Fifty Mice Part 23

Jay closes his eyes. "And I wish I could say there was some . . . satisfaction in seeing . . . feeling all this, but theres not, but . . ." His thread unravels. Hes beaten. Hes got no fight left. He knows it. "You thought Id lead you somewhere." Nothing from Doe. He no longer cares to know what they want. "Or youd see where Dunn would take me." Tripods head moves slightly, as if hes looking for some signal from Doe. And what Jay wants?

Does eyes stay aimed straight ahead, "Whatever you say, Jay. Have a party."

Jay lays the side of his head she hit against the window and feels the heat on his skin. "Okay." It does not escape his notice that shes called him Jay.

The Prius slips down an off-ramp, decelerating, and outside Jay sees streamers: plastic triangle flaglets of red white blue flap and rattle like little tropical fish sucking air, as, underneath them: the federal car fragments through the intersection, leaving rubber as it arcs around the used-car lot and merges with local traffic.

Vaughn?"

Its the white door at the very end of the corridor, 440E, and the E is missing; fourth floor of a Deco Irving Gill knockoff residential apartment building just off Las Palmas. Jay pounds with the heel of his hand.

"Vaughnie? You home?"

No answer. An uneasy deadness in the stale air. He looks at Doe, and Tripod. "If they took him," Jay says. "Why would he be here?"

"If they took him." Tripod puts a fat hand on him and draws him aside to let Jane Doe expertly kick the door inward without splintering the jam.

It doesnt smell right. Theres lots of Vaughn in the place, but also something else. Not Vaughn.

Doe has her gun out, but at her side; she leads them through the quaint, pointless quasi-foyer with the small, round antique table Vaughn got from his grandmother and a fishbowl of tetras suspended in still water like a handful of small promises. Vaughns bachelor apartment is usually tidy, bright, sunny, with a postcard view of the Hollywood sign. But right now everythings been tossed like a salad and the Venetian blinds are rent and splayed and the mermaid Jay pulled warm and vibrant from a strip-club sea just last night dangles dead as anything in the middle of the main room, hung from blue-black duct-taped hands on a ceiling fan slowly turning with an angry hum.

Somebody has shot her in the head.

Even Doe is caught by surprise, and she exhales a soft, sad lament.

Jay turns away, light-headed. He twists and buckles to his knees. His forehead touches to the floor like a penitent praying, and Tripod arcs around him, no big deal, as if to suggest this sort of thing happens in his, their, world every day (which it couldnt) and in so doing establish his, their, professional distance from it (which he cant), cracking wise: "Well, now, okay, maybe h.e.l.l believe us. Maybe h.e.l.l finally understand the serious, serious s.h.i.t hes all up in." But Doe just touches the mermaid lightly, tenderly, sorrowfully, and the body sways. "Oh, girl," she says to it softly. "Im sorry." Then, to Jay, absent of judgment, asks, "Do you know her?"

Theres no response from Jay, who has further upset himself with his unchecked, spontaneous, and callous relief that it isnt Vaughn hanging from the fan.

f.u.c.k. f.u.c.king coldhearted s.h.i.t.

"Jay?" Tripod, impatient. Hes pulled latex gloves from his pocket and put them on. Does he always carry them?

s.h.i.t. s.h.i.t.

Did he know her?

Doe looks absently to the doorway, still gaping, but shes talking to Tripod. "Call it in, Miles. Dont touch anything. Were not staying."

Did he, does Jay, know anything?

Finally, Jay finds his voice: "Yes," he answers. "Yes." And then, truthfully: "No."

Twenty-six miles across the sea Santa Catalina is a-waitin for me Santa Catalina, the island of romance, romance, romance, romance Water all around it everywhere Tropical trees and the salty air But for me the thing thats a-waitin there-romance It seems so distant, twenty-six miles away Restin in the water serene Id work for anyone, even the Navy Who would float me to my island dream Twenty-six miles, so near yet far Id swim with just some water-wings and my guitar I could leave the wings but Ill need the guitar for romance, romance, romance, romance -"26 MILES (SANTA CATALINA)," THE FOUR PREPS (1958).

Music and lyrics by Bruce Belland and Glen Larson

25 .

CHASING DUSK, skimming the surface, Long Beach forgotten, the Catalina jet cruiser runs through sawtooth dark water, roiling, rolling, shoved high by one wave, dropping hard into the trough of the next, trailing in its wake a foaming scar of white.

It may be that more than fifty million mice die in U.S. laboratories every year. Jay found the data incomplete, and murky. Laboratory mice succ.u.mb to everything from toxicology tests (in which they are slowly poisoned) to burn studies to psychological experiments designed to induce terror, anxiety, depression, and helplessness.

Even C. C. Littles eugenic mice are still mammals with nervous systems much like a mans; they feel pain, fear, loneliness, joy. They become emotionally attached to one another, love their families, and bond with human guardians.

Baby mice giggle when tickled.

Some adult mice have been known to show empathy when another mouse-or human with whom theyve bonded-is in distress, and exhibit altruism, will even put themselves in harms way, rather than allow another living creature to suffer.

Vaughn says this is horses.h.i.t, but you can look it up.

They are, however, Jay discovered, categorically not included in the federal Animal Welfare Act provisions that extend at least some hope of dignity to other experimental subjects. While rabbits and guinea pigs, for example, must be provided with pain relief, and labs must prove there are no modern alternatives to the use of these species, scientists are not even required to count the number of mice who perish in the course of their research.

Off and on for more than two hours, from Vaughns apartment to San Pedro and now on the fast boat, Jane Doe has been murmuring to him, perhaps debriefing him, but Jay cant seem to hold on to what shes been saying. He cant shake the dead girl from his head. They are the only pa.s.sengers making this crossing; Tripod remained behind in San Pedro. The forward cabin is vacant, Jay is pretty sure there are support marshals with them on the boat, from the way Doe is all relaxed and easy, and sometimes he can feel their eyes on him, but hasnt seen them, and he doesnt care; the Feds think they erased him from Los Angeles, but in truth he was never there.

The dead girl has also discomposed the implacable Jane Doe. Jay can see it in the marshals face: the tightness around her mouth, a fitful preoccupation in her gaze, even though, once she confirms how little Jay knows about the stripper, she stops talking about it and moves on to other subjects.

Are they worried about Vaughn? Doe wants to know more about him and, like in his sessions with Magonis, Jay is quick to become discouraged by how little he can detail once he gets past a wooly, ballpark resume and wiki of his putative best friend: valley kid, original Pokemon survivor, North Hollywood High gifted program, biochemistry at Berkeley, fondness for mussels, no interest in team sports, two siblings he talks about, one that he doesnt. Jay keeps telling her, just like he told Public, that Vaughn is collateral to whatever this is, but Doe seems skeptical and the image of the dead mermaid stripper keeps cycling back on them, bleak, final, a reminder that there is a deadly game being played.

By someone.

And Ginger told him that Catalina wasnt safe.

Its not surprising that the more they talk about it, the less certain Jay is that a sanctuary is even possible for him anymore. His nerves are raw, his ambition guarded. After a while he pleads fatigue, leaves the cabin and Jane Doe and her questions, and stands on the forward deck, letting the raw, briny mist soak him, thicken his hair, sting his eyes.

He wonders whats going on with those cardboard clouds.

The dark b.u.mp of Mount Orizaba seems to draw no closer for the longest time. It is a peculiarity of Catalina that some days it is a low smear barely visible on the horizon, and some days it rises like the broad back of a leviathan above the livid sea.

He doesnt look back at the mainland.

A canopy of stars drops like a bad scrim, and the cruisers motors cut, the bow levels, and finally Avalon lights accordion out from the darkness, close. Jay smells the faint rancid backwash of fish, gasoline, and pollution that plagues the sheltered harbor. Water laps at the hull chines. Music rattles out of a bar somewhere. The town seems to have shrunk in his absence. Tired and windblown and wanting paint.

Public is waiting for them, on the Casino Mole boat landing, in a pool of light, hands jammed in the pockets of his coat. He looks lonely, Jay thinks. Small and lost. Public watches the ferry come in and does not change expression when Jay comes down the pier to join him.

He says nothing. His hard gimlet eyes are empty.

The bungalow is dark. Dead quiet when Jay gets the door closed and the sound of the Catalina night is squeezed away. He sags, eyes half-mast, against the front wall. Then opens his eyes wider, surfacing, and . . . becomes suddenly acutely aware of the utter absence of- -everything- -everything too spare, in the kitchen dark. The overhead light flickers on at his touch. Spotless. No, empty. Barren. Jay looks across at the blank window of Barrys house and- -his heart sinks- -in the bedroom, the bed made up but abandoned, hospital corners and stiff white inst.i.tutional pillows. n.o.body in it: vacant: and n.o.body expected. All of the odd little-girl toys are missing, along with her drawings, picture books, collected golf-course curios, her tumbled-out shoes, an utter absence of any of Gingers personal effects on the bureau: the scant jewelry, the cut-gla.s.s bottles of perfume, the bulletlike cylinders of lipstick: the closet absent of clothing- -the one thing he hadnt factored in and now, numb and emptied out, chastises himself for not seeing it, the most obvious thing, right in front of him the whole time- -theyre gone.

Jays been away a little more than twenty-eight hours.

Ginger and Helen are gone.

26 .

MISERABLE, he stays up late drinking at the Parrot, unwilling to sit in the bungalow alone. One-legged Leo and the old actress are on the veranda, powering down Rusty Nails and arguing, as usual, about transubstantiation. "Welcome the f.u.c.k back, bienvenue, James or Jay, whichever." Leo, lapsed Catholic but Pope Francis fanboy, thinks the doctrine is just another eschatological smoke screen, purely semantic, the Vatican Council throws up to cloak its more reprobate, pederastical appet.i.tes and transgressions; the actress is old-school Christian Science and convinced that everything is a metaphor.

Even Jays familys departure.

"The Lord giveth, and, well, you know," she says, and asks, basically, what did he expect? It hits him: shes in the program: a protected witness relocated here to Catalina long ago, maybe even one step short of stardom once, and then, for all these years, derailed. Erased. Reborn.

Peromyscus polionotus, Jay tells them, well into his third (or fourth?) frozen margarita, "is a small, nocturnal mouse found in the southeastern United States. A.k.a. oldfield mice, theyre monogamous, pairs mate for life, and both the guys and the gals take care of the oldfield babies."

Leo allows that he doesnt like mice; rodents, in general, creep him out, although on one harrowing mission to Chile he was forced to eat degu (that countrys indigenous, brush-tailed rat relation) and, roasted over an open fire and well salted, it wasnt all bad.

"The females," Jay soldiers on, "have a greater impact on the success of the family unit than do the males-but consequently male oldfield mice get better perks from choosing carefully between potential mates who represent potential futures, or like: paths of life."

"Same as it ever was," Leo drawls, David Byrnelike, and, la Dumas, "Cherchez la femme, pardieu! Cherchez la femme!"

The actress raises her gla.s.s. "What he said. Here, here."

Jay expands: "At Manchurian Global, we put them in a maze that my friend Vaughn built from scratch, using big pet-store aquariums divided by opaque panels that would isolate the females from each other, but allow the guys to schmooze the girls, individually and privately, so that we could track the amount of time spent a.s.sociating with each female, and figure out which girl mouse which guy mouse was crushing on."

Leo concurs that these parameters sound reasonable. The actress has mixed emotions about the largely pa.s.sive role a.s.signed to the "poor ducks."

Some males, Jay admits, "were disoriented at first, and, you know, indifferent to the experiment. Focused solely on getting the f.u.c.k out, or literally confused by the parameters of their new situation." The tequila is coursing warm through his veins. "We got mice from all over the country, in order to ensure a kinship coefficient that would not bias the outcome of the study."

Leo grumbles that he doesnt know what the f.u.c.k a kinship coefficient is, and, Flomax kicking in, excuses himself for the mens room. Jay slides his eyes to the actress. Thin white seams of last-century plastic-surgical corrections are ghosting through her carefully applied foundation; the Rusty Nails are making her eyes crazy red.

"As might be expected," Jay tells her, sounding more and more like the paper Vaughn wrote, that Jay typed and spell-checked, "males spent significantly more time a.s.sociating with, you know: exciting, vivacious, unfamiliar, distantly related females than with more familiar females."

"Men love mystery," the actress says, smiling. "You remind me of something," she adds, drowsy. "From Peter Pan, one of those boys who were with him on the island, runaways who never wished to grow up. But more at the end, when they did, when they had to."

Jay confesses that he never liked that story. The actress says she once played Peter Pan in a summer stock musical. "Like Mary Martin, but we didnt have a rigging, so I just had to run around the stage and flap my arms." Her words are beginning to slur.

The oldfield males were subsequently separated from their chosen female, and when Leo comes wobbling back, Jay tells them how he was witness to the corresponding listlessness and decline and full-on depression of the test subjects that made them unsuitable for further experimentation.

He says, "Many just failed to thrive, stopped eating, stopped grooming, stopped moving, and died."

"Tout amour," Leo murmurs. "Vouloir prendre la lune avec les dents."

This mouse melancholia did not factor into the final, official study. "Theyre just mice," Vaughn had said. "Dont read too much into it."

"What happened to the boys who survived?" the actress wonders.

"Sold to pet stores," Jay says, "as bulk food for large snakes and other reptile predators." And their litters provided subjects for subsequent studies involving experimental neuroses and the Milky White Maze.

The actress bursts into tears, and Leo and Jay can only watch, uncomfortable, while she excuses herself and fumbles for her purse by her chair and hurries out into the comfort of the night.

The Parrot has last call. Leo tells one final, bitter war story entirely in French, and Jay staggers home on mist-slick, black ribbon streets under a smudge of cloud-wrapped quarter-moon.

Home.

The empty bungalow and the bed hes never slept in. Cold, stiff sheets, absent of wordless little girls, just the trace of Gingers perfume, and the weight of Vaughn and the murdered mermaid still unshakable; drunken spinning lime-and-reposado-fueled dreams of an impossible future to which only a Lost Boy can aspire.

Theyve been moved to a new situation," Magonis tells Jay the next morning in the video store. The shrink has a new walker, flat black, with big wheels and hand brakes. "You shouldnt have taken that L.A. run."

But would it really have mattered? Jay asks himself, and answers himself: No. Slow-witted by a searing hangover, he rings up rentals for a reptilian, leathery-skinned long-timer in bicycle shorts: Forrest Gump, The Wiz, Ordinary People, and Double Fattiness, one of Sam Dunns chop-socky cla.s.sics.

"Movies died in 95," the customer gripes, pretending Magonis isnt there.

"Have a nice day," Jay says. The door jingles out of tune as the shop empties of the interloper. Eyde. Jay remembers her name too late.

"New situation. What is that?"

Magonis approximates a shrug. "A new situation-"

"-like, another house on the island? Two Harbors?" Jay feigns calm and logical; hes already decided its the best strategy (or ruse de guerre, as Leo would say) for now.

"No." Magonis puts his hands in the pockets of his slacks and jiggles keys. "A more permanent situation," Magonis says. "Long-term. Protection-wise."

"Where?"

"On the mainland. Or maybe not. Im sorry, its none of your business. Or mine, for that matter. Look, Jay-"

"You could find out, though."

"It was never to be made permanent. We said that going in. Jay, this witness protection protocol has been around for a long time, with remarkable success rates, based on a few simple principles including 'need to know, and 'inst.i.tutional firewalls."

"Is that good for Helen, moving her around all the time, is that healthy?"

Magonis stares at him.

"Because Im just saying. I dont know for a fact, but Im guessing she and Ginger have soldiered through seven rings of h.e.l.l long before they got thrown into this one, you and Public and the program, and subsequently you guys go yanking her, them, from place to place, school to school, situation to situation w.i.l.l.y-nilly without a thought about how that impacts Helen-and Ginger, but especially Helen."

"Helens fine."