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I would like to formally apologize to the Cannes Film Festival.
Cragganmore had munched on the mail, leaving only a delivery menu from the corner pizzeria in one piece.
Nicholson could see the mouse in the open frame of the semi-attached kitchen, licking a drop of whiskey off the counter. He took a step toward the filthy thing and glowered down at it, baseball bat raised in the air. The mouse paused and offered an obeisance – half wassail and half apology. He couldn’t believe the nerve of the creature! It must have been drunk.
All this nonsense with the mouse had weakened our hero, both psychologically and emotionally, so that when the exterminator arrived, Nicholson found himself opening up to the stranger, almost against his will. He continually referred to the other Jack Nicholson and worried that this lesser more submissive version of the movie star had reduced his legend to a mediocrity he cared not to immortalize.
In response, the exterminator offered a quote from the novel Moby-Dick:
SEAT thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
Jack Nicholson thought this very apt and felt it particularly rung true to our activity in social media sites like facebook.
“Faces lie,” the exterminator explained while picking his nose. “You can think there’s a secret sadness behind someone’s eyes if you like, but it’s probably just gas.” From his medical bag, he took some poison packages labeled MEMITIM in bold caps and tossed them around the apartment. “We go by instinct. Walking, breathing, blinking: that’s what takes up most of our consciousness.” As if reaching some grand conclusion, he waived the pizza delivery flyer in the air. “It’s likely mon petite poupée was trying to tell you something with this. What do you say to calling in a large pie? Just to see what kind of response it stimulates.”
“I don’t think the mouse was trying to tell me anything by leaving the pizza menu untouched. I just mentioned that as an aside.”
“Stop reasoning like a casserole. The worm is in the fruit.” He took great pains to reach down for the lint covered glue traps, muttering various French proverbs: “Retomber comme un soufflé…” and “C’est pas de la tarte, mon amis.” Then he looked me in the eye to conclude, “Si, c’est marche pas… ooo la la, c’est la fin des haricots!” Since I do not speak French, I was unsure if I ought to have assumed a facial expression that encouraged his banter or one that let him know I’d rather he speak to me in English. He responded to my indecisiveness with equal in-betweeness: “You are a bit dans le pâté this morning, no?”
After finding an insect or two on a glue trap, the exterminator began to skip around the apartment, sniffing about for murine odors, pausing each time he found a dead insect in order to swing his hips rhythmically from side-to-side while picking his nose. This dance frustrated Nicholson, and upon the fourth pause for a hip-shake and nose-pick, our hero exploded.
“These glue traps are useless!”
“Well, they’re not eating any bread, dear Jackie!”
“Who isn’t eating any bread?”
“The glue traps! Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” repeated the exterminator, now with his finger up his nose. “It’s a line from one of your moving pictures! The Batman!”
“Is your work finished here?”
“Tell me, how does one dance with the devil? How would such a dance be performed?” “Look, I don’t know…”
“Well, surely you learned the choreography on set! I know how performance actors research.”
“There was never any actual dance with the devil in the pale moonlight.”
“Well, I have a few ideas. Dance with me.”
“What?”
“Indulge me…”
“No.”
The exterminator angrily stuck his finger up his nose. “There are two things in this world that I truly adore. Eating and dancing! You have refused me both of them today. Cursed be thy name. I challenge thee to a duel!”
Nicholson ordered the pizza.
The exterminator tossed a couple of slices of pizza beneath the furniture and into the corners. He and Jack stretched out on the floor to eat the rest of the pie ancient Greco-Roman style.
EXTERMINATOR
You know those little birds? The little, pretty, delicate ones? What are they called?
NICHOLSON
Robins?
EXTERMINATOR
No, not robins. But they do resemble robins. I imagine them having a smaller sounding name.
(pause)
The other day I was eating some bread in the park and there was a big group of them. One or two of them would kind of approach me, but then quickly scatter away in flight. So I set aside a few crumbs on the bench beside me. One little guy hops up on the bench – you know, decides to test things out for a bit. He comes a little closer... And just as he’s about to pick up a crumb with his tiny little beak, the fear becomes too strong to bear and he flies away.
(beat)
But this fear… It’s me too. I mean, I also become afraid. What right do I have to fear such a tiny beautiful bird?
(takes a bite of pizza)
What is this fear? Where did it come from? I so much enjoy their smallness and delicacy. No part of me would want to stronghold it. So, by this logic, the bird has no right to be afraid of me either. And yet, I somehow understand the little birds. There is something in me that must be overcome, handled.
(pause)
Perhaps man once grabbed small bird at random, took a large bite out of it, swallowed the head in one. Maybe some men still do. There is an instinct that I feel is present, and it makes sense that these small birds feel it too. So, the closer they approach, the more I’m a little afraid and the more they’re a little afraid. There is a fear. But make no mistake, I would never dream of hurting the little things. I rather like them.
NICHOLSON
A sparrow? Yes, a sparrow, perhaps.
EXTERMINATOR
Sans doubt. I’m not really sure what the difference is between the two.
After the exterminator left, Jack felt a warm sort of urge to return to Edith’s emails.
--- edith beaumont wrote:
> How ridiculous we must appear to the dinosaurs –
> tiny little things running around to gather their bones for study,
> millions of years after their extinction.
>
> I thought about it while clipping my toenails and examining the nail
> from my big toe, imagining it a good find to something small.
> Something that would understand it differently than you or I.
> Something the size of an ant or a mouse.
> Is it the distance in size or in time that makes all things, all ideas,
> appear fooloish? Or is it just us? And, ultimately,
> what’s the difference?
