Knockout Mouse (8 page)

We sat on the couch without talking, still naked, in the dark. Passing headlights slid up and away through the blinds. Now and then a car door slammed outside. The freeway hummed
faintly in the distance. Before me, on the coffee table, was a bowl of shrimp that I knew would taste good. Jenny certainly seemed to be enjoying hers. I speared a shrimp on my fork, but couldn’t bring it to my lips. Instead I just stared at it. This could have killed Sheila, I kept thinking. One little shrimp. It didn’t, and yet Sheila was still dead, without having eaten a single bite.

If Potrero Hill had a center,
it was Scoby’s Cafe on 18th Street. After sleeping in the next day, Jenny and I walked up three blocks to the cafe. I brought Sheila’s diary with me.

You could see the strata of history in the clientele. The newest stratum was the laid-off dot-com kids, in fleece and sandals, drinking coffee to no point, itemizing their severance deals and the hardship of living on unemployment. Just below that layer were the ones still plugged in by various gadgets on their belts, gulping coffee to propel them through a day of coding, milestones, delivery of deliverables, and the general job of monetizing the Internet. Then there were the artists, ambitiously scruffy in drab browns and greens. I’d moved in seven years ago during an earlier artist phase, just before the high-tech invasion, when rents were still sane. Actually, artist types had been moving to the neighborhood since the sixties and the days of the hippies. A few of them remained, too, hair turned the color of ash. Some Hell’s Angels still lurked down in Dogpatch, and increasingly the hill was subject to the legions of cutthroat mothers aiming strollers of Jacobs and Madisons at your knees, as they did in the more affluent Noe Valley.

Now and then you’d see the guys with lunch pails stop in for a coffee to go: men who worked in the machine shops, warehouses, and piers at the base of the hill, a reminder of the days when the neighborhood was all about longshoremen and light industry. Before that, it had been a pasture called Goat Hill, with a great view and plenty of salmon in a creek long paved over.

Jenny and I got our coffee and some banana bread and squeezed into a table in the corner. A big storefront window was behind us, and we could see the dogs and smokers who loitered on the benches outside.

The black cover of the diary stared up at us from the little square of faux-marble. I turned the book over. “Let’s start at the end.”

I flipped through unfilled pages to the last page of writing. Sheila’s tiny, neat script had a slight backward slant, as if braving a strong wind. I scanned for something—I didn’t yet know what—that would help us figure out what had happened. Acronyms jumped out—MCl24, Fc, FAb, HAMA—along with a slew of scientific terms. The page was dotted with small drawings as well, many of a Y-shaped figure that looked as though it were reaching to the sky like a Joshua tree.

“Maybe it’s a work notebook,” I said. That reminded me of the zip disks. I’d transferred them to a pocket in the case of my camera, which I’d left at Rita’s for the Monday shoot.

“No…” Jenny was peeking at the previous page. “Listen to this:
Another letter from Simon. He wants a decision. I feel I’m in a tightening vise. How can I explain to him the decision is not mine, but was written generations ago?
”

Jenny hit the page with her fist. “How do you like that? She was fucking Simon after all!”

“How could she be fucking Simon if he’s in Australia? But this does tell us that Sheila still had some interest in him, which might also explain why Fay stole the diary.”

Jenny flipped through the pages. “I don’t know. I don’t see how anyone could be threatened by this girl. Look at these.” She held up a page of inky self-portraits. The mouth was a thin, wavering line, the hair anguished wriggles, the eyes downcast dots. It made me think of how, in the medical literature I’d read, almost everyone who had experienced anaphylactic shock described a sense of impending doom as it came on.

We got some more coffee and kept scanning. Some pages were dense with writing, some contained only a few brief, melancholy entries. Drawings were sprinkled throughout. Some were strange figures that had appeared in her dreams. One was a mouse, surrounded by more of those Y shapes, and various calculations. I got the feeling she was trying to work out a scientific puzzle.

“I knew Sheila was shy,” Jenny said. “I didn’t realize she was so… sad.”

“She was just struggling, Jenny.”

“She had no self-esteem. Look at this business with Simon. Let’s say, for a minute, it’s true that he wanted to hook up with her again. It seems like she wanted to, too—but she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. Or wouldn’t decide. Or whatever.”

“There’s something else.”

Jenny waited, but I couldn’t explain it to her yet. I’d seen something at the dinner party, a pungent wit and an inquisitive mind. I saw it in the journal, too. Her hesitations came, in part, from being open minded, wanting to inspect things from every angle. The journal entries read like a series of investigations, even when she was analyzing the dark clouds of her own psyche.

No, something else had her in a twist. She appeared to be in a crisis about work. She described being transferred out of her group two weeks ago and being stuck with tedious titration tasks in the new post. It made her question her future at LifeScience and her sense of purpose in general. One of the last entries mentioned that she was going to talk with Karen about it—the same Karen, almost certainly, that Perkins had mentioned at the hospital. Sheila was very nervous about having set up that meeting, though she didn’t spell out why.

But there was more to it than work. Something else between the lines—I took the diary from Jenny and looked for an entry that might unlock it. “Here,” I said, “read this.”

Called Mother tonight. Hard to tell if she understood me. Could barely make out her words. At first her responses seemed non sequiturs, but then I began to feel she had something incredibly wise and insightful to tell me, something just on the edge of my understanding, if only I could make that one last leap of logic with her. A leap beyond my scientific mind.

Father says she is fine, no change, no need to worry. But each time I call I feel she has drifted a little farther from my reach. The calls are painful. Why do I live so far away from her? I know the answer. It’s not to do with her at all. I feel so bad for her—maybe because I fear seeing myself in her. I wonder if I’m just fleeing from my own fate? Not the one I have the illusion of shaping, but the one written in my DNA. Maybe what it comes down to is that I am afraid to face up to my own future. Mother’s helplessness, our shared destiny.

We humans owe our existence to our genes, yet they will betray us for the smallest selective advantage. We’re
built for reproduction, and once that is done, our genes could care less what happens to us as an organism. Does the world really need more babies? No, it’s our genes that do. They code for chemicals that make us want to propagate. From the gene’s point of view we’re just temporary vessels in which to ride until passed to the next vessel. The vast majority of mutations are disasters for individuals, but for genes they’re the engine of immortality. One comes along every so often that happens to improve the species’ survival and genes are all over it, like investors in a new technology. Most of the candidates are losers, but the winners win big.

Of course, genes don’t think or plan. Like all life, they plunge ahead blindly. Their self-seeking nature is theoretical. Who’s to say the theory is “right”? It’s a choice, a glass through which to view the world. I never bought into the idea until I saw it in action here, but technology does have a logic and force of its own. Look at how the people in Silicon Valley drive themselves. Eighty-hour weeks, and that’s when no deadline looms. Half of them barely exist in their bodies: their real lives take place on a screen. The other half tone and polish their bodies like sports cars.

I suppose my own work is a way of wrenching unwanted destinies away from nature. Taking them into our own hands, refusing to be cast as one of the losers. Yet even as I do this, I see how it can be twisted by others, turned to their own purposes. I see how unpredictable the effects of my actions are, as unpredictable as the effects of engineering a new molecule into an organism. As unpredictable as people are, even the ones who came into our field with the best intentions.

I know I’m only sabotaging myself, and yet I can’t stop identifying with Smidge and her lonely fate. Mine may well be the same. By the time it comes, my mother, the only one who would understand, will be long gone.

“Jeez,” Jenny said. “She really is kind of morose, don’t you think?”

“Do you know who Smidge is?” I asked.

“No, she never mentioned her. Do you have any idea what she’s talking about with this destiny stuff?”

I leaned back against the window and took a sip of coffee. “She’s trying to recast her role, rewrite her script.”

Jenny only shook her head.

Closing the book, I said, “Well, I don’t see any obvious answer to what happened to Sheila. Unless it’s in a language we don’t understand yet. I do want to find this Karen. She might be able to tell us what is really going on at LifeScience.”

» » » » »

The walk back to my flat reminded me of why I live in San Francisco. There had been a few wisps of fog in the morning, but they were gone now. The sky was brilliant autumn blue, the bay a luminous mirror. A red and white container ship slid up the Oakland channel.

As soon as we got to the top of the stairs in my flat, Jenny turned to me in alarm. “Bill, where’s my handbag? I know I didn’t take it to the cafe with me.”

“It was on the chair by the door, where you always leave it.”

We began a hunt for it, starting in the bedroom, under the tossed clothes and unread newspapers. It wasn’t in the living room, either. The camera cases by the bookshelves looked out of
order. A panic hit me. I knelt and unzipped them. No, the Aaton, the lenses, the DV, the DAT recorder, all were safely in their bags. But something had changed. The side pockets were open.

I thought for a minute. The front door had been locked. I went to the kitchen in back. The window was partially open. I was pretty sure I hadn’t left it that way. I stuck my head out. A sliding ladder leaned against the wall. The top rung rested just a couple of feet below the window sill.

“Jenny,” I called over my shoulder, “someone broke in!”

I clambered out the window and down the ladder. No one was hiding in the weedy postage stamp of a backyard. No one in the garage either. I did a pull-up on the fences on each side of the yard. No sign of the intruders. I went back up the ladder, two rungs at a time, and called the cops.

The police didn’t stay long.
They were not impressed with the extent of our loss. Yes, I admitted, the expensive camera equipment was intact. My insurance company would be spared. The only things missing were some videotapes and Jenny’s handbag. Luckily, she’d taken her wallet and cell phone with her. The cops wrote it up and told us they would be in touch. They also suggested I put the ladder away.

That much was true. Mrs. Debler, the owner, had some roof work done two years ago. The ladder had been leaning against the back fence ever since. I collapsed the ladder and stowed it in the garage. I also checked the yard again, more slowly, and this time found a few boot prints. I went back up to get a camera.

“This makes me so mad,” Jenny said. She was looking around for what else might have been taken. “All this really valuable stuff, and what do they pick? My bag.”

“You think they should have taken my livelihood—my cameras—instead?”

“You know I don’t mean it that way. It’s just that I had some personal stuff—some really good skin lotions I just bought.”

“They weren’t looking for money. This is all about Sheila. They were looking for specific items relating to her. My videocassettes,
which probably are blank. They may have thought the diary was in your handbag.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “You don’t think it was Fay?”

“Could be. Or the guy from LifeScience. Or Marion. They all knew about it. I’ll ask the neighbors if they saw anyone.”

The sound of the phone ringing startled us. I picked it up in my office. Jenny followed, hand covering her mouth.

“Hi, Wes,” I said. “Glad it’s you.”

Jenny exhaled with relief, then paced in the hall while I told Wes about the break-in. She came back into the room and said, “I’m going to look around the neighborhood. Maybe whoever took my bag tossed it in the bushes.”

I told her I’d come find her.

Wes knew about Sheila, it turned out. Marion had told him. Apparently the two of them had been burning up cell phone minutes. Wes was seeing her tonight and expected cellular communication of another kind to occur.

I asked if she’d said anything more about Sheila. “Not to me. You had to go down and identify the body, huh? That must have been weird.”

“It’s only gotten weirder.” I filled him in about LifeScience, Fay, and the diary, and wondered which one of them was connected to the theft.

“I don’t know, Billy,” he said. “Is it really worth getting involved in this?”

“I’ve been looking for something to do for nine months. This isn’t what I had in mind, but I can’t stop thinking about what happened to Sheila. My flat getting robbed means I’m already involved.”

Wes’s call-annoyance feature interrupted the conversation.
He said he had to take it, so we signed off. I went downstairs to photograph the footprints in the garden.

I was back inside when the doorbell rang. I assumed it was Jenny. But when I opened the door, there stood Gregory Alton. “You’re here,” he said. “Good. We can talk now.”

Slamming the door in his face would have been enjoyable. But if I did, he’d just stand out there until Jenny came back. So I joined him on the porch. “Hey Gregory, how do you get the dotcommer off your doorstep?”