Fifty Mice: A Novel (9 page)

IT’S AN UNGAINLY,
mid-sixties, skillion-roofed building. Tan and white.

Who was Zane Grey?

The entrance is propped open with a brick.

A cool, unlit hallway, redolent with discouragement.

A stairwell with a stack of small square windows framing postcard views of the Avalon hills.

After a long morning of tepid coffee from Big E’s Café, no customers, and several failed attempts to access the Internet in any useful way on the Island Video desktop computer (he can browse, but he can’t post; can’t access his e-mail; can’t find his Facebook page), Jay took his two-o’clock lunch as instructed, turned the BE BACK AT sign to face the street, killed the lights, and came through the translucent door into a muggy marine midday, locking up behind him.

The Zane Grey was at the dead end of a walkway street, no sign of its other occupants as he walked in, but he could hear faint strains of an opera, hissing low on cheap speakers somewhere on the first floor.

Upstairs is no different, a low, cottage-cheese ceiling and a
series of closed doors along a zigzag corridor, at the end of which number 204 is ajar, wan daylight streaming through the gap between door and doorjamb, and angled across the thread-worn, piquant corridor carpet.

Jay enters the office, cagey. Given Public’s track record so far, nothing would surprise Jay, but he’s anxious anyway. Takes in the modest desk, bookshelves crammed with psychology and counseling textbooks, a few fuzzy toys spilling off the lowest shelf, two comfortable club chairs with a hook rug between them. Diplomas tastefully tucked in among generic seascape paintings.

“Sit. Get comfortable.”

Jay whirls. A small, wide, round man with a bad hairpiece comes in from the hallway, leaning heavily on a walker, hands dripping wet, a lit cigarette dangling from his chapped red lips. Sheepish: “No towels in the toilet again.” He straightens, shakes his big hands out, finally wipes them on his linen pants, re-grips the walker and rolls through favoring one hip to settle heavily in the chair by the window. Backlit by this day’s bright gray fog gloom, his face darkens, softens, features suddenly made wooly with shadows.

Smoke curls around him.

“I haven’t witnessed anything,” Jay says.

“Ho! Forget the pleasantries, right to the point. Good.” The man shifts the cigarette from one hand to the other so he can adjust himself in the chair. “My name is Magonis. I’ll be your headshrinker for the foreseeable future.”

“Are you a doctor?”

Magonis says he is.

“Psychologist? Or a medical doctor?”

Magonis lets this go, because either it should be obvious that he is or he doesn’t care that he isn’t. And all of a sudden, emotions roil up
from where Jay has held them in check, he’s dizzy, his head pounds from caffeine and frustration, he worries that he might just explode.

“Mr. Warren—”

“—Johnson,” Jay corrects him brusquely, letting his bridled thoughts spill out, “and can I just say that, for the record, changing my name, cutting my hair, without asking my permission, while it may be legal and everything, it doesn’t much make me want to cooperate with you, or Public, or Jane Doe, or whoever. It’s lame. It’s actually stupid, because now I don’t trust you—and you change my name—and you give me a fake family, and you think—what? That’s going to make me feel more comfortable spilling my guts?”

Magonis just listens, and smokes.

“Did you do any background on me at all? I mean, Jesus Christ, this is some kind of crazy mistake, anybody who spent half a second on due diligence would realize I am not of any value to anyone, not even my fiancée, really, since I can’t even commit to her,” but now Jay’s lost his way: “I’m tired, I’m confused, nobody will tell me what this is supposed to be about, just a lot of cryptic double-talk and knowing winks and fuck me sideways if you don’t have the wrong guy.”

Magonis nods, contemplative, eyes at half-mast. Jay catches his breath and wonders, irritated, if the shrink is falling asleep. And why the cigarette smoke doesn’t smell.

“Sit down.”

“I’ll stand, thanks,” Jay says.

Magonis leans, stretches to his desk, his fingers waggle, find, and remove a fat, worn old-fashioned day scheduler from atop a pregnant manila file folder and bring it back so Magonis can hold it up for Jay’s inspection.

“I believe this . . .”—he Frisbees it crisply across the room to Jay, who manages to catch it before it hits him—“. . . is your day planner.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Very retro.”

“Okay.”
Where’s this going?

“We liberated it,” Magonis says. “Because, you see, what we’re gonna do,
James
, since you can’t, or won’t, or shouldn’t, remember—”

For Jay, the response is almost automatic now: “—remember what?”

Magonis smiles crookedly, revealing tiled yellow teeth. “Hey, make sure that your name is in there.” There’s something weird going on with his eyes. Only one of them is looking at Jay.

Jay flips the cover. Front page dog-eared and scribbled with notes and odd phone numbers and the name JAMES WARREN printed in pen, as if by Jay, in Jay’s handwriting.

Of course it is.

“It’s yours?”

“This isn’t my name.”

“Well, neither is Jay, really, is it?”

He keeps forgetting that they may know more about him than he cares to ever admit. But this is word games, really, and Jay’s more than willing to play. “Yeah. It is, yeah.”

“But—”

“It’s mine. Jay. I chose it.” He wonders if that information is in one of Public’s files.

Magonis balks. “Okay. But on your birth certificate.”

“Which one?” Jay asks sharply.

Magonis nods, shakes his head, retreats into his professional avuncularity, and waits.

Jay recognizes the entries in the day planner, yes. Hurriedly scrawled in his cramped half-cursive, cryptic, incomplete, sometimes lacking even sense. Words and phrases that remind him of nothing, but, yes, his writing, his days, his journal.

With Jimmy Warren’s name.

“I’m not ever going to be okay with this.”

Magonis ignores him, pressing fat hands together. “So. What we’re gonna do, James—James or Jimmy? Or do you prefer Jim?” He’s enjoying this. “What we’ll do is go through the last year or so of your life, day by day, but not necessarily chronologically, and just, well . . . talk about what you’ve written in there about certain days. What happened, what you
say
happened, what
really
happened . . . what you
remember
happening . . . because together we’re going to try to color between the lines, if you will, fill in the missing details of each day of your lived life over the past three hundred and sixty-five days, or so, since what we have there, in your datebook, is, you have to admit, fairly sketchy.”

Jay just stares at him. The cigarette, despite Magonis’s hard work on it, has remained the same size because, Jay realizes, it’s a smokeless, electric one.

“How come you don’t use a computer calendar program?” Magonis muses aloud. “Or a phone app?”

“What if I can’t remember details,” Jay asks, instead of answering.

“Or don’t want to?”

Jay doesn’t feel the need to respond to this, either.

“Mmm. Sorry. Or. Or. Or. The variations are endless, this rumination can go on and on, Jim.” The shrink shifts in his chair with discomfort. Crosses his legs at the ankles. “For example, what if you have lacunar amnesia and simply blocked the memories?”

“Oh, snap,” Jay says, momentarily abandoning himself to pure snark. He can’t help it. “I dunno. Gee. Maybe you can coax ’em out? Hypnotize me?”

“Down, boy. This isn’t a test,” Magonis responds, subdued, but with just the slightest edge. “There are no right or wrong answers.”

“Evidently, there are. Or I wouldn’t be here.”

The hairpiece has slipped slightly. Rakish and silly, Jay thinks. Magonis’s left eye is lively and penetrating, the right eye fixed
defiantly over Jay’s shoulder. “I want to help you. Can we call a truce and—”

“—I want you to call me by my name,” Jay says.

“What?”

“Jay. That’s my name, Jay Johnson, and I’m asking, please, that in here we use my name, okay? Because that’s who I am.”

He Frisbees the day planner back fluttering at Magonis, who makes no attempt to catch it, so it just misses the older man’s head and slaps against the high back of the armchair, dropping straight down behind him, where he struggles to twist and reach and get it out from between the cushions.

“And if your own name may put you at risk?” Magonis asks.

“I’ll take that chance. It’s mine. I don’t want another one.”

“Fair enough,” Magonis says, as if he really understands. He balances the cigarette on the arm of the chair, twists the other way, and finally retrieves the day planner. “Fine. Okay. Jay, then. Jay. Please. Have a seat.” Smiles sadly, and means it.

“No.”

“. . . Or not.” Magonis takes up the cigarette. The LED at the end glows blue when he sucks on it. Maybe it’s running out of batteries. Coils of vapor skew sideways. He splits the planner open to FEBRUARY 12. His face angles up; right eye dead-aimed at Jay while the left one studies Jay’s scrawled entry.

“Let’s start . . . here—”

He thumbs Jay’s familiar chicken-scratch and haplessly abbreviated notations: a couple of phone numbers, a halfhearted stab at sketching a popular comic strip character, and a lopsided Valentine’s heart that’s been distractedly shaded in.

And Jay thinks:
Of all days, this day.

“On the morning of February twelfth, you went to a flower shop on Melrose to order a dozen roses for—”

And Jay remembers:

Long, lissome fingers, black pearlescent fingernails, filling out a delivery order form with the name:

“—S-T-A-C-Y.” Jay spelled it out. “Stacy.”

The flower salesgirl, probably about nineteen, a kind of proto-goth mascara, low-cut black T-shirt spilling swells of pale blue-veined décolletage but half hiding the curving red-and-black tattoo of a snake; her black-set liquid amber eyes tilted up, tentatively, flirting. Or nearsighted. “Girlfriend?”

Busted. “—Um, what? Oh, no, she’s, uh—”

Magonis looks from the day planner to Jay. His eyes cast with unsettling indifference. “Your girlfriend was away?”

“Fiancée. On business, yeah,” Jay says, his face burning. He sits down in the chair facing Magonis.

“Fiancée. Stacy.”

“Yeah.”

Jay smiled at the salesgirl. Casual: “—She’s my sister. Yeah. Stacy. She, um, just broke up with her boyfriend and I . . . wanted to, you know.”

Flower salesgirl (genuine): “For your sister. Ohmygod, that is so sweet.”

Magonis touches his toupee lightly, checking its position, and, apparently satisfied, reads the rest of the February 12 page, quiet. Jay waits. “The phone numbers here,” Magonis muses. “Cold calls, we checked them. This doodle? Dilbert?”

“Yeah.”

Magonis flips the page over, glances at the blank backside, then returns to the scribbles Jay made on the day, then up at Jay again. Eyes hooded, off-kilter, unnerving.

“I don’t keep a very . . . my notes, they’re, you know, to myself, so they’re not exactly . . .” Then Jay decides to go on the offensive. “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t see what comes of going into this kind of detail for a day where obviously nothing of interest to you or your federal employer remotely occurred.”

Magonis extrapolates the obvious fact, “You went out with her. This girl at the flower shop.”

“What?”

Magonis repeats himself: the flower girl: Jay saw her, met her, hit on her, lied about being engaged, went out with her on the night of the 12th. Statement as question.

Jay throws an embarrassed smile, “Jesus, did I write all that in there?”

“No,” Magonis says.

They both permit a discomfiting pause to swell.

Evasive, Jay: “You know, um, I don’t really remember what happened, I . . .”

“You met her after work,” Magonis says, “you had a drink, you went to her place, and—”

Jay says, “I don’t see where this is . . .”

“—you fucked her.”

Water.

In liquid shadow two clothed bodies churned in a claw-foot bathtub, the hot water cascading over the sides onto dogtooth tiles, Jay and this flower girl, wet, carnal, gasping, kissing, devouring each other—

“—Hold on—that’s harsh—and I didn’t—”

“Engaged in sexual relations. Made love. Hooked up. Or at least,” Magonis continues, “that’s what you told Larry Wilson, in your office.”

Larry Wilson, booth-tanned, bullet head shaved clean and a vandyke that squirreled away crumbs, would daily rise up over the wall of Jay’s cubicle with two pencils jammed up his nostrils and sing Justin Bieber songs.

“Listen, man, let me just explain something: Larry is not a reliable source for any—”

Magonis cuts him off again: “You seemed to like telling the flower girl story, though, Jay, you told it to, well, everybody.

“Although”—flipping through notes—“you told your friend Vaughn”—and Jay pictures Vaughn, Manchurian Global lab in chaos, as he struggles to secure whisker-thin electrode wires to tiny probes surgically screwed into the skull of an unhappy mouse as Jay regales him with some shaggy-dog saga of sexual shenanigans—“a slightly more graphic version in which the aforementioned Flower Girl moonlighted as an Exotic Underwater Dancer and you engaged in—”

Here Jay closes his eyes hard to conjure:

A Technicolor strip club where his flower girl floated weightless in a huge bottom-lit martini glass; grinding, wearing a blacklight-neon G-string and a shimmery, diaphanous latex flipper tail, pressing albino breasts flat against the glass of the tank. Jay, ringside, stared up at her, mouth open in an awestruck O.

“Jesus.” Hands together, leaning forward toward Magonis, Jay asks, “What’re you guys, the Inquisition? I mean . . . this is unbelievable. This is my private life.”

Or are they just stories?

Magonis nods, not listening, “But, full disclosure here, we found no evidence of anal penetration, so I have to assume your recounting of the event for your friend allowed for a gentlemanly degree of exaggeration, if it’s true at all.” Then he frowns. “Is there really a bar where young women strip underwater?”