Fifty Mice: A Novel (15 page)

Jay shifts again, trying to find a better position that he’s pretty sure does not exist.

Waiting for Ginger to look away.

But hoping she doesn’t.

Ginger, on the bed, is waiting for him to settle, she has a message for him; when his eyes finally meet hers again she raises her hands slowly, like a magician, rotates them, to show both ivory-pale forearms. Her lips form words Jay can’t hear but understands: I’m cured.

Jay nods.

His mom’s honey has worked its miracle.

And something in the way she stares at him is different: eyes unlocked and searching, as if she thinks maybe she can figure him out if she just looks long enough.

Jay pretends to close his eyes and sleep. Ginger smiles faintly before she lies back on the bed, rolling to her side, tucking her arm over Helen and settling in to the catholic stillness of the Catalina night.

Jay, though, remains awake. Unable to sleep. It doesn’t bother him.

Maybe he’s slept long enough.

“THEN SHE SAID
she sensed a million orange-and-blue tears lapping up the sides of my body.”
It’s Jay’s voice, thin, a recording:
“You know: fire. Which she likened to a half-formed sexual feeling.”

Laughter, static and nothing, and then Vaughn’s voice, made distant by the telecommunications matrix of modern phones.

“Ooooh, baby. This is what you get for walking into a place with a neon hand in the window.”

But Jay is not laughing.
“Shut up, Vaughn, this is serious. I mean, I felt this kind of . . . shame, you know? because, I really . . . I was hypnotized by it. By believing it.”

The plastic cogs of a vintage Nakamichi cassette deck pinwheel as, listening, Jay considers the bulky, ’80s-vintage entertainment center of cherrywood and glass in the bookshelf of office 204 and speculates: a consequence of underfunding or is Magonis just going for the high hipster irony?

“This storefront psychic say whether you, like, die in this fire?”
Vaughn is asking.

“Well, you can’t . . .”
Jay’s voice sounds stressed, drifts and phase
shifts between sources.
“I don’t know if it was literal. Or maybe the timing wasn’t . . . specific. I don’t remember.”

“But has any of it come true?”

“No. Not yet.”

Jay turns away from the console and regards Magonis with incredulity. “You recorded my phone conversations.”

Magonis leans forward in his chair, fussing with his electric cigarette.

“Don’t you need, like, a warrant?”

“We had what we needed,” Magonis says elliptically. “The NSA is our friend.”

“Except for Los Angeles,”
Jay’s voice on the tape continues, and repeats:
“Except for L.A.”

Jay remembers the conversation: hurrying toward the Hollywood/Vine Red Line escalator in the W Hotel, sidestepping the Swedish tourists in skirts and T-shirts and jorts and fanny packs and unisex sandals, phone-cams held high like penitents’ icons, Jay with a Bluetooth wireless in those days, his voice compressed and city noises filtered.
“And you think she’d be answering the standard questions, you know? Work stuff. Success, failure. Who’m I gonna marry, will I get a raise?”
His laugh is forced.
“No. She gives me a bag of what look like peyote buttons and a year’s supply of Mexican Darvon. Enough to melt snow, I mean . . .”
There’s an awkward pause, and Jay remembers he dug for his Metro Rail fare TAP card.
“So much for predictions.”

“The hell were you doing at a fortune teller, anyway, I guess is my question,”
Vaughn says.

The sound of Hollywood Boulevard slipstreams away, sucked into white noise as this Jay-on-tape walked into the W: Jay-on-Catalina conjures a mental slide show of the
cirque
of junkies and prostitutes and businessmen and tourists he left behind under what was likely to be a gauzy, too-hot sun.

“Stacy,”
Jay’s voice answers.

“Oh. That explains it.”

“I know, right?”

“But um, just to be clear—does this lady tell you how it’s gonna turn out? Kids? Cancer? House in Calabasas?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, did she . . . know about, you know: girl, flower shop?”

Emphatic:
“God, no.”

“Not so clairvoyant, then. When it comes right down to it.”

Then nothing, tape spinning, spinning.

Jay’s head is down, he’s standing beside the bookshelf, waiting for more, watching motes of light-spackled dust coil up from the carpet, and speculating on why this phone call would be of any interest to the Feds.

“It’s kind of like that movie,
The Conversation
,” Jay decides.

“Not really.”

“I watched it in the shop the other day.”

“That was directional microphones, and all the cross-fading and noise reduction and filtering comes later. Technology from, basically, the Stone Age.” Magonis sucks on his cigarette, but nothing happens, and he scowls. “No. We’re slightly more sophisticated than that now,” he says. “But less artful. The blend is real-time, the feed is sourced. We’re in the satellite, the network, we’re in the exchange, and we’re in the cell site, and we’re in the chip in your phone.”

“I have this friend,”
Vaughn blurts, on the recording, his words splintering slightly with digital drift.
“AlwayAlways—psypsychic—parties. RaRaRabid. But—loves the future.”

Jay’s voice:
“Wherever that is.”

Cell reception falters and fails as Jay goes down the escalator to the underground platform, where thousands of film reels are stuck decoratively to the ceiling of the station, black and white wall tiles stutter through shadows, and the source-surveillance of Jay and
Vaughn’s phone connection is suddenly riven and corrupted by a vast sea of unmoored voices:

“—interesting. You can’t—”

“God—”

Shriek of static, then there’s Vaughn again, crystal clear:
“Jay? Can you hear me?”

A stray voice, female:
“When he knows I crave things—”

“—lost lines of childhood sing in your head,”
Jay’s voice cuts in. Then lots of static.

“Jay?”

Jay has been watching Magonis put a new nicotine cartridge in his ridiculous cigarette, and now he says, “There’s a point to this?”

Magonis holds up his free hand: “Shhhhhh.”

A stray voice, sobbing:
“I’ve been so lucky.”

Then Jay’s voice, dry as if through a tin can and a string:
“—things you’re supposed to do, or be, or apologize for, or whatever—”

Dead air.

“Jay?—I lost you.”
Vaughn.

The distinctive low rumble of the Red Line train entering the station. A fragment of AM Spanish-language radio. The hiss of doors opening. Jay imagines himself stepping onto the train, eyes tracing over two city college students, slumped in their seats with their earbuds, eyes like black sparks.

“—forgiveness. Redemption—”

Jay asks Magonis to turn off the tape. “It’s just me and Vaughn shooting shit.”

On the tape, Vaughn, waxing:
“I know, it’s something you don’t . . .”
His voice trails off, then picks up a new thought:
“and even if you actually live here, I mean: angels? What the fuck?”

“They exist,”
Jay’s voice insists. The
biiiiing
of the departure warning. In the flutter of the car’s fluorescent light, he imagines himself
grabbing the overhead bar to brace for the train’s moan of acceleration.

Vaughn:
“What do you mean, exist?”

Jay:
“What?”

Dial tone. Disconnect.

It seems incredible to Jay that he even got reception all the way through the station and into the train. Underground. There are stretches of Olympic in Beverly Hills where calls drop like in a third world country. Maybe there’s a whole cell-tower thing in the W Hotel atrium, hidden behind the hanging ferns.

The tape deck stops, reverses, rewinds, all by itself. Magonis drifts, deep in thought.

The clock on the wall reads five minutes to three. This session is nearly over. Jay asks, finally, impatient, “Um. So now what? You gonna go hunt down the psychic and talk to her?”

Magonis looks up at him oddly, his gaze bidirectional. “We already did.” He rolls the phony cigarette between his fingers and gestures with it, like some character in a Noël Coward play. “Masie Del Rio. Little storefront on La Brea and Waring?”

He gets up, moves to the desk. “Ms. Del Rio told us if you’ve survived this long, you’re going to live forever”—opens his desk drawer—“which is ironic”—and takes out a Chicklet-size flash drive nestled in a plastic foam protective case. “Exhibit B.” He holds it up high between his thumb and forefinger for Jay to see. “Ten gigabytes. Plenty of memory. Which might, for example, hold an encrypted comprehensive highly sensitive list of names that existed on one and only one other highly secure mainframe storage device in the temperature-controlled vault of a Virginia private contractor that not coincidentally was hacked and purged and corrupted so that this flash drive of names is a unique repository. Names of people who, were the list to find its way into the wrong hands, well, these people named
might very well be compromised, if you get my meaning. Because. Of what they know. Or who they are. Or what they represent. You see the significance?”

“Confidential witnesses and informants?”

“Just for argument’s sake.”

Jay shrugs. “Well. You’ve got that copy. You know who they are, you can move them.”

“This? No. Let’s say this one is blank. But the real one looks exactly like it.”

“Is it?”

“Is it what?”

“Blank.”

Magonis shuffles around the desk, hands the flash drive to Jay, and sits down on the arm of his chair, knees creaking. “Seen it before? Familiar?”

“No.”

“Take your time.”

“Has anyone on the list been—?”

“We can’t both be asking questions.”

Jay nods. “No. Okay. It looks a little fancier than the memory stick I use to back up my iTunes. Which is maybe one gig. What happened to exhibit A?”

“You.” Both of Magonis’s eyes sync and settle on Jay. “You’re exhibit A.”

Jay was pretty sure this was the answer he’d get, but it still has a troubling chill to it. He flips the flash drive back onto the desk. “What about the flower girl?”

“She’s deceased.”

Jay walks to the window, buying himself time to sort these details, then turns, thoughtful. “You guys think I have the list?” Suddenly it all lines up: the someone who broke into his apartment was a Doe, or
a Public: Feds. Looking for their list. When they couldn’t find it, they grabbed him, they expected him to come clean right away, and when he didn’t, this, the island, the safe house, the questions, Magonis. Convinced somehow that Jay has it and/or has hidden it and/or knows where it is.

But Jay wonders, again, ineluctably,
Why?

“I don’t know that you do or don’t,” Magonis responds without inflection. Then, thoughtfully: “If you pressed me, I’d say you didn’t. But some of us think you do know
why
we don’t have the list anymore.

“And herein lies the irony of your fortune teller’s prediction: Unless you remember? You and I will be here, on this rock, in this room, Prometheus and an old walleyed eagle, doing this, this crazy headshrinking rondel,
hoping
,” Magonis adds, coldly, matter-of-fact, “that, God forbid, nobody gets it into his tiny paranoid impatient bureaucratic mind that it might be a whole lot easier to put a bullet in your head and disappear you in the rocky depths off Jewfish Point and hope that the list is never found.”

THE RESERVOIR,
filled to capacity for so long, now tapped, empties of all the words Helen’s held hostage.

It turns every walk home into an aria.

Each afternoon, from the schoolyard to the bottom of the hill that leads to their bungalow, the little girl serenades him with a steady outflow of eight-year-old chinwaggery, like some midget castrato AM radio talk show host on Red Bull: Barbie, Ariel the mermaid, puppies, unicorns, musicals, playground etiquette, the magnificence of Miss Healy (best second-grade teacher ever), peanut butter vs. Nutella (close call, but only one comes in crunchy), Jenny Humbert’s hair (all the way down to
here
), ocelots, the possible extinction of the narwhal, clips vs. scrunchies, green-tea ice cream (how weird is that?),
Charlotte’s Web
(it’s true, animals can talk to one another and we don’t understand them), why there are words that sound the same but mean different things, triangles, counting by threes, Movies I Know I’d Like if Mommy Ginger Would Let Me See Them, Arlo the Shaky Kid’s struggle with quiet time, ponies and horses, good cat names, state capitals, mysterious possible barf under the play structure, favorite food (Chinese chicken salad), and why the Chumash people ate
grunions. Every afternoon Jay and Helen take their downtown Avalon loop through the cool winter shadows of the bay-facing businesses. Water slaps against the seawall, sailboat riggings rattle, and Helen talks.

“—I’ve always wanted to live in a village like Belle and have all the villagers say hello and sing and I’d walk to school instead of going there in the car, so, yeah, like this place, I guess, except it’s not really where we live, is it? In the place where I used to live it wasn’t a village, really, it was apartments and not so many trees, bigger and kind of scary and I couldn’t go outside because of the bad kids and mean dogs and stuff. But Mommy says nothing is like a cartoon, and I know that, everyone tells me it’s not real, but it
could
be, couldn’t it?”

Jay doesn’t disagree.

“And there could be magical animals and spoons that can talk. And there could be a Santa Claus even if he doesn’t come to my house. And my friend Jenny who I don’t know anymore was nice and gave me a hair band that had real jewels but I lost it. The jewels weren’t actually real, just real for me, but. I don’t miss her. Jenny. Sometimes she was mean.”

The maze her mind runs never fails to enthrall him; eight years old, the same age as was Jay when his life disassembled. They never talk about why she quit talking, or whether she’s who has a secret the Feds want to protect, and not Ginger.

No one follows them.

The busboys have left the island, evidently their cooling out completed, and the Wednesday game has been bolstered by new faces: a pale, frightened, hair-challenged man who says little and does nothing but jack up long shots that rarely hit; a short young woman who must’ve played in college and trash-talks the Conservancy interns until they’re crippled with laughter; a Fed, Jay can tell he’s a Fed, who works out of the island bank and fouls hard.

“But shouldn’t everyone have, like, a village, and friends, and magic?” Helen is asking. “And there wouldn’t have to be some guy with a flute like in the
Pied Piper
we’re doing, luring the children off into caves because the mommies and daddies won’t give him his money. A safe place for a family. Because kids have to be safe so they won’t mind how tough things are, later, when they get older, because they’re sort of like, I don’t know, they get real, real . . . well, tired? for one thing.” Sometimes she loses the thread. “So they don’t give a hoot? And need to take a nap and then, when they get up, they can have a Harvey Wallhanger or something and then kick back and forgetaboutit!” She cracks herself up, and laughs too hard, and they have to stop, and Jay waits for her to calm down, pretending he’s found something interesting in the dusty antiques store window that reflects their mirror images back at them.

Behind Jay, a spectral Catalina ferryboat idles out at the transparent jetty, taunting him, as always, with escape and freedom. If that’s what he still wants.

“—I’m just being silly.” Helen catches her breath.

Jay says, “Harvey Wall
banger
, not—”

“My old daddy liked them,” the girl says absently, leaking something from that private part of herself without even realizing it. “I think they taste like cough syrup.”

“Old daddy?”

Helen frowns then, made cautious, and doesn’t answer him, as if two worlds have collided and canceled each other out. “Nothing,” she decides finally.

“What was he like? What did he do?”

“I don’t know,” Helen says too quickly. “They’re not for kids,” she observes. “Harvey whatevers. Are they?”

“No.”

“I’m only ever talking to you,” she reminds Jay gravely. “Nobody else.”

“Only ever. That sounds like a long time. Why? Why not your mommy, or—”

“Mean,” Helen says out of nowhere, and it takes Jay a moment to understand what she’s talking about: the old daddy. “He was really really mean.” She stares up at Jay, in the window, abruptly saddened, and then goes completely expressionless. She’s learned to turn her emotions on and off; at the age of eight Jay found the off switch but had a more difficult time finding the on. “Everything is hard to understand.”

“You’re not wrong,” Jay says.

“Does that mean I’m right?” This cheers her; she announces, “The rule from now on is there always has to be a mommy and a daddy.”

Jay doesn’t know what to say to this.

“I decree. In my land. It’s like if you have food on your plate, you have to eat it. And you’re the daddy, right?”

He looks at her reflection, shimmery in the glass, angled, slightly set back from him, in the shade, with the sunlight bright behind her. The ferry is heading back to San Pedro, a slurring slash of white in the window-glass bluescape.

A man who looks a lot like Sam Dunn stands on the pier with a new boat-kiosk guy, both with arms akimbo, legs wide, like cardboard cutouts. Dunn should be on his plane, making his afternoon mail run, Jay thinks absently. Is it not a daily flight? He files this away, with the other bits and pieces he’s collecting: the Realtor’s unused golf cart, the coming and going of delivery trucks from the north island, the faces of locals who pay too much attention to him and tourists who return with regularity but no firm purpose, the slow relaxing of federal vigilance that he’s felt more than observed.

“You’re the daddy. That’s what Mommy said,” Helen adds to fill the silence, less sure of herself.

“I’m not, though,” Jay says, so regretful that it surprises him. “Not really.”

“Yes, you are.” In Helen’s tone he hears Ginger’s familiar
Don’t contradict me.
“You are,” Helen repeats. “That’s what you are now, and Mommy’s Mommy and I’m . . . me. Helen.”

“It’s parts in a musical, isn’t it? Just for the show. You can’t make something so just by saying it is.”

Helen looks at him fiercely, with a small child’s intractable conviction. “You can if you want to.”

“And if I don’t?”

“What?”

“If I don’t want to make something so just by saying it is.”

Helen is quiet. Then, in a pretty good eight-year-old’s imitation of Jay: “Yeah, well, but once you get past that—”

Jay laughs. “—Clouds?”

Helen nods, solemn but pleased: “Clouds.”

Behind them, the sun is, in fact, curtained by a cloud and the light level dips and their reflections dissolve and now Jay can clearly see the baroque cerise velvet chaise longue featured prominently in the front display. He muses:
Who on this island would buy that?
He thinks:
If everyone here is like me, hiding, holding back, trawling through the murky waters of their past for memories someone else needs, and tending to pointless businesses existing only to give legitimacy to the lie—

—how is that different from real life?

The ferryboat horn bleats a faint, last good-bye as it clears the speed buoys, its dark, departing shape barely a punctuation on the seam between the sea and mainland. Dunn and the boat-rental guy have gone into the kiosk.

Helen steps up next to Jay, and takes his hand and presses her nose against the window and makes a low animal noise in her throat.

“Why did you tell me Ginger wasn’t your mom?” Jay asks, fishing. “The other day?”

“I don’t know.” Helen probes her nostril with a wiggling finger, and then gestures royally to the chaise with the other hand. “That’s pretty. It’s, like, for a princess, from a castle. I’d want to have it in my room and lie on it. But not be Sleeping Beauty. And I don’t like the color. Do you think it can talk?”

Jay is still back with her reveal: “What did you mean, Ginger’s not your mom?”

“What?”

“Helen—”

“I don’t know. I just said it.”

“Who’s your real mommy?”

Helen takes her hand away, won’t look at him. She breathes out and fogs the glass and draws a circle with two dots and cat ears before the condensation evaporates. “You don’t want to be my dad?”

Jay no longer has an answer for this, everything has become so involute. So layered and confusing.

Gold-brocade curtains cascade around either edge of the chaise. A neon sign that tilts down overhead past the awning from the second-floor hotel spells VACANCY backward and gleams and trembles in the pair of filigree mirrors bookending the chaise.

After a while, Jay wonders aloud what color Helen thinks it should be. Helen says she doesn’t know, but suggests pink, her color default.

Jay frowns at the chaise. “That is pink.”

“No. It’s just light red.” Bored: “Can we go now? I think Mommy’s making cookies.”

“Ginger?”

“Mommy.” She looks at him, challenging him to deny her this. He won’t.

The sun behind them blazes again, cloud-free, and Helen, as if quoting (Ginger, probably), turns away, declaring: “Family is everything.” She walks out into the sunlight and away down the street.

Jay stays for a moment, staring at his reflection, which seems, suddenly, a stranger to him. By the time he moves, Helen is marching off, small, happy again, singing at the top of her lungs and tunelessly: “Family is everything,” with the chorus, “that’s the way it’s going to be.”

“You got it all figured out,” Jay says.

“Yep.” Helen skips ahead, turns, and walks backward, facing him, smiling. “It was really really really hard. But you know what? It doesn’t even matter what I say, because things just are what they are,” she sings, making up her own musical, “and they’re not what they’re not—that’s what I say so it’s so,” after which she launches into another monologue about good Jenny and bad Jenny that takes them all the way to the end of the street and around the corner.