Fifty Mice

by Daniel Pyne

  And now he understands just how stupid this was.

  It’s pitch black in front of him; the ductwork is filthy, the palms of his hands already grimed. Up ahead he can only faintly make out a ghosting of light that spills sideways from a blunt angle of darkness at some indefinite distance (five feet? five hundred?) that must be a bend in the passageway, and, beyond it, the next possible means of egress. He’s already exhausted from pulling himself in. Shower steam floods the vent and slicks him. He can’t get fully to his hands and knees. Legs scraped raw, no pants, just his sweaty boxers and the flimsy, backless hospital gown, Jay has no way to put his shoes on, so he pushes them ahead of him and starts to slither-crawl away.

  The thin metal flexes, of course, and thunders like a kettledrum. So much for the element of surprise. Or any real hope of success. What keeps Jay going at first is just the certainty of the consequences of getting caught, now that he’s made his intention to run known. He keeps crawling, mouse in a maze, Vaughn be damned, hoping for that impossible resolution to an experiment with a foregone conclusion.

  Mice, Jay muses ruefully. Whose genetic makeup is surprisingly like ours.

  At the first intersection he veers right into a slightly bigger, and filthier, ducting, curtained with sheets of lint and cobwebs, praying that this one may lead somewhere promising, but having no confidence that it does.

  Hands and knees, now, faster, he keeps crawling. The squeak and thrum of his knees and skin. Somewhere far behind him there is the sound of the bathroom door burst open and he hears Public saying: “How lame is this?” And then: “He is not helping himself here.” And, shouting, louder, presumably with his head up in the vent: “Jay?” bent and amplified by unforgiving air duct acoustics. “Goddamn it.”

  Doe is also talking, but not to Public, and not behind him, but below him. On a walkie-talkie or cell phone. Coordinating his containment from the room or hallway across which the ducting is taking him.

  But now there’s no light at all. His eyes try to adjust, he can feel them straining to see anything. Jay is moving as fast as he can, oblivious to any obstruction in front of him, throwing out one hand after another so that at least he’ll touch it before he crashes into a dead end, arriving abruptly at an intersection of three different, smaller ducts, each snaking off into its own dark oblivion. Each too small, as he touches the sharp edges of the openings and makes the quick calculation, for him to continue.

  He hears movement and footsteps below him. Doe and Public, strolling, taking their time. He imagines them listening for him: eyes tilted up to the ceiling tiles of a big empty ward. He holds his breath.

  “See, a woman would never do this,” Doe is saying.

  “What—escape from safety?”

  Their voices keep moving under and away from him.

  “No. It’s this: a man crawls back down the umbilical, expecting the womb . . .”

  Jay’s eyes track fits of spark and color that first he thinks are some kind of entoptical floater, but when he moves his head they reflect hard off the galvanized steel and betray a vertical shaft directly above him, with vents leaking daylight in dreamy stripes. Maybe, he thinks carelessly. Hope is for suckers, Nietzsche responds—well, more or less. Jay contorts to a standing position as quietly as he can, and starts to wriggle upward in the vertical shaft, pressing his elbows and his knees against the opposing planes of steel, like a rock climber in a chimney. The ducting groans and shudders on its mounts.

  “. . . but a woman, a woman confronted with this cold, dark, narrow passageway to God only knows where . . .”

  Doe and Public, walking back.

  “How’s that divorce going?” Public ribs.

  A burst of static from a walkie-talkie, high above; a huge grille has been pulled and the purplish-pale and square-haired head of a uniformed cop appears, leaning half inside, with a flashlight, sending an optimistic flutter of beams down the sides of the air shaft, but never quite reaching Jay.

  “. . . a woman sees it for what it is. She knows it’s hopeless, because it’s exactly like her last four relationships. Dark, narrow, and humiliating dead ends.”

  Public laughs.

  The flashlight retreats and the cop disappears and Jay is left slipping, groaning, his greasy sweat-streaked skin burning as he tries to hold himself up with only the friction of his limbs against the sheet metal. He’s about ten feet up; falling down is not an option. He has those queasy gym-class butterflies he’d get rope-climbing when he was finally able to go all the way to touch the ceiling. But a frantic twist and shimmy brings him up to the next junction, where he can find purchase on the horizontal shaft there and slowly pull himself to relative safety. But now what? This duct is smaller than the lower ones, and he can only wiggle forward, on his belly, arms flippering to propel him, his lower legs barely clearing the angle of the up shaft. Thump thump thump-thump thump-thump. He struggles over a series of interchanges, scraping across seams. All the fight is out of him, a weird aimless momentum keeps him moving forward: escape imitates life. The duct snakes left, snakes right, and executes a sharp L-turn, each new passageway growing narrower and tighter than the last.

  He feels a zephyr on his face, and smells fresh air. The tunnel ahead slopes away dramatically, curving down and twisting. Jay stops and contemplates the drop. It’s not viable. No way can he control the descent, and he doesn’t know what lies ahead. It could be another vertical, down which he would plunge headfirst. And probably die.

  Shit. He has to go back. Backward. No turning around. An access panel pops open behind Jay’s feet, and the flush-faced cop jabs his crew cut into the ducting, jack-in-the-box, flashlight beam aimed right at and blinding Jay as he looks back into it.

  “Yo.”

  Jay, spooked, reflexively pulls himself away from the pop-up cop, forgetting the steep drop ahead in the ducting, and then as gravity wraps its heavy arms around him he tries to catch himself, but the sweat-oily palms of his hands find no purchase on the air duct steel, and his weight passes the tipping point and Jay plummets down the duct, a fleshy toboggan, helpless, into utter darkness. It happens so fast he barely registers the abject terror that, later, he will always feel when he remembers the fall. There’s just the vague, disembodied feeling that this probably won’t end well. His nerves and senses are seared by the dull shriek and agony of his skin skidding on metal. A square of light hurtles toward him, breakneck, hardly the glow at the end of the tunnel that near-death stories always go on about, but maybe death comes at you in an angry rush, or maybe it’s just daylight through the metal screen crosshatching of a rodent guard affixed inside an exterior vent.

  Bigger and bigger and bigger as he plummets toward it, holding in its tracery sky, clouds, and that bright flare of sun into which Jay literally explodes, hashing his face and shoulder as the grille tears loose, and he tumbles out and drops, mostly naked, scared, heart pounding, hips and shins raw in the fresh air, legs and arms whirling without purpose. Later he’ll be told he fell thirty feet into a dumpster filled with trash bags that saved his life, the cardboard and loose garbage erupting as it swallowed and cushioned him.

  He doesn’t remember it.

  He remembers the narrowing air shaft, the impossible decline, the cop-in-a-box discovering him, a howling tornado of pain, an odd limbo of float, and suddenly not being able to breathe.

  The wind is knocked out of him. His lungs heave and spasm, emptied by the impact of the fall. He isn’t sure if he’s been paralyzed or if it’s just the dead weight on his limbs that’s making it so hard to move.

  “Breathe, Jay. Come on.”

  Someone claws away the collapse and gently lifts him at the waist, easing air back into his empty chest. John Q. Public has clambered up and over and into the bin, dug through for Jay, and found him, stunned, blue-lipped, eyes wide, and: “Alive. Thank God.”

  Thank God? For a moment, Jay wonders if he’s misjudge
d them. Or is it just another indication of how desperately they need what he can’t give them? He gasps, gulps air. His arms fold into his chest, weak. Blood beads and runs down his neck from the crosshatch wound that stretches from his right eye and temple to his ear.

  “Jay.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t move.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Sure, but don’t move. Let us—let us—”

  Mulish, Jay rolls over, getting his knees underneath him, and another pair of hands helps him rise out of the garbage, the smell of it suddenly overwhelming him, his senses returning, aligning, and the worried looks of Public and the purple-faced cop who have taken him into custody for something he didn’t see, and the bright sun and the glare of the whitewashed concrete side of the hospital or whatever it is, and one tall, lean laughing lunatic palm tree looming over him and shaking its unhinged head.

  “I’m okay,” Jay says, and nods for some reason, though he most assuredly is anything but.

  | 5 |

  HE TRIES TO MAKE IT A GAME.

  All the unrelenting stress has sharpened his senses to a kind of jittering hyperlucidity that feels almost like a superpower.

  Or just too much coffee.

  His fall has taken the fight out of him. He’s a stick in the gutter after a storm, caught in the current of runoff, hurtling helplessly toward a drain.

  They’re on their way to what Public has called a transfer point; a black cloth bag is loosely draped over Jay’s head, his hands are free. Where daylight bleeds into the darkness at his neck and shoulders, a bright clutter of what Jay guesses is landscape passes outside. And what else? The press against his shoulders of two fleshy U.S. Marshals in the backseat of a vehicle that smells of vanilla air freshener and cigarettes and french fries. He could take the hood off, but they’ve asked him not to in a way that precludes arguing about it. The mewling hum of the car means it can’t, he decides, be more than four cylinders, and a murmur of low front-seat voices, and the wheezy muffled shoop shoop shoop of traffic passing in the opposite direction suggests they’re still on city streets, windows up: muffled talk radio bleats for a moment from an adjacent car, then bus brakes wheeze, a distant siren tails away and the tires click and pop across rents and seams in the roadway. Must be the 101. A turn indicator ticks. Now they’re taking an exit ramp. Stale frozen air blows back from the air conditioner; it’s been unseasonably hot.

  One of the marshals wears an unfortunate cologne. Everything goes dark as they pass through a tunnel, or freeway underpass. A greenish flicker belies a canopy of trees, and the car slows to residential speeds, slows, stops. Hot, sweet fresh air floods the backseat as both doors gape, and the marshals on either side of him slide away, one of them pulling Jay with him, and helping him find his feet on a sidewalk.

  His arm, shoulder, and hip are really starting to ache from the hard landing in the garbage bin.

  They’re walking, and he’s trying not to stumble.

  Leaves shiver around his feet in light breeze, the midwinter sun reflects up at him from flagstone pavers, brown shoes beneath khaki chinos on one side of him, sneakers and new jeans on the other.

  “Step up.”

  More flagstone.

  “Step up.”

  Sun, shade, some kind of porch; he’s at the mercy of their lead. Someone knocking on wood. The wheeze of a screen door, the hands on his upper arms urge him over the threshold and inside.

  Someone’s house? Wall-to-wall carpet, a suggestion of sectional sofa, the legs of a table. Sound of a television, more voices from another room, overlapping, and the Scooby-Doo theme song. Jay knows all the words.

  “We ran into gridlock again on the four-level, got off at Silver Lake,” Public is explaining to whoever is immediately in the room with them, “took Beverly to Highland, then cut down to Olympic, which was, I don’t know, so messed up. They’re putting in storm drains, it’s backed up from Hauser. Pack a snack.”

  “You should have dropped down to Pico,” someone says.

  “Yeah, but Pico sucks when you hit Robertson. That whole Cheviot Hills run? Brutal.”

  Jay’s hood is pulled up and off.

  He stands in a modest, sparsely furnished living room filled with strangers bathed in soft light. Jay’s focus whipsawing as Public makes introductions: “Jay, this is Gavin Patterson . . . that’s Julia Del Valle. Mark Meyers from the Justice Department—” There are hands to shake, and the faces, one after the other. Jay can’t possibly keep them all straight. “—Ms. Doe you’re acquainted with; the marshals, Rodriguez and Kelly, who escorted you here and who are only temporarily assigned to this location, so say hello and good-bye, you won’t be seeing them again—”

  Amid the mixing, shuffling cast of characters a small television screen in the far corner glows with Cartoon Network. A very small girl sits cross-legged in front of it, shoulders hunched, with her back to Jay, and on the sofa sits a tired and sulkier-looking version of the young woman with the crooked smile Jay recognizes from Public’s file snapshots, back in the hospital, in another life.

  “—and over there, that’s Ginger. Say hi, Ginger. And her little one’s Helen . . .”

  Ginger raises frank black eyes to Jay and doesn’t say anything, expressionless: no makeup, angry ink-black hair that could use some brushing out, an oversize pale green cardigan sweater pulled over her knees, as if she’s freezing in all this empty Santa Ana heat. The little girl, Helen, doesn’t turn, stays lost in her cartoons.

  Under Ginger’s steady gaze, Jay self-consciously touches the crosshatched scab on the side of his face, and Meyers puts a hand on his shoulder and slides into Jay’s line of sight, blocking mother and child.

  “So, hey. Listen, Jim. On behalf—”

  “It’s Jay.”

  “—Jimmy, on behalf of the entire U.S. Justice Department, I just want to say—”

  Jimmy?

  Public interjects, “—um, Mark, he’s not—”

  “—say that anything you need, you know, just holler, because we’re here for you on this one thousand percent—”

  “—not fully on board yet,” Public cautions.

  He means I’m uncooperative, Jay thinks. Not quite down with the program.

  Meyers fronts a frown. “What?” Jay watches the man’s eyes drift to Public, clouded with doubt. Public just shrugs.

  “I want to talk to a lawyer,” Jay says simply. He’s trying to be cool, cooperative, still holding out some thin Panglossian hope that they will come to their senses and realize their mistake. The room goes quiet, except for Helen’s cartoon show.

  Jay feels the woman named Ginger’s dark eyes shift to him again. He looks at her. She pushes the hair off her face, like she’s just now noticing he’s there.

  It occurs to him that she’s not beautiful, not like Stacy. But there’s something about her that makes it hard for him to look away. And when he does, she stays with him, indelible.

  “Please?” Jay adds, more subdued, and probably, he understands, unnecessarily.

  • • •

  For a while, they leave him alone in a bedroom with crinkled Jay-Z posters taped to the wall and a NASCAR bedspread and high-school textbooks stacked haphazardly on an IKEA bookshelf. The desk is messy, but the carpet is new; there’s a faint smell of fresh latex paint; it’s hard to say whether this is supposed to be a boy’s or a girl’s room, or, Jay thinks, maybe it’s neither, maybe it’s all for show. His reality turned inside out, Jay is no longer confident that he knows where the centerline is.

  Shadows crawl into the room and settle. The comings and goings and muted conversations in the house disarrange and offer him no answers to his increasingly anguished preoccupation with what the Feds could possibly want from him.

  His mind is sodden, his memory scrambled by disquiet. His recent past, as he thinks back on it, the weeks
and the months, lurch and stall, rock forward, backward, an inconsequential blur, details pinwheeling into foreground and just as quickly spinning away: a breakfast at Platters in Glendale’s Frogtown (who was that with?), a few random lines from The Breakfast Club, the big storm that knocked the tree down across Franklin, Vaughn sick from mescal shooters (or was it Aaron Olson? Or that strange guy Vaughn calls Trey?), the White Stripes at the Wiltern playing an uninspired short set, Stacy’s loser Kappa sisters with the beach house at Dana Point (he can never remember their names), the six-hundred-pound drag queen in a tennis dress at WeHo Halloween. But then other years leak in and cause chaos, scraps of nothing: fourth grade, a trip to Mammoth, his dad sacked out on the sofa during March Madness, the unfortunate collagen lip treatment that his mom didn’t need, the controller attack patterns in Nintendo Super Smash Bros. Melee, his first girlfriend Lisa’s lopsided breasts, the virginal Emma’s peculiar preoccupation with feet that creeped him out, and what was that bar on New Years ’06, in New York, the Village, with the grapefruit martinis?, and one particularly sweet reverse layup on a driveway backboard, among the desperate farrago of television, the scatter of Internet signal and noise, texting, posting, friending, gaming, taggings and selfies, the disconnection and loneliness, the information overload, the tedium and repetition: day, after day, after day, after day, immutable, unremitting, unremarkable.

  What of this could they possibly want?

  • • •

  Eventually one of the escort marshals, still trailing his miasma of aftershave (Rodriguez? Jay guesses) comes to get him, and leads him out into the narrow hallway and down to a kitchen where Public and Doe wait at a Formica breakfast table with a scary-thin lady lawyer who introduces herself as Arden Richter, and smokes a Marlboro Red with abandon.