Fifty Mice Part 14

Sandy rises and lets her hands fall away. Her nose is skewed and bleeding. Her chin set hard, mouth a straight, angry line. Head c.o.c.ked back, she looks down at Jay from her angled eyes. And then hits him so hard the back of his head makes a crater in the plaster lathe.

In office 204 the next morning, everybodys present and accounted for: Jay (crazy black eye and a surplus of regret), Magonis, Barry (weirdly cheerful), the young marshal called Sandy (ruined nails and her nose set, braced, and taped), Tripod (hair gelled and malicious smile unshakable), and John Q. Public (serene and dapper in his cream-of-wheat sport coat and teal club tie).

"I saw him in the window," Jay says.

Tripod insists he wasnt there.

"Hes lying."

"And n.o.body saw any fire," Barry adds.

Magonis suggests they move past the petty argument, that Jays explosion was borne of more than just Tripod making lewd gestures in the window, which Tripod again, like a fourth-grader, forcefully denies. The shrink has left his walker somewhere, and seems to be fully ambulatory without it. Is the limp an affectation? Is everything and everyone on the island perpetually in flux?

All Jays paranoia has come rus.h.i.+ng back.

"Okay. Then explain to me the point," Jay asks Public, seething, "of three U.S. Marshals sitting in that house watching me like some kind of reality TV show." Or test subject, he thinks. The mice, again.

"Watching me, watching Ginger, watching Helen-" Always the G.o.dd.a.m.n mice.

With a shrug, "Got to have eyes on you," Public argues. "Its part of the security protocol. More concerned about incoming than outgoing, though. Truly."

"Watching me in my house is protocol?"

Public shrugs. "If we were, and Im not saying we are, most people might say it makes them feel safer."

"Anyway, its not even your house, is it?" Tripod drawls, nettling.

"Jimmy, theres no cameras," Barry announces, defensive. "Were not peepers. Miless just jerking your chain."

Jay just looks at him.

"Not your real house, not your real life," Tripod sings. "Maybe hes getting confused."

Jay has reached a point where his outrage has been trumped by his situational impotence. He looks to Public, the diplomat, who says that while there arent any cameras, they could loosen their surveillance a notch, if thats really what Jay wants- "Yes," Jay says.

-and if Ginger agrees to it, Public continues. "Theres the little girl to consider," Public says.

A new thought dances into Jays head: maybe Helen is the protected witness, and Publics lurid story about Ginger is just another layer of cover.

Magonis is talking about the imperfections of artificial constructs engendered by protective custody, the sacrifices one has to make sometimes for the greater good, and everyones safety, and Jay, surfacing from thoughts about Helen-as-witness, reminds them that he didnt want to be here to begin with. Tripod drily suggests Jay try paddling a kayak to the mainland, see how that works out. Barry chokes down laughter, and Sandy tells them both to shut the f.u.c.k up.

"He keeps trying to call his girlfriend," Barry complains to Public. "Not to s.h.i.+ft gears, but. I got phone logs from all over Avalon: bars, hotel reception, day-trippers cell phones hes been borrowing. He needs to put on his big-boy pants and stop d.i.c.king around." Jay doesnt deny it, although it was only the one tourist, a spur-of-the-moment thing when he was standing outside his shop. He got that squalling sound, like an old-fas.h.i.+oned dial-up modem trying to connect.

He hasnt tried to make another call in over a week.

He looks around the room. A veneer falls away.

Just people doing their jobs, he realizes. Buckham & Buckham with badges. Flawed, petty, distracted by personal problems, judgment clouded by personal prejudice, professional but disengaged.

Vulnerable. Just like Jay.

"Is she really a girlfriend," Tripod muses, trying to scratch under his cast with a pencil, "in the deeper, emotional sense of the word?"

"Are we finished here?" Magonis asks, bored.

"Cameras and microphones out of my house," Jay confirms. "Now. Today."

"Sure." Public nods. "Its already done, since there arent any."

Divide and conquer. This is just another workplace maze, and Jay instinctively presses his advantage: "And I want Tripod off my case. Literally."

Magonis and Public trade looks.

"No way," Tripod says. "Dont let him-"

"Can I just say," Barry jumps in, "this paranoid thing where hes, like, were all voyeurs peeping into his private life is fairly insulting to me and Sandy. Were professionals," Barry adds. "Weve done everything we can to try and make this situation as constructive and comfortable for him as-"

"All I want is some privacy," Jay says. "You treat me like a zoo animal, were not gonna get anywhere."

Tripod talks over everybody, dagger eyes on Jay, unable to contain himself: "I know what this is about. I know: I hear Ginger sucks pole like a pro. And he dont want to share."

Sandy explodes, lunges at Tripod; fortunately, Public manages to catch her before any damage can be done, because she looks like she could kick Tripods a.s.s. Barry and Public pull her away while Marshal Miles dances just out of range and taunts, "Cmon. Bring it."

Barry, forgetting in the moment that their relations.h.i.+p is a fiction, tries to intercede, spousal, "Sandy-"

"Shut up. Youre a s.h.i.+thead," Sandy tells Barry. "Dont defend the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d." She wont look at him. "Jays right, s.h.i.+p him back to L.A."

"Jimmy," Barry points out pointlessly.

"Easy does it," Magonis says to Sandy as, sandwiched between the immobile old shrink and a surprisingly hard-bodied Public, she stops struggling. "Breathe. Breathe."

They look for Jay, but hes already walked out of the office with his small victory.

The hallway is empty. A cold slurry light glares through the unwashed windows in the stairwell at the far end.

No one follows him.

And he makes it a point to be down by the seawall when the last boat back to San Pedro leaves the ferry landing. Tripod is on it, with his duffel and backpack.

Jay waves good-bye.

14 .

FOUR WEEKS IN, Jay thinks hes got the Magonis thing under control.

His hands hang from the loops of the chain-link fence as he stares through the hatchwork of wire watching Helen play with her cla.s.smates. Chasing each other around, freeze tag, their long shadows crisscrossing on the asphalt. A normal little girl except that she doesnt make a sound.

Theres no more discussion with the federal shrink about the dead flower girl or strip-bar mermaids; Jay has successfully steered the daily dialectic in 204 to safer territory, which is to say anything, everything, else: the endless stretches of days and weeks and months in which his previous years life has played itself out, soberingly colorless, but, full disclosure, as far as Jay can tell, no different from the featureless year of his life that preceded it, or the year before that one, back and back and back.

Its growing colder; the sun crosses the island lower in the sky, shadows deep all day.

Helen is clearly in charge of the handball game, gesturing, her face a riot of free-flowing emotions, and none of the other kids seem to mind or even notice that shes not using words.

Sometimes Jay worries that this recent past hes unwrapping, day by day, with the odd-eyed shrink, which presents itself to Jay as one sad sustained serialized failure-to-engage, would, in the eyes of another man, read as normal and fine, recalled with a wistful fondness and satisfaction. Would he, in a different context, stripped of the need to provide the key, the clue, to unlock a young womans demise-the flower girl-if that is in fact what the Feds are hoping h.e.l.l give them (that is, if she really died-and he has only their forensic photographs as testament to it and which the mere existence of Photoshop renders inconclusive without other corroboration), would he look at himself and judge his past year differently: with empathy, with forgiveness, absent prejudice?

Autonomic arousal (and, remember, arousal = anxiety) in mice is a biological reaction triggered by the nervous system, including raised heart rate, pupil dilation, changes in breathing. The sympathetic response.

Electrocortical arousal in mice is a change in brain wave functioning, changing frequency, speeding up or slowing down, and probably linked to Eysencks reticular activating system, about which Jay has never understood squat.

Behavioral arousal is a change in observable mouse demeanor, including restlessness, fidgeting, trembling, or tension.

Even as hes settled into his fragile new made-up existence, the tectonic s.h.i.+ft Jays experiencing by facing down his old one remains unnerving. He wants to ask Ginger if she feels the same way, but hes afraid of the answer.

a.s.suming that a mouse (or its genetic cousin, the hominid h.o.m.o sapiens) would actively try to escape an adverse, a.k.a. stressful, stimulus, the tail suspension test dangled, in air, a subject facing downward above a solid surface, with adhesive tape affixed three-quarters of the distance from the base of the mouses tail (duct tape, unsuitable, will tear hair and skin; attach too near the tip and the mouse will come loose and plummet down), for six or more minutes. Mice will typically panic, and struggle vainly to face upward and climb to a solid surface; when the animal stops moving hes considered to have given up. This resignation to immobility is characterized as depression and submission, which is usually the goal of the TST, but some strains of lab mice can skew the mean due to tail-climbing behavior and unusual leg clasping, neurological abnormalities, or a streak of just plain ornery.

Despite Manchurian Globals ongoing effort to identify and isolate unsuitable subjects, such outliers continued to show up on test day, because it was suspected that one of the lab technicians was sneaking in after hours and releasing them back into the general population.

A quilt of clouds skitters inland.

Helen drops a wicked topspin lob past the outstretched arms of a hapless little toehead, point and game.

If Jays going to try to escape, and disappear, he senses he has to do it soon.

Some days Jay runs.

Some days he skirts the seawall where Leo, the one-legged French (or Belgian) putative Brigade des Forces Speciales casualty is preparing for yet another unsuccessful abalone diving mission (there are no abalone in the waters off Catalina, Floria informed Jay one day as he bought cereal and bananas, because the withering foot syndrome wiped them out in the early 90s), past the picket of palm trees and the big casino, across Descanso Beach, up to the Hamilton Cove condominium complex that hangs from the near-vertical, northern escarpments of Avalon canyon, overlooking the sea.

Some days, following the switchback streets between the bungalows and vacation homes, sun on his back, to the crest of the high plateau, where the buffalo came out of the fog and the road leads ten miles to the airport-in-the-sky and, some days, even from here, Jay can catch Sam Dunns Cessna shooting out from between the hills, over the eastern cliffs where the channel current crashes against the rocks, out over the whitecapped water, rising, rising, banking gently up into the sky and heading for Los Angeles.

h.e.l.l slow, and check his watch, looking for patterns, a schedule, and by the time he looks up into the sky again, the Cessna is but a silvery checkmark in the sweep of blue.

And some days Jay will cross town after his session with Magonis to wait outside the schoolyard for Helen and walk her home. Its prearranged, theres no pattern and no predicting when, Ginger scheduling him at breakfast, never saying where sh.e.l.l be or why she cant do it, and Jay never asking, because he likes doing it, and is afraid if he asks too many questions sh.e.l.l change her mind. Despite her denial, he a.s.sumes she has something like his appointment with Magonis, only with someone else. Relating to what she remembers, knows, saw.

Or didnt see.

And Helen, well, Helens not talking.

Not yet.

After school, after watching the playground through the chain link and agreeing to one more turn on the monkey bars, Jay and Helen walk home. If shes happy to see him she doesnt give it away. Her expression is just short of serious, businesslike, in a friendly but distracted schoolgirl way. Hes no longer a stranger, but not quite a friend. He doesnt want to admit how thoroughly shes crawled under his defenses. He takes long strides, she has to skip every few steps to catch up, and Jay pretends not to notice.

There are two princ.i.p.al routes they can take, neither one direct. He lets Helen decide. One loops through downtown Avalon, past the shops and restaurants and along the serpentine seawall to the casino ballroom, then up to their bungalow on the steep streets that st.i.tch the canyons north slope.

The other route involves cutting across the golf course, which Helen seems to enjoy because theyre always finding things in the rough. Not just the lost golf b.a.l.l.s, either, but tees (white, natural, and in colors), quarters, dimes, nickels, ball markers, pencils, hats, visors, a V-neck sweater, a broken six iron, one running shoe, and an inside-out umbrella. Helen especially likes the hot-pink and chartreuse high-vis golf b.a.l.l.s, and the white ones Sharpie-marked with golfer hieroglyphics: lines (straight and wavy), circles, dots, curlicues, crosses, diamonds, squares. Once they found a dead bird and Helen wouldnt leave until they buried it deep in a sand trap.

Hes stopped talking for her; where once he carried both sides of the conversation like a homeless schizophrenic, now hes content to let language go: the sound of their feet, the wild conversations of the birds, the channel wind across the golf course, sharp punctuations from construction sites or distant machinery, or the low murmuring of golfers on other fairways, whine of their carts, rattle of clubs, a ball struck well, a dog that wont stop barking, theres plenty to hear.

Hes considered that maybe it isnt that shes not talking, its that shes busy listening for what might be coming for Ginger.

This clear afternoon the bay sleeps vitreous in the long, cool shadow of the barren hills, and Jay is pus.h.i.+ng farther ahead of Helen by lengthening his strides without quickening them. The fairway gra.s.s is damp and winter-length, and their feet leave twin trails of dark ovals that s.h.i.+mmer in the occasional shaft of sun. Her little backpack slips off one shoulder as she struggles to keep up. Shes frustrated. He seems not to care. Its a long shot, but one hes been working toward for several days: their nebulous relations.h.i.+p means she cant be sure that h.e.l.l look back for her.

In the fourth fairway rough, in the dipping swale that rises through a stand of scraggly manzanita to the seventh green, Helen pulls up, cross.

And shouts: "WAIT."

Wait.

Jay stops walking, hesitates, and turns around, slowly.

Helen glares at him: clinging obstinately to her silence, flushed, furious, wordless.

"Did you say something?"

Trapped, she fights back tears.

"Are you talking to me," Jay asks, as if innocently, "or . . . ?" He looks around the empty golf course, purely gestural.

"Or maybe it was somebody else," Jay says. He waits for a moment. Nothing from Helen. He turns his back on her, and takes a step forward. And another. And another.

"It wasnt," Helen sparks.

There. He stops again, turns again deliberately, and they stare at each other for a long time.

"It wasnt," she says again.

She looks into him, defeated. Her defeat becomes his loss, added to all the rest that hes lost, and the sudden weight of it after years of denying it rocks him. "Im sorry," he says softly. "I just . . ."

Helen opens her mouth, and nothing comes out. Tears flow, shes crying, shoulders heaving, losing it, and any lingering chance Jay may have of self-congratulation for orchestrating this moment is stripped away by her expression of raw vulnerability.

s.h.i.+t.

He walks back, kneels down next to her, and slips the pack from her shoulders. "Hey," he says softly. "Its okay. Im sorry. This wasnt supposed to . . ." But guilt overcomes him because, yeah, he calculated everything for just this result, and he knows that she probably understands it or will figure it out over time and, like any parent, even a fake one, he wonders if she will forgive him.

"You tricked me," she says.