Fifty Mice: A Novel (2 page)

SKIP BACK.

Two days. Sunday night, or early Monday.

His eyes blinking open to a bedroom he knew and yet sensed with dull dread was not the bedroom he fell asleep in, because something had been added.

This is what he remembers:

Fear.

Darkness.

Baroque patterns dusting the walls, thrown upward by streetlights through the beveled diamond windowpanes. The heavy night air and an uneasy stillness. Stacy shifting under the covers beside him, dreaming, fitful. Her pink bare body threw off a dozy heat.

Slender hand, upturned.

The engagement ring with its cold hard little diamond.

Heart beating, mouth cotton, he debated waking her, but first tried to convince himself it was just trace echoes of the past, fear he’d felt before and still hadn’t, couldn’t, after all this time, contrive to forget. So he lay quietly and listened, willing his heartbeat to slow, measuring his breathing, listening until the quiet turned itself inside
out and he was all but certain that, yes, somebody was in the apartment with them.

And his pulse started pounding all over again.

He reached down and groped under the bed for the aluminum softball bat he kept there, just in case.

Shadow among shadows, he slid from his bed and drifted, bat gripped two-handed, into the hallway. He heard the rustle of bougainvillea, felt a breeze on his neck. He smelled lantana out in the courtyard, wet, sickly-sweet. And mildew, from the entry stairwell, where the plaster was ruined by January’s rains.

The front door to the apartment was open, halfway, light from the outside corridor spilling in.

He froze. Brought the bat to half-mast and re-gripped it, and re-gripped it, wondering what he’d do if the intruder stepped out of the darkness now. More than anything, Jay wanted to get back in the bed, back under the covers, the way he would when he was eight and afraid of the darkness, convinced that if any part of him was exposed to the night whatever was lurking in it would take him. Safe, under the covers, until the rescue of daylight, and his mom waking him, smiling, everything good.

He peered back down the hallway, where he could see the sheer curtains rippling because the French doors to the tiny balcony were open.

Doors that had been closed when they fell asleep.

He waited, listened for the intruder.

Nothing.

The common corridor was empty when he walked out of his apartment to the stairwell banister and looked down.

Two floors below: a hand on the railing: someone descending: the faintest complaint from the loose riser near the bottom.

Then gone.

•   •   •

Y
ou call the cops?”

“And tell them what? Somebody took a shortcut through my place?”

“Well . . . yeah.”

“I didn’t, no. Call them.”

Manchurian Global, lunchtime, Vaughn’s lab. Not quite
The Island of Dr. Moreau
, but pretty freaky. The chemical smells. The shivery racket of caged rodents, hard drives, refrigerators, and floor fans.

“Maybe you imagined it.”

“No.”

Jay didn’t tell Stacy what he thought had happened until morning. He just closed all the doors and locked them and sat for a while in the darkened living room, thinking about his brother, Carl, and what he might be doing if he were still alive. Then he booted up
Call of Duty
and played with the sound turned off, abandoning strategy for maximum firepower and discovering what he already knew: it doesn’t work. Toward dawn, Jay slipped back into bed and did the trick he’d learned about forgetting, turning reality into a dream, because dreams could be dismissed and forgotten, lost in the veiled awakening to a new day.

“Freaked me out, I’ll tell you that.”

He watched a white mouse smear through a luminous white world of white dead ends and white disappointment; it stopped, sniffing, determined, the droll pink eyes staring, spooked. Distorted and washed out and his nose a fleshy insult, Vaughn’s green eyes peered intently back at the mouse through Plexiglas etched by countless tiny laboratory mouse scratches, watching the helter-skelter progress of today’s furry volunteer.

Or victim,
Jay thought.

“Nothing missing?”

“No.”

“What’d Stacy say?”

“She thinks I imagined it.”

Vaughn let his silence make its point.

“She’s wrong, Vaughn.”

The mouse scampered bumbly down the white pathways, making one sharp right turn after another, sure of itself now, remembering the way, hurrying toward the expectation of a reward and oblivious to the possibility of a punishment—
like us,
Jay thought. A white plastic dreamscape with the voice of God moving behind it, monitoring his geometric paradise, if God was a lanky post-doc named Vaughn: “Maybe it was that guy.”

Jay frowned. “What guy?”

“Stacy’s, you know—her old boyfriend. The boxer.”

The boxer. “Juan Pablo?”
No.
Jay said, “He moved to Houston. And he wasn’t a boxer—or a cage fighter or whatever—that was just you telling stories that one night, after a couple of French 75s.”

Vaughn’s face rose and loomed over the Milky White Maze, with proto-geek safety glasses and a tentative, beardlike facial growth, his hair gelled up all porcupine, finger-in-socket, over the chalky labyrinthian passageways, a brooding Magog. “We’re so vulnerable when we’re asleep,” Vaughn mused darkly.

Jay shrugged. “Asleep, awake, it’s not that different.”

“Oh.” Vaughn waited for Jay to expand on this observation, then looked disappointed when he understood that Jay wouldn’t.

The mouse was momentarily still. Listening to them.

“What do you know about experimental neurosis, Jaybird?”

“A little,” Jay lied. “Remind me.”

“Mice,” Vaughn explained, “whose genetic makeup is more similar to that of human beings than most of us care to admit, are submitted to a maze at the end of which are two doors, one with a
circle that rewards them with food, and one with an ellipse that punishes them with an electric shock.”

“Sounds fairly unremarkable, so far. Junior-high science fair stuff from, I dunno, 1954?”

“Don’t snark.” Vaughn’s gaze was hard on his test mouse as it scampered toward what Jay guessed would be a dreamy white failure, since that was usually the experimental goal. “Over time,” Vaughn continued, “we change out the ellipse on the shock door, slowly replacing it with a less and less ovoid shape. Or, in other words, the symbol becoming more and more similar to the one on the safe door, more and more circular with each successive iteration.”

“Bet that pisses off the mice.”

“Mice don’t have feelings.”

“Everything’s got feelings, Vaughn.”

Vaughn just stared.

“Right. Okay. Please continue. Becoming more circular with each iteration,” Jay prompted.

“At that critical point where the synapses in the mouse mind can no longer grok the difference between circle and ellipse, the mice go crazy and eat themselves.”

“
Eat
themselves?” This was why Jay no longer worked at Manchurian Global.

“‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.’”

“Uh-huh. Cue the Latin, Mr. Wizard, which you know I don’t understand.”

“Look, if I thought somebody broke into my apartment in the middle of the night, I would have called the cops, Jay.”

“How is that in any way related to mice going all autocannibal?”

“I’m just saying.”

Vaughn’s current victim was slip-sliding down a stainless-steel incline, frantic to stop itself, as if it knew what was coming, careening
toward a pair of hinged doors designed to open to a short drop into an aquarium of ice water. But not this mouse, skittering, shrieking, stubbornly stopping itself just short of the plunge.

“Shit.” Vaughn made some marks on a clipboard and plucked the mouse out of the maze. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

Jay sighed. No sense in drawing it out. “So, it’s the stress, right?”

“We’re not completely sure,” Vaughn said. He disappeared into the rows of cages. “We can’t be certain.”

“And you’re thinking my midnight intruder, that’s just—”

“I don’t think anything. I’m a scientist. I observe and record.”

Jay played the straight man: “Well, what else could it be?”

“That’s what we’re asking ourselves.”

“And this, the eating thing, happens to every mouse?”

“Yes.” Jay watched his friend’s head of quills shark deeper into the lab. “With the exception of these fifty mice they cloned in Utah.” Jay heard the sound of a soda can hissing open.

“Apparently, they don’t give a shit.”

•   •   •

J
ay was twelve minutes late back to Buckham & Buckham from Vaughn’s lab, a mortal sin duly noted by Buddy DeLuca from his open floor supervisor’s office, “Again.”

He remembers the acrid afterburn of overcooked coffee: somebody’d forgotten to switch off the Krups.

“Today,” Jay announced to the cube farm of murmuring fellow phone drones, a labyrinth of workspaces not so different, he thought drily, from Vaughn’s milky white one, “today is the first day of the rest of your pointless lives.”

“Bite me,” from the nearest desk.

“You all weighed down with the ball and chain, or are you playing hoops with us tonight, J.B.?”

When Jay worked at Manchurian Global, in the sprawling rat maze of animal cages, test stations, and analytic hardware that Vaughn whimsically calls his office in the sprawling rat maze of think-tank and research facilities that Manchurian Global whimsically calls its campus, slacker Jay carried animals to and from experiments, keyed in data, cleaned, fed, watered, cremated the obdurate or unlucky, and still squandered a good part of his 346 days there inert, slouched in a chair, lab coat and wrinkled khakis, legs splayed, flip-flops, iPod wired into his ears, squeezing a rubber stress ball and fiddling with his phone and successfully ignoring the endless stream of data that chattered across multiple workstation screens like so many Chinese billboards among the rats and mice who scampered, paranoid, back and forth, back and forth, across their cages, searching for a way out, in vain.

Now a crisply starched J. B. (Jay) Johnson—an all-new gung-ho Jay 2.0 (beta), nearly six months in the making, and hoping to stick: scrappy, young, feckless, cyan eyes and a puzzle of black hair, rocking some dove-gray wool slacks, white cotton button-down, and a club tie—slowed his perp walk, and called across the partitions, good-natured, “Stacy’s got some kind of yoga spin-lati thing at Curves, so I’m good to go.”

“Downward dog.”

“Whatever.”

“Okay. Yo. Seven o’clock. Need a ride?”

“No. Catching the Red Line.”

“You’re awesome green, bro.”

Purling plainsong of the free market. Everyone rigged with Bluetooth phone headsets and false bravado, low-watt smiles, scared shitless that today won’t be the day, their brittle sales conversations overlapping in a din, and Jay remembered how mice are highly social animals who speak at frequencies humans can’t hear; play, wrestle,
love, sleep curled up together, because without companionship they get lonely and depressed, anxious, lost.

Or eat themselves. Fuck Vaughn. Now he couldn’t get the mice out of his head.

“Herself, Jay. Line five.”

“Thank you.”

Jay’s cubicle: ergonomic, monochromatic and soulless, the requisite Herman Miller knockoff chair squeaking as he swiveled into it, adjusted his headset, and: “Hey Stace, what up?”

There were no personal effects save a Chris Paul bobblehead and a thumbtacked photograph of the prepossessing-but-underfed Stacy, thigh gap, petulant plumped lips and salon-blond hair, a soft electric kind of girl who elicits from bros in bars the inevitable waggish: I’d hit it. Which Jay found sadly comforting.

He can’t remember what she said on the call.

When subjected to painful stimulus, mice make humanlike facial expressions of displeasure, and before Jay quit his lab job, Manchurian Global had developed a mouse grimace scale (MGS) for measuring rodent pain based on five distinct “pain faces.”

He can’t remember which face he made while Stacy talked. Maybe all of them.

The relevant truth is that what Jay remembers from her call is not listening and choosing instead to rerun in the theater of his head an unreliably enhanced highlight reel from some stay-at-home Saturday, his ball and chain huffing like a corgi in heat, clothes peeled, curlers popping from her hair, tipped backward on and gripping the edges of her dining table, one bare pink ankle crooked around Jay’s neck, poleaxed with pleasure while Jay crimped up buttery between the clamp of her thighs, inelegant because of the positional physics at play: jeans jammed down around his knees, holding her other foot out like a tiller—

(Nothing wrong with Jay and Stacy’s sex life, was what Jay was always trying to convince himself. Vigorous and creative. All good.)

—and by the time his head cleared, Stacy and her no doubt valid worries about the trajectory of their relationship, its purpose, its potential, was off the line and Jay was in the middle of a cold call with a potential customer in Minneapolis. The rote pitch, memorized:

“What we are, sir, basically, is an e-commerce shopping mall where you can set up for and be exposed to and monetize hundreds of thousands of potential click-throughs.”

Does he love her? He wants to. He hopes so. He doesn’t want to hurt her, so there’s that. But he knows it’s not enough. During the courtship phase, male mice make simple, plaintive whistles or modulated calls. After mounting the female, however, male mice make chirping sounds that are strikingly similar to human laughter.

“Scalability? No, sir. Not a problem. We’ve got a bunch of Caltech web-weenies shackled down in the basement working on this thing twenty-four/seven/three-sixty-five—just kidding—ha ha ha ha ha but—”

And so on, and so on, and so on.

In his twenty-seven weeks, three days, six hours, forty-nine minutes at Buckham & Buckham, Jay has twice been named Salesman of Merit, but more often called in and warned that his shift yield has sagged and put him in danger of missing his quota, which is grounds for dismissal, which is its own kind of death. He earns to a base pay scale of just under forty-four thousand dollars a year after taxes, carries almost sixty thousand dollars owed in student loans; has a horizontal game that’s better than his vertical, and a decent mid-range fallaway jump shot; his vintage 325i is in the shop because he can’t afford to have the transmission rebuilt.