LATEST NEWS: I’ve had everything a man could ask for, but I don’t know if anyone could say I’m successful with affairs of the heart. I don’t know why. I would love that one last real romance. But I’m not very realistic about it happening. What I can’t deny is my yearning.
Letters: I’d like to apologize to my father. My mother. My grandmother.
INT. EXTERMINATOR’S APARTMENT – DAY
Bookshelves lined with volumes upon volumes of encyclopedias resembling the large book the exterminator had brought upon his first visit to Nicholson’s New York apartment, and in which he had marked down Cragganmore’s name. They are organized by year, dating back to Ancient Egypt.
EXTERMINATOR
I’m something of a plumitif mal connu.
Finding a shelf indexed Plague Collection (Vol. 1-10), Jack Nicholson opens a book filled with strands of hardened mucous carefully placed over individual names.
JACK NICHOLSON
There were mice in Ancient Egypt?
EXTERMINATOR
Cockroaches, scarabs, and many frogs…
The scene shifts to Jack Nicholson’s New York City apartment with our hero on his deathbed.
The exterminator is seated and staring at Nicholson’s face. The bespectacled cecum reaches into the black hoodie adorning his head, and he slowly peels off his face – like that fat lady in the scene from the original Total Recall – to reveal his naked skull. And, as if he had peered into the depths of Nicholson’s dream while our hero slept, the exterminator says: “To produce a mighty script, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the mouse, though many there be that have tried it.”
But this too is a dream. I know it is a dream. I suspected it before, but I know it now for sure.
INTERIOR. JACK NICHOLSON’S STUDIO APARTMENT - MORNING
There is a crumple in the bedspread where Edith once slept – once, as in for one night. Our hero sits on a piece of bed still warm from the night’s sleep and spills the remainder of scotch on the floor in memory of Cragganmore.
After they had a falling out and Jack Nicholson had berated Cragganmore for being a bad roommate and not taking out the trash often enough, the mouse grew accustomed to sneaking in and out of the apartment from corner to corner and by night, so as not to be seen. The more Crag skulked about the place, the more Jack became suspicious. His toothbrush began to taste like toilet mornings; his sleep seemed to be disturbed at the pivotal moment each night; and the food in his fridge was increasingly tainted with germ and disease. Nicholson had decided that if the mouse could not stand to be around him in his own home, if Cragganmore would not pass the remainder of days beside him with love and care, she would have to go. After all, he had only put up the notice seeking a roommate in a naive hope of a romantic meet-cute. If Cragganmore was unable to serve this purpose, the mouse would have to go. He certainly didn’t need anyone to share the meager rent of his tiny studio apartment. Jack Nicholson had millions of dollars. He was a Hollywood star.
Beginning to masturbate to visions of Edith dressed in a mouse costume, he suddenly stops upon noticing her sitting on his toilet. Her face has been replaced by Cragganmore’s. Continuing to play with himself, he is mystified by this human woman quizzically turning her mouse-face to the side. David Lynch. Stanley Kubrick. “Oh my God, I think I just shit my pants…” says she in a mousy New York kind of way.
Perhaps Cragganmore was a woman, pregnant. From an entire family of mice living within the confines of my walls. A happy family. He raised the bottle to the new arrival, baptized the little guy Tiny Talisker, and tenderly kicked the old cage.
The clank of a trashcan and a wretched stench – heavy in the crisp morning dew. Ironside. “You are an abrasion below my knee,” he thought. “I tried not to notice you for too long and you are now an infection I’d like to get rid of; but I fear that I’d have to lose my entire leg in the process.”
