White Horse

her.

“People are made of dark corners, America.”

“Do you need a break?” I call out over my shoulder.

“It is probably a monster,” he continues, “that thing inside you. Like those creatures in the barn.”

Lisa shakes her head, trots to catch up to the Swiss, curls her fingers around the strap dangling from his backpack. The tap of the broom handle resumes.

“What’s your help going to cost me?”

“I will tell you. When it is time.”

I don’t ask. I don’t dare.

DATE: THEN

The last time I see Ben, he’s hunched over like he’s waiting on a spinal tap. Of course, it’s not like I know I’ll never see him again. There is no Rod Serling voice in my head. This is it. Say your good-byes. You have now entered the Twilight Zone.

“Man,” Ben says when I inquire after his health. “I need a new bed or something. My back’s killing me.”

He sleeps on a couch in his living room, amongst his precious high-tech setup. Ben’s apartment is the belly of a robot, red and green LEDs announcing the health status of the system at any given moment.

“You could just regenerate.” I point to one of the few organic components in the room, a cardboard mock-up of a Borg regeneration chamber.

“Don’t mock the Borg. One day we’re gonna be living in a Star Trek world. Not in this lifetime. But one day.”

I hold up the bag in my hand. “How does Chinese grab you?”

“Me so hungry. Hope I can keep it down. It’s been a couple of days since…” He points a finger at his open mouth, mimes puking.

We divvy up beef and broccoli, fried rice, sweet-and-sour pork, and some kind of shrimp I can’t pronounce. I’d pointed to it on the menu to save myself the tongue twist. And while we watch his screen saver contort on the triple wide screens, I ask about Stiffy.

“Don’t know,” he says. “Haven’t seen him.”

My chopsticks catch on the box’s flap. A shrimp flies overhead, lands on the couch. Ben snatches it up and crams the naked crustacean into his food-flecked mouth.

“I haven’t seen him, either. Want me to help hand out fliers?”

“Nah. He’ll show up when he gets hungry enough.”

“I’ll have a look for him later.”

“Whatever, man.”

Thirty-seven is the official number of cats in my apartment building. Forty-one if you consider Mrs. Sark on the sixth floor has four more cats than she lets on. It helps that they’re blood brothers and all answer to “Mr. Puss-puss.”

Forty-one cats.

One day they go wandering, as cats are wont to do, never to come home.

SEVEN

Shit, piss, fuck.” The curses fly from the mouth of a lab technician struggling to grow facial hair with more substance than fuzz. His name is Mike Schultz. “All of them.”

The mice are dead. Like he said, all of them. I know because I found them when I came through with the industrial wet vac.

Jorge is standing across from me, arms crossed, a victory dance of string lights illuminating his eyes. He shakes his head as though this is a tragedy, as if dozens of dead mice matter. And they do —just not to him. I’ve seen the stuffed squirrel heads dangling from his rearview mirror.

Schultz rubs his forehead. “Shit.”

“Looks like somebody screwed up.” Jorge stares straight at me when he says it.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Schultz. “They were like that when I got here.”

“Not your fault.” He stabs a button on the wall panel.

We stand there staring at the dead mice, and I try not to care.

A minute later, footsteps knock out a determined beat on the floor. Then the big guy appears. This worries me because George P. Pope never comes down here. I’ve never met him, but his grinning face greets me in the lobby every morning. Choose Pope Pharmaceuticals, he says on the screen, with a smile that’s supposed to be reassuring, fatherly. Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family. Without it he appears vulpine. Perhaps he really is larger than life, or maybe he’s a physically huge man. I can’t gauge his real size. Either way, we all shrink back to make him fit, even the woman who clings to his heels. She’s a blonde so pale, she blends and swirls until she’s one with her crisp lab coat.

There are rumors about Pope, of hookers and blow and of a wife no one has ever seen or met. Some say she’s a scientist and he keeps her locked away creating the drugs that Pope Pharmaceuticals stockholders love so much. Some say she’s a great beauty who spends her days prowling the streets of Europe for the latest fashions. One thing they all agree on is that no one here has ever seen her.

Jorge and I are invisible for now.

“What have we got?” he snaps at Schultz.

“Dead mice.”

“What, all of them?” Planting himself in front of the cages, he tests Mike’s hypothesis and discovers it holds true. The mice are all dead. Not sleeping. Not faking. Then he realizes Jorge and I exist.

“One of you found them?”

“Me,” I say.

“And you are?”

“Zoe Marshall.”

He weighs my response and finds it lacking. “Did you do anything different in your routine?”

“No.” I run down the list of things to do, which never varies.

“Any new cleaning products?”

I open my mouth to answer, but Jorge leaps in wearing a brown nose.

“No, sir. Same old, same old.”

Pope waits and I know it’s me he wants to speak.

“We’ve been using the same products since I began working here,” I say.

“New perfumes, creams—has anything at all changed? Think hard.”

Only the jar. But that has nothing to do with here and a pile of dead mice.

“No,” I say.

Pope claps once, rubs his hands together as though he’s grinding this incident to dust. “Right,” he says. “Maybe it’s something we’re feeding them, then, eh?”

He strides out, shoulders straight, head up. Fists clenched. Gait absolute. The woman follows. From the bob of her hair I can tell her mouth is busy asking questions his back isn’t answering.

Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family.

Jorge follows me into the changing rooms at the end of shift. “You don’t need this job.”

I say nothing.

“My cousin coulda had it.”

I keep on ignoring him.

“I know you live in a rich-bitch apartment.”