Fifty Mice Read online

  “Bet that pisses off the mice.”

  “Mice don’t have feelings.”

  “Everything’s got feelings, Vaughn.”

  Vaughn just stared.

  “Right. Okay. Please continue. Becoming more circular with each iteration,” Jay prompted.

  “At that critical point where the synapses in the mouse mind can no longer grok the difference between circle and ellipse, the mice go crazy and eat themselves.”

  “Eat themselves?” This was why Jay no longer worked at Manchurian Global.

  “‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.’”

  “Uh-huh. Cue the Latin, Mr. Wizard, which you know I don’t understand.”

  “Look, if I thought somebody broke into my apartment in the middle of the night, I would have called the cops, Jay.”

  “How is that in any way related to mice going all autocannibal?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  Vaughn’s current victim was slip-sliding down a stainless-steel incline, frantic to stop itself, as if it knew what was coming, careening toward a pair of hinged doors designed to open to a short drop into an aquarium of ice water. But not this mouse, skittering, shrieking, stubbornly stopping itself just short of the plunge.

  “Shit.” Vaughn made some marks on a clipboard and plucked the mouse out of the maze. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

  Jay sighed. No sense in drawing it out. “So, it’s the stress, right?”

  “We’re not completely sure,” Vaughn said. He disappeared into the rows of cages. “We can’t be certain.”

  “And you’re thinking my midnight intruder, that’s just—”

  “I don’t think anything. I’m a scientist. I observe and record.”

  Jay played the straight man: “Well, what else could it be?”

  “That’s what we’re asking ourselves.”

  “And this, the eating thing, happens to every mouse?”

  “Yes.” Jay watched his friend’s head of quills shark deeper into the lab. “With the exception of these fifty mice they cloned in Utah.” Jay heard the sound of a soda can hissing open.

  “Apparently, they don’t give a shit.”

  • • •

  Jay was twelve minutes late back to Buckham & Buckham from Vaughn’s lab, a mortal sin duly noted by Buddy DeLuca from his open floor supervisor’s office, “Again.”

  He remembers the acrid afterburn of overcooked coffee: somebody’d forgotten to switch off the Krups.

  “Today,” Jay announced to the cube farm of murmuring fellow phone drones, a labyrinth of workspaces not so different, he thought drily, from Vaughn’s milky white one, “today is the first day of the rest of your pointless lives.”

  “Bite me,” from the nearest desk.

  “You all weighed down with the ball and chain, or are you playing hoops with us tonight, J.B.?”

  When Jay worked at Manchurian Global, in the sprawling rat maze of animal cages, test stations, and analytic hardware that Vaughn whimsically calls his office in the sprawling rat maze of think-tank and research facilities that Manchurian Global whimsically calls its campus, slacker Jay carried animals to and from experiments, keyed in data, cleaned, fed, watered, cremated the obdurate or unlucky, and still squandered a good part of his 346 days there inert, slouched in a chair, lab coat and wrinkled khakis, legs splayed, flip-flops, iPod wired into his ears, squeezing a rubber stress ball and fiddling with his phone and successfully ignoring the endless stream of data that chattered across multiple workstation screens like so many Chinese billboards among the rats and mice who scampered, paranoid, back and forth, back and forth, across their cages, searching for a way out, in vain.

  Now a crisply starched J. B. (Jay) Johnson—an all-new gung-ho Jay 2.0 (beta), nearly six months in the making, and hoping to stick: scrappy, young, feckless, cyan eyes and a puzzle of black hair, rocking some dove-gray wool slacks, white cotton button-down, and a club tie—slowed his perp walk, and called across the partitions, good-natured, “Stacy’s got some kind of yoga spin-lati thing at Curves, so I’m good to go.”

  “Downward dog.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Okay. Yo. Seven o’clock. Need a ride?”

  “No. Catching the Red Line.”

  “You’re awesome green, bro.”

  Purling plainsong of the free market. Everyone rigged with Bluetooth phone headsets and false bravado, low-watt smiles, scared shitless that today won’t be the day, their brittle sales conversations overlapping in a din, and Jay remembered how mice are highly social animals who speak at frequencies humans can’t hear; play, wrestle, love, sleep curled up together, because without companionship they get lonely and depressed, anxious, lost.

  Or eat themselves. Fuck Vaughn. Now he couldn’t get the mice out of his head.

  “Herself, Jay. Line five.”

  “Thank you.”

  Jay’s cubicle: ergonomic, monochromatic and soulless, the requisite Herman Miller knockoff chair squeaking as he swiveled into it, adjusted his headset, and: “Hey Stace, what up?”

  There were no personal effects save a Chris Paul bobblehead and a thumbtacked photograph of the prepossessing-but-underfed Stacy, thigh gap, petulant plumped lips and salon-blond hair, a soft electric kind of girl who elicits from bros in bars the inevitable waggish: I’d hit it. Which Jay found sadly comforting.

  He can’t remember what she said on the call.

  When subjected to painful stimulus, mice make humanlike facial expressions of displeasure, and before Jay quit his lab job, Manchurian Global had developed a mouse grimace scale (MGS) for measuring rodent pain based on five distinct “pain faces.”

  He can’t remember which face he made while Stacy talked. Maybe all of them.

  The relevant truth is that what Jay remembers from her call is not listening and choosing instead to rerun in the theater of his head an unreliably enhanced highlight reel from some stay-at-home Saturday, his ball and chain huffing like a corgi in heat, clothes peeled, curlers popping from her hair, tipped backward on and gripping the edges of her dining table, one bare pink ankle crooked around Jay’s neck, poleaxed with pleasure while Jay crimped up buttery between the clamp of her thighs, inelegant because of the positional physics at play: jeans jammed down around his knees, holding her other foot out like a tiller—

  (Nothing wrong with Jay and Stacy’s sex life, was what Jay was always trying to convince himself. Vigorous and creative. All good.)

  —and by the time his head cleared, Stacy and her no doubt valid worries about the trajectory of their relationship, its purpose, its potential, was off the line and Jay was in the middle of a cold call with a potential customer in Minneapolis. The rote pitch, memorized:

  “What we are, sir, basically, is an e-commerce shopping mall where you can set up for and be exposed to and monetize hundreds of thousands of potential click-throughs.”

  Does he love her? He wants to. He hopes so. He doesn’t want to hurt her, so there’s that. But he knows it’s not enough. During the courtship phase, male mice make simple, plaintive whistles or modulated calls. After mounting the female, however, male mice make chirping sounds that are strikingly similar to human laughter.

  “Scalability? No, sir. Not a problem. We’ve got a bunch of Caltech web-weenies shackled down in the basement working on this thing twenty-four/seven/three-sixty-five—just kidding—ha ha ha ha ha but—”

  And so on, and so on, and so on.

  In his twenty-seven weeks, three days, six hours, forty-nine minutes at Buckham & Buckham, Jay has twice been named Salesman of Merit, but more often called in and warned that his shift yield has sagged and put him in danger of missing his quota, which is grounds for dismissal, which is its own kind of death. He earns to a base pay scale of just under forty-four thousand dollars a year after taxes, carries almost sixty thousand dollars owed in st
udent loans; has a horizontal game that’s better than his vertical, and a decent mid-range fallaway jump shot; his vintage 325i is in the shop because he can’t afford to have the transmission rebuilt.

  “The robustness of this site is key to us,” Jay had promised his Minneapolis prospect the way he always did, “and that’s why we’re approaching only the most attractive vendors.”

  Stacy’s climax: usually less a scream than a choked-back, fragile, high-pitched hiss. After sex: male mice often sing in triumph, at around 20 to 22 kHz. He remembers how Stacy’s eyes would close and her lips curl back, and her whole body gone rigid—he can recall her hands fluttering and searching for his hips—and her heart beating so hard he could feel it against his chest—and remembers how sometimes he could imagine being married to her, but more often he couldn’t.

  Jay never sings.

  He remembers looking at the clock, five to six, and thinking, Forty minutes home, grab my Nikes and my bag, Silver Line to the 7th Street station, Red Line to Hollywood and the Y.

  There was the crossover dribble he’d perfected and was dying to use on that jamook from North Hollywood with the hairy shoulders and too much Axe. He can’t remember the guy’s name though.

  Or maybe it’s just that he never knew it.

  There was the train change at Hollywood and Western.

  His bag on the platform.

  Old lady. Groceries. Cougar with a gun—

  | 3 |

  WAKING:

  A splitting headache.

  The mazelike grid of cracks and fissures in a white plaster ceiling as his unconsciousness falls away simply bewilders: a latticework of gypsum crazing.

  Where is this? Where am I?

  Stale air, a spookish quiet.

  Dull moan of an ancient heat-pump air conditioner rising, white noise kicking on. The stiff mattress crinkles plastic underneath him, there’s a scrape of cold sandpaper pillow against his skin.

  Scared: This is not a memory or a dream.

  Skimcoat of daylight blushes through translucent institutional windows, there are no wall decorations, just this hospital bed, containing Jay, a sideboard, and two metal chairs. His fingertips tingle; he smells floor polish and a trace of disinfectant.

  One of the chairs beside the bed is occupied, by a fit-looking man in his mid-thirties, unevenly sunburned, open face, sad eyes. Plastered to the lapel of his sport coat, this man’s got a “HELLO My Name Is” sticker on which he’s scrawled the name PUBLIC, cursive, with a Sharpie.

  “Hey. How’re you feeling, Mr. Johnson?”

  Jay blinks, lost, doped, the dull panic swirling, and still emerging from the fog. His tongue feels thick. He wants to say I feel like shit or Who are you? but nothing comes out.

  Public nods. “Sometimes the tranquilizer really kicks your ass. I’m sorry about it.”

  Jay finds a word. “What?”

  “Tranquilizer. Do you remember what happened in the subway station?”

  “Yes.” Then: “No. Maybe.”

  “Good. Okay. We acquired you there. I apologize for the artlessness of it, but sometimes . . .” His voice trails off. He shrugs. “The short of it is, you’re in a safe facility, Jay. No one knows you’re here, nobody can get to you.”

  “Get to me?” He tries to push himself up, but his wrist rattles a handcuff that binds him to the bedrail. Jesus. A wave of panic breaks over him, and he has to close his eyes for a moment to let it pass.

  “Oh, that, it’s . . . for your own protection,” Public explains. “I don’t have the key on me, or I’d . . .” Again the trailing off, the shrug. It all feels too practiced. A voice in Jay’s head is whispering: You have to get out of here. You have to get out of here. He glances to the open door, and the empty corridor beyond it. Feels the cut of the handcuff against bone. Public says something else, but Jay’s mind can’t process it. He blinks and says, “What?”

  “You’re in the program, now.”

  “Program.”

  “Witness protection.”

  Jay hears himself say it once more: “What?”

  “Safe. Nobody can get to you because you’re in the Federal Witness Protection Program.”

  “I’m in witness protection.”

  “Yes.”

  Shaking his head slowly, Jay, genuinely trying to wrap his mind around it: “Why?”

  Public laughs. And the freshet of fear it engenders chills Jay like an ice bath.

  Does time pass? Did his eyes close?

  “Jay?”

  He feels a gap, empty of sense or sensation, but resurfaces to the man labeled Public still beside his bed, a subtle shift of light, a distant lonely keening of siren, or alarm, outside this building where he’s being held.

  “Jay. Hey.” Public stands over the bed, a tracing of worry in his expression. “I think I lost you there for a sec.”

  “I think,” Jay says, voice raw, “there’s been some kind of mistake here.”

  “Say again?”

  “Mistake.”

  “How so?”

  “In every way,” Jay says, and it doesn’t sound like him, but his thoughts are at least gathering with more purpose.

  Public laughs again. And says, “I know, right?”

  “Seriously, I’m—”

  “—It’s okay, it’s okay,” Public says kindly. “It’s normal to feel completely weirded out at this point. Even paranoid. Take your time.”

  Jay asks if he’s in custody.

  “Protective custody. Yeah, I guess.”

  Jay rattles the handcuff again, pointedly. “Under arrest?”

  “No.”

  Jay makes another attempt at sitting up, and manages to get his torso roughly vertical, shaking off a swim of vertigo, and discovering that his fingertips are bandaged with gauze and tape, and extremely tender because:

  “Oh, yeah, hey, we did some acid abrasion, there,” Public is saying, “just in case. That weird paresthesia tingling deal you’re feeling should be way better by tomorrow.”

  “In case of what?”

  “Also your hair,” Public confesses, ignoring the bigger question. Jay reaches up and feels the stubble of a brand-new buzz cut with the palm of his free hand. What do they want from me?

  “We restyled it a bit. Do you feel any different? IQ-wise, I mean,” Public jokes, “now that you’re a blond?”

  Jay just stares back blankly. This has got to be like one of those government screwups: families evicted for mortgage default from properties they own, SWAT teams storming the wrong apartment, people showing up to vote and getting told they’ve died.

  “Somebody broke into my apartment. Couple of nights ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “Or at least I think someone did. Is that what this is about?”

  Public is expressionless. “I don’t know. Is it?” He uses a remote to motor up the back of the bed and make Jay more comfortable. For a long time neither one of them speaks.

  “Here’s where I am with this,” Jay says finally. “I have no idea why you would think I need to be in witness protection. I’m completely confused. And a little scared, if you want to know the truth.” He’s still hoping that if he stays calm and cooperative, and explains himself, this crazy error they’ve made will become self-evident, there will be embarrassed faces, waivers of culpability to sign, sincere apologies, and he’ll go home to deal with the bad haircut and the acid burns.

  “I know, right?” Public says.

  “So, I mean. How about this: if you could just tell me what it is you think I’ve seen, or witnessed . . .”

  Public shakes his head. “Better that you tell me. What you think it is.”

  “But I just explained—”

  “—No, see, you have to tell me,” is what Public says, firmly, like a parent to a child. “That’s where we are with
this. That’s why we’re here.”

  Jay closes his eyes. Frustration has shoved his headache down to the base of his skull, where it pulses, almost cold. “I’m here,” he says, as levelly as he can, “handcuffed to a bed. Like a prisoner.”

  Public opens his mouth, then closes it, reconsidering what he was going to say. Out in the hallway, old-school linoleum shines like it’s been recently waxed. There doesn’t seem to be anyone standing guard on the room. If it’s a hospital, Jay decides, it’s not a new one, possibly not even a functioning one. And for the first time he wonders if Public is who he says he is.

  “I’m supposed to have a key,” Public says apologetically, sitting down again and crossing his legs. “Okay, look. A lot of people feel the way you do right now, at first. Upside down. Don’t know if we can be trusted, or even are who we say we are, which is completely understandable. But over time—”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “No, of course not”—but continuing his prior explanation, Public—“what I’m saying, over time it’s just the overwhelming feeling of helplessness—of having to rely on total strangers—”

  “I’m the wrong guy,” Jay tells him. “I’m nobody: work in a telemarketing office, play a little basketball. My girlfriend thinks I’m afraid to commit, my friends—”

  Public interrupts, “Jay—”

  “I don’t have anything to tell you. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t see anything,” Jay pleads.

  The briefest cloud of doubt crosses Public’s features, then clears. He shrugs. “That contradicts our information.”

  “Then somebody gave you bad information,” Jay reasons. “You know. Or transposed a Social Security number. It happens.”

  Public nods his inexpressive nod. “Jay, I’m a deputy U.S. Marshal and not inexperienced at the acquisition, securing, and unwrapping of confidential informants. We’re very, very careful and we don’t make those kinds of mistakes, but sure—I totally get where you might be coming from. Your fears, your distrust. And you don’t have to say anything at all to us until you’re ready.”