Hall of Small Mammals (10 page)

Inside the building, she gives her purse and keys to the guard and walks through an X-ray detector. She watches the guard watch the screen. Maybe he can see her bones. She hopes her bones are beautiful, or at least average. At the front desk, she gets a sticker that says
TEMPORARY
. In the elevator, she peels the sticker off her chest.

She has to wait for her interview. She sits down beside a man in a rough-looking suit. He seems nervous. When he scratches his mustache, little flakes of dandruff fall out of the hairs. His wristwatch is two minutes off the digital clock on the wall. He fiddles with the silver knob on the side until the times are perfectly synchronized.

Later, the secretary calls Ellie's name and leads her down the hall to an office with glass walls. The man on the other side of the glass motions for her to come in and sit down. He is on the phone but smiles at her.

“Let's talk about it over dumplings,” he says to the person on the phone. “You ever eat them? Good Lord, you gotta try the dumplings at this place I know around the corner. Yeah, they got chicken in them. You don't eat chicken? Did I know that? Shit, sorry. I'm pretty sure they got fish ones too.”

The phone call ends. He stares at Ellie with bright green eyes, his hair combed forward and cut straight across his forehead, his blue shirt almost shimmering under the lights. He introduces himself as Burton. He takes some papers and a pen out of a desk drawer. He taps the pen against his chin.

“You might find our method unusual,” he says. “But we've found that the typical questions don't tell us anything useful. We like to start with hypotheticals.”

“Okay,” Ellie says.

“Excellent,” he says. “Here we go. You're given a shoebox. In the shoebox are three mice. All the mice are going to die, but if you smash one with a hammer, the other two can live. What do you do?”

Ellie has never killed a mouse before, not even in a trap. When she was growing up, her family had a cat that took care of things like that. She tries to imagine smashing a mouse with a hammer. She imagines the mouse as a very still fluffy thing on a cold cement floor. She imagines the hammer in her hand. She swings the hammer down, but instead of a crunch, she imagines wind chimes.

“Don't think about these questions too long,” Burton says.

“I guess I'd kill the mouse,” she says.

Burton makes a mark. She asks if she answered correctly.

“No right or wrong,” he says. “These are hypotheticals. Next.
You're on a spaceship. You're set to become the first person to leave the galaxy by traveling at the speed of light. But then you realize that, because of relativity, a hundred years will have passed when you return to earth, and everyone you know will have expired.”

“Expired?” she asks, and thinks of milk.

“Yes,” he says. “They'll all be dead, but you will be the same age. Do you complete your mission?”

“So,” Ellie says, “I only realize this once I'm all the way out there in space?”

Burton makes another mark. Then, without waiting for her answer to the space question, he says, “You're a devout member of a religious group. You discover that your Spiritual Leader, henceforth referred to as SL, is a charlatan. He's stealing money from all the other followers. This one's multiple choice. Do you:
A.
Call the authorities.
B.
Interrupt a religious service and present evidence of the SL's wrongdoing to the followers.
C.
Alert both the authorities and the followers with a strongly worded letter.
D.
Confront the SL in private.
E.
Claim to be a new prophet and banish the SL from the existing group for reasons unrelated to the financial crime.
F.
Leave the religious group and write a tell-all book.
G.
Blackmail the SL for a cut of the stolen funds—”

“How many choices are there?” Ellie asks. “I think I'm losing track.”

“I'm almost done,” Burton says. “
H.
Start a new religious group and declare spiritual war.
I.
Go on a pilgrimage to a religious shrine and ask for God's guidance.
J.
Wear a recording device and try to get the SL to admit the financial crimes on tape.
K.
Become an atheist.”

Ellie doesn't know what to say. She grew up Methodist and
nothing like that ever happened in her church. Their wine was grape juice. The minister played an acoustic guitar.

“I guess I'd do the thing where you confront the SL in private,” she says. “I mean, how much money are we talking about here?”

He doesn't answer but makes another mark. Then he says, “You find out you're pregnant and—”

He stops talking and looks up at her.

“Just so you know,” he says, “we ask the men this one too. Okay, you find out you're pregnant, and it is revealed that your baby will very likely save the entire world one day. But giving birth to this baby might result in your own death. Would you terminate the pregnancy?”

“God,” Ellie says. “I guess I'd have to keep it, right?”

“And if that child only has a fifty percent chance of saving the world?”

“I guess I'd still keep it.”

“Twenty-five percent chance?”

“Maybe not,” Ellie says. “No, in that case, I probably wouldn't go through with it.”

Burton makes a mark.

“I like you,” he says. “You seem to have your head on straight. You'd be surprised how many people don't. By the way, do you know how to make a spreadsheet?”

Ellie says she does. Burton makes another mark and then presents her with a booklet and a pen for the essay portion. Ellie had no idea there would be an essay portion. He says it's nothing major, just a few quick paragraphs. She'll have fifteen minutes.

“Here we go,” he says. “The question is: How will the world end, and what will happen when we die?”

He leaves the room. Ellie didn't get much sleep last night. She was out late for her friend Mary's thirtieth birthday party, and her mind feels like Swiss cheese. She starts writing:

The end of the world will be like when the candles get blown out on a cake. Everything will end very fast but with a final little flicker so that we at least know it's happening. Then the earth will just stop existing. And we won't know why. We won't even care why. Our souls will still exist but in a different way and they won't care about why it ended because we won't need the earth anymore. When we talk about the earth, we'll laugh about how silly it was to be here. Earth will be like some dream we all had together. It will be like one of those dreams where you eat mud because in the dream eating mud seems like a perfectly natural thing to do. After the earth ends, it will be like waking up from a dream like that. We'll all stand around wondering why we ate all that mud. Also, we won't have private parts.

After Burton collects her essay, he shakes Ellie's hand and says he'll be in touch. She doesn't feel confident. She probably shouldn't have mentioned the bit about the mud. She probably shouldn't have said she'd abort the baby with a twenty-five percent chance of saving the world.

Outside the snow is falling into the prickly bushes along the building entrance, collecting in the green groove of every leaf. She can tell the leaves are prickly but sticks her hand into a bush anyway. It pricks her in a few spots. She can't tell where it hurts
most. When she squeezes her palm, a few small drops of blood rise to the surface of her skin.

Ellie walks to the parking garage. She should call her mother. Her mother will want a full report. That can wait. She feels something in her pocket. She pulls it out. It's the sticker that says
TEMPORARY
. She sticks it on the dashboard above the heater and drives to Pop-Yop, the soft-serve place where Mary works.

“But if they offer you the job, you'll take it, though,” Mary says, wiping down a tabletop. Her friend, who used to say she was going to travel around the country in a Volkswagen Beetle selling homemade jewelry, has recently developed such a practical streak. She says she's even been thinking about asking her brother for a loan so she can make an offer on this Pop-Yop. Ellie pulls the silver handle on the wall and fills her cup. Mary gives it to her for free so long as she doesn't overdo it with the toppings. Ellie tries to never overdo it with the toppings but sometimes she can't help herself.

•   •   •

Two weeks later, Burton calls to offer her the job.

“You're our top choice,” he says. “And that essay. Loved it. So funny. I showed a few people. Hope that's okay?”

Ellie doesn't ask him what exactly he found so funny. She's not sure she wants to know. She tells him she'd like a day to think about the offer, as if she has ten others to consider, but Ellie knows, eventually, she will accept. Otherwise her mother would kill her.

Big D organizes a small going-away party on her last day at the restaurant. He brings in chocolate cupcakes from the grocery
store since the kitchen restaurant isn't open yet. All the waiters and cooks stand around with dark chocolate in their teeth, asking Ellie questions about what's next.
This job,
she wants to say,
and after that, probably, some other job.
Big D pours everyone a shot. He's ready to pour another round but the manager says that's enough.

•   •   •

She's shopping for Christmas gifts at the mall when she sees Harry for the first time since moving back to town. He's in the parking lot, loading giant boxes into the back of his car. He can't believe it's really her. Yes, she changed her hair. It's shorter. He looks different too. He has a patchy beard and tired eyes.

“My oh my,” he says.

“Let's get coffee,” she says.

They leave in his car. It's snowing.

At a café, they order holiday coffee drinks and waters and a figure-eight pastry with some kind of cream filling in the holes like little yellow swimming pools.

Harry runs a food bank now. His jeans are too big for him. They sag low on his hips.

Ellie tells him she's sorry, about everything, and he nods.

“So, you changed much?” he asks.

Yes, maybe, she says. But then again, probably not. She's back home, after all.

Harry has big news to share. He's engaged.

“Who's the lucky lady?” she asks.

He whips out his cell phone and shows her a photo. The woman in it has brown hair, and she is very aware of the camera.
That is, she's smiling broadly, her teeth twinkling, brilliantly white and possibly a little sharp.

“Her name's Caroline,” he says. “We met at the church.”

“As in, your mother's church?” she asks.

“Technically it's
my
church now too,” he says. “Caroline's a teacher. We live on the other side of town.”

Ellie considers asking Harry if his fiancée waves her arms during the songs at church. But she decides that she shouldn't. That would not be kind. Then she asks it anyway.

Harry smiles and blows a dent into the foam of his pumpkin spice latte.

They haven't touched the pastry. Harry insists she take it with her, but the look of it makes her feel sick. She isn't ready to go home yet, and so he drives them to the park, which is empty and a little cold. She wraps her jacket tight and leans into Harry. Through the metal bars of the jungle gym, she watches two gray squirrels chase each other around a tree. Around and around and around. So gratuitous. Harry puts his hand on her knee, and she doesn't object. It's like old times. She asks him if he thinks they are alone in the universe, and he smiles and says he reckons not. They climb onto the jungle gym and hang upside down. His hair touches the ground. Her face turns pink. She hopes they'll make biscuits
later.

O
ur house was more than a hundred and fifty years old and full of mysteries and we loved it. We'd bought it for the original hardwood floors and the ornate plasterwork and the stone fireplace. Soon after we arrived, the man across the street, the unofficial neighborhood historian, dropped off his self-published pamphlet. It included a lengthy essay that said our place had been, at various points, a boardinghouse (1840s/50s), a convalescent home (1890s), the boyhood home of a famous neuroscientist (1920s/30s), a lawyer's suite (1960s), and a drug house (1990s). Now it was ours: its history, its shoddy plumbing, lead paint, crumbling foundation, all of it.

Reorganizing our boxes in the attic one afternoon, my wife discovered a silvered daguerreotype hidden in the eaves. The woman in the photograph had a pinched, severe-looking face, and she was dressed in some sort of black frock. On the back, the script slanted and faded, was a single word:
Lang.
This made sense.
According to the brochure, the area had been settled mostly by German immigrants.

Not long after that, I was fixing the basement stairs and discovered two red candles and what I guessed was a possum skull concealed beneath the boards. It looked like it had been there a long time. The skull was gray and thin, two small pencil-prick nostril holes below the eyes, the front teeth fanglike and awful and covered in dried drips of red wax. My wife, who grew up Catholic and who can be pretty grim, dubbed the relic Saint Possy and stuck it on our dresser, which meant we had to fall asleep looking at it.

The first night it was there, I dreamed I needed surgery and had to watch a doctor pull what looked like dirty linguini from a hole in my side. The second night I dreamed I was pregnant.

“You can't blame that stupid skull,” my wife said, and patted its crusty crown.

“Don't even try to tell me that thing isn't evil,” I said.

“It's just bone,” she said. “Just carbon atoms, same as you and me.”

Still, I didn't want it on the dresser. The skull absorbed light, and after dark it was the brightest object in our bedroom. I threw my shirt over it whenever we had sex because surely any child conceived in its sight was going to come out a monster. I tolerated it for as long as I could—a month, maybe—before packaging it in a shoebox and shoving that toward the back of the closet.

We went out for dinner one night, and I ordered mussels and french fries, and we talked about money because we'd spent most of our savings on the house and we still had more repairs to make. We were thinking about taking in a roommate to make ends
meet. When we came home, I polished off a bottle of wine and fell asleep fast, but around midnight I woke up with a full bladder. When I got back from the bathroom, the skull was on the dresser again, the sockets empty and dark.

I shook my wife. She didn't even open her eyes. She patted my arm. A slow smile crept across her face.

“You're a jerk,” I said. “Don't you know you married a man with a gentle heart? Can't you see what you're doing to me? And you know that may not even be a possum—the truth is, we don't know what it is. It could be anything. It could be a deformed baby skull. Remember the photograph from the attic? Maybe it was her deformed stillborn baby, and she built a shrine for it under the stairs.”

I thought my wife had already fallen back asleep, that she wasn't paying me any attention, but two days later, she came home from work with a strange look on her face, a nervous half smile. I asked her what was wrong, and she pulled a mess of paper towels out of her purse. She unraveled the ball, and there was the skull.

She said she'd taken it to her friend Barry, who taught biology at the university in town.

“And?”

“It's not a possum skull,” she said. “It's not a baby skull either. But don't freak out. He doesn't really know what it is. He's never seen anything quite like it.”

We were at the kitchen table. I got up to doctor the soup I was making and then sat back down. I asked her if she thought we should just bury it in the backyard instead. To be done with it.

“Maybe we should put it back under the stairs where we found it,” she said. “It was probably there for a reason.”

The skull was on the table between us. It seemed to breathe. I was losing my appetite. She scraped some of the red wax off the bone, studying it. My wife hadn't been to church since she was a little girl. She was a Buddhist now, and one of the wonderful things about our house was that she had a room entirely for her meditation, which she did every morning.

“You don't really think it's evil, do you?” she asked. “Because I don't believe in evil. I don't see things black-and-white.”

“It's at least a very dark gray,” I said. “If what we're talking about is a spectrum of goodness.”

“Why were there candles?” she asked. “That is eerie, right?”

We didn't say anything for a while. The skull grinned at us. Maybe we were waiting for it to talk.

“This is silly,” she said. “I mean, really, what are we so afraid of?”

She snatched the skull off the table and threw it at the floor. The skull didn't break. It ricocheted toward the door and slid to a stop at the doormat.

My wife went into the hall closet and took out our bucket of tools. I asked her what she was doing. She rummaged around and pulled out a socket wrench.

“Wait,” I said, but it was too late. She was down on all fours, bashing the skull as hard as she could. She hit and she hit and she hit, and when she was done, there were fragments of bone everywhere. She looked at me with wild eyes.

“Quick,” she said. “Help.”

I was brushing the pieces into a pile, trying to collect all of them together. If we weren't diligent now, we'd never be rid of this thing. Months from now we'd still be finding tiny shards. What if
we got a bone splinter? What if there were bone particles in the air and we breathed them in? She got out the broom and swept as thoroughly as she could and then told me to do the same. Then we wiped the floors with wet paper towels.

“I feel funny,” she said. “Something's not right.”

She looked like she was bracing for a sneeze but the sneeze wouldn't come. I gave her a Kleenex and advised her to blow her nose. Then I blew mine. We weren't hungry anymore. I threw out the soup. We went to bed early. The next morning neither of us mentioned what had happened, but I saw her scanning the floor while we ate breakfast, and also later at lunch. That night I had another dream. I was pregnant again, but in this one whatever was growing in my belly could talk. It had a smooth voice, baritone, vaguely southern, muffled by my flesh, and it called me a coward. It called me a wretch. It spoke with the power of all the saints in heaven. It called me names I don't even remember but still feel.

I told my wife about it in the shower.

“No skull to blame for it now,” she said. “That's just your own inner weirdness.”

I worried that the voice in the dream had been my own.

After that we rarely talked about the skull, except as an anecdote at dinners and parties. Oh, yes, I'd say, she was wild-eyed when she destroyed it. Well, you should have seen
him
, my wife would say, he was such a baby. We'd make ourselves sound silly. We made ourselves sound temporarily insane. That always got big laughs. The more we told the story, the stranger we seemed. We told it until the people in the story were barely recognizable versions of ourselves.

Years later we sold the house and bought a newer one on the other side of town, in a better school district. We were unloading all our mixing bowls in the new kitchen when I saw it at the bottom of the box: the tooth, gray and small. Nothing had changed. We hadn't changed.

“You know what we have to do,” my wife said. “So we might as well get it over with.”

We drove over to the old house. We hadn't yet handed over the keys. Standing there one last time under those beautiful high ceilings, the floorboards creaking under our feet, I thought about how soon we'd be just another footnote in our neighbor's pamphlet. My wife moved to toss the tooth into the fireplace ash but I stopped her. What if what was required was a little pageantry?

“Such as?”

I led us up to the attic, where we had, perhaps unkindly, left behind a few boxes of our junk and trash. We didn't have any candles, so I jabbed the tooth into an ugly old teddy bear's mouth, which made the bear look country-poor and sad and creepy. I placed it in the attic eaves alongside the daguerreotype. It felt right to unite them. I don't mind admitting now that I performed a little farewell dance as I backed toward the door, where my wife waited with her arms crossed.

“You think that's necessary?” she asked.

I shrugged: What was the harm? Just after pulling the light cord and leaving the attic forever I even whispered a few quick words into the darkness. When I turned, my wife had her eyes closed and hands clasped. A little prayer, she called it later, in the car, joking, though we both knew that's exactly what it had been.