David Phalen - Chasing the Idea Rat with My Best Friend, Jaime

One cop has already taken up a position in front of the door. His hand on the holster holding his stun gun, he stands wide-legged, confident. I move to the left, while Jaime drifts slightly right, but the cop holds his position, knowing he needs to slow us for only a couple of seconds to allow the others to arrive in time to take us.

Jaime slows down, trying to figure an angle that doesn’t exist. My first instinct is to do the same, but in less than the time it takes me to put one foot down and lift the other, what I have to do comes to me. It is a moment that reminds me of difficult test questions back in school, when a sudden answer would pop into my head. Rarely even close to an answer I expected, its correctness was always so apparent that I never hesitated to follow my instincts and write it down.

I bolt ahead of Jaime, straight for the cop. He pulls out his stun gun to keep me from getting around him, but he has misread my intentions. I run into him as hard as I can. Streaks of light flash inside my head as I hit him. I wrap my arms and legs around him as we fall. He struggles to get up, but I’m dead weight and he has no leverage.

Jaime runs past, through the revolving doors, back into the city. A few cops follow half-heartedly, knowing they’re already too late. He will lose himself again in the dance of the people he despises, the losers and castoffs without hope that their lives might ever get better.

As the cop struggles beneath me, I think of those people. Surely, there must be some breakthrough that can help them. Some moment of unexpected insight from someone, somewhere, that will change things for them.

I wonder what it will feel like as some Idea Rat’s experiences seep into my mind. I hope it’s like those times with the difficult test questions. I would chase the solution half a dozen different ways. Then, sometimes even after I had given up and gone on to another question, the answer would be there, full-blown and obvious in my head. I used to love those moments, that feeling that something had crawled out from a place hidden inside of me.

Maybe chasing the Idea Rat has led me to a life full of such moments.