Fifty Mice: A Novel (19 page)

HE ARRIVES SO EARLY
that he sits and waits for a while in the first light on a bus bench across the street. Visiting hours are nine to six, but the graveyard-shift staff lets him in when he tells them who he is and who he’s come to see.

No one has called on her in a long time.

They find his name on the list in a file of preapproved visitors.

A nurse offers Jay coffee. Steam twists and coils from a cup with pop-out handles.

Huntington Hospital has a psychiatric wing called Della Martin, nestled deep inside the grand modern-mission medical complex, with a restful courtyard of grass and garden and trees. While, officially, the ward has no long-term-care program, there is a middle-aged female patient who has been here for as long as anyone can remember.

This woman is ashen-faced, and her dry, short hair is the institutional gray of the walls. Her eyes are dulled by years of lithium and the latest antidepressants and electroshock whenever it happened to come back in fashion.

She hasn’t spoken in almost twenty years.

Jay sits on the edge of her bed, across from her worn armchair, dawn light slanting through the slot of window tracing faint promise on the hook rug under his feet. There are two forgettable abstract paintings on the facing walls, which Jay remembers from his father’s den; the bureau is covered with framed snapshots of a happy family of five: vacations to Disney World, Christmas, birthdays, summer at the beach, three children, frozen in time: ten, eight, and five.

A larger formal wedding photo rises behind the collection as if attending it, awkward, ungainly; the young couple is handsome, happy and in love, oblivious to the catastrophe that awaits them and their children and all these framed stillborn memories they would not, did not, have the good fortune to ever look back on.

“Mom?”

The female patient is Jay’s mother, and the glowing young woman in the photograph is Jay’s mother, and there is no resemblance between the two. None.

She says nothing.

•   •   •

T
his is what he remembers:

Fear.

Darkness.

His eyes blinking open to a bedroom he knew and sensed was not the same bedroom he’d fallen asleep in.

Something had been added.

Halloween night had been frigid, frost dusting the grass when they trick-or-treated, glistening on their shoes, the ghosts of breath trailing as they ran from door to door. His homemade ghoul costume hung from the hook on the open closet door, glow-in-the-dark viscera painted across it and still faintly greenwhite, slow-fading like memories, and all the candy in a pillowcase safely shoved under his bed.

On the back side of the shake-roof split-level was thick bluegrass that sloped past the covered, peanut-shaped pool to a dry creek bed that ran along a private gravel road lined thick with eucalyptus and pine; the streetlight at the intersection was shrouded by the trees’ canopy, so even with the draperies pulled open the room was dark.

His heart was pounding in his chest, his mouth was cotton; he was scared and he didn’t know why.

What had changed?

Motionless from fear, he listened. Listened until the quiet turned itself inside out and he became certain that somebody was in the house. Motionless, he listened, hoping for the heavy tread of his father’s feet, or the whistle of his mother’s slippers, or the slow-sliding socks of his brother, Carl, or his little sister’s chronic sniffling. Halloween, he told himself. Halloween is scary, it’s just that.

A low murmuring. Drawers sliding out and back in.

A heaviness in the house, extra weight, extra mass. A disturbance in the balance of things. Movement he could sense and not account for. A wicked, crushing, foreboding of otherness.

His father’s voice, sleepy, calling out to ask who the hell was making that racket in the kitchen.

And then such an absence of noise, it was as if lives had already been sucked from the house.

He remembers being very confused after that.

He’s never been sure how long he stayed in his bed, listening, waiting, dreading.

He thinks he heard his sister, Cara, cry out so suddenly that the silence swallowed it and made him wonder, in his bed, whether he’d heard anything at all.

His ears ringing. His heart pounding.

Shadow among shadows, he slid from the bed and went to the doorway of his bedroom, still listening to the uncertainty of his dread.
Felt the cold of the terra-cotta tiles in the hallway on the soles of his feet. Smelled the pine and eucalyptus outside, wet, sickly-sweet.

A rustle of trees and branches; icy breeze brushed his neck.

The front door was open. A cold hollowing darkness spilling in.

He stopped. Not brave. He wanted to go back to his room, get back in his bed, back under the covers; he was only eight and afraid of all darkness, convinced, once tucked in, that if any part of his body became exposed to the night whatever was lurking out there in it would find him.

Not so much to steady himself as just to feel its reassuring immutability, he put his hand on the wall and looked back down the hallway, to his bedroom, where he saw that the door to Cara’s room was yawning in; through the yawning he watched curtains curl, rippling, lit ghostly by his little sister’s nightlight, more of the cold bleak gloaming stealing in.

A door that his mother always closed after Cara fell asleep. A window that should not have been open.

And the noise in the kitchen, feet scuffling, half an exclamation of surprise and then a soughing sound and his cowardly indecision: the open front door and its promise of safety and the otherness in the house, the rancid smell of them, their voices, the bloody palm print on the wall: the ominous absence of anyone else in his family awake.

This is what he wants to forget:

Fear.

Darkness.

Everything that followed.

•   •   •

E
ven now it’s a jumble.

There are blank bits that he could fill in, if he wanted, with what he later learned.

Jack-o’-lanterns’ rowdy, puddled light from melted candles drew him up the steeply sloping hillside, through his mother’s roses, thorns slashing him, pajamas tearing, barefoot, slipping on the frost-cold flattened lawn and leaves, eight years, two months, six days old, blind with tears to the Bruces’ house where drunk, adult-size sexy witches and warlocks and vampires laughed shrill and febrile at the cartoon spookiness of his costume (zombie?), the liberal use of lifelike blood (just like a boy, isn’t it?), and his squeak—he couldn’t speak—the words wouldn’t come—

—he was struck dumb—

—squeaking—

—crying—

—help them, help them, help them—

—Abigail Bruce finally found him and understood that her neighbors’ son shouldn’t have been there after midnight.

He does not remember what he told them. A group of men went together down the hill to the house and came back pale and shaken. Someone cleaned Jay’s cuts and wrapped him in a blanket and the women sat with him, quiet, holding his hands, black mascara tears running down high-colored cheeks, sober while the men huddled and murmured with low, regretful voices.

The police found his father in the kitchen with stab wounds to the heart and head. Jay’s little sister was suffocated as she slept. His brother. Carl. Struck and killed with the aluminum bat kept next to his bed. His mother, battered, broken, endured. Detectives believed that she came down after Jay fled, interrupted the two men at work on his father in the kitchen, and was caught in the front hallway but somehow survived an unspeakable assault, and the front hallway was where the men from the neighbors’ party found her, eyes fixed, mouth open slack; the men in their Halloween costumes and stage
makeup, she thought them angels, and the single statement she made to them before leaving this dimension was “Pray for us.”

Two homicidal interlopers in 99-cent store masks and black sweats disappeared into the night of All Hallows, two scary monsters in a city of masquerades. They took the jewelry and a couple hundred dollars cash, a Cartier watch that had been his mother’s Christmas gift that year, and the lives of five people, two of whom did not die.

Jay has no memory of the funeral.

After the one time, to collect his things, he never went back in the house.

The home invaders were never caught, and because there was a worry that the perpetrators would come back to “finish the job,” he and his mother were relocated to California, where the generous insurance settlement cared for them both—Jay in boarding schools, summer science camps, and awkward trips with the Bruces, who were his parents’ executors and best friends—what remained of his mother in managed-care facilities and psychiatric hospitals, principally Della Martin, where doctors watched and waited and hoped for a breakthrough that never came.

Twenty years of silence.

Spring semester of his high-school senior year at a Santa Barbara private school, Jay had had a visit from a federal agent who told him that a convict in Leavenworth had confessed to the crime in a letter he left behind to be found in his cell after the man garroted himself with a loop of baling wire in the prison garden one hot summer’s afternoon. His recounting was dispassionate, detailed and specific, credible, including information that his accomplice had died of a drug overdose six months after the killings, a bad bolus of Mexican brown purchased with the last of the blood money stolen from Jay’s family. It was a waxen day at Cate, the fog off the ocean was gluey and warm
and clung obstinately to the hillside. The man gave no reason for the murders. Offered no apology, sought no forgiveness. He had said he hoped this would give Jay some kind of “closure,” and that he was sorry it was so long coming.

It was a good story, well delivered. Earnest. Maybe true, sure. Jay suspected, however, that they’d made it up. That it was another sleight-of-hand blithely offered to facilitate his so-called healing. At the time, Jay didn’t know how to tell the federal agent that, if he thought about that night at all anymore, it was to wonder why he hadn’t stayed in the house with his father, and not run like a little coward into the darkness, where his life and all memory of what he witnessed between the hallway and the Bruces’ party fell away and was lost.

There are some doors mice choose not to go through.

There are things best forgotten.

Or not remembered.

•   •   •

A
t noon his mother rises from her chair, stiff, knee joints clicking, and kicks off her slipper turtles and climbs onto the bed, knifing pale varicose legs under the sheet and tugging it up over the shoulder she turns toward the wall so as not to face him, although Jay, still sitting on the edge of the mattress, wonders if she even really understands that her son, her only remaining family member, is there.

“Mom?”

He feels a strange compulsion to talk to her. He wants to tell her what’s happened, that he’s been taken into protective custody by federal agents who want him to remember something he may never have seen. That he’s broken up with a fiancée his mother didn’t know he had, he’s been given a false life with a woman named Ginger and her daughter, Helen, selectively mute, and he’s developed all these dumb, stupid, complicated attachments and feelings for the woman and
coaxed the daughter into talking to him. And it’s not real. He knows it’s not, but it might as well be, it might well be what he wants, but what he wants, what he wants to know, what he wants to ask, what he wants his mother to tell him, is: What should he do?

“I learned this thing in college,” Jay says aloud to his mother’s back. “In, I think, philosophy class, this experiment called Mary’s Room. There’s Mary, this brilliant scientist, who gets locked away and raised in a black-and-white room, where she’s given a black-and-white television monitor and the controls for the camera that’s directly attached to it, which can, like, float around the world—don’t ask—wherever she needs it to. And Mary, who eventually becomes a specialist in the science of seeing, slowly collects all the physical information there is to truly know about what happens when we experience colors: what goes on when we see sunflowers or tropical skies or ripe tomatoes on the vine. She learns the exact wavelengths of light necessary to stimulate the retina to perceive these colors, and exactly how the brain decodes that information and then stimulates the feelings we have and the breath we need to expel and the vocal contractions necessary to say, ‘Whoa, look: that sky is fucking
blue.
’

“In other words: she knows everything there is to know about the science of color. Everything. In theory. But when the door unlocks and she finally walks out of that room into the world of color, what? I mean, when she actually
experiences
color. Will she learn anything new?”

Jay’s mother says nothing. She doesn’t move.

“You can study and shape and imagine what it would be like to experience something—let’s say, in this case, a life, a real life—but how do you know that you’d recognize it when it happens to you?

“And what if you recognize it, but it’s just a construct? Temporary, hypothetical. A convenient fiction.”

Jay’s mother says nothing.

He blinks back tears that take him by surprise. He puts his hand lightly on her arm, and the arm draws away from him, in a reflexive recoil.

The lab mouse was invented in 1909 by Harvard track star C. C. Little, who mated generation after generation of field mice until he had a healthy, genetically stable, inbred strain that lived in sterile isolation awaiting any number of unfortunate outcomes over which it had no control. But as genetically close as a mouse may be to a man, mouse metabolism is not human metabolism, and there are a lot of ways of being small and brown. Or white and blind. Or epileptic. Or obese. So a new science of mousing evolved, to make it possible to turn on or off individual genes in mice and isolate those traits linked to diseases or conditions that Big Pharma like Manchurian Global yearn to cure. And with the sequencing of the mouse genome, the lab mouse is no longer a substitute human. Not even a mouse, really. It’s something other: a genomic runner negotiating the maze between life and code: offering an illusion of understanding things that Jay knows cannot be understood.