Atomic Nerds

Now that we seem to be picking up some popularity (thanks for the add, Matt!), I should probably think to making an effort at posting more than just the occasional paint-peeler aimed at whatever pack of idiots happen to be pissing me off on a given day. Since the annual August hippy-migration is over, such as it was this year, and they’ve gone back to doing whatever it is they do instead of working and bathing, I figured some of y’all might get a kick out of this True Tale of Drama (TM).

Due to some timing issues, I wound up doing my first year of college with the associated “Are you literate?” and “Can you do simple arithmetic?” classes at the local branch campus whilst living at home. Because of this, when I transferred down to the school’s main campus for sophomore year and on, this somehow managed to get me classified as a freshman for housing purposes. I was promptly chucked into the party dorm, filled with the earnest glow of fresh young faces eager to learn. Specifically, they were interested in learning how much beer you could get for under $5, how hung-over you could be and still pass, and how much noise you could make after 1 AM without attracting the police. The guy down the hall had a rather impressive marijuana plant in his room, and a bit further down the hall I later found out there’d been a bust for a meth lab while I was studying for an exam. The fact that I landed a single room that year instead of one shared with a room mate is quite possibly the only reason I survived without a visit to the Graybar Hotel, but that’s a different story for another day, involving capacitors, electrical outlets, and the phrase “OH MY GOD HE’S TRYING TO KILL US!”

I digress.

While residing in this exquisitely maintained cinder block and linoleum residence facility, I had loaded my schedule to the gills, mostly with classes designed to weed out the types I occasionally deigned to refer to as my neighbors. Between the ongoing noise and equally ongoing late nights of work, sleep was not the easiest thing to come by. Eventually though, I settled into a more-or-less routine to keep my head above water, and hopefully (through the assistance of LabRat, despite her being a few states away) sane. Thus when I awoke one morning to find my chest covered in rather angry and somewhat bloody wounds, I was a trifle perplexed. I knew damn well I hadn’t been out partying, let alone brought home some wild and flailing sorority skank. My first thought was that maybe I’d fallen out of bed and hit an exposed wire on the asylum-grade frame on the way down, but a check of the edges of the bed ruled that out. Since my room was next to the garbage room, I figured I had probably just attracted the attention of some long-clawed and curious rodent, scrubbed and disinfected the wounds thoroughly, and resolved to pick up some mouse and rat traps from Wally World. LabRat, while also unsettled, agreed this was the most likely cause.

Traps were set at the most likely points, homework double checked, and I began the nightly battle for sleep. The next morning, the traps were un-sprung, and I had no fresh wounds. I figured the problem was more or less taken care of, and went on about my business of ulcer development. The next night, however, things got weird. I’d gotten in the habit of sleeping with my closet door open, since I could use it to brace my front door. The doors were nice solid-core affairs, and I didn’t really expect anybody would be able to crash through the locked front door without waking me up, but given the other inmates, I tended to err on the side of caution. Anyway, in the middle of the night after some drunken buffoon came crashing through the halls on the nightly stagger home, I woke up and saw a small pair of glowing red eyes in my closet, significantly above ground level. After some brief flailing calisthenics and a few laps around the room at about shoulder height, I rubbed my eyes and looked again. The eyes were gone. Chalking it up to a bad dream and the usual stress, I slogged my way back to sleep, trying to ignore some rather odd high-pitched noises, which I convinced myself were just odd squeaks from the probable rodent culprits.

The next morning I woke up with fresh wounds, including a rather ugly looking cut on my big toe, which had been exposed from under the blanket most of the night courtesy of unseasonably hot weather. More disinfectant, bandaging, and a day in which I failed spectacularly to pay attention during lectures followed. The problem was detailed to the few folks I liked enough locally to talk to, as well as LabRat and choice other online acquaintances. The rat theory was still the leading contender, but it was jokingly proposed that my room could be haunted as well, and I was offending the spirit of some deceased partier with my excessive studying, or possibly vampires. Ha ha guys, very funny. Searching more seriously for a way to identify the cause, it was decided that I should scatter some salt around my bed before turning in, in order to show the tracks of whatever was doing this. We decided on salt for several reasons. First, sugar or flour or coffee grounds would probably attract more rodent attention rather than simply expose whatever was there already. Secondly, I damn well wasn’t going to waste precious coffee just over a couple of weird cuts. Thirdly, if it was a vampire, those guys would have to stop and count each grain, giving me time to deploy my patented anti-vampire measures. In the interests of scientific completeness, I hung a few anti-evil wards, charms, trinkets, etc. Science leaves no option unexplored, after all.

The next night was cool enough that my legs stayed under covers all night, and I was tired enough from the combined stress of “What the hell is carving me up?” and an exam on C++ pointers that I managed to just drop right off. The next morning found another fresh crop of blood-stained sheets, this time somewhat messier than normal. Profanity and disinfecting followed. The salt around my bed was utterly undisturbed. At this point, I began to grow alarmed, and my closet was taking on an unfamiliar and unpleasant aroma which I assure the reader was not the result of the aforementioned late-night calisthenics.

Heads were scratched, chins stroked thoughtfully, and companions edged cautiously away from me, as clearly a psychotic break with reality was in progress. Better to get some distance in which to take notes and get a head start should I snap in the middle of breakfast. I was not in a pleasant frame of mind. Fortunately, this aligned with my academically light day of the week, involving a fund extorting academic well-roundedness class in introduction to biology. While I normally considered this class nothing more than a chance to catch up on whatever hellacious problem set I had been assigned in my calculus class (the normal pattern had a very frustrated professor arguing with some, ahem, vocal Christians regarding evolution despite the other hundred or so students in the hall contemplating refunds for wasted time – we were so naive), today the professor managed to keep hold of the reins and steer our pliable minds to matters of actual merit. The subject of the day was bats. Bells went off, fireworks fired, and a heavenly choir descended with a banner proclaiming “Eureka!” I floated the theory past those who were still edging cautiously away from me, and the general consensus was that the theory was Good.

That night I removed the screen from my window, carefully avoiding the broken glass I had scattered to keep boisterous academics from jumping up and grabbing the windowsill to slap the pane on their way in late at night, opened the window and curtains as wide as possible, killed the lights, and climbed into bed to See What Happened. After a time period roughly the same length as the Cretaceous, the high pitched squeaking began, along with a rustle from the closet. Moments later, amidst some leathery flapping, my winged adversary flapped happily through the open window, never to be seen again.

The next day during office hours I stopped by with a few follow up questions concerning the flapping vermin for my bio professor. She conceded, very grudgingly, that Albuquerque was in fact at the extreme northern range of the infamous Vampire Bat. Understandably dubious, she offered the theory that it was simply a very disoriented and much more common Mexican Free-tailed bat, as common in town as pigeons, that had landed on me and scratched me up in an attempt to exit the room. Comparing what I saw flap out the window to various stuffed specimens, however, the size much more closely approximated the toe-slashing bloodsucker model. I still think she figured I’d simply had too much to drink and had a tangle with some broken glass (several nights running?).

In the aftermath, I discovered a opening in the top of my closet just large enough to accommodate the critter, and just out of sight enough to escape casual detection. The guano aroma quickly abated, and no more strange wounds showed up, much to the delight of both myself and my laundry budget.

Unfortunately, the tale does not end so easily. After a day or two with no new injuries, it dawned on both LabRat and I roughly simultaneously that hey, aren’t bats notorious for carrying rabies?

Shit.

If you have never had the experience of convincing a university infirmary Quack-In-A-Box that you have been exposed to rabies via a bat in your dorm room, I suggest you take up a simpler task; working on Fermat’s last theorem comes to mind. Eventually through a combination of presenting the wounds, explaining the series of events (several dozen times to a large assortment of nurses, the doctor on duty, and a couple people I’m sure were just sent in to hear the wild tale of the night), and general tenacity, the state CDC was contacted. I am pleased to report that rabies shots are no longer the nightmarish series of abdominal injections from the days of Ol’ Yeller, however I am less enthused to report that obtaining the drugs in modern times involves sending the patient to a downtown Albuquerque Greyhound station at 9pm on a Friday night to pick up the couriered package from the CDC office in Santa Fe. Additionally, I find it unlikely that I will forget either the vivid hot-pink hue the stuff takes on when mixed for follow-up injections, or the roughly gallon-sized bolus to the buttocks required for initial treatment.

Having a nurse exclaim “Oh, you’re the rabies guy!” gets old after the first time too.

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