I was born in Bloomington, Indiana, and while my first three years gave me a few things to be frightened of-- the snakes from Indiana Jones, my mom dancing in an Indonesian devil mask, the big boys at the public swimming pool-- it wasn't until we moved to Madison, Wisconsin, that I really learned how to be scared.    The house was big, the house was old, and, at night, the house was loud.  The floors creaked.  The pipes cracked.  The radiators banged.  In the attic, where my brother and I slept, bats flew in through the patchy screens, screeching and flapping till Moose(our cat) bit off their heads.   Squirrels scraped the shingles.  Birds sung Verdi in the fiberglass walls.  It was as if, lulled into torpor by its previous, gentler tenants-- drug-pushing dentists-- the house awoke to our Hartogian din, and summoned its minions in order to shout us back down.
Each night, before I went to sleep, I clasped my hands together and counted off on my fingers the things that were going to kill me, and how I would neutralize each.  If burglars came snooping, I'd bash them with the barbell beneath my bed.  If, as in Little Shop of Horrors, our house-plants grew surly, I'd zap them with the wires of my reading lamp. And plugging my ears against the moaning laundry, gritting my teeth against the caterwauling cats, I would slowly fall asleep.
But still I'd dream, about rats and sinking islands.
Several times a week, I dreamt about rats.  Rats three times as big as me, with tails like power lines, and teeth like broken beer bottles.  Rats in multitudes, like a field of toothy grass.  White rats.  Brown rats.   Rats on sinking islands.
Sometimes I would be an explorer, charting the volcanic rock, until the boulders grew rodentious mouths and dragged me down to a swirling sea.  Other times, my school had gone there on a field trip.  The buses left without me.  The rats emerged to snuggle with me, courteous while the tide washed us drowning to the silent deep.
When I awoke, my hands still tightly clasped, the cats had left, and the wind had stopped its moaning.  I wondered what there was beneath the sea, in that dark and silent wash.  I had rarely seen rats myself, but at the skating pond near our house, we saw muskrats quick and black beneath the ice, tunneling into their burrows.  Once a year, my brother said, an unlucky zamboni driver would be swallowed up by those tunnels and plunge down into the dark.  What did he see, what did he feel, before he lost consciousness?  Did he feel the whiskers of the muskrats as they nosed past him, unperturbed in their search for fish? (I threw off my top blanket, its woolen fringe now whiskery.) Did he find the same mudmuck on the bottom, as when, in the summers, we dove down to capture turtles and rustle up ducks?  And most of all, what did he hear, in the icy and deep?
I began to sleep less.  My feverishly clasped hands offered no protection from that silent and chilly sea, the inevitable descent into silence and dark. I had learned to live with noises, with screeching and scraping and shouts.  I couldn't bear the thought of silence, of silence even inside my head. "Dead, dying, death,"  I said to myself, a choric ode whose strophe seemed quieter than quiet.  I slept still less.
My mother began to read to me to coax me off to sleep, in marathons of incantation, in unabridged exposition of  The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis and the Rats of Nimh. But eventually her voice would grow hoarse and her eyes red, and I would be left to think about rats.
And then my brother bought a radio.  When I was a baby, and would wake screaming from dreams of Indonesian devil-masks, my brother would take me downstairs to watch re-runs of the Lone Ranger.  Now Tonto was joined by the Shadow and Charlie Chan, and by weather reports and news reports and sports.  Words in endless streams rained upon me, drowning out the screaching radiators and the caterwauling cats, tugging me down to sleep.  And now in dreams, the rats would speak, about the coming snow-fall or the Brewers' pitching or the tastiness of Lemon Tea Snapple.  And the school bus came back, to sell me new car insurance.  It was driven by the guy from the zamboni.

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