Fifty Mice Part 11

GINGER CONFUSES HIM.

What is that trope people recite? Mystery inside a riddle wrapped in-or wait. No. s.h.i.+t. Enigma is part of it, though. And a riddle.

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

And then theres the whole killing thing, which, yes, hes already dismissed, but thats the history with which shes 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 Publics idea. "You two kids need to act like youre a normal functioning couple, so no one gets suspicious." Jay thinks this, too, is bulls.h.i.+t, since hes 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 pa.s.sing 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.

"Dont a.s.sume," Public likes to tell him, when Jay does manage to cross his path. "People a.s.sume the serial killer next door is just a regular guy. People a.s.sume the child molester couldnt possibly be the favorite uncle. People a.s.sume that if they live right G.o.d will reward them, but only one guys come back to tell us about it, and hes family, so we can a.s.sume hes not entirely objective.

"a.s.sumptions are the enemy of truth, and truth is all were after."

Jay doesnt know what this means, but he a.s.sumes 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 gla.s.sed-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 Gingers 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 Gingers.

Sustaining a conversation is still trouble for them. Jays on his second Buffalotini, a frozen concoction of bison milk, vodka, Tia Maria, and bitters that the c.o.c.ktail 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 phones screen in what appears to be a furious texting session, for Jay to read her eyes. Collared s.h.i.+rt and chinos, he doesnt 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 cant be completed as dialed."

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

"So you cant."

"What."

"Make calls."

Ginger shrugs. "Who would I call?"

Jay leans forward, on both arms. Feels heat from the candle, and its glow pushes Gingers face farther into a gauzy otherworld of the bars 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, doesnt answer.

"I know, right?" Jay says.

"I dont know what that means."

Jay sits back, allows that it probably doesnt matter, and starts sweeping the beer nuts back into the dish.

"Youre odd." Ginger puts the phone down and sips her drink, then reacting, making a face. "OhmyG.o.d. Yeeg."

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

She doesnt even smile. She studies Jay for what seems like a long time. "Well, how do you think this works?"

"I have no idea. Thats why Im-"

"And what makes you think its supposed to work at all? Its an arrangement theyve 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 theyre 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?"

"Im 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 theyd remember it. And-dont 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.

"Its 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, h.e.l.l, its pretty much just abject fear-terror-it wont even move, because its not only remembering, its 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, Im lost."

"Otherwise they went about their business. They couldnt 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 dont think youre explaining this right."

"You can make someone remember something that didnt happen."

"Okay."

"It is possible."

"Somebody been zapping you?"

"Not exactly, but-"

"Youre just saying."

"Yeah. I guess." Hes 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. "Theyre not metaphors, theyre just furry mammal vermin teetering on the low end of the food chain." Vaughn tended to suck the romance out of everything.

"I dont know. I get the feeling you arent trying to remember, youre trying to forget," Ginger says pointedly.

Jay sits back.

And the awkward silence between them returns.

Its 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. Its 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 s.h.i.+fts gears. "This shrink named Magonis?" Jay knows she doesnt. Hes followed her, more than once, during the day, to see where she goes, and it isnt 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 Es, on Crescent Avenue, watching the moored boats rock in the harbor. And Jays watched her, like a voyeur, or a jealous husband. Shes 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 shes alone, makes his heart ache. This cold, complex woman with the little girl who wont speak to her.

He understands what thats like, trying to make sense of the senseless. He wants to tell her that its 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 insects 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 s.p.a.ce 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 doesnt know.

"You want another round? Nachos? Guac and chips?" Its Penny, their waitress. Shes dressed vaguely c.o.c.ktail wench, Wonderbra and fishnet stockings, but the green-and-blue tattoo spilling down her shoulder to her elbow is a lively array of obscure j.a.panese anime.

Jay looks to Ginger: nothing.

"I think were 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, "Thats 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 its important, though. You just move here?"

"We did."

"Its nice," Penny says. "Slow. But nice. You know. What do you do?"

Jay hesitates. "I have the video rental place on-"

"Gabes?"

"Yeah."

"That was weird. How quick he cashed out."

"Was it? I dont know anything about it. Never met him," Jay adds. "We used a broker."

"That weird guy." Pennys 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. "Hes got a tongue thing." Gingers thumbs poised over her phone, but not moving, shes listening. "Next thing I know Tinas gone, some Hispanic family is living in her place."

Jay doesnt know what to say, but Penny doesnt seem to need him to comment.

"Well, good luck with it. We dont 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 s.e.x 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. Youd 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 ga.s.sed 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 dont use it, the ocean wants it, bad. Weekend people dont think of that. Its not like a vacation cabin you can just shut up and turn off the water and power and come back next summer and everythings pretty much like you left it. Cody, he says boats are living things, you dont 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, n.o.body gives a hoot." Penny grins. "Hey, whynt I bring you some nachos? On the house."

"No, dont." Ginger, too quickly, the cold Ginger. She and Penny trade quick, hostile looks. "Were leaving," Ginger says. "Thanks, anyway." She touches Jay lightly on the arm, pushes her chair back, and walks out. Jay cant tell if her pique is honest or a performance. Either way, he doesnt understand it.

Penny watches her go, eyes dark. "I hope shes 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 hes even said it, because it means nothing, just makes Penny blush.

Ginger is waiting for him outside, arms folded. No expression, no hint of any emotion except an apparent impatience to drop the faade and get back home to Helen. But she takes him on a detour to the tiny grocery store. Glare of white fluorescence, a new flat-screen TV mounted over the cas.h.i.+er counter with murmuring advertis.e.m.e.nts and infomercials on some kind of continuous feed.

Entering the store, she inexplicably takes his hand in hers and mines, from some other Bizarro Ginger, this weird flirty smile for the young Latina behind the counter, Florias daughter, and then, in Spanish, asks with pitch-perfect fl.u.s.tered self-consciousness where the condoms are.

Turns out theyre under the counter, discreet, in a teak display box that reminds Jay of the way some high-end restaurants will bring a selection of exotic teas to the table at the end of a meal. Ginger buys half a dozen, sharing gentle quips with the Floria and flicking smoky eyes to Jay and back, shy, still smiling-Ginger hasnt smiled this much the whole time hes been with her-and slips her hand into the back pocket of his jeans as they walk out with their purchase.

In the darkness, it all falls away. No smile, diffident expression, her hands to herself again.

Streetlights haloed with night mist coming in off the channel.

Jay has to ask, "What was that about?"

"Couple of drinks at the Parrot, date night, we dont want your friend Penny to think Im not accommodating," Ginger says. "Men have needs. I bet she and Cody go home, get baked, and have at it. Lack of chitchat notwithstanding." She stops at a public trash can and empties the condoms into it.

"Live the lie," she says, and looks hard at Jay through the dark, false lashes, drilling deep, to his vacant soul.