His head drooped, and he peered up at me, forehead wrinkling and mouth crooked into half a smile. If Owen were an animal, he’d be a lemur, one of those long, slender animals, with concave chests and beady eyes. “You’re a little frightening.” He held his finger and thumb an inch apart. “You know that? Just a little.”
I lifted my eyebrows. I found it hard to carry a dead anything without giving off an at least slightly off-putting impression to the general human populace. Owen was different, though. I plopped the rat down on his back with a thud and got to work examining the claws. Owen slid off the stool, made his way over to a cluttered pile of discarded machinery parts, and began tinkering with an old clock. This was his thing. Owen liked to tinker. He kept a stash of old radios, model airplanes, desktop computers, and random car parts just so he could take them apart and put them back together in a new way. I was sure there was some psychoanalysis in this hobby ripe for the picking, but I never questioned his love for tiny machinery parts and the desire to know what made them tick. Instead, when I found a discarded DVD player on the side of the road, I just loaded it up and gave it to Owen as a gift. He was, as a friend, very easy to shop for.
“You should reset the rattrap.” My breath caused one of the whiskers on Mr. Bubbles’s nose to quiver. “We’ll need another one soon.”
I listened to the cranking of a ratchet screwdriver.
“But we just got this one,” Owen protested. “What about the test-animal application?”
I rested my chin on my knuckles and brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. “That’ll take too long. Stop being such a baby.”
Only the first Mr. Bubbles had been secured through “proper channels.” As far as our biology teacher knew, we were still using the same one. Owen said sometimes he heard rats shrieking in his sleep.
I glanced up at the other jarred specimens, their eyes magnified in the curved glass cases, each one carefully preserved for laboratory study. I inherited the storm cellar from my father, where he’d kept his lab equipment in a shelter that was supposed to protect him from the very thing he was chasing. Once he was gone, Mom wouldn’t step foot inside. Memories, to her, must look like ghosts.
The cellar was a cluttered, misshapen hideout carved into the red dirt with a hatch door in the ceiling that let people in and kept tornadoes out. A worktable occupied the center of the room, still draped with Dad’s old maps and Doppler coordinates. In the corner, next to the chalkboard, sat an old, claw-foot bathtub. Shelves lined the surrounding walls crowded with weather vanes, old fan parts, wheels off a rusted tricycle, and dim jars of syrupy liquid. My father had collected other assorted items for his laboratory, too: a gurney, dusty Victorian-era textbooks—many first editions—a collection of surgical utensils, a generator, a transistor radio, clouded beakers, a model skeleton, a gopher skull, and a preserved pig heart. Much like a living, breathing thing, the cellar laboratory reflected a kind of organized chaos in which I knew where everything was and yet somehow always managed to uncover new treasures.
I stifled a yawn and drew myself back to the work, dragging my finger over the curling pages of my notebook. Inside, I’d scribbled a short list of variables: kilowatts, conductors, incision points. Each separate attempt had been crossed out. I was missing something. Something tantalizingly close and just out of reach, like a word tingling the tip of the tongue. The answer was there, buried in the pages of my notes, in the texts I read, in the diagrams I designed; it was all there—it had to be—and yet it may as well have been hieroglyphics.
The scent of burning skin still hovered in the room, mixing with the fresh chemical cocktail that was leftover from when a dead lizard had fried to the point of extra crispy earlier this evening. The reptiles never worked. Their scales hardened and their wiry bodies blackened around the edges, turning stiff and brittle under the shock. Still, I swore this time—I swore—that the lizard’s foot had moved just before he turned into an unappetizing, reptilian potato chip.
I drummed my fingers on the metal tray, trying to mentally unlock the answer from Mr. Bubbles as if it were hidden not in my careful methodology but there underneath his matted fur.
“It has to be more volts,” I said at last.
The clink of metal parts stopped. “More?” And then it resumed from Owen’s side of the room. The twisting of a screw and the sound of a tool being dropped onto a pile. “Maybe it’s the incisions,” he said. “Maybe if we attached the wires to the external layer of the epidermis, then—”
“No, it’s not the placement.” I’d studied the anatomy time and time again. I’d spent late nights trying every other point of entry for the wires, and no configuration came close to working except for this one. “At fifty watts I got his tail to move.”