On no sleep, work that morning was an ongoing hell. I had to sneak out to my car at lunch and catch a nap, but I woke up three hours later not in the least refreshed: it wasn’t a nap, it was a damn coma. The boss called me in: “Yeah yeah, ying ying, ya ya, where in the hell have you been?” Put the fear of God in me. I stayed late working on the annual report, which made no sense to me anymore. I was just sitting there, “pretending,” which is a lot harder than actually working. You could chop logs all day, stack thirty cords of wood, and not get as tired. When the boss bagged out, I waited five minutes and then left. My back was killing me. The hump veers toward my left shoulder. It was all hot and knotted up like an angry fist. Just complete agony.

I stopped at the supermarket for some Advil and asked a stocker where the mousetraps were. Evidently, there’d been a run on rodent traps. “Cold weather,” he said.

I said, “You haven’t been selling rat traps?”

“Rat traps, yeah, sold a few,” he said, pointing them out. They were huge rectangular slabs of pinewood with monstrous springs and rectangular clap bars made of heavy-gauge metal. Big enough to snag a Shetland pony.

“Whoa, man!” I said. “I hope I don’t need one of those.”

“Where do you live?” he asked me, and I told him the neighborhood and he said no doubt my problem was mice. Rats don’t frequent upscale places, he said. They go for the shitholes where people leave garbage around. He couldn’t guarantee it but he was ninety percent sure. Then he left me alone in the aisle to inspect the merchandise. I chided myself for being melodramatic. No rats, just some mice. And others were having the same problem. I was reassured. I was fortunate to be able to get any traps at all. There were only five left and I bought all five.

I thought of using poison, going for complete and certain eradication, but I wanted to see the corpses. Your mouse poisoner is like a bomber pilot flying miles above a war zone—the bloodless battle. That’s cool, but sometimes you hear of poisoned mice dying in parts of the house that are inaccessible to the homeowner and giving off a horrible smell. People start yanking off drywall panels to get to the smelly things, knocking down chimneys, tearing up the foundation.