Secret Life
The next day, the woman began to bring breadcrumbs, seeds, and other scraps from her apartment. She even went to the store to buy cheese. As many as ten scruffy, nervous mice feasted on what she had brought in with her. Their quick, hesitant movements amused her. Their psychic abilities impressed her as well; they always disappeared at least fifteen minutes before the courier arrived with the latest document to enjoy the stamp of approval.
She found herself trying out names for the mice on a pad of paper: Charles, Leisa, Paul, Zeb, Gwen, Jonathan, Diana, Bob…
After a while, as she sat in her office without windows, waiting for the next document, she found herself listening to the chirping language of the mice as they bickered over a biscuit or a rind of cheese. The more she watched them as they spoke to each other, the more she began to understand the nuances of their speech. Once or twice, she lay on the floor and covered her arms with bits of cracker and seeds. The bristly feel of their whiskers, the softness of their noses, the delicate touch of their paws—all of this helped her to understand them.
Several years passed. The woman’s hair became flecked with gray. Her father and mother both died within a year of each other. The number of documents to be stamped never increased or decreased. Her entwined states of being friendless and alone were broken by all-too-infrequent periods of happiness that only made her feel worse when they ended, abruptly.
But she did learn the language of the mice. So well did she learn their language that she was able to teach them elements of her own language. This happened slowly and steadily, so that she almost did not notice the change, how the mice became her eyes and ears in other parts of the building. How they reported back to her on events and people that fascinated her. And because the viewpoint of a mouse is rather like that of a child—different and new and sparkling around the edges—their accounts were all the more entertaining and insightful.
The woman let her hair grow long and did not bother to dye the gray out of it. She wore long patchwork skirts and slippers. She stopped drinking whiskey. She no longer even bothered to say hello to the infrequent courier.
Instead, she found herself speaking more and more often through her mice, the voices of the mice become her voice. They spoke out in rustles and murmurs and chirps from the air ducts and the little holes in the vents and pipes: a dusty whisper that filled the building little by little until the janitors would look up from their jaded contemplation of the newspaper, struck by what seemed like a tongue of air in a place where no breeze ever blew.
At least, this is the story some inhabitants of the building tell to explain why, at odd times—on elevators, in an empty hallway—voices can be heard, speaking through the walls.
The Mimic
Dressed in a black business suit, a mimic appeared among the office workers on the third floor. He set up his computer in a just-abandoned cubicle. The dull hiss of his gray-spackled monitor reflected ghoulishly off his chalky face. He had an odd way of staring at the monitor, with his head cocked to the side. He had wrists and hands pale as the underbelly of a toad. He did not talk much.
“He is not natural to this place,” some said.
“None of us are,” others said.
If there had been fewer employees, perhaps the mimic would have been found out sooner. But the inhabitants of the third floor now numbered in the hundreds. They pressed down into the emergency stairwells, where middle managers sat in bewildered little groups, laptops balanced on their crossed legs. Everyone had to take lunch in shifts, for otherwise the elevators would groan with the weight for hours. Even a half-desk of space was coveted as a promotion.
