Fifty Mice Read online

  “She wants you to help her with some clouds.”

  Surfacing from a fitful nap to the inverted face of Helen: feline enhancements resulting from face-painting at an after-school birthday party.

  This upside-down cat Helen peers quizzically at Jay sprawled on his sofa, stirring fully clothed and clammy from angry, troubling daydreams.

  “She what?”

  “Clouds,” Ginger says, unseen, calling out to him from the dining room: “For a school play.”

  Jay sits up, groggy. Helen just stares at him like Magonis does, but both her eyes work fine. It’s like she can see right into him. Not through him; into him.

  “They’re doing a musical,” Ginger elaborates.

  “With first-graders?”

  “And Helen is making props.” Squeak of wooden chair in the dining room. Ginger’s ignoring his question.

  Jay shakes the cobwebs out of his head. Not convinced this isn’t more dreaming. “What musical?”

  “The Pied Piper.”

  “Guy with the rats.”

  “Roughly,” Ginger says. She’s come to the archway to check on Jay and her daughter, who hasn’t moved.

  “I didn’t know there was a musical.”

  “There is now.”

  “Look,” Jay begins, “no offense, but I’m not really familiar with—”

  Ginger explains that one of the teachers wrote it. Book and lyrics. Jay wants to make a snarky observation about grade-school teachers and musical theater, but doesn’t even know where to start. Ginger wonders if “ambitious” is the word he was looking for?

  “Well—or fucking impossibly grim, excuse my French.”

  “It’s German, actually. Sixteenth century. And there’s a suitably happy ending in this telling.”

  She surprises him with this comment. Slowly, their more sustained conversations since Helen’s night terrors have been filled with similar surprises. A passion for Korean barbecue. A superstition involving frogs. Jay has grown so accustomed to Stacy’s easy two-dimensionality, Ginger’s raveled, mercurial presence is alternately scary and exhilarating. Sometimes both.

  The sum of this—Ginger—the puzzle of Helen’s willful silence, the craziness of his ongoing internment, and the stress of his sessions with Magonis, is that he has never felt so alive.

  Again, Jay starts to say something, but Ginger’s eyes tell him to shut up, shifting discreetly to Helen and back. Apparently, in another life, she explains, in language she hopes Helen can’t follow, the author had Broadway ambitions. But some combination of crystal meth, bad boyfriend, forced prostitution, and involuntary manslaughter has resulted in her being available here on Catalina to share her talents with the children.

  Jay, translating: “She’s in the program.”

  Ginger reminds him that they’re not allowed to ask.

  “How many people on this island do you think are—”

  Ginger cuts him off, repeating that they’re not allowed to ask. “What difference does it make?” she adds. Then shifts gears, upbeat, “Parents are encouraged to get involved.”

  Jay decides that it’s not worth taking the position that this invitation to parents does not, technically, apply to him. It’s ungenerous and, in truth, he’s interested. “I don’t remember clouds in the Pied Piper of Hamelin,” he says instead.

  “Are you kidding?” Ginger smiles slightly. “Clouds are everywhere,” she says. “You’ll see.”

  Clouds.

  Clouds, barely moving, in a ghostly blue sky.

  Wickedly hungover, Jay leaned toward the windshield, looked out and up, between the curling fat ribbons of elevated concrete freeway, squinting against the gauzy glare of light—

  “What?”

  “I said the play’s a virtual cloud convention,” Ginger says. “You’re not listening to me.”

  “No, I am. It’s just . . . with Magonis, he gets me in these memory spirals, and . . .”

  Clouds.

  “. . . there was this girl.”

  Ginger: “There’s always a girl.”

  Jay shakes his head. “I thought I had dreamed her.”

  Ribbons of darkness looped across awkward groping, the girl had her blouse open, red snake, lacy black bra—Jay’s lips skated across the sweep of her shoulder, her fingers curled through the latticework of the rising elevator cage and the girl’s eyes fluttered and her breath sweet, hot, thick with Kentucky bourbon.

  “Tell me.” Her voice is too soft, all the edges rounded off. He doesn’t trust it.

  “I mean, I really can’t be sure if she was . . . I might have been dreaming. It’s all a mash-up.”

  “Of what?”

  Of Jay, in the car, empty parking lot, hungover, dead yellow sun spliced through the dirty windshield making his eyes hurt, wondering where the hell he was.

  He says, “And then I . . . you know—”

  Jay and Ginger, staring at each other. Aware that Helen’s eyes are on them from where she’s playing on the floor.

  “—woke up,” Jay says.

  Jay leaned toward the windshield. Looked out. Up. Squinting against the glare of the light at the—

  “And then what?”

  —Clouds.

  Jay smiles at her, sheepish. “Clouds,” he says. “Everywhere.”

  Raindrops on noses

  and whispers on kittens . . .

  “Isn’t it whiskers? Whiskers.”

  So here is Jay in the Catalina Elementary School cafeteria, carving a huge fluffy cloud from corrugated cardboard, while Helen, close enough to be his shadow, uses pale blue paint to outline a cut cloud she’s already slathered with white.

  One of her classmates is crooning her audition piece, high, slightly flat:

  . . . Pink salmon cabbages melt into string

  these are two-oo of my FA-VOR-IT thingz!

  Night, it’s cold, a stiff sea wind rattles the windows. In the far corner, near a freshly built plywood platform stage, boys and mostly girls audition nervously for a couple of sleepy teachers. A chunky woman with hair splayed by a scrunchie plays accompaniment on an upright piano, eyes closed, mouthing the proper lyrics. Three brawny dads with power tools study the new stage and murmur gravely. Verse mangling continues unabated, as Jay, all casual, makes conversation with his pretend daughter, the selective mute:

  “How come you aren’t trying out for a part in the play?”

  Helen just paints.

  Jay is determined that he will hold conversation with her whether she responds or not; in his admittedly limited experience, kids don’t say much that’s interesting, anyway, and this one, with her sharp looks and droll expressions, seems like she’s carrying on one long continuous monologue—or tuneless aria—for her own entertainment, without the complication of words. Jay wants in on that.

  “Is it the talking thing?” Jay asks her.

  Helen looks up at him deadpan.

  Against the far wall, a couple of Spanish-speaking women and Ginger, on ladders, are trying to hang a curtain from a cable on one end of the room, for the temporary stage. It sags, big-time. Ginger keeps glancing over at Jay and Helen with a look that tells Jay she still doesn’t completely trust him with her daughter.

  “Because, don’t get me wrong,” Jay continues, “I like a good musical as much as the next fool—well, maybe not—but—I think you could get up there and be, like, really really quiet and not say anything, and that could be, you know, pretty effective. Which is to say good. Dramatically. With the piano and everything.”

  Helen stares at him.

  “I carve a lousy cloud. I know. I know.”

  She goes back to her painting.

  “Helen is a pretty serious name.”

  No reaction.

  “You go by anything else? Shorter?”

  No.

 
; “I guess there’s not really a diminutive for Helen.” Jay finds himself struggling not to fall into the empty patter of the phone jockey: “But I’m just saying. Helen could be very heavy baggage. Woman that brought down an entire civilization, launched a thousand ships, et cetera, et cetera. Troy? With the guys hiding in the horse? And noble Hector and the other guy, the creep, I forget his name. Maybe you heard about it. I think Disney made a movie.” He waits again; again, no reaction. “Although, I wikied it on my computer at work, and some Greeks say the whole thing never happened, all a ruse. I guess there’s a lot of variations on the story. But here’s the thing: in one, Zeus has Hermes fashion Helen out of—guess what?—yeah, clouds.”

  Nothing from Helen.

  Jay props his improbable, chop-blocky cumulus against his leg. “Or not. Okay, look. Helen. See, for me? It doesn’t matter if you talk, there’s all kinds of ways to communicate. Plus,” he drops his voice low, as if sharing a secret, “I actually get where you’re coming from. Half the time nobody listens to what you’re saying, anyway, it’s just noise to them, just something they gotta tolerate until they can speak again, so I’m saying it’s like, you know: what’s the point?

  “Amiright?”

  Helen bends close to her cloud, so close, like someone incredibly nearsighted, meticulously brushing her blue highlights, affecting total concentration, pretending she’s ignoring him.

  Simple chords bang from the piano. Jay’s heard this one before. Another hopeful audition begins to murder the lyrics of a beloved Broadway warhorse:

  Somebody will shout, tomorrow

  I will betcha a dollar . . .

  “I mean,” Jay is saying, “talking is words, and words are . . .”

  • • •

  March third,” Magonis says, the datebook falling open to another apparently random calendar page; squares of sunlight, the smell of warm leather, crackle of Jay’s planner with its helter-skelter scrawlings, as if someone (not even Jay) wrote in it while on a roller coaster.

  March third.

  • • •

  He can’t take his eyes off the bad hairpiece. He expects at any moment for it to leap out into the room like a scruffy flat rodent. But at least it distracts him from Magonis’s wandering eye. Is it taped on? Glued? What unfortunate individual sacrificed the hair for it, and how much were they paid?

  “Are you married?” Jay has asked him before, in elusion. What kind of wife would allow him that rug?

  “Love is a complex neurobiological phenomenon,” Magonis had replied, thoughtful. “Dopamine, vasopressin, oxytocin, serotonergic signaling, not to mention endorphins and all these weird endogenous morphinergic mechanisms.” He shook his head. “There are benefits to the romantic love concept, mostly sex and reproduction. But psychologically? It’s a toxic stew.” In short, “No. Like nature, I abhor the vacuum.”

  Jay has no idea what happened on March third.

  And he’s still upset by what he saw before he came for this appointment.

  • • •

  Jay spent the morning sitting behind the counter at the video store watching Savage Messiah and Googling information about Catalina Island and Avalon and tidal reports and how long it would take to swim to the mainland, but discovered he still cannot log in or access any social networks, or Skype, or post anything or shout out into the worldwide void; his ability to upload is, like his physical egress from the island, somehow globally blocked, wherever he logs on.

  Nobody ever comes in.

  Two women hurried past on the sidewalk around eleven, hair jacked by the sea wind, one of them waved in at him and smiled, and Jay thought he recognized her as part of the U.S. Marshal team at the Santa Monica safe house, but Jay sees U.S. Marshals in pretty much everybody now.

  He locked up early and went for bad coffee at Big E’s, never making it there because as he rounded the corner he saw a cluster of boats on the horizon line, one of them with a flashing light on it like a police patrol car. Standing on the seawall, he watched them come in to the pier: two civilian fishing skiffs and a big old trawler, trailing behind a sleek harbor patrol boat that tied up on the pier near the harbormaster’s office; there was a man lying in back who they lifted carefully and handed to dockworkers, and that was when Jay realized that the man was Hondo, the boat-rental guy, and he was dead.

  A shattered fiberglass kayak followed the body from the back of the patrol boat to the pier. It looked like someone had crushed the side of the kayak with a sledgehammer or a baseball bat, and it continued leaking enough seawater that they had to lift Hondo again and move him out of the spill.

  A compact ambulance rumbled out of Avalon from the fire station, no siren. The EMTs took over and the fishermen and patrol officers stood around for a while, arms folded, saying little, until finally the fishermen separated and came walking down the pier and Jay could overhear them talking about it as they passed him:

  —I wonder what coulda done that to the kayak.

  —Rock. Or rocks.

  —Before or after he got shot in the head?

  —Coulda been he hit his head on the rocks. Caught a swell and it dropped him right on ’em. There’s all kinds of worrisome shit below the surface of the San Pedro channel you don’t want to think about.

  —Looked like a gunshot wound.

  —As if you could fucking tell.

  —I’m just saying.

  —You watch too much CSI.

  —Okay. Okay. But you saying he couldn’t tread water? Wearing a life vest?

  —Maybe it knocked him out. Hell, maybe it broke his ribs, turned him upside down. The point is, we don’t know.

  —The fuck was he doing way out there?

  Paddling for the mainland, was Jay’s thought.

  —Drowning.

  He recognized Island Video’s favorite Francophile customer Sam Dunn walking with them, but Dunn’s eyes were down, and he didn’t look up, and when they went into Big E’s their conversation went with them.

  Jay gave up on his bad coffee; he was late for the Zane Grey, Magonis, room 204. Arriving, he asked about Hondo, but the federal shrink didn’t know anything about it, and added, somewhat tetchy, that he was on the island only for Jay.

  And, presently, whatever it was that happened on March third.

  “PCW?” Magonis reading, head tilted slightly, Jay assumes, to favor his useful eye: “That’s all you wrote here. You wrote: ‘PCW.’” Magonis looks up. “What is that?”

  PCW. Paper Clip Wars.

  Insurgent response to the tedium of phone sales.

  SuperSmash Melée in the bullpen, moving low and fast through the milky white maze mouselike to pop up over the half-wall and poise, rubber band stretched back slingshot between his fingers and thwak lets fly with a silvery paper clip that just misses coworker Larry, who dives away, war sweeping through the office, six, seven players, light jittering off bent-wire projectiles that spin glinting and ricochet off walls and windows, shoulders, backs, and asses, bodies jerking to momentary safety, twisting, stumbling, falling in passageways, and laughing.

  Phones ring unanswered, lines light up, flashing, data streams across LCD screens, noncombatants cowering low at their desks with their headphones and monitors and keyboards uprooted.

  Jay shakes his head. Somehow he doesn’t want to give the shrink the satisfaction of admitting he was part of such a pointless diversion. Doesn’t want to acknowledge that he spent hours calculating a full range of arcane statistics: win/loss, yield, ordnance economy, weapon accuracy, overall efficiency, splits, rankings, vulnerability to low, middle, high attack, kill ratios, value added, fail rates and speed charts.

  “It’s just, it was, I don’t know, business as usual. Sell sell sell,” Jay says. It’s not enough, Magonis keeps waiting for the answer, and Jay, vamping: “So, I mean, PCW, it—PCW stands for partial . . . so, it’s like an acronym: pa
rtial collection, um, of . . .”

  “Not so important,” Magonis says.

  “. . . warranties. Warrants.”

  Until somebody—was it Larry? or Timmerman?—took a paper clip right in the eye and folded over, hands to his face, screaming Ow SHIT jesusshitow ow ow and blood spritzing through his fingers and Buddy DeLuca had to be told, which led to a private conference and reprimands and penalties and overtime and Larry or Timmerman came back with a shit-eating grin and thick gauze over one eye and no permanent damage and, supposedly, a prospective date with a smoking-hot ER nurse, but it was game over, End of War.

  “. . . part of this kind of insurance program we had,” Jay is saying with all sincerity. “For sharing net losses.”

  He can’t tell if Magonis believes this or not.

  March third.

  Hondo was still alive then, somewhere. Of that much Jay is certain.

  • • •

  Cliffside on Chimes Tower Road, high above a sun-stung winter Avalon, after school, the Beacon Realty golf cart that no one seems to notice Jay borrowing for another joyride struggles upslope, Helen on the seat beside him, hands folded nicely in her lap, back straight.

  “We can’t work in a vacuum,” Jay tells her. “We’ve gotta do some cloud research. Like, immerse ourselves in cloudiness. Just go completely cloud.”

  Not even a smile from Helen. It’s after school, they should be making more props for the Pied Piper, but over breakfast Ginger announced she wouldn’t be there and wondered if Jay could bring Helen home, getting him to promise he wouldn’t forget, so Jay figures he’s got a Get Out of Jail Free card for at least a couple of hours, until they’re due home for supper. And while it’s not something that he’d admit willingly, taking her on this excursion is something he’s been looking forward to all day.

  “Because your mom is right,” he says. “Basically, this whole play makes or breaks based on its clouds. Lotta people think it’s just rats and kids and a guy in lederhosen playing a flute, with some very, very timid plague allusions.” He shakes his head. “But once you get past the singing and dancing”—he makes a vague gesture here, both hands leaving the wheel of the cart, and it veers momentarily toward the edge of the road—“there’s nothing but air and water. And vapor is our middle name, baby.” Jay grabs the wheel, they curve away from trouble and cruise up onto the rolling, empty expanses of the high plateau. Narrow, dark creased coulees stubbled with mountain mahogany and scrub oak and mission manzanita zag like scars down to rocky, surf-sprayed escarpments, the whitecapped ocean stretches magnificently to mainland Los Angeles shrouded, as always, in its aetherlike womb of air pollution.