Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

“Mouse shit!” Hugh cried out. “We’ve got mouse shit in our sink!” He stared intently at it as if it would move. “They’re taking over.”

  Rachel turned away from the refrigerator. “I’m glad you can find some humor in it—are you going to scoop it up or what?”

  “It’s probably good fertilizer. Maybe Penny Dreadful would like it for her mulch pile.” He had taken to calling their downstairs tenant Penny Dreadful, and her cat Baby Dreadful.

  “Hugh, think about it: some mouse is climbing around our sink and stove and cutting board. Oh, gross, and I just made a sandwich over there. We’ve got to call the exterminator or something before we die of bubonic plague.”

  “You ate a mouse-shit sandwich?”

  “Disgusting. Hold the mayo. I feel like we should call the health department to close us down. You’re supposed to get some poison and traps. That’s your job, right?”

  “You don’t really want to kill Mickey or Minnie, do you?”

  “Even Gus-Gus and Mighty Mouse. The three blind mice, too. I don’t care. This is getting sickening.”

  Hugh began squeaking. He wrinkled his nose and wiggled his ears. He stepped over to her, his chin pressed down against his neck making him look remarkably chinless, his eyes wide. Squeak!

  “Oh, Hugh, really.” Rachel clucked her tongue but could not help smiling.

  “How’s about a mouse fuck?” His voice was a high-pitched falsetto.

  “Hugh.”

  “Well, we haven’t really, you know, had our inaugural…fuck.”

  “It’s Tuesday afternoon and I have to be back in the office in twenty minutes.”

  “Squeak!”

  “That is the least erotic sound I have ever heard a man or mouse make.”

  “You be Minnie and I’ll be Mickey.”

  “And we’ll both end up looking Goofy. Blasphemy.”

  “How do you think mice do it, anyway?”

  “Something I can go my whole life without ever finding out. And I hope our mice don’t do much of it around here. Now Hugh, stop that—I am not about to…right here.”

  “So don’t.”

  She felt his hand climbing up the side of her thigh, tickling the light hair that she’d missed shaving, and then pulling aside her hose. “You’ll run them, Hugh.” But she let him continue and he did run them, tucking his fingers up between the elastic. Her breathing was getting heavy. Whenever they made love she always felt as if they were suddenly in some dark closet, two children naked together playing doctor. It made her feel happy and strong, to say nothing of the intense pleasure she felt and the thought that this was something so right and natural, a man making love to a woman, the two bodies becoming one monstrous but natural body, normal life… his lips, rough and heavy, never half as hungry as hers seemed—she was embarrassed by these sudden explosions of sexual heat. Her body would go out of control and she would do things with him that she would later feel were not things that Rachel Adair, lawyer and daughter of Mike and Dorothy Brennan, would normally be responsible for. Sometimes when they made love, in the dark closet of her mind, she imagined there were five of him, five Hughs stroking her, licking her, holding her, kissing her, pulling her against their moist, rutting bodies.

  Rachel clutched the edge of her skirt up around her waist, as Hugh, kissing her, licking her neck, pressing his mouth up behind her ear lobe, inched her pantyhose down towards her knees. She reached with her hand towards his crotch and just as she touched the rough denim of his 501 Levi’s, pressing her fingernails in between the buttons, about to pop them open, Hugh drew back. Away from her.

  “God,” he said.

  Her eyes came back into focus. The heat brushed past both of them, dissipating into the atmosphere. “Mmm?”

  “I just saw our mouse run behind the stove—it kind of unnerved me.”

  Rachel let the edges of her skirt fall back into place, and Hugh withdrew his hand from between her legs. He reached down and pulled her hose back up. He seemed very workmanlike about it. He reached up and kissed her nose, biting slightly. “Nose shark.”

  She looked at him, disoriented. “We’ve got to have our inaugural, um, you know…”

  “Right now I think I should try to get that mouse out of here—do you know where the broom is, Scout?”

  But she knew enough not to insist on returning to a potential fifteen minutes of animal lust—she didn’t really want to work up a sweat, anyway, the humidity would take care of that.

  Rachel also knew that Hugh had lost his erection.

  And not when he’d seen the mouse.

  He’d lost it when she’d touched him there.

  You don’t go around mentioning to the man you love that he can’t get it up. Let’s Pretend you saw the invader mouse, too, and make a thing of it, but don’t make a big deal out of temporary impotence. She could count on her fingers the number of times they’d made love since Hugh had been unemployed. Maybe five times in five months. Only once in the past six weeks. Either she was too tired or he fell asleep early, or he was reading a really good book in bed, or she said something to make him angry, or there was a mouse running loose behind the stove. It had gotten to a point in the evenings when Rachel, coming home from a mountain of work and a full day in court, didn’t even consider sex an option worth pursuing.

  Hugh was bending over, trying to look behind the stove, when Rachel said, “When you find our mouse, be sure and ask him how mice do it. And take notes, okay?”

  This is as bitchy as I get.

  4.

  People passed in and out of her office all day, but they might as well have been pigeons fluttering through one of the city’s parks: Rachel felt isolated at work, isolated at home, and she found that she was losing her ability to concentrate on the things that had to get done. She’d been through something like this with the miscarriage. She’d gone to a therapist, who told her this inability to concentrate on the work at hand was a sign of depression, perhaps a very severe depression. The therapist suggested she see a doctor for a complete examination, and suddenly, when she was twenty-seven, Rachel Adair felt like she’d turned into Frances Farmer. She imagined that once she went to a psychiatrist, she’d be put in a hospital, they’d find out awful things about her mind, shave her head, force her into hot baths—followed, perhaps, by shock treatment and a tidy lobotomy. Just stick that old ice pick up under the eyelids and everything will be hunky-dory. If only it were that easy. Then one day, just as suddenly, this sort of anxiety was gone. The world seemed different to her. You lose a baby—but not a baby, just a small subdividing sphere, a microscopic amoeba like thing, no heartbeat, something the size of a pea that was formed when one of those tadpole sperm collided with an ovum—you lose a baby and you get slightly depressed. Normal life, Scout, a blessing in disguise. You don’t concentrate too well at work, so, hell, you take a few weeks off work (unstructured time, the therapist called it) and you maybe fall in love with the man you married—you try to concentrate on a little nurturing of him because he really needs it—you help with his unemployment anxiety, with his “I didn’t pass the D.C. bar” anxiety. You listen to your mom’s advice on How To Make A Man Happy. ‘Cause weren’t mom and dad happy? Even when they fought like tigers, weren’t they happy? And wouldn’t it make daddy proud, if he were alive, to know she was working on her marriage?

  How come when Hugh and I fight I always feel like I’m the bitch goddess of Northwest Washington, propelled on by one of those delightful mood swings that the therapist had mentioned way back in the spring?

  But now, in summer, the humidity, the monoxide-filtered air of the Washington streets, the rush, the push, the phone calls—zillions of phone calls to and from bitching clients— Rachel felt herself slipping again. At least she was conscious of slipping, and she couldn’t blame it on a miscarriage, nothing as understandable as that. According to her calendar, she would be eight months pregnant if she hadn’t lost her little sphere.

  Could she blame her bad feelings on Hugh?
>
  Could she say Let’s Pretend that it was Hugh’s fault that she was slipping into a lethargy, a depression, a deep depression, a deep-shit depression?

  Let’s Pretend.

  There is no Hugh Adair.

  I can’t, I can’t. I love Hugh. We’ve got our share of problems and right now it seems awful. We’ve gotten up to our necks in it—I hate my job, Hugh has no job, he’s probably ordering a drink right now, and I’m a witch to think that, maybe he’s in an interview right now, or dropping an application off, or worrying about the next bar exam. But it’s a hot summer, and we have more than most couples our age—we’re healthy, we own our own home. I’ve got a well-paying job.

  As mom would say. Normal Life.

  As daddy would say, it all comes out in the wash.

  She remembered—no, she concentrated on what she loved about Hugh, and none of it had to do with his ability to find work. She loved his smile, she loved the way she felt when they cuddled together in bed at night, she even loved him when he was down and sad, looking so much like a little boy, the heavy shock of blond hair falling down across his forehead, his blue eyes becoming large and round.

  Mom pushed daddy too hard. Rachel had seen it all the time she was growing up. Why couldn’t mom just have been satisfied with daddy the way he was? He provided well enough, and he made sure we all got good educations, and he was always there on weekends to do family things—he didn’t have to be the most ambitious or wealthiest man in the world.

  Rachel was determined not to do the same thing with Hugh. He’d come around in his own time. Not all men had to have burning ambition. Not all men had to be ridiculously goal oriented. Hugh had a law degree and one day soon she might even be jealous of his success. And proud of him. She hadn’t understood why she had passed the bar and he had not; he was bright, top of his class, she had faith in him most of the time, but he’d tied himself in knots over the exam—it was all a foreign language to him. One of the qualities that had attracted her to him during their courtship had been the fact that he seemed to take none of it seriously: Let’s Pretend, Scout, he’d say, cradling her in his arms, Let’s Pretend, I’m the daddy and you’re the mommy and I’m hammering loose nails back into the floor, I’m greasing the hinges on the doors, and you’re telling the kiddos a bedtime story and we’re all drinking hot cocoa

  But it’s time, Hugh, to take a few things seriously.

  5.

  At night, in bed, the heat rose in the house and seemed to linger in a cloud above her head; no matter how she adjusted the thermostat, it was warm in the bedroom. Hugh set up a small fan in the doorway, which seemed to do nothing more than make an annoying whirring noise. He’d set mousetraps up in the corners of the rooms, and every now and then, she’d hear the traps clacking and she’d imagine the dead gray mouse, its head smushed beneath the wire jaw of the trap. She could never recall the moment when sleep would come to her—she felt as if she lay awake half the night, listening to the clacking of the mousetraps, Hugh’s breezy snores, and the whirring of the fan. Hugh would press up against her back in his sleep, and she would feel the damp fever of sweat along her back, tickling. The clacking mousetraps reminding her of the supposed ghost of the house, the whore Rose Draper, The Clapper, who was supposed to wander the house clapping her hands together.

  Somewhere, off where the sirens screamed down one street or another, out where the cats cried in sexual longing, she would hear a baby crying, too, and it would comfort her like nothing else and before she realized it, she would be asleep, dreaming.

  6.

  Rachel didn’t even have to wake Hugh up—he was staring up at the ceiling. “I was dreaming of bombs exploding,” he murmured.

  Clack! A mousetrap from out in the hall.

  She closed her eyes and thought about sleep again. He’ll take care of the mousetraps.

  “How many do you think we’re catching?” His breath was like steam against her shoulders; she felt him move his head against the small of her back, his hair greasy against her skin.

  She didn’t answer.

  “I’d guess in the hundreds. I better go downstairs and change the traps now that I’m up.”

  She sighed, realizing that she would not quickly get back to sleep. “I kind of feel bad for the mice.”

  “Yeah, they’ve probably been coming in here for generations.” Hugh chuckled and she felt his arm snake under her shoulder blades and curve around to stroke the skin covering her ribs; she automatically pulled her stomach in. Then his arms slithered back away from her; the bed creaked, she felt his weight shift, he was standing up.

  Clack!

  She kept her eyes closed and tried to think about sleep, although every time she was falling (she imagined sleep as a downward drifting on a feather bed, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the house spinning through a cyclone while she slept) another trap would spring somewhere downstairs or in the hall.

  She heard Hugh say, “I was sure the fan would make enough white noise to cover the sound of the traps.”

  She lay there, eyes pressed shut, a tension headache coming on, wondering what “white noise” meant—the phrase sounded foreign even though she knew in her heart of hearts what it meant, or at least she’d used that phrase before.

  And then she was at her mother’s house in Arlington, helping to can peaches—something her mother had never done in her life. If anything they’d be uncanning peaches. Her mother said, “All summer long they ripen.”

  Then her mother opened her mouth to speak and a clack! came out instead; Rachel grasped her heart, which was easy to do because she was standing there naked in her mother’s kitchen. Naked and her mother didn’t seem to care in the least.

  But it wasn’t her mother, it was Hugh, wearing her mother’s housedress, and as he turned away from the jars of peaches, he said, “I think we just got Cubby, Karen, Bobby, and Annette.”

  But she was mistaken, her vision was going in and out of focus and it wasn’t Hugh at all, but daddy, who smiled sweetly to her. His smile grew wider, a piano keyboard smile, until his teeth started bursting through his cheeks and stretching out, opening wide as he said, “Rachel, Let’s Pretend I’m the daddy and you’re the mommy and we have a whole mess of kiddos…”

  Rachel heard a gurgling noise from inside her, and she looked down at her stomach: it was growing large as if she were being pumped up with water. Her breasts were rising like twin helium balloons to compete in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; her stomach was churning like a washing machine on a full cycle; she felt tiny feet kicking her from inside. She was getting fat and heavy, swollen. Beneath her enormous breasts, another pair of breasts sprouted, and below them, another, all the way to her navel which itself stretched from side to side of her puffing belly like a mouth opening and closing with each breath. She heard a clack! from somewhere. She had the feeling that a kettle was about to boil over, and she remembered that she’d left eggs boiling in a saucepan and she had to go turn down the heat. Now the eggs were probably cracking from the soaring temperature. She realized that the boiling was going on in her stomach as her six breasts began leaking milk. Beneath the clacking and the bubbling, she heard her babies, inside her, crying—she was boiling her mess of kiddos before they even had a chance, her spheres were screaming beneath her flapping navel. Then her ears were ringing like an alarm going off, a kitchen timer, and she knew a clock! was coming, the biggest clack! she was ever going to hear, a clack! to end all clacks, like a time bomb, her biological clock was going off, a clack! that would mean—

  When Rachel’s belly exploded into a shower of streaming spheres with tiny feet, and rivers of milk spurted from her breasts, and the scream was caught way down deep in her larynx which was now exposed because the skin had ripped all the way up to her throat, she opened her eyes.

  Hugh stood, a silhouette in the hall light.

  Her own body was whole and naked and she lay atop the sweat-soaked sheet of their bed.

  “Nine are dead—n
ine mice,” he said groggily. “I think Mouseketeer roll call is over for the night.”

  Rachel closed her eyes and pretended she was asleep because she knew if she could pretend she was asleep, maybe she would be asleep.

  But she was awake most of the night, waiting for the next clack! to occur.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FEEDING THE DEAD

  1.

  Mattie Peru, her trash bags of invisibility wrapped around her face like a scarf, walked down the aisle of the grocery store—people were staring at her, someone’s little girl was even pointing at her as she passed the frozen food section, but she didn’t care. Her trash bags rustled like dead leaves underfoot, and as she lumbered down towards the L’il Ol’ Baker’s Pantry, she clutched them about her neck. She could not be invisible for this—that magic would have to be saved up now, saved for the big fight with Baron Samedi. Her thoughts were jumbled—language didn’t come easy to her anymore, not since her baby died, and words came in strings like spit into her mouth—sometimes she couldn’t control the way they leapt out, sometimes she managed to imprison them beneath her tongue.

  He’s gettin’ through, he’s crawling up and out, and this ain’t his domain. The words wanted to fly from her mouth, but she reined them in. You buy your yogurt and your frozen pizzas and your Sugar Free Gum, but you don’t keep him away, you don’t got the magic inside you, you don’t know what he comes for, you don’t know the way he turn life and death inside out and upside down and take the baby before he cries and the mama before she gives milk, and he makes the house scream with the lost and the ones that don’t know no better! But some of the words spat out from between the gaps in her teeth without her being aware of it, and the nice middle-aged lady picking out the raspberry jelly doughnuts and the crullers for her breakfast was treated to: “Getting! Crawlin’! Domain! Frozen pizzas don’t keep him away! Inside out ‘n upside down, take the baby! The house scream, no better!”