Fifty Mice

by Daniel Pyne

  Magonis nods, contemplative, eyes at half-mast. Jay catches his breath and wonders, irritated, if the shrink is falling asleep. And why the cigarette smoke doesn’t smell.

  “Sit down.”

  “I’ll stand, thanks,” Jay says.

  Magonis leans, stretches to his desk, his fingers waggle, find, and remove a fat, worn old-fashioned day scheduler from atop a pregnant manila file folder and bring it back so Magonis can hold it up for Jay’s inspection.

  “I believe this . . .”—he Frisbees it crisply across the room to Jay, who manages to catch it before it hits him—“. . . is your day planner.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Very retro.”

  “Okay.” Where’s this going?

  “We liberated it,” Magonis says. “Because, you see, what we’re gonna do, James, since you can’t, or won’t, or shouldn’t, remember—”

  For Jay, the response is almost automatic now: “—remember what?”

  Magonis smiles crookedly, revealing tiled yellow teeth. “Hey, make sure that your name is in there.” There’s something weird going on with his eyes. Only one of them is looking at Jay.

  Jay flips the cover. Front page dog-eared and scribbled with notes and odd phone numbers and the name JAMES WARREN printed in pen, as if by Jay, in Jay’s handwriting.

  Of course it is.

  “It’s yours?”

  “This isn’t my name.”

  “Well, neither is Jay, really, is it?”

  He keeps forgetting that they may know more about him than he cares to ever admit. But this is word games, really, and Jay’s more than willing to play. “Yeah. It is, yeah.”

  “But—”

  “It’s mine. Jay. I chose it.” He wonders if that information is in one of Public’s files.

  Magonis balks. “Okay. But on your birth certificate.”

  “Which one?” Jay asks sharply.

  Magonis nods, shakes his head, retreats into his professional avuncularity, and waits.

  Jay recognizes the entries in the day planner, yes. Hurriedly scrawled in his cramped half-cursive, cryptic, incomplete, sometimes lacking even sense. Words and phrases that remind him of nothing, but, yes, his writing, his days, his journal.

  With Jimmy Warren’s name.

  “I’m not ever going to be okay with this.”

  Magonis ignores him, pressing fat hands together. “So. What we’re gonna do, James—James or Jimmy? Or do you prefer Jim?” He’s enjoying this. “What we’ll do is go through the last year or so of your life, day by day, but not necessarily chronologically, and just, well . . . talk about what you’ve written in there about certain days. What happened, what you say happened, what really happened . . . what you remember happening . . . because together we’re going to try to color between the lines, if you will, fill in the missing details of each day of your lived life over the past three hundred and sixty-five days, or so, since what we have there, in your datebook, is, you have to admit, fairly sketchy.”

  Jay just stares at him. The cigarette, despite Magonis’s hard work on it, has remained the same size because, Jay realizes, it’s a smokeless, electric one.

  “How come you don’t use a computer calendar program?” Magonis muses aloud. “Or a phone app?”

  “What if I can’t remember details,” Jay asks, instead of answering.

  “Or don’t want to?”

  Jay doesn’t feel the need to respond to this, either.

  “Mmm. Sorry. Or. Or. Or. The variations are endless, this rumination can go on and on, Jim.” The shrink shifts in his chair with discomfort. Crosses his legs at the ankles. “For example, what if you have lacunar amnesia and simply blocked the memories?”

  “Oh, snap,” Jay says, momentarily abandoning himself to pure snark. He can’t help it. “I dunno. Gee. Maybe you can coax ’em out? Hypnotize me?”

  “Down, boy. This isn’t a test,” Magonis responds, subdued, but with just the slightest edge. “There are no right or wrong answers.”

  “Evidently, there are. Or I wouldn’t be here.”

  The hairpiece has slipped slightly. Rakish and silly, Jay thinks. Magonis’s left eye is lively and penetrating, the right eye fixed defiantly over Jay’s shoulder. “I want to help you. Can we call a truce and—”

  “—I want you to call me by my name,” Jay says.

  “What?”

  “Jay. That’s my name, Jay Johnson, and I’m asking, please, that in here we use my name, okay? Because that’s who I am.”

  He Frisbees the day planner back fluttering at Magonis, who makes no attempt to catch it, so it just misses the older man’s head and slaps against the high back of the armchair, dropping straight down behind him, where he struggles to twist and reach and get it out from between the cushions.

  “And if your own name may put you at risk?” Magonis asks.

  “I’ll take that chance. It’s mine. I don’t want another one.”

  “Fair enough,” Magonis says, as if he really understands. He balances the cigarette on the arm of the chair, twists the other way, and finally retrieves the day planner. “Fine. Okay. Jay, then. Jay. Please. Have a seat.” Smiles sadly, and means it.

  “No.”

  “. . . Or not.” Magonis takes up the cigarette. The LED at the end glows blue when he sucks on it. Maybe it’s running out of batteries. Coils of vapor skew sideways. He splits the planner open to FEBRUARY 12. His face angles up; right eye dead-aimed at Jay while the left one studies Jay’s scrawled entry.

  “Let’s start . . . here—”

  He thumbs Jay’s familiar chicken-scratch and haplessly abbreviated notations: a couple of phone numbers, a halfhearted stab at sketching a popular comic strip character, and a lopsided Valentine’s heart that’s been distractedly shaded in.

  And Jay thinks: Of all days, this day.

  “On the morning of February twelfth, you went to a flower shop on Melrose to order a dozen roses for—”

  And Jay remembers:

  Long, lissome fingers, black pearlescent fingernails, filling out a delivery order form with the name:

  “—S-T-A-C-Y.” Jay spelled it out. “Stacy.”

  The flower salesgirl, probably about nineteen, a kind of proto-goth mascara, low-cut black T-shirt spilling swells of pale blue-veined décolletage but half hiding the curving red-and-black tattoo of a snake; her black-set liquid amber eyes tilted up, tentatively, flirting. Or nearsighted. “Girlfriend?”

  Busted. “—Um, what? Oh, no, she’s, uh—”

  Magonis looks from the day planner to Jay. His eyes cast with unsettling indifference. “Your girlfriend was away?”

  “Fiancée. On business, yeah,” Jay says, his face burning. He sits down in the chair facing Magonis.

  “Fiancée. Stacy.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jay smiled at the salesgirl. Casual: “—She’s my sister. Yeah. Stacy. She, um, just broke up with her boyfriend and I . . . wanted to, you know.”

  Flower salesgirl (genuine): “For your sister. Ohmygod, that is so sweet.”

  Magonis touches his toupee lightly, checking its position, and, apparently satisfied, reads the rest of the February 12 page, quiet. Jay waits. “The phone numbers here,” Magonis muses. “Cold calls, we checked them. This doodle? Dilbert?”

  “Yeah.”

  Magonis flips the page over, glances at the blank backside, then returns to the scribbles Jay made on the day, then up at Jay again. Eyes hooded, off-kilter, unnerving.

  “I don’t keep a very . . . my notes, they’re, you know, to myself, so they’re not exactly . . .” Then Jay decides to go on the offensive. “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t see what comes of going into this kind of detail for a day where obviously nothing of interest to you or your federal employer remotely occurred.”

  Magonis extrapolate
s the obvious fact, “You went out with her. This girl at the flower shop.”

  “What?”

  Magonis repeats himself: the flower girl: Jay saw her, met her, hit on her, lied about being engaged, went out with her on the night of the 12th. Statement as question.

  Jay throws an embarrassed smile, “Jesus, did I write all that in there?”

  “No,” Magonis says.

  They both permit a discomfiting pause to swell.

  Evasive, Jay: “You know, um, I don’t really remember what happened, I . . .”

  “You met her after work,” Magonis says, “you had a drink, you went to her place, and—”

  Jay says, “I don’t see where this is . . .”

  “—you fucked her.”

  Water.

  In liquid shadow two clothed bodies churned in a claw-foot bathtub, the hot water cascading over the sides onto dogtooth tiles, Jay and this flower girl, wet, carnal, gasping, kissing, devouring each other—

  “—Hold on—that’s harsh—and I didn’t—”

  “Engaged in sexual relations. Made love. Hooked up. Or at least,” Magonis continues, “that’s what you told Larry Wilson, in your office.”

  Larry Wilson, booth-tanned, bullet head shaved clean and a vandyke that squirreled away crumbs, would daily rise up over the wall of Jay’s cubicle with two pencils jammed up his nostrils and sing Justin Bieber songs.

  “Listen, man, let me just explain something: Larry is not a reliable source for any—”

  Magonis cuts him off again: “You seemed to like telling the flower girl story, though, Jay, you told it to, well, everybody.

  “Although”—flipping through notes—“you told your friend Vaughn”—and Jay pictures Vaughn, Manchurian Global lab in chaos, as he struggles to secure whisker-thin electrode wires to tiny probes surgically screwed into the skull of an unhappy mouse as Jay regales him with some shaggy-dog saga of sexual shenanigans—“a slightly more graphic version in which the aforementioned Flower Girl moonlighted as an Exotic Underwater Dancer and you engaged in—”

  Here Jay closes his eyes hard to conjure:

  A Technicolor strip club where his flower girl floated weightless in a huge bottom-lit martini glass; grinding, wearing a blacklight-neon G-string and a shimmery, diaphanous latex flipper tail, pressing albino breasts flat against the glass of the tank. Jay, ringside, stared up at her, mouth open in an awestruck O.

  “Jesus.” Hands together, leaning forward toward Magonis, Jay asks, “What’re you guys, the Inquisition? I mean . . . this is unbelievable. This is my private life.”

  Or are they just stories?

  Magonis nods, not listening, “But, full disclosure here, we found no evidence of anal penetration, so I have to assume your recounting of the event for your friend allowed for a gentlemanly degree of exaggeration, if it’s true at all.” Then he frowns. “Is there really a bar where young women strip underwater?”

  Jay, completely confused, but intimidated, and embarrassed, and angry, stands up. “You know what? That’s enough. We’re done.” He licks dry lips and won’t look at Magonis, who quietly closes the day planner. No expression.

  “We can be,” Magonis says. “Done for today, if you’ll just confirm: that your girlfriend—sorry, fiancée—Stacy was away on business, that you asked this flower girl out on a date, and that you went home with her—or went somewhere, it would be really useful if you could remember that, but oh well—and then that you, the two of you, you and the flower girl, had sexual relations. Yes, no?”

  “She asked me out,” Jay says finally, as if that distinction makes all the difference.

  Another long silence.

  “I’m not here to judge you,” Magonis says.

  “Can you just tell me,” Jay protests, irritably, “what the hell does this have to do with—?”

  Magonis talks over him. “We don’t know. We don’t know. But.” He hesitates. “What would you say if I told you the flower girl was murdered early that next morning.”

  Jay’s not sure he heard this right.

  Reaching on the desk, Magonis finds and flips an envelope at a dumbstruck Jay.

  “Maybe executed. Could have been a professional job. Raising, I don’t know, all kinds of questions. As you can imagine.”

  Jay stares at the older man. There is that uncomfortable stillness that follows truth and recognition, the men measuring each other, one for signs of deception, the other for the tells of intention. Slowly, Jay opens the envelope and pulls out the collection of crime photos he was shown at the hospital among Public’s papers: unforgiving forensic pictures of a lurid murder scene: the flower girl floats chalk white in a bathtub of pink water, topless, breasts slack, hair in her eyes, slurred black mascara and filmy underwear, legs colt awkward, arms flung out, shot twice through her chest.

  “I think you told the marshals you didn’t know the woman in this photograph.”

  Jay’s thoughts clot, thick. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t make the connection—”

  “—Or you lied.”

  “What?”

  “Lied. Made an intentionally false statement.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I can’t answer for you.”

  Truly shaken: “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying whatever comes into my mind, Jay. Speculation. But then. I wasn’t there.”

  Jay blinks.

  “Done? No.” Magonis sucks his electric cigarette and shakes his head. “We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

  He’s right.

  And yes, Jay remembers the flower shop, corner of Melrose and Crescent Heights, cramped, dark, even in midday, fragrant, the special on a dozen roses from the refrigerated glass case, the pools of ceiling pin lights, the exotic tropicals, the potted palms.

  He remembers the salesgirl writing, she was left-handed and had that weird lobster-claw way of holding the fountain pen to keep her hand out of the ink. Her letters were looped and forward-leaning.

  “I have this second job,” she told him. “I work nights. But.” She looked up. “We close at two . . .”

  She handed him a slip of paper with the address of a Glendale strip club where bright light strobed across Jay as he came in, pushing past the thick-waisted underage frat boys clotted around the bouncer at the door trying to convince him they were twenty-one.

  When they had adjusted to the darkness, Jay’s eyes lasered to the luminous cylindrical water tank that dominated the middle of the club, glowing like a lava lamp, a naked mermaid curling, languid, swirling bubbles like free electrons and slowly stripping inside.

  Not the flower girl.

  No, Jay found his flower girl behind the bar in a tight black strip-club T-shirt, pouring drinks; she smiled when she saw him.

  He remembers how, later, he and the girl spilled out, drunk, laughing, into an empty parking lot, pale colored lights of the bar slowly flickering and dying as the place closed down and Jay swung her up into his arms and ran with her, legs aching, across the empty street, to the entrance of an apartment building where the lobby was tile and carved moldings and Deco teardrop hanging lights and an elevator cage waiting, the rattle of its gate, the hand-lever control that rotated and the cables hummed and the car rose and ribbons of darkness looped across awkward groping, and the girl had her blouse open, some kind of lacy black bra, the red snake tattoo—and her fingers curled through the latticework of the rising car—

  And now this unremarkable Zane Grey Building, office number 204, in which Jay looks at his hands. Magonis waits, his right eye wandering, aimless, as if losing interest.

  “Look, it’s not what you think. I didn’t, we . . . nothing happened. Okay? It was one time, I told a lot of stories, they were bullshit. No sex, we just . . .”

  —They stopped, he remembers, outside apartment 3H. Didn’t they? Didn
’t he lean back against the wall, drunk, blissful, the hallway and the whole world coruscating, and didn’t she smell faintly of jasmine, Maker’s Mark and vermouth, and didn’t he let the girl mold herself against him, warm and fecund; didn’t Jay brush tears from mascara-streaked eyes as she angled her head and kissed his hand, his neck, his—

  “—I didn’t know her name. I never asked,” Jay admits, senseless.

  Magonis quietly closes the planner. Switches his bogus cigarette off. No expression on his face except for those crazy eyes.

  | 10 |

  OR WAS THE HALLWAY COMPLETELY DARK?

  Or was the kiss just a brush of lips, chaste, regretful?

  Or did she fumble for her keys? Sly-sliding wistfully out from the cage of his arms along the textured wall to the deadbolt, and then opened it, she slipped inside, click of a wall switch, light spilling out as she glanced one last time back at Jay as he turned to go. Dark figures swarmed her as the door closed—he never saw them—shadows and shapes, her swift startled intake of breath, the scuffling feet on the hardwood floor.

  Or was everything under water?

  Harsh overhead light of the bathroom, tub filled with pink, her wide, frightened eyes as she toppled backward toward the roiling surface, filling, and a gun, aimed at her chest, finger thick on the trigger—

  —and the elevator’s byzantine prison.

  Ascending out of darkness, breaking the surface of water—blades of light cutting Jay into pieces with moving lattice shadows. He gasps for air. Then finds darkness again, above, as the elevator rises rises rises and everything goes black.

  He woke confused.

  Came awake in a car not his, empty downtown parking lot, framed in the fork of two elevated freeways gridlocked with morning traffic. Leaden roar of the essentially motionless cars. Shimmer of heat waves, light glinting off glass and chrome, dawn crawling over east L.A., the sun an insult, the air heavy with the brown sick—