Smoke and Mirrors

“I don’t know,” said Regan. They were in the bar of a small hotel in the West Country, burgundy-colored carpets, fawn-colored wallpaper. He was nursing a gin and tonic; she was sipping her second glass of Chablis. Gwen had once told Regan that blondes should only drink white wine; it looked better. He laughed until he realized she meant it.

“It’s a dead one of these,” she said, turning her hand over so the fingers hung like the legs of a slow pink animal. He smiled. Later he paid the bill, and they went upstairs to Regan’s room . . .

“No. Not poison. You see, I don’t want to kill it,” he told the saleswoman, Becky.

She looked at him curiously, as if he had just begun to speak in a foreign tongue. “But you said you wanted mousetraps . . . ?”

“Look, what I want is a humane trap. It’s like a corridor. The mouse goes in, the door shuts behind it, it can’t get out.”

“So how do you kill it?”

“You don’t kill it. You drive a few miles away and let it go. And it doesn’t come back to bother you.”

Becky was smiling now, examining him as if he were just the most darling thing, just the sweetest, dumbest, cutest little thing. “You stay here,” she said. “I’ll check out back.”

She walked through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. She had a nice bottom, thought Regan, and was sort of attractive, in a dull Midwestern sort of way.

He glanced out the window. Janice was sitting in the car, reading her magazine: a red-haired woman in a dowdy housecoat. He waved at her, but she wasn’t looking at him.

Becky put her head back through the doorway. “Jackpot!” she said. “How many you want?”

“Two?”

“No problem.” She was gone again and returned with two small green plastic containers. She rang them up on the cash register, and as he fumbled through his notes and coins, still unfamiliar, trying to put together the correct change, she examined the traps, smiling, turning the packets over in her hands.

“My lord,” she said. “Whatever will they think of next?”

The heat slammed Regan as he stepped out of the store.

He hurried over to the car. The metal door handle was hot in his hand; the engine was idling.

He climbed in. “I got two,” he said. The air-conditioning in the car was cool and pleasant.

“Seatbelt on,” said Janice. “You’ve really got to learn to drive over here.” She put down her magazine.

“I will,” he said. “Eventually.”

Regan was scared of driving in America: it was like driving on the other side of a mirror.

They said nothing else, and Regan read the instructions on the back of the mousetrap boxes. According to the text, the main attraction of this type of trap was that you never needed to see, touch, or handle the mouse. The door would close behind it, and that would be that. The instructions said nothing about not killing the mouse.

When they got home, he took the traps out of the boxes, put a little peanut butter in one, down at the far end, a lump of cooking chocolate in the other, and placed them on the floor of the pantry, one against the wall, the other near the hole that the mice seemed to be using to gain access to the pantry.

The traps were only corridors. A door at one end, a wall at the other.

In bed that night Regan reached out and touched Janice’s breasts as she slept; touched them gently, not wanting to wake her. They were perceptibly fuller. He wished he found large breasts erotic. He found himself wondering what it must be like to suck a woman’s breasts while she was lactating. He could imagine sweetness, but no specific taste.

Janice was sound asleep, but still she moved toward him.

He edged away; lay there in the dark, trying to remember how to sleep, hunting through alternatives in his mind. It was so hot, so stuffy. When they’d lived in Ealing he’d fallen asleep instantly, he was certain.

There was a sharp scream from the garden. Janice stirred and rolled away from him. It had sounded almost human. Foxes can sound like small children in pain—Regan had heard this long ago. Or perhaps it was a cat. Or a night bird of some kind.

Something had died, anyway, in the night. Of that there was no doubt at all.

The next morning one of the traps had been sprung, although when Regan opened it carefully, it proved to be empty. The chocolate bait had been nibbled. He opened the door to the trap once more and replaced it by the wall.

Janice was crying to herself in the lounge. Regan stood beside her; she reached out her hand, and he held it tightly. Her fingers were cold. She was still wearing her nightgown, and she had put on no makeup.

Later she made a phone call.

A package arrived for Regan shortly before noon by Federal Express, containing a dozen floppy disks, each filled with numbers for him to inspect and sort and classify.

He worked at the computer until six, sitting in front of a small metal fan that whirred and rattled and moved the hot air around.

He turned on the radio that evening while he cooked.

“. . . what my book tells everyone. What the liberals don’t want us to know.” The voice was high, nervous, arrogant.