—All right. That’s a start. I suppose.
—I saw, I see, I’m looking at a dead mouse.
—Oh shit.
—No, no, I’m not at home. I’m out on the street. In town I mean.
—Oh, OK.
—It’s just lying here, in the gutter.
—Right. Are you sure it’s dead?
—Yes.
—You don’t want to attempt some CPR? Call an ambulance?
—I can’t figure out how it died.
—Old age maybe.
—Do mice die of old age?
—I’m sure some of them must do.
—On the street?
—What, you think they should have a sacred place where they go to die?
—I find the whole thing quite moving.
—Aw. That’s sweet. I think.
—I mean, it looks somehow significant. Or, not significant, that’s not what I mean. It looks somehow terrible, as if, you know, here, in the midst of all this, all this life, there’s this dead thing. This death.
—This mouse.
—Yes.
—Are you still meeting Michael? For lunch?
—Yes. I suppose.
—Life hasn’t suddenly ceased to have any meaning or anything?
—No.
—Where are you going?
—To the place, the café place that he likes, I don’t know what it’s called. You know.
—Well, you’re going to be late.
What I wanted to tell K, what I wanted to say to K then was, I don’t want to leave the mouse. The sentence assembled on my tongue and started forward. I said, I … But it was of course a ridiculous thing to say. To even consider saying. It was mad. And of the alternatives which presented themselves, as don’t began to pass through my lips, I don’t want to leave the house seemed if anything even more suggestive of some kind of half-arsed melodrama. And anyway, I had already left the house. Want came out. I don’t want to leave you now simply made no sense at all. In fact, it suggested meanings and thoughts and even agendas which were simply not in my head. Out tumbled to. I bit down on leave, truncated it by a syllable. I don’t want to lee … and then corrected myself with an impatient little sigh. I don’t want to be, I don’t want to be late. Even that was suspicious. It was a thing I just wouldn’t say. K picked up on it.
—Is it squished?
—What?
—The mouse. Is it squished and horrible?
—No. No, not at all. Well …
I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the poking.
—Not much. Not at all really. It’s very passive, peaceful. It looks unhurt. Its face looks a little, you know, oh, I’m dying now. But there’s no injury. No wounds. That I can see.
—No blunt-force trauma?
—No …
—Have you drawn it?
Funny that it never occurred to me to draw it. That I used the pen to poke rather than draw. That what you would have thought of as my natural instinct had been somehow redirected towards touch.
—Eh, no. No. I don’t have a sketchbook. Or a … I have a sketchbook. I don’t have a pen.
—Well, have you got your camera?
—Yes.
—Then take a photo.
—Why?
—What do you mean, why? You’re transfixed by it. Record it. You might use it for something.
—I’m not transfixed by it.
—Yes you are. You’ve called me up to tell me you’re standing in the street staring at a dead mouse and you’ve gone all metaphysical. Of course you’re transfixed. Now take a photograph of it and go and have lunch with Michael. You’ll be late.
The truth was that I didn’t want to take its photograph. It didn’t seem right. But I couldn’t say that to K, who would have laughed.
—All right.
—All right. Call me again later. Minus dead things ideally. OK?
—Yeah. OK. Sorry.
—I love you.
—I love you too.
I didn’t want to take a photograph. His photograph. Something about the scene was irreducible. To take out my camera and point and click would be an act of censorship. I would be editing out the noise of the traffic, the voices, the shuffle of feet on the pavement, the high rumble of the airplanes, the sound of the world as it is. I would be editing out the spring confusion of a clear fresh day and exhaust fumes; the low lumpen scent of the burger bar at my back; the ineffable musk of the city, never mind of the mouse itself. I would also be editing out my own reaction to this scene, which was, now that I had talked to K, beginning to strike me as immensely strange. I would be editing out the sadness. I would be reduced, I knew it even then, to showing a photograph of a dead mouse to the people I love, in an attempted explanation. For all of this blurred impossible. This life.
To say it even now sounds ridiculous.
But K had told me what to do. Not to do it would mean having to explain not doing it. I couldn’t quite grasp the explanation for taking a picture or the explanation for not taking one. Perhaps they were the same explanation, differently sized. Proportionate. But proportionate to what? To what they explained, or to our capacity for explanations like that? Maybe it’s better to reduce. To short-circuit the direct experience, to minimise memory’s chances of messing things up. If I had a photograph, maybe I would only have a photograph. A picture of a dead mouse. What could be simpler, smaller, more stupid, less significant? Really, it was nothing.
I took out my camera. There was an amount of fumbling. Doing this always makes me feel like a tourist, like a visitor here. It is one of those cheap but clever digital cameras – it looks like a toy. The size of it is supposed to make it compact, discreet, easy, but it seems to me always awkward, unwieldy, and I feel I’m forever on the verge of dropping it. It has a bag that is not really a bag at all, more a jacket, an overcoat, which has to be taken off, the Velcro ripped and then the thing itself slipped out, balancing it in one hand, and the so-called bag in the other, and then the lens cap, which is just badly designed, and
