The Year of the Rat
A Thong, a Slavish Throng and a Prophet Plain Wrong
By Genevieve Jacobs
L’an du Rat. I will always remember this as the day I was sanding the deck on our little boat in the harbor just under the airstrip in Tahiti.
And aboard the boat anchored next to us, the playboy model American girl came up on deck with her walkman hooked to her string undies. I think we call them thongs, now. Things. Thongs.
She danced on deck while brushing her teeth. I saw the sun gloss her hair. She heard private music, something I’d never heard: my music has always been shared, or inflicted on others. Because, technology.
Other than that…the deep internal music that is private for me only in my own mind which no earplug or wire can ever ever ever unlock. The music that keeps me sailing all these thousands of sea miles.
My hands turn golden under the dust of the egg-yolk yellow paint I am sanding, making non-skid patches on our white deck. She dances, like a chicken chick herself, laying eggs of jealousy and wonderment. White teeth. American teeth. Recognizable the world over.
I call over, “Hey! Bonjour! Want some coffee? What you doing here?!”
Meaning, this bay is a backwater, not used to harboring glamour pusses like herself…
She detaches an earphone and pulls the toothbrush out of her mouth to say:
“What are YOU doing here?”
Touche.
So I row over to give her a lift to a cup of cafe au lait, which might ruin her perfect teeth.
She hops aboard my little rubber dinghy and lifts her chin, gesturing towards the rafted boats across the way. She says, “I’m with the cult. We are waiting for the end of the world. The extraterrestrials will come, and we will be ready.”
I keep rowing.
“Ok, so. What about those of us who are not ready?”
“You will perish horrible deaths…floods, fires, lava, conflagration!”
I keep rowing. This sounds strangely all too familiar. My parents had a bout with evangelical Christian stuff about a decade earlier. Which stimulated me to remove myself from their world altogether. I guess they call that being a teen runaway.
I keep rowing and I say “Would you wish that on me? And us? Really?”
She says: “This is the Year of the Rat. Survivors? ‘We cannot shed tears for the others’, my master says.”
“Your—Master?!” I feel suddenly sick in the pit of my stomach, down in the bilge where the greasy things are spurning her words.
“Yes! I want you to meet Him. He is so wow. So gorgeous and so…WOW!”
I smile a lame smile and keep rowing. We hop aboard and I make the cafe au lait and she says
“You know, this is the Year of the Rat. This is the year it will happen.”
I take her back to her boat, as it turns out, part of the flotilla that is the belonging of the Master Guru Ji, the guy with the medallions on his chest.
For a moment or two I doubt myself and wonder…perhaps she is right, he is right, it’s all coming down, now.
After she’s gone below I go back to my work on the boat that has taken us safely so far across the Pacific Ocean. I finish taping the outlines of the yellow egg-yolk golden nonskid, and I am satisfied.
As I drift off to sleep in the cockpit under the Southern Cross, I hear a scrabbling noise by the rudder. I look into the deep of night but can see nothing only the splashing of some creature, not a fish kind, by the rudder and pintles and gudgeons.
I take a flashlight that still has a battery…I shine it into the darkness.
I see the eyes reflecting back to me. Of a rat.
A rat who has swum out here from shore, hoping for refuge.
“Any port in a storm,” as the saying goes.
Many Thanks to Genevieve Jacobs for letting us reproduce her writing. You can read more of it on her substack page HERE