The door snaps open and a woman steps into the café. Cold air rushes in as she stands in the doorway. She looks about thirty. She is attractive, freckled, fresh. She wears a mid-length calfskin coat, with a black flannel scarf around her neck. She pauses for a moment. Her cheeks are flushed from the cold, her eyes bright. She looks vigorous, nervy, alive.

She is my wife.

As she closes the door behind her, she tilts her head forward, her hair rolling over her shoulders. She catches it in her hands, then straightens. A barrette is in her mouth. She pulls her hair back and slips on the barrette to make a ponytail. She smiles to herself, then moves with confidence to an empty table.

A few minutes pass. At least five. Not more than ten. The door opens again, with another burst of cold air, and a man walks in. He is tall, elegant, pressed. He wears a gray wool overcoat, collar raised, and expensive Italian shoes. He starts to unbutton his coat as he scans the room. He finds her. He smiles.

He is not me.

He walks over to her table and bends over. She turns to face him, smiling broadly. He kisses her on the lips. Four seconds, maybe five. It is not a chaste kiss. He stands up. They both smile. He turns and walks to the counter.

She remains seated, tapping her fingers idly on the table. By now she has removed her scarf. Her eyes wander around the café.

She will not see me, because I am not in the café. I am, apparently, in an editorial meeting, cutting apart a young writer’s first novel, while all this happens. I do not think I have ever been to this café. The scene is unfolding in my mind as Ellis narrates it.

Ellis is another editor at our agency. He recognizes my wife, because there is a picture of her on my desk. She does not recognize him, because there is no picture of Ellis in our house. They have met, once, at an office holiday party. He is sure it was her.

He says he is sorry but he had to tell me. He waits a minute, maybe two, then quietly leaves. The door closes softly behind him.

I leave work early and get into my car. I do not know where I am going.

#

The summer before my sophomore year in college, I worked as a lab assistant in a research hospital. At the time, I wanted to be a doctor. The lab was researching a possible treatment for Parkinson’s disease, a sickness of trembling. The experiment used rats. Trembling rats. Thousands of them.

No one is quite sure what causes Parkinson’s. We know that it happens when a part of the brain called the substantia nigra starts to die. In a research lab, of course, they don’t wait for the substantia nigra to die by chance.

In our experiment, the lab injected fetal cells into the brains of rats with Parkinson’s, to see whether the injected tissue would replace the dead cells. My supervisor was a graduate student with the unfortunate name of Stephen Sneady. Stephen was impatient to finish the project, because then he could write his dissertation and get away from all those damned rats.

I had two main tasks at the lab. The first task went like this: I reach into the back of a cage and pull out a quivering rat. It squirms but does not bite; we clip their teeth. I place the rat in a peculiar sort of vise. One set of clamps locks its head in place. I then grasp its torso, and set a second pair of clamps on its rump. The rat is trapped and cannot move, or, as we say, it has been stabilized. It is frightened, but not yet in pain. That comes soon enough.

First, though, I must give the rat some ketamine, to ease what will follow. I set the needle of a syringe in the dimple at the top of its head, between its ears, and inject the ketamine. Ketamine does not actually prevent pain. It simply causes the subject to dissociate from its pain.

After the ketamine has taken effect, I position another syringe over the rat’s head, and slowly squeeze the plunger. Now the rat feels pain, but it is not his pain. It is the pain of another rat, a rat that is for some reason occupying his body. He has dissociated. I have dissociated too. I am not involved with the part of the experiment where we try to cure the disease.

#

The next morning, I am careful to do nothing unusual at breakfast. Our daughter Emily munches and crunches her cereal. I pretend to read the newspaper, but really watch from the corner of my eye as Kathleen deftly sections a grapefruit. After a few minutes, I realize that Emily is gone; I have been distracted, and she has already left for school. I wait another minute, then rise. I kiss Kathleen on the forehead, pull on my coat, and pretend to leave for work. Instead, I lie in wait at the far end of the block, and when Kathleen emerges from our house, I follow at a discreet distance.

#

When Emily was four, she announced that she wanted a unicorn for her birthday. Not a fluffy toy unicorn, but a living, breathing one. She was convinced that unicorns are real, and she wanted one. It was my fault, I suppose. I had bought an illustrated storybook called The Way of the Unicorn and read it aloud to Emily. She fell in love with it, and insisted that I read it to her every night.

In the story, a young unicorn named Gallot is separated from his mother. He tries to find her in the forest, but to no avail. He asks all the woodland creatures (“Mr. Fox, Mr. Owl, Mr. Squirrel, and Mrs. Jackrabbit,” Emily recites faithfully) if they have seen her, but they are unable to help. Finally, Gallot decides to consult the Whistling Dervish, a wise if eccentric dwarf who lives at the swamp’s edge in a giant hollowed tree (“with an otter for a butler and a puddle for a welcome-mat,” Emily notes). Along the way to the swamp there is a clever and amusing incident involving a bullfrog, but it’s not very relevant and I don’t remember it. Gallot eventually arrives at the Dervish’s tree, where the otter butler seems to be waiting for him.

The Dervish, who is an ascetic and a hermit, does not often receive visitors, but he is willing to meet with Gallot. The young unicorn describes his plight, how he has spent weeks, perhaps months, searching in vain for his mother. He explains how he has been forced to forage for his food (“blueberries and rosemary, with an apple for dessert”), to make a mat of oak leaves for his bed, and to keep a watchful eye on the raccoon, who takes what does not belong to him.

The Whistling Dervish listens carefully to Gallot’s story, lights his pipe, and reflects in silence for a moment.

#

The second task went like this: I pick up a clipboard Stephen has left for me near the coffee machine. It contains a list of numbers. I go to a particular numbered cage, and, for the second time in the rat’s life, I reach in and pull it out from the back. Once again, it squirms with dread. I place it into a different vise. I inject an anesthetic into its head.

This time we do not use ketamine. It is not strong enough. The protocol says we need to wait ten full minutes for the anesthesia to take effect. Stephen says that five is plenty.

#

Kathleen winds her way down the streets in her Saab. Her head bobs rhythmically from side to side. She stops at a red light. I turn on the radio in my car and tune to her favorite station. I can see the silhouette of her head through the windows of the two cars between us, and I confirm that she is bouncing to the music on the radio. It is strange but comforting to know that we are listening to the same song.

The light turns green and she pulls away. I continue to follow, keeping a safe distance. I am sure that she does not see me. I am not sure why I care.

#

The Dervish sets his pipe down and looks Gallot straight in the eye. “Your mother has left you for no reason,” he says. “Now you must learn to take care of yourself. You must become wise in the way of the unicorn. You must become strong.”

Gallot cries for a few minutes, then wipes his eyes (“on a hanky,” Emily supplies, “made of cattails”) and prepares to leave. “I have one more question,” Gallot asks as he exits the Dervish’s tree. “Since I have come here, you have not whistled once. Why do they call you the Whistling Dervish?”

“So that you may learn disappointment,” the Dervish replies.

Really, it is a terrible book for children.

#

I take out the scalpel and sterilize it; a few minutes pass. Maybe five. Certainly not ten. I slice open the rat’s chest. Its entire body tenses, and it squeals in pain. Stephen says to ignore it. I inject a fixative into the beating left ventricle of its tiny heart. Within a few seconds, the brain starts to mummify; this will make it easier to study afterwards. I place the rat’s head in a miniature guillotine, as if it were an unrepentant traitor, rather than a senile, trembling rat. Stephen says to remember all the old people with Parkinson’s at the county nursing home. The blade falls.

#

Eventually Kathleen pulls into a parking lot. A diner. I park on the other side. Once she is through the door, I creep to the wall, keeping in the shadow of the awning, and peek over the windowsill. She arrives at a booth. A man is seated there. He jumps to greet her. He is wearing a gray wool overcoat. I cannot tell if his shoes are expensive or Italian, because they are blocked by the tablecloth. He is tall, elegant, pressed. He is exactly as Ellis described. They embrace. He helps her remove her jacket. He removes his own, and hangs both on a peg near the booth. They kiss on the mouth, then sit down.

I tell myself I will watch them for ten minutes. Suddenly I am reminded of the diner, so much like this one, where Kathleen and I met on our first date. I had just switched to English, and I was going to be a writer.

Five minutes have passed, and I am ready to leave. It is not my pain.

#

The story ends shortly after Gallot’s conversation with the Whistling Dervish. Gallot returns to the forest, alone, and sets himself to the task of becoming a full-grown unicorn. He sharpens his horn on the same whetstone his mother used. He abandons his oak-leaf beds and builds himself a proper warren. One day, Gallot is found by a little girl named Sara Lou. She loves Gallot, and he loves her in return. The author makes a go at a happy ending, and I see that Emily is taken in.

One night, just as Kathleen served dinner, Emily announced that she wanted a unicorn for her birthday.

“You mean like Jenny has?” my wife asked, referring to a child next door with an enormous soft-sculpture purple unicorn in her bedroom.

“No,” Emily replied. “I mean a real, live unicorn.” She crossed her arms and nodded for emphasis.

“Don’t be silly, dear,” Kathleen murmured, blowing into her soup. “There are no such things as unicorns.” 

– Ron Fein

Author’s Note: “The Way of the Unicorn” was written in longhand at a commercial laundromat. It was originally published in Redivider in spring 2004, and was my first published short story.