Harmless Experiment — A Terrible Serial Killer
My mother had a great sense of humor. She appreciated funny movies, and she knew I loved them too. We’d go to the local theater sometimes. We didn’t have a lot of dough, my dad was an entrepreneur surviving week-to-week, but he still managed to buy my mom a sandy beige sports car. I think he knew what a pain in the ass he was to live with—that’s another story—so this was his tiny way of making amends.
My mom was a beauty. This was not my biased estimation, it was objective fact. She came from Israel as a little girl and her complexion was imbued with that light, dark sweetness. Her brown hair was long and very soft. She had high cheekbones too, so between all these traits, nobody could ever figure out where she was from. A true exotic. Most strikingly, her eyes were never accusing or threatening. They were innocent. Very smart too, and aware, which made their innocent quality all the more impressive. She chose to see the good in all things.
I have always had a thing for Chevy Chase movies. The weekend Spies Like Us opened, the one where he plays alongside Dan Aykroyd, was an absolute must see. The commercials looked hilarious and captivated my attention. I’d lay on the Berber carpet in our living room, propped up on two giant Persian pillows, and slide my little fingers over the channel switches on the black box remote. I kept clicking the different channels all day to catch another glimpse of the commercial with the Spies Like Us trailer. Naturally I was begging my mom to go to the theater, and it was an easy sell because she was into it too.
We jumped into the hot new car. My mom lit a cigarette, turned on the radio station WPLJ that played rock tunes–Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On a Prayer” was released recently and came on–and we sang along to its rousing chorus. I rubbed my feet on the plush mat and didn’t even mind the cigarette smoke too much. When we got to the theater we discovered we weren’t the only ones excited about the movie–it sold out right after we got our tickets. They overbooked it, all the seats were taken, but we just sat on the floor in the back. We left in absolute stitches, joking about how we were about to pee ourselves during so many hilarious scenes in the movie.
Then I broke this piece of news to her: that I would need to purchase ten lab mice for a science fair experiment I was assigned to do with my friend, Sam. She groaned for a couple reasons–Sam and I couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble together–and mice? I assured her that Sam would actually give the mice, who were our test subjects and needed to be watched carefully–room and board at his parents’ house. I simply had to give him cash for the purchase, and after a little hesitation, mom forked it over for the mice, food and a cage.
Sam was one of my closest little buddies. We were kind of allies as inmates in a religious day school. We cracked jokes during daily services and passed notes during all our classes. The last time I slept over his place, we tossed huge water balloons at oncoming cars. We scored a direct hit on one Buick, the water splashing across the windshield, damn near causing the driver to crash right into a tree. He chased us back to Sam’s house. His mother caught us making this fast escape, and we giggled while the man barked that his life was almost cut short by a couple dumb kids.
We were also pretty poor students. In my case, I was severely challenged in math and science. It didn’t interest me, other than whether Lysol spray could actually make a fart catch fire. We had this total hot, bitchy lady for a science teacher. She was short with her students, always admonishing us to hand in our outstanding assignments.
The big thing was the science fair. It was a major part of the year’s grade, but more than that, it required an idea, a scientific experiment of some sort to actually do and then present to the school. You were allowed a partner. Sam and I teamed up and one day we hung around his place with his stepfather, Rick, who was in construction. We came up with this idea we thought would be so cool – Rick could help us build a maze out of wood and we could run mice through it. As stupid as that sounds, we took it to another level when we added the necessary ‘scientific experiment’ twist–we would split lab mice into two groups. One group would subsist on their usual diet, while we’d ply the other with drugs, then set both loose to see which performed better. In other words, how would a massive, continual injection of sugar affect the animals’ ability to negotiate the maze. The other test group would be cared for in the ‘normal’ fashion, as in, not torturing and slowly killing them. It was a fantastically idiotic idea that we set to work on with great relish. Rick helped us with the materials and the building of the maze, and we agreed that Sam would house them.
This plan worked… for a while. I’d go to Sam’s to work on our plan that violated every letter of the animal cruelty law. We named each mouse after a part of the name of our hero, New York Yankee Don Mattingly, whose name is forever tarnished. We gassed up half the mice with a dropper full of liquid sugar and got them crazy wired. We had to constantly adjust the dosage because at first, they were too overloaded and were climbing the walls of the maze, not trying to run through it. Meanwhile, the well-nourished group was struggling to escape, but were coming quite close. Turns out a diet of food and water is quite conducive to optimum performance.
All of this was working, actually–we recorded our observations in a notebook by each individual mouse and monitored their progress. It looked like we’d be okay. Then I got a phone call from Sam that his family had to go out of town for the weekend, unexpectedly, and asked if I could take the mice and keep them at my place.
I knew my mom wouldn’t be too thrilled but hey, it was for school, and they’d just be in the cage. I took the mice off Sam’s hands and left them in my room so my parents wouldn’t be reminded they now ran a rodent rescue. After I came back from school, it was time to avoid doing any homework, and go shoot some hoops in the playground. Sam called to check in and I assured him the mice were all fine, feeding away and rustling around in the cage. They were my test subjects and while I wouldn’t exactly call them cute, I was impressed with myself for having a real experiment in progress. I’d even begun to grow fond of the little guys.
When I came back from the playground, sweaty and hungry, I ducked into my room and undressed for the shower. It was eerily quiet. No rustling. The cage was empty! Nerves prickled my neck and arms. Holy shit… holy shit, I kept repeating in my puberty addled brain, investigating the cage for any magician’s trap door they may have slipped into, just having a little fun with Erik, when the cat’s away the mice will play, right?
They weren’t under the bed. They weren’t making a sound. Where the hell had seven lab mice gone? Then I heard bumping noises behind my dresser, which was long and wide and pushed up against the wall. I stuck my head in the crack and saw a couple of those suckers running back and forth along its length. We had trained them well. Then I heard the radiator clang. I got down on all fours and craned my neck under the bottom of the it, and sure enough, there was a hole in the wall! How many of our prize mice had made a daring POW escape to my neighbor’s apartment? It then occurred to me that the door to my room was open the whole time I’d been at the playground. The rest of them must be loose everywhere—
There were no options. I had to bring my mother into this. Better she know now, than to open a cupboard in the kitchen and have a mouse fly out of it.
“Uh, mom, you’re not gonna like this.”
“You playing ball before homework? Not really. Get in the shower and get ready for dinner. No games, phone or TV. Do your homework.” She was busy in the dinette, with bills and papers spread out in piles under the warm yellow light. She dragged from a smoke and waved me away.
“But mom, you don’t understand.”
“I understand fully well, young man, you weren’t suppo—”
A tiny face with whiskers stuck its head out from under her papers.
“Ahhhhhh!!!” She leapt from the chair.
The little guy squeaked and ran around the table.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you!” I laughed. “They’re out! They got outta the cage in a wild bid for freedom!”
“We have to catch them before your father comes home,” she said, the anger leaving her eyes in favor of its usual softness. She smiled. “Were there other sightings?”
“My bedroom–the scene of the crime–I’ll show you.”
After my mom surveyed the challenge facing us behind the dresser, and the hole in the radiator, she said: “We can’t have these guys getting a free ride, staying here like this and not paying any rent.” We giggled. “As far as the hole in the radiator, I think Mrs. Silvestry will finally have some of the company she’s always wanted.”
“You’re not worried about the mice spreading around the building?” I asked.
“What mice?” my mom said, crossing her arms. “Get dressed, we need to go to the pet store.”
I threw my dirty clothes back on and we jumped in the car. We were at a pet shop next to my mom’s bank in five minutes flat. She instructed me to go in and procure traps–it was my mess and I needed to figure out how to clean it up.
“What if we can’t round them all up? Should I get new mice?”
“Not if you still want to live here.”
“Okay, I’m going.” What the hell was Sam gonna say when I told him about the great escape?
“Welcome to Pet Land,” I heard when I walked in. I’d never had so much as a hamster, so this animal kingdom was totally foreign to me. Huge fish tanks, colorful birds squawking, reptiles, and the strange intermingled smells of different creatures surrounded me. I went to the front counter where the man had greeted me. He was in his late teens, mullet haircut, flannel cutoff at the arms, thin scruff under his chin. He had a look in his eyes like he could tell you exactly what it said when you played Ozzy Osbourne records backwards.
“I need help. I’ve got a bunch of lab mice loose in my house.”
“Alright, gotcha. So you need traps. Aisle three.”
“Maybe you could… uh, do the traps keep them alive and unharmed? How does it work, I’ve never hunted an animal before.”
He spit out hubba bubba gum into his hand and tossed it in the trash.
“You running a shelter? You set the traps and that’s that, they’re in there. Can’t get out. Our bestseller is the glue trap, they won’t get outta that, trust me. I’ll show you, this way.”
I was mortified. Back in the car I showed my mom the pile of glue traps we now had at our disposal. She nodded approvingly. We went back into my room and the kitchen and living room and set up all the traps like we were on some kind of commando mission. Apparently there was a substance on the surface of the glue that attracted the poor buggers to the trap. The good news was the traps worked. That was also the bad news because the actual glue doesn’t poison the mouse, but simply holds it in place while it thrashes about in a futile effort to free itself.
“Your father will be home soon. You have to take care of it.”
“How?”
“Consider this part of the experiment.”
And so I went about the grim business of being the hatchet man for these mice. My sugar riddled mice, whom I’d actually grown fond of, were now in the hands of a monster. Because when each guy was on the glue trap, looking at me with its furtive, desperate eyes, I slid him down an incinerator shoot.
“Mom, the good news is I’d make an awful serial killer,” I said, tears wetting my cheeks.
“My poor baby,” she said, hugging me. “And you’ll never be a scientist. But, with these kinds of misadventures, you’ll tell some good stories, just like in our funny movies.”
Eric Lewin’s new book, Son of Influence is available now.