Rainey Royal

by Dylan Landis

  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.

  “You’ve stolen two laboratory animals,” says Leah. She can’t move. She feels Rainey tuck in one last strand of hair.

  “Truth or lie. Remember that cape I wore in high school? I still have it.” Rainey steps back. Leah does remember; she remembers even the double line of stitching on the hem, and how the hem sailed out behind Rainey’s boots and flapped back to kiss them. “I stole it,” says Rainey. “From a stranger. It was the worst thing I ever did.”

  “That’s the worst thing you ever did?”

  Leah deposits Miss Mouse back in her drawer, looks at the next mouse, and hears a tiny whimper that turns out to be her.

  “Do a mouse and tell me a truth,” says Rainey. “Or don’t do a mouse. This is a terrible job. You need to quit.”

  Leah gently plunks Experimental No. 3 on the scale. He scurries and sniffs. “I once locked myself in the prep room,” she says, “and inhaled the ether.”

  “You? Interesting,” says Rainey.

  Leah doesn’t reveal the rest: that in a brief suspended state she saw her father, dressed in bizarrely mismatched clothes, in a corner of the room. He seemed not to see her. He looked around as if watching tiny planets spin in the air, and she thought about the days in ninth grade she’d go from school to the hospital and then home, where she’d clean her room from a chart she made up, so that her furniture smelled of lemon oil and renewal. She was thirteen years old, and she couldn’t stop him from dying, but she could vacuum her rug and polish her desk and line her books up like teeth. She remembered all that, sprawled on the floor.

  She’s been afraid to commune with the ether since, but she wants to see her dad.

  Leah strokes No. 3, who looks over the edge of the scale and ponders the cart. There’s not one place to slip in a needle.

  “It’s over, right?” Rainey has taken the mice out of her pocket and strokes them, watching her.

  Leah has seven more experimentals, plus the ten controls, who get plain alcohol.

  “You mean quit?” says Leah. She looks Rainey in the eye for about five seconds, then has to cut away. She did everything Rainey told her all through high school. Surely she is stronger now. “I can’t screw up this way,” she says.

  “So don’t screw up this way,” says Rainey. “Screw up by setting them free.”

  LATELY LEAH’S BEEN DREAMING of torrential rain. One dream she’s under a narrow, dripping awning, sheltered by the thrilling technicality of a single inch. Another she stands behind a waterfall, stares through the downpour, dry by the grace of a few degrees.

  You can always come work with me, darling, her mother said. You have an eye.

  She’s been tempted to ask what her mother thinks all this water means. Helen Levinson has theories, sometimes. But Leah would have to explain how good it feels, this thin sliver of safety. She’d have to explain her strange place in this recurring wet dream: arms outstretched, ready to leap.

  WITHOUT WARNING RAINEY SETS her two mice on the scale. Suddenly a cluster of identical white mice—faintly yellowed to be exact, pink of tail and inner ear—turn circles around each other. It only takes one second to lose track of Experimental No. 3, and that is the second in which Leah looks at Rainey in shock.

  “You just ruined an eight-week scientific experiment.”

  “Aren’t you relieved?”

  “You don’t understand,” says Leah, breathless. “They’ll make me sacrifice those mice.” She’s never been cal
led upon to kill a mouse. Ether overdose, she’d probably use. She’s heard of techs who break the tiny spines with a pencil.

  “Sacrifice? To the science gods?”

  THEY WALK WEST TO Central Park, mice sliding and scrabbling in a cardboard box that once held ether cans.

  “Third truth or lie,” says Rainey.

  “No more. I just stole twenty mice.”

  “Twenty-two. And you freed yourself,” says Rainey. “Here’s what I think. I think the ether and Tina are true. I think we’ll end up at your place drinking the Jack Daniel’s I have in my pack.”

  “Oh,” says Leah, and flushes.

  “All true? Am I right?”

  Leah nods. She should have lied. She should make some excuse about her place being a mess; that could be her first lie. She’s never had company yet—she wears her life too tight. Her favored company tends to be her own chattery, sardonic mind.

  They approach the park under a brilliant afternoon sun. Tree leaves glitter when they shiver. Rainey’s hair stirs and falls in the breeze. “You haven’t guessed mine,” she says.

  “Both lies,” says Leah. “I think you cheated.”

  “Both true.”

  “No,” says Leah. “Stealing a cape is not the worst thing you ever did.”

  “It is at gunpoint,” says Rainey. “You could turn me in, and I’d go to prison.”

  Leah inhales sharply but says nothing. She steps more lightly on the concrete as if Rainey’s truths were made of glass and she were trying not to crush them. She doesn’t ask questions—she finds she likes the not-knowing and the yearning sensation that goes with it. They enter the park and follow a curving path. After a while they walk on the grass and stop at a spot with bushes and a bit of distance from people out enjoying the day.

  “This is your baby,” Rainey says.

  Tonight the mice will be picked off by cats and owls. Still, they have today. Leah opens the flaps and tips the carton. Mice tumble out. Some have dark stains on their ivory fur from sliding around in their pellets. Their noses go right to work, vacuuming. It’s like they can’t wait to learn about the world. Leah thinks she knows how they feel.

  Earth, the noses report. Grass, moisture, squirrels, dogs. God, freedom, ants.

  “We’ll sell a couple of shirts,” says Rainey, as if she’s just thought of it, “and then we’ll go to your place.”

  She kneels to watch the mice, and Leah squats to do the same. They are close enough for Rainey to lean on Leah briefly, close enough for Leah to panic. Close enough for Rainey, possibly detecting the shift, to straighten. Far enough for Leah to think: Come back.

  This is going to be complicated, she thinks.

  The mice don’t disappear at once; they have nothing to run from; they are gentled. They percolate across the grass, edge under a nearby bush, flicker slowly away. There is so much for them to sniff, and the directions they take are so random. Rainey doesn’t stir. After a while Leah’s ankles ache from crouching.

  They wait without moving till the last tail blinks out of sight.

  ALL THEY HAD TOGETHER

  At Eighty-Ninth Rainey waits as Leah presses her nose to Schatzi’s window and sighs over three tall Styrofoam cakes.

  They are wedding cakes, frosted with plaster, for all Rainey knows, and a fine, gray dust. The center cake is governed by a plastic bride. “I could eat the whole thing,” says Leah. The plastic bride is shorter than her groom, who holds her hand. Leah is nearly six feet tall, and Rainey wonders if she’s ever held anyone’s hand.

  Sweetheart, the plastic groom will say, and the word will hum like a transformer. The plastic bride will take off her dress and lay it on the neighboring cake.

  “If you want one, get one,” says Rainey.

  “You can’t just buy a wedding cake,” says Leah.

  Three weeks have passed. No police ever came. Leah works in a rat lab way uptown now, at Columbia Pres, where they took her references on faith. She and Rainey are wandering back in a relentless drizzle from the museum to Leah’s sublet.

  Rainey’s cigarette hisses at the sidewalk and drowns. “You can do anything you want,” she says, and strides into the bakery.

  Inside, a shopping cart drips on the terrazzo floor. Empty shelves ache for their lost loaves: it’s almost closing. The counterwoman moves slowly. Box, bialys, Danish, string.

  “How much is a wedding cake?” says Rainey.

  “Oh, my God,” says Leah. “I can’t believe—”

  “Such rain,” says the counterwoman, pulling a green pad from her smock. Her hair is teased. She and Rainey will never understand each other; this is clearly a woman who keeps a plastic bonnet in her purse. “How many?”

  “One,” says Leah. She bounces up and down on the tips of her toes.

  “How many people.”

  “Not many,” says Rainey. “The smallest you have. But three tiers.”

  The woman traces a cake in the air. “Four inch, eight inch, twelve,” she says, and glances past Leah at the streaming window. “Seventy-five dollars.”

  Rainey glances at Leah, who is biting her lip. “Do it,” she says.

  “Oh, my God,” says Leah. “Seventy-five dollars for a cake. It’s a sin.”

  “For filling,” says the counterwoman, “you want raspberry, buttercream, ganache—”

  “Buttercream,” says Leah, with feeling. “And smooth fondant icing.”

  “Yeah, and we have this one request,” says Rainey. “Instead of flowers—” Many words can be uttered in a bakery, but mouse turns out not to be one of them. “The bride is a scientist. She works with mice. Can you do mice?”

  “Not on wedding cake.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because five years old,” says the woman, “a girl starts dreaming about her wedding, she wants flowers, not mice.”

  Rainey tugs the woman’s pad across the thick glass counter and draws a Beatrix Potter creature. “Look,” she says, pushing the pad back, “it’s cute.”

  “I know what looks like a mouse,” says the woman. “I have traps. I put day-old bread, the mouse sniffs—” She scurries two fingers across the glass, then slams her palm down.

  So, flowers. Rainey asks to have it for the weekend. The woman looks at her as if the cake might be used for some practical joke. “Tina will love this,” Rainey says. Leah says nothing, but Rainey sees her tap the glass case. Three left, three right. Rainey puts her hand between Leah’s shoulder blades and rubs her on the back.

  THE WEDDING CAKE, DELIVERED Saturday to Leah’s East Eighty-Third Street studio, is half illusion. The tiers pretend to rest gently on one another, but no. They’re set on cardboard circles, which are held up by tongue depressors, clipped and sunk like rebar into the layer below.

  Then there is the lie of abundance. “A slice of wedding cake is one inch wide and two inches deep,” says the instruction sheet. No wonder the thing feeds eighty.

  “What time will you be there?” Tina had said, and the question struck Rainey as oddly precise, as if Rainey’s arrival from West Tenth Street was of more interest than the cake’s.

  Around two, Rainey said. The cake’s coming at three. And Tina said, “I’ll come around four,” and Rainey had a thought so crazy it seemed almost sane: She’s going to see Howard when she knows I’ll be out. But that was ridiculous. All they had together were a few clarinet lessons and some staring contests.

  While the baker’s apprentice sets the three layers on the table, Rainey takes the slicing diagrams from Leah and studies them. They look like clocks.

  “One inch?” says Leah. “Is this for real?” But the baker’s apprentice isn’t listening. He floats a circle of parchment onto the largest tier. Then he lifts tier 2 by its cardboard underbelly and deposits it on the parchment. The intercom buzzes. The baker’s apprentice starts frosting the seams, squeezing ribbons of buttercream from a fabric sack.

  Rainey lets Tina in. “Hey,” says Tina. She has no trouble meeting Rainey’s eyes. That’s a good s
ign, right? Rainey sniffs. Tina smells faintly like sandalwood. She often does. Stop it, thinks Rainey. Half the people you know smell like sandalwood.

  Tina edges up to the table. She nods at Leah—no smile—and Rainey sees she is going to have to work at this, she is going to have to force this friendship. Tina sets an anatomy book unnervingly close to the cake. She never goes anywhere without a textbook; she’ll study standing up in the subway. It drives Rainey crazy; she’d rather talk.

  Tina watches the baker’s apprentice squeezing out frosting and says, “Can I try?”

  He ignores her. “Tina,” says Leah. “Don’t.”

  “I’ve got surgeon’s hands,” says Tina. “I’m not going to ruin your cake.”

  “She’s not going to ruin your cake because she’s not going to do it,” says Rainey.

  Man and buttercream remain in deep communion. Finally he says, “There’s a bit of an art to it. If I wasn’t free, they’d stake the cake and deliver it whole.”

  “ ‘Stake the cake’?” says Leah.

  “For stability,” he says. “Sharpen a dowel and hammer it down the middle.”

  “Hah,” says Tina. “Like killing a vampire.”

  The baker’s apprentice blanches. “You haven’t said you like it.”

  It’s both effusive and restrained, this wedding cake, strewn with café-au-lait roses. Rainey still wishes she’d managed mice.

  “I love it,” says Leah. “You should sign it.”

  He looks around her bare-walled studio. “Where’s your wedding?”

  “She came to her senses,” says Rainey lightly. “Where’s your cloche?”

  He touches his uncovered hair.

  “Take it apart first,” he says. “Eat from the bottom, not the top.”

  As soon as he leaves, Tina picks up the knife that Leah has set on the windowsill.