by Eliza Gilbert
Every summer we go to see the mouse man. The Long Island FunFest has pygmy goats, funnel cake tacos, aerialists in lycra mermaid tails whose breasts smack their chins when they lutz into the dive pool, but we only go because of the mouse man. Dad is a quant at Jane Street so money is no object. Just being real. And even still the drive is hostile. Bridgehampton to Brentwood, ninety minutes in the trade parade, but in exchange for this one day as our courier we contract to be mild and scarce for the rest of June. So he bucks up. Plus there is a golf simulator.
In the car Parker considers famine. “I went hyperlink to hyperlink on the famine Wiki,” he says. “Nothing stuck.”
St. Luke’s awards one eighth-grader a silver cup every year for an outstanding summer research project, and Parker needs a win to offset his SSAT scores.
“The Soviet famines speak to me,” he sighs, “it’s just, I’m afraid I’ll sound like a hardcore capitalist.”
“Ask the mouse man,” says Lucas, nine. “Mouse man’ll know.”
“I’m going to steal a mouse today, probably,” says Piggy, the girl sibling.
“Mouse man, mouse man, mouse man,” we dirge, all three of us together, pulling our chins to our collarbones like Marion Plum the choirmaster always tells us to. “June thirteenth is the day of the mouse man!”
Lucas’ vibrato would bring you to tears.
Dad puts Big Sean on the CarPlay, “Jump Out the Window.” To the left of the expressway there’s this sound barrier wall where ivy grows in chubby tallies, and we wonder how does it do that. In our heads we say the word Ronkonkoma over and over again like it’ll open some door somewhere. And probably, it does.
Eighty bucks each, that’s the cap, eighty bucks in ones, and Dad says don’t come looking for more, he’ll be online all day, doing stochastic things. Lucas will pledge $9 to a single deep-fried Almond Joy. Otherwise all the cash goes to the mouse man. Dad stays in the car, and when we return he’ll pretend to have been there all day, just so super stochastic. But we’ll spot him by the beer garden, and later being tugged like a puppy into a mermaid aerialist’s RV. He’ll drop at least a Benjamin on the golf simulator, and though he is a trim triangular man, once the sun slips below its axis he will be seduced by a schlonging corn dog, he will eat it fast and out in the open, so nimble it’s inevitably fellatious, plain for anyone to see, and then back in the car backtesting strategies he’ll feel weird about it.
Across the field we go, our empty garbage bags catching behind us like parachutes, us three whooping over this field Suffolk County Community College owns and uses in some unknown capacity, sports maybe, though it's hard to imagine the ground ever coming back from FunFest’s ten-day tenure. Some patches are dook-paste and others just dust. The people here are mostly the sticky kind you don’t see in the Village. We don’t look too hard. Any afterthought of grass is dermaplaned beneath our feet, this being part of our mission, pave the grass, stomp the fry boxes embedded like pressed flowers.
The mouse man’s by the west corner, where he always is, in the gingham tent between the Ring-a-Duck and the mirror maze. “The Lanky Lanky Langfords!” he calls when we’re within twenty feet, and this is sweet and political of him, as we are quite robust children. “Is it the thirteenth already?”
He is father-aged, scruffled, and we think has TMJ, or maybe enamel hypoplasia, because his teeth are saffron and short as pills. His hair, though—how we wish we could nuzzle into its golden grass just like the mouse he shows us now, tipping his boater hat.
“How many plays until we get to see the troops?” Parker asks.
“How much you got?”
“Eighty, same as always.”
“Forty plays, then. Forty plays each and I take you to the barracks.”
The game is afoot. The game is like this: there is a Sajak-ian wheel at the center of the tent, and each sliver of the wheel says a word like “Melon” or “Grandma” or “Purple.” Players place a dollar on the booth counter, in the corresponding betting zone of their choice. The mouse man spins the wheel, plucks the mouse from his hat, and sets it on the wheel. If the mouse dives down the tiny hole in the wheel-sliver upon which you placed a bet, you win one of the pocket knives that hang from the booth frame like dreamcatchers, each handle imprinted with a different interpretation of the American flag. Or you can choose a big stuffed punching glove.
Parker bets “Green.” Piggy bets “Fire.” Lucas bets “George Carlin.” The mouse man spins the wheel and dumps the mouse and we watch god-smacked like mothers of an Olympian.
Lenny—all the mice are named Lenny—stands addled at the hub for a moment.
“Lenny!” cries the mouse man. “Lenny, find your way, my friend!”
Reinvigorated, Lenny darts south. He enters the “Meat” hole. We feel like such losers, we could cry.
“Money money money!” yips the mouse man, snatching up our idiot loser dollar bills.
Dad always says we’re like Polymarket noobs with the mouse man, those smooth-brainers who bet on things they care about rather than cutting the odds. Guileless, he calls us, which is not so different from what the St. Luke’s boys call Parker, which is “motherless,” “That’s motherless behavior, big dog,” but it isn’t true, of course we have a mother, it’s just that she has relocated to an ashram in Nova Scotia. And fuck that “guileless” fuckshit, because on dollar thirteen “Spud” hits for Piggy, she picks up a Texas Revolution-themed knife, and a few dollars later, Lucas shoves an alpaca in his garbage bag after “Courage” proves indomitable.
“I’m going to slit my wrists,” Parker keeps saying. He is always the biggest loser.
“Gotta win a knife first,” says Piggy, and just like that Lenny the mouse disappears down the "Disappointment" chute, and she wins a small patriotic tanto.
Dollar forty comes. The mouse man plops the worn-out Lenny into his hat. To the Ring-a-Duck guy he calls, “Fudsy! Taking ten!” and Fudsy makes a rapid hand-sign denoting his understanding.
The troops live out by the mouse man’s RV, in a defunct propane tank. The mouse man has retrofitted it with an open-shut mechanism, laid the bottom with aspen sheddings. Currently there are about twenty-five Lennies living inside, bustling around like atoms.
“If you kill or lose one,” warns the mouse man grinningly, “I’ll bite your ears off.”
The way he says “kill” is like “keel,” and for the rest of our childhood this is what we say whenever we want to kill each other, “I’ll keel you!” and it will help us want to kill each other less.
They are healthy mice, pert, well-fed, and good-tempered to boot, collected but not lazy, probably because of whatever pheromone or benzo is in the spritz bottle the mouse man regularly spritzes them with. We kneel by the tank and consort with the Lennies, hey little Lennies, hey little guys. We are all pretending not to be afraid of their teeth. The knees of our Rag & Bone’s schluck into the mud, us three layovers playing wild. Lucas is even wearing overalls.
“Hey,” Peter calls to the mouse man, who stands on the steps of the RV with a Coors. “What famine do you think of when you think ‘famine?’”
“Potato one.”
“Aside from the potato one.”
“I don’t know, I guess whichever famine’s happening now.”
“This is for a history project. It has to be over and done with.”
“The Second Famine of the Gaucho Shadow Army, then.”
“Hell yeah, what’s that, some Bolivian shit?”
“I couldn’t say.”
Piggy stands up from the aluminum trough, licks the sheddings off her fingers and says, “Can we see how you live?”
The mouse man says, “What?”
“It’s our fourth year knowing you, and you’re great to take us back to see the troops, but we never get to see how you live.”
“I live in Allentown. I’m a wireman. This is a summer gig.”
“She means, can we come in,” says Parker, and the mouse man shrugs, waves us inside the RV, where it smells like gum wrappers moldering in the pocket of a Carhartt. All the light comes from under the cabinetry and there are empty sugar packets on the floor. A wire is strung across the kitchen, two pairs of jeans and an undershirt hung to dry.
“Wow,” says Piggy.
“Look, a loft bed!” cries Lucas.
“Can I get you anything?” says the mouse man.
“A beer,” Parker says. “Definitley a beer.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Good. Else I could get in trouble.”
The mouse man lets them sit at the dinette, lets them bring in five Lennies in a Pyrex. We feed the mice table salt off our pinkies. Parker empties his first beer in the company of someone else’s father, because that’s another thing the mouse man tells them, that he’s got a kid who makes pizza in Nazareth, that’s the Nazareth outside of Allentown, not the other one. And his boy doesn’t just cut slices at a pizza joint, he makes pizza for a pizza restaurant, like a pizza restaurant that serves prosciutto and capicola instead of ham on their pizzas, and all the different colored truffles, and he’s the youngest on the line, the mouse man’s son. And he lives with his mother but that’s fine, that’s just one of those choices people make that you can’t hate them for making, right? And which of the American knives in the booth do we think an eighteen-year-old would like most to receive for his birthday? Pick two, even. The mouse man can part with two.
One of the under-cabinet lights flickers. Out the window the sun is falling. The mouse man looks off somewhere else.
“Our mother’s in an ashram,” offers Lucas. “She says she’s doing her time.”
“Lucas,” says Parker.
“She says she’s abandoning the self.”
“Lucas.”
The mouse man opens another beer. “Yeah, man. Real. I’ve been thinking about that stuff. Like, my son’s grown up, there’s no more child support, and what do you even do with that?”
“Have more money?” Lucas guesses.
“No, man, have less self. And it’s like, you see so many kids working a job like this, and you just realize how corroded you’ve become, how much more self they have on you, and you just hate them for it. They put their dollars on “Yellow” or “Mom” or whatever, and you give them their knife, and you think about burying it in—like, you want to take something from them and give it back to yourself. You know? Do you guys want some popcorn or something? I could put the mice away. Turn on the old Xbox.”
“We should actually be going,” Parker says.
“Back out to the wheel? Yeah, let’s hit those other forty plays.”
“I mean, we should be going. Checking out some other games. Diversifying.”
We have never played nor felt the urge to play any other game at the FunFest, but abruptly this whole thing has started to feel somewhat rapey. Still Lucas says, “Noooo,” and picks up a Lenny and lets a single tear drop onto its buffy belly. The mouse man snatches it from him. Snatches the whole Pyrex.
“Out, then,” he says. “Whatever. God forbid a guy tries to connect.”
So we get out. And as we thread between trailers and motor homes we hear the mouse man make a low animal noise, and so we start to run, pink and giddy with fear, and we shriek until we hop the partition back into the fairground.
From the Ring-a-Duck, the man named Fudsy calls to us, “Where’s Henry, you guys seen Henry?”
“Probably best to close the Rodent Roulette for today,” Parker says, panting, and we all lose our breath again, melting into fits, we are filled with unnameable triumph, to have slain a Goliath with only our absence, our lack of interest!
With the remaining one-hundred-and-eleven dollars we buy three turkey legs, a bacon-wrapped caramel apple, cranapple slushies, and two funnel cake tacos. We eat them sitting on top of the picnic tables while the sun goes and the lights blink awake on the Zipper, the Pharaoh's Fury, the Super Cyclone, the Dream Catcher, the Delusion, and the colors invert on the big wheel, you can see its whole skeleton. We sample a few more games. They lack stakes and living animals. We feel sick. We see that the lights are on in the mouse man’s tent, the wheel ticking away again, a new Lenny at its lynchpin.
“Mouse man, mouse man, mouse man,” Lucas sings morosely. “June thirteenth is the day of the mouse man.”
Piggy takes from the pocket of her jeans a small breathing bundle of fur. Breathing for now, but its head is dented.
“I rescued him,” she whispers, and Lucas throws up cranapple in the mud.
Back in the car Dad has a schmear of body glitter on his neck. Python is open on his laptop. He is pretending to type.
“Day well spent?” he asks as they merge back onto the LIE.
“We almost got taken,” says Piggy, sliding a finger along the blade of her new tanto. “We won a lot.”
“Dad,” Parker asks, “what do you think about the Bengal famine?”
Lucas is burping loudly, crying silently.
Would you be sad to find out that the Lenny in Piggy’s pocket is dead before they make it back to Bridgehampton? Would it surprise you to know that in twenty years, Parker’s at Jane Street, and Piggy’s sucking puss, and who the hell knows where Lucas went, mooncalf little fuck, took after Mom, the growth-horomone injections never jacking him past 5’3, what a little weirdo he was, my brother, all these fears and affectations, probably Into the Wild-like dead by now, but man oh man, let me tell you, man oh man, that kid could sing.
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Eliza Gilbert will be twenty-two for like two more weeks, if everything goes to plan. She is submitting this now so she is always twenty-two somewhere.
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