Fifty Mice: A Novel (18 page)

Often, even after years, mental states once present in consciousness return to it with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will; that is, they are reproduced
involuntarily
.
Here, also, in the majority of cases we at once recognize the returned mental state as one that has already been experienced; that is, we remember it. Under certain conditions, however, this accompanying consciousness is lacking, and we know only indirectly that the “now” must be identical with the “then”; yet we receive in this way a no less valid proof for its existence during the intervening time. As more exact observation teaches us, the occurrence of these involuntary reproductions is not an entirely random and accidental one. On the contrary they are brought about through the instrumentality of other immediately present mental images. Moreover they occur in certain regular ways which in general terms are described under the so-called “laws of association.”

—HERMANN EBBINGHAUS (1885)

Memory: A Contribution to Experimental
Psychology

HIS KEY IN THE DEADBOLT LOCK.

His lock.

His apartment door, which he’s unlocked at least a thousand times. Jiggling metal against metal, but the deadbolt won’t budge and a woman’s voice calls out querulously from inside:
Who is it?

Who is it? For a moment he’s confounded, and he steps back to make sure that he’s at the right door, even though he knows he is, this door he’s opened and closed and gone in and out of without thinking about it, instinctive, but after a month in the shifting sands of witness protection, his senses are dulled again, his compass broken. Anything could be true. Or nothing.

The tiny security peephole in the door ripples with the black-and-hazel smear of a tiny, distant eye pressed against it. Jay removes the key from the lock and steps back.

Jay says that this is where he lives.

The voice disagrees, and points out that, in fact,
it
lives here, evidenced by the fact that it is inside and Jay is out in the hallway with a key that doesn’t work.

Erased.

Embarrassed, he corrects himself: he used to live here: there is no response to his apology.

His body still aches from the impact of the Cessna’s crash landing, his legs are dead from running, he reeks of smoke and sweat and maybe, he considers, he’s been concussed, because if he was thinking straight he should never have come here to begin with, should have known that his apartment would be emptied and re-rented as part of the deletion that Public claimed was foundational to the program.

Jay puts his head to the door and asks if he could just, for a moment, look inside and see it again. He wants to know that something he remembers is true.

He hears the woman, farther back in the apartment, moving around, calling out to him to go away before she calls the police.

•   •   •

H
is Los Angeles, washed-out, uninviting, dour.

Mid-city, disgorged from a 720 rapid bus, it feels to him like a foreign country. The squat, blunt, tawny sage hills rising above the crazy quilt of architecture, malignant scatter of stucco boxes, and the intermittent cluster of high-rises or skyscrapers, louvered parking structures, the theme-park shopping malls, the food trucks, phone stores, walking Sikhs, cut fruit vendors, hot dogs wrapped with bacon, inflatable toys on sticks. The scream of billboards, branding, half-naked boy-hipped women you’ll never know gazing down with hollow promises, someone else’s dreams.

The long-shadowed rectilinear moil.

The shimmering rivers of traffic.

The mad, quailing palms.

At the boxy, tan, Beaux Arts Hollywood Y, Jay pushes from bright, flat flaxen daylight in through the side gymnasium doorway, a stark silhouette that resolves into a man, and he stands for a while with
hands in pockets, watching basketball players run the court, sneakers squeaking, bark of voices, slap of bodies and limbs colliding, the sharp percussion of the ball on the floor.

There are familiar faces, a couple of heads turn, with partial recognition: the equivocal look, half-nod, but the game flows on. Jay forgotten.

He doesn’t see anyone from his old employer, Buckham & Buckham. They’re still at their desks, he thinks.

He wants to take a shower, but the Sikh at the desk says Jay’s membership has lapsed, in fact, he owes more than a hundred dollars in delinquent fees and there’s only seventeen and change in his old wallet, so he turns and goes back outside, where a dim, bloodshot descending sun is still trying to burn through the fog, fat in a nankeen sky.

•   •   •

A
CCESS DENIED ACCESS DENIED ACCESS DENIED.

A reflection of Jay’s resignation in the screen of a cash machine mocks him. There’s a short line of impatient people behind him; he punches the keyboard again, sure that his password is right, knowing before he started that federal due diligence would have blocked this path along with all the others, but stubborn, he gets nothing but irritable beeps and denial of service, and finally swirls away as the machine eats his cash card and resets:

PLEASE INSERT YOUR CARD AND ENTER YOUR PIN CODE.

The dead eye of the security camera stares back at him.

•   •   •

A
new hire, the security guard in the lobby not only didn’t recognize him, but had never heard of Buckham & Buckham, and said the seventh floor was vacant and even confided that building management was having a hard time finding new tenants for several
full-floor suites on account of the stagnant economy and soft commercial rental market and Jay was welcome to go up and look, the doors were open.

Upstairs, on seven, Jay rips protective paper from a window to let light fall in on the emptied low-slung span of what was once his workplace. There’s nothing here, just the faint impression of the desks and cubicle walls on the dirty carpet, and the raw guts of an IT system disemboweled and sprouting out of the floor at junction boxes.

Jay takes it all in. The quiet is awful, and the air is stale. Public wasn’t kidding when he told Jay they’d make him vanish; not just him but everything that defined him. How far does it go? He’s not as upset as he should be, and he wonders why. His old life feels like a story someone told him, secondhand, unreal.

He waits, listening for a haunting of voices he remembers but cannot recall. He wonders, not for the first time, but for the first time with a kind of clarity:
What happens when everything you’ve known is made a lie? And all the lies play true? Are you the sum of your memories, or a collection of consensual, verifiable facts?

•   •   •

H
e still has a key to her apartment, too, but decides to ring the bell so as not to frighten her, and just in case she changed the locks, not wanting to repeat the distressing episode that happened at his own apartment, earlier; he hears the familiar shuffle of her fluffy slippers on hardwood flooring and, after a moment, Stacy opens the door and comes face-to-face with Jay. Evidently, it still takes her breath away.

“Oh. My. God.”

She looks good. But then, she always looks good, she works hard at it. Jay says hi quickly, moves past her, into the tiny, single-girl apartment he thinks he remembers, but where now a hard-bodied guy in a
tight black T-shirt and Prada suit stands up from the love seat like a bit character in a failed ’90s TV crime drama. Jay can’t remember his name; it’s the guy he thought moved to Houston.

“Oh my God,” Stacy says again, in rising pitch.

“Hi. I’m sorry. I’ll explain everything in a second, but first I gotta call Vaughn.” Jay cuts his best indifferent look to hard body as he crosses to the phone. “Who are you?”

“Who are you?” the guy asks, standing up. It’s the cage fighter: Juan Pablo. He’s bigger than Jay remembers, and not remotely South American. But not really a cage fighter, Jay reminds himself, and Jay’s pretty certain about it; that was just Vaughn, riffing, stoned. Wasn’t it?

Jay glances at Stacy. “Tell him. Tell him who I am.” He lifts the receiver from the cradle, and dials.

Stacy still hasn’t closed the door. “What are you doing here, Jay? Did they let you . . . out?”

“What? Out of where? I’ve been in witness protection, you won’t believe what I—”

Stacy cuts him off, cold: “Your mom called me and explained to me about the, you know, breakdown, and—”

“My mom can’t call anybody, Stacy. I told you that.”

“Yeah, well, she said that you’d say that, and that it was all part of your, you know, situation.”

Jay listens to the phone ring on the other end of his call. “Come on, Vaughn. Pick up.”

“This situation you have—this condition—oh, Jay, why didn’t you tell me the truth to begin with? I feel like I don’t even know you, I feel like I’ve wasted—”

Jay, attention divided, “Stacy, trust me on this: my mom didn’t call you.”

But Stacy’s not listening. “You did this, anyway. You were the one
who didn’t want a commitment. Didn’t want strings, take it as it comes, well lah dee dah, Jay, lah dee dah.”

“What are you talking about? I proposed to you. We’re engaged.”

“No. Not really. Never really. I even had to buy the goddamn ring. Here. You can have it back.” It’s in her hand. She presses it into his palm, and the diamond bites.

“Stace.”

“You didn’t want it, Jay. That’s why we could never pick a date. You know you didn’t, and okay, maybe neither did I and now—this—well, I’m sorry but—”

“There is no ‘this.’ Let me just—why doesn’t his machine pick up?”

Hard body looks to Stacy. “Baby, do you want me to take him outside?”

Baby? “GODDAMMIT!” Jay slams the phone down, and whirls on the Prada man. He inexplicably growls, “Back off, motherfucker!” and it sounds incredibly lame and stupid coming out of his mouth.

The puzzled look from Juan Pablo. “Hey, now.” Still, Prada man drifts sideways, wary, rolling his shoulders, wiggling his fingers, taking Jay’s measure.

“They said that you might do this, too,” Stacy says. “They said—”

“What, that I went crazy? Stacy, they grabbed me, they put me into—”

Talking over him: “No, not crazy, just—”

“They?”

“The doctors. After I talked to your mom.”

“Wait. Did they tell you, what, Jesus—they’ve got me in some mental institution somewhere? And you believed them?”

“. . . just, more, like mixed up, and . . .”

“TOTAL strangers—”

“. . . you know, and kind of delusional, baby, which the doctors said makes you think things are happening that . . . aren’t.”

Jay, keeping tabs on the cage fighter, shakes his head. “Stacy. Somebody calls you on the phone and says I’m in the mental hospital, says she’s my mother, and you go, ‘Oh, okay’? SHIT, Stacy, goddammit! I mean—”

“This is hard for me, too.”

He tries to stay calm: “Okay. They, U.S. Marshals, took me into witness protection. They think I’ve seen something, or know something, I dunno, it’s insane—the whole fucking thing is one long bad dream—”

Stacy is in her own aria. “—do you think I’ve slept one night since you didn’t come home? I can’t stop thinking about you, and how I had no idea you were—your Facebook page? Is
blocked
—”

“Stacy, will you listen? Look at me. This is me—”

“—and I’m just not good at this sort of thing—”

“—You know me. I’ve been disappeared, and you’re one of the only people I can—”

“—but I can’t pretend that this doesn’t like . . . change everything. I mean. I can’t be your nurse, Jay, I’m strong, but not that strong, and you’ve gotta go back, and whatever it is, whatever dark storm you’re going through, let them help you, well, you gotta let them get you well again and let me . . . go—”

Jay stares at her, suddenly hearing her; he’s hearing her for the first time.

Tears streaming down Stacy’s face. “Jay—? Jay—?”

“—what?”

Her voice soft, soothing, the way she might talk to a child: “They gave me a number. To call. In case. Let me,” and she’s moving to the telephone, “so let me just call the hospital and tell them you’re here, and—”

“Whatever dark storm I’m going through?”

“Jay—”

“No.” Jay moves to intercept and stop her, but the hard-body guy grabs him, big hands on Jay’s arms, and spins him away.

“Let her make the call.”

Jay loses it. “You want to go, Houston, here, now?” The big man lets go of Jay and takes a half a step back, frowning, putting his hands out to either side, empty.

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t think so, because you do
not
want to be where I am right now, man, because—” Jay turns, hurls the ring in his fist across the room as hard as he can and is astonished when it
sticks
in the drywall like one of those flying oriental nunchuk whirly blades, or whatever they’re called.

Hard body grabs Jay and lifts him a little too easily and pins him hard against the wall, knocking what’s left of his breath out of him. Stunned, wheezing, Jay tries to fight back, approximating something he’s seen in a movie, swings rubbery, but his fists find nothing but air, and suddenly he’s stumbling out the door, colliding with the hallway wall opposite and falling to his hands and knees, woozy. Something pings off the side of his head and falls to the carpet, scattering light: the engagement ring. He looks up in time to see the door slamming shut. The man is laughing behind it and Stacy is telling him: “I’m calling them. We can’t just leave him out there, he’s sick . . .”

Whatever the would-be cage fighter from Houston murmurs to her is muffled, and Jay, in the empty corridor, can’t decipher it. He gets up, unsteady. Attends to the sudden quiet, and surrenders to it, and walks away.

A WROUGHT-IRON ELEVATOR CAGE
descends, byzantine, bottoms out at the end of a narrow foyer, and its manual-draw doors remain shut, the lift empty. Through locked glass double doors Jay peers in from outside the building, his hands laced through the security grille, buttery light bouncing off brass mailboxes queued along one tiled wall.

He didn’t dream this.

He turns away, his reflection vanishing into a silken darkness through which a crude neon red-lipped smiling mermaid perched on a cocktail glass glows crazily. Her tail flutters and, in a sequence of neon stutters, she drops inside the glass.

He didn’t dream her, either.

•   •   •

I
nside the storefront strip club directly across the sleepy street, fixtures rattle with the rapid-fire percussion from calypso music and a tangerine-tailed real-life mermaid rises in the huge glass cylinder that serves as a watery center stage; hair black, skin white, she floats up, arches her back and does a lazy, curling flip, palest breasts roiling, the
girl, sinking away again, down, and golden bubbles rise in a burst from both sides of her siren’s red-lipped smile.

Half a dozen male patrons, none of them sitting together, watch her swim.

On the far side of the huge, glowing tank, in the darkest part of the bar, Jay looks back at her blankly, nursing a ten-dollar vodka tonic. Swirling the ice. Lost. An uneasiness has been creeping up on him, a nebulous slow-dawning understanding that it’s possible the relative ease with which he escaped from custody, or protection, may have been predestined: they let him get away to see where he’d go. Ego prevents him from fully embracing this notion, but he can’t seem to dismiss it. It travels with him like a yoke.

The mermaid floats up close to the glass in front of him, dark hair in tendrils, pale skin, glitter mascara, one pink nipple pierced with a gold fishhook. A tiny zipper tag flags from the orange scales at her hip, betraying the rubber tailfin costume this thalassic stripper has zipped herself into.

The dream version of the club, softened, rippled and smeared, looms behind her: the bar, the doorway, the faceless patrons at the scuffed black laminate tables . . .

. . . and John Q. Public strolling through the entrance curtain, followed closely by the Agent Known As Barry Stone. Public scans the bar, the room. The patrons. The tank. Mermaid in slow gyration, gilded in bubbles. Barry circles the stage-front tables, casual, careful, staying in the shadows.

No Jay.

•   •   •

N
o, Jay is bursting through the door of the upstairs tank room, out of breath from his sprint up the stairs. He slams it shut, looks around for something to wedge it closed. Water rocks free in
the big, circular access hole that comprises the middle of the wooden floor. Some spangly mermaid costumes hang upside down from a rack in the far corner like gutted fish.

The pockapockapocka of a tiny air compressor whose hose disappears down into the water. Club music thumps below. An orange smear curls deep in the tank. Jay’s desperate to discover a second way out. There’s a ladder in the corner that leads to a trap door up to the roof. Fire escape?

Water sloshes up over the edge, darkening the floor, and the orange mermaid breaks the surface, gasping, spitting out her transparent air hose, scaring the shit out of Jay, and then groping for the railing to beach herself.

“Help me out here, willya, I can’t”—she extends a slender white hand toward Jay—“this lovely fin suit’s like wearing a giant dildo, plus it leaks and fills up and probably weighs as much as I do by the time I’m done.” Jay braces himself and hauls her up into the room, and she flops, awkward, wet, tail spritzing heavily chlorinated moisture, frisky breasts going everywhichway. “I HATE IT. I just . . . hate it . . .” She finds the zipper and yanks and escapes, wearing nothing but a bikini bottom, and now she gets self-conscious: “TOWEL?”

Jay finds one, and the girl covers up, shaking the water out of her ears.

“You’re not supposed to be in here,” she says. Then, squinting at him: “Jurgen?”

“No, Jay.”

“Sorry. I’m blind without my glasses and I can’t wear contacts in the, you know. Seriously: legally blind. I want to get the laser surgery, but I’m nervous about it. I hear it goes bad. Jurgie’s this guy I made a mistake and sucked off about a month ago.” She adds, “Musta been life-changing, cuz he keeps following me, and like I’m gonna go through that crazy shit again, uh-uh, I don’t even think he’s German.”

She finds her glasses on a shelf above the mermaid tail rack. Thick rims, retro-chic cat’s-eye. She turns and watches Jay as she peels off her bottom, under the towel, and hangs it, dripping, from a hook. “Never wear latex with a Brazilian,” she warns him. “You walk like a rodeo cowboy for a week.”

“I’m looking for . . .” Jay stops himself. He sounds like a cop. He takes a different tack. “There was another girl who worked here, at the bar. Last winter.”

The mermaid gives him a dead eye, teasing: “Oh, sure, okay, yeah, like now I know exactly who you’re talking about.”

“She worked at a flower shop during the day. This was just, nights, I guess, part time, but, well, something, this bad thing, happened to her and—”

“—Miriam.”

Miriam.

The girl is suddenly sad. “Aw, Jesus, what a fucking mess. You were a friend of hers?”

“Kinda,” Jay says, but, from memory, a single image: running across an empty expanse of blacktop with a mermaid in his arms.

“Super-tragic,” the stripper remembers, “I mean—and she was our best swimmer, too, she was like, I think, almost in the Olympics or something, in that synchronized thing.”

“No, she worked the bar. I—”

The mermaid shakes her head, wet hair dripping. “Miriam was a mermaid. Miriam Miller. I wasn’t here when it happened, but,” she’s looking down, distracted, into the water, “hey, is somebody looking for you?”

Jay follows her eye line down through the tank and the warp of the water to Public, hands pressed against the glass, looking back up at him blindly.

“Don’t worry, he can’t see you,” the girl says, shaking out her hair
again and starting to twist it, the squeezings streaming back into the tank, “on account of, I think, the surface reflection, or something. Otherwise, all the fappers would be, you know, nose pressed to the glass and drooling—”

•   •   •

J
ay explodes through the trap door to the rooftop like he’s been launched from the ladder, pivots, his ankle aching, kicks the metal square shut again with his good foot and hop-skips across the roof, bathed in back-bleed from the shimmering cocktail neon hanging over the club. At the parapet he leaps a narrow slot of darkness to the tar-and-gravel of the next building’s roof, landing gingerly, weight on one leg, and limps across to the next parapet, to leap again.

One after another, roof to roof, down the block. Vent pipes like punctuation marks, his sneakers slipping here and there on ancient patches. The channeled black scar of the L.A. River squeezes in from the sudden rise of Griffith Park, to the north, as the row of commercial buildings ends in a cross street and Jay can go no farther. He glances back. No one has followed him, and the one sleepy car that crawls past below is heading away from him, east into the Valley scatter.

Jay finds the fire escape and awkwardly scrambles down. Hits the sliding ladder and takes it rattling to its abrupt end—hangs there for a moment—drops to the sidewalk, where he sinks back into the shadows and sits back against the brick, ankle throbbing, catching his breath.

Another car blows past, headlights liquid in the night air, slows at the corner, taillight winking red, and disappears.

The night is electric with the deep hush-and-rumble of the Los Angeles he’d forgotten from his weeks on the island. Across the street, a dead metal security gate pulled across its entrance, is a flower shop.

Jay stares at it dully.

He remembers that his mother loved roses.