Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce Read Free Book Online Page B

fantasy. Fantasies don’t have faults. But he does, and she still loves him. That’s what’s so unnerving.”
    They rock the fridge back on the dolly and drop it down another step. Walker counts off the steps as they approach the bottom. Three, two, one. They are in a very small space.
    Walker opens the front door with his backside. They try to roll the fridge through, but it’s too wide for the door by almost five inches. Alan can’t believe it. He says he measured the frame. Walker glances at his watch. He has to go soon, he says. He’s already almost an hour late for work. They’re in the middle of a new production, a play that takes place on a cruise ship lost at sea. He needs to be there soon to meet with the costume designer. Alan looks exhausted. He says he understands. Even if he has to take the whole goddamn fridge apart later, they’ll get it through that door one way or another. He tells Walker to wait right there on the stoop. He’s got something for him.
    Walker fixes his sleeves and wipes the sweat off his forehead. When Alan returns, he’s holding a small boxy tape deck. Hepushes the Eject button and extracts a gray cassette with a thin white sticker across the front. It says I MONICA KILL DEVIL HILLS SPR ING BREAK SISTER GOD DESS , but that is scratched out. Below that, it says ZZZZZZZZZ .
    â€œThis is going to save you,” Alan says.
    â€œAn old mixtape?”
    â€œEver heard of sleep suggestion? I audited a class at the university a few years back and made a tape to listen to while I slept at night. Don’t laugh. It really did the trick. You can have this. I think it needs D batteries. Press this button, and you can record. Create your own tape. Tell her she’s married to you, not Alan. Tell her whatever you want. Once she’s asleep, press Play. Few weeks of this, you’ll never hear another word about this marriage thing.”
    The machine is heavy for its size. Walker holds it like a handgun in a paper bag. He tries to give it back, but Alan refuses to take it from him.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Claire gets some bad news. A lab somewhere in Europe has constructed a black sphere and plans to flood it with something called K-matter. She emails Walker about it at work with a frowny-faced emoticon. If the experiment in Europe works like they think it will, she says, then particles cannot half exist. The researchers will have effectively disproved Daisy Theory.
    That night he gets home late and finds Claire already in bed under the covers with her grandmother’s rosary beads. She isn’t religious. He’s never known her to even set foot in a church, but she loved her grandmother. The beads are wrapped so tightaround her white palm that they leave small indentations when Walker pries them loose.
    â€œSay they disprove it,” he says. “Where does something go when it stops existing?”
    â€œWhere does it go?” she asks. “Nowhere. It doesn’t exist.”
    â€œBut nowhere is somewhere.”
    â€œThis isn’t
where
versus
somewhere else
. This is being versus nonbeing.”
    He strips down and gets into bed, cuddling up behind her. Once she is asleep, he waits for something to happen. He’s not sure what. Claire’s dream marriage makes a certain kind of awful sense: a theoretical husband for the woman who spends her days in a theoretical haze. Her advisor was never the threat; it was always Alan. He watches her sleep as if the drama is unfolding just behind those eyelids. Maybe she will say something in her sleep. It would be like eavesdropping on a conversation taking place in a universe that Walker cannot reach, one where Walker does not even exist. He tries to imagine not existing. He imagines darkness, the absence of thought, but then his thoughts invade, and he exists again.
Claire
, he wants to call out.
Claire
.
    â€œClaire.” She doesn’t budge. He places