Kandis Elliot: Evolution in Guadalajara

As we approached the lecture-hall church, proprietors of tiendas along the streets were just lifting their shop doors after the one-to-three P.M. siesta, heavy, iron garage doors essential in a country of poverty, thieves, and gangs. Each opened door released the rank odor of sewage, the closed areas accumulating air seepage from below the streets, reminding us of what was down there.

“Doctor Hugo Albricht, in 1956, put two adult white rats—” Ziggy was shouting to the audience in Spanglish, fully seizing their attention from the fiery proletariat-versus-bourgeois painting raging behind his back, “one male and one female, in the basement of Birge Hall—that’s the University of Wisconsin’s biology building—and let them breed.” He paused for dramatic effect. He had already shown a slide of the human population growth curve, the little dip in the 1300s during the Black Death years, the line skyrocketing after the industrial, medicinal, and green revolutions to the “Year 2000” mark, where it divided in three parts, one shooting up out of sight and labeled “Pope’s dream,” the other slightly decreasing and leveling off, labeled “Sanity,” and the third falling precipitously toward zero, labeled “Inevitable.”

When we’d arrived, the church-cum-auditorium was half empty—Ziggy’s conservation speeches never drew much of a crowd anywhere. I put The Royal We on the seat next to me. In deference to a foreign colleague, Inez had sent out word to attend-or-else, and most of the faces were student-age, with a couple of rows of university dignitaries up front. Media people had been packing up their camcorders and preparing to leave after enough footage for a sound bite; when Ziggy started with Albricht’s rats, the paparazzi had stayed and turned their equipment back on. The Guadalajara press was going to love blasting Ziggy’s pro-abortion, anti-Pope rhetoric, I knew. Comparing humans to animals. Suggesting people of color curb their fecundity—him a white, Earth-sucking American, any one child of whose would use more than forty times the world’s resources than a Third-World child would use. I could feel our influence with the conservation movement here dropping like the ’29 stock market. Universidad directors who had sponsored us wiggled uncomfortably in their seats. Several ladies of child-bearing age watched Ziggy’s every move with predatory lust.

“Albricht gave them all the Purina Rat Chow and water they could hold,” Zig was roaring. Ziggy never lectured at any volume save High. “And guess what? Adam and Eve Rat had babies. And more babies. And the babies grew up and had babies. So many they couldn’t even be counted, not by all the graduate students in the biology department. But they didn’t go hungry or thirsty, oh no. Nobody starved. Everybody made love. Albricht was a good Pope.”

The audience let that sink in, discovered it was a funny, and laughed half-heartedly.

“The basement of Birge Hall is a very big place. It held lots of rats. But eventually it began to fill up. There were rats on the conduit. Rats on the fuse boxes. Rats on the pipes. Rats all over the floor. None of them hungry, unless they got hungry for space. For lebensraum. And you know what happened then?”

Another pause for dramatic effect. The audience leaned forward. I thought I saw a tiny shadow, mouse-sized, zip across the spotlight dribbling down the front of the stage. I looked around: the auditorium, like the basement of Birge Hall, was also filling, even though the doors had been closed to admittance at the start of the talk.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Albricht’s rats developed civilization. Yes, a very human-like society, complete with politicians.” Ziggy was in fine voice; politicians bounced off the cathedral ceiling, ricocheted around the auditorium, knocked paint off the mural behind and above his head. Flecks from both the marching zombie proletariats from hell and the sweating bourgeois CEOs fell like snowflakes. The inclined floor quavered beneath my feet. “Three big, mean rats proclaimed themselves king. Each had henchmen who protected the respective thrones, one on the top of a water heater, one on a distilled-water line, the other in a cranny in the wall. All high spots. The men-at-arms attended their masters when they went off for food or ladies. Every so often new, young rats would join the mercenaries, and every so often one of them would battle the king and kill him and take his place.

“Life in the lower echelons was also changing. Gangs of young rats would terrorize older ones, chasing them from their little plot of ground, often killing them. Not for food, mind you. No one was hungry. Rules for making love changed. Female rats no longer went into estrus. But they were hunted down by packs of males and forced to copulate nonetheless. Can we use the word rape here? Or is that too human a term?”

Men of the audience cringed. Ladies licked their teeth: Ziggy the biologist-hunk. “¡Aguas!” Inez shuddered, mortified, slouching farther down in her seat, but I always suspected her of certain Zygidaynus fantasies, too. I started to notice children in the auditorium. They elevated themselves by kneeling in their seats to better see a slide of rats like a lumpy hot carpet on the floor, walls, and fixtures of a dim basement that receded into darkness.

“Mother rats who had litters started to ignore their babies. The little kiddies went malnourished, they weren’t washed properly, they developed sores and grew sickly. Many were killed by the gangs. Many were killed by their own mothers. The moral rules of rat society had broken down, and there was chaos throughout the land, or in this case throughout the basement.” Ziggy searched the stunned audience. Two babies started to cry. A mother three seats down from The Royal We began to nibble on her infant, which was too terrified to make a sound. I turned away as she bit its fingers off, not before noticing that children on either side of her were similarly mutilated and scarred.

Sounds of heavy machinery came through the doors of the auditorium. The floor shivered in waves.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Ziggy boomed, “does any of this seem familiar? Do you think that we don’t need clean air and wide open spaces and the beauty of nature? Do you think we can be good animals if only we are fed enough? But people are already starving. Our cities are teeming rat holes chewing away at our morality, our personal liberties, our ability to be responsible animals. What kind of world are we making for our children? For them, for the future of mankind, we must preserve the world that evolved us, or we will disappear along with that world! ”

I never liked Ziggy’s “children” argument. It seemed to me that on the one hand he preached birth control, and on the other that preserving nature was something we adults did only for our children, which Ziggy suggested we don’t have. My mind strayed to my internal argument, and I started to see retinal lice again in the dim lecture hall. I thought it might have been The Royal We, who had heard all this before and had long since grown jaded by the rat slides. Was she slinking around, about to disappear out the nearest window and end up a taco entree?

She was still politely seated beside me, steadfastly refusing to look toward Ziggy’s ranting—since the morning’s dousing The We no longer acknowledged Ziggy’s presence on the face of the Earth. She quietly basked in the curious stares of nearby attendees. House pets in general were a rare thing here, and most of those were caged songbirds. I squinted around, wondering if someone hadn’t brought their pet cardinal or oriole and let it loose; several of the just-glimpsed motes appeared to silently fly past at head-height. Something rat-sized darted behind the corner of the stage. Several other shadows on the floor seemed to harbor darker shadows moving within. If those are cockroaches, I thought, I’m taking a machete to bed with me tonight. I put my arm protectively around The Royal We—the auditorium was now standing room only, and people lining the near wall angrily coveted her seat. Little creatures continued to appear subliminally to my peripheral vision.