Fifty Mice: A Novel (11 page)

—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: partial 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.

•   •   •

C
liffside 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.

“Can’t have your happy ending if the sun doesn’t break through the, you know.”

No fog today.

Just clouds, white, cartoon, scattered like cotton Morse code from horizon to horizon, a dotted ceiling that floats, 3-D, beneath the canopy of pale blue sky.

Helen’s heels kick the bench in a distracted rhythm. One-two, one-two. Fretful or bored. Hondo’s body was gone from the Green Pleasure Pier by the time Jay left Magonis. The shattered kayak was propped up against the shuttered kiosk where the ex-con had worked. What happens when someone who’s been erased dies? Does anyone notice? Can a made-up life matter?

Jay clips through the low brush and bristle grass, the hard-packed dirt road dipping and rising as Helen clutches the seat rail and leans out from under the canopy to stare up at the clouds, mesmerized, mouth agape, eyes slitted, the wind in her hair until Jay swerves and bumps and jerks to a halt just off the sloping shoulder, in a riotous field of knee-high wildflowers spanning a table of land that sweeps west to a rocky escarpment on the Pacific side of the island.

“Coupla measly cardboard cumulus ain’t gonna make it,” he tells Helen, and jacks the brake with his foot. “Not for us.”

She hops out of the cart and shrugs off her backpack and runs into the tall flowers, arms angled high, her eyes raised to the blissed-out heavens above her.

Julie Andrews, Jay thinks, and slides off the bench seat into the sunlight. That was a good musical.

He looks northeast. Another couple miles distant, rising above the island’s angled steppe, a small airfield where mainland charter and commuter planes can land offers a single dusty scar of a runway made feasible by beheading two peaks and using the resulting rock, clay, and debris to flat-grade the gaps. It cleanly bisects the leveled mesa and simply ends at the edge of a bluff. There’s a collection of modest terra-cotta terminal buildings with a Runway Café sign glowing green, half a dozen parked planes, and an almost empty parking lot where park service pickups squat in the latticed shade of a brace of mahogany trees.

A Cessna four-seater is taxiing to position, the drone of its engines burring loud out of the wind like a giant locust, wings waggling. At the end of the runway the plane curls to face the mainland, then stops, the cockpit door catches sunlight as it opens and light splinters off it. The distinctive figure of Sam Dunn emerges, wireless headset and a pair of mirrored sunglasses Jay can see from where he stands; Dunn runs to the rear and tugs impatiently on the elevator trim tab until it unfreezes from the horizontal stabilizer.

The plane creeps forward, threatening to take off without its pilot, but Dunn runs back to the flapping door and climbs inside.

The pitch of the engine rises, and the plane rolls forward, picking up speed, but not nearly enough, it seems, before it runs out of airstrip and drops off the plateau and disappears from sight for a startling moment. Then it catches the channel updraft, air under its wings, reappears, steady, rising, and soars back high up into the dappled sky of cotton-ball clouds, propeller droning drunkenly as it hurries toward L.A.

Jay shades his eyes, lost in thought, watching it go. Dunn is not part of Public’s game. Jay is sure he would have known it from when Dunn first came into the shop. No. Dunn is a wild card.

Possibly a trump card.

A joker that flies.

So lost in thought, Jay can’t be sure he’s heard, under the worbling whine of the Cessna, a little girl’s voice announce matter-of-factly: “She’s not my mom.”

And Jay turns, startled. Helen is staring at him, intent.

“What?”

Helen says nothing to him. She gives no indication that she’s said anything. Did he imagine it? Jay takes a couple steps toward her.

“What did you say?”

Nothing from Helen. Only the steady gaze that she’s perfected.

“Just now. You talked.”

Her expression: open, innocent, inscrutable, unyielding.

“You said . . .” Jay’s voice trails off. He balks, adrift in doubt, and it spooks him.

Helen draws a wedge of hair out of her eyes and lazy-skips away, trailing her hand lightly across the tops of the golden yarrow and mariposa lilies, back to the golf cart, where she climbs up on the seat and slips her arms into the loops of her backpack and waits for him, and for the long ride back to town, attending to only what’s ahead of them.

GINGER CONFUSES HIM.

What is that trope people recite? Mystery inside a riddle wrapped in—or wait. No. Shit. Enigma is part of it, though. And a riddle.

Jay has never been any good at riddles, plus Ginger is thorny and complicated in a way that Jay nevertheless finds more beguiling than he thinks he should.

And then there’s the whole killing thing, which, yes, he’s already dismissed, but that’s the history with which she’s been saddled, and the questions linger, chief among them:
Why would Public want me to think that?

Ginger may not scare him, but the Feds still do.

A night out sans Helen is Public’s idea. “You two kids need to act like you’re a normal functioning couple, so no one gets suspicious.” Jay thinks this, too, is bullshit, since he’s convinced that everyone in Avalon is, in one way or another, either working for the Feds or cowed by them.

For his part, Public is the White Rabbit, mercurial, always darting just ahead of Jay—seen passing on a golf cart with Barry, at the end of a street bracing a couple of local working men in coveralls, on the
back of a big yacht at anchor with day-trippers from Balboa, but seldom where Jay needs him to be to ask myriad new questions he has about Ginger, Helen, what really happened to the unhappily departed Hondo, and whether Magonis is really a doctor, or just another federal agent playing make-believe.

“Don’t assume,” Public likes to tell him, when Jay does manage to cross his path. “People assume the serial killer next door is just a regular guy. People assume the child molester couldn’t possibly be the favorite uncle. People assume that if they live right God will reward them, but only one guy’s come back to tell us about it, and he’s family, so we can assume he’s not entirely objective.

“Assumptions are the enemy of truth, and truth is all we’re after.”

Jay doesn’t know what this means, but he assumes that Public is jerking his chain because the reedy smile that follows this homily is a kind of flesh-and-blood emoticon, human spam. And Jay has noted with an uneasy curiosity how Ginger will put herself between Public and Helen whenever Public is around.

Happy hour at the Garrulous Parrot, crawling twilight shadows calling for the tea lights and candles that lend a low-rent
Pirates of the Caribbean
ride vibe to the otherwise mawkish glassed-in
terraza
nestled in palms and gum trees, back up the canyon on the road to the Wrigley Gardens. The dim light helps ease the awkward silence resulting from Ginger’s preoccupation with her smartphone. Helen is home under the watch of Sandy, their pretend friend and next-door neighbor, a tired-looking twenty-something with a hay bale of frizzy pulled-back hair, and Helen has the
Toy Story
DVD trilogy and their home phone speed dial programmed to Ginger’s.

Sustaining a conversation is still trouble for them. Jay’s on his second Buffalotini, a frozen concoction of bison milk, vodka, Tia Maria, and bitters that the cocktail waitress Penny recommended before either of them says anything. Ginger has slapped on some edgy red
lipstick and false eyelashes for the occasion, making it impossible, when she declines her head to her phone’s screen in what appears to be a furious texting session, for Jay to read her eyes. Collared shirt and chinos, he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he makes a mosaic with the beer nuts, and wonders aloud, finally, “You can make outgoing calls?”

She looks up at him, expressionless.

“My phone,” he clarifies, “if I try to call the mainland, somebody comes on the line and tells me to hang up and try again later. Or can’t be completed as dialed.”

“Angry Birds,” Ginger explains, unapologetically, and shows him the game app alive on her phone.

“So you can’t.”

“What.”

“Make calls.”

Ginger shrugs. “Who would I call?”

Jay leans forward, on both arms. Feels heat from the candle, and its glow pushes Ginger’s face farther into a gauzy otherworld of the bar’s dim shadows. “So what do you think? How does this work?” Jay asks. “Are we a happy couple? Why did we move here? Are we apathetic Gen-X or just complacent? Is Helen adopted, or maybe the result of some kind of baby-making science, your eggs and store-bought sperm, which has left me feeling kind of . . . evanescent.”

Ginger tilts her head, doesn’t answer.

“I know, right?” Jay says.

“I don’t know what that means.”

Jay sits back, allows that it probably doesn’t matter, and starts sweeping the beer nuts back into the dish.

“You’re odd.” Ginger puts the phone down and sips her drink, then reacting, making a face. “Ohmygod. Yeeg.”

“It gets better once you get past the taste and the texture.”

She doesn’t even smile. She studies Jay for what seems like a long time. “Well, how do you think this works?”

“I have no idea. That’s why I’m—”

“And what makes you think it’s supposed to work at all? It’s an arrangement they’ve made more for their convenience than ours. Safety protocol and redundancies and whatnot. Short term, nonbinding, trivial in the long run. You know?”

Short term
settles on Jay like a funk.
Clinical trial, but without a control.

“I worked in this lab for a while,” Jay says. “My friend does experiments with animals, mostly mice, because they’re crazily close to us, genetically.”

“Mice.”

“Yeah. I know. Gives, like, a whole new wrinkle to that old challenge, ‘Are you a mouse or are you a man?’ But. There was this one thing they were doing, trying to combine old memories and new ones by jacking with the neurons in their brains, giving them hybrid memories that were part real and part fake.”

“How can they tell mice are remembering anything?”

“I’m glad you asked. See, what happens is memory is laid down, or maybe stored, in neurons that are firing when that memory is taking place. Later, if you can find and trigger those neurons, you bring that memory back. On command. So what we did was put these certain genetically engineered mice in a test chamber with a specific color and smell, and let them crawl around for a while so they’d remember it. And—don’t ask me how—they—the egghead science team my friend is part of—they figured out and marked the neurons where that memory was stored.

“Then we dosed the mice with this chemical that activated those neurons, and put the same mice in a distinctly different test
chamber: different color, different smell. And zapped them with electric shocks.”

“Nice,” Ginger says, a little bored, fiddling with her phone again.

“It’s called fear conditioning. The whole floor is some kind of conductive metal. You zap a mouse and it gets afraid of the place where it was zapped—”

“What a surprise, really,” Ginger says drily.

“—and when you put that normal mouse back in that place later it will freeze up, what they, the scientists, call arousal, but, hell, it’s pretty much just abject fear—terror—it won’t even move, because it’s not only remembering, it’s remembering the terrible stuff that happened there.

“But these experimental mice were all messed up. They had the memories of the first chamber flooding back on them while they were being zapped in the second chamber—which created a hybrid memory, and now they would only freeze up when we put them in the second chamber and activated the memories from the first chamber.”

“Okay, I’m lost.”

“Otherwise they went about their business. They couldn’t recall being zapped in the second chamber unless they were also having the false memory of being in the first chamber. The false felt real.”

Ginger shakes her head. “Somehow I don’t think you’re explaining this right.”

“You can make someone remember something that didn’t happen.”

“Okay.”

“It is possible.”

“Somebody been zapping you?”

“Not exactly, but—”

“You’re just saying.”

“Yeah. I guess.” He’s no longer sure why he even brought it up. Vaughn once accused him of being obsessed with the mice. “Dude, stop projecting,” he told Jay. “They’re not metaphors, they’re just furry mammal vermin teetering on the low end of the food chain.” Vaughn tended to suck the romance out of everything.

“I don’t know. I get the feeling you aren’t trying to remember, you’re trying to forget,” Ginger says pointedly.

Jay sits back.

And the awkward silence between them returns.

It’s quite a while before Jay breaks it. “There was another one, clinical trial, I mean, where they let this one mouse get really, really good at running a maze. He knew every turn. Then they chopped him up, and fed him to a bunch of other mice to see if, by eating him, they could acquire any of his talent for running the labyrinth.”

Ginger seems appalled but strangely interested in this one. “Did they?”

Jay says he quit before the results came back. It’s a lie; he got fired. And he knows the numbers by heart, because he tallied them for Vaughn.

“Grim.” Ginger shudders.

“Do you have meetings with the guy with a bad toupee?” Jay shifts gears. “This shrink named Magonis?” Jay knows she doesn’t. He’s followed her, more than once, during the day, to see where she goes, and it isn’t to the flat-roofed office building where Magonis holds court in 204. There were errands: groceries, drugstore, the band of a watch that she needed to get repaired. Once she played tennis with the neighbor who calls herself Sandy, and two other women at courts near the golf course clubhouse; afterward they disappeared inside and stayed for a long time.

But Ginger spends most of her time alone with her thoughts,
sitting on the front porch of the bungalow, or on a canvas sling chair at Descanso Beach, or at a tin table outside the coffee shop, Big E’s, on Crescent Avenue, watching the moored boats rock in the harbor. And Jay’s watched her, like a voyeur, or a jealous husband. She’s sorting through something, trying to make sense of whatever architecture of events brought her here, to Catalina, witness protection, with Jay. Her fragility, or his sense of it, when she drops her guard and thinks she’s alone, makes his heart ache. This cold, complex woman with the little girl who won’t speak to her.

He understands what that’s like, trying to make sense of the senseless. He wants to tell her that it’s futile, but knows this is something she will have to come to on her own.

And then what?

The sound of Angry Birds bleats from the smartphone between her slender thumbs like some weird insect’s call. He stares at her. Of the dozen or more patrons in the bar, more than half of them have phones out, glowing, demanding their attention, drawing them away, the siren call of a pointless connection to a virtual life.

And clouds, Jay thinks. Whole worlds floating in the empty space between here and there, tethered to this world by a tenuous signal and PIN-code prayer. Jay has nothing to put in the clouds. Nothing worth saving, nothing worth remembering.

Except that Helen spoke to him. And Ginger doesn’t know.

“You want another round? Nachos? Guac and chips?” It’s Penny, their waitress. She’s dressed vaguely cocktail wench, Wonderbra and fishnet stockings, but the green-and-blue tattoo spilling down her shoulder to her elbow is a lively array of obscure Japanese anime.

Jay looks to Ginger: nothing.

“I think we’re good,” he tells Penny.

“Date night?”

“What?”

She winks. “I got a third-grader, Max, I seen you at school with your little girl. Helen?”

Ginger says, “That’s right,” softening, and puts the phone away.

“Me and my husband, Cody, we do a date night like every other week. I can always tell. We got nothing to say to each other, either. Dr. Phil says it’s important, though. You just move here?”

“We did.”

“It’s nice,” Penny says. “Slow. But nice. You know. What do you do?”

Jay hesitates. “I have the video rental place on—”

“Gabe’s?”

“Yeah.”

“That was weird. How quick he cashed out.”

“Was it? I don’t know anything about it. Never met him,” Jay adds. “We used a broker.”

“That weird guy.” Penny’s hands flutter uncertainly in a gesture that somehow exactly conjures Public. “My friend Tina had kissy-face with him one night after last call.” She lowers her voice. “He’s got a tongue thing.” Ginger’s thumbs poised over her phone, but not moving, she’s listening. “Next thing I know Tina’s gone, some Hispanic family is living in her place.”

Jay doesn’t know what to say, but Penny doesn’t seem to need him to comment.

“Well, good luck with it. We don’t rent videos. We got a dish.”

Jay shrugs. “Okay.”

“Very private guy, Gabe. My husband thought maybe he was one of those people have to register as a sex offender, but Cody, he watches way too much reality television, you know what I mean?”

“What does your husband do?” Jay asks, just making conversation, being polite. Ginger has gone deep in her game again.

“Boat babysitting,” Penny says. “Here and Two Harbors. You’d be
surprised how many people got boats they just leave, never use, never come. I guess they probably intend to. So Cody keeps them all gassed and ready, anyway, like he runs the engine for a while, checks the battery, oil, hoses, does the upkeep, you know. Thing with a boat is you don’t use it, the ocean wants it, bad. Weekend people don’t think of that. It’s not like a vacation cabin you can just shut up and turn off the water and power and come back next summer and everything’s pretty much like you left it. Cody, he says boats are living things, you don’t show them a little love, they get sick and die. So.”

“Sounds like a good gig.”

“Yeah, well, and he can smoke his stinky bud all day, nobody gives a hoot.” Penny grins. “Hey, whyn’t I bring you some nachos? On the house.”

“No, don’t.” Ginger, too quickly, the cold Ginger. She and Penny trade quick, hostile looks. “We’re leaving,” Ginger says. “Thanks, anyway.” She touches Jay lightly on the arm, pushes her chair back, and walks out. Jay can’t tell if her pique is honest or a performance. Either way, he doesn’t understand it.

Penny watches her go, eyes dark. “I hope she’s got an upside.”

“She does.” Jay puts a twenty on the table. “But I guess we do get what we deserve,” he says automatically, “right?” and wondering why he’s even said it, because it means nothing, just makes Penny blush.