by Daniel Pyne
“So. Bad margaritas: not enough salt on the rim and I hate that—and Rob Roys—or was it Separators?—which my friend Otto once drank at a brunch, nine in a row, and got eighty-sixed, because you knock a few back, thinking, ‘This is nothing,’ and two minutes later you’re flat on your ass, bitching about the Lakers.”
Jay gets up, to pace.
The air compressor hitched and sighed.
A shitty bar band he’s just thought of shuffles into this gathering decoupage of his memories and invention, a Jethro Tull cover thumping muffled like a yearning.
“Retro night. Flute solo.” Jay smiles. “Christ. Can you believe that?”
Alone at a table ringside to the mermaid tank, Jay drained another Rusty Nail, sloooop, no problem.
Jay takes a pause and concentrates. He can’t afford to let this float away. “What I’ve got, though, remember: it’s pieces,” he warns. “I’m just saying. And you can’t trust that. You know—not completely.”
After a moment, Magonis prods him. “Go on.”
The shriek of bad music, loud, on blown speakers, the table of Korean businessmen laughing, the chime of glasses behind the bar and a mosaic: the painted nails, the slender arms, tail, swerve, bedroom eyes of the mermaid flower girl.
“Her eyes,” Jay says.
The big tank glowing incandescent as she swam and stripped.
“As she swims and strips,” he says.
She looked right out into the sea of chairs, into the colloquium of men, and found Jay—or did she?
“And then . . .”
Because, inside the tank, mermaid point of view—he’s thought this through—wouldn’t what she saw be the arc of aquarium glass reflecting her starkly downlit mirror image back at her? A water world in which she’s the only inhabitant.
“. . . Through the tank, past the swimming stripper, I could see shapes, kinda like shadows on the other side: these guys: suits, young, old, yearning, sitting, standing, staring, dark, sharp-featured faces suddenly caught in a strobe of light cast from above.”
Magonis leans in, hooked.
“Shadows.”
Magonis waits.
“Drifting along the singular, curving plane of the tank. Like vertical eels,” Jay says. “Flip-book faces, one after the other, smeared and distorted, if only, like a camera, I could just push closer, you know? Zoom in, find focus—almost there, almost a revelation—then: flam flam flam flam—the shadows kicked off the edge of the tank where they became the bodies of men in black suits moving fast, around the corner.”
“Running away?”
“Running away,” Jay says. “You feel the gunshot, visceral; it never registers really, not like—”
Silence. No band, no compressor. Smoke pulsing with light.
“Anyway. You don’t hear it.”
Something instantly shattering the strip bar’s raucous, testosterone-fueled tenor: the crowd flinched as one. Shadow fringes slower to react, but middle of the room between two pools of downlight a man was lifted out of his chair, blown backward by bullets and, midair, hit again, by more bullets, body jerking, limp rag doll haloed in a fine mist of expelled blood.
Magonis asks how many shots there were.
“But all I see is the girl,” Jay says instead.
In the tank, the water bloomed with eddies of—
“The pink tendrils of blood from her back,” he remembers.
A faraway, hollow crackling sound swiftly built to a roar. The glass of the tank was fracturing white-silver. About to burst.
“Her hands pressed against the glass as it slowly spiderwebbed. From the pressure of the bullet hole. And she had this . . . look of . . . surprise. This strange, abbreviated smile . . . issuing bubbles.
“I can’t even describe the way that sounds in your head,” he says.
“Why did you run with her?”
The confusion.
Front row, Jay turned one shoulder reflexively in defense of himself as the glass of the tank exploded out onto him, water shoving him back. The flower girl flowed into his arms, and they were swept away into the tumult of screaming patrons, swirling tables and chairs.
“Jay.” Magonis leans forward, elbows on knees, palms pressed together and touching his lips: “Why did you run with her, Jay?”
Jay doesn’t answer for the longest time. His face contorts with an onrushing accretion of shame he has buried and grief he has never allowed himself to feel. There are tears in his eyes, for this mermaid, this girl, this woman, he knew only in the most physical way.
He found the strength to lift her from the floodwaters. Stumbled through chairs and flailing customers, through the beaded curtain, and out the door. He sprinted blindly across the parking lot, holding the dying mermaid in his arms.
“You think, when you see it on television, how fake it is that guys can carry girls, you know? Running through the flames. Big-shot heroes. Because girls, they’re actually pretty fucking heavy in real life.” He thumbs the tears from his face. “But it’s true.”
She was feather-light but slippery cold in his arms . . .
“This girl was weightless.”
He cannot distinguish anymore between what he’s inventing and what he remembers. Parking lot. Empty street. Lobby. How did he get the front door open? Elevator cage. The groan of gears engaging and cables going taut. Choppy light flickering halos, the dying girl’s limp fingers curled through the latticework of the rising car.
An old carved apartment door that Jay muscled through and carried his mermaid into—
Sun punctures the morning marine layer outside and the office abruptly floods with light. Magonis squints, turns from the window, backlit like some Biblical prophet. His fake hair afire. “The man who was shot, behind the tank, in the bar—”
But Jay cuts him off. “You think you can manage things. You say to yourself: ‘What the hell, I’m a problem-solver.’ And then you trace back through all of these useless acts. Epic fails. All the blanks you couldn’t fill. Helpless. Until you get to the most incredible, inexplicable, abjectly humiliating and utterly, indelicately human one.”
Magonis says nothing.
“I put her in fresh water,” Jay says. “Where mermaids breathe.”
Her colorless body, afloat. The white porcelain tub, holding her in its glare. And Jay in her bathroom, wet, exhausted, heaving, standing over her, fists balled up, disbelieving.
“And then, nothing.”
He sank to his knees.
“Test pattern.”
And could not find a God to pray to.
“Lights out.”
Magonis makes one of his abstracted, empty-handed gestures. “Trauma is this weird thing, Jay.” He sounds skeptical. “We cushion the shock. Things retreat. But—”
“You guys. Found me, and moved me.”
Magonis nods, confirming it. “Who was in the bar?” he asks again, stubborn.
“I woke up behind the wheel of my car, hungover and thickheaded. I was parked between two freeways. You know where the 10 and the 110 intersect just south of downtown? Near Staples Center?
“A long way from the bar. And so I didn’t believe it had happened. I had no proof . . . that it ever happened.” Jay thinks about this, then adds, “I didn’t look for any proof, either, I know. But.”
“You carried her out of the bar,” Magonis says. “Your actions were . . . unusual.” He grips the arms of his chair and pushes himself more upright. “And as we watched you, on various surveillance cameras in the parking lot and buildings in the area, watched you carry her across the street, into the building where she lived, we thought: it’s a hide-and-seek thing. And then we watched you some more. Patient. I mean, it’s not like memories are dead. They—”
“They’re dead all right. And corpses keep their secrets. Forcing you into,” Jay smiles bitterly
, “communication with ghosts. That’s the only evidence you got that means anything, as far as I can see.”
Magonis stares at him. His question unanswered.
“Sam Dunn,” Jay says finally.
“What?”
“The charter pilot who flew me out of here. The chop-socky film nut. Dunn.” He gestures nebulously. “In the bar. Among all those faces, his—”
“His.”
“Yeah. A distorted reflection of him in the glass. I can still see it.” Jay could. He made himself see it. “I didn’t make the connection until I saw him here, on the island, and even then . . .” Jay lets whoever’s listening in try to complete the thought, because he doesn’t have anything left.
“So what are you saying? That Dunn was the shooter? Dunn?”
Jay shakes his head and shrugs. “I’m saying whatever comes into my mind. Isn’t that what you want?”
“If Dunn was the shooter, Dunn would have the list. People on it would already be,” Magonis, catching himself, editing himself, “well, compromised—and he wouldn’t be bothering with you or your friend.” The federal shrink stares at him, one eye fixed, one wandering, and Jay can’t tell which is the one struggling to see through him, or if it even matters now.
“You didn’t see anything,” Magonis says with an edge.
“Yeah, I’ve been saying that all along, but the fact is? I saw plenty,” Jay tells him. “Just not what interests you.” Then asks, “Is that it? Are we finished?”
“You tell me.”
“We’re done,” Jay says. And in the chilled darkness of the makeshift surveillance room that Jay imagines is probably right downstairs, John Public and Jane Doe will stare blankly at four monitors on which four Jays walk out of office 204.
| 29 |
PIANO PRELUDE, faintly out of tune, and awkward; the deliberate jauntiness of a primary-school music teacher aspiring to something like Sondheim, but never making it there.
Jay can’t get it out of his head.
He’s walking with purpose down Crescent Avenue, in the silt light of dusk, onto the Green Pleasure Pier, where the new Pacific Boats rental kiosk guy, Valario, is lowering the wing flap shutters that secure the counter windows, done for the day.
Jay’s come more or less directly from his session with Magonis. As his plan unfolds, resolute, inescapable, he starts to think it’s so dumb it might even work. Everything is stacked against his succeeding, and he knows that even in success everything is stacked against what he wants to happen afterward ever working out.
But Jay has chosen his door: he’s going through it: tonight.
He’s made a couple of stops on the way to the pier, creating his own admittedly improvised, abbreviated, but nevertheless adult-size milky white maze in the hope that it will help obfuscate the obvious and buy him more time: first, beer at the Nautilus, a bar he’s never been in before, where a couple of locals who rented Blue Valentine for the sex scenes and were disappointed sat at a corner table, playing rummy. Locals. He didn’t think they were marshals, or in the program. Then, at the tiny grocery store, he bought bottled water and snacks and three thermal blankets that he threw away in a dumpster a couple blocks later, making sure that no one saw him do it.
He asked Floria about the weather, and she told him it was going to be a quiet night. No habrá viento. Calm.
“Yow, Mister-mister,” Valario says in his Eurotrash hip-hop way, before Jay even reaches him. He’s not exactly in the program, just some collateral damage of a garden-variety drug case that went postal and now the government feels responsible for his safety. He wants to be a deejay. He wants Jay to be a record company R&D guy the marshals have taken into custody, and has half convinced himself that Jay is stowed away here because of testimony he’s going to give that will bring down the record business and make it possible for aspiring musicians—or mash-up artists—like Valario to thrive in the feeding frenzy that surely follows. Jay knows that Valario is part of the loose network of part-time amateur spies that have helped Doe and Public keep a rein on him.
He’s counting on it, actually.
“I need a boat overnight.”
“You can see with your eyes I am closed.”
“I promised the kid I’d take her to see the flying fish.”
Valario shrugs, looks at Jay with no expression, no judgment. “Better weather tomorrow, my friend.”
“C’mon.”
Valario shrugs again. Stares out across the sea. Then back at Jay. “Five hundred dollars.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Jay will haggle a bit just for form. Valario expects it. “Your day rate is one hundred.”
Downturn of mouth, Valario cracks his neck, and flips the latches on the window shutters with a kind of finality.
Jay looks away, south, and sees, hurrying to the Cabrillo Mole ferry landing, Magonis, going as fast as his old legs and cane will allow him, handle of a small rolling suitcase in his free hand, a collection of books bungee-corded awkwardly to the top. The shrink is boarding the day’s last boat, which is idling, impatient, at the passenger pier, preparing to head back to L.A.
They know it’s the endgame, Jay thinks.
Even from a distance Magonis looks glad to be going. But then, unaccountably, stops. Turning at a shout to a burst of bright red silk coming at him on strap heels: the old actress, a whirling of pale arms and legs that furls into the bigger man and nearly disappears in his unlikely embrace.
“Two-fifty,” Jay offers Valario.
“Four.”
“Three.”
“And you will bring it back first thing in the morning, clean and spanking, no bilge water I have to bail, full can of gas.”
Magonis and the old actress, heads touching, her scarf sailing, her face canted back under his like in the movies, the old ones, before love got deconstructed.
“Deal.”
A final ferry horn calls. The odd couple separates, Magonis hustling off, doesn’t look back.
The glass-rippling water of the bay judders with the twilight. Los Angeles glisters on the eastern horizon, like an expensive piece of jewelry that someone has stepped on and ruined.
At which, as if cued, the engagement ring, Stacy’s rock, comes out of Jay’s pocket, worth considerably more than three hundred dollars, but Jay doesn’t care.
After the ring has changed hands, operating and safety instructions given, and three life vests produced from a bin at the back of the kiosk, Jay knows that Valario will be in the darkness of his shop, dialing his cell phone to report to the Federales what has happened, while, out on the end of the dock Jay yanks the cord of a faded fiberglass skiff’s outboard engine, kicking it to life.
• • •
And he imagines:
Jane Doe is staring out a window and into the kitchen of Jay and Ginger’s bungalow, where Helen is fussing with Ginger’s hair, trying to put a ribbon in it that matches the one in hers.
The girl who won’t speak.
The ringtone—the first few bars of “Brick House”—causes Doe to get her phone from her bag: “Yeah?”
The house is vacant. Jay has looked into it, and has seen that a couple cardboard moving boxes are all that remain of the star-crossed fiction that was Barry and Sandy.
As his boat glides across the harbor toward the brightly lit casino façade, Jay imagines Doe listening to Valario’s soft reporting, tapping to end the call, and pushing her coat aside and adjusting the gun that he has never not seen strapped to her hip.
In the mirror on the mantel he imagines she looks back at herself and, perhaps, for a moment, because of darkness and irresolution, doesn’t recognize her own face.
• • •
Jay trims the tiller of the outboard motor and weaves his Boston whaler through the crowded marina, zigzagging in and out of the moorings but advancing steadily toward the casino
ballroom and the navigation light at the end of the narrow man-made breakwater that extends from it like an apostrophe.
He wants to be on the harbor side of the building to better access the concrete walkway that encircles it, but because of the fuel docks and the harbor patrol headquarters he doesn’t dare row closer than the point of the jetty, so Jay secrets and secures his skiff in the shadows among and scrambles his way back to the casino along the tumbled curl of quarried quartz dividing Avalon Bay from the sea.
The harbor water is like dark glass.
Light skitters across it, nervous.
There’s only one part of Jay’s scheme that worries him:
Ginger doesn’t know about it.
• • •
You wouldn’t think that grade-school kids could do The Pied Piper of Hamelin justice.
Watching from the deep shadows of the casino’s vast hollows, Jay imagines it was Public’s mother’s favorite fairy tale, back in the day; how she might have loved the brutal justice of it, and passed this on to her son, and the romance: all those kids who never come back—but, now, here, as, in a spotlight, five children, stage-stiff, in furry rat suits and those weird German shorts with suspenders, begin to sweetly sing the penultimate song in a musical, Public wears the squared-off expression of a man who might grudgingly admit the performance was not as painful as he expected.
Auf wiedersehen
farewell
good-bye—
Upturned faces of the parents glow in the backwash of the stage lights; the old actress, front row, mascara tears streaming down her face. Behind them, Jane Doe slides through the twilight to where Public stands, hands in pockets, his eyes ticking to the wings, to Ginger and Helen. Wary. Expectant.
The marshals’ heads overlap, they exchange words.
Ginger turns with a start when Jay touches her on the shoulder. Almost eclipsed by shadows, he puts his hands up, defensive, afraid she’s going to take a swing at him, that she knows some cop karate or something, but she just stares at him until he lets his hands come down on her shoulders lightly and walks her farther back into the gloaming; his pants reek of salt water, her body throws heat against his icy-cold skin.