Fifty Mice: A Novel (14 page)

“Christ on a cracker, man, will you—will you—just stop—c’mon.” Barry tries to corral Jay’s whirling arms and fists. “We’re not
watching anything but your back, you moron. We’re here to PROTECT you—stop stop stop—stop fighting—us—”

“Where’s Tripod?! Ask him about it. I just saw him in the window—”

“Just. Take it—easy—”

They spin. Jay slips Barry’s grip, steps backward, and, sensing movement behind him, pivots, swings, and hits Sandy, just arriving, right in the face.

She sinks, hands crossed over her nose.

Barry wraps his arms around Jay from behind, jams him down to the floor, and pins him there. “Calm the fuck down.”

Between her hands, Sandy says something neither of them can understand. Back against the wall, knees to her chest, painted toes lifted, head tilted back. There’s blood running down her chin.

“I just want to talk to Public,” Jay says, played out, as Barry lifts him and holds him against the wall with one big forearm up under his neck. “This is all—I saw that asshole Tripod—I just need to talk to Public.”

Sandy rises and lets her hands fall away. Her nose is skewed and bleeding. Her chin set hard, mouth a straight, angry line. Head cocked back, she looks down at Jay from her angled eyes. And then hits him so hard the back of his head makes a crater in the plaster lathe.

•   •   •

I
n office 204 the next morning, everybody’s present and accounted for: Jay (crazy black eye and a surplus of regret), Magonis, Barry (weirdly cheerful), the young marshal called Sandy (ruined nails and her nose set, braced, and taped), Tripod (hair gelled and malicious smile unshakable), and John Q. Public (serene and dapper in his cream-of-wheat sport coat and teal club tie).

“I saw him in the window,” Jay says.

Tripod insists he wasn’t there.

“He’s lying.”

“And nobody saw any fire,” Barry adds.

Magonis suggests they move past the petty argument, that Jay’s explosion was borne of more than just Tripod making lewd gestures in the window, which Tripod again, like a fourth-grader, forcefully denies. The shrink has left his walker somewhere, and seems to be fully ambulatory without it. Is the limp an affectation? Is everything and everyone on the island perpetually in flux?

All Jay’s paranoia has come rushing back.

“Okay. Then explain to me the point,” Jay asks Public, seething, “of three U.S. Marshals sitting in that house watching me like some kind of reality TV show.”
Or test subject,
he thinks. The mice, again.

“Watching me, watching Ginger, watching Helen—”
Always the goddamn mice.

With a shrug, “Got to have eyes on you,” Public argues. “It’s part of the security protocol. More concerned about incoming than outgoing, though. Truly.”

“Watching me in my house is protocol?”

Public shrugs. “If we were, and I’m not saying we are, most people might say it makes them feel safer.”

“Anyway, it’s not even your house, is it?” Tripod drawls, nettling.

“Jimmy, there’s no cameras,” Barry announces, defensive. “We’re not peepers. Miles’s just jerking your chain.”

Jay just looks at him.

“Not your real house, not your real life,” Tripod sings. “Maybe he’s getting confused.”

Jay has reached a point where his outrage has been trumped by his situational impotence. He looks to Public, the diplomat, who says that while there aren’t any cameras, they could loosen their surveillance a notch, if that’s really what Jay wants—

“Yes,” Jay says.

—and if Ginger agrees to it, Public continues. “There’s the little girl to consider,” Public says.

A new thought dances into Jay’s head: maybe Helen is the protected witness, and Public’s lurid story about Ginger is just another layer of cover.

Magonis is talking about the imperfections of artificial constructs engendered by protective custody, the sacrifices one has to make sometimes for the greater good, and everyone’s safety, and Jay, surfacing from thoughts about Helen-as-witness, reminds them that he didn’t want to be here to begin with. Tripod drily suggests Jay try paddling a kayak to the mainland, see how that works out. Barry chokes down laughter, and Sandy tells them both to shut the fuck up.

“He keeps trying to call his girlfriend,” Barry complains to Public. “Not to shift gears, but. I got phone logs from all over Avalon: bars, hotel reception, day-tripper’s cell phones he’s been borrowing. He needs to put on his big-boy pants and stop dicking around.” Jay doesn’t deny it, although it was only the one tourist, a spur-of-the-moment thing when he was standing outside his shop. He got that squalling sound, like an old-fashioned dial-up modem trying to connect.

He hasn’t tried to make another call in over a week.

He looks around the room. A veneer falls away.

Just people doing their jobs, he realizes. Buckham & Buckham with badges. Flawed, petty, distracted by personal problems, judgment clouded by personal prejudice, professional but disengaged.

Vulnerable. Just like Jay.

“Is she really a girlfriend,” Tripod muses, trying to scratch under his cast with a pencil, “in the deeper, emotional sense of the word?”

“Are we finished here?” Magonis asks, bored.

“Cameras and microphones out of my house,” Jay confirms. “Now. Today.”

“Sure.” Public nods. “It’s already done, since there aren’t any.”

Divide and conquer. This is just another workplace maze, and Jay instinctively presses his advantage: “And I want Tripod off my case. Literally.”

Magonis and Public trade looks.

“No way,” Tripod says. “Don’t let him—”

“Can I just say,” Barry jumps in, “this paranoid thing where he’s, like, we’re all voyeurs peeping into his private life is fairly insulting to me and Sandy. We’re professionals,” Barry adds. “We’ve done everything we can to try and make this situation as constructive and comfortable for him as—”

“All I want is some privacy,” Jay says. “You treat me like a zoo animal, we’re not gonna get anywhere.”

Tripod talks over everybody, dagger eyes on Jay, unable to contain himself: “I know what this is about. I know: I hear Ginger sucks pole like a pro. And he don’t want to share.”

Sandy explodes, lunges at Tripod; fortunately, Public manages to catch her before any damage can be done, because she looks like she could kick Tripod’s ass. Barry and Public pull her away while Marshal Miles dances just out of range and taunts, “C’mon. Bring it.”

Barry, forgetting in the moment that their relationship is a fiction, tries to intercede, spousal, “Sandy—”

“Shut up. You’re a shithead,” Sandy tells Barry. “Don’t defend the little bastard.” She won’t look at him. “Jay’s right, ship him back to L.A.”

“Jimmy,” Barry points out pointlessly.

“Easy does it,” Magonis says to Sandy as, sandwiched between the immobile old shrink and a surprisingly hard-bodied Public, she stops struggling. “Breathe. Breathe.”

They look for Jay, but he’s already walked out of the office with his small victory.

The hallway is empty. A cold slurry light glares through the unwashed windows in the stairwell at the far end.

No one follows him.

And he makes it a point to be down by the seawall when the last boat back to San Pedro leaves the ferry landing. Tripod is on it, with his duffel and backpack.

Jay waves good-bye.

FOUR WEEKS IN,
Jay thinks he’s got the Magonis thing under control.

His hands hang from the loops of the chain-link fence as he stares through the hatchwork of wire watching Helen play with her classmates. Chasing each other around, freeze tag, their long shadows crisscrossing on the asphalt. A normal little girl except that she doesn’t make a sound.

There’s no more discussion with the federal shrink about the dead flower girl or strip-bar mermaids; Jay has successfully steered the daily dialectic in 204 to safer territory, which is to say anything, everything, else: the endless stretches of days and weeks and months in which his previous year’s life has played itself out, soberingly colorless, but, full disclosure, as far as Jay can tell, no different from the featureless year of his life that preceded it, or the year before that one, back and back and back.

It’s growing colder; the sun crosses the island lower in the sky, shadows deep all day.

Helen is clearly in charge of the handball game, gesturing, her face a riot of free-flowing emotions, and none of the other kids seem to mind or even notice that she’s not using words.

Sometimes Jay worries that this recent past he’s unwrapping, day by day, with the odd-eyed shrink, which presents itself to Jay as one sad sustained serialized failure-to-engage, would, in the eyes of another man, read as normal and fine, recalled with a wistful fondness and satisfaction. Would he, in a different context, stripped of the need to provide the key, the clue, to unlock a young woman’s demise—the flower girl—if that is in fact what the Feds are hoping he’ll give them (that is, if she really died—and he has only their forensic photographs as testament to it and which the mere existence of Photoshop renders inconclusive without other corroboration), would he look at himself and judge his past year differently: with empathy, with forgiveness, absent prejudice?

Autonomic arousal (and, remember, arousal = anxiety) in mice is a biological reaction triggered by the nervous system, including raised heart rate, pupil dilation, changes in breathing. The sympathetic response.

Electrocortical arousal in mice is a change in brain wave functioning, changing frequency, speeding up or slowing down, and probably linked to Eysenck’s reticular activating system, about which Jay has never understood squat.

Behavioral arousal is a change in observable mouse demeanor, including restlessness, fidgeting, trembling, or tension.

Even as he’s settled into his fragile new made-up existence, the tectonic shift Jay’s experiencing by facing down his old one remains unnerving. He wants to ask Ginger if she feels the same way, but he’s afraid of the answer.

Assuming that a mouse (or its genetic cousin, the hominid
Homo sapiens
) would actively try to escape an adverse, a.k.a. stressful, stimulus, the tail suspension test dangled, in air, a subject facing downward above a solid surface, with adhesive tape affixed three-quarters of the distance from the base of the mouse’s tail (duct tape,
unsuitable, will tear hair and skin; attach too near the tip and the mouse will come loose and plummet down), for six or more minutes. Mice will typically panic, and struggle vainly to face upward and climb to a solid surface; when the animal stops moving he’s considered to have given up. This resignation to immobility is characterized as depression and submission, which is usually the goal of the TST, but some strains of lab mice can skew the mean due to tail-climbing behavior and unusual leg clasping, neurological abnormalities, or a streak of just plain ornery.

Despite Manchurian Global’s ongoing effort to identify and isolate unsuitable subjects, such outliers continued to show up on test day, because it was suspected that one of the lab technicians was sneaking in after hours and releasing them back into the general population.

A quilt of clouds skitters inland.

Helen drops a wicked topspin lob past the outstretched arms of a hapless little toehead, point and game.

If Jay’s going to try to escape, and disappear, he senses he has to do it soon.

•   •   •

S
ome days Jay runs.

Some days he skirts the seawall where Leo, the one-legged French (or Belgian) putative
Brigade des Forces Spéciales
casualty is preparing for yet another unsuccessful abalone diving mission (there are no abalone in the waters off Catalina, Floria informed Jay one day as he bought cereal and bananas, because the withering foot syndrome wiped them out in the early ’90s), past the picket of palm trees and the big casino, across Descanso Beach, up to the Hamilton Cove condominium complex that hangs from the near-vertical, northern escarpments of Avalon canyon, overlooking the sea.

Some days, following the switchback streets between the bungalows and vacation homes, sun on his back, to the crest of the high plateau, where the buffalo came out of the fog and the road leads ten miles to the airport-in-the-sky and, some days, even from here, Jay can catch Sam Dunn’s Cessna shooting out from between the hills, over the eastern cliffs where the channel current crashes against the rocks, out over the whitecapped water, rising, rising, banking gently up into the sky and heading for Los Angeles.

He’ll slow, and check his watch, looking for patterns, a schedule, and by the time he looks up into the sky again, the Cessna is but a silvery checkmark in the sweep of blue.

And some days Jay will cross town after his session with Magonis to wait outside the schoolyard for Helen and walk her home. It’s prearranged, there’s no pattern and no predicting when, Ginger scheduling him at breakfast, never saying where she’ll be or why she can’t do it, and Jay never asking, because he likes doing it, and is afraid if he asks too many questions she’ll change her mind. Despite her denial, he assumes she has something like his appointment with Magonis, only with someone else. Relating to what
she
remembers, knows, saw.

Or didn’t see.

And Helen, well, Helen’s not talking.

Not yet.

•   •   •

A
fter school, after watching the playground through the chain link and agreeing to one more turn on the monkey bars, Jay and Helen walk home. If she’s happy to see him she doesn’t give it away. Her expression is just short of serious, businesslike, in a friendly but distracted schoolgirl way. He’s no longer a stranger, but not quite a friend. He doesn’t want to admit how thoroughly she’s crawled under
his defenses. He takes long strides, she has to skip every few steps to catch up, and Jay pretends not to notice.

There are two principal routes they can take, neither one direct. He lets Helen decide. One loops through downtown Avalon, past the shops and restaurants and along the serpentine seawall to the casino ballroom, then up to their bungalow on the steep streets that stitch the canyon’s north slope.

The other route involves cutting across the golf course, which Helen seems to enjoy because they’re always finding things in the rough. Not just the lost golf balls, either, but tees (white, natural, and in colors), quarters, dimes, nickels, ball markers, pencils, hats, visors, a V-neck sweater, a broken six iron, one running shoe, and an inside-out umbrella. Helen especially likes the hot-pink and chartreuse high-vis golf balls, and the white ones Sharpie-marked with golfer hieroglyphics: lines (straight and wavy), circles, dots, curlicues, crosses, diamonds, squares. Once they found a dead bird and Helen wouldn’t leave until they buried it deep in a sand trap.

He’s stopped talking for her; where once he carried both sides of the conversation like a homeless schizophrenic, now he’s content to let language go: the sound of their feet, the wild conversations of the birds, the channel wind across the golf course, sharp punctuations from construction sites or distant machinery, or the low murmuring of golfers on other fairways, whine of their carts, rattle of clubs, a ball struck well, a dog that won’t stop barking, there’s plenty to hear.

He’s considered that maybe it isn’t that she’s not talking, it’s that she’s busy listening for what might be coming for Ginger.

This clear afternoon the bay sleeps vitreous in the long, cool shadow of the barren hills, and Jay is pushing farther ahead of Helen by lengthening his strides without quickening them. The fairway grass is damp and winter-length, and their feet leave twin trails of dark ovals that shimmer in the occasional shaft of sun. Her little
backpack slips off one shoulder as she struggles to keep up. She’s frustrated. He seems not to care. It’s a long shot, but one he’s been working toward for several days: their nebulous relationship means she can’t be sure that he’ll look back for her.

In the fourth fairway rough, in the dipping swale that rises through a stand of scraggly manzanita to the seventh green, Helen pulls up, cross.

And shouts: “WAIT.”

Wait.

Jay stops walking, hesitates, and turns around, slowly.

Helen glares at him: clinging obstinately to her silence, flushed, furious, wordless.

“Did you say something?”

Trapped, she fights back tears.

“Are you talking to me,” Jay asks, as if innocently, “or . . . ?” He looks around the empty golf course, purely gestural.

“Or maybe it was somebody else,” Jay says. He waits for a moment. Nothing from Helen. He turns his back on her, and takes a step forward. And another. And another.

“It wasn’t,” Helen sparks.

There. He stops again, turns again deliberately, and they stare at each other for a long time.

“It wasn’t,” she says again.

She looks into him, defeated. Her defeat becomes his loss, added to all the rest that he’s lost, and the sudden weight of it after years of denying it rocks him. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I just . . .”

Helen opens her mouth, and nothing comes out. Tears flow, she’s crying, shoulders heaving, losing it, and any lingering chance Jay may have of self-congratulation for orchestrating this moment is stripped away by her expression of raw vulnerability.

Shit.

He walks back, kneels down next to her, and slips the pack from her shoulders. “Hey,” he says softly. “It’s okay. I’m sorry. This wasn’t supposed to . . .” But guilt overcomes him because, yeah, he calculated everything for just this result, and he knows that she probably understands it or will figure it out over time and, like any parent, even a fake one, he wonders if she will forgive him.

“You tricked me,” she says.

“Yeah.” She searches his face for the reason, and he should say,
Because
I’ve been there, Helen. I don’t know why you stopped talking, but I’ve been in that place, where everything goes dead, where you want to just curl up and disappear, and I know what happens when you stay there too long.
Instead he just shrugs and shakes his head, struck dumb, like her.

She collapses against him. He has never felt so low.

“I won’t tell anyone,” he promises.

Ginger is out on the porch waiting when Jay and Helen come up the hill to their bungalow, hand in hand. Her tears are dried, but Helen’s cheeks are flushed and her eyes rimmed red, and he feels a tiny, worried tightening of Helen’s grip as they tromp up the stairs and Ginger, smiling, squats down to take Helen’s backpack and feels her forehead and speculates that there must be pollen in the air and then asks her daughter, as she always does, about her day.

Helen’s eyes stay on Jay, level, waiting for the double cross, despite what he’s told her. She’s said nothing since the golf course. But Jay gently disentangles his fingers and goes inside, keeping his promise.

Suddenly this is the most important thing to him, keeping his promise to this little girl he still barely knows.

•   •   •

L
ater, blades of street light through the curtains cut ribbons across Jay when he rolls onto his back, startled, eyes open and staring up at Helen, who stands over him; stands very still, just looking down at
him, holding her pillow and her blankie crushed against her chest until there’s a flutter of light in the dining room, and Ginger appears, silhouette in the archway, rumpled in a sweatshirt, long legs bare.

“She’s scared,” Ginger says, sleepy. “She wants to sleep in here.”

Jay’s fuzzed brain takes a moment to register this: “Oh.” He frowns. “Okay. Lemme just—” He tries to push himself upright, but he’s all mummified by the sandwich of sheet and blanket. “She can have the sofa, and I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“No,” Ginger says, talking over him, “with you. She wants to sleep in here, on the sofa. With you.” She emphasizes the words precisely, letting her question fall between inflection and tone.

This does not, to Jay, seem like a good idea, given Ginger’s not-so-guarded curiosity about why Helen might be asking this, out of the blue, not to mention that it would be impractical, given the narrow beam of the sofa. “What?” He looks at Helen, realizes that the little girl is dead serious, oblivious to Ginger’s fears; Jay understands that it’s important, and part of some unspoken bond he’s formed, he and Helen, and not to be easily dismissed or trifled with.

It’s a test, and Ginger and Helen are looking for equal and opposite correct answers.

“Oh.” Jay blinks. “Um”—uncomfortable, wishing Ginger would help him out here, knowing she won’t—“I don’t . . . think that’s . . .” He looks up at Ginger and squints. “. . . gonna work—comfortability-wise, I mean, look, hey, I know: why don’t I sleep in your room, on the floor or something?” He starts to gather his bedclothing. “And that way you can sleep in your own bed . . . but I’ll be . . . right there. With you.” He glances pointedly at Ginger, adding, “On the floor.”

It takes a few minutes for Jay to get relocated and arranged in a corner of their bedroom: cold, mostly uncomfortable despite the stuffed animals Helen has generously donated from her small collection—it’s a hardwood floor. He shifts and tries to find a neutral
position for his hips and legs, and feels the unforgiving flatness, staring out into the soft darkness where Helen has fallen asleep again and where Ginger sits, cross-legged, staring down at him with her dark, unreadable eyes.