Fifty Mice Read online

  “Constitutionally speaking, you’re here voluntarily,” she says.

  Jay shakes his head. “But I’m not.”

  “Right, well, and your government is claiming they’ve brought you into custody for your own protection. So.” Arden grips the edge of the table like a schoolgirl waiting to get her test back, and expecting an A.

  “They can do that?”

  Richter takes the cigarette from her lips and stares at it. “They can do whatever they want, and you can take them to court for it, later, and—”

  “Like unlawful detention, or something.”

  “You’ve been watching your Law and Order,” Richter observes. “Yes. Or something.”

  “But meanwhile?”

  Richter’s hands flutter up in what Jay assumes is a shrug of helplessness.

  Jay looks to Public. “I guess I just want to know, protection from what?” He looks at Richter. “Or whom? Can you get them to tell me that?”

  Doe tells Richter that Jay has already asked it, but she, they, the Federal Authorities, this group of marshals, can’t answer that question without completely compromising the investigation in which Jay has been deemed a materially significant player.

  “That doesn’t really make sense,” Jay observes aloud, “but, okay. So where does that leave me?”

  Again, a fluttery shrug.

  Public shows his teeth, not really grinning, unamused, but apparently interested for the first time. “You really have no clue why we brought you in?”

  “I don’t. No.” He looks to Richter again. “This is what I’ve been trying to get through to them.”

  Doe starts to interrupt, but Public holds up his hand, so Jay can finish.

  “I didn’t see anything,” Jay tells everyone in the room, as calmly as he can. He still wants to believe that these are rational people who have made an honest but aggravating mistake and if he’s just convincing enough, and lays it out for them, right here, right now, they’ll let him go. “I don’t know . . . anything. I have nothing to offer you. And because you won’t give me a clue as to what it might be—”

  “We can’t. Don’t you understand? We need it to come from you, unsolicited—it’s essential that you tell us without our asking for it—”

  “Why?”

  This causes another awkward hiccup in the conversation. Evidently, they can’t tell him that, either. “This is either a case of mistaken identity or some bad information you got on your end,” Jay says. “I’m nothing. I’m just a regular, normal, boring guy. I lead a regular, normal, boring life, a telemarketer who sells virtual real estate on his way to a Thursday-night three-on-three roundball with some other guys, friends, when you, I dunno, accosted me, and pulled my coat over my head and drugged me and took me away and dropped me into this . . . well, yeah, I’m sorry, but for me it’s a nightmare. Okay? You can see that, right?”

  Richter looks at the marshals. “My client says he didn’t see anything.”

  “How can he be so sure that this is about something he saw?” Doe asks simply.

  Richter looks at Jay.

  The room spins. Jay crimps his eyes. He doesn’t know how to respond. The discussion keeps circling on itself, an endless loop of flawed logic, and each time the argument comes back around, he feels a little less sure that what he knows is true is true.

  It’s Vaughn’s crazy experiment with the doors and the suicidal mice.

  “Jay. The civil rights of the individual,” Richter begins, as if composing a brief, “can on occasion be subsumed by the rights of the community to”—someone sneezing in the hallway distracts her into a thought-stutter—“to certain, to certain, to certain information that the individual may possess, which could prevent,” she pauses, eyebrows furrowed, starting to lose her way, “a larger . . .” And then she’s completely lost, and looking for shore. “. . . well . . . harm . . .” She takes a long drag on the last of her Marlboro, eyes apologetic, and then shakes out and lights up another cigarette, end to end.

  Doe, to Jay: “If you don’t know anything, if you are—not in a legal sense, but generally—innocent, why did you try to run away from us?”

  “I was scared. I feel like nobody is listening to me.”

  Public, to Jay, cold hard fact: “Because you aren’t saying anything.”

  Jay looks at his lawyer. “And they can just keep me like this? Hold me indefinitely?”

  “No. But yes. I mean—the law is, legally, well, clear—but, as I said before, in practice, vague. In this area.” Arden Richter does a French inhale of cigarette smoke, lips pursed.

  “Vague?”

  Richter nods, rounds her lips, puffs out a smoke ring and taps the ash into her coffee cup. “For example, they could argue that what you know is dangerous, or in the public interest to protect—or acquire—and until you tell them—”

  “You don’t exist anymore,” an impatient Public says sharply, the veneer peeling. “We’ve erased you, my friend. So technically we’re not keeping you at all.”

  Erased. Jay feels like he’s floating up, off his chair. Out of body: where reality becomes a dream, and dreams are something you wake up from.

  Doe sighs, leans back, visibly upset with her colleague. Evidently, this is more than she wanted Jay to know.

  Erased. Jay has known weightlessness before. “Wake up,” he says. Bang. His head hits the table. “Wake up.” Bang. “Wake up.”

  “Jay.” Doe is watching him, kindly, worried.

  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

  | 6 |

  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.

  • • •

  It 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.