GINGER CONFUSES HIM.
What is that trope people recite? Mystery inside a riddle wrapped in—or wait. No. Shit. Enigma is part of it, though. And a riddle.
Jay has never been any good at riddles, plus Ginger is thorny and complicated in a way that Jay nevertheless finds more beguiling than he thinks he should.
And then there’s the whole killing thing, which, yes, he’s already dismissed, but that’s the history with which she’s been saddled, and the questions linger, chief among them: Why would Public want me to think that?
Ginger may not scare him, but the Feds still do.
A night out sans Helen is Public’s idea. “You two kids need to act like you’re a normal functioning couple, so no one gets suspicious.” Jay thinks this, too, is bullshit, since he’s convinced that everyone in Avalon is, in one way or another, either working for the Feds or cowed by them.
For his part, Public is the White Rabbit, mercurial, always darting just ahead of Jay—seen passing on a golf cart with Barry, at the end of a street bracing a couple of local working men in coveralls, on the back of a big yacht at anchor with day-trippers from Balboa, but seldom where Jay needs him to be to ask myriad new questions he has about Ginger, Helen, what really happened to the unhappily departed Hondo, and whether Magonis is really a doctor, or just another federal agent playing make-believe.
“Don’t assume,” Public likes to tell him, when Jay does manage to cross his path. “People assume the serial killer next door is just a regular guy. People assume the child molester couldn’t possibly be the favorite uncle. People assume that if they live right God will reward them, but only one guy’s come back to tell us about it, and he’s family, so we can assume he’s not entirely objective.
“Assumptions are the enemy of truth, and truth is all we’re after.”
Jay doesn’t know what this means, but he assumes that Public is jerking his chain because the reedy smile that follows this homily is a kind of flesh-and-blood emoticon, human spam. And Jay has noted with an uneasy curiosity how Ginger will put herself between Public and Helen whenever Public is around.
Happy hour at the Garrulous Parrot, crawling twilight shadows calling for the tea lights and candles that lend a low-rent Pirates of the Caribbean ride vibe to the otherwise mawkish glassed-in terraza nestled in palms and gum trees, back up the canyon on the road to the Wrigley Gardens. The dim light helps ease the awkward silence resulting from Ginger’s preoccupation with her smartphone. Helen is home under the watch of Sandy, their pretend friend and next-door neighbor, a tired-looking twenty-something with a hay bale of frizzy pulled-back hair, and Helen has the Toy Story DVD trilogy and their home phone speed dial programmed to Ginger’s.
Sustaining a conversation is still trouble for them. Jay’s on his second Buffalotini, a frozen concoction of bison milk, vodka, Tia Maria, and bitters that the cocktail waitress Penny recommended before either of them says anything. Ginger has slapped on some edgy red lipstick and false eyelashes for the occasion, making it impossible, when she declines her head to her phone’s screen in what appears to be a furious texting session, for Jay to read her eyes. Collared shirt and chinos, he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he makes a mosaic with the beer nuts, and wonders aloud, finally, “You can make outgoing calls?”
She looks up at him, expressionless.
“My phone,” he clarifies, “if I try to call the mainland, somebody comes on the line and tells me to hang up and try again later. Or can’t be completed as dialed.”
“Angry Birds,” Ginger explains, unapologetically, and shows him the game app alive on her phone.
“So you can’t.”
“What.”
“Make calls.”
Ginger shrugs. “Who would I call?”
Jay leans forward, on both arms. Feels heat from the candle, and its glow pushes Ginger’s face farther into a gauzy otherworld of the bar’s dim shadows. “So what do you think? How does this work?” Jay asks. “Are we a happy couple? Why did we move here? Are we apathetic Gen-X or just complacent? Is Helen adopted, or maybe the result of some kind of baby-making science, your eggs and store-bought sperm, which has left me feeling kind of . . . evanescent.”
Ginger tilts her head, doesn’t answer.
“I know, right?” Jay says.
“I don’t know what that means.”
Jay sits back, allows that it probably doesn’t matter, and starts sweeping the beer nuts back into the dish.
“You’re odd.” Ginger puts the phone down and sips her drink, then reacting, making a face. “Ohmygod. Yeeg.”
“It gets better once you get past the taste and the texture.”
She doesn’t even smile. She studies Jay for what seems like a long time. “Well, how do you think this works?”
“I have no idea. That’s why I’m—”
“And what makes you think it’s supposed to work at all? It’s an arrangement they’ve made more for their convenience than ours. Safety protocol and redundancies and whatnot. Short term, nonbinding, trivial in the long run. You know?”
Short term settles on Jay like a funk. Clinical trial, but without a control.
“I worked in this lab for a while,” Jay says. “My friend does experiments with animals, mostly mice, because they’re crazily close to us, genetically.”
“Mice.”
“Yeah. I know. Gives, like, a whole new wrinkle to that old challenge, ‘Are you a mouse or are you a man?’ But. There was this one thing they were doing, trying to combine old memories and new ones by jacking with the neurons in their brains, giving them hybrid memories that were part real and part fake.”
“How can they tell mice are remembering anything?”
“I’m glad you asked. See, what happens is memory is laid down, or maybe stored, in neurons that are firing when that memory is taking place. Later, if you can find and trigger those neurons, you bring that memory back. On command. So what we did was put these certain genetically engineered mice in a test chamber with a specific color and smell, and let them crawl around for a while so they’d remember it. And—don’t ask me how—they—the egghead science team my friend is part of—they figured out and marked the neurons where that memory was stored.
“Then we dosed the mice with this chemical that activated those neurons, and put the same mice in a distinctly different test chamber: different color, different smell. And zapped them with electric shocks.”
“Nice,” Ginger says, a little bored, fiddling with her phone again.
“It’s called fear conditioning. The whole floor is some kind of conductive metal. You zap a mouse and it gets afraid of the place where it was zapped—”
“What a surprise, really,” Ginger says drily.
“—and when you put that normal mouse back in that place later it will freeze up, what they, the scientists, call arousal, but, hell, it’s pretty much just abject fear—terror—it won’t even move, because it’s not only remembering, it’s remembering the terrible stuff that happened there.
“But these experimental mice were all messed up. They had the memories of the first chamber flooding back on them while they were being zapped in the second chamber—which created a hybrid memory, and now they would only freeze up when we put them in the second chamber and activated the memories from the first chamber.”
“Okay, I’m lost.”
“Otherwise they went about their business. They couldn’t recall being zapped in the second chamber unless they were also having the false memory of being in the first chamber. The false felt real.”
Ginger shakes her head. “Somehow I don’t think you’re explaining this right.”
“You can make someone remember something that didn’t happen.”
“Okay.”
“It is possible.”
“Somebody been zapping you?”
“Not exactly, but—”
“Yeah. I guess.” He’s no longer sure why he even brought it up. Vaughn once accused him of being obsessed with the mice. “Dude, stop projecting,” he told Jay. “They’re not metaphors, they’re just furry mammal vermin teetering on the low end of the food chain.” Vaughn tended to suck the romance out of everything.
“I don’t know. I get the feeling you aren’t trying to remember, you’re trying to forget,” Ginger says pointedly.
Jay sits back.
And the awkward silence between them returns.
It’s quite a while before Jay breaks it. “There was another one, clinical trial, I mean, where they let this one mouse get really, really good at running a maze. He knew every turn. Then they chopped him up, and fed him to a bunch of other mice to see if, by eating him, they could acquire any of his talent for running the labyrinth.”
Ginger seems appalled but strangely interested in this one. “Did they?”
Jay says he quit before the results came back. It’s a lie; he got fired. And he knows the numbers by heart, because he tallied them for Vaughn.
“Grim.” Ginger shudders.
“Do you have meetings with the guy with a bad toupee?” Jay shifts gears. “This shrink named Magonis?” Jay knows she doesn’t. He’s followed her, more than once, during the day, to see where she goes, and it isn’t to the flat-roofed office building where Magonis holds court in 204. There were errands: groceries, drugstore, the band of a watch that she needed to get repaired. Once she played tennis with the neighbor who calls herself Sandy, and two other women at courts near the golf course clubhouse; afterward they disappeared inside and stayed for a long time.
But Ginger spends most of her time alone with her thoughts, sitting on the front porch of the bungalow, or on a canvas sling chair at Descanso Beach, or at a tin table outside the coffee shop, Big E’s, on Crescent Avenue, watching the moored boats rock in the harbor. And Jay’s watched her, like a voyeur, or a jealous husband. She’s sorting through something, trying to make sense of whatever architecture of events brought her here, to Catalina, witness protection, with Jay. Her fragility, or his sense of it, when she drops her guard and thinks she’s alone, makes his heart ache. This cold, complex woman with the little girl who won’t speak to her.
He understands what that’s like, trying to make sense of the senseless. He wants to tell her that it’s futile, but knows this is something she will have to come to on her own.
And then what?
The sound of Angry Birds bleats from the smartphone between her slender thumbs like some weird insect’s call. He stares at her. Of the dozen or more patrons in the bar, more than half of them have phones out, glowing, demanding their attention, drawing them away, the siren call of a pointless connection to a virtual life.
And clouds, Jay thinks. Whole worlds floating in the empty space between here and there, tethered to this world by a tenuous signal and PIN-code prayer. Jay has nothing to put in the clouds. Nothing worth saving, nothing worth remembering.
Except that Helen spoke to him. And Ginger doesn’t know.
“You want another round? Nachos? Guac and chips?” It’s Penny, their waitress. She’s dressed vaguely cocktail wench, Wonderbra and fishnet stockings, but the green-and-blue tattoo spilling down her shoulder to her elbow is a lively array of obscure Japanese anime.
Jay looks to Ginger: nothing.
“I think we’re good,” he tells Penny.
“Date night?”
“What?”
She winks. “I got a third-grader, Max, I seen you at school with your little girl. Helen?”
Ginger says, “That’s right,” softening, and puts the phone away.
“Me and my husband, Cody, we do a date night like every other week. I can always tell. We got nothing to say to each other, either. Dr. Phil says it’s important, though. You just move here?”
“We did.”
“It’s nice,” Penny says. “Slow. But nice. You know. What do you do?”
Jay hesitates. “I have the video rental place on—”
“Gabe’s?”
“Yeah.”
“That was weird. How quick he cashed out.”
“Was it? I don’t know anything about it. Never met him,” Jay adds. “We used a broker.”
“That weird guy.” Penny’s hands flutter uncertainly in a gesture that somehow exactly conjures Public. “My friend Tina had kissy-face with him one night after last call.” She lowers her voice. “He’s got a tongue thing.” Ginger’s thumbs poised over her phone, but not moving, she’s listening. “Next thing I know Tina’s gone, some Hispanic family is living in her place.”
Jay doesn’t know what to say, but Penny doesn’t seem to need him to comment.
“Well, good luck with it. We don’t rent videos. We got a dish.”
Jay shrugs. “Okay.”
“Very private guy, Gabe. My husband thought maybe he was one of those people have to register as a sex offender, but Cody, he watches way too much reality television, you know what I mean?”
“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.