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Louis lived in a tenement as dingy, brown, and sepia-toned as any
immigrant's photograph of early 1900s New York. Lots and lots of other
mice, far more than were legal, lived behind the doors of the top hallway
of their building; everyone crowded, everything frantic and worried that
they'd be found out. One day, of course, they were. The men with their
blazing eyes and swooping trenchcoats came bursting into the hall like
stormtroopers, some horrible amalgam of the INS, exterminators, and the
police coming to evict the residents of the hall, lawful and unlawful
alike. Even the mice living there legally, under their own names, were
turned out on the streets.
Louis lost his parents during the hubbub that ensued, and had been searching for them for quite some time when I ran into him on a sand dune in New Mexico. He was tiny, about as big as my thumb, and despite clearly having been walking in the desert for quite some time, his skin was as tender, pink, and moist as a newborn's. He told me his story, his description of the pogrom chilling in its sheer calculatedness -- the men had waited until the hall was full to bursting before sweeping through -- while the sun set red behind a landscape of saguaros and yucca plants, thousands of miles from the city he'd begun in. I watched him walk away into the desert, leaving a tiny furrow behind him in the sand, which I followed with my eyes until he was out of sight. Sometime during the night, a torrential thunderstorm swept through, and the arroyo he was walking in became the whole and sole property of a flash flood, sending him coursing and careening between its walls and boulders until a freak wave tossed him over the edge and tumbling down a dune lit only by lightning and compacted by rain, helplessly somersaulting down the steep sand until he rolled into my waiting hands, cupped to receive him, he still alive, and me his Christopher Robin. |
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