At the end of July, a bat somehow got trapped in our apartment. This scared us. A lot. Last night, we found another bat in the apartment. Aside from giving us undue stress and panic, its now just damn annoying. What follows are the accounts of both bat stories:
About a week and a half ago a little visitor invited itself to spend an evening in our apartment. No, it wasn't a baby or the Tooth Fairy or a mouse or a waterbug or even a cockroach. It was far, far worse than any of those.
It was a bat. Furry, with leathery wings. In our apartment. Flying.
We were eating dinner in the living room in front of the TV, as usual. We had gotten about halfway through our chicken stirfry when something cast a shadow over the couch. I instinctively winced while Avery shouted "Oh my god it's a bat! There's a bat in here!" Before you could even blink, we had run into the bedroom and slammed the door shut. Both of us were panicking at this point: what the hell were we supposed to do now? Since Avery's mom had had a bat accidentally fly into her apartment the week before, we decided to call her for advice. Seems that we were supposed to open a window, which would require one of us to leave the room, rip the window fan out of the window, throw open the window and remove the screen. There were no volunteers. Plan B?
Plan B was to call my mother, who told us to call the landlord. Ah ha! Reinforcements. Very wise. The landlord and his wife were here in 10 minutes, armed with a basket and a rake. Problem was, we had scared the damn thing away with all of our screaming and door slamming. The bat was nowhere to be found. Avery helped them search for 30 minutes, to no avail. I stayed in the bedroom, communicating through a crack in the door. The landlord's wife told me that I "had to get over my fear." Ha! Can't we start with talking about my fear? Do we really have to skip ahead to the direct confrontation part? Guess so.
Since no one could find it, we nervously assumed that it must have gone out the way it came in (however that was) and the landlord went home. We watched TV until 11:00 PM and, thinking all was safe ("It definitely would have been flying around if it was still in here..."), I went to do the dishes. 5 minutes later, I happened to glance to the right just in time to see the bat come flying around the corner and into the kitchen RIGHT AT MY FACE! Goddamn, I'll never forget that image. I immediately dropped to the floor and did a duck-and-cover, screaming at the top of my lungs. "It's in here, it's in hee-ee-re!" I screamed to Avery, who was surfing the internet at the other end of the apartment. Avery came into the kitchen and signaled it was safe to run back into the bedroom. I scurried across the floor on my hands and knees. (Many days later, Avery told me that while I was in the duck-and-cover position on the floor, the bat was behind me, hanging on the doorjamb of the bathroom door, "trying to blend in." When I started to make a dash towards the bedroom, it flew after me, presumably because it thought I would be trying to get out of this damned apartment as well. Avery nobly fought it off with the rake, though, kind of like a crazed jousting match from the depths of hell.)
Now we were really panicking: sweating, shaking and getting a little desperate. We tried to call our downstairs neighbors. No luck. Avery snuck out of the bedroom to run downstairs and knock on our downstairs neighbors' door. No luck. We even tried calling the dog warden, hoping that the city would have some kind of Pest Control and Removal Department. No answer. (It was midnight, after all.) My mother called back to report that they had just printed out some information from the internet about Bats and How to Catch Them.
Avery eventually managed to open the living room window. All right. Any minute now. An-n-ny minute. We were going to sit here in front of the bedroom with a rake all night if we had to. We both watched the window, waiting to witness the bat actually exiting the apartment. The thing was hiding again. As the minutes turned to hours, we both started getting more and more pissed. Don't these things have sonar? Aren't they supposed to sense that there's a window open. This goddamned bat. Fucking bat! We have work tomorrow! I'm still hungry! I just want to go to bed! Wah!
The silence was becoming more scary than helpful (we originally thought that having the TV on would distract the bat), so Avery turned on the TV. All of a sudden he leapt up, ran over to the window and slammed it shut. The bat had somehow gotten between the windowpane and the screen, and was hanging upside down between them. Oh, this bastard of a bat was going to leave, all right. Avery shined a flashlight on it (now it was more like science, but still gross) trying to get it to leave. That did nothing, so we held the lamp up to the window ("It's just turning away from the light.") Hairdryer? Nothing. Rubbing two Japanese knives together to make a distasteful sound? Nothing. The only thing that made it leave (at 2:00 AM, I might add) was us leaving the room.
Needless to say, I found it impossible to sleep that night. I was nervous for days afterward, thinking that any minute another one would fly into the room. My mind started thinking paranoid thoughts: was that the original bat between the window and the screen? Or was it a companion bat, coming to rescue the original bat? Did the bat actually fly outside when we left the room, or did it come back into the apartment? Was it just hiding again? Is it still in here? Will it come back? How did it get inside in the first place? I went to work the next day thinking that I'd tell my story and would get some "yeah, that happened to me once" sympathy. Instead I got, "Oh my god, that's my biggest fear!" and "Of course I've never had a bat in my house!" My mother suggested that they might be going into our apartment to roost. What a lovely thought.
My biggest fear used to be the chairlifts at ski slopes. Now my biggest fear is the chairlifts at ski slopes tied with having a disoriented, freaked-out bat flying around my apartment. I feel the urge to write into the Sassy-now-Jane magazine column: "It Happened to Me": "I never thought in a million years that I would have to worry about not just bugs, but bats -- hairy, scary bats -- sneaking in between the open spaces of the plastic window fan..."
Once we got rid of the first bat, we didn't see hide nor hair of it again. Just to make ourselves feel better about the whole thing, we bought a little wooden bat, painted it black with two little eyes, and hung it above the door. That obviously did nothing to keep them away, because last night we found a second bat hiding behind a wooden chest in our bedroom. Yes, our bedroom; how spooky is that?
It was about 2:00 AM. We had gone to bed pretty late since it was the weekend and all, and were just starting to fall asleep when Avery heard weird scratching noises and sat up in bed, ready to yell at the cats. Murat, one of our cats, was reaching behind the wooden chest and batting at something, presumably at the other cat, Odie. Avery got up, went to take a closer look and all of a sudden told me to "get out, now! There's something behind there...I don't know if it's a sock or what." So we leave the room, confirm that since Odie is hiding in her usual "I'm scared of everything that breathes" position behind the couch, it isn't her. Avery grabs the handy little rake (left over from the last bat fiasco), enters the bedroom and starts raking at whatever's back there. "I think it might be a leaf." He says. "Come see if this looks like a leaf to you."
[Now, at this point, this could have been a really good story to be told at cocktail parties and around dinner tables: "And it was just a LEAF! Can you imagine, getting all worked up over a little leaf? Well, thank god it wasn't another bat!" <insert laughter all around>]
So I'm really hoping it's just a leaf, and projecting leaf thoughts onto it while looking at the tiny little part sticking out from behind the wooden chest, and the back of my mind is telling me that it doesn't really look a whole hell of a lot like any leaf, but I just ignore that voice and say, all giving false hope-like, "Well, there are a lot of leaves in here."
It wasn't a leaf. It wasn't a leaf at all. It was a bat. A little gerbil-sized bat caught between the wall and the cable wires leading to the bedroom television set. After Avery slammed the wooden chest back against the wall in panic while I repeated "No, it is not; no, it is not; no it is not" fifty times in response to the news that it was indeed a bat (we were both shivering basketcases at this point), we gathered in the hall and tried to come up with a plan. After several recon missions in which the goal was to pull the wooden chest out from the wall enough to actually do something with this thing, Avery came up with a plan entailing the cats eating the bat. "Eat it?" I said. "What are they gonna do, pick the bones clean and leave the wings there? They're not gonna eat it!" Nevertheless, he picked up Murat and tossed her on top of it. The cat looked at the bat - who was now lying prone - for a few seconds and calmly walked away. We then coaxed Odie out from behind the couch and threw her in the bedroom as well. "Get it!" we yelled encouragingly.
We continued checking on the cats' progress for the next several minutes. The first time we opened the door, Mu was sitting leisurely on the bed, like some type of feline royalty. The second time we looked, she was rolling around on the floor. Odie just sat on the bed and stared into space. A lot of help they are in times of dire crises.
We gathered our bat fighting weapons: a flowered hat box, the flashlight, a Steve Madden shoe box and a decorative metal wall hanging. Avery put on his jacket and grabbed the rake. He managed to rake the cables away from the bat, and we were ready to capture it (hence, the flowered hat box) but it was up against the wall, so a square receptacle was in order (the Steve Madden shoe box.) The wall hanging, which kind of looks like a round pan and advertises the Belgian beer Duvel, was in case I had to fight the bat off (I talked Avery out of using one of our good frying pans.)
We the discussed who should rake the bat away from the wall and who should throw the shoe box on top of it. I volunteer for throwing the shoe box. We get the bat under the shoe box (it's either stunned or playing dead or something at this point, because thank godfully it's not moving) put a garden trowel on top of it in case it decides to wake up or turn into a vampire or something, and search for something to slide under the box. Once that's done, Avery slides it into the living room where I wait with an open window. We toss it out. It hits the dirt. Hmmm. Must still be stunned. When we looked for it this morning, though, it was gone.
How the hell did it get there? Don't know. Did we see it flying around? No. Why do they keep pestering us? Don't know that, either, but we're starting to wonder if there's any kind of support group for when Bat Stuff Happens to Good People....