Joshua Mohr - Fight Song

“I turned your colleague into a rodent, Bob. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were antagonizing me by flaking on my show. I’m a big deal, man. I’m famous. I have over three thousand fans on Facebook. I’m a true miracle worker and you spit in the face of me and my show’s free tickets? Nobody treats me like I’m some walking colostomy bag and gets away with it. I mean, I have a statue of myself in my backyard.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Oh, sure, oh, yeah, my wife sought the solace she needed in the arms of another man and also two women she met in hotel bars because I failed to satisfy her sexually. But also she failed me in the realm of communication, right? I never knew that she wasn’t sexually satisfied or I would have done something about it. I am a sorcerer. I could have made her clit grow to the size of a pie tin. I could have pleased her in ways she’s never even pondered, but again, I didn’t know there was a problem. The point is that the communication broke down. And now, me and you, our communication is faltering. I give you free tickets. I excuse your kidnapping. I wipe the slate clean. And you can’t even live up to your end of the agreement and come to the show?”

“So you’re wasted,” Coffen says.

“I’m so drunk that it should be called something else. I’m ‘floff-mongered.’ Float that new bit of slang around and see if it catches on.”

“Where are you anyway?”

“I’m in my shame-cave.”

“Your what?”

“This place I go when I need to be alone with my self-sympathy,” he says. “When my floff-mongering is front and center.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Tonight’s show was a disaster. I had to flee the scene as a fugitive. I could have used a friendly face in the audience, Bob. Shit went terribly wrong. It was a new illusion. I made everybody’s chair fly about fifteen feet in the air. I told them to hold on tight. I told them there was no real danger. As long as they stayed steadied, they’d only be floating there, say, thirty seconds or so before I let them back down. But then one woman puked. Then another did. And that made them all wobbly and woozy and soon one fell off and then another and pretty soon everyone was falling from the sky and landing on the carpet in screaming heaps. I kept saying to them, ‘You are safe, but you are vulnerable. That’s the balancing act. That’s what the flying-chair metaphor represents.’ But it was too late. They were already starting to fall.”

“Did anyone get hurt?”

“Lots of them got hurt,” Björn says.

“And you left?”

“Hell yeah, I left. It was a bloodbath. I split out the fire exit once they all started plummeting.”

“I’m glad we weren’t there, or Jane and I would have fallen, too.”

“Or maybe it would have gone as expected had you been there to cheer me on, man. Even magicians need friends.”

“Are you blaming me?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“How does that make any sense?”

Bob hears a noise on Björn’s end of the phone that sounds like a can opening, then a desperate sip being taken: “In my mind’s eye,” Björn says, “the floating-chair illusion made perfect sense. Everyone would sit, perched high and mighty, and I’d give an inspiring speech about the travails of monogamy, learning to balance all the chaos and unpredictability of life. But once the first lady fell, it was a total shit show.”

“What did you think was going to happen?”

“I thought maybe two or three people would fall, total. Gotta crack a couple eggs to make an omelet, as the kids say. Now I need to get out of this town ASAP.”

“Not too ASAP,” Coffen says. “You have to turn Schumann back.”

“Oh, do I have to turn back your mousy associate?” he yells. “Is that what Björn has to do?”

“Can we meet first thing tomorrow — me, you, and Schumann? Please? Let’s talk about our options.”

“I haven’t totally decided whether I even want to turn him back. He kidnapped me. Let’s not forget that piece of the puzzle.”

“Well, that’s what we should talk about. Let me plead his case to you.”

“Fine, plead his case. Now I need to focus on my shame-cave. I need to sulk. Need to … Wait, what’s my new slang again?”

“Floff-monger.”

“Yes, I need some serious floff-mongering.”

Björn hangs up and Bob ponders magic. At first, it had seemed so clear that Schumann was not the mouse, but the longer this is going on, Coffen actually wants it to be true — wants to believe in Björn’s powers. Why not? Bob writes code, breathes code. He lives like a character in the worst video game of all time: slowly fizzling out, level by level, until there’s nothing left except a pile of fluorescent orange that needs to be swept up. If there’s some magic out there that can help him avoid the dust pan, well, it sure sounds good right about now.

When last Coffen reviewed the hallowed tenets of babysitting, it was his understanding that the custody of said baby in the said sitter’s stead was a temporary arrangement. As in, thanks, Tilda, for taking wee mousy Schumann off Coffen’s hands for a few hours, but he’s now come to reclaim the great rodent booty that is Bob’s neighbor.

However, a certain Taco Shed employee doesn’t want to cough him up.

“His family gets home soon,” Coffen says to Tilda, standing in the doorway of her apartment early the following morning and hoping that this idea contains the cocktail of persuasion. “We’ve got to get him back to his life.”

It’s approximately 6:30 AM on Monday morning. The mouse runs around Tilda’s cupped hands. “I think he’s happy. We were up all night together; we bonded in a very spiritual way. He has a look in his eyes that tells me he’d like to stay like this forever. Honestly, this might be the kind of change that he truly wanted.”

“Can I please have him back?”

“He might be the perfect man for me,” Tilda says.

“He’s not a man.”

“Sure he is, but he’s also so small he can’t hurt me, and that’s what I’ve always wanted.”

Schumann makes some chirpy, mousy noises and is clearly shaking his wee head to the contrary of her statements.

“He has a wife and kid,” Coffen says.

“He told me all about them way back when he first started being one of my intercom clients. And he told me a lot after we did it in the SUV. Honestly, I don’t think he’d miss too much sleep over never seeing them again.”

“He’s a good father.”

“But maybe he’d make a better mouse, at least for the foreseeable future, and trust me: I’ll take incredible care of him.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“He’s the perfect pet,” she says.

Coffen wants to say something supportive, something about how extraordinary she is and that she deserves a partner of the same species. Sure, she’s had a stable of bad relationships. Yes, life can be hard. No, she’s not perfect. But she can’t wrap her heart in muscles, like a fragile trinket in bubble wrap and stop trying to find somebody who might make her happy. Those are all the things Coffen hopes to convey, and it comes out like this: “You don’t need a mouse man, Tilda.”

“What’s wrong with a mouse man?”

“How will you two ever dance together?”

“That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

“You deserve a full-blown human being.”

“Not sure I want one of those.”

Schumann now stands solely on his hind legs and is shaking his wee head.

“But look at how he’s shaking his head,” Coffen offers up.

“His head’s not moving.”

“I can see him shaking it.”