Helen just paints.

Jay is determined that he will hold conversation with her whether she responds or not; in his admittedly limited experience, kids dont say much thats interesting, anyway, and this one, with her sharp looks and droll expressions, seems like shes carrying on one long continuous monologue-or tuneless aria-for her own entertainment, without the complication of words. Jay wants in on that.

"Is it the talking thing?" Jay asks her.

Helen looks up at him deadpan.

Against the far wall, a couple of Spanish-speaking women and Ginger, on ladders, are trying to hang a curtain from a cable on one end of the room, for the temporary stage. It sags, big-time. Ginger keeps glancing over at Jay and Helen with a look that tells Jay she still doesnt completely trust him with her daughter.

"Because, dont get me wrong," Jay continues, "I like a good musical as much as the next fool-well, maybe not-but-I think you could get up there and be, like, really really quiet and not say anything, and that could be, you know, pretty effective. Which is to say good. Dramatically. With the piano and everything."

Helen stares at him.

"I carve a lousy cloud. I know. I know."

She goes back to her painting.

"Helen is a pretty serious name."

No reaction.

"You go by anything else? Shorter?"

No.

"I guess theres not really a diminutive for Helen." Jay finds himself struggling not to fall into the empty patter of the phone jockey: "But Im just saying. Helen could be very heavy baggage. Woman that brought down an entire civilization, launched a thousand ships, et cetera, et cetera. Troy? With the guys hiding in the horse? And n.o.ble Hector and the other guy, the creep, I forget his name. Maybe you heard about it. I think Disney made a movie." He waits again; again, no reaction. "Although, I wikied it on my computer at work, and some Greeks say the whole thing never happened, all a ruse. I guess theres a lot of variations on the story. But heres the thing: in one, Zeus has Hermes fashion Helen out of-guess what?-yeah, clouds."

Nothing from Helen.

Jay props his improbable, chop-blocky c.u.mulus against his leg. "Or not. Okay, look. Helen. See, for me? It doesnt matter if you talk, theres all kinds of ways to communicate. Plus," he drops his voice low, as if sharing a secret, "I actually get where youre coming from. Half the time n.o.body listens to what youre saying, anyway, its just noise to them, just something they gotta tolerate until they can speak again, so Im saying its like, you know: whats the point?

"Amiright?"

Helen bends close to her cloud, so close, like someone incredibly nearsighted, meticulously brushing her blue highlights, affecting total concentration, pretending shes ignoring him.

Simple chords bang from the piano. Jays heard this one before. Another hopeful audition begins to murder the lyrics of a beloved Broadway warhorse: Somebody will shout, tomorrow I will betcha a dollar . . .

"I mean," Jay is saying, "talking is words, and words are . . ."

March third," Magonis says, the datebook falling open to another apparently random calendar page; squares of sunlight, the smell of warm leather, crackle of Jays planner with its helter-skelter scrawlings, as if someone (not even Jay) wrote in it while on a roller coaster.

March third.

He cant take his eyes off the bad hairpiece. He expects at any moment for it to leap out into the room like a scruffy flat rodent. But at least it distracts him from Magoniss wandering eye. Is it taped on? Glued? What unfortunate individual sacrificed the hair for it, and how much were they paid?

"Are you married?" Jay has asked him before, in elusion. What kind of wife would allow him that rug?

"Love is a complex neurobiological phenomenon," Magonis had replied, thoughtful. "Dopamine, vasopressin, oxytocin, serotonergic signaling, not to mention endorphins and all these weird endogenous morphinergic mechanisms." He shook his head. "There are benefits to the romantic love concept, mostly s.e.x and reproduction. But psychologically? Its a toxic stew." In short, "No. Like nature, I abhor the vacuum."

Jay has no idea what happened on March third.

And hes still upset by what he saw before he came for this appointment.

Jay spent the morning sitting behind the counter at the video store watching Savage Messiah and Googling information about Catalina Island and Avalon and tidal reports and how long it would take to swim to the mainland, but discovered he still cannot log in or access any social networks, or Skype, or post anything or shout out into the worldwide void; his ability to upload is, like his physical egress from the island, somehow globally blocked, wherever he logs on.

n.o.body ever comes in.

Two women hurried past on the sidewalk around eleven, hair jacked by the sea wind, one of them waved in at him and smiled, and Jay thought he recognized her as part of the U.S. Marshal team at the Santa Monica safe house, but Jay sees U.S. Marshals in pretty much everybody now.

He locked up early and went for bad coffee at Big Es, never making it there because as he rounded the corner he saw a cl.u.s.ter of boats on the horizon line, one of them with a flashing light on it like a police patrol car. Standing on the seawall, he watched them come in to the pier: two civilian fishing skiffs and a big old trawler, trailing behind a sleek harbor patrol boat that tied up on the pier near the harbormasters office; there was a man lying in back who they lifted carefully and handed to dockworkers, and that was when Jay realized that the man was Hondo, the boat-rental guy, and he was dead.

A shattered fibergla.s.s kayak followed the body from the back of the patrol boat to the pier. It looked like someone had crushed the side of the kayak with a sledgehammer or a baseball bat, and it continued leaking enough seawater that they had to lift Hondo again and move him out of the spill.

A compact ambulance rumbled out of Avalon from the fire station, no siren. The EMTs took over and the fishermen and patrol officers stood around for a while, arms folded, saying little, until finally the fishermen separated and came walking down the pier and Jay could overhear them talking about it as they pa.s.sed him: -I wonder what coulda done that to the kayak.

-Rock. Or rocks.

-Before or after he got shot in the head?

-Coulda been he hit his head on the rocks. Caught a swell and it dropped him right on em. Theres all kinds of worrisome s.h.i.t below the surface of the San Pedro channel you dont want to think about.

-Looked like a gunshot wound.

-As if you could f.u.c.king tell.

-Im just saying.

-You watch too much CSI.

-Okay. Okay. But you saying he couldnt tread water? Wearing a life vest?

-Maybe it knocked him out. h.e.l.l, maybe it broke his ribs, turned him upside down. The point is, we dont know.

-The f.u.c.k was he doing way out there?

Paddling for the mainland, was Jays thought.

-Drowning.

He recognized Island Videos favorite Francophile customer Sam Dunn walking with them, but Dunns eyes were down, and he didnt look up, and when they went into Big Es their conversation went with them.

Jay gave up on his bad coffee; he was late for the Zane Grey, Magonis, room 204. Arriving, he asked about Hondo, but the federal shrink didnt know anything about it, and added, somewhat tetchy, that he was on the island only for Jay.

And, presently, whatever it was that happened on March third.

"PCW?" Magonis reading, head tilted slightly, Jay a.s.sumes, to favor his useful eye: "Thats all you wrote here. You wrote: 'PCW." Magonis looks up. "What is that?"

PCW. Paper Clip Wars.

Insurgent response to the tedium of phone sales.

SuperSmash Melee in the bullpen, moving low and fast through the milky white maze mouselike to pop up over the half-wall and poise, rubber band stretched back slingshot between his fingers and thwak lets fly with a silvery paper clip that just misses coworker Larry, who dives away, war sweeping through the office, six, seven players, light jittering off bent-wire projectiles that spin glinting and ricochet off walls and windows, shoulders, backs, and a.s.ses, bodies jerking to momentary safety, twisting, stumbling, falling in pa.s.sageways, and laughing.

Phones ring unanswered, lines light up, flashing, data streams across LCD screens, noncombatants cowering low at their desks with their headphones and monitors and keyboards uprooted.

Jay shakes his head. Somehow he doesnt want to give the shrink the satisfaction of admitting he was part of such a pointless diversion. Doesnt want to acknowledge that he spent hours calculating a full range of arcane statistics: win/loss, yield, ordnance economy, weapon accuracy, overall efficiency, splits, rankings, vulnerability to low, middle, high attack, kill ratios, value added, fail rates and speed charts.

"Its just, it was, I dont know, business as usual. Sell sell sell," Jay says. Its not enough, Magonis keeps waiting for the answer, and Jay, vamping: "So, I mean, PCW, it-PCW stands for partial . . . so, its like an acronym: partial collection, um, of . . ."

"Not so important," Magonis says.

". . . warranties. Warrants."

Until somebody-was it Larry? or Timmerman?-took a paper clip right in the eye and folded over, hands to his face, screaming Ow s.h.i.t jesuss.h.i.tow ow ow and blood spritzing through his fingers and Buddy DeLuca had to be told, which led to a private conference and reprimands and penalties and overtime and Larry or Timmerman came back with a s.h.i.t-eating grin and thick gauze over one eye and no permanent damage and, supposedly, a prospective date with a smoking-hot ER nurse, but it was game over, End of War.

". . . part of this kind of insurance program we had," Jay is saying with all sincerity. "For sharing net losses."

He cant tell if Magonis believes this or not.

March third.

Hondo was still alive then, somewhere. Of that much Jay is certain.

Cliffside on Chimes Tower Road, high above a sun-stung winter Avalon, after school, the Beacon Realty golf cart that no one seems to notice Jay borrowing for another joyride struggles upslope, Helen on the seat beside him, hands folded nicely in her lap, back straight.

"We cant work in a vacuum," Jay tells her. "Weve gotta do some cloud research. Like, immerse ourselves in cloudiness. Just go completely cloud."

Not even a smile from Helen. Its after school, they should be making more props for the Pied Piper, but over breakfast Ginger announced she wouldnt be there and wondered if Jay could bring Helen home, getting him to promise he wouldnt forget, so Jay figures hes got a Get Out of Jail Free card for at least a couple of hours, until theyre due home for supper. And while its not something that hed admit willingly, taking her on this excursion is something hes been looking forward to all day.

"Because your mom is right," he says. "Basically, this whole play makes or breaks based on its clouds. Lotta people think its just rats and kids and a guy in lederhosen playing a flute, with some very, very timid plague allusions." He shakes his head. "But once you get past the singing and dancing"-he makes a vague gesture here, both hands leaving the wheel of the cart, and it veers momentarily toward the edge of the road-"theres nothing but air and water. And vapor is our middle name, baby." Jay grabs the wheel, they curve away from trouble and cruise up onto the rolling, empty expanses of the high plateau. Narrow, dark creased coulees stubbled with mountain mahogany and scrub oak and mission manzanita zag like scars down to rocky, surf-sprayed escarpments, the whitecapped ocean stretches magnificently to mainland Los Angeles shrouded, as always, in its aetherlike womb of air pollution.

"Cant have your happy ending if the sun doesnt break through the, you know."

No fog today.

Just clouds, white, cartoon, scattered like cotton Morse code from horizon to horizon, a dotted ceiling that floats, 3-D, beneath the canopy of pale blue sky.

Helens heels kick the bench in a distracted rhythm. One-two, one-two. Fretful or bored. Hondos body was gone from the Green Pleasure Pier by the time Jay left Magonis. The shattered kayak was propped up against the shuttered kiosk where the ex-con had worked. What happens when someone whos been erased dies? Does anyone notice? Can a made-up life matter?

Jay clips through the low brush and bristle gra.s.s, the hard-packed dirt road dipping and rising as Helen clutches the seat rail and leans out from under the canopy to stare up at the clouds, mesmerized, mouth agape, eyes slitted, the wind in her hair until Jay swerves and b.u.mps and jerks to a halt just off the sloping shoulder, in a riotous field of knee-high wildflowers spanning a table of land that sweeps west to a rocky escarpment on the Pacific side of the island.

"Coupla measly cardboard c.u.mulus aint gonna make it," he tells Helen, and jacks the brake with his foot. "Not for us."

She hops out of the cart and shrugs off her backpack and runs into the tall flowers, arms angled high, her eyes raised to the blissed-out heavens above her.

Julie Andrews, Jay thinks, and slides off the bench seat into the sunlight. That was a good musical.

He looks northeast. Another couple miles distant, rising above the islands angled steppe, a small airfield where mainland charter and commuter planes can land offers a single dusty scar of a runway made feasible by beheading two peaks and using the resulting rock, clay, and debris to flat-grade the gaps. It cleanly bisects the leveled mesa and simply ends at the edge of a bluff. Theres a collection of modest terra-cotta terminal buildings with a Runway Cafe sign glowing green, half a dozen parked planes, and an almost empty parking lot where park service pickups squat in the latticed shade of a brace of mahogany trees.

A Cessna four-seater is taxiing to position, the drone of its engines burring loud out of the wind like a giant locust, wings waggling. At the end of the runway the plane curls to face the mainland, then stops, the c.o.c.kpit door catches sunlight as it opens and light splinters off it. The distinctive figure of Sam Dunn emerges, wireless headset and a pair of mirrored sungla.s.ses Jay can see from where he stands; Dunn runs to the rear and tugs impatiently on the elevator trim tab until it unfreezes from the horizontal stabilizer.

The plane creeps forward, threatening to take off without its pilot, but Dunn runs back to the flapping door and climbs inside.

The pitch of the engine rises, and the plane rolls forward, picking up speed, but not nearly enough, it seems, before it runs out of airstrip and drops off the plateau and disappears from sight for a startling moment. Then it catches the channel updraft, air under its wings, reappears, steady, rising, and soars back high up into the dappled sky of cotton-ball clouds, propeller droning drunkenly as it hurries toward L.A.

Jay shades his eyes, lost in thought, watching it go. Dunn is not part of Publics game. Jay is sure he would have known it from when Dunn first came into the shop. No. Dunn is a wild card.

Possibly a trump card.

A joker that flies.

So lost in thought, Jay cant be sure hes heard, under the worbling whine of the Cessna, a little girls voice announce matter-of-factly: "Shes not my mom."

And Jay turns, startled. Helen is staring at him, intent.

"What?"

Helen says nothing to him. She gives no indication that shes said anything. Did he imagine it? Jay takes a couple steps toward her.

"What did you say?"

Nothing from Helen. Only the steady gaze that shes perfected.

"Just now. You talked."

Her expression: open, innocent, inscrutable, unyielding.

"You said . . ." Jays voice trails off. He balks, adrift in doubt, and it spooks him.

Helen draws a wedge of hair out of her eyes and lazy-skips away, trailing her hand lightly across the tops of the golden yarrow and mariposa lilies, back to the golf cart, where she climbs up on the seat and slips her arms into the loops of her backpack and waits for him, and for the long ride back to town, attending to only whats ahead of them.

11

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