Fifty Mice Part 12

"Helens adopted," Jay says. All of a sudden he feels the need to play a trump card, hes tired of losing every hand.

"Are you fishing, or did somebody tell you?" she shoots back, subdued. More of Publics Machiavellian s.h.i.t. "Can I give you some useful advice? Dont trust him. Ever." Then, defensive, "Shes my daughter, Jay, does it matter?"

It surprises him, when she says his name. There was an ease to it hes not sure she intended.

"I just . . . I dont know. I need to know what Im dealing with. Everybodys got so many secrets."

"What youre dealing with? Youre not. Dealing. With anything. Youre here to tell them what they want, and were together until you do or they get tired of asking or somebody comes and whacks you-which, Im sorry, is not my business, either, unless you bring that down on Helen or me, whether she is my biological issue or not-and in the meantime-" She stops, surprisingly emotional, and looks away. Jay, chilled by her choice of words (Whacks me?) considers for the first time that she could be even more adrift than he is. And worries again about what she knows that he doesnt.

Ginger starts walking up the hill to their house.

"-In the meantime, live the lie," Jay says, finishing her thought, a step behind.

"Yeah. Can you manage that?"

Jay nods. "Its my specialty," Jay tells her.

12 .

A CLEMENT DOMESTIC STASIS SETS IN: breakfast (cereal and milk), comics (Helen wants him to read them to her, although he suspects she can read them herself), walk to work, coffee from Big Es (black, bad), bag lunch, the two oclock with Magonis, dinner (Ginger can cook), homework (phonics and basic arithmetic), play (Barbies or board games), and bed (the sofa beginning to sag, his back stiff and electric with shooting pain; when hes asked for a proper bed, Magonis just mumbles about budget cuts and the paperwork). The ineluctable presence and puzzle of this girl and this woman, this faux-family, the easy rhythms, like a heart, beating, like breathing. Reflexive and essential.

He makes friends, sort of. The old actress he should remember but whose name hes afraid to ask for fear of insulting her; she holds happy hour court at the Parrot bar claiming to be the friend Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner were visiting on their tragic trip to Catalina back in the day. The pensioned Frenchman of the Brigade des Forces Speciales Terre who lost his leg to an IED in the Cte dIvoire and does Tai Chi on Abalone Point at dawn, but who Ginger insists is a Belgian con man selling Herbalife to the unsuspecting. The shave-ice man, Ruben, whose shave-ice kiosk is never actually open.

A noontime basketball game with a couple of busboys from the Seaview and Anacapa hotel kitchens, the soul-patch hipster who runs Island Zip Line, and a rotating lineup of Conservancy interns from UC Irvine regularly devolves into a primal brawl that leaves him bruised and sore for the entire week that intervenes. Zip Line, who the busboys have nicknamed Tripod based on his apparently legendary physical endowment, which, they swear, has been posted on YouTube by one of his recent conquests, reveals himself to be one of Publics Feds when, after a particularly hard disputed foul by an intern where they both tumble off the court, he pulls a gun from an ankle holster and straddles the terrified intern and shoves the barrel of the .22 into the college kids mouth, screaming, "You want a piece of this?! You want a piece of this?!" like something out of a bad cop movie. The intern did not want a piece of anything. It took a while for the busboys to talk the Fed down.

Later, over a beer at the Parrot, Tripod confesses to Jay that, "This whole WitPro detail is not what I signed up for when I joined the marshals, and its kinda starting to wig me out." Jay tries obliquely to ask some questions about Public, but Tripod just smiles and wags his finger and asks how many condoms Ginger has left from her big grocery-store buy. "Id give my right nut for a little of that moist comfort." Tripod leers, and Jay wants to hit him, but isnt eager to taste the metal of the gun.

Maybe theyre testing me again.

In the corner, magazine, pint of beer, feet kicked up, is the puddle jumper pilot and chop-socky superfan Sam Dunn, and Jay considers using him as an excuse to get away from Tripod until it dawns on Jay that what Dunn is flipping through are pictorials in some p.o.r.nographic publication from Southeast Asia, crazy Thai alphabet screaming in lurid colors from the cover photograph of a nearly naked clearly underage girl in a bomber jacket and nothing else; this may explain why Dunns sitting alone. Meanwhile, Tripod is asking Jay for what he calls a "whos hotter bake-off": Ginger vs. Stacy: "The government-subsidized gash or your old girlfriend?" Jay stares, numb. "Stacy by a mile, amiright?" Tripods drunk, on a roll, and launches into a semi-lewd tribute to Stacys "rack and back," which, he insists, made the surveillance of Jay on the mainland well worth the ha.s.sle. Ginger, Tripod muses, "I would think is kinda bony." But he allows that could be awesome, depending, and then waits for Jays response with a completely serious expression.

When, before Tripod shows up for the next game, Jay tells the busboys, who have often expressed a shy and genuine awe at Jays cosmic good fortune to have been paired with such a quality individual of the female persuasion as Ginger, about this conversation, they fall quiet, dont say anything, eyes hooded, reaction indifferent, but the first time Tripod goes up for a rebound one of the busboys low-bridges him, and, when he lands hard, the other one steps on his arm and breaks it cleanly.

"Theyre DEA deep-cover guys," Public explains gravely in the Emergency Room where Tripod gets treated. "They dont mess around." Public has shown up unsummoned, and Jay can now a.s.sume that the Feds are watching one another, as well as him. "Things got hairy and they got extracted and parked here until the situation chills. MS-13," he adds, as if Jay should know what this means. "Mara Salvatrucha. Salvadoran gangs, East L.A.?" Public shakes his head. "Miles should know better." Miles must be Tripods real name.

So its like that.

He knows he needs to get out.

Jay tells himself he cant afford to relax, its all a trap. But hes missed this. Family, community, context. He cant remember ever having it, not even in boarding school, where he felt the safe, claustrophobic intimacy of adolescence, and the odd parenting of the instructors and coaches, and the structure of college prep, but never trusted it because everyone else went home to their families while he was, perpetually, the charity case, the lost boy, the invited guest who put everyone on their best behavior because they pitied him and, on some level, congratulated themselves not just for showing empathy, and offering kindness, both of which were, he knew, often sincere, but also because they were not him.

Here, now, on Catalina, he has found dry land in the vast ocean of his disconnection.

"Youre holding back," Magonis tells him.

"Im not," Jay lies.

"Youre hiding things. You have secrets. Let go of them." Magonis makes a sudden shift in his chair, like something bit him on the a.s.s. The faint sour bloom of middle-aged gas followed by a feeble grimace.

"Supposing I was, and Im not saying I am, how would you suggest I do that?"

In the strange limbo of room 204, Magonis traces circles in the air with the unlit cigarette scissored between his fingers. "Begin with a very thorough, and careful-even though it may be painful-a.n.a.lysis of your own att.i.tude toward your life before you came here."

What life?

Those days Jay would park in his cubicle at Buckham & Buckham and float, eyes dead, as all the LEDs of his phone lit up and lines chirred unanswered?

It was float or drown.

Is that a life?

"Follow that with a careful a.n.a.lysis of your att.i.tude toward other people in that life."

Nights pa.s.sed, indistinguishable, in tenebrous clubs and coffee joints and sports bars, the empty thicket of Jays friends, the small talk and petty grievances, arguments, betrayals, and recriminations, bands that played so deafening he would bend at the waist, fingers to his ears, riding a kind of willful oblivion; the drinking, chiding, laughing, and Stacy (or Lisa or Aly or Emma before her), lovely, perfumed, draped across him, sloppy drunk.

And he floated, forward moving, alive, at least.

"Then follow that with a very careful examination of your att.i.tude toward self."

Was it self-defense or damage? Even in his most reflective drunk, he never cared to ask himself. Jay held fast to his unexamined life because he believed examination was unnecessary; there was Jay, and there was the world: singular, plural: he was in it but not of it. Too much to lose. Too much lost.

"And when all of this is done, inquire of your own self concerning why this att.i.tude, and how, and by what process has it been allowed to take possession of the mind."

Hum of the air conditioner kicking in. Jay shifts in his chair, impatient. "Okay."

"After that," Magonis says, then waiting, waiting, drawing his hesitation out for, Jay guesses, some kind of dramatic emphasis. "After that, go into silence."

"Can we take a sec and go back and talk about the flower shop girl?" Jay gets up, antsy, and paces.

Magonis says that its fine with him.

"In the spirit of me being helpful and all," Jay continues, "Im just-its-" He starts over, "What youre looking for-are you saying its somehow about her?"

"Who?"

"The flower shop girl."

"Should it be?" Magonis furrows one brow. Evidently they, too, are independent of each other. "I thought we were talking generally about your life and your, I dont know, diffidence?"

Jay hesitates and asks the question he really meant to ask: "You guys dont think I had something to do with what happened? I mean, to her."

"Flower girl."

Jay doesnt think this merits a response.

"No." Magonis uncrosses and re-crosses his legs, stiffly. "Did you?"

"No." Jay is irritated. "I dont, didnt, like I said, even know her name." Hes at a loss. "Look, Im sorry I lied about it. Or . . . whatever. Its just-I was-" catching himself, "I am engaged, I stepped out, I didnt want to . . . you know. Because: my girlfriend. Its not something Im proud of, and Im not being a jerk about this, I want to help you, I want to get back to my-" He stops, caught short.

Back to my what?

"-you know . . . and Ive been racking my brain for what I might have, what I possibly could have-you know-seen-and its just, at the same time, with all these questions and coded inferences, and the daily 'What did you do on August fifth? and 'What does this mean when you wrote this on the first Monday in May? I mean, G.o.dd.a.m.n it," the frustration boils over. "s.h.i.t." He gestures at Magonis but the words are slow to follow: "I mean. What if. Maybe I didnt see anything. But you want me to think I did. Think Ive seen something. Right? Okay? Or. What if this whole thing, all of it . . . is a charade, is about getting me to think I remember something I never saw-"

A single image seared into Jays memory: liquid night, and hes in it, running across an empty expanse with a mermaid cradled in his arms.

"-so that Ill put it all together in a way that convinces even me that I actually witnessed something that never happened?"

The air-conditioning kicks on with an angry moan, and stale cabbage air floods the room.

"That is exactly what were being very careful not to do, Jay." Magonis heaves himself and opens a window. "Thats why were here."

"Is it? I dont know anymore."

Magonis just looks at him and waits, untroubled by Jays accusations, expressionless. Jay stops pacing and closes his eyes and runs both hands through his hair, trying to squeegee his brain.

"Or what if youre just messing with my memory, trying to mix me up so that I cant remember something?"

"What if we are?"

"Youd be a.s.sholes," Jay says.

For a moment, Magonis seems to consider this as a possibility. Then he says, "All memories are false, you do understand this? Re-experiencing the experience is, by definition, a distortion. We dont remember anything exactly the way it happened because we arent there anymore, present in that particular moment of being. And the pieces we do remember, we will add to, or subtract from, over the course of time, in order for us to make sense of them. We rewrite," he stresses the word pointedly, "usually to make ourselves look better."

Jay studies him. "But what if you take away one of those pieces-take, like, a piece that actually makes what you remember make sense-"

"It all crumbles," Magonis agrees. "The memory itself becomes, well, mutable."

"Mutable?"

"Unreliable. Quicksand. In which the truth can simply sink and disappear."

"Okay. And then, what? You, me, we, cant know, you cant know for sure . . . that any of what we think we remember really happened?"

Magoniss slight shrug is equivocal. "Were just talking, Jay. This and that."

Jay sinks back in the easy chair and puts his head in his hands, frustrated. "I dont know what you want."

"No," Magonis says. "You dont know what you want. Thats whats really holding us up here, isnt it? The hard truth, as Ive said, is that nothing we perceive is ever actually in fact exactly the way it appears." He pauses to let this sink in. "And since reality is consensual, what if everything youve just said could be true, depending. And were just waiting for you to pick a place to start?"

13 .

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-".

An awful, thin, shrill, inhuman sound brings Jay rushing into the bungalow kitchen to discover Ginger holding a flaming frying pan, struggling to transport the roiling grease fire from the stove to the sink.

"EEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-"

Helen, quailing in the corner, paralyzed, is the one making the scary high-pitched shriek.

"Oh-no, hey, no-whoa-" Jay has an inarticulate panic-induced brain freeze and cant find the words to say what he needs to stop Ginger from making the next mistake: water from the tap.

"EEEEeeeee-"

Foom. A plume of fire volcanoes up from the pan, Ginger loses her grip, overcompensates, the fryer tips and a river of flames cascades backward across her oven mitts and splashes onto her sweatshirt.

"Oh boy," she says, distant, with that vacant remove that sometimes attends catastrophe. Shes on fire.

Helen is rigid with terror.

The tablecloth blurs off the breakfast table as Jay yanks it loose and envelops the flaming Ginger in its folds, and the whole smoldering package in his arms. Later, h.e.l.l wonder how he even knew what to do with a grease fire; later, when he thinks of it, if he dreams about it, Ginger will melt and h.e.l.l be helpless to stop it from happening.

Thick black smoke is everywhere. Jay falls back, twisting Ginger down to the floor on top of himself, cushioning her descent, and holds her there, smothering the flames with his embrace. Shes coughing and shaking, stunned eyes, framed by the creases of the heavy, smoldering cloth, fixed on Jay, in shock.

And then Helen is on top of both of them, tears spilling, leaking the noise of her wordless weeping, trying to wedge her way under Jays arms to get next to her mother.

"Its over," Jay says. "Its okay, its over, were good." He kicks out at the smoldering frying pan where the grease has burned down and flips it upside down, killing the last of the fire.

For a long time they lie in a lump on the blackened linoleum.

Honey ribbons onto the reddened, largely superficial burns on Gingers blistered arms. Jay kneels beside her, on the bed, in the darkened bedroom, one hand already slick with honey, the other delivering it to Gingers right hand and forearm from his fingertips, the honey scooped from a big open jar.

"Lemme know if this hurts. Its not supposed to hurt."

Ginger just watches him, shivering. She smells of smoke and perfume. The faint white salt of dried tears trails down from her smeared, racc.o.o.ned mascara. There are two rolls of toilet paper and a Scotch tape dispenser between Jays crossed legs.

"This was my mothers big miracle home remedy," Jay says about the honey. "I remember she was always burning her hands on these s.h.i.tty aluminum pots we had when I was little and that my father claimed over and over would give us all Alzheimers, all the while smoking two packs a day."

"Is that what killed him?"