I've received a lot of mail about The Rat. Lots of suggestions and funny comments, most of which would fit very well into the story arc of a sitcom. The trouble is, I didn't create him, he's not fictional, and he's definitely dug in deep. If he was a figment of my imagination, I could work it out so he ran over, apologized, and took a powerwasher to his mess. Or I could have him simply move away and leave the area to a Hazardous Materials Team. Sadly, he's real.
I've been thinking about the origins of The Rat. One has to wonder how a living space gets to that point. Dennis Leary wondered the same thing about the 1200 lb man - when he hit, oh…say, 800 lbs, didn't there come a time when he thought, "Maybe I should PUT THE FORK DOWN" ? I've been thinking lately that maybe The Rat is broken - he just doesn't have that little voice that tells us to draw the line - or maybe he has too many other voices drowning out that little one.
If you or I spill something on the floor, we get that panicked run to grab something and sop it up - maybe he doesn't? Maybe he just leaves it there. Maybe that switch is burnt out in him.
When we let the dishes go for an afternoon or until the next morning, there's a moment when we think that it would be so much easier just to leave them there - maybe they'll evaporate or be stolen. Maybe he gave in to that feeling around 1992.
There is an inordinate amount of unsolicited print advertising here - you want to know where all the pretty trees are going? They're headed over here to make glossy fliers telling us about new high-rise apartment buildings and great deals on call girls. I throw out a ton of this stuff every single day, and if I didn't it would create a drift of dirty paper at my doorway about four feet high. It's important to me that I don't have such a stockpile, but perhaps he cares less about things like that?
It occurs to me that he just doesn't know any better. In trying to picture his childhood, I have considered that he's a chronic Mama's boy, and never learned to take out the garbage or clean the toilet because his mother always did it. The cause and effect "Inactivity-Stench" paradigm just doesn't compute, because he was never part of that system before. I have to wonder if he comes home and asks the room "WHAT is that reek??", and then shrugs and wades through his swamp to ignore it for another night.
Maybe he likes it. Maybe the thick fog of putrescence is his natural environment, and he feels comfortable in it. Maybe he spends weekends writing long tirades to his friends about the weird foreigner across the hall, forever going in and out, sometimes carrying suspicious blue bags filled with precious coffee grinds and eggshells. Maybe he's sickened by the constant aroma of detergent and fresh air. Maybe he scrambles to the peephole when he hears my door, trying to catch a glimpse inside, to the bare floors and folded laundry….
….But probably not.
Maybe he's a lazy, filthy jerk. Maybe he's a dangerous lunatic who lives like a transient, and he's just waiting for the very moment someone says something about his place, to unleash a prolonged campaign of weirdness on his neighbours. Maybe he's an evil genius, bent on the domination of the 14th floor. There's just no way for me to be sure.
I tried to understand his position, and came up with the preceding points. The problem is, he's not living in a shanty in the mountains somewhere - he sees others taking out garbage, mopping floors, and cleaning things in general. He must have seen pictures of what a typical home looks like, and he must know that his own varies wildly from that. As I said in the original rant, he dresses normally and is presentable for work, so he's proven that he understands some societal norms. There's no way he hasn't noticed that other doors don't look like they're smeared with fudge. He's living in a huge building with thousands of people, and he's not pulling his weight. We should vote him off the island.
As for 'what I've done' about this. Nothing. The weather cooled off recently, so he keeps his door closed most nights, and the cooler air doesn't transmit his microbes as well as hot and humid air. It's become bearable again, and it's not the emergency it was a month ago. Sure, I know he's in there, incubating new armies of stinkbots to invade in Spring, but that's months away. Ok, I admit that I came home pretty drunk one night and shouted into his open door for a few minutes, and the fliers seemed to disappear the next day. Might be a coincidence, might be that he responds well to verbal abuse.
Thank you very much for all your comments and suggestions. I'll spend these months of respite from the offensiveness, studying Japanese and sorting out the best plan for confronting the problem, in time for the Rainy Season next year.