People Family Animals
When the Squirrels Are Over
Squirrels are violent maters. I thought about that as metaphor, but I’ve already written that kind of essay, that story.
I can’t find a metaphor for the squirrels. Each time they scratch and chatter above the bedroom ceiling, or nibble through the insulation of our attic leaving a confetti of toxins on the kitchen counter, each time they screech and scream their mating calls and fuck and tumble and find a new way into our house, I think, This should mean something . This should carry allegorical or metaphorical properties; that might make it feel better. But there is no meaning. I haven’t found one yet.
I’ve become friendly with the men who come to take care of the squirrels. There are a few men—all with different energy and trapping styles. One seems queer; my wife and I think he’s flagging himself to us, though we have limited time with other people these days; we are lonely; we’ll see anything. Another is older, wizened by years of animal mysteries; he’s the One Last Job guy in the movies who does his thing impressively, wickedly, cunningly. I like him. The other men sort of just follow directions. They extend ladders and hustle through the crawl spaces on their hands and knees. For a long time, they did not believe us about the squirrels. Mice, they said. Squirrels, we said. We live with them. They practice aerobics and compose music in our office spaces; they built a roller coaster above the stairs. We would know.
Squirrels are violent maters. That’s what the Clint Eastwood guy said to me yesterday. They kill each other over sex. I looked into this myself, on the internet, and read that squirrel semen coagulates into a vaginal plug inside the female, which she sometimes removes in order to fuck some more. Then she eats the plug. I thought, Wow, that is goth . I like that the female squirrel has power—that the fighting above our kitchen and bedroom and bathroom isn’t just squirrel rape but something more. She wins.
Squirrels are violent maters. I thought about that as metaphor, but I’ve already written that kind of essay, that story. I don’t want to compare squirrel mating to my own assaults; that feels off-color to me. But still, having written about it, I am writing about it again—this time in novel form; that story doesn’t go away for me. More than anything, it’s always there. Violent mating. I write about violent mating as the squirrels scale the windows, making eye contact, unafraid. It is a cheap metaphor—animalistic properties, so what. I hate it. That comparison doesn’t go away either.
The first time one of the squirrels breached the house, meaning it made its way inside the actual house, I thought all the noise was my wife Hannah. Or maybe the dog. Or maybe the other dog. In retrospect, none of them would have made noise like that—they’re all fairly quiet. I was on the phone with my friend Esmé and I thought, Stop making noise like that . It was so much noise, and distracting. Bags thrown around, crinkling. Glasses knocked over. Food noises.
It especially didn’t make sense because Hannah was teaching a class on Zoom; she wasn’t making all those noises. I knew this—I heard her upstairs saying something about metaphor or meter when I also thought she was going through bags in the kitchen. Then I heard her say, Stay in the room and don’t come out. Only then did I notice my own dogs in my own room with me.
Sometimes I am so lonely I’ll believe anything. I was on the phone with Esmé when the choreography defied sense. I learned later, after the chase, that Hannah came down the stairs for a face-off with the squirrel, who was sitting on our record player. In my mind, the record player will always be on, the squirrel spinning around and around like a mall holiday train track, but this wasn’t my visual or memory to begin with, it was Hannah’s.
One day, I will still remember the squirrel spinning and maybe I’ll tell people about it. Maybe our future kids, should we acquire any. That will be an unbelievable story, I think. People will say, You have got to be kidding me.
Squirrels are violent maters. I thought about that as metaphor, but I’ve already written that kind of essay, that story. Jo Ann Beard wrote about a squirrel infestation in her essay “The Fourth State of Matter,” and people remind me of this. I’d forgotten about her squirrels—there are so many other important things in that essay. When I revisit the essay, I remember that the squirrels function as a nuisance, and then a stand-in for loss. Loss of a husband. Noise, then no noise. An empty. That’s what her squirrels mean to me, though maybe not for her. I think this is a good metaphor.
When Hannah chased the squirrels, I stayed in the room. I heard her huffing and puffing and saying “Oh shit” over and over again. I asked Esmé to stay on the phone and distract me but she began talking about something very serious that required me to interpret meaning. I couldn’t do it. I became very invested in the squirrel chase and did not want a distraction after all. I also did not want to be a friend who does not listen. I hung up, guiltily.
As Hannah and the squirrel chased each other, I wondered what she was seeing. I didn’t yet know about the record player—she hadn’t shouted that to me. I just imagined the squirrel dancing around, maybe with shoes on. Hannah as the One Last Job guy, suddenly equipped with obscure animal-trapping knowledge; maybe a bandana was on her head. She opened and shut doors and ran around and it made so much noise.
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, she said.
I felt crushingly alone when this fight went down. Hannah and I have experienced so many things in real time, together, this past year in the squirrel’s home in a world in a pandemic. But in the chase I knew she was acquiring all these new images and fears and things she’d remember forever about the squirrels, and I was behind the door, and I would never know. I’d only know what she told me. I’d ask her to tell me again and again about the record player detail, and then I made up some details of my own. When she cleaned the rice cooker, I thought, I bet it was there. I bet the squirrel made the rice cooker its little home, sleeping on a bed of rice. It opened and shut the lid itself with its little squirrel hands. This is a story I wouldn’t tell.
Yesterday, I thought about the children I’d like to tell these stories to. I google things about adopting from China because I’m Chinese and that might feel meaningful to me, but then I remember gay people can’t adopt from China or from anywhere easily. I let myself cry for a little bit over this. Then I feel weird for searching for children on the internet, scrolling pages like they’re dating sites, so clinical. Then I remember that this is the way you often do it, when you’re gay. You scroll a lot, looking for information. I wonder if the gay exterminator has ever scrolled. Hannah says it’s okay, no children have to come tomorrow. I wonder how long we will say this.
Yesterday, I was alone when the squirrels came back. I thought one was stuck and suffering, but really it was many and they were fucking. That’s what the gay exterminator said before he said Violent Maters, repeating after Clint Eastwood. The squirrels screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed, and I thought, I can’t take this anymore . I sat on my blue couch, in the corner of it, and stared at the wall all day. The men had shown me a live cage trap, and then they showed me with their hands how it would open and shut and no one would get hurt. No more traps, I said, and I listened to the squirrels celebrate for the rest of the night.
The blue couch—it was for the future kids. It’s a big couch. Lately, I sit on it a lot, unable to move for hours, sometimes a full day. I imagined it, before it even arrived, having crayon marks on it; I imagined being mad about those squiggles of crayon but quietly pleased, saying, Don’t color on that couch like that! I worked so hard to afford it!
Hannah says it’s okay, no children have to come tomorrow. I wonder how long we will say this. Squirrels have great capacity for memory. I learned that on the internet too. They remember where the food is for months and months. They come back to the food because they worked hard to collect it, even if that means gnawing through brick. The squirrels have now gnawed through metal and copper and shingle and wood to get back into our house, I guess for the food. Some people use glass, to teach the squirrels a lesson in their mouths.
I keep a birdcage in our living room full of cards and keys and letters and ticket stubs, just to remember. This is a bad metaphor. A therapist once asked me, How does it feel when you go through the things in the birdcage? And I didn’t understand her question. How often do you do it? she said. But going through the contents of the cage had never crossed my mind. I just liked knowing I could, if I needed to remember. Now, it only occurs to me to go through the contents of the cage when I think about what that therapist asked of me. She moved to California.
Strobe lights are supposed to work for the squirrels; some friends tell me this. They send me an instructional video about hanging a strobe light in the crawl space to scare off the squirrels. The squirrels don’t like strobe lights because they have gentle eyes. Hannah says, Where would we hang the strobe light? Because they’re everywhere, not just one place. I think we would have to buy several strobe lights to pull this off. I think our house would look so interesting at night with strobe lights everywhere, all night, and neighbors wouldn’t know what to think. They might think we had parties full of people in a pandemic, and we wouldn’t want the neighbors to think that. We have been alone with the exception of the squirrels and the team of men who try and fail to trap them.
Yesterday, one of the men called our house the Lion House. He said he got my panicked call when the squirrel started screaming and asked his buddy, is that from the Lion House? He pointed to a giant stuffed tiger I keep upstairs, on the squirrels’ floor. I said, That’s a white tiger. He said, Okay, well, the Tiger House then. The original stuffed tiger was a gift from my father when I was a kid. It burned when my old house burned down. A woman at the dry cleaners tried and failed to save the burned tiger, whose plastic eyeballs had melted off, one dangling. My mother got me a new tiger, this time much larger, as an adult. It is a giant tiger, and I wonder what the squirrels think of it, if they call it their daddy.
This is the squirrels’ house, though I can’t find any meaning to it. The men sealed the holes again, but they’re everywhere this morning. Alone last night, as I sat on the blue couch with no crayon marks on it, one of the squirrels came to the window and stared at me. Taunting. Pissed. I don’t know, maybe just bored. Then she stood on the front steps and screamed her mating call. I think if there were a squirrel translator she would have been saying, Come fuck me in my house.
When the squirrels are over, my friend says, at least you will have strobe lights. We already have a strobe light, from when there were parties, but I wonder if our light is strong enough. Maybe the squirrels would like to rave in the glow of our light the way we used to dance in it. I was trying to meditate and chant when the squirrels came screaming yesterday morning. I was alone and trying to connect to a higher power, pule for the Hawaiian gods and kūpuna—then another breach. I thought, This has got to have meaning to it.
Hannah has cut away so many branches. She’s seen things I haven’t seen, crossed a threshold I’ll never reach because she and the squirrel got into it while I stayed in the room during the chase. I was told to stay, but I would have stayed anyway. I am very afraid of the squirrels and this is their house. On the internet, they say I should knock if I go up to the office or the crawl space, before hanging the light. The squirrels are protective over their babies and nests, they say. You should knock, or play a loud song.
I am very afraid of the squirrels and this is their house. What song would you play? a friend asks me, but I’m not sure I could choose one. There would be so much pressure to choose the right song for this. Hannah went outside this morning to check for squirrels on our roof; I stayed on the blue couch, by the window. And how will we tell each other what we see and what we hear? she asks. I think walkie-talkies would be very impressive and appropriate for this job, but we don’t have any walkie-talkies. I say, Telepathically, or by the phone, we could do it.
In the sunshine, I see her point to the roof as I stare from the window. Something is there, she sees a new opening, or a squirrel, but I cannot see it. I know it’s there from the way she is pointing, and from my couch I only hear it. Something is running. I note this as a thing to say, to report back to her when she comes inside. I hear it moving above me and Hannah is in the bright sun, pointing.
I wonder what song I would choose for them, if it would be upbeat or slow. Hannah takes a picture on her phone of the thing I can’t yet see, though later I might zoom in and imagine what it was like to really see it. I imagine what the neighborhood is thinking about our squirrels. If, from a second or third or fourth floor, they have come to like them, name them, if they gather to watch them climb our roof and wait for them to get in.
