Free Knockout Mouse by James Calder

years ago during an earlier artist phase, just before the high-tech invasion, when rents were still sane. Actually, artist types had been moving to the neighborhood since the sixties and the days of the hippies. A few of them remained, too, hair turned the color of ash. Some Hell’s Angels still lurked down in Dogpatch, and increasingly the hill was subject to the legions of cutthroat mothers aiming strollers of Jacobs and Madisons at your knees, as they did in the more affluent Noe Valley.
    Now and then you’d see the guys with lunch pails stop in for a coffee to go: men who worked in the machine shops, warehouses, and piers at the base of the hill, a reminder of the days when the neighborhood was all about longshoremen and light industry. Before that, it had been a pasture called Goat Hill, with a great view and plenty of salmon in a creek long paved over.
    Jenny and I got our coffee and some banana bread and squeezed into a table in the corner. A big storefront window was behind us, and we could see the dogs and smokers who loitered on the benches outside.
    The black cover of the diary stared up at us from the little square of faux-marble. I turned the book over. “Let’s start at the end.”
    I flipped through unfilled pages to the last page of writing. Sheila’s tiny, neat script had a slight backward slant, as if braving a strong wind. I scanned for something—I didn’t yet know what—that would help us figure out what had happened. Acronyms jumped out—MCl24, Fc, FAb, HAMA—along with a slew of scientific terms. The page was dotted with small drawings as well, many of a Y-shaped figure that looked as though it were reaching to the sky like a Joshua tree.
    “Maybe it’s a work notebook,” I said. That reminded me of the zip disks. I’d transferred them to a pocket in the case of my camera, which I’d left at Rita’s for the Monday shoot.
    “No…” Jenny was peeking at the previous page. “Listen to this:
Another letter from Simon. He wants a decision. I feel I’m in a tightening vise. How can I explain to him the decision is not mine, but was written generations ago?
”
    Jenny hit the page with her fist. “How do you like that? She was fucking Simon after all!”
    “How could she be fucking Simon if he’s in Australia? But this does tell us that Sheila still had some interest in him, which might also explain why Fay stole the diary.”
    Jenny flipped through the pages. “I don’t know. I don’t see how anyone could be threatened by this girl. Look at these.” She held up a page of inky self-portraits. The mouth was a thin, wavering line, the hair anguished wriggles, the eyes downcast dots. It made me think of how, in the medical literature I’d read, almost everyone who had experienced anaphylactic shock described a sense of impending doom as it came on.
    We got some more coffee and kept scanning. Some pages were dense with writing, some contained only a few brief, melancholy entries. Drawings were sprinkled throughout. Some were strange figures that had appeared in her dreams. One was a mouse, surrounded by more of those Y shapes, and various calculations. I got the feeling she was trying to work out a scientific puzzle.
    “I knew Sheila was shy,” Jenny said. “I didn’t realize she was so… sad.”
    “She was just struggling, Jenny.”
    “She had no self-esteem. Look at this business with Simon. Let’s say, for a minute, it’s true that he wanted to hook up with her again. It seems like she wanted to, too—but she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. Or wouldn’t decide. Or whatever.”
    “There’s something else.”
    Jenny waited, but I couldn’t explain it to her yet. I’d seen something at the dinner party, a pungent wit and an inquisitive mind. I saw it in the journal, too. Her hesitations came, in part, from being open minded, wanting to inspect things from every angle. The journal entries read like a series of investigations, even when she was analyzing the dark clouds of her