THE OVERHEAD FLUORESCENTS flicker on and slowly brighten Vaughn’s Manchurian Global lab, and Vaughn, pulling his card from the reader and looping the lanyard back around his neck, enters to the sharp smell of urine and the startled light shimmying of tiny legs across cages and the insane screaming of a couple of test monkeys.
“Yeah, yeah,” he drawls, “Daddy’s home.”
It always takes a while for the energy-savers to gain their full intensity. Vaughn weaves his way through warrens of mostly unused cages interspersed with stainless-steel examining tables and Plexiglas mazes in various stages of demolition. His desktop computer monitor is on and glows with data; an archived Los Angeles Times newspaper article featuring a big lurid color photo of a covered body getting hauled by fire personnel out of the front of an apartment building. The headline:
—
STRIP CLUB MERMAID’S MURDER BAFFLES POLICE
—
In the thick of the body copy is inset a one-column head shot of Jay’s flower girl, helpfully captioned “Miriam Miller.” Vaughn frowns because this was not on his computer screen when he left the lab last night.
Strewn across the desk are more articles that have been printed out, and tiled, overlapping:
—
THREE DEAD AT GLENDALE STRIP BAR
D.A. SEEKS SAMARITAN WITNESS TO CLUB KILLINGS
—
A short intake of breath, Vaughn sinks into his chair, shakes his head, wondering, basically, what the hell?
—
EXOTIC SWIMMER SHOT IN CLUB,
CARRIED TO APARTMENT
—
Jay’s hand touches his knee. Vaughn yells and kicks back from the desk.
“Vaughn.” Jay, rolling out, spectral and groggy, from where he’s been sleeping, then hiding (when he heard someone come in). “It’s me.”
“HOLYcrap,” Vaughn says. “I almost—what are you—Jay?” Looking closer: “Your hair looks like crap. You’re like, are you a blond now or—?” and finally, “how the hell did you get in here? This is a secure building.”
Jay’s up and stretching. “I keyed in my old code,” he says. “Or maybe you told me what yours was, once.”
Vaughn is staring at him.
“What?”
“Did they let you out or did you escape?”
“I haven’t been in a mental hospital.”
Jay, rote: “I’m not crazy, I didn’t go crazy, I wasn’t in a mental hospital. Feds’ve taken me into witness protection, they think I . . .”
Vaughn is staring at him.
“Don’t. Vaughn? No. Don’t do that. Come on—this isn’t—this is me. Vaughn, you know me.”
“No.”
“How can you—”
“I know what you’ve told me. I know what you want me to know. But, um. Do I know that it’s true?”
“Yes. You do.”
Vaughn shakes his head. “No, see, that’s just the thing—I don’t. Not really. After you . . . disappeared? And I got the call from the hospital?”
“There was no hospital,” Jay says again.
“It’s like I thought about it. You know? I thought about it, us, our friendship, me and you. What I know, what I really know. I thought about it for a long time and I realized: How long have I known you? And I don’t know shit.”
The lights hum. The animals fidget in their cages, hungry.
“You live lightly on this earth, my friend,” Vaughn says. “It’s like you don’t, I mean, there’s no, well . . .” He makes an ambiguous gesture. “. . . not a lot of give and take.”
Jay nods, because he actually understands, and wants to explain, “That’s changing—”
“But, um.”
“—I swear to you, federal marshals have put me in protective custody over on Catalina Island over something I don’t even know what it is.”
“Rutger Hauer.”
“What?”
“In Blade Runner.” Vaughn indicates, with his chin: “Your hair, dude.”
Jay runs a hand across it, absently. “And yeah, I took a runner. I got away from them with this weird guy in his pot plane.”
Doubtful: “. . . Okay.”
“Seriously. We crashed. I don’t know what happened to him. But they erased me, Vaughn. Everything I was. Or thought I was. Buckham and Buckham? Gone. I mean, gone. Some lady’s living in my apartment, Stacy’s shacked back up with that guy from Houston—”
“The cage fighter.”
“Vaughn, he’s not.”
“Okay. Whatever.”
“And they told everybody who might wonder where I went that I went crazy.”
“Juan Pablo.”
“That’s not his name. Vaughn: focus.”
“They said your family took you home.”
Jay blinks. “They said what?”
“After the breakdown,” Vaughn says. “You never talk about your family.”
“Who? Who said about my family?”
“I mean,” Vaughn says, “you talk about being erased, but it’s like you don’t even exist here and now to begin with. You know what I mean? Maybe nobody notices you’re gone because you were never here.”
Jay says nothing. Hollowed out.
Vaughn looks away, to the articles, to the computer screen. “What’s all this?”
“Vaughn—”
The monkeys are screaming again, and genuflecting in their cages, arms out, heads dipping, long fingers laced through the bars. It’s a morning call to prayer.
“They left a number I’m supposed to call when I see you,” Vaughn admits sheepishly.
Jay, impatient: “What’s your point?”
“Well, um. They left it on my cell phone this morning.”
“So?”
“When I see you, Jay. Not if, when.”
Jay blinks. They knew. They let him go.
But why?
• • •
The newspaper articles spill upside down across a swirly Formica tabletop. This downscale Atwater retro café is chrome and black and white and gray. There’s a breakfast crowd, mostly locals; the dark eyes of the lone waitress watch idly from behind the register. Jay sits opposite Vaughn in a crescent vinyl booth safely away from the front window, fanning and collating his collected documentation between them to make his case.
“You remember this?”
Deeply engaged with his scrambled egg, chorizo, feta, and cactus burrito, Vaughn can only shake his head and murmur, mouth full between bites, “Since when do you read the newspaper? You always say it’s too depressing.”
Jay thumbs the head shot of Miriam. “According to my new federal friends, I went out with her—well, yeah, and I did, I think I did, but they knew all about it, they’ve been watching me for—remember? She worked in this flower shop on Melrose where I got Stacy a Valentine’s Day—”
“I remember that.” Vaughn bolts some coffee. “Yeah. Your porno fantasy. She—”
“No. I made that part up.”
“Really?”
“Or. Maybe I made all of it up. I don’t know. I don’t know. You’re just taking my word for it, anyway. The point is—”
“See what I mean? You’re not a truthful person.”
“—the point is,” Jay continues, stubbornly, “they think I know something about what happened to this woman, what happened in this bar, but I don’t. Remember. I was drunk, or stoned, or drunk and stoned, or it didn’t happen. I don’t know, Vaughnie. I don’t remember.”
“Yeah, well. Memory, yo, seriously: What is it? The fucking consensus intersect of desire and regret.”
“Or what I do remember doesn’t, you know, add up to . . . this,” Jay says ruefully. “What they’re . . .” He stops. What are they saying it adds up to? “It’s all . . . I mean, it didn’t even happen on the right day.” He makes a sweeping gesture to the articles. “They keep talking February twelfth, but according to these stories, February twentieth, February twenty-second, this all happened like, eight, ten days later.”
Vaughn, pushing his empty plate away, makes the point that he thought Jay went out with her twice.
Jay: “Excuse me?”
“That I personally know of,” Vaughn says, “that you told me about, but, um. For all I know it coulda been—”
Jay cuts him off. “Are you listening to me?”
“I’m just saying.”
“They don’t even have the right day.”
“Oh.”
“I would remember. If I went out with her twice.”
“Okay.”
“I would.”
“Hey,” Vaughn says blithely. “Maybe you’ve fallen through a wormhole, man. Parallel universe. Or you went in one and came back out.”
The shriek of the espresso machine allows them to sit back and regroup. A waiter refills Vaughn’s coffee and clears their plates. Jay hasn’t touched his oatmeal. Glancing reflections of traffic fractures through the window. Someone at a table in the front laughs too loudly.
“They walk me through my life last year, day by day, but out of order,” Jay says. “Like they’re trying to trap me or something. Catch me in a lie. So deliberately random that there’s got to be a pattern, certain connections they want to make. It’s gotta all fit, I mean, the details, and I keep trying to . . . figure out . . .” His voice trails off, suddenly bleak. “But my life was shit, wasn’t it?”
“Everybody’s life is shit.”
“You’re wrong.”
Vaughn says that that’s why they invented heaven. “Well, oh, and for those few lucky pricks whose lives aren’t shit?—the one percent, credit swap bullshit, or those Goldman Sachs sucks, billionaire IPO Net-head geekazoids and maybe supermodels with real breasts and anybody who works at Apple?—there’s eternal hell waiting for them, so it all, like, evens out.” Vaughn frowns. “What is that?”
Jay’s got Stacy’s engagement ring out of his pocket; he’s spinning it absently on the Formica, lost in thought. “I went out with the flower girl . . . twice?”
“I don’t remember exactly,” Vaughn lies, and looks away, guiltily, and seems like he’s about to try to explain it, but Jay’s next soft statement stops him:
“My brother and sister and my dad were murdered when I was eight.”
Vaughn turns his eyes to Jay, mind clearly blown. What?
“Yeah. They never caught who did it.”
Jay watches Vaughn slowly try to comprehend that this is a confession. That Jay is telling him something fundamental. He doesn’t move.
“I should have told you a long time ago.”
“Probably,” is what Jay thinks Vaughn exhales.
“Not that it explains everything, but, I don’t know. It was not good. Not . . . good. My mom went catatonic with grief,” Jay says. “You know. What they call fugue state or something. She’s still . . .”
Jay can tell that Vaughn’s mouth has gone dry because he lifts his cup and sips cold coffee, murmurs something soft that gets lost in the diner’s din.
“I know,” Jay says.
Vaughn offers something else, kind, sorrowful, meaningless.
Spinning the ring like a gyroscope, Jay: “Me, I got away. They didn’t get me because I ran. Two guys. Two guys, they took some money and jewelry. It was on Halloween, that was why I never liked . . .” Vaughn knew all about Jay and Halloween, but now knew why. “I had this righteous stash of candy under the bed in a pillow slip. I forgot to get it. When they took me back for my stuff. For the longest time I tried to convince myself that was my big regret. And everything after, it’s like I had this life that was predicated on not looking back, never looking back. Can you call that a life? I don’t know. But, um,” he says, unwittingly mimicking Vaughn, “I got a new one, on Catalina, Vaughnie. Totally by accident, and pretty much totally a construct, I guess, but . . .”
“A new life.”
“Yeah.”
“But what?”
Behind Vaughn, in the mirror surface of the stainless-steel wall behind the breakfast counter, Jay senses more than sees a movement, a figure, the faint ghost of the street and someone in the front window staring in—
“Jay?”
—the face of Sam Dunn, staring in at them.
Jay swivels in his chair (how did Dunn survive the crash?), spooked (how did Dunn survive?), looks to the front window itself: nothing, nobody there. A shiny slur of traffic through morning sun.
“What are you looking at?”
Jay turns back to Vaughn. Chilled. “Nothing.”
The ring wobbles to a stop. Jay covers it with his hand.
Struggling to stay on topic: “Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, somebody holds your past year up like that, naked, particularly a life as sorry and sketchy as mine, it looks . . . I don’t know . . .”
He glances over his shoulder to the window again. No Sam Dunn.
“I’m sorry,” Vaughn says.
“It is what it is. I didn’t tell you because I don’t tell anybody. Like I said. I don’t think about it.”
“Yeah.”
“I just—”
“—Okay.”
“So. Now you know.”
Vaughn sighs, and looks relieved somehow. With a friend’s rare kindness, as if sloughing it off, no big deal, “I realize this will probably sound incredibly lame, but, um: it’s your life, Jay, you’ve only got one. I mean. Fuck it. Whatayagonnado? Reboot?” He belches. And smiles faintly, wry. Jay is quiet. He looks down at his hand covering the ring and a life from which he’s just now realizing he’s been set free.
“Jay. Jay. You okay?”
“Yeah, fine.” Jay looks up. “Hey, I’m gonna need some money.”
Vaughn blinks. Money?
“And a place to crash, just until—” Jay feels the movement behind this time, his head whips to the window, where he catches just a glimpse of a face, a figure, a shape slip out of frame, and abruptly he’s pushing up and away from the table. “I gotta check this—sit tight for a sec, okay?” he tells Vaughn and hurries to the front door and out onto the sidewalk, where he looks both ways, up and down the street, not much foot traffic in either direction, and no sign of Sam Dunn.
It’s a bright, unforgiving sunlight. The homeless guy on the corner dances, his tinfoil cape throwing off dazzle. Jay moves along the café window, under an awning, to where he thought someone, maybe Sam Dunn, was standing when he thought he saw him, and turns to peer back into the diner at Vaughn—
—who is gone.
Struck light-headed with a slow-rising panic, Jay tries not to freak out: there’s the table, there’s Vaughn’s chair pushed back, there’s his coffee cup freshly filled. Jay wants to think maybe Vaughn’s in the bathroom, and when he gets back inside he goes down the narrow, dead-end hallway to the door marked: GUYS. Barges in. It’s unoccupied. But the window is cranked wide, and the sound of a car firing up draws Jay to it, and to look out into the alley behind the diner where a beat-to-hell dark gray S-Class Mercedes is pulling out, fast.
Vaughn’s face is twisted toward Jay, one hand pressed to the back window glass, frightened eyes, mouth open and yelling something as the German sedan peels out. Then he’s jerked back into the shadow of the interior and the sun’s reflection wipes even the memory of him away.
Oh shit.