Mice Shockers

Melissa slapped Marshall hard across the cheek. When he recovered from the pain and turned back from the blow, she smiled and whispered, "Did you like that? Now, the bedroom."

She began to climb off Marshall's lap when he realized that he still had the gun in his hand. He grabbed Melissa's back and held her on top of him.

"What is it? Let's go to the bedroom."

"But first..." Marshall faltered. He reached for the duffel bag on the floor at his side but accidentally knocked it over.

"What? But first what?"

"But first... slap me again." He could hardly believe that he said it himself. He was trying to gain time and it was the only thing that came to mind. Leaning toward the duffel bag, his fingers began to close around its top when Melissa's hand slammed into his mouth so hard that he could feel a hot rush of blood from the inside of his lower lip. He let go of the duffel bag.

"Again?"

Marshall cringed. "Please."

He heaved his body forward and caught the top of the duffel bag. Instantly, he pulled it toward him and thrust the gun inside, between the tools and the wig. Just then, Melissa's punch caught him in the nose and blood began to leak from his left nostril. Instinctively, his hand jerked from the duffel bag to cover his nose. Unfortunately, one of the buttons of his glove caught on the red wig and it too came flailing in front of his face.

Melissa simply stared.

"This..." Marshall began, "Heh, heh, this is something that I... like to... I sort of... heh, heh, well... carry it around because I..."

"Like to wear it?" Melissa prompted. "Well, put it on."

"What?"

"Let me see what it looks like."

Marshall untangled the wig from the button on his glove. "It's really not necessary..." he stammered.

"But I'd enjoy seeing it."

Marshall reluctantly placed the wig on his head. Melissa adjusted it and brushed some of the locks from his eyes. "Red's not your color. Although it could just be that this shade doesn't work with the crimson blood on your face."

"That's quite possible," Marshall said, wiping away some blood with his glove. His face was hot with humiliation. The thought pounded in his mind: I've got to kill her, kill her right now.

"What else have you got in that bag of yours? Maybe a dress or..." Melissa thrust her hand down into the mouth of the duffel bag before Marshall could even react. She froze. "What am I touching right now?"

Marshall squirmed beneath the weight of her question and her body. "I had... no intention... of shooting..."

Melissa pulled out the pink, plastic, packet of cocaine and showed it to Marshall. "Well, of course. This you would snort."

Marshall nodded.

Jumping off of him, Melissa opened the packet and poured some cocaine on to the coffee table, using a nearby New Yorker Magazine to form four lines. "So many things I would never have guessed about you," she mused. "Go ahead."

Marshall thought back to an experiment he had tried early in his career in which he put several mice in a cage that had two rooms. In the first room, the floor would shock the mice every half hour for a total of forty-eight shocks a day. In the other, the floor would sporadically shock the mice; however, only twenty-four times a day. The mice would always choose to remain in the first room where the shocks came in regular intervals. It was Marshall's theory that, in the second room, a sense of false hope and then betrayal set in when the mice went for as much as four hours before they were unexpectedly shocked again. In the first room, despite being caused harm twice as often, the predictability of measured shocks actually provided a sort of comfort for the mice. It was pain they could depend on.