Fifty Mice Read online

  “Whatever dark storm I’m going through?”

  “Jay—”

  “No.” Jay moves to intercept and stop her, but the hard-body guy grabs him, big hands on Jay’s arms, and spins him away.

  “Let her make the call.”

  Jay loses it. “You want to go, Houston, here, now?” The big man lets go of Jay and takes a half a step back, frowning, putting his hands out to either side, empty.

  “No. I don’t think so. I don’t think so, because you do not want to be where I am right now, man, because—” Jay turns, hurls the ring in his fist across the room as hard as he can and is astonished when it sticks in the drywall like one of those flying oriental nunchuk whirly blades, or whatever they’re called.

  Hard body grabs Jay and lifts him a little too easily and pins him hard against the wall, knocking what’s left of his breath out of him. Stunned, wheezing, Jay tries to fight back, approximating something he’s seen in a movie, swings rubbery, but his fists find nothing but air, and suddenly he’s stumbling out the door, colliding with the hallway wall opposite and falling to his hands and knees, woozy. Something pings off the side of his head and falls to the carpet, scattering light: the engagement ring. He looks up in time to see the door slamming shut. The man is laughing behind it and Stacy is telling him: “I’m calling them. We can’t just leave him out there, he’s sick . . .”

  Whatever the would-be cage fighter from Houston murmurs to her is muffled, and Jay, in the empty corridor, can’t decipher it. He gets up, unsteady. Attends to the sudden quiet, and surrenders to it, and walks away.

  | 21 |

  A WROUGHT-IRON ELEVATOR CAGE descends, byzantine, bottoms out at the end of a narrow foyer, and its manual-draw doors remain shut, the lift empty. Through locked glass double doors Jay peers in from outside the building, his hands laced through the security grille, buttery light bouncing off brass mailboxes queued along one tiled wall.

  He didn’t dream this.

  He turns away, his reflection vanishing into a silken darkness through which a crude neon red-lipped smiling mermaid perched on a cocktail glass glows crazily. Her tail flutters and, in a sequence of neon stutters, she drops inside the glass.

  He didn’t dream her, either.

  • • •

  Inside the storefront strip club directly across the sleepy street, fixtures rattle with the rapid-fire percussion from calypso music and a tangerine-tailed real-life mermaid rises in the huge glass cylinder that serves as a watery center stage; hair black, skin white, she floats up, arches her back and does a lazy, curling flip, palest breasts roiling, the girl, sinking away again, down, and golden bubbles rise in a burst from both sides of her siren’s red-lipped smile.

  Half a dozen male patrons, none of them sitting together, watch her swim.

  On the far side of the huge, glowing tank, in the darkest part of the bar, Jay looks back at her blankly, nursing a ten-dollar vodka tonic. Swirling the ice. Lost. An uneasiness has been creeping up on him, a nebulous slow-dawning understanding that it’s possible the relative ease with which he escaped from custody, or protection, may have been predestined: they let him get away to see where he’d go. Ego prevents him from fully embracing this notion, but he can’t seem to dismiss it. It travels with him like a yoke.

  The mermaid floats up close to the glass in front of him, dark hair in tendrils, pale skin, glitter mascara, one pink nipple pierced with a gold fishhook. A tiny zipper tag flags from the orange scales at her hip, betraying the rubber tailfin costume this thalassic stripper has zipped herself into.

  The dream version of the club, softened, rippled and smeared, looms behind her: the bar, the doorway, the faceless patrons at the scuffed black laminate tables . . .

  . . . and John Q. Public strolling through the entrance curtain, followed closely by the Agent Known As Barry Stone. Public scans the bar, the room. The patrons. The tank. Mermaid in slow gyration, gilded in bubbles. Barry circles the stage-front tables, casual, careful, staying in the shadows.

  No Jay.

  • • •

  No, Jay is bursting through the door of the upstairs tank room, out of breath from his sprint up the stairs. He slams it shut, looks around for something to wedge it closed. Water rocks free in the big, circular access hole that comprises the middle of the wooden floor. Some spangly mermaid costumes hang upside down from a rack in the far corner like gutted fish.

  The pockapockapocka of a tiny air compressor whose hose disappears down into the water. Club music thumps below. An orange smear curls deep in the tank. Jay’s desperate to discover a second way out. There’s a ladder in the corner that leads to a trap door up to the roof. Fire escape?

  Water sloshes up over the edge, darkening the floor, and the orange mermaid breaks the surface, gasping, spitting out her transparent air hose, scaring the shit out of Jay, and then groping for the railing to beach herself.

  “Help me out here, willya, I can’t”—she extends a slender white hand toward Jay—“this lovely fin suit’s like wearing a giant dildo, plus it leaks and fills up and probably weighs as much as I do by the time I’m done.” Jay braces himself and hauls her up into the room, and she flops, awkward, wet, tail spritzing heavily chlorinated moisture, frisky breasts going everywhichway. “I HATE IT. I just . . . hate it . . .” She finds the zipper and yanks and escapes, wearing nothing but a bikini bottom, and now she gets self-conscious: “TOWEL?”

  Jay finds one, and the girl covers up, shaking the water out of her ears.

  “You’re not supposed to be in here,” she says. Then, squinting at him: “Jurgen?”

  “No, Jay.”

  “Sorry. I’m blind without my glasses and I can’t wear contacts in the, you know. Seriously: legally blind. I want to get the laser surgery, but I’m nervous about it. I hear it goes bad. Jurgie’s this guy I made a mistake and sucked off about a month ago.” She adds, “Musta been life-changing, cuz he keeps following me, and like I’m gonna go through that crazy shit again, uh-uh, I don’t even think he’s German.”

  She finds her glasses on a shelf above the mermaid tail rack. Thick rims, retro-chic cat’s-eye. She turns and watches Jay as she peels off her bottom, under the towel, and hangs it, dripping, from a hook. “Never wear latex with a Brazilian,” she warns him. “You walk like a rodeo cowboy for a week.”

  “I’m looking for . . .” Jay stops himself. He sounds like a cop. He takes a different tack. “There was another girl who worked here, at the bar. Last winter.”

  The mermaid gives him a dead eye, teasing: “Oh, sure, okay, yeah, like now I know exactly who you’re talking about.”

  “She worked at a flower shop during the day. This was just, nights, I guess, part time, but, well, something, this bad thing, happened to her and—”

  “—Miriam.”

  Miriam.

  The girl is suddenly sad. “Aw, Jesus, what a fucking mess. You were a friend of hers?”

  “Kinda,” Jay says, but, from memory, a single image: running across an empty expanse of blacktop with a mermaid in his arms.

  “Super-tragic,” the stripper remembers, “I mean—and she was our best swimmer, too, she was like, I think, almost in the Olympics or something, in that synchronized thing.”

  “No, she worked the bar. I—”

  The mermaid shakes her head, wet hair dripping. “Miriam was a mermaid. Miriam Miller. I wasn’t here when it happened, but,” she’s looking down, distracted, into the water, “hey, is somebody looking for you?”

  Jay follows her eye line down through the tank and the warp of the water to Public, hands pressed against the glass, looking back up at him blindly.

  “Don’t worry, he can’t see you,” the girl says, shaking out her hair again and starting to twist it, the squeezings streaming back into the tank, “on account of, I think, the surface reflection, or something. Otherwise, all the fappers would be, you k
now, nose pressed to the glass and drooling—”

  • • •

  Jay explodes through the trap door to the rooftop like he’s been launched from the ladder, pivots, his ankle aching, kicks the metal square shut again with his good foot and hop-skips across the roof, bathed in back-bleed from the shimmering cocktail neon hanging over the club. At the parapet he leaps a narrow slot of darkness to the tar-and-gravel of the next building’s roof, landing gingerly, weight on one leg, and limps across to the next parapet, to leap again.

  One after another, roof to roof, down the block. Vent pipes like punctuation marks, his sneakers slipping here and there on ancient patches. The channeled black scar of the L.A. River squeezes in from the sudden rise of Griffith Park, to the north, as the row of commercial buildings ends in a cross street and Jay can go no farther. He glances back. No one has followed him, and the one sleepy car that crawls past below is heading away from him, east into the Valley scatter.

  Jay finds the fire escape and awkwardly scrambles down. Hits the sliding ladder and takes it rattling to its abrupt end—hangs there for a moment—drops to the sidewalk, where he sinks back into the shadows and sits back against the brick, ankle throbbing, catching his breath.

  Another car blows past, headlights liquid in the night air, slows at the corner, taillight winking red, and disappears.

  The night is electric with the deep hush-and-rumble of the Los Angeles he’d forgotten from his weeks on the island. Across the street, a dead metal security gate pulled across its entrance, is a flower shop.

  Jay stares at it dully.

  He remembers that his mother loved roses.

  | 22 |

  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.

  • • •

  This 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.

  • • •

  Even 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, sl
ipping 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.