Rainey Royal (16 page)

“I don’t wear T-shirts,” says Leah.

Rainey says, “Then just
look
at one. They’re beautiful.”

It has now been twenty-four hours and twenty minutes since the last injections: not good. These things should be exact. Rainey unfurls a black top from the pack. It bears the face of a saint painted in gold, a delicate female face with full
parted lips like hers and a halo of feathers. She’s wearing one like it, with a halo made of little gold arrows. If it were on a leotard, Leah would grab it. “Twenty dollars,” says Rainey. “She’s pretty, right? She’s the patron saint of artists. Look, it’s signed.”

“It’s beautiful, but—”

“But what? She’s the patron saint against temptation, too, but that doesn’t seem to be your problem.” Rainey laughs.

Leah wants to duck; she feels as if a helicopter rotor is whirling overhead. “I don’t have any extra money.”

“Why
extra
? Don’t you ever just buy a shirt? Or a piece of art?”

Leah does not buy pieces of art. She likes her walls bare and white. Her mother has taught her all kinds of decorator facts, such as Things That Should Be White and Every Room Needs a Touch of Gold.

She steps back. “I have to work,” she says. “I’m the only person in on Sundays.”

“Well, that’s cool.” Rainey rolls the T-shirt back into her pack. “I’ll go with you. We can play Two Truths and a Lie. Then you can help me sell shirts in the park.”

“I can’t bring you to
work
.” Rainey would be repelled by her job, or she would bring mischief into the lab, or both.

“Why not? I’ll be good. I won’t touch a thing.”

Two Truths—whatever that game is, Leah’s not giving up any truth. Her truths would be mortifying, and she can’t cough up lies. “I’m not allowed to bring people,” she says.

Always been obsessed with you
. That would be true.
Wanted to be like you. Wanted to have a cruel streak and secrets and a sex life and be an artist
. Is that six nuggets of truth or one big lump? By then Rainey will know Leah is not worth her time. That, or she will attach herself to Leah in some dangerous manner.

“Really, I can’t,” says Leah.

“You’re the only person there,” says Rainey. “Who’s going to know?”

S
HE STROLLS
R
AINEY PAST
the security guard, who knows her and is busy with the
Post
, into an aging, hospital-like building. It’s so silent most Sundays, if she stands in certain spots, she can hear air molecules crash in her ears.
Brownian movement
. She loves that. No one works weekends but a handful of lab techs engaged with animals, and they are all on different floors. Monkeys, dogs, rodents, cats.

Rainey looks around as if she has never seen anything resembling a hospital.

“Look, this could make you sick.” Elevator goes so slowly. “I have to inject twenty mice who have tumors under their skin. It hurts.”

She gets a skeptical look that she takes to mean: It doesn’t hurt
you
. “Is that the first?” says Rainey. “Truth or lie?”

“It’s science,” says Leah, by which she also means, but cannot say:
It is my religion
.

She can’t tell that to her mother, either. Helen called last night from LA, where she is becoming known for her highly
textured, all-white interiors, to say: That job is sucking the life out of your life. Or words to that effect. Words like: Twenty-three—darling, don’t you want a boyfriend? You need some life in your life, darling, besides those fucking mice.

Her mother said
darling
the same way she said
fucking
: so it rang, high and sweet, like a struck glass.

“I like the mice,” Leah had said. “They’re sweet.”

T
HE DOORS GLIDE OPEN
on an old, greenish hallway. Even under fluorescent tubes, Rainey’s dark hair shimmers. Leah shortens her stride so she can watch the hair lap against Rainey’s back. The hallway leads to a glass-walled corridor where a sign reads
BREAULT ANIMAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION.
“BARF,” says Leah. Rainey looks at her sharply. “Acronym,” Leah says happily. At the corridor’s end she unlocks the prep room for her lab. It’s a surgical space, which pleases her. On the long countertop, she takes bloods once a week from mice she tucks under a bell jar with an ether-soaked rag. Above the counter, a sliver window runs the length of the room. September sun slants through the glass, and she wonders if Rainey, being an artist, appreciates the cool aesthetic of it all: steel cabinets, steel countertop, the scalpels she forgot to zip up in their case.

Rainey ignores a wheeled chair, caresses the slope of a bell jar, and sits on the counter, skirt drawn over her knees. “What do you do in here?”

“Preparations,” says Leah. “It’s a prep room.” No way will
she tell about the bloods—the way she cuts off just the tip of a mouse’s tail, the tiniest southernmost slice, and milks blood into a test tube. While remembering to breathe, lest she faint. Mouse is out cold, after its skirmish with the ether. And the tail tip, resembling a clotted pimple, gets flicked into the trash.

Nor will she tell Rainey what had her kneeling, her first day, in the hall, sinking through a lake of algae-colored tile and praying no one in a white coat would walk by. It was the sound: the click of scalpel against the countertop, at the bottom of the slice.

She gathers syringes from a cabinet and, from a lab fridge bearing a sticker that says
NO FOOD
, little bottles of halothanadol and two Baby Ruths.

“Chocolate?”

“Fat,” says Rainey, and grabs some minute amount of flesh at her waist.

It would be delicious to stare. Leah doesn’t. She arranges everything, including the Baby Ruths, symmetrically on a steel tray. “I’m on the sugar diet,” Leah says. “My theory is it keeps you wired, and you stay thin from always moving.”

“Sometimes it’s good to be still,” says Rainey. “Are you sure you want to hurt those mice?” She taps an unlit cigarette as if she means to light it. In the prep room. Near the
ether
. Leah can’t help thinking that she looks like a butterfly in an operating room—a rare and beautiful contaminant.

“Not that I’m squeamish,” says Rainey, and tucks the
cigarette behind her ear. “Tina showed me her cadaver in med school. She was dissecting the hands. It was rather beautiful. She said she felt gratitude, not disgust. If you were wondering.” Truth or lie, Leah thinks, she’s on a roll. She notices the cabinet door still open, syringes exposed. Hoping Rainey won’t take it personally, she strolls over and locks the cabinet.

Across the hall she juggles tray and keys, opens the door to the colony, and flicks on the light. The room always feels like a cruel trick. Inside, tall metal racks hold dozens of bare, transparent plastic bins that slide in and out like drawers. Each mouse lives alone in its own bin. And that’s it. No daylight, no running wheels, no little shelters, no toilet-paper tubes to scurry into, no cellmates—and mice like to play; they are social and curious. The colony breaks her heart. Some of the mice rear up in what Leah takes to be interest when she walks in. Then they drop back onto their feet, being morbidly obese—literally, genetically, bred that way.

Leah watches Rainey take it in, look around at the bins and sniff. Lab perfume, Leah calls it: fur, food, and cedar. Mice groom themselves, though it’s hard to nibble one’s own back if one weighs the mouse equivalent of three hundred pounds.

“Sorry, guys, it’s us.” Always greet the mice. Leah sets her tray down on a metal trolley, which she covets, along with a tower of plastic drawers.
In five hundred words or fewer, explain why you wish to pursue research in the biological sciences
, the grad school applications ask, and Leah wishes she could
write about lab equipment, the way its chilly elegance clicks with her brain. So exquisite, how everything in BARF is pristine and performs some precise function. Perfect job for her. Stopping a study because it hurts a few mice is not high on any lab’s list.

“They’re adorable,” says Rainey. “Are they nice?”

“They’re gentled from birth.” Leah goes to a rack of mice that are not in use and slides out a drawer. “Let her sniff you,” she says. Rainey dips a hand in the bin.

Leah plucks her first mouse, Experimental No. 1, a.k.a. Big Handsome, out of a drawer by his thin pink whip of a tail and sets him gently on a scale on the cart. She makes her obeisance: “Yea, though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” she says, picking up a syringe, “thou shalt fear no evil, for it will all be over pretty soon.”

“That sounds awful.” Rainey’s voice is a texture Leah can’t name: water, gravel, silk.

“It’s important,” says Leah. Halothanadol turns fat mice into thinner mice, that’s the general idea. If it can cure obesity, it might cure the side effects—heart disease, diabetes, like that.

“Just say you couldn’t do it.” Rainey separates out a twist of her hair and dangles it into the bin. “Two Truths and a Lie,” she says. “You first.”

“Rainey, not now.” Leah sinks a syringe through the rubber stopper of a halothanadol bottle, pulls up the plunger, holds the syringe up to look for air bubbles, and flicks it
sharply to dislodge them. Then she ejects a fine spray. Big Handsome patrols the perimeter of the scale in little spurts.

“Me first?” Rainey has the mouse in her palm now. It quivers and sniffs. It is the size and shape of a fig. She folds her arm against her chest and lets the mouse creep to her elbow. “I fell in love with an eighty-year-old man,” she says. “I was eighteen. I lived in his apartment. I wore his dead wife’s clothes, and I slept in his bed. I really loved him.”

Leah thinks: I could never make up something like that. She palpates Big Handsome, who might as well be stuffed with tiny pebbles. His tumors are hard, and everywhere.

“He didn’t believe me, though. He wouldn’t make love to me.”

Maybe he couldn’t, thinks Leah. Then she decides Rainey is too beautiful to sleep with an eighty-year-old man. She tries to lift some of the pebbled flesh and stick it lightly: subcutaneous, should be easy. Needle hits something hard under the skin. Everything is hard under Big Handsome’s skin. It’s revolting. She yanks the needle away and releases the mouse, who bolts across the cart.

“Lie,” says Leah breathlessly.

“You have to hear all three first,” says Rainey. “Or how will you know? Your turn.” To her credit, she hasn’t gotten sick. Leah looks up, drawn by a small movement, and sees Rainey open a second drawer and take out another mouse.

She tries the shot again, jabbing harder. This time some of the halothanadol gets into Big Handsome, who squeaks
and whirls, and nips her finger. Lab mice rarely bite; they’re trusting creatures. “You don’t want to keep doing that,” Rainey says. “Nasty drug.”

“It’s not the drug,” says Leah. “It’s the alcohol we dissolve it in. It kills the flesh.”

“It’ll kill your karma,” says Rainey. “Try dissolving it in water.”

“You mean saline. We can’t. It floats on top, like baby powder.”

Leah sucks on her finger and starts chanting in her head because her fingertip hurts, because she deserves it, because she doesn’t know if she should give Big Handsome another half shot, because she has nine experimentals left to inject.
Nam-myoho-renge-kyo
, she mutters. Once she read that in Buddhist labs, they don’t throw dead mice out in Hefty bags. No, they hold little mouse funerals with incense, and they chant. Send the little rodent souls off in peace. What lie can she offer that will sound like a truth? What truth can she offer that will sound like a lie?

“Go, Leah,” says Rainey. “Truth or lie.” The two mice waddle up and down her arm, sniffing each other as they pass.

Leah blurts it. “I’m still scared of Tina Dial.” She works off a piece of fingernail with her teeth and returns Big Handsome to his plastic drawer. “I know that’s dumb.”

“Yeah, well, Tina’s intense. But you ought to confront it. You ought to see her.”

“I’d rather not.” She takes out a second mouse.

“Don’t take any shit from her. It would be a good exercise.” Rainey Royal is looking at me, thinks Leah. “I’ll get you together,” says Rainey. “You’ll be friends. Tina’s fantastic. You going to damage that mouse, too?”

Leah sets Miss Mouse delicately on the cart. She calls all the boys Big Handsome and all the girls Miss Mouse. Miss Mouse whiskers the edge of her universe, the metal rim of the scale. Leah writes down her weight, grabs her, and jabs fast. Same horrible squeak. Leah lets go just before she bites. Good for her—she
should
bite. Another halfhearted shot, too. Halothanadol drips from the syringe and dampens her fur.

In five hundred words or fewer, please describe what interactions in the biological sciences, professional or personal, have affected your desire to work in the field
.

I like being alone with the mice, thinks Leah. I like the absence of interaction. Though she is jealous of Tina, going to medical school.

“This is awful,” she says.

“Don’t do it,” says Rainey. “Let’s set them free.”

“They can’t survive in the wild. They’d starve.” It’s a pointless argument. This is her
job
.

“It’s New York,” says Rainey. “There’s pizza crust everywhere.”

“They’re prey. They’d get eaten.”

“It’s an honest death. Look at you, Leah,” says Rainey. “You’re shaking.” Amazingly, she tucks both mice in the
pockets of her skirt. Then she walks up behind Leah, takes her crazy red hair in her hands, and strokes it into a ponytail. Leah can’t believe it. Talk about needing to stand still sometimes. This might be the gentlest thing she’s experienced at Rainey’s hands, and Rainey has, at various times in high school, French braided her hair, slapped her in the face, taught her to dance, and tried to instruct her in numerous things, including some inviting manner of moving the tongue across the teeth that doesn’t look like dislodging crumbs, and—there is no polite way to say it—an intimate skill involving an elongated fruit. Leah was hopeless.

“You’re a wreck,” says Rainey. “You’ll never do all those mice.” She coils the hair into a twist and tucks it into a bun.