Fifty Mice: A Novel (4 page)

Shoes squeak on the industrial tile, trailing faint echoes as Public goes away.

Jay closes his eyes and tries to breathe.

VAUGHN?

Or Manchurian Global, the shadowy government contractor, some covert study that’s gone off the rails, a secret experiment Jay doesn’t even remember he walked in on, and—

—no. He’s pretty sure he knows what it can’t be, but not what it is.

He doesn’t like to look backward; Jay has never really cared where he’s been. He prides himself as always forward-moving: here, in the moment: unbeholden to an immutable and, by the way, completely irrelevant past. Gone. Done. How to remember what he did six months ago, six weeks ago, six days ago, at a specific time in a specific place—it seems impracticable. Time flows, life passes, memories are compromised by distance and the distortion of perspective, mood, focus. You look in the mirror and you see not your face as it is, but your face approximated by the millions of times you’ve seen it before, tired, hungover, happy, broken, sick, young, younger, the baby, the boy, the survivor, the man, staring back at you, reversed, reflected, ever since you first were aware it was your face, the sum total of yourself, not even close to what another person looking at you would see.

Not to mention the hard fact that you might not want to remember that person you were before.

For a long time after Public retreats, Jay’s motionless on his hospital bed, eyes closed but wide awake, struggling to determine what he could possibly know, or have seen in the past year, that would be of value to federal law enforcement. So, yeah, a good guess might be Manchurian G., something to do with his old job, or the behavioral research Vaughn does; something perilous that Jay has seen without knowing he’s seen it.

There is, however, the dead girl in the photographs. And Jay’s conviction that there is no Venn intersect between that girl and Vaughn.

He wonders: What was Vaughn’s point about those fifty cloned mice?

How many images do we process, in a single day? How many people do we encounter?

How many times waking in the night to the touch of breeze across his face and the soft darkness and the fear and indecision and the certainty of an interlocutor; that reflexive spike of terror tethered to another time, a different breach. Was that important? Was that part of this?

The more he tries to remember, the more jumbled the memories get. Last year’s birthday. Christmas. March Madness, he lost fifty bucks on his office pool bracket. The faint impression Stacy leaves in the covers of the bed, the tendrils of her perfumes. Her closet packed with clothes and shoes she never wears. The sound of January rain on the French doors, the leak down the wall.

His father’s face, alive, asleep, dead.

His sister’s empty bed that next morning when they took him back to get some clothes.

His mother’s vacant stare.

There was that night he saw the motorcade, leaving Westwood, when was that? May? Every intersection blocked on the west side. Getting out of there was a nightmare. The pooling streetlights, the spectral gauze of marine layer off the Pacific, and the brittle gleam of motionless traffic. It might have been a shutdown for the President. The blacked-out windows of all those long limousines. And the homeless man with the megaphone and the red tinfoil cape who brought it all to a standstill, screaming gibberish, until LAPD and Secret Service swarmed him and carried him to a waiting van, thrashing and spitting.

Was there something that night he missed?

His mouth is dry. His fingertips itch like crazy. He rubs them against the clammy palms of his hands, and tugs against the handcuff, and then sinks into himself, frustrated, almost resigned. Everything seems out of his control, and control, for Jay, has always been everything.

Public’s boilerplate documents wait on the steel tray angled across the bed, and Jay is deciding that he needs to have an attorney look at them when a woman’s voice startles and observes: “You could have someone review those, but the trouble with lawyers is that they are the most-likely-to-squeal-like-a-squirrel component in all our studies of why witness protection programs get compromised and people we’re trying to save die.”

The brunette from the subway has breezed in, brisk, lively, self-possessed, jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. Empty hip holster for the weapon she’s left somewhere (for safety?), but she’s jangling a fistful of keys and has her own “HELLO My Name Is” sticker on which she’s scrawled in purple Sharpie: DOE.

Unlocking his handcuff, she continues, “It’s just, once lawyers get to talking it’s hard to shut them up. Plus they’re abject cowards, which makes them particularly susceptible to torture.” She adds, “Hi,” and
takes a ballpoint pen from her pocket to put on top of Public’s waiver documents.

“Hi.” Jay slides upright, again, queasy with discomfort, light-headed but starting to shake off the muddle, deadened legs swinging out and dangling over the side of his bed, blood rushing back to his tingling feet, determined to stand up until he feels the air-conditioned air on his ass and realizes he’s in one of those backless hospital gowns that nobody has bothered to tie. He rubs his wrist and looks up to meet Doe’s implacable gaze.

“Fortunately, under the U.S. Patriot Act and its amendments and revisions,” she tells him, “we are empowered, if we want, to simply dispense with that potential risk factor. Lawyers, I mean. Not that we will,” Doe admits, “some of us still believe in the rule of law, that it’s your right as a citizen to have counsel, although the Supreme Court may have a different opinion soon, and, I know it’s been said before by my colleague, but: you aren’t being accused of anything.” She finishes her speech there. And waits. Not as pretty as he remembers. Maybe it’s the cold gray light.

“You can keep me in limbo forever, is what you’re saying.”

“Forever,” Doe muses, still friendly, “is a long time. So. On a scale of one to ten, how freaked out are you?”

Jay doesn’t want to answer this. Instead he gestures to her name tag. “Doe?”

“Jane. Yeah.” She reads Jay’s doubt. “Deputy U.S. Marshal. Do you need to see my badge?”

“That’s not really your name.”

“Don’t hurt my feelings,” she says playfully.

“And Public? Stab in the dark: John Q.?”

Doe smiles, big. She’s got one molar capped gold in back. Weirdly blue-collar and endearing. “
Exactamente.
Good guess.”

Jay is not amused. “I might feel better talking to you with an
attorney present,” Jay says, reaching back and struggling to make a knot in his gown tie. It won’t take.

“Yeah? Why? What have you done?”

“You sound like your partner.”

“Oh, we’re not partners,” she says categorically. “But I am sorry. For messing with you. We’re just attempting to keep it, you know, light. I can only imagine how incredibly strange all this must be.”

Jay breathes out, tight. “Just a bit, yeah.”

“Although, what’s interesting to me is how you’re not nearly as freaked out as I would think you’d be,” she says purposefully, twisting her mouth, wry, and cutting him a curious look that seems to suggest, if he’s not diligent, she’ll get right into his head. Jay’s pulse skips. She doesn’t wait for a response from him, doesn’t seem to expect one. All friendly again: “You want some help with that gown?”

“No, I think I’m good.” Jay lowers himself from the bed unsteadily to the floor, feeling the icy tile on the soles of his already cold feet, and holding his gown shut behind him with one hand.

“Okay.”

The bathroom door is in the far corner, twenty feet of open floor, and Jay just focuses on getting there and keeping his backside to the wall.

“You can put your clothes on,” Doe tells him. “They’re hanging on a hook in there.”

“Great.” He meets her steady gaze reluctantly. Doe worries Jay more than Public; the amiable good nature, the genuine concern, it’s seductive, and winning, and he doesn’t believe it. This woman orchestrated and conducted his forceable abduction only a few hours—or is it days?—ago. “Oh, wait.” Jay stops, slide-steps back to the bed, reaches, takes the legal papers one-handed from the bedside table, and flips the pen up off them and catches it in his mouth.

Doe, impressed: “Whoa. He does tricks.”

“Boarding school. You learn . . . all kinds of useless stuff.” Reversing again, and the same weird sideways shuffle takes him to the bathroom, with Doe, arms akimbo, watching.

“Show me something else.”

Jay smiles reflexively as he backs into the bathroom, and thinks:
Watch me disappear.

Safely inside, Jay locks the door, leans against it and takes a few deep, ragged breaths. The notion of escape has been dancing in and out of his thoughts for a while now, but he has no plan, no skill set that would suggest he could pull it off. It’s a small space: toilet, sink, and a rust-streaked, cobwebbed shower nobody has used in a long time. His eyes slide to his reflection in the mirror over the sink. He sees a pale, stubbled face under bleached, chopped hair and, for a moment, doesn’t even recognize himself.

“Everything okay in there?”

Jay stares.
Oh, man.

“Did you say something?” The soft slap of her hand on the door. “Jay. Everything okay?”

“Yeah. My hair especially.”

“Touch of the dramatic,” she says, still trending to cheerful. “It’ll grow out.”

The glare of the single bulb.

The grating hum of the air-conditioning.

What happens next unfolds in loose fragments that will later defy any rational explanation. The rasping noise brings his eyes to the ceiling above the toilet, and any number of bad action movies where the hero escapes through the ducting.

Gray slacks hurriedly taken from the hook on the back of the door and pulled on; the toilet flushed, seat cover dropped, and Jay stepping up onto it, barefoot, buttoning his pants, hospital gown billowing open in the air currents from the big latticed ceiling grille for the
central air. Jay’s gauze-clumsy fingertips claw at it, hoping it’s one of those spring-secured grilles, but, no—
shit, shit—
hex nuts hold the vent in place.

He flushes the toilet again.

From outside: “Jay?”

“Nothing, all good,” Jay blurts incoherently. Then improvises, “Can I take a shower? I’m, like, pretty funky.”

A slight hesitation. “Sure. Whatever you need.”

“Thanks.”

“Towel?”

“Right. Yes. Thank you.”

He steps down, cranks the handles in the shower stall to send a loud splatter of tepid water into the splash trough, and thinks he hears Doe’s footsteps trail out into the hallway.

Public’s ballpoint pen, unscrewed, disassembled, pieces spilling out across the dusty white vanity counter, will serve as a crude tool. In boarding school, Jay had breached any number of off-limits spaces using only his pens, scissors, and paper clips. Moments later he’s up on the toilet again, using the husk of the pen like a socket wrench to jimmy the hex nuts from the grille. They pop and yield; the vent cover goes gently to the floor. Jay throws shoes and socks up into the darkness, then reaches into the steel ducting, to find leverage and pulling himself up awkwardly into the opening, skin scraping against sharp metal. Two of his fingers are cut and bleeding through the gauze. Steam is billowing up, condensing on the steel. His hips stick. By the width of the waistband of his pants he can’t fit. It’s so stupid he almost laughs, but his fingers are bleeding, and the hot, damp air is blinding him, his arms are shaking, and some elemental part of him doesn’t want to give up to them. He makes one last, desperate pull, twists, and his pants slide off, dangle for a moment from his calves, and then fall to the floor beside the toilet as his pale legs fold up into the duct.

And now he understands just how stupid this was.

It’s pitch black in front of him; the ductwork is filthy, the palms of his hands already grimed. Up ahead he can only faintly make out a ghosting of light that spills sideways from a blunt angle of darkness at some indefinite distance (five feet? five hundred?) that must be a bend in the passageway, and, beyond it, the next possible means of egress. He’s already exhausted from pulling himself in. Shower steam floods the vent and slicks him. He can’t get fully to his hands and knees. Legs scraped raw, no pants, just his sweaty boxers and the flimsy, backless hospital gown, Jay has no way to put his shoes on, so he pushes them ahead of him and starts to slither-crawl away.

The thin metal flexes, of course, and thunders like a kettledrum. So much for the element of surprise. Or any real hope of success. What keeps Jay going at first is just the certainty of the consequences of getting caught, now that he’s made his intention to run known. He keeps crawling, mouse in a maze, Vaughn be damned, hoping for that impossible resolution to an experiment with a foregone conclusion.

Mice,
Jay muses ruefully.
Whose genetic makeup is surprisingly like ours.

At the first intersection he veers right into a slightly bigger, and filthier, ducting, curtained with sheets of lint and cobwebs, praying that this one may lead somewhere promising, but having no confidence that it does.

Hands and knees, now, faster, he keeps crawling. The squeak and thrum of his knees and skin. Somewhere far behind him there is the sound of the bathroom door burst open and he hears Public saying: “How lame is this?” And then: “He is not helping himself here.” And, shouting, louder, presumably with his head up in the vent: “Jay?” bent and amplified by unforgiving air duct acoustics. “Goddamn it.”

Doe is also talking, but not to Public, and not behind him, but below him. On a walkie-talkie or cell phone. Coordinating his
containment from the room or hallway across which the ducting is taking him.

But now there’s no light at all. His eyes try to adjust, he can feel them straining to see anything. Jay is moving as fast as he can, oblivious to any obstruction in front of him, throwing out one hand after another so that at least he’ll touch it before he crashes into a dead end, arriving abruptly at an intersection of three different, smaller ducts, each snaking off into its own dark oblivion. Each too small, as he touches the sharp edges of the openings and makes the quick calculation, for him to continue.