It doesn’t rain much and the wind hardly ever picks up beyond a lazy breeze. And nobody swims in January so the surface of the apartment-complex pool gets just about zero stimulation for a long time. The exceptions are slight: a leaf or a tiny bug may alight by random chance, not even breaking the surface tension; a soccer ball, launched by a miraculous kick, the highlight of a down-the-street little boy’s life, once made a splash then bobbed then floated on the restored equilibrium. Otherwise, nothing.
The inner guts of the poolwater churn, eddies and vortices stimulated by the scheduled filter, incomputable and invisible, but that energy never affects the surface. The overly-cautious dose of chlorine makes life impossible in the pool so no being will ever perceive the churn of the guts. Like so many processes across the cosmos, it unfolds as would be described by geometrical differential equations but no description ever materializes; no describer ever materializes. What a waste!
God is nothing if not wasteful, thinks Luisa, flipping open the dumpster past the pool area and mashing her trashbag into the engorged pile so that the door closes all the way and the stench doesn’t leak out. She doesn’t know how many people live in the complex but she measures them by their trash output. It’s huge, endless. She has never swum in the pool but she has appraised it at least twice a week for five years, every time she takes out her trash. The pool never offers anything in return. All its random inner turmoil stays under the flat surface. Something would have to puncture the membrane.
Today’s the day. Luisa blurts a guttural “oh!” and shivers with surprise a quarter-second after her eyes catch a mouse floating dead, face-down, limbs suspended, a rotting blemish on the surface of the otherwise formless pool. The shock aborts her walk back from the dumpster. She cannot bear to get closer nor farther away. The mouse is so cute— it would be so cute alive, she thinks. Can a dead thing be cute? And how can such a cute thing die?
Nobody else is around. Luisa blocks the midday sun with her hand and squats. Her eyes readjust. The mouse’s slick fur frays out at its edges, terminating in hypnotic wisps. The insubstantial knuckles of its little paws neither strain nor flop; they are perfectly relaxed. Its tail traces out a loping sigmoid, oscillating slowly, without purpose. She can’t see any blood or any broken bones. This little guy just drowned. He must have leaned in for a drink and slipped in, she imagines. He must have struggled then stopped struggling when he died. This mouse is some kind of aquatic, inverse Icarus. But mice have no myths. His story ends with a funeral for one.
For a fleeting moment, Luisa is once again a little girl who loves animals more than anything. She feels phantom braces on her teeth and remembers the feeling of pigtails pulling her scalp. “I have to do something” rots instantaneously into “something has to be done,” her aloof adulthood choking out the flare-up of enthusiasm. Without standing from her squat, she hinges around her left foot and scuttles to the pool’s edge, hoping that one final closer look will reveal what to do.
“Uhh,” she bleats involuntarily.
“Sorry, little dude.” On whose behalf she is apologizing she does not know.
I’m not going to bury you. In no universe is her uncovered hand going to make contact with the chlorine-soaked mouse corpse. Leaves and bugs have a way of getting filtered by the, uh, filter, she reckons, but this animal seems too big, too significant, to fit under the “margin of error.” It is a non-negligible death in the pool. “Someone has to do something” also sags into “something has to be done.” Luisa looks over her shoulder to the fringe between the cement walking area and the fence from which a row of mediocre trees sprout. None of the fallen leaves look robust enough to fashion into some grasping implement. It is not worth the risk of being spotted clutching a mouse-and-leaf taco in a public area. She looks the other direction. A net is propped up next to a door with no handle. Am I allowed to use that net? She imagines fishing out the mouse and flinging it into the dirt. I don’t want to contaminate the net. She looks back at the mouse and decides on inaction.
Luisa calculates that the mouse’s small departed soul deserves a small moment of silence, not a full weeping eulogy or a flag flown at half-mast. It has to be really silent, though; in a way, her whole life has been silent since she moved to the complex — silent but noisy. This innocent mouse deserves silence without noise. She shifts, settling in, balanced equally on both heels. She resets her hand-shade and focused on the creature. The pump belches on the other side of the pool, releasing a bulbous wave that slinks towards the poor mouse. Kinetic energy bumps the mouse’s body up then back down. The wave, half-dissipated, ricochets off the pool’s wall and jiggles the mouse once more on the way back. Luisa does not react; she perceives the motion induced in the mouse and for the first time feels a tingle of the immense complexity of the system of chemical fluids contained in the pool’s unfeeling cement.
The mouse is dead, she thinks, but it still has a mechanical essence. It can move in certain ways and not others, but it can no longer move on its own. It’s the little liquid fluctuations that interact with its joints and its weight. As far as the mouse is concerned — well I guess the mouse is not concerned anymore — as far as the mouse is concerned, its own body is animated by an indescribable mystery from way down below.
Luisa tries to look at the water through the water. She looks for motion, trying to trace a path from something happening in the liquid to a direct consequence that nudges the mouse. This is not possible. And yet she feels it. The pool holds a ton of energy. But nothing can organize that energy and unmire it from its entropic whirl. The dead mouse could not overcome it nor extract mercy from it before it died. The pool can’t charge Luisa’s phone nor can it even reveal anything about itself when she gazes into it. It’s all just random. It can’t bring the mouse back to life even as it cruelly simulates elements of that life. The pool serves up, without any consciousness, pre-killed prey to the first predator who’ll take it. Does the chlorine make it unpalatable to a hawk? Luisa imagines that a noble predator would prefer to do its own killing and moreover to feast on unchlorinated mouse. This leads her to conclude that this death is meaningless, ripped out of the circle of life. It’s just a body, unfulfilled, subject to random forces it cannot control let alone understand, floating, equivalent dead or alive, maybe perceived, maybe not.
The moment she gave the little soul expires. The mouse yaws a few degrees anticlockwise but does not roll. Luisa takes a last look then hoists herself up, pressing her hands into her knees, waiting for the dizziness to pass before she heads back inside. A fear bubbles up, that she is not so different from that mouse, but before it can breach the surface, she pushes it away by reaching for her phone.