Fifty Mice: A Novel (10 page)

Jay, completely confused, but intimidated, and embarrassed, and angry, stands up. “You know what? That’s enough. We’re done.” He licks dry lips and won’t look at Magonis, who quietly closes the day planner. No expression.

“We can be,” Magonis says. “Done for today, if you’ll just confirm: that your girlfriend—sorry, fiancée—Stacy was away on business, that you asked this flower girl out on a date, and that you went home with her—or went somewhere, it would be really useful if you
could remember that, but oh well—and then that you, the two of you, you and the flower girl, had sexual relations. Yes, no?”

“She asked
me
out,” Jay says finally, as if that distinction makes all the difference.

Another long silence.

“I’m not here to judge you,” Magonis says.

“Can you just tell me,” Jay protests, irritably, “what the hell does this have to do with—?”

Magonis talks over him. “We don’t know. We don’t know. But.” He hesitates. “What would you say if I told you the flower girl was murdered early that next morning.”

Jay’s not sure he heard this right.

Reaching on the desk, Magonis finds and flips an envelope at a dumbstruck Jay.

“Maybe executed. Could have been a professional job. Raising, I don’t know, all kinds of questions. As you can imagine.”

Jay stares at the older man. There is that uncomfortable stillness that follows truth and recognition, the men measuring each other, one for signs of deception, the other for the tells of intention. Slowly, Jay opens the envelope and pulls out the collection of crime photos he was shown at the hospital among Public’s papers: unforgiving forensic pictures of a lurid murder scene: the flower girl floats chalk white in a bathtub of pink water, topless, breasts slack, hair in her eyes, slurred black mascara and filmy underwear, legs colt awkward, arms flung out, shot twice through her chest.

“I think you told the marshals you didn’t know the woman in this photograph.”

Jay’s thoughts clot, thick. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t make the connection—”

“—Or you lied.”

“What?”

“Lied. Made an intentionally false statement.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I can’t answer for you.”

Truly shaken: “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying whatever comes into my mind, Jay. Speculation. But then. I wasn’t there.”

Jay blinks.

“Done? No.” Magonis sucks his electric cigarette and shakes his head. “We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

He’s right.

And yes, Jay remembers the flower shop, corner of Melrose and Crescent Heights, cramped, dark, even in midday, fragrant, the special on a dozen roses from the refrigerated glass case, the pools of ceiling pin lights, the exotic tropicals, the potted palms.

He remembers the salesgirl writing, she was left-handed and had that weird lobster-claw way of holding the fountain pen to keep her hand out of the ink. Her letters were looped and forward-leaning.

“I have this second job,” she told him. “I work nights. But.” She looked up. “We close at two . . .”

She handed him a slip of paper with the address of a Glendale strip club where bright light strobed across Jay as he came in, pushing past the thick-waisted underage frat boys clotted around the bouncer at the door trying to convince him they were twenty-one.

When they had adjusted to the darkness, Jay’s eyes lasered to the luminous cylindrical water tank that dominated the middle of the club, glowing like a lava lamp, a naked mermaid curling, languid, swirling bubbles like free electrons and slowly stripping inside.

Not the flower girl.

No, Jay found his flower girl behind the bar in a tight black strip-club T-shirt, pouring drinks; she smiled when she saw him.

He remembers how, later, he and the girl spilled out, drunk, laughing, into an empty parking lot, pale colored lights of the bar slowly flickering and dying as the place closed down and Jay swung her up into his arms and ran with her, legs aching, across the empty street, to the entrance of an apartment building where the lobby was tile and carved moldings and Deco teardrop hanging lights and an elevator cage waiting, the rattle of its gate, the hand-lever control that rotated and the cables hummed and the car rose and ribbons of darkness looped across awkward groping, and the girl had her blouse open, some kind of lacy black bra, the red snake tattoo—and her fingers curled through the latticework of the rising car—

And now this unremarkable Zane Grey Building, office number 204, in which Jay looks at his hands. Magonis waits, his right eye wandering, aimless, as if losing interest.

“Look, it’s not what you think. I didn’t, we . . . nothing happened. Okay? It was one time, I told a lot of stories, they were bullshit. No sex, we just . . .”

—
They stopped, he remembers, outside apartment 3H. Didn’t they? Didn’t he lean back against the wall, drunk, blissful, the hallway and the whole world coruscating, and didn’t she smell faintly of jasmine, Maker’s Mark and vermouth, and didn’t he let the girl mold herself against him, warm and fecund; didn’t Jay brush tears from mascara-streaked eyes as she angled her head and kissed his hand, his neck, his—

“—I didn’t know her name. I never asked,” Jay admits, senseless.

Magonis quietly closes the planner. Switches his bogus cigarette off. No expression on his face except for those crazy eyes.

OR WAS THE HALLWAY
COMPLETELY DARK?

Or was the kiss just a brush of lips, chaste, regretful?

Or did she fumble for her keys? Sly-sliding wistfully out from the cage of his arms along the textured wall to the deadbolt, and then opened it, she slipped inside, click of a wall switch, light spilling out as she glanced one last time back at Jay as he turned to go. Dark figures swarmed her as the door closed—he never saw them—shadows and shapes, her swift startled intake of breath, the scuffling feet on the hardwood floor.

Or was everything under water?

Harsh overhead light of the bathroom, tub filled with pink, her wide, frightened eyes as she toppled backward toward the roiling surface, filling, and a gun, aimed at her chest, finger thick on the trigger—

—and the elevator’s byzantine prison.

Ascending out of darkness, breaking the surface of water—blades of light cutting Jay into pieces with moving lattice shadows. He gasps for air. Then finds darkness again, above, as the elevator rises rises rises and everything goes black.

He woke confused.

Came awake in a car not his, empty downtown parking lot, framed in
the fork of two elevated freeways gridlocked with morning traffic. Leaden roar of the essentially motionless cars. Shimmer of heat waves, light glinting off glass and chrome, dawn crawling over east L.A., the sun an insult, the air heavy with the brown sick—

“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 . . .”

•   •   •

M
arch 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.

•   •   •

H
e 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.

•   •   •

J
ay 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: