Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

“Not mine,” he said. “Let’s start with you in the shower. You ready?”

She was not ready. She slipped back into her underwear and told him it was over.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I want the tape,” she said. “From the beach.”

“I erased it. I always tape over them.”

She left him half naked in the bathroom. Later she wondered if she might have gotten the tape from him then if she’d only been a little bit more persistent. She thought about it constantly. At work, ringing people up, she lost track of the numbers. She spilled a box of rainbow sprinkles, and what should have been a ten-minute cleanup took her almost thirty.

“You’ve got to get the tape back,” her friends said. “What if he puts it online?”

Online! She started visiting pornography sites, just in case. There were so many sites, so many categories of sex. She couldn’t believe all the categories: Mature, POV, MILF, Amateur, Ex-Girlfriend. How might Wynn have categorized her?

She called him and demanded the tape.

“I already told you,” he said. “It doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I’ll call the cops.”

“Listen, if I had it, I’d give it to you, but I don’t. You can’t just call me like this. I’m at work.”

She imagined a locked desk drawer in his home study, a hundred tapes, each with a label, her name on one of them, the date, the location, the positions, the noises made, all of it charted out and diagrammed.

This was her situation to fix. Wynn kept a key hidden under a rock on the back porch. She remembered that. All she had to do was wait for the right day, the right moment…

• • •

“And so you think he has the tape here,” Brooks says. “Somewhere in this house? And that’s why we broke in?”

She nods.

“You could have just told me earlier,” he says.

“You would have judged me.”

“Sure, but only a little.”

“Would you have gone along with it? If you’d known we were breaking into someone’s house?”

“No, of course not,” he says. “I would have waited in the car.”

She smiles at him, and he is relieved to see that it’s a real smile, without a trace of pity. “So where is Wynn now?” he asks. “How much time do we have?”

“A few hours, maybe. They drove up to Chapel Hill for the day. His son’s looking at colleges.” She knows this because Wynn shares so much of his life online. When she was with him, he was always typing something into his phone.

“If I had a sex tape, I don’t think I’d keep it in the house for my wife to find.”

“You don’t know Wynn.”

The dogs have stopped barking. They sit patiently at the foot of the fridge. Brooks’s ankle throbs. He doesn’t know what to do next. If only he could curl up on top of the fridge and take a nap. But the dogs will never give up. They are trained to attack intruders, and that’s exactly what he and his sister are: intruders. Brooks has broken into someone’s home. He needs a brick. Where’s his brick? Give him a brick.

Brooks jumps — not over the dogs and toward the door but to their left. He lands on both feet and sprints back down the hall. The dogs follow. He’s the distraction, the bait. “Find it!” he yells back to Mary. He passes the pantry. Ahead of him is the grandfather clock. A blue Oriental rug shifts sideways as he turns left at the end of the hall. He runs up a wide staircase, hand on the rail, and at the top he sees that there are doors, three of them. They look the same. It’s like a terrible game show. He grabs the knob of the middle door, but his fingers won’t grip right. “Some things will get better and others won’t,” Dr. Groom says, and Brooks will have to accept that.

But it’s not his fingers, he realizes. The door is locked. He slings his shoulder into it with all his weight. Thankfully the lock is cheap and the door pops open.

Closing it behind him, he finds himself in a room with hot pink walls decorated with gruesome movie posters. A stereo and a television barely fit on a small white desk beneath the window. In the dead gray television screen Brooks can see his own warped reflection staring back: his terrible haircut, his skeletal face. Overhead the ceiling fan spins. The bedspread moves.

Moves? A tiny wiggle at the corner of his vision. An almost imperceptible change in the arrangement of wrinkles in the blanket. Like a scene from a horror movie.

In the months after the accident Brooks experienced what he now knows were mild hallucinations. At the hospital he became temporarily convinced that a family of goats had taken up residence under his bed. They had gray coats and wet black eyes, and at night they came out to lap water from the toilet. If Brooks called for help, the goats would scatter in all directions. They would duck for cover and hide. Dr. Groom explained that Brooks could no longer implicitly trust everything he saw and heard. What Brooks needed, he said, was a healthy dose of skepticism. If goats were ransacking his room, he was supposed to remember that it would be very tricky for a goat to somehow get past the hospital front desk and take the elevator to the third floor. If the coat rack asked him for a grilled cheese, Brooks needed to remind himself that coat racks did not typically require human food, especially not grilled cheeses. If the bedspread sprang to life…

He steps toward the bed. There are pillows piled at the head and foot. In the middle, under the bedspread, is a person-sized lump. He watches it closely. It might be rising and falling, but then again—

“Who’s under there?” he asks.

The lump is very still.

“I’m trying to leave,” he says. “So don’t be afraid. All of this was a big mistake. Us being here, I mean. We know your dad. We got trapped. By your dogs.”

The lump doesn’t move.

“I’m Brooks. I’m not sure if you’re actually under there. Maybe I’m talking to nothing. I can get a little confused. I haven’t always been this way.” He steps toward the desk. “I’m moving your desk so I can go out the window. Your dogs want to eat me. So I’m going out the window. Sorry.” An apology to a ghost.

He slides the desk toward the closet, everything on it rattling. A water glass topples over and the liquid rolls. He grabs a soccer sock off the floor and sops it up before it touches a closed laptop covered in pink monkey stickers. “I spilled some water,” he says, “and I had to use one of your socks. Sorry. Your laptop is fine, I think.” He gets the window open and pops out the screen, which lands below in some holly bushes. He sticks one leg out and straddles the sill. It’s a long way down but not so far that he will necessarily break a bone. Still, this is probably going to hurt.

“Ba baboon,” the lump says.

“I’m sorry?”

“Say that to the dogs and they won’t attack you.”

“So you’re really under there?”

The lump doesn’t answer.

“Thank you. That’s very kind. I’m Brooks.”

“Yeah, you said that already.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be off with your family or something?”

“I got out of it. Please go now.”

“I hope you’re not just in my head,” he says, and goes to the door. “Because that would mean ba baboon is total nonsense, and I’m about to get bitten again.” The lump doesn’t answer. He’s about to turn the knob but stops. He walks back over to the bed. “By the way, just in case this ever happens again—”

“God. Why haven’t you left yet?”

“I will. I’m about to. But next time this happens, you should really consider calling the police — or at least your parents.”

The lump is quiet.

“Just an idea,” Brooks adds.

The lump sits up fast, the bedspread transformed into a mountain. “Look, my mom, like, stole my cell, all right? I told you what to say, now go. Just get out of here.”