Fifty Mice: A Novel by Daniel Pyne Read Free Book Online Page B

but for me it’s a nightmare. Okay? You can see that, right?”
    Richter looks at the marshals. “My client says he didn’t see anything.”
    “How can he be so sure that this is about something he saw?” Doe asks simply.
    Richter looks at Jay.
    The room spins. Jay crimps his eyes. He doesn’t know how to respond. The discussion keeps circling on itself, an endless loop of flawed logic, and each time the argument comes back around, he feels a little less sure that what he knows is true is true.
    It’s Vaughn’s crazy experiment with the doors and the suicidal mice.
    “Jay. The civil rights of the individual,” Richter begins, as if composing a brief, “can on occasion be subsumed by the rights of the community to”—someone sneezing in the hallway distracts her into a thought-stutter—“to certain, to certain, to certain information that the individual may possess, which could prevent,” she pauses, eyebrows furrowed, starting to lose her way, “a larger . . .” And then she’s completely lost, and looking for shore. “. . . well . . . harm . . .” She takes a long drag on the last of her Marlboro, eyes apologetic, and then shakes out and lights up another cigarette, end to end.
    Doe, to Jay: “If you don’t know anything, if you are—not in a legal sense, but generally—innocent, why did you try to run away from us?”
    “I was scared. I feel like nobody is listening to me.”
    Public, to Jay, cold hard fact: “Because you aren’t saying anything.”
    Jay looks at his lawyer. “And they can just keep me like this? Hold me indefinitely?”
    “No. But yes. I mean—the law is, legally, well, clear—but, as I saidbefore, in practice, vague. In this area.” Arden Richter does a French inhale of cigarette smoke, lips pursed.
    “Vague?”
    Richter nods, rounds her lips, puffs out a smoke ring and taps the ash into her coffee cup. “For example, they could argue that what you know is dangerous, or in the public interest to protect—or acquire—and until you tell them—”
    “You don’t
exist
anymore,” an impatient Public says sharply, the veneer peeling. “We’ve
erased
you, my friend. So technically we’re not keeping you at all.”
    Erased.
Jay feels like he’s floating up, off his chair. Out of body: where reality becomes a dream, and dreams are something you wake up from.
    Doe sighs, leans back, visibly upset with her colleague. Evidently, this is more than she wanted Jay to know.
    Erased.
Jay has known weightlessness before. “Wake up,” he says. Bang. His head hits the table. “Wake up.” Bang. “Wake up.”
    “Jay.” Doe is watching him, kindly, worried.
    Public pushes away from the table, walks to the wall, and comes back, hands on hips. Drone of the television bleeds through from the front room. Sitcom laugh track. Jay leaves his forehead on the tabletop, frustrated, tired.
    “I’m sorry,” he says. “Don’t mind me.”
    The others stare at him, confused. “He doesn’t trust us,” Doe tells Public. “Which is perfectly understandable.” The way she says it makes it sound like Public’s fault.
    Public nods, blows out air. “Okay.”
    Richter raises her hand. “Perhaps if my client and I could have a moment alone?”
    Head on the table, drained, defeated, Jay murmurs that that won’t be necessary. Ms. Richter is just a prop in this play.
    “Okay. Well.” Public is moving to the door, lively, energized. “I guess we’re good, then? Ready to rock and roll?”
    “I can try to get an injunction,” Richter says to Jay without confidence, and she stays seated. “A writ of habeas corpus. I could try.”
    Jay says nothing.
    Public: “Comeoncomeoncomeon—” He opens the door, and marshals flood the room, grasping Jay under the arms and lifting him from the chair to his feet, out the back door, which opens to bright sunshine and long shadows and the sullen, settling day’s heat. Down two steps, hurrying under the canopy of a grapefruit tree and over