Fifty Mice: A Novel (23 page)

THIS IS WHAT HE REMEMBERS:

A mermaid, roiling the petite sea of her giant barroom beaker with shimmering bubbles and fractured light, arms graceful, tail coiling. The flower girl; his flower girl. Loin-thrilling, wanton, siren-smiling, unreal. She arcs up, her breasts rippling buoyant. Waves at him. Waves a goofy little girl wave—

“There’s a lot of it I don’t understand,” he says.

In the stolid office, number 204, chairs facing, Jay and Magonis are staged for what Jay hopes will be the last time.

“Nobody expects you to.”

To say that Jay has a plan would be generous. He has an intention, a direction, a goal—or maybe just a destination. And an irrepressible, blind, obdurate determination to reach it, by whatever means necessary. “I didn’t . . .”

“Just tell us what you saw, Jay. That’s all we’re asking.”

Jay knows that’s not true.

His eyes have found the four, small, wireless video cameras: mounted on the bookshelf (high and wide), between the pictures on the cabinet behind the desk (low and wide), in the air-conditioning
duct (side view), and on the windowsill (tight over the shoulder) behind the chair where Magonis hunches, chewing a fingernail, his hat hair evidently an afterthought today, ill-combed and crooked.

Multiple angles. Discreet placement. Jay’s got an audience of more than one. Doe? Public? Someone they answer to? At Cate, junior year, he played Banquo in
Macbeth
, but forgot his lines during the dress rehearsal and was replaced opening night by Vaughn.

Jay closes his eyes.

“First off—”

He imagines:
Vaughn, plunging awkwardly into the mermaid tank, fully clothed, lab coat trailing white filaments as if of chalky melt, and tangling around him as he churns his arms and curves upright and peers out at Jay, scared—

“—Vaughn.” Jay opens his eyes. “He’s not involved.”

“So you’ve said.”

“In any way. He’s an accident of intersect.”

“That’s an interesting way of phrasing it.”

“Passing through,” Jay says. “I just want everybody to be very, very clear about that, whatever happens, and leave him alone.”

“Whatever happens?”

Jay worries he’s said too much. “Maybe they think they can use him to get to me. Or they’ve misinterpreted our friendship to imply collaboration. I don’t know, but I just know, I’m telling you, he’s . . .”

Magonis nods. “Okay.” But he’s evidently not convinced. “Manchurian Global does a lot of government contract work, CIA stuff. You don’t think—”

“No no, this isn’t anything like that, it’s not spies, man. Jesus. How cheesy would that be?” Jay says.

“Oh.”

There’s something in Magonis’s tone when he says this; Jay’s eyes narrow. “I mean—or would it be?”

Magonis just waits.

“Spies?”

With his good eye, Magonis studies his bit-down nail.

“No . . .” Jay says, thinking it through aloud. “It’s something stupid, isn’t it? Like revenge or greed or—”

“Jay.”

He remembers, in a dizzying rush:

“—or love.”

Liquid darkness of the strip club, thump of bass notes, smell of liquor and desperation, stray light striating across Jay as he drifted in, sifting through the beaded curtain just past the bouncer at the door. The flower girl, tight black T-shirt half-hiding her snake tattoo, looked out at him, amber-eyed, from behind the bar, where she poured out martinis from a shaker. The luminous tank threw its rippling glow across the room, across the lumpen hunched figures in cane chairs nursing drinks, eyes fixed on the show, and, yes, the flower-girl-now-turned-mermaid, naked breasts pressed pale pink flat against the transparent swerve of the tank, and—

boom

The tank exploded. Water and glass.

Magonis, wondering: “Jay?”

Entropy.

Parking lot.

Static crush of cars glinting streetlight, the smell of smog and sea, the deafening hush of an L.A. night, a thin sheen of night dew on the asphalt and the harlequin neon of the strip bar slowly flickering—shorting out—dying as Jay ran from the doorway of the club, across the wet pavement, with a mermaid in his arms—

Jay looks at his hands. Magonis clears his smoker’s throat and waits.

“I went hoping maybe I could take her out for coffee or something after, like the last time. Still, I don’t know. The embarrassment.
It was a spin cycle: longing, lust, the sweaty entanglement, the slow-dawning shame, then retreat. To Stacy. And repeat.

“That I couldn’t get her out of my head, just finally gave way to, after a while, sure, I just wanted her.” Jay goes quiet, with some thinking. He doesn’t want to go too fast, but it’s iffy what he’s got under control here and what’s simply spilling out in confession.

“I wanted her. But. Strippers.” He sighs. “It’s not a game with them. You know? Or it’s the right game, which, I know, is kinda fucked-up, unless you see it as a romantic thing. Old school. And foolish beyond belief.

“Save the lost girl, with your noble intentions, your roll of money, your fast car. Take her home, make her real. Suburbia. Babies. But, still, after, in the dark . . .

“Ba-boom.”

Magonis notes that this sounds like something Jay read in
Esquire
, if it’s still in print, or
Maxim.
Jay allows that both are, and it might be, but argues that Magonis is of the generation that produced Hefner and Norman Mailer, so if it is some banal macho fantasy maybe it’s generationally immutable.

“Truth is. I was bored with my girlfriend,” Jay admits.

Magonis just nods.

“Pissed off at her or maybe just at my life in general, which was, you gotta admit after all you’ve heard, really one long relentless pointless chore.”

Magonis shifts in his chair, trying to find a comfortable position. On the exhale: “Okay. That’s interesting and everything, Jay, and we could spend a few years on the couch examining the roots of it, but—”

“—No, it’s relevant to this,” Jay insists. “Because expectation goes to the heart of what you see, do you know what I mean? You see what
you prepare yourself for seeing.” He sits forward in his chair, intent on Magonis. “And what you don’t expect, can’t . . . doesn’t . . . hold. We don’t really see what we’re surprised by. It goes by too fast. That’s my theory.”

“And?”

“That night the bar was filled to capacity, mostly men, the kind who say ‘titties.’ Vacant expressions, or hard, or lonely. A couple bachelor parties of frat brothers drunk as pigs. Laughing, reeling, shadowy smears in the dark recesses of the place, hustling the one waitress for a lap dance she wasn’t for any amount of money going to do.

“The smell of chlorine from the tank, the pop and hissing of an air compressor, the dreamy unreality of night, and the naked, unedited lust. As if you just—”

The air compressor, upstairs where the mermaids dressed and slipped into the tank, was totally inaudible in the bar below. So as not to break the illusion. Plus, all that fucking rave mix music—

A white lie.

“—stepped off into another dimension,” Jay finishes. He grins warily at Magonis, who seems, so far, engaged.

“So. Bad margaritas: not enough salt on the rim and I
hate
that—and Rob Roys—or was it Separators?—which my friend Otto once drank at a brunch, nine in a row, and got eighty-sixed, because you knock a few back, thinking, ‘This is nothing,’ and two minutes later you’re flat on your ass, bitching about the Lakers.”

Jay gets up, to pace.

The air compressor hitched and sighed.

A shitty bar band he’s just thought of shuffles into this gathering decoupage of his memories and invention, a Jethro Tull cover thumping muffled like a yearning.

“Retro night. Flute solo.” Jay smiles. “Christ. Can you believe that?”

Alone at a table ringside to the mermaid tank, Jay drained another Rusty Nail, sloooop, no problem.

Jay takes a pause and concentrates. He can’t afford to let this float away. “What I’ve got, though, remember: it’s pieces,” he warns. “I’m just saying. And you can’t trust that. You know—not completely.”

After a moment, Magonis prods him. “Go on.”

The shriek of bad music, loud, on blown speakers, the table of Korean businessmen laughing, the chime of glasses behind the bar and a mosaic: the painted nails, the slender arms, tail, swerve, bedroom eyes of the mermaid flower girl.

“Her eyes,” Jay says.

The big tank glowing incandescent as she swam and stripped.

“As she swims and strips,” he says.

She looked right out into the sea of chairs, into the colloquium of men, and found Jay—or did she?

“And then . . .”

Because, inside the tank, mermaid point of view—he’s thought this through—wouldn’t what she saw be the arc of aquarium glass reflecting her starkly downlit mirror image back at her? A water world in which she’s the only inhabitant.

“. . . Through the tank, past the swimming stripper, I could see shapes, kinda like shadows on the other side: these guys: suits, young, old, yearning, sitting, standing, staring, dark, sharp-featured faces suddenly caught in a strobe of light cast from above.”

Magonis leans in, hooked.

“Shadows.”

Magonis waits.

“Drifting along the singular, curving plane of the tank. Like vertical eels,” Jay says. “Flip-book faces, one after the other, smeared and distorted, if only, like a camera, I could just push closer, you know? Zoom in, find focus—almost there, almost a revelation—then: flam
flam flam flam—the shadows kicked off the edge of the tank where they became the bodies of men in black suits moving fast, around the corner.”

“Running away?”

“Running away,” Jay says. “You feel the gunshot, visceral; it never registers really, not like—”

Silence. No band, no compressor. Smoke pulsing with light.

“Anyway. You don’t hear it.”

Something instantly shattering the strip bar’s raucous, testosterone-fueled tenor: the crowd flinched as one. Shadow fringes slower to react, but middle of the room between two pools of downlight a man was lifted out of his chair, blown backward by bullets and, midair, hit again, by more bullets, body jerking, limp rag doll haloed in a fine mist of expelled blood.

Magonis asks how many shots there were.

“But all I see is the girl,” Jay says instead.

In the tank, the water bloomed with eddies of—

“The pink tendrils of blood from her back,” he remembers.

A faraway, hollow crackling sound swiftly built to a roar. The glass of the tank was fracturing white-silver. About to burst.

“Her hands pressed against the glass as it slowly spiderwebbed. From the pressure of the bullet hole. And she had this . . . look of . . . surprise. This strange, abbreviated smile . . . issuing bubbles.

“I can’t even describe the way that sounds in your head,” he says.

“Why did you run with her?”

The confusion.

Front row, Jay turned one shoulder reflexively in defense of himself as the glass of the tank exploded out onto him, water shoving him back. The flower girl flowed into his arms, and they were swept away into the tumult of screaming patrons, swirling tables and chairs.

“Jay.” Magonis leans forward, elbows on knees, palms pressed together and touching his lips: “Why did you run with her, Jay?”

Jay doesn’t answer for the longest time. His face contorts with an onrushing accretion of shame he has buried and grief he has never allowed himself to feel. There are tears in his eyes, for this mermaid, this girl, this woman, he knew only in the most physical way.

He found the strength to lift her from the floodwaters. Stumbled through chairs and flailing customers, through the beaded curtain, and out the door. He sprinted blindly across the parking lot, holding the dying mermaid in his arms.

“You think, when you see it on television, how fake it is that guys can carry girls, you know? Running through the flames. Big-shot heroes. Because girls, they’re actually pretty fucking heavy in real life.” He thumbs the tears from his face. “But it’s true.”

She was feather-light but slippery cold in his arms . . .

“This girl was weightless.”

He cannot distinguish anymore between what he’s inventing and what he remembers.
Parking lot. Empty street. Lobby. How did he get the front door open? Elevator cage. The groan of gears engaging and cables going taut. Choppy light flickering halos, the dying girl’s limp fingers curled through the latticework of the rising car.

An old carved apartment door that Jay muscled through and carried his mermaid into—

Sun punctures the morning marine layer outside and the office abruptly floods with light. Magonis squints, turns from the window, backlit like some Biblical prophet. His fake hair afire. “The man who was shot, behind the tank, in the bar—”

But Jay cuts him off. “You think you can manage things. You say to yourself: ‘What the hell, I’m a problem-solver.’ And then you trace back through all of these useless acts. Epic fails. All the blanks you couldn’t fill. Helpless. Until you get to the most incredible, inexplicable, abjectly humiliating and utterly, indelicately human one.”

Magonis says nothing.

“I put her in fresh water,” Jay says. “Where mermaids breathe.”

Her colorless body, afloat. The white porcelain tub, holding her in its glare. And Jay in her bathroom, wet, exhausted, heaving, standing over her, fists balled up, disbelieving.

“And then, nothing.”

He sank to his knees.

“Test pattern.”

And could not find a God to pray to.

“Lights out.”

Magonis makes one of his abstracted, empty-handed gestures. “Trauma is this weird thing, Jay.” He sounds skeptical. “We cushion the shock. Things retreat. But—”

“You guys. Found me, and moved me.”

Magonis nods, confirming it. “Who was in the bar?” he asks again, stubborn.

“I woke up behind the wheel of my car, hungover and thickheaded. I was parked between two freeways. You know where the 10 and the 110 intersect just south of downtown? Near Staples Center?