Fifty Mice: A Novel (6 page)

Public pushes away from the table, walks to the wall, and comes back, hands on hips. Drone of the television bleeds through from the front room. Sitcom laugh track. Jay leaves his forehead on the tabletop, frustrated, tired.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Don’t mind me.”

The others stare at him, confused. “He doesn’t trust us,” Doe tells Public. “Which is perfectly understandable.” The way she says it makes it sound like Public’s fault.

Public nods, blows out air. “Okay.”

Richter raises her hand. “Perhaps if my client and I could have a moment alone?”

Head on the table, drained, defeated, Jay murmurs that that won’t be necessary. Ms. Richter is just a prop in this play.

“Okay. Well.” Public is moving to the door, lively, energized. “I guess we’re good, then? Ready to rock and roll?”

“I can try to get an injunction,” Richter says to Jay without confidence, and she stays seated. “A writ of habeas corpus. I could try.”

Jay says nothing.

Public: “Comeoncomeoncomeon—” He opens the door, and marshals flood the room, grasping Jay under the arms and lifting him from the chair to his feet, out the back door, which opens to bright sunshine and long shadows and the sullen, settling day’s heat. Down two steps, hurrying under the canopy of a grapefruit tree and over manicured fescue to a wooden gate, and, in the alleyway behind the house, an idling white twelve-person van with ebony-tinted windows; everybody piling inside, the van moving forward even before the side door finishes sliding shut.

Jay, wedged again in the middle seat between Public and another marshal whose name he’s already forgotten (Kelly?), cranes around to locate the little girl named Helen, sitting small in the backseat, holding hands with her mother. The girl’s eyes are wide, her face expressionless.

“You ready for this?”

She says nothing. Eyes straight ahead. Jay looks to her mother, the woman named Ginger, who has brushed her hair and applied a skim of pale lipstick and who shakes her head ever so slightly, gaze steady, right into him, almost a challenge.

Jay nods. “Jay,” he says, in case she’s forgotten. “I’m Jay.”

“Are you,” the woman says drily, and it’s not really a question.

Mental states of every kind,—sensations, feelings, ideas,—which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist. Although the inwardly-turned look may no longer be able to find them, nevertheless they have not been utterly destroyed and annulled, but in a certain manner they continue to exist, stored up, so to speak, in the memory. We cannot, of course, directly observe their present existence, but it is revealed by the effects which come to our knowledge with a certainty like that with which we infer the existence of the stars below the horizon.

—HERMANN EBBINGHAUS (1885)

Memory: A Contribution to Experimental
Psychology

AND WHAT ABOUT ALL THOSE THINGS
he would rather not have to remember?

The drunken stupors, the petty betrayals, the missteps, the blown layups, the bad sex, the wasted hours, days, weeks, the lies, the secrets, the shame and the regret.

Why wake the dead?

•   •   •

A
cheap numbing percussive roar like ten thousand vuvuzelas cores the smear of blue that is a glassy sea, Pacific Ocean, traveling close and fast beneath the low-flying silver belly of the charter helicopter they boarded in San Pedro. Having never been in a helicopter, Jay is surprised that such an expensive piece of aircraft would make such a low-rent racket.

The eight-seater banks sharply and a scorched blunt of island slides into view through the cockpit window: fat, brown, treeless mountains taper off into the sea, and, behind it, no horizon, just a subtle shift in hues of gray where sea meets sky. Jay, wedged in a back cockpit corner seat, stares dully out the windshield at his
future—earmuffed, hip-to-hip with the little girl, Helen, who sits low, cratered between Jay and her mother.

He feels nothing. He has no expectations. Skills he perfected at eight years old in a hurricane of grief have come back to temper the storm of his current dislocation. The life he had falls away from him, lived: lightly, indefatigably, a shedding of skin.

Can he wait them out? He has done it before.

Jay nudges Helen. “First time in a helicopter?”

The little girl looks right at him, as if startled. Her eyes are as deep as the water below them.

“Yes.” Ginger answers for her. Helen’s mom smells faintly of some fruity perfume, and, in the San Pedro charter office bathroom she put on some regrettably dark eye shadow that lends her a weird, suburban vampiress feel. She’s younger than she wants to be. But older than Jay.

“For me, too,” Jay says to Helen, then tries again: “So what do you think?”

“She’s afraid of heights,” Ginger says. Helen’s hand grips Ginger’s tightly, knuckles pink white from pressure.

“Same with me,” Jay says, to Helen, and then he looks up at Ginger, trying to smile, wry, but not sure that he manages it: “Does your mom charge you a monthly fee for the answering service?”

Ginger’s expression is neutral. “She doesn’t talk.”

Jay nods, backing off. “That’s cool. Okay.”

“No, she doesn’t talk. To anyone. Not even me. She’s . . .” Ginger loses her momentum. Looks out the side window, then back. Eyes overcast, momentarily vulnerable.

“Oh,” Jay says.

They study each other for a moment longer, then Ginger looks out the window again, dismissing him. A crescent, box-canyon harbor, dimpled off-center on the fat southern end of the long, rocky, submerged peanut of terra-cotta island has revealed itself: trees and roads
and docks and quays and white yachts and trawlers and sandy beach and seawall, and a mad clutter of geometric shapes: houses, apartments, hotels, crisscrossed by the grids of narrow, blacktop streets that make up the town of Avalon on the island of Santa Catalina.

•   •   •

I
t pinwheels below them, long cerulean shadows spilling out into the bay as the helicopter descends to the Pebbly Beach heliport and disgorges Jay and Ginger and the girl and his federal escort into chilly Catalina dusk. The sky is cloudless, gauzy with marine inversion and the westward drift of mainland smog. The harbor is empty, the town quiet save the slip-slap of moored boats and soft lap of surf on sand, some tourists on Segways, a leaf blower deep up-canyon, the seasonal shops shuttered.

Jay has been to this island before, with a couple of friends, just after college: a lovely, disheveled resort twenty-some miles from the mainland—California’s Capri—bastard spawn of left-coast Deco, Arts and Crafts, and Mediterranean Revival. He sorts the splintered fragments of that long weekend on Descanso Beach, baked and broiling, suffering the fat black biting sand flies and hoovering beach bar piña coladas from plastic cups and staggering along Crescent Street and throwing up onto the tumble of bleached rock breakers off the Cabrillo Mole, near the desalination plant. Evan and Jessica. Later, they broke up, and both went to law schools back east. Two of what then he would have called his closest friends. Jay doesn’t even know where they’re living now.

There are even fewer people out on the backstreets, and none give a second glance when a caravan of golf carts shuttling the new arrivals hangs a right on Vieudelou Avenue and labors up a steep-sloping street lined with clapboard summer homes arranged like steps up the hillside, nosing in, finally, in front of a weathered-brown
quasi-Craftsman bungalow: new butter-yellow shutters yawn for shaded windows, there’s a porch swing, hummingbird feeder, and a SOLD sticker on the real-estate sign out front.

Inside it’s small and neat. Fully furnished. Surprisingly welcoming.

“It’s nice,” Ginger says, flat. She looks at the little girl. “Isn’t it?”

Jay watches Helen ignore her mother and beeline to some moving boxes on the floor, to open them, one after another, determined bordering on frantic, looking for something. A clutter quickly accumulating in her wake.

“We brought what clothes we could,” Public says to Jay and Ginger, “did some shopping for essentials, basic food.” His smile is efficient, and without warmth. “We all chipped in and got some toys and things for the little one.”

He walks through to the dining room, bangs his briefcase down on the table, opens it, and empties the contents of a fat, long envelope, providing inventory:

“Credit cards, checking account, driver’s licenses . . .”

Jay angles past him, into the kitchen. Tiny, warm. Old appliances; the stove smells faintly of gas.

“. . . Helen is all signed up in the local grade school. It’s probably a little smaller than she’s used to, but . . .” He drones on: weekly stipend, cover jobs in town, act normal, basic rules and restrictions of witness protection, which will, he assures them, be a largely forgiving trial-and-error kind of thing until they get settled. “Just use your heads. Be smart . . .”

A double-hung window looks out across a narrow gap and straight into the kitchen of the adjacent house, where Jay can see a beefy man, his close-cropped, faux-hawk haircut sharked up with product, washing dishes or something. The man looks up and sees Jay and grins happily for some reason. Opens his window and motions for Jay to do the same:

“Jimmy! You made it! When’d you get in?”

Jay doesn’t know this guy. And Jay is not Jimmy.

“When’d you get in?” the neighbor asks again.

Jay has a sinking feeling that this is part of his new fiction. “I’m Jay,” Jay says. “I don’t think we’ve met,” he adds.

“What are you talking about? Barry Stone. We went to college together.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“You went out with my sister. Lee.”

“No.”

“In New York. When you were working for Morgan Stanley.”

Jay starts to close the window. It’s as if he’s walked onto the stage of a play already in progress. He doesn’t know the players, he doesn’t know his lines.

“Sandy’ll be back in half an hour. We’ll pop over. Make the official—”

Jay snaps the window shut, locked. Barry’s mouth is still moving, slow to react.

The panicky presentiment that drove him into the air ducts overtakes him again. Jay backs away, numb, and returns to the dining room, calling to Public: “You know what? This is just creepy now. I mean, I understand why the island, I get the desire for isolation—but is it really necessary to have . . .” His voice trails off.

Ginger sits at the table, her head in her hands. Does not look up. Public and Doe are gone.

In the front room, Helen, tears streaming down her face, rummages through a box of decidedly masculine whatnot, and it dawns on Jay that this is
his
whatnot, from his dresser drawers and bathroom vanity: socks, briefs, toiletries, vitamins, electric shaver and other personal grooming items, a broken roll of quarters (for parking meters), an American flag pin, a tarnished roach clip (he’d forgotten he
owned), safety pins, loofah sponge (whose is that?), several condom packets, and a watch he never wears.

“Hey. That’s my stuff.”

He says it automatically, and much more sharply than he intends. Helen looks up at him and freezes; all the nightmare of disorientation he’s been experiencing since the old lady fumbled her groceries on the Red Line is manifest in the little girl’s face, and Jay grieves suddenly not for his own lost freedom, but for hers. Ginger gets defiantly between Jay and her daughter, eyes flashing, like some feral animal protecting her young. A gesture of surrender: Jay’s hands are out, open: he’s sorry, he’s really sorry, and understands something he didn’t before, something he can’t articulate, so he looks away from them, chastened, down to the table blankly and at all the credentials that Public has left behind:

A credit card in the name of EDWARD JAMES WARNER.

A driver’s license: Jay’s awkward photograph, but the name beside it is Edward James Warren, and the address is unfamiliar.

A second license with Ginger’s photograph, and the name GINGER WARNER.

A joint checking account.

A birth certificate for HELEN WARNER with both Edward James’s and Ginger’s names on it.

More erasure. Jay’s head jerks up, cold sweat. Walls closing in. Cuts anxious eyes at Ginger, whose expression is unreadable, and Helen, who hasn’t moved.

He darts past them both, to the front door, throws it open and goes lurching out across the porch.

“PUBLIC!”

Down the front steps, into the street, he can just make out the parade of golf carts disappearing back around the corner at the
bottom of the hill, vanishing into the quaint clapboard backside of Avalon’s business district.

He catches his breath.

Avalon Bay: a sheet of imperfect, handmade glass.

The sky: teal blue.

The sun: fully disappeared over the rocky island’s western summit, casting its gentle twilight up into the narrow back reaches of the valley that cradles the town.

This really is happening. And yet, in a sense, what is happening isn’t real
.

“Jimmy?”

Jay turns to the voice of his neighbor. Barry Stone is a vague shape in the doorway of his house next door, framed by the beams of his short porch and shrouded by the darkness falling.

Splintered ghosts of Ginger and Helen watch, from behind the front window, overlaid by Jay’s reflection as he comes back up onto his own porch. Seeing them, feeling the dull weight of neighbor Barry’s vigil in the shadows, everything gone spectral, illusive, his ability to parse this world confounded by legerdemain, scrims and props, constructs and consensual lies—Jay thinks:
Oh, fuck.

Cantonese opera, with all the face paint and swordplay and caterwauling, but without the happy ending.

Or any ending.

We’re all making it up as we go along.

Helen clutches a pale stuffed animal Jay hasn’t seen before, and was, no doubt, the subject of her dogged search through all the boxes.

Is Helen real?

Clearly Ginger is a construct, captive just like him; she troubles and intrigues him, and despite her physical similarities with the girl, Jay begins to wonder if Ginger and Helen are in fact even related.

Does it matter?

Barry barks something from his porch, with an earnest tone of concern. Jay doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t care. He pretends he didn’t hear, and rolls his shoulders gently, testing the ache from his fall.

Night’s curtain drops on Avalon.

End of scene. No applause.

Jay goes inside, where his new family waits for him in the warm embrace of artificial light.