Fifty Mice

by Daniel Pyne

  “What does your husband do?” Jay asks, just making conversation, being polite. Ginger has gone deep in her game again.

  “Boat babysitting,” Penny says. “Here and Two Harbors. You’d be surprised how many people got boats they just leave, never use, never come. I guess they probably intend to. So Cody keeps them all gassed and ready, anyway, like he runs the engine for a while, checks the battery, oil, hoses, does the upkeep, you know. Thing with a boat is you don’t use it, the ocean wants it, bad. Weekend people don’t think of that. It’s not like a vacation cabin you can just shut up and turn off the water and power and come back next summer and everything’s pretty much like you left it. Cody, he says boats are living things, you don’t show them a little love, they get sick and die. So.”

  “Sounds like a good gig.”

  “Yeah, well, and he can smoke his stinky bud all day, nobody gives a hoot.” Penny grins. “Hey, whyn’t I bring you some nachos? On the house.”

  “No, don’t.” Ginger, too quickly, the cold Ginger. She and Penny trade quick, hostile looks. “We’re leaving,” Ginger says. “Thanks, anyway.” She touches Jay lightly on the arm, pushes her chair back, and walks out. Jay can’t tell if her pique is honest or a performance. Either way, he doesn’t understand it.

  Penny watches her go, eyes dark. “I hope she’s got an upside.”

  “She does.” Jay puts a twenty on the table. “But I guess we do get what we deserve,” he says automatically, “right?” and wondering why he’s even said it, because it means nothing, just makes Penny blush.

  Ginger is waiting for him outside, arms folded. No expression, no hint of any emotion except an apparent impatience to drop the façade and get back home to Helen. But she takes him on a detour to the tiny grocery store. Glare of white fluorescence, a new flat-screen TV mounted over the cashier counter with murmuring advertisements and infomercials on some kind of continuous feed.

  Entering the store, she inexplicably takes his hand in hers and mines, from some other Bizarro Ginger, this weird flirty smile for the young Latina behind the counter, Floria’s daughter, and then, in Spanish, asks with pitch-perfect flustered self-consciousness where the condoms are.

  Turns out they’re under the counter, discreet, in a teak display box that reminds Jay of the way some high-end restaurants will bring a selection of exotic teas to the table at the end of a meal. Ginger buys half a dozen, sharing gentle quips with the Floria and flicking smoky eyes to Jay and back, shy, still smiling—Ginger hasn’t smiled this much the whole time he’s been with her—and slips her hand into the back pocket of his jeans as they walk out with their purchase.

  In the darkness, it all falls away. No smile, diffident expression, her hands to herself again.

  Streetlights haloed with night mist coming in off the channel.

  Jay has to ask, “What was that about?”

  “Couple of drinks at the Parrot, date night, we don’t want your friend Penny to think I’m not accommodating,” Ginger says. “Men have needs. I bet she and Cody go home, get baked, and have at it. Lack of chitchat notwithstanding.” She stops at a public trash can and empties the condoms into it.

  “Live the lie,” she says, and looks hard at Jay through the dark, false lashes, drilling deep, to his vacant soul.

  “Helen’s adopted,” Jay says. All of a sudden he feels the need to play a trump card, he’s tired of losing every hand.

  “Are you fishing, or did somebody tell you?” she shoots back, subdued. More of Public’s Machiavellian shit. “Can I give you some useful advice? Don’t trust him. Ever.” Then, defensive, “She’s my daughter, Jay, does it matter?”

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

  “I just . . . I don’t know. I need to know what I’m dealing with. Everybody’s got so many secrets.”

  “What you’re dealing with? You’re not. Dealing. With anything. You’re here to tell them what they want, and we’re together until you do or they get tired of asking or somebody comes and whacks you—which, I’m 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 doesn’t.

  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. “It’s 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 E’s (black, bad), bag lunch, the two o’clock 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 he’s 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 he’s 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 Spéciales Terre who lost his leg to an IED in the Côte d’Ivoire 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 Public’s 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 kid’s 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 it’s 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. “I’d give my right nut for a little of that moist comfort.” Tripod leers, and Jay wants to hit him, but isn’t eager to taste the metal of the gun.

  Maybe they’re 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 pornographic 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 Dunn’s sitting alone. Meanwhile, Tripod is asking Jay for what he calls a “who’s hotter bake-off”: Ginger vs. Stacy: “The government-subsidized gash or your old girlfriend?” Jay stare
s, numb. “Stacy by a mile, amiright?” Tripod’s drunk, on a roll, and launches into a semi-lewd tribute to Stacy’s “rack and back,” which, he insists, made the surveillance of Jay on the mainland well worth the hassle. Ginger, Tripod muses, “I would think is kinda bony.” But he allows that could be awesome, depending, and then waits for Jay’s 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 Jay’s cosmic good fortune to have been paired with such a quality individual of the female persuasion as Ginger, about this conversation, they fall quiet, don’t 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.

  “They’re DEA deep-cover guys,” Public explains gravely in the Emergency Room where Tripod gets treated. “They don’t mess around.” Public has shown up unsummoned, and Jay can now assume 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 Tripod’s real name.

  So it’s like that.

  He knows he needs to get out.

  • • •

  Jay tells himself he can’t afford to relax, it’s all a trap. But he’s missed this. Family, community, context. He can’t 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.

  “You’re holding back,” Magonis tells him.

  “I’m not,” Jay lies.

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

  “Supposing I was, and I’m 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—analysis of your own attitude 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 analysis of your attitude toward other people in that life.”

  Nights passed, indistinguishable, in tenebrous clubs and coffee joints and sports bars, the empty thicket of Jay’s 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 attitude 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 attitude, 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 it’s fine with him.

  “In the spirit of me being helpful and all,” Jay continues, “I’m just—it’s—” He starts over, “What you’re looking for—are you saying it’s 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 don’t know, diffidence?”

  Jay hesitates and asks the question he really meant to ask: “You guys don’t think I had something to do with what happened? I mean, to her.”

  “Flower girl.”

  Jay doesn’t think this merits a response.

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

  “No.” Jay is irritated. “I don’t, didn’t, like I said, even know her name.” He’s at a loss. “Look, I’m sorry I lied about it. Or . . . whatever. It’s just—I was—” catching himself, “I am engaged, I stepped out, I didn’t want to . . . you know. Because: my girlfriend. It’s not something I’m proud of, and I’m 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 I’ve been racking my brain for what I might have, what I possibly could have—you know—seen—and it’s 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, goddamn it,” the frustration boils over. “Shit.” He gestures at Magonis but the words are slow to follow: “I mean. What if. Maybe I didn’t see anything. But you want me to think I did. Think I’ve 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 Jay’s memory: liquid night, and he’s in it, running across an empty expanse with a mermaid cradled in his arms.

  “—so that I’ll 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 we’re being very careful not to do, Jay.” Magonis heaves himself and opens a window. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “Is it? I don’t know anymore.”

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

  “Or what if you’re just messing with my memory, trying to mix me up so that I can’t remember something?”

  “What if we are?”

  “You’d be assholes,” 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 don’t remember anything exactly the way it happened because we aren’t 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, can’t know, you can’t know for sure . . . that any of what we think we remember really happened?”

  Magonis’s slight shrug is equivocal. “We’re just talking, Jay. This and that.”

  Jay sinks back in the easy chair and puts his head in his hands, frustrated. “I don’t know what you want.”

  “No,” Magonis says. “You don’t know what you want. That’s what’s really holding us up here, isn’t it? The hard truth, as I’ve 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 you’ve just said could be true, depending. And we’re 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 can’t 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.