By Matthew

Did I mention that I hate Arthur Dent?

I’m not sure if I have made that abundantly clear. I despise him so much that I wish my hatred of Arthur Dent could be fabricated into some sort of monument. If I only had such power. If only someone else in this great wide (or maybe tiny) Universe agreed with me and that this wasn’t part of a long drawn out gag percolating with Petunia-scented foreshadowing.

Let me be Frank, even though my real name is Matthew: I’m more than certain Arthur Dent killed my first cat when I was a child. She was a Calico. Her name was Einstein. She was followed by Einstein II, a male gray and white kitten. My babysitter told me that Einstein II ran up to her boyfriend and bit him on the hand. Then, inexplicably and mysteriously, right after that, Einstein II fell over dead. I never did see Einstein II’s body. They explained they had to get rid of it because “he had worms or something.” Several months later I found her heroin needles hidden inside a teddy bear.

There was an Einstein III that was white and gray, though I can’t remember its gender. It was an extremely short-lived relationship. We let it outside one day and never heard from it again.

At that point, we stopped naming our cats Einstein. We boycotted cats altogether.

But habit is stubborn’s dumber and more feeble-minded brother.

During my freshman year in high school, I purchased a gray and white mouse that I named Einstein. He was part of a set of four mice my brother and I had bought at a pet store. Just a handful of hours after bringing Einstein home, I was cleaning his and his roommates’ cage when the metal-barred lid slipped out of my wet hands and fell with a heavy, sickening thud upon Einstein.

He died. As did another mouse Whose Name I Can’t Remember.

It was all quite disturbing. Full of squeaks, tiny broken spines and gasping last breaths.

When I purchased the mice I had been assured that Einstein and his friends had been male mice. The clerk had lifted up their tails at the counter to check, nodded his head and said, “Yup.” This belief and trust culminated in some confusion when I found one of the surviving mice of the cage-dropping tragedy –- a dark brown mouse named Rasputin — viciously and furiously humping another mouse I had named Newton.

Rasputin would hump and hump Newton non-stop. Newton would squeak in protest. They would squeak together. I didn’t know what to do. I thought that they might be “prison gay.” I thought maybe they were trying to console each other after witnessing their cage mates be crushed in front of them. Then Newton got pregnant and had Rasputin’s babies. I slowly realized Newton had obviously not been a boy. But, after the tragedy of Einstein and Whose Name I Can’t Remember, I happily welcomed Rasputin and Newton’s love children and named them Napoleon and Galileo and Caesar and Pascal and so forth and so on along those lines.

Unfortunately, not all those offspring were boys.

The results were mortifying.

Sometimes Rasputin would be humping Newton. Sometimes Galileo would be humping Newton. Sometimes Rasputin would hump Pascal. Sometimes Galileo would hump Pascal. Most of the time Caesar just seemed content to watch.

Newton and Pascal had litters. Those litters all humped each other and humped their parents (who themselves were humping each other) and produced more litters. And those litters humped each other, their parents and grandparents (who were all humping one another) and produced even more litters.

The numbers quickly grew to staggering and then sickening.

I was ultimately forced to cull the herd; to find humane and painless ways to disposes of new born litters. It was a horrific task for a young boy that liked to draw comic books and play BattleTech and TMNT and devising an ultimate role-playing game that combined the two. But by then it was already too late. Newton and Rasputin had been the Adam and Eve to planets of nympho mice. Eventually, an apex mouse — an intelligent, wily and mean dark black Nameless mouse — was produced and escaped from its cage to terrorize our house. I was happy and mightily relieved when the refrigerator was finally able to brutally kill Nameless and end that nightmare. Unfortunately, the refrigerator had also been mortally wounded in the conflict and had to be put down.

Let me also admit that I can’t imagine the horror left in the wake by the buckets of Rasputin and Newton’s long lines of offspring that we eventually released into our courtyard when we finally said good-bye to that Wellington, Florida suburb. I know a neighbor’s cat went on a maniacal mousing spree; killing dozens in the first few moments. But that poor cat –- whose name I never knew; it could have been Einstein; it could have been Schrodinger –- was simply out numbered.

Property values in the state promptly plummeted as mice populations surged to epidemic proportions.

Imagine so many descendents from a jettisoned population, like that of Ship B from Golgafrincham. The unwanted and despised discarded on an unsuspecting landscape to trudge on stupidly, surviving at first by sheer numbers. Then having the lucky, crafty and hearty continuing on to reproduce and reproduce and reproduce.

I also can’t help but recognize the irony when many years later, following the rebuilding after Hurricane Charlie, my Dad’s restaurant (not at the end of the Universe but in a small town called Arcadia) was overrun by massive, ash-colored rats. They peeked out in crowded groups of triangle faces from under the hood of the Salamander. They scratched inside the walls and more than nibbled upon the bread and produce. They were in the pantry and the walk-in. They lounged in cast iron skillets and in the pots and pans.

We were forced to kill them all.

As is often the case when two worlds collide.

Marvin’s death always fills me with a void (that was a purposeful contradiction).

If only Arthur Dent would die, like so many pets named Einstein. Like so many mice and rats trying to eke out a living underneath the warm, Florida sunshine.