating from his brush with death. I answered the phone from the passenger’s seat of the car, while my wife spirited us away. 

“I don’t blame you,” he told me. “These disgusting animals are beyond reason. The city I remember has been dead for a long time. The situation was cataclysmic. Far beyond any of our capabilities.” 

I didn’t take offense, because the situation was absolutely leagues beyond my capabilities, which were dubious from the start. Besides, the City Hall Siege probably saved my marriage. If we hadn’t left when we did, my wife would have been pushed past the point of tolerating my obsession. She would have left without me, and I, being slow to the take, would have waited too long to join her.  

“For what it’s worth,” the mayor said with a sharp laugh, “you managed to eradicate a substantial number of them. Cheers.” 

My stomach dropped, then. Outside my window, trees raged past wild and green. 

When we got back to our town, my wife ran squealing like a girl through the fields of yellowing grass and picked me a handful of dandelions and Queen Anne’s Lace. I went back to snacking in my office while my men carry out humane animal interventions in little old ladies’ cottages. My wife has started holding private lessons from our home on the weekends. I spend long hours listening to grating string renditions of nursery rhymes while staring listlessly out the window. I wonder about them often. How many of them there are now, what new corners of civilization they’ve managed to collapse.  

Mostly, I wonder how it feels. To be so bold. To be so free. 

Last week, I went to the pet store. My wife has been talking about wanting a bird. I think the musician in her naturally gravitates toward animals of song. Hoping to surprise her, I perused the canaries and parrots and finches. They ruffled their feathers gaudily, pecked demurely at the metal of their enclosures. So blue, so yellow, so manageably contained. I chose an orange lovebird, mostly because of the name, which I knew would make my wife smile. On my way out of the store, I passed a plastic cage filled with wood chips.  

Inside was a white rat with wet, pink eyes. She was pressing herself against the plastic of her enclosure, licking at the air holes, endeavoring, I knew, toward something beyond this moment. While I sat there next to her, crouching to be close, I watched as my hand rose, of its own volition, toward the door.