WAKING:
A splitting headache.
The mazelike grid of cracks and fissures in a white plaster ceiling as his unconsciousness falls away simply bewilders: a latticework of gypsum crazing.
Where is this? Where am I?
Stale air, a spookish quiet.
Dull moan of an ancient heat-pump air conditioner rising, white noise kicking on. The stiff mattress crinkles plastic underneath him, there’s a scrape of cold sandpaper pillow against his skin.
Scared: This is not a memory or a dream.
Skimcoat of daylight blushes through translucent institutional windows, there are no wall decorations, just this hospital bed, containing Jay, a sideboard, and two metal chairs. His fingertips tingle; he smells floor polish and a trace of disinfectant.
One of the chairs beside the bed is occupied, by a fit-looking man in his mid-thirties, unevenly sunburned, open face, sad eyes. Plastered to the lapel of his sport coat, this man’s got a “HELLO My Name Is” sticker on which he’s scrawled the name PUBLIC, cursive, with a Sharpie.
“Hey. How’re you feeling, Mr. Johnson?”
Jay blinks, lost, doped, the dull panic swirling, and still emerging from the fog. His tongue feels thick. He wants to say I feel like shit or Who are you? but nothing comes out.
Public nods. “Sometimes the tranquilizer really kicks your ass. I’m sorry about it.”
Jay finds a word. “What?”
“Tranquilizer. Do you remember what happened in the subway station?”
“Yes.” Then: “No. Maybe.”
“Good. Okay. We acquired you there. I apologize for the artlessness of it, but sometimes . . .” His voice trails off. He shrugs. “The short of it is, you’re in a safe facility, Jay. No one knows you’re here, nobody can get to you.”
“Get to me?” He tries to push himself up, but his wrist rattles a handcuff that binds him to the bedrail. Jesus. A wave of panic breaks over him, and he has to close his eyes for a moment to let it pass.
“Oh, that, it’s . . . for your own protection,” Public explains. “I don’t have the key on me, or I’d . . .” Again the trailing off, the shrug. It all feels too practiced. A voice in Jay’s head is whispering: You have to get out of here. You have to get out of here. He glances to the open door, and the empty corridor beyond it. Feels the cut of the handcuff against bone. Public says something else, but Jay’s mind can’t process it. He blinks and says, “What?”
“You’re in the program, now.”
“Program.”
“Witness protection.”
Jay hears himself say it once more: “What?”
“Safe. Nobody can get to you because you’re in the Federal Witness Protection Program.”
“I’m in witness protection.”
“Yes.”
Shaking his head slowly, Jay, genuinely trying to wrap his mind around it: “Why?”
Public laughs. And the freshet of fear it engenders chills Jay like an ice bath.
Does time pass? Did his eyes close?
“Jay?”
He feels a gap, empty of sense or sensation, but resurfaces to the man labeled Public still beside his bed, a subtle shift of light, a distant lonely keening of siren, or alarm, outside this building where he’s being held.
“Jay. Hey.” Public stands over the bed, a tracing of worry in his expression. “I think I lost you there for a sec.”
“I think,” Jay says, voice raw, “there’s been some kind of mistake here.”
“Say again?”
“Mistake.”
“How so?”
“In every way,” Jay says, and it doesn’t sound like him, but his thoughts are at least gathering with more purpose.
Public laughs again. And says, “I know, right?”
“Seriously, I’m—”
“—It’s okay, it’s okay,” Public says kindly. “It’s normal to feel completely weirded out at this point. Even paranoid. Take your time.”
Jay asks if he’s in custody.
“Protective custody. Yeah, I guess.”
Jay rattles the handcuff again, pointedly. “Under arrest?”
“No.”
Jay makes another attempt at sitting up, and manages to get his torso roughly vertical, shaking off a swim of vertigo, and discovering that his fingertips are bandaged with gauze and tape, and extremely tender because:
“Oh, yeah, hey, we did some acid abrasion, there,” Public is saying, “just in case. That weird paresthesia tingling deal you’re feeling should be way better by tomorrow.”
“In case of what?”
“Also your hair,” Public confesses, ignoring the bigger question. Jay reaches up and feels the stubble of a brand-new buzz cut with the palm of his free hand. What do they want from me?
“We restyled it a bit. Do you feel any different? IQ-wise, I mean,” Public jokes, “now that you’re a blond?”
Jay just stares back blankly. This has got to be like one of those government screwups: families evicted for mortgage default from properties they own, SWAT teams storming the wrong apartment, people showing up to vote and getting told they’ve died.
“Somebody broke into my apartment. Couple of nights ago.”
“Oh.”
“Or at least I think someone did. Is that what this is about?”
Public is expressionless. “I don’t know. Is it?” He uses a remote to motor up the back of the bed and make Jay more comfortable. For a long time neither one of them speaks.
“Here’s where I am with this,” Jay says finally. “I have no idea why you would think I need to be in witness protection. I’m completely confused. And a little scared, if you want to know the truth.” He’s still hoping that if he stays calm and cooperative, and explains himself, this crazy error they’ve made will become self-evident, there will be embarrassed faces, waivers of culpability to sign, sincere apologies, and he’ll go home to deal with the bad haircut and the acid burns.
“I know, right?” Public says.
“So, I mean. How about this: if you could just tell me what it is you think I’ve seen, or witnessed . . .”
Public shakes his head. “Better that you tell me. What you think it is.”
“But I just explained—”
“—No, see, you have to tell me,” is what Public says, firmly, like a parent to a child. “That’s where we are with this. That’s why we’re here.”
Jay closes his eyes. Frustration has shoved his headache down to the base of his skull, where it pulses, almost cold. “I’m here,” he says, as levelly as he can, “handcuffed to a bed. Like a prisoner.”
Public opens his mouth, then closes it, reconsidering what he was going to say. Out in the hallway, old-school linoleum shines like it’s been recently waxed. There doesn’t seem to be anyone standing guard on the room. If it’s a hospital, Jay decides, it’s not a new one, possibly not even a functioning one. And for the first time he wonders if Public is who he says he is.
“I’m supposed to have a key,” Public says apologetically, sitting down again and crossing his legs. “Okay, look. A lot of people feel the way you do right now, at first. Upside down. Don’t know if we can be trusted, or even are who we say we are, which is completely understandable. But over time—”
“Am I under arrest?”
“No, of course not”—but continuing his prior explanation, Public—“what I’m saying, over time it’s just the overwhelming feeling of helplessness—of having to rely on total strangers—”
“I’m the wrong guy,” Jay tells him. “I’m nobody: work in a telemarketing office, play a little basketball. My girlfriend thinks I’m afraid to commit, my friends—”
Public interrupts, “Jay—”
“I don’t have anything to tell you. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t see anything,” Jay pleads.
The briefest cloud of doubt crosses Public’s features, then clears. He shrugs. “That contradicts our information.”
“Then somebody gave you bad information,” Jay reasons. “You know. Or transposed a Social Security number. It happens.”
Public nods his inexpressive nod. “Jay, I’m a deputy U.S. Marshal and not inexperienced at the acquisition, securing, and unwrapping of confidential informants. We’re very, very careful and we don’t make those kinds of mistakes, but sure—I totally get where you might be coming from. Your fears, your distrust. And you don’t have to say anything at all to us until you’re ready.”
“No, I’m ready. Ask away.”
Again, clouds, this time of impatience. “There’ll be plenty of time for that, once we get you somewhere more secure.”
“What if . . . I don’t want to go?”
Public just shrugs.
“But I’m not under arrest.”
“No.”
“Can I call somebody? I should call my fiancée so she doesn’t worry. How long has it been since you took me off the train?”
Public ignores the last part, and says that calling Stacy probably is not a good idea; what the girlfriend doesn’t know, the girlfriend can’t tell anybody.
Who would she tell? Jay wonders.
“And you have no family,” Public adds.
“No,” Jay agrees, which is the lie he always embraces, but now he’s curious about just how much Public knows, and where the U.S. Marshals, if that’s who they are, are getting their information.
“So,” Public adds, in case Jay didn’t pick up on the significance of the statement, implying: Jay won’t be missed.
“What will you tell Stacy?”
“It’s all been taken care of.”
“No worries. We’re very thorough.”
“And what if I want to talk to an attorney?”
“Jay, you’re not under arrest. You’re in protective custody.”
“Abducted and held against my will,” Jay tries to say, in the most matter-of-fact way, but knows it comes out brittle. And he no longer cares. All the stories he’s heard about people convicted of crimes they didn’t commit, who spend nearly a lifetime in prison before somebody proves them innocent. He’s Alice, down the rabbit hole, and the drug they gave him has made him pretty fucking small.
Public shrugs. “It may be that you simply don’t fully comprehend the potential fragility of your situation outside of our aegis. We have to be careful during this transition. We would be callous if we let you go.”
Jay stares at him. The man is grandstanding, smug. Jay takes a deep breath, exhales. It doesn’t help. “Aegis. I don’t even know what that means,” Jay says bleakly.
“My point being, you could be in danger, from the people who would be most impacted by what you know. Or saw.”
A current of fresh air brushes Jay’s skin, from an open window or door somewhere in the building. Again, a vague urge to just run away from this rises. But how? He asks: “What if you aren’t what you say you are? Or what if you are, but you’re lying about what you want? I mean . . . what if you’re the danger, you’re the people most impacted by what I know?”
“I’ll concede that point,” Public says. “How can you trust people who grab you off a Metro train and jack you with tranquilizers and tie you to a bed?”
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” Jay says, the broken record. “I don’t know what you want.”
Public is patiently agreeable. “If I were you, I would take that position. Under the circumstances. So, like I said, go slow. I would.” His calm is absolute, and Jay can see that there’s no shaking it. “But here.” Lifting a battered briefcase from under the chair to his lap, Public pops it open and removes two dossiers with blown-up photographs clipped to them. On the first: what look like crime scene photos of a young woman’s body, naked, murdered, twisted across a wet tile bathroom floor.
“We want to know what happened to her,” Public says.
Jay’s mind reels over the stark, disturbing images of the girl. He feels sick. Thoughts tumble too fast for words. The cold fear crawls through him, his breathing shallow, his voice a thousand miles away.
“You don’t know her?”
“No.” He doesn’t. He didn’t.
“Never seen her?”
That’s a trickier question, one that freezes Jay, and one that Public lets slide, or answers for him, resigned to Jay’s intransigence: “No. Sure. Okay.” Tucking the crime photos away, Public looks up and openly studies Jay for a moment. Trying to read him? The second folder has a sheaf of documents, reports of some kind, with snapshots clipped to them, hastily taken images of a sulky, angular young woman with black eyes and a crooked smile, and of a grim little girl who looks nothing like her.
This file Public doesn’t explain, or share.
“In a couple of days,” Public, conversational, “we’ll be moving you to an interim temporary-permanent situation”—he waves at the folders—“where you’ll be sequestered for a few weeks of debriefing while we grow you an acceptably secure, permanent location. And help you adjust to your new life.”
Jay wants to say so many things he can’t speak. The relentless impulsion of what is happening roils him. A corkscrew of college philosophy class surfaces out of his imbroglio, namely Nietzsche: the irrationality of something isn’t an argument against its existence, but actually a condition of it. He shifts his weight, and unintentionally his trembling wrist rattles the handcuff, and he wonders how fast, after being drugged silly, he would be able to run, if the opportunity presented itself. Public tosses a sheaf of legal boilerplate onto the aluminum bedside tray and swings the tray across Jay’s lap.
“Power of attorney. If you’ll just”—he proffers a pen—“put your Sam I Am here and here, after you’ve read the fine print, we’ll need to secure your personal effects and resources yadda yadda ASAP since, for all practical purposes—you no longer exist.” He shuts the briefcase and stands up.
“I don’t want a new life,” Jay says emptily. No longer exist. He wonders if that will be such a change.
Public smiles, avuncular. “Everybody wants a new life.”
“Oh,” is all Jay says. He can’t keep the panic down. The room spins. “I really need to use the bathroom.”
Public, chagrined: “Right. Sorry. I’ll have to . . . get somebody.” Public hesitates, then takes his briefcase and starts walking out.
“What if I refuse. What if I say no?” Jay calls after him. It’s his last stab at resistance. He doesn’t expect it to work, but it feels right to say it out loud.
Public turns around but continues backpedaling toward the door, Fred Astaire. “We’d have to kill you,” he says, and allows the requisite deadpan, then cracks the requisite smile, and admits, “Just kidding,” making a gun with his thumb and finger, pointing it at Jay, pulling the trigger, and slipping into the hallway.
Shoes squeak on the industrial tile, trailing faint echoes as Public goes away.
Jay closes his eyes and tries to breathe.