I met my first rat in São Paulo, Brazil, not in the sticky summer when you wait for your turn to feel the oscillating fan for a few seconds, but in the cold, sticky winter. Winter in São Paulo (starting in June and humidly freezing its way through August) is the time when you mix flour with rubbing alcohol in a small cereal bowl to burn all night, because central heating in Brazil is more ridiculous than Gonçalvo Braga da Silva's jokes that gently skirt humor without bedding it down. "Why did the Hulk's girlfriend dump him? (Pause for comedic timing.) Because she wanted a more experienced man; he was too green." . . . But the rat.
     He was having a leisurely time in the kitchen late at night, as was his custom, until the guys and I tried to flush him out from behind the butane stove tank with broom handles and other weapons that made us feel safe, as though we were the ones in danger. He made a desperate bid for freedom past our tree-trunk legs (we jumped, I admit, fearful of bubonic plague and teeth honed from a lifetime of gnawing) and jumped, flipped, and hopped his way up the stairs, too cool to die, the James Dean of rodents.
     Whump and clang, and "There he is!" and "I got 'im!" and "Let him pull his tail out from under the lid," and "No way, moron!" and a few hours later we whumped him under an overturned wastebasket, the best we could do for a makeshift cage on such short notice. We tested his mettle by poking at him with chopsticks from leftover Chinese takeout. He fought back and bared his fangs, fiercer than any caged lion. He was about a foot long, not counting the tail. I know this from a picture someone took (seriously Gonçalvo, a camera at a time like this?) of a shoe hitting the wall just above him as he scurried toward some distant hope of leaving our apartment alive. He was bigger than my size 10. (Gonçalvo, you're killing me. Why'd you have to throw my shoe, man?)
     None of us were brave enough to risk losing a finger by picking him up, so we slid a book underneath the wastebasket and carried him, cage and all, to the outdoor sink where we washed our clothes. "Get a book," and "That one's not big enough," and "But this one has a picture of Jesus on it."
     He must have known what would happen next, there in the sink with the wastebasket still secured on top of him. I wondered for a second what it would be like to know that death is coming, rising, pouring to the very top, one small air bubble trapped inside the wastebasket. I would have been in a state of utter panic. As if he hadn't already deprived me of 5 hours of sleep, he added insult to injury by calmly and regally swimming to the air bubble and breathing what he could from it. In a daze, I took a knife and perforated the basket to allow his last breath to bubble up and escape him. Nobody gave him a last meal or said a prayer for him, so I thought it the least I could to not look away as he twitched and convulsed his last seconds of life. While we buried him under the pimenta plant in the back yard, the sun rising in approval of our dusk-'til-dawn conquest, I wished that I could cling to life with such dignified tenacity.