Fifty Mice

by Daniel Pyne

  “Mice, but yeah.” But Jay’s mind goes elsewhere. Back to where this journey started. Vaughn and the lab: experimental neurosis. “To the doors.” Consuming themselves, in their choler and confusion.

  “The what?”

  “Doors,” Jay repeats. “Forward to and through the doors.”

  “Oh.” Dunn, nodding as if he understands.

  Crackle of static on the radio, some airport control tower, comprehensible only to Sam. Dunn asks why Jay quit that job with Vaughn. Jay recalls the day he was tasked with shaving two dozen rats’ heads, placing them in a clamp-like restraint, using a glorified drill press to puncture tiny holes just behind the ears into which thin wires were cemented and soldered to solid-state microprocessors the rats wore like football helmets, chin-strapped on, blinking teal LEDs and a whip antennae, and then Vaughn’s project leader, a sun-starved psycho-behavioral post-doc goth goddess with violet-tinted contact lenses and a tangle of ginger hair and a filthy lab coat, tapping steadily on a wireless tablet keyboard sending messages to the rats that had them gyrate tilt-a-wheel until their eyes bled and they convulsed into comas.

  “I got let go,” Jay says. “Funding issues.”

  A dreamworld flickers in and out of existence as the squawk of air traffic control harmonizes with the drone of the plane. Parallel rows of halogen lights beckon them forward, skewed in the cockpit windshield.

  “Jeez. We’re cockeyed,” Dunn says, and fusses with the wings to straighten their orientation to the runway guides as the Cessna gently falls to its impending landing.

  Then: a muddle of flashing red lights: another phalanx of patrol cars, this time police, racing along on either side of the runway to keep pace with the plane.

  Unnerved, Dunn says, “Shit—what are—FUCK. Cops.” Jay, of course, assumes it’s Public’s guys, Feds, waiting to re-collect him, and starts to mentally resign himself to it, but Dunn throws the throttle forward, and the engine complains because: “Oh, man, and I got twelve kilos of pot in the luggage bay. SHIT. SHIT.”

  Twelve kilos of—what?

  Landing gear toes the tarmac, the tires skid and the plane bounces. Directly ahead of them, at the far end of the runway, are more cop cars and emergency vehicles and lights flashing spectral through the fog. The Cessna, powering up, accelerates toward the blockade, landing gear touching twice more before leaving the tarmac for good and barely clearing the hardware below, men in fire suits and uniform frozen, watching as the plane careens over them, one strut clipping something with a sickening metal shriek of a wheel torn loose, and the plane is tugged violently sideways, Sam Dunn screaming as he tries to hold his plane from nose-diving left: “LOSE THE WEED! LOSE THE WEED!”

  The Cessna lifts wildly, knifes into the fog, and the police dragnet vanishes behind them. Muffled cry of the engines peaking and then simply cutting out. Stalled.

  Silence.

  “Initiating plan B,” Dunn mumbles, numb.

  Jay is afraid to move. Waiting for the impact of a crash . . . that doesn’t happen. Plan B?

  Dunn is fighting with switches, trying to will the engines to restart, and yelling at Jay: “THERE’S A—I’M—DUDE, helpmeout . . . LUGGAGE HATCH! IN THE BACK! IN THE BACK! THROW—THE WEED—OUT the DOOR—BEFORE I PUT THIS FUCKER DOWN! I’LL . . .” Dunn doesn’t finish the thought.

  Scrambling back through the cockpit only because maybe then Dunn will shut up and concentrate, losing his balance, catching himself on the bulkhead, Jay gropes at the prominent handle he finds on the floor in the back of the cabin, twists and yanks the compartment hatch open, revealing: nothing. No dope. Just the mailbags. He braces himself to turn, confused, frowning, and say something to Dunn, but Dunn is no longer at the Cessna’s controls and as Jay’s brain struggles to process all these incoming contradictions his world explodes because the plane finds ground.

  The noise of the impact is so deafening Jay registers only the change of pressure in his ears. He’s thrown violently forward, feetfirst, but somehow catches and braces himself between the backs of two seats while the fuselage fishtails and carves like the bow of a boat through turf and mud that sprays helter-skelter into the cockpit behind a bright curtain of shattered windshield glass as the plane finally impales itself on the low branches of a huge tree, bark and greenwood erupting scattershot, the smell of burnt wood and jet fuel and a gray darkness that grows a muffled silence, fingers of fire reaching upward, smoke gathering, the sound of Jay’s breathing, coughing, his own heartbeat, the sound of his shoes banging on metal, the searing pain that shoots through his ankle and then a perfect oval punches out of the darkness as the Cessna’s door falls away and a shadow passes. Chalky light spills in on Jay, the weblike fractured branches of the tree crowd the cabin, but he’s been sheltered by the seats.

  The Cessna’s torn and buckled metal tick tick ticks with stress points released. Hacking up the acrid smoke, Jay tumbles out of the plane, onto the cold, wet grass of a small city park. Fog hangs curtained across a bright green field bordered by trees that seem to be holding the formless drapery aloft.

  He rises onto his hands and knees, looks back at the plane. Tangled fingers of oak have punctured the cockpit like an iron maiden where Sam was sitting. Tongues of flame lick the broken cockpit glass still held in the windshield’s warped frame. Reflection of tree, sky, fire, and the exquisitely fractured safety glass prevent Jay from seeing inside.

  Sirens, distant, mournful. Growing louder.

  Jay gets up, his ankle fat, aching. And he runs. Like Ginger told him to.

  Often, even after years, mental states once present in consciousness return to it with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will; that is, they are reproduced involuntarily. Here, also, in the majority of cases we at once recognize the returned mental state as one that has already been experienced; that is, we remember it. Under certain conditions, however, this accompanying consciousness is lacking, and we know only indirectly that the “now” must be identical with the “then”; yet we receive in this way a no less valid proof for its existence during the intervening time. As more exact observation teaches us, the occurrence of these involuntary reproductions is not an entirely random and accidental one. On the contrary they are brought about through the instrumentality of other immediately present mental images. Moreover they occur in certain regular ways which in general terms are described under the so-called “laws of association.”

  —HERMANN EBBINGHAUS (1885)

  Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology

  | 20 |

  HIS KEY IN THE DEADBOLT LOCK.

  His lock.

  His apartment door, which he’s unlocked at least a thousand times. Jiggling metal against metal, but the deadbolt won’t budge and a woman’s voice calls out querulously from inside: Who is it?

  Who is it? For a moment he’s confounded, and he steps back to make sure that he’s at the right door, even though he knows he is, this door he’s opened and closed and gone in and out of without thinking about it, instinctive, but after a month in the shifting sands of witness protection, his senses are dulled again, his compass broken. Anything could be true. Or nothing.

  The tiny security peephole in the door ripples with the black-and-hazel smear of a tiny, distant eye pressed against it. Jay removes the key from the lock and steps back.

  Jay says that this is where he lives.

  The voice disagrees, and points out that, in fact, it lives here, evidenced by the fact that it is inside and Jay is out in the hallway with a key that doesn’t work.

  Erased.

  Embarrassed, he corrects himself: he used to live here: there is no response to his apology.

  His body still aches from the impact of the Cessna’s crash landing, his legs are dead from running, he reeks of smoke and sweat and maybe, he considers, he’s been concussed, because if he was thinking straight he should never have com
e here to begin with, should have known that his apartment would be emptied and re-rented as part of the deletion that Public claimed was foundational to the program.

  Jay puts his head to the door and asks if he could just, for a moment, look inside and see it again. He wants to know that something he remembers is true.

  He hears the woman, farther back in the apartment, moving around, calling out to him to go away before she calls the police.

  • • •

  His Los Angeles, washed-out, uninviting, dour.

  Mid-city, disgorged from a 720 rapid bus, it feels to him like a foreign country. The squat, blunt, tawny sage hills rising above the crazy quilt of architecture, malignant scatter of stucco boxes, and the intermittent cluster of high-rises or skyscrapers, louvered parking structures, the theme-park shopping malls, the food trucks, phone stores, walking Sikhs, cut fruit vendors, hot dogs wrapped with bacon, inflatable toys on sticks. The scream of billboards, branding, half-naked boy-hipped women you’ll never know gazing down with hollow promises, someone else’s dreams.

  The long-shadowed rectilinear moil.

  The shimmering rivers of traffic.

  The mad, quailing palms.

  At the boxy, tan, Beaux Arts Hollywood Y, Jay pushes from bright, flat flaxen daylight in through the side gymnasium doorway, a stark silhouette that resolves into a man, and he stands for a while with hands in pockets, watching basketball players run the court, sneakers squeaking, bark of voices, slap of bodies and limbs colliding, the sharp percussion of the ball on the floor.

  There are familiar faces, a couple of heads turn, with partial recognition: the equivocal look, half-nod, but the game flows on. Jay forgotten.

  He doesn’t see anyone from his old employer, Buckham & Buckham. They’re still at their desks, he thinks.

  He wants to take a shower, but the Sikh at the desk says Jay’s membership has lapsed, in fact, he owes more than a hundred dollars in delinquent fees and there’s only seventeen and change in his old wallet, so he turns and goes back outside, where a dim, bloodshot descending sun is still trying to burn through the fog, fat in a nankeen sky.

  • • •

  ACCESS DENIED ACCESS DENIED ACCESS DENIED.

  A reflection of Jay’s resignation in the screen of a cash machine mocks him. There’s a short line of impatient people behind him; he punches the keyboard again, sure that his password is right, knowing before he started that federal due diligence would have blocked this path along with all the others, but stubborn, he gets nothing but irritable beeps and denial of service, and finally swirls away as the machine eats his cash card and resets:

  PLEASE INSERT YOUR CARD AND ENTER YOUR PIN CODE.

  The dead eye of the security camera stares back at him.

  • • •

  A new hire, the security guard in the lobby not only didn’t recognize him, but had never heard of Buckham & Buckham, and said the seventh floor was vacant and even confided that building management was having a hard time finding new tenants for several full-floor suites on account of the stagnant economy and soft commercial rental market and Jay was welcome to go up and look, the doors were open.

  Upstairs, on seven, Jay rips protective paper from a window to let light fall in on the emptied low-slung span of what was once his workplace. There’s nothing here, just the faint impression of the desks and cubicle walls on the dirty carpet, and the raw guts of an IT system disemboweled and sprouting out of the floor at junction boxes.

  Jay takes it all in. The quiet is awful, and the air is stale. Public wasn’t kidding when he told Jay they’d make him vanish; not just him but everything that defined him. How far does it go? He’s not as upset as he should be, and he wonders why. His old life feels like a story someone told him, secondhand, unreal.

  He waits, listening for a haunting of voices he remembers but cannot recall. He wonders, not for the first time, but for the first time with a kind of clarity: What happens when everything you’ve known is made a lie? And all the lies play true? Are you the sum of your memories, or a collection of consensual, verifiable facts?

  • • •

  He still has a key to her apartment, too, but decides to ring the bell so as not to frighten her, and just in case she changed the locks, not wanting to repeat the distressing episode that happened at his own apartment, earlier; he hears the familiar shuffle of her fluffy slippers on hardwood flooring and, after a moment, Stacy opens the door and comes face-to-face with Jay. Evidently, it still takes her breath away.

  “Oh. My. God.”

  She looks good. But then, she always looks good, she works hard at it. Jay says hi quickly, moves past her, into the tiny, single-girl apartment he thinks he remembers, but where now a hard-bodied guy in a tight black T-shirt and Prada suit stands up from the love seat like a bit character in a failed ’90s TV crime drama. Jay can’t remember his name; it’s the guy he thought moved to Houston.

  “Oh my God,” Stacy says again, in rising pitch.

  “Hi. I’m sorry. I’ll explain everything in a second, but first I gotta call Vaughn.” Jay cuts his best indifferent look to hard body as he crosses to the phone. “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” the guy asks, standing up. It’s the cage fighter: Juan Pablo. He’s bigger than Jay remembers, and not remotely South American. But not really a cage fighter, Jay reminds himself, and Jay’s pretty certain about it; that was just Vaughn, riffing, stoned. Wasn’t it?

  Jay glances at Stacy. “Tell him. Tell him who I am.” He lifts the receiver from the cradle, and dials.

  Stacy still hasn’t closed the door. “What are you doing here, Jay? Did they let you . . . out?”

  “What? Out of where? I’ve been in witness protection, you won’t believe what I—”

  Stacy cuts him off, cold: “Your mom called me and explained to me about the, you know, breakdown, and—”

  “My mom can’t call anybody, Stacy. I told you that.”

  “Yeah, well, she said that you’d say that, and that it was all part of your, you know, situation.”

  Jay listens to the phone ring on the other end of his call. “Come on, Vaughn. Pick up.”

  “This situation you have—this condition—oh, Jay, why didn’t you tell me the truth to begin with? I feel like I don’t even know you, I feel like I’ve wasted—”

  Jay, attention divided, “Stacy, trust me on this: my mom didn’t call you.”

  But Stacy’s not listening. “You did this, anyway. You were the one who didn’t want a commitment. Didn’t want strings, take it as it comes, well lah dee dah, Jay, lah dee dah.”

  “What are you talking about? I proposed to you. We’re engaged.”

  “No. Not really. Never really. I even had to buy the goddamn ring. Here. You can have it back.” It’s in her hand. She presses it into his palm, and the diamond bites.

  “Stace.”

  “You didn’t want it, Jay. That’s why we could never pick a date. You know you didn’t, and okay, maybe neither did I and now—this—well, I’m sorry but—”

  “There is no ‘this.’ Let me just—why doesn’t his machine pick up?”

  Hard body looks to Stacy. “Baby, do you want me to take him outside?”

  Baby? “GODDAMMIT!” Jay slams the phone down, and whirls on the Prada man. He inexplicably growls, “Back off, motherfucker!” and it sounds incredibly lame and stupid coming out of his mouth.

  The puzzled look from Juan Pablo. “Hey, now.” Still, Prada man drifts sideways, wary, rolling his shoulders, wiggling his fingers, taking Jay’s measure.

  “They said that you might do this, too,” Stacy says. “They said—”

  “What, that I went crazy? Stacy, they grabbed me, they put me into—”

  Talking over him: “No, not crazy, just—”

  “They?”

  “The doctors. After I talked to your
mom.”

  “Wait. Did they tell you, what, Jesus—they’ve got me in some mental institution somewhere? And you believed them?”

  “. . . just, more, like mixed up, and . . .”

  “TOTAL strangers—”

  “. . . you know, and kind of delusional, baby, which the doctors said makes you think things are happening that . . . aren’t.”

  Jay, keeping tabs on the cage fighter, shakes his head. “Stacy. Somebody calls you on the phone and says I’m in the mental hospital, says she’s my mother, and you go, ‘Oh, okay’? SHIT, Stacy, goddammit! I mean—”

  “This is hard for me, too.”

  He tries to stay calm: “Okay. They, U.S. Marshals, took me into witness protection. They think I’ve seen something, or know something, I dunno, it’s insane—the whole fucking thing is one long bad dream—”

  Stacy is in her own aria. “—do you think I’ve slept one night since you didn’t come home? I can’t stop thinking about you, and how I had no idea you were—your Facebook page? Is blocked—”

  “Stacy, will you listen? Look at me. This is me—”

  “—and I’m just not good at this sort of thing—”

  “—You know me. I’ve been disappeared, and you’re one of the only people I can—”

  “—but I can’t pretend that this doesn’t like . . . change everything. I mean. I can’t be your nurse, Jay, I’m strong, but not that strong, and you’ve gotta go back, and whatever it is, whatever dark storm you’re going through, let them help you, well, you gotta let them get you well again and let me . . . go—”

  Jay stares at her, suddenly hearing her; he’s hearing her for the first time.

  Tears streaming down Stacy’s face. “Jay—? Jay—?”

  “—what?”

  Her voice soft, soothing, the way she might talk to a child: “They gave me a number. To call. In case. Let me,” and she’s moving to the telephone, “so let me just call the hospital and tell them you’re here, and—”