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with us, honey," they shouted to him—a joke, or a sincere invitation, since they had seen what kind of theatre he had come out of. "No thanks," he said. He looked up. The pale night sky seemed to have risen from this brightness like smoke from a white-hot fire.
    Now, in the cab, he turned, thinking he might share this memory with Eliot, when the driver slammed on his brakes and they lurched forward. "What's wrong?" Eliot asked.
    "Ay dios," the cab driver said quietly.
    Then Philip looked out the window and saw that the intersection was full of white mice. Thousands of them. They swarmed the street in panicked hordes, like tiny indistinguishable sufferers in a fourteenth-century vision of hell. They cascaded over the sidewalk curbs and plunged after each other into gutters. Against the new snow they were nearly invisible, small quakings of motion.
    "My God," Philip said. The driver opened his door and got out of the cab, and Philip and Eliot followed him. None of the cars at the intersection were honking, nor were they making any effort to move. Even the passersby—mostly old women who might have screamed had they seen just one of these creatures dart out from behind a garbage can—hung back while the mice poured out of a small white truck that rested on a corner, its front wheels on the sidewalk, its hood bent around a lamppost. "Poor little things," Philip heard someone say—a voice emerging from the low hum of the crowd which seemed so disembodied that after a moment he wondered if he had imagined it. The mice ran in circles or huddled in clumps as horns began to honk and drivers too far back to see what was going on yelled, "Hey, will you move it?" But no one moved it.
    The cab driver shook his head. Nearby, other cab drivers were conferring in Spanish. Then they got back in their cars. Philip and Eliot followed. "I hope no one was hurt," Philip said.
    "There'd be ambulances if anyone was hurt badly."
    In the distance, police sirens wailed. The driver swore, spat, honked his horn, and began to move the cab forward slowly, but without stopping. The cab parted the sea of mice, and turned onto Ninety-sixth Street. Philip closed his eyes, fearful that he might be compelled to look behind himself for small clots of blood in the snow.
    "I guess they were being taken up to Columbia, to the labs there," Philip said a few minutes later, when they were safely deposited on the West Side Highway. "In some ways, they were lucky. Probably they've escaped having horrible things done to them." He was thinking of a book he read as a child about rats who escape from some sort of government institution.
    "Mrs. Frisby and, the Rats of NIMH," Eliot said. "It was one of my favorites when I was a kid. Derek used to read it to me. Yes, I think those mice were being transported up to Columbia for some horrible experiment to test their pain thresholds. They'd be injected with varying quantities of morphine and set on top of gas burners, and the researchers would measure how long it took each mouse to scream. Or jump. Or whatever mice do when they're in pain. That really happened, you know. Some scientists did it to freak out a group of anti-vivisectionists who were marching in front of their building every day."
    "Jesus," Philip said.
    Now the taxi driver turned and delivered to them, in bad English, his own private explanation for the event. They listened, trying to extract what they could. "The shit of the world" was all Philip understood.
    "Well, in any case, we can read all about it in the Post tomorrow," Eliot said, as if in conclusion. "The Post will put this on its front page,M ICE A TTACK U PPER M ANHATTAN."
    He lifted his arm and stretched it out behind Philip's head. A beam of light from a truck going the other way passed over Eliot's face, illuminating for a fraction of a second his pale skin, his eyes, the small hairs coming over his cheek like a grass. Philip reached over and stroked the cheek, a gesture that even now seemed to him