The Fate of Mice (2 page)

I remember galloping, the wind in my mane and the road hard against my hooves. Dr. Krantor says this is a false memory, that there is no possible genetic linkage between mice and horses, and I tell him that if scientists are going to equip IQ-enhanced mice with electronic vocal cords and teach them to talk, they should at least pay attention to what the mice tell them. “Mice,” Dr. Krantor tells me acidly, “did not evolve from horses,” and I ask him if he believes in reincarnation, and he glares at me and tells me that he’s a behavioral psychologist, not a theologian, and I point out that it’s pretty much the same thing. “You’ve got too much free time,” he snaps at me. “Keep this up and I’ll make you run the maze again today.” I tell him that I don’t mind the maze. The maze is fine. At least I know what I’m doing there: finding cheese as quickly as possible, which is what I’d do anyhow, anytime anyone gave me the chance. But what am I doing galloping?

“You aren’t doing anything galloping,” he tells me. “You’ve never galloped in your life. You’re a mouse.” I ask him how a mouse can remember being a horse, and he says, “It’s not a memory. Maybe it’s a dream. Maybe you got the idea from something you heard or saw somewhere. On TV.” There’s a small TV in the lab, so Dr. Krantor can watch the news, but it’s not even positioned so that I can see it easily. And I ask him how watching something on TV would make me know what it
felt
like to be a horse, and he says I
don’t
know what it feels like to be a horse, I have no idea what a horse feels like, I’m just making it up.

But I remember that road, winding ahead in moonlight, the harness pulling against my chest, the sound of wheels behind me. I remember the three other horses in harness with me, our warm breath steaming in the frosty air. And then I remember standing in a courtyard somewhere, and someone bringing water and hay. We stood there for a long time, the four of us, in our harness. I remember that, but that’s all I remember. What happened next?

Dr. Krantor came grumbling into the lab this morning, Pippa in tow. “You have to behave yourself,” he says sternly, and deposits her in a corner.

“Mommy was going to take me to the
zoo,”
she says. When I stand on my hind legs to peer through the side of the cage, I can see her pigtails flouncing. “It’s
Saturday.”

“Yes, I know that, but your mother decided she had other plans, and I have to work today.”

“She did
not
have other plans. She and Michael were going to take me to the
zoo
. You just hate Michael, Daddy!”

“Here,” he says, handing her a piece of graph paper and some colored pens. “You can draw a picture. You can draw a picture of the zoo.”

“You could have gotten a
babysitter,”
Pippa yells at him, her chubby little fists clenched against her polka-dot dress. “You’re
cheap
. A babysitter’d take me to the
zoo!”

“I’ll take you myself, Pippa.” Dr. Krantor is whining now. “In a few hours. I just have a few hours of work to do, okay?”

“Huh,”
she says. “And I bet you won’t let me watch TV, either! Well,
I’m
gonna talk to Rodney!”

Pippa calls me Rodney because she says it’s prettier than rodent, which is what Dr. Krantor calls me: The Rodent, as if in my one small body I contain the entire order of small, gnawing mammals having a single pair of upper incisors with a chisel-shaped edge. Perhaps he intends this as an honor, although to me it feels more like a burden. I am only a small white mouse, unworthy to represent all the other rodents in the world, all the rats and rabbits and squirrels, and now I have this added weight, the mystery Dr. Krantor will not acknowledge, the burden of hooves and mane.

“Rodney,” Pippa says, “Daddy’s scared I’ll like Michael better than him. If you had a baby girl mouse and you got a divorce and your daughter’s Mommy had a boyfriend, would
you
be jealous?”

“Mice neither marry nor are given in marriage,” I tell her. In point of fact, mice are non-monogamous, and in stressful situations have been known to eat their young, but this may be more than Pippa needs to know.

Pippa scowls. “If your daughter’s Mommy had a boyfriend, would you keep her from seeing your daughter
at all?”

“Sweetheart,” Dr. Krantor says, striding over to our corner of the lab and bending down, “Michael’s not a nice person.”

“Yes he is.”

“No, he’s not.”

“Yes he is! You’re just saying that because he has a picture of a naked lady on his arm! But I see naked ladies in the shower after I go swimming with Mommy! Michael doesn’t always ride his motorcycle, Daddy! He promised to take me to the zoo in his
truck!”

“Oh, Pippa,” he says, and bends down and hugs her. “I’m just trying to protect you. I know you don’t understand now. You will someday, I promise.”

“I don’t
want
to be protected,” Pippa says, stabbing the paper with Dr. Krantor’s red pen. “I want to go to the zoo with Mommy and Michael!”

“I know you do, sweetheart. I know. Draw a picture and talk to the rodent, okay? I’ll take you to the zoo just as soon as I finish here.”

Pippa, pouting, mumbles her assent and begins to draw. Dr. Krantor, who frequently vents his frustrations when he is alone in the lab, has told me about Pippa’s mother, who used to be addicted to cocaine. Supposedly she is drug-free now. Supposedly she is now fit to have joint custody of her daughter. But Michael, with his motorcycle and his naked lady, looks too much like a drug dealer to Dr. Krantor. “If anything happened to Pippa while she was with them,” he has told me, “I’d never forgive myself.”

Pippa shows me her picture: a stick-figure, wearing pigtails and a polka-dot dress, sitting in a cage. “Here’s my picture of the zoo,” she says. “Rodney, do you ever wish you could go wherever you wanted?”

“Yes,” I say. Dr. Krantor has warned me that the world is full of owls and snakes and cats and mousetraps, innumerable kinds of death. Dr. Krantor says that I should be happy to live in a cage, with food and water always available; Dr. Krantor says I should be proud of my contribution to science. I’ve told him that I’d be delighted to trade places with him — far be it from me to deny Dr. Krantor his share of luxury and prestige — but he always declines. He has responsibilities in his own world, he tells me. He has to take care of his daughter. Pippa seems to think that he takes care of her in much the same way he takes care of me.

“I’m
bored,”
she says now, pouting. “Rodney, tell me a story.”

“Sweetheart,” says Dr. Krantor, “the rodent doesn’t know any stories. He’s just a mouse. Only people tell stories.”

“But Rodney can
talk
. Rodney, do you know any stories? Tell me a story, Rodney.”

“Once upon a time,” I tell her — now where did that odd phrase come from? — “there was a mouse who remembered being a horse.”

“Oh,
goody!”
Pippa claps her hands. “Cinderella! I love that one!”

My whiskers quiver in triumph. “You do? There’s a story about a mouse who was a horse? Really?”

“Of course! Everybody knows Cinderella.”

I don’t. “How does it end, Pippa?”

“Oh, it’s a happy ending. The poor girl marries the prince.”

I remember nothing about poor girls, or about princes, either, and I can’t say I care. “But what about the horse who was a mouse, Pippa?”

She frowns, wrinkling her nose. She looks a lot like her father when she frowns. “I don’t know. It turns back into a mouse, I think. It’s not important.”

“It’s important to me, Pippa.”

“Okay,” she says, and dutifully trudges across the lab to Dr. Krantor. “Daddy, in Cinderella, what happens to the mouse that turned into a horse when it turns back into a mouse?”

I hear breaking glassware, followed by Dr. Krantor’s footsteps, and then he is standing above my cage and looking down at me. His face is oddly pale. “I don’t know, Pippa. I don’t think anyone knows. It probably got eaten by an owl or a cat or a snake. Or caught in a trap.”

“Or equipped with
IQ
boosters and a vocal synthesizer and stuck in a lab,” I tell him.

“It’s just a story,” Dr. Krantor says, but he’s frowning. “It’s an impossible story. It’s a story about magic, not about science. Pippa, sweetheart, are you ready to go to the zoo now?”

“Now look,” he tells me the next day, “it didn’t happen. It
never
happened. Stories are about things that haven’t happened. Somebody must have told you the story of Cinderella — ”

“Who?” I demand. “Who would have told me? The only people I’ve ever talked to are you and Pippa — ”

“You saw it on TV or something, I don’t know. It’s a common story. You could have heard it anywhere. Now look, rodent, you’re a very suggestible little animal and you’re suffering from false memory syndrome. That’s very common too, believe me.”

I feel my fur bristling. Very suggestible little animal, indeed!

But I don’t know how I can remember a story I’ve never heard, a story that people knew before I remembered it. And soon I start to have other memories. I remember gnawing the ropes holding a lion to a stone table; I remember frightening an elephant; I remember being blind, and running with two blind companions. I remember wearing human clothing and being in love with a bird named Margalo. Each memory is as vivid and particular as the one about being a horse. Each memory feels utterly real.

I quickly learn that Dr. Krantor doesn’t want to hear about any of this. The only thing he’s interested in is how quickly I can master successively more complicated mazes. So I talk to Pippa instead, when she comes to visit the lab. Pippa knows some of the stories: the poem about the three blind mice, the belief that elephants are afraid of mice. She doesn’t know the others, but she finds out. She asks her mother and her friends, her teachers, the school librarian, and then she reports back to me while Dr. Krantor is on the other side of the lab, tinkering with his computers and mazes.

All of my memories are from human stories. There are also a witch and a wardrobe in the story about the lion; the mouse who is in love with the bird is named Stuart. Pippa asks her mother to read her these stories, and reports that she likes them very much, although the story with the bird in it is the only one where the mouse is really important. And while that story, according to Pippa, ends with Stuart looking for his friend Margalo, the story never says whether or not he ever finds her. The fate of mice seems to be of little importance in human stories, even when the mouse is the hero.

I begin to develop a theory. Dr. Krantor believes that language makes me very good at running mazes, that with language comes the ability to remember the past and anticipate the future, to plan and strategize. To humor him, I talk to myself while I run the mazes; I pause at intersections and ask myself theatrical questions, soliloquizing about the delicious cheese to be found at the end of the ordeal, recounting fond anecdotes of cheeses past. Dr. Krantor loves this. He is writing a paper about how much better I am at the mazes than previous mice, who had IQ boosting but no vocal synthesizers, who were not able to turn their quests for cheese into narrative. Dr. Krantor’s theory is that language brings a quantum leap in the ability to solve problems.

But my theory, which I do not share with Dr. Krantor, is that human language has dragged me into the human world, into human tales about mice. I am trapped in a maze of story, and I do not know how to reach the end of it, nor what is waiting for me there. I do not know if there is cheese at the end of the maze, or an elephant, or a lion on a stone table. And I do not know how to find out.

And then I have another memory. It comes to me one day as I am running the maze.

In this memory I am a mouse named Algernon. I am an extremely smart mouse, a genius mouse; I am even smarter than I am now. I love this memory, and I run even faster than usual, my whiskers quivering. Someone has told a story about a mouse like me! There is a story about a very smart mouse, a story where a very smart mouse is important!

Pippa comes to the lab after school that day, scowling and dragging a backpack of homework with her, and when Dr. Krantor is working on his computer across the room, I tell her about Algernon. She has never heard of Algernon, but she promises to question her sources and report back to me.

The next day, when she comes to the lab, she tells me that the school librarian has heard of the Algernon story, but says that Pippa isn’t old enough to read it yet. “She wouldn’t tell me why,” Pippa says. “Maybe the mouse in the story is naked?”

“Mice are always naked,” I tell her. “Or else we’re never naked, because we always have our fur, or maybe we’re only naked when we’re born, because we’re furless then. Anyway, we don’t wear clothing, so that can’t be the reason.”

“Stuart wears clothing.”

“But the three blind mice don’t.” My personal opinion is that Stuart’s a sell-out who capitulated to human demands to wear clothing only so that he could be the hero in the story. It didn’t work, of course; the humans couldn’t be bothered to give him a happy ending, or any ending at all, whether he wore clothing or not. His bowing and scraping did him no good.

I suspect that Algernon is non-monogamous, or perhaps that he eats his young, and that this is why the librarian considers the story unsuitable for Pippa. But of course I don’t tell her this, because then her father might forbid her to speak to me altogether. I must maintain my appearance of harmlessness.

Am I a sell-out too? I don’t allow myself to examine that question too closely.

Instead I tell Pippa, “Why don’t you ask your mother to find the story and read it to you?” Since Pippa’s mother doesn’t mind letting her see naked women in the shower, she may not share the librarian’s qualms about whatever misconduct Algernon commits in the story. It makes perfect sense to me that a very smart mouse would do things of which humans would not entirely approve.

“Okay,” Pippa says. “The story’s called ‘Flowers for Algernon,’ so it must have a happy ending. Mommy gets flowers from Michael on her birthday.”