Fifty Mice

by Daniel Pyne

  Baby mice giggle when tickled.

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

  Vaughn says this is horseshit, 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 Vaughn’s apartment to San Pedro and now on the fast boat, Jane Doe has been murmuring to him, perhaps debriefing him, but Jay can’t seem to hold on to what she’s been saying. He can’t shake the dead girl from his head. They are the only passengers 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 hasn’t seen them, and he doesn’t 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 marshal’s 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 résumé and wiki of his putative best friend: valley kid, original Pokémon 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 doesn’t. 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 wasn’t safe.

  It’s 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 what’s going on with those cardboard clouds.

  The dark bump 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 doesn’t look back at the mainland.

  A canopy of stars drops like a bad scrim, and the cruiser’s 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 Barry’s house and—

  —his heart sinks—

  —in the bedroom, the bed made up but abandoned, hospital corners and stiff white institutional pillows. Nobody in it: vacant: and nobody 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 Ginger’s personal effects on the bureau: the scant jewelry, the cut-glass bottles of perfume, the bulletlike cylinders of lipstick: the closet absent of clothing—

  —the one thing he hadn’t 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—

  —they’re gone.

  Jay’s 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 fuck 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 appetites and transgressions; the actress is old-school Christian Science and convinced that everything is a metaphor.

  Even Jay’s family’s departure.

  “The Lord giveth, and, well, you know,” she says, and asks, basically, what did he expect? It hits him: she’s 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, they’re monogamous, pairs mate for life, and both the guys and the gals take care of the oldfield babies.”

  Leo allows that he doesn’t like mice; rodents, in general, creep him out, although on one harrowing mission to Chile he was forced to eat degu (that country’s indigenous, brush-tailed rat relation) and, roasted over an open fire and well salted, it wasn’t 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 Byrne–like, and, à la Dumas, “Cherchez la femme, pardieu! Cherchez la femme!”

  The actress raises her glass. “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 associating 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 passive role assigned to the “poor ducks.”

  Some males, Jay admits, “were disoriented at first, and, you know, indifferent to the experiment. Focused solely on getting the fuck 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.”

&n
bsp; Leo grumbles that he doesn’t know what the fuck a kinship coefficient is, and, Flomax kicking in, excuses himself for the men’s 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 associating 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 didn’t 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. “They’re just mice,” Vaughn had said. “Don’t 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 he’s never slept in. Cold, stiff sheets, absent of wordless little girls, just the trace of Ginger’s 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.

  • • •

  They’ve 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 shouldn’t 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 Dunn’s chop-socky classics.

  “Movies died in ’95,” the customer gripes, pretending Magonis isn’t 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; he’s already decided it’s 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. I’m sorry, it’s 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 ‘institutional firewalls.’”

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

  Magonis stares at him.

  “Because I’m just saying. I don’t know for a fact, but I’m guessing she and Ginger have soldiered through seven rings of hell 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 willy-nilly without a thought about how that impacts Helen—and Ginger, but especially Helen.”

  “Helen’s fine.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Jay—”

  “No, listen—”

  “Jay—”

  “—I read somewhere that kids who go through serial relationships, foster care, whatever, can grow up to be sick puppies. You know? Serial killers and stuff. Sociopaths. They’ve done studies. You must know about them. You guys have a huge responsibility here.”

  “You understand our position, then,” Magonis says evenly.

  “No,” Jay says. He does, but he can’t.

  Magonis takes the electric cigarette from where he’s tucked it behind his ear. Rolls it between his fingers, no intention to smoke, just a prop, for effect. He says, “I thought you weren’t the family kind of guy.” He looks up into Jay’s eyes and holds them, level, piercing, unblinking. For some reason he wants Jay to say it.

  Jay drops all pretense. “I want them back,” he admits. “Okay? Yeah. You took away my life, I want the one you replaced it with. It’s only fair.”

  “Fair.”

  “That’s right.”

  Magonis bursts out laughing.

  • • •

  Public is less amused.

  “Jay,” he says, as a sigh, exhaling it. “This arrangement. It was never intended to be—”

  “—permanent. I know. No shit. Well, guess what?”

  Public studies him. At Magonis’s instruction, Jay has found the head Fed at Big E’s, waiting on a triple latte and chatting up Penny, cocktail waitress from the Garrulous Parrot who, from her easy body language and casual sharing of Public’s chocolate croissant, fingers brushing his, appears to have let the Fed introduce some measure of doubt into her fealty to the boat babysitter husband, Cody.

  “Bring them back,” Jay says simply, “and I’ll tell you the truth.”

  “This dislocation, your state of flux, it’s perfectly natural to form attachments. All the adjusting. It takes time.” Public finishes his thought before Jay’s offer fully lands. “What?”

  “I’ll tell you what I saw, everything,” Jay says, playing his trump card, and straightens up, stubborn.

  Silence. Public is, for once, flummoxed. And skittish: the way he sent Penny off when Jay showed up: brusque, impatient, unhappy. A man in flux? He repeats the offer aloud, frowning, as if trying to make sense of it.

  Reading the tea leaves of Public’s distraction, suddenly understanding that maybe this has been Public’s folly and crusade, and he’s gone all-in on it, Jay is gambling that it’s the conundrum in the Glendale strip bar that they crave unwrapped: the flower girl: the mermaid: the shooting that happened there: Jay, girl in his arms, running away, running away. It can’t be anything else, can it? He’s making this up as he goes along, hoping it will be enough, hoping that he can make it enough.

  They stand at the seawall, looking out at the rows and rows of boats and yachts moored, white, bright, promising, in the morning sun. The reek of fish and petroleum is almost overwhelming. A brac
e of high-school kids in yellow kayaks and orange life vests paddles out around the tongue of Casino Mole toward the kelp forests of Lover’s Cove.

  “Everything,” Jay says again, impassive, waiting. “You got me. I give up.”

  Public tilts his head to one side, a dog hearing a weird frequency, or wondering where you hid the squeaky chew toy. “I don’t understand, though. Why were you holding back from us all this time?”

  “Maybe you didn’t offer me the right incentive.”

  “But—”

  Jay, honest: “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Public seems to accept this. He’s pensive for a while, staring out at the harbor. Then: “What if they don’t want to come back?”

  Jay says nothing. In this experiment, the parameters are fixed, there are no variables.

  “Ginger and her daughter. You know . . . we can’t just force them to—”

  “—Yes, you can. You can do whatever you want. You’re God.”

  Public doesn’t deny it.

  | 27 |

  AN ENDLESS PARADE of whitecaps paints a watery tessellation as far as the eye can see.

  Unruly waves swell over the rocks of Abalone Point, sending cotton spumes of mist skyward with a rumbling, hissing symphony of indefatigable yearning.

  Then, head thrown back, momentarily deafened by the rotor roar, Jay watches the helicopter arrive and spiral down to the helipad, settle, and go quiet, doors opening to release Helen and Ginger.

  They step unsteadily to solid ground. Helen runs to Jay, leaps, arms wide, for him to catch, and she hugs him, hard in a silent bliss.

  Ginger hangs back, her hair a mad tangle, her eyes dark and chary with that wacky ’90s grunge-rock art-school mascara he’s come to expect when she tries to doll herself up, her expression flat and unreadable but possibly pissed off. Her eyes find Jay for an instant before flicking away, and Jay follows her worried gaze to Barry, just turning and stepping, like a forgotten promise, into the shadows of the heliport terminal hangar, where Sandy has chosen to stay. Public declined to attend the happy reunion, explaining he had preparations to make with Doe. Jay doesn’t know what he expected from Ginger, but he’s understandably uncertain, apprehensive: it’s a strange feeling, where something matters.