Fifty Mice Page 19

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.

  • • •

  At 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.

  And monsters exist.

  And mermaids drown.

  And little boys lose their lives without dying.

  And their moms lose their minds.

  She has no reaction to his leaving. A staccato of anguished voices and the rattle-drone of dayroom television serenades him down the corridor to the front desk, where he signs out. The receptionist smiles sympathetically and asks if he had a nice visit.

  Jay allows that he did.

  | 23 |

  THE OVERHEAD FLUORESCENTS flicker on and slowly brighten Vaughn’s Manchurian Global lab, and Vaughn, pulling his card from the reader and looping the lanyard back around his neck, enters to the sharp smell of urine and the startled light shimmying of tiny legs across cages and the insane screaming of a couple of test monkeys.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he drawls, “Daddy’s home.”

  It always takes a while for the energy-savers to gain their full intensity. Vaughn weaves his way through warrens of mostly unused cages interspersed with stainless-steel examining tables and Plexiglas mazes in various stages of demolition. His desktop computer monitor is on and glows with data; an archived Los Angeles Times newspaper article featuring a big lurid color photo of a covered body getting hauled by fire personnel out of the front of an apartment building. The headline:

  —

  STRIP CLUB MERMAID’S MURDER BAFFLES POLICE

  —

  In the thick of the body copy is inset a one-column head shot of Jay’s flower girl, helpfully captioned “Miriam Miller.” Vaughn frowns because this was not on his computer screen when he left the lab last night.

  Strewn across the desk are more articles that have been printed out, and tiled, overlapping:

  —

  THREE DEAD AT GLENDALE STRIP BAR

  D.A. SEEKS SAMARITAN WITNESS TO CLUB KILLINGS

  —

  A short intake of breath, Vaughn sinks into his chair, shakes his head, wondering, basically, what the hell?

  —

 
; EXOTIC SWIMMER SHOT IN CLUB,

  CARRIED TO APARTMENT

  —

  Jay’s hand touches his knee. Vaughn yells and kicks back from the desk.

  “Vaughn.” Jay, rolling out, spectral and groggy, from where he’s been sleeping, then hiding (when he heard someone come in). “It’s me.”

  “HOLYcrap,” Vaughn says. “I almost—what are you—Jay?” Looking closer: “Your hair looks like crap. You’re like, are you a blond now or—?” and finally, “how the hell did you get in here? This is a secure building.”

  Jay’s up and stretching. “I keyed in my old code,” he says. “Or maybe you told me what yours was, once.”

  Vaughn is staring at him.

  “What?”

  “Did they let you out or did you escape?”

  “I haven’t been in a mental hospital.”

  “But—”

  Jay, rote: “I’m not crazy, I didn’t go crazy, I wasn’t in a mental hospital. Feds’ve taken me into witness protection, they think I . . .”

  Vaughn is staring at him.

  “Don’t. Vaughn? No. Don’t do that. Come on—this isn’t—this is me. Vaughn, you know me.”

  “No.”

  “How can you—”

  “I know what you’ve told me. I know what you want me to know. But, um. Do I know that it’s true?”

  “Yes. You do.”

  Vaughn shakes his head. “No, see, that’s just the thing—I don’t. Not really. After you . . . disappeared? And I got the call from the hospital?”

  “There was no hospital,” Jay says again.

  “It’s like I thought about it. You know? I thought about it, us, our friendship, me and you. What I know, what I really know. I thought about it for a long time and I realized: How long have I known you? And I don’t know shit.”

  The lights hum. The animals fidget in their cages, hungry.

  “You live lightly on this earth, my friend,” Vaughn says. “It’s like you don’t, I mean, there’s no, well . . .” He makes an ambiguous gesture. “. . . not a lot of give and take.”

  Jay nods, because he actually understands, and wants to explain, “That’s changing—”

  “But, um.”

  “—I swear to you, federal marshals have put me in protective custody over on Catalina Island over something I don’t even know what it is.”

  “Rutger Hauer.”

  “What?”

  “In Blade Runner.” Vaughn indicates, with his chin: “Your hair, dude.”

  Jay runs a hand across it, absently. “And yeah, I took a runner. I got away from them with this weird guy in his pot plane.”

  Doubtful: “. . . Okay.”

  “Seriously. We crashed. I don’t know what happened to him. But they erased me, Vaughn. Everything I was. Or thought I was. Buckham and Buckham? Gone. I mean, gone. Some lady’s living in my apartment, Stacy’s shacked back up with that guy from Houston—”

  “The cage fighter.”

  “Vaughn, he’s not.”

  “Okay. Whatever.”

  “And they told everybody who might wonder where I went that I went crazy.”

  “Juan Pablo.”

  “That’s not his name. Vaughn: focus.”

  “They said your family took you home.”

  Jay blinks. “They said what?”

  “After the breakdown,” Vaughn says. “You never talk about your family.”

  “Who? Who said about my family?”

  “I mean,” Vaughn says, “you talk about being erased, but it’s like you don’t even exist here and now to begin with. You know what I mean? Maybe nobody notices you’re gone because you were never here.”

  Jay says nothing. Hollowed out.

  Vaughn looks away, to the articles, to the computer screen. “What’s all this?”

  “Vaughn—”

  The monkeys are screaming again, and genuflecting in their cages, arms out, heads dipping, long fingers laced through the bars. It’s a morning call to prayer.

  “They left a number I’m supposed to call when I see you,” Vaughn admits sheepishly.

  Jay, impatient: “What’s your point?”

  “Well, um. They left it on my cell phone this morning.”

  “So?”

  “When I see you, Jay. Not if, when.”

  Jay blinks. They knew. They let him go.

  But why?

  • • •

  The newspaper articles spill upside down across a swirly Formica tabletop. This downscale Atwater retro café is chrome and black and white and gray. There’s a breakfast crowd, mostly locals; the dark eyes of the lone waitress watch idly from behind the register. Jay sits opposite Vaughn in a crescent vinyl booth safely away from the front window, fanning and collating his collected documentation between them to make his case.

  “You remember this?”

  Deeply engaged with his scrambled egg, chorizo, feta, and cactus burrito, Vaughn can only shake his head and murmur, mouth full between bites, “Since when do you read the newspaper? You always say it’s too depressing.”

  Jay thumbs the head shot of Miriam. “According to my new federal friends, I went out with her—well, yeah, and I did, I think I did, but they knew all about it, they’ve been watching me for—remember? She worked in this flower shop on Melrose where I got Stacy a Valentine’s Day—”

  “I remember that.” Vaughn bolts some coffee. “Yeah. Your porno fantasy. She—”

  “No. I made that part up.”

  “Really?”

  “Or. Maybe I made all of it up. I don’t know. I don’t know. You’re just taking my word for it, anyway. The point is—”

  “See what I mean? You’re not a truthful person.”

  “—the point is,” Jay continues, stubbornly, “they think I know something about what happened to this woman, what happened in this bar, but I don’t. Remember. I was drunk, or stoned, or drunk and stoned, or it didn’t happen. I don’t know, Vaughnie. I don’t remember.”

  “Yeah, well. Memory, yo, seriously: What is it? The fucking consensus intersect of desire and regret.”

  “Or what I do remember doesn’t, you know, add up to . . . this,” Jay says ruefully. “What they’re . . .” He stops. What are they saying it adds up to? “It’s all . . . I mean, it didn’t even happen on the right day.” He makes a sweeping gesture to the articles. “They keep talking February twelfth, but according to these stories, February twentieth, February twenty-second, this all happened like, eight, ten days later.”

  Vaughn, pushing his empty plate away, makes the point that he thought Jay went out with her twice.

  Jay: “Excuse me?”

  “That I personally know of,” Vaughn says, “that you told me about, but, um. For all I know it coulda been—”

  Jay cuts him off. “Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “They don’t even have the right day.”

  “Oh.”

  “I would remember. If I went out with her twice.”

  “Okay.”

  “I would.”

  “Hey,” Vaughn says blithely. “Maybe you’ve fallen through a wormhole, man. Parallel universe. Or you went in one and came back out.”

  The shriek of the espresso machine allows them to sit back and regroup. A waiter refills Vaughn’s coffee and clears their plates. Jay hasn’t touched his oatmeal. Glancing reflections of traffic fractures through the window. Someone at a table in the front laughs too loudly.

  “They walk me through my life last year, day by day, but out of order,” Jay says. “Like they’re trying to trap me or something. Catch me in a lie. So deliberately random that there’s got to be a pattern, certain connections they want to make. It’s gotta all fit, I mean, the details, and I keep trying to . . . figure o
ut . . .” His voice trails off, suddenly bleak. “But my life was shit, wasn’t it?”

  “Everybody’s life is shit.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  Vaughn says that that’s why they invented heaven. “Well, oh, and for those few lucky pricks whose lives aren’t shit?—the one percent, credit swap bullshit, or those Goldman Sachs sucks, billionaire IPO Net-head geekazoids and maybe supermodels with real breasts and anybody who works at Apple?—there’s eternal hell waiting for them, so it all, like, evens out.” Vaughn frowns. “What is that?”

  Jay’s got Stacy’s engagement ring out of his pocket; he’s spinning it absently on the Formica, lost in thought. “I went out with the flower girl . . . twice?”

  “I don’t remember exactly,” Vaughn lies, and looks away, guiltily, and seems like he’s about to try to explain it, but Jay’s next soft statement stops him:

  “My brother and sister and my dad were murdered when I was eight.”

  Vaughn turns his eyes to Jay, mind clearly blown. What?

  “Yeah. They never caught who did it.”

  Jay watches Vaughn slowly try to comprehend that this is a confession. That Jay is telling him something fundamental. He doesn’t move.

  “I should have told you a long time ago.”

  “Probably,” is what Jay thinks Vaughn exhales.

  “Not that it explains everything, but, I don’t know. It was not good. Not . . . good. My mom went catatonic with grief,” Jay says. “You know. What they call fugue state or something. She’s still . . .”

  Jay can tell that Vaughn’s mouth has gone dry because he lifts his cup and sips cold coffee, murmurs something soft that gets lost in the diner’s din.

  “I know,” Jay says.

  Vaughn offers something else, kind, sorrowful, meaningless.

  Spinning the ring like a gyroscope, Jay: “Me, I got away. They didn’t get me because I ran. Two guys. Two guys, they took some money and jewelry. It was on Halloween, that was why I never liked . . .” Vaughn knew all about Jay and Halloween, but now knew why. “I had this righteous stash of candy under the bed in a pillow slip. I forgot to get it. When they took me back for my stuff. For the longest time I tried to convince myself that was my big regret. And everything after, it’s like I had this life that was predicated on not looking back, never looking back. Can you call that a life? I don’t know. But, um,” he says, unwittingly mimicking Vaughn, “I got a new one, on Catalina, Vaughnie. Totally by accident, and pretty much totally a construct, I guess, but . . .”