-a man in a federal suit tumbles out of the back of one of the Avalon station SUVs to watch helplessly as the mail-run Cessna floats off the headland cliff, dipping, then catching the ocean updraft effortlessly for a power-climb into a torrid days poor excuse for a sky.

19

.

"DOUBLE FATTINESS IS ANOTHER GOOD ONE.".

Blue sky and the laboring whine of the Cessna climbing fast.

"Dreaming the Reality."

"What?"

Blue sky. Smear of whitecapped water, a sliver of firmament. Blue sky.

Hurtling through empty s.p.a.ce on a diagonal, gravitys drag-what do they call it?-g-force, makes Jays eyes ache in their sockets, and his fingers tremble.

"Guy in a maze," Dunn explains, no stress in his voice. No sign that hes mid-loop of some inexplicable aerobatic maneuver involving roll, pitch, and yaw; he could be sitting on the seawall by the Tuna Club, sucking on a warmish microbrew and watching the sun set over East Peak. "Guy in a maze confronts kickboxing killers, prost.i.tutes who can crush watermelons with their thighs."

Jays muscles tighten and his stomach flips.

"Everybodys lying," Dunn says.

Blue sky. And the angry whinge of the plane: "Theres a warlock with an army of female zombies brought to life by pounding spikes through their skulls-"

A sense of spinning, but with no horizon to reference, its like a crushing onset of vertigo until an upside-down c.o.c.keyed world slides into Jays field of vision and hangs there, sky, ocean, and the litter of civilization with which Los Angeles tumbles off the continent-but in reverse order- "-all these nests of worms and centipedes that grow under the skin-"

-and Jay, eyes closing, cheeks sheet-white- "-a magician," Dunn revels, "who drinks human milk to keep from aging-"

-the plane twists, flips, and swan-dives earthward, toward blue-black whitecapped swirls of sea, gaining speed, a death dive, and- "-not to mention all the usual exploding bodies, love potions, amnesia, hysterical blindness-"

-through a gathering gossamer fume that seems to be spun out of nothing, a pillow of dreams- "-crocodiles slit open to release snow-white doves, fireb.a.l.l.s, and this really confounding subplot involving-"

-g-forces blading Jays cheeks like rubber- "-a lost little boy who rebels against his well-meaning but s.l.u.tty mom."

At the last minute, Dunn pulls back on the yoke, the Cessna arcs up and strafes low across opaque sine waves of indigo water that foam and fall away.

"Epic."

They rocket into white blindness.

Dunn chortles: "Marine inversion from the Santa Ana situation. Hodeeho." He eases back on the throttle and pops his sungla.s.ses up onto his head, squinting into the impenetrable fog.

"Soup," he says. "Technical flying from here on, ladies and gentlemen."

Jay shifts in his seat, swallowing the acid regurge that rose to high tide in his throat.

"Skywriting, sometimes youd go through a fat letter you just laid down and get somesuch like this. Only for the moment, though. Like you forgot something. Then itd . . . clear."

Jay feels delivered into abeyance. No sense of movement, or direction, just the steady hum of the twin engines and the thwop of the propeller blades in the moist air.

"Cant we just climb up out of it?" Jay asks, whereupon a jumbo jet breaks through the brume, its belly huge, jet turbines roaring. Dunns prop plane pinwheels and barely avoids crashing into it.

"Whoa, Nelly!"

The noise is astonishing.

The jet vanishes almost instantly, it happens so fast Jay doesnt even feel the panic until its already gone, leaving a whirlpool of turbulence and wind shear that has Dunn fighting with his throttle just to stay aloft.

"-I dont think so, no," he says to Jay. "Were kinda splitting hairs between LAX and John Wayne flight grids here."

Jay thinks: No s.h.i.t.

Theyre in the fog for a long time. As if someone painted the c.o.c.kpit canopy opaque white. For a long time they dont speak. Jay wants Dunn to concentrate.

"Its like weve been erased," Dunn announces finally. Fluttering shadow geometries glide past. Buildings?

Erased. Dunn has no idea how that resonates for Jay.

A Milky White Maze, Jay thinks.

"A what?" Dunn asks.

Jays surprised he said it aloud. "My friend runs experiments with mice in mazes," he explains. "I used to work with him. Theres one, its made of translucent plastic, sometimes its even suspended in water, lit from all sides. The rats have no visual points of reference. The world is a blur."

A canyon of huge buildings looms dead ahead. Ma.s.sing from nothing. The Cessna, jacked sideways by Dunns sharp reflex, banks gracefully and slips through unscathed, swallowed again by the stubborn marine layer.

"Whats the point?" Dunn asks, meaning the maze. He turns to look at Jay, his face lit cold and white and surreal and edged green by the dull glow of the instrument panel.

"I dont know," Jay says, sorry he brought it up.

"Maybe," Dunn suggests, "its so they wont remember how to get back to where they started. So the rats gotta, you know, always go forward."

"Mice, but yeah." But Jays mind goes elsewhere. Back to where this journey started. Vaughn and the lab: experimental neurosis. "To the doors." Consuming themselves, in their choler and confusion.

"The what?"

"Doors," Jay repeats. "Forward to and through the doors."

"Oh." Dunn, nodding as if he understands.

Crackle of static on the radio, some airport control tower, comprehensible only to Sam. Dunn asks why Jay quit that job with Vaughn. Jay recalls the day he was tasked with shaving two dozen rats heads, placing them in a clamp-like restraint, using a glorified drill press to puncture tiny holes just behind the ears into which thin wires were cemented and soldered to solid-state microprocessors the rats wore like football helmets, chin-strapped on, blinking teal LEDs and a whip antennae, and then Vaughns project leader, a sun-starved psycho-behavioral post-doc goth G.o.ddess with violet-tinted contact lenses and a tangle of ginger hair and a filthy lab coat, tapping steadily on a wireless tablet keyboard sending messages to the rats that had them gyrate tilt-a-wheel until their eyes bled and they convulsed into comas.

"I got let go," Jay says. "Funding issues."

A dreamworld flickers in and out of existence as the squawk of air traffic control harmonizes with the drone of the plane. Parallel rows of halogen lights beckon them forward, skewed in the c.o.c.kpit windshield.

"Jeez. Were c.o.c.keyed," Dunn says, and fusses with the wings to straighten their orientation to the runway guides as the Cessna gently falls to its impending landing.

Then: a muddle of flashing red lights: another phalanx of patrol cars, this time police, racing along on either side of the runway to keep pace with the plane.

Unnerved, Dunn says, "s.h.i.t-what are-f.u.c.k. Cops." Jay, of course, a.s.sumes its Publics guys, Feds, waiting to re-collect him, and starts to mentally resign himself to it, but Dunn throws the throttle forward, and the engine complains because: "Oh, man, and I got twelve kilos of pot in the luggage bay. s.h.i.t. s.h.i.t."

Twelve kilos of-what?

Landing gear toes the tarmac, the tires skid and the plane bounces. Directly ahead of them, at the far end of the runway, are more cop cars and emergency vehicles and lights flashing spectral through the fog. The Cessna, powering up, accelerates toward the blockade, landing gear touching twice more before leaving the tarmac for good and barely clearing the hardware below, men in fire suits and uniform frozen, watching as the plane careens over them, one strut clipping something with a sickening metal shriek of a wheel torn loose, and the plane is tugged violently sideways, Sam Dunn screaming as he tries to hold his plane from nose-diving left: "LOSE THE WEED! LOSE THE WEED!"

The Cessna lifts wildly, knifes into the fog, and the police dragnet vanishes behind them. m.u.f.fled cry of the engines peaking and then simply cutting out. Stalled.

Silence.

"Initiating plan B," Dunn mumbles, numb.

Jay is afraid to move. Waiting for the impact of a crash . . . that doesnt happen. Plan B?

Dunn is fighting with switches, trying to will the engines to restart, and yelling at Jay: "THERES A-IM-DUDE, helpmeout . . . LUGGAGE HATCH! IN THE BACK! IN THE BACK! THROW-THE WEED-OUT the DOOR-BEFORE I PUT THIS f.u.c.kER DOWN! ILL . . ." Dunn doesnt finish the thought.

Scrambling back through the c.o.c.kpit only because maybe then Dunn will shut up and concentrate, losing his balance, catching himself on the bulkhead, Jay gropes at the prominent handle he finds on the floor in the back of the cabin, twists and yanks the compartment hatch open, revealing: nothing. No dope. Just the mailbags. He braces himself to turn, confused, frowning, and say something to Dunn, but Dunn is no longer at the Cessnas controls and as Jays brain struggles to process all these incoming contradictions his world explodes because the plane finds ground.

The noise of the impact is so deafening Jay registers only the change of pressure in his ears. Hes thrown violently forward, feetfirst, but somehow catches and braces himself between the backs of two seats while the fuselage fishtails and carves like the bow of a boat through turf and mud that sprays helter-skelter into the c.o.c.kpit behind a bright curtain of shattered windshield gla.s.s as the plane finally impales itself on the low branches of a huge tree, bark and greenwood erupting scattershot, the smell of burnt wood and jet fuel and a gray darkness that grows a m.u.f.fled silence, fingers of fire reaching upward, smoke gathering, the sound of Jays breathing, coughing, his own heartbeat, the sound of his shoes banging on metal, the searing pain that shoots through his ankle and then a perfect oval punches out of the darkness as the Cessnas door falls away and a shadow pa.s.ses. Chalky light spills in on Jay, the weblike fractured branches of the tree crowd the cabin, but hes been sheltered by the seats.

The Cessnas torn and buckled metal tick tick ticks with stress points released. Hacking up the acrid smoke, Jay tumbles out of the plane, onto the cold, wet gra.s.s of a small city park. Fog hangs curtained across a bright green field bordered by trees that seem to be holding the formless drapery aloft.

He rises onto his hands and knees, looks back at the plane. Tangled fingers of oak have punctured the c.o.c.kpit like an iron maiden where Sam was sitting. Tongues of flame lick the broken c.o.c.kpit gla.s.s still held in the windshields warped frame. Reflection of tree, sky, fire, and the exquisitely fractured safety gla.s.s prevent Jay from seeing inside.

Sirens, distant, mournful. Growing louder.

Jay gets up, his ankle fat, aching. And he runs. Like Ginger told him to.

Often, even after years, mental states once present in consciousness return to it with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will; that is, they are reproduced involuntarily. Here, also, in the majority of cases we at once recognize the returned mental state as one that has already been experienced; that is, we remember it. Under certain conditions, however, this accompanying consciousness is lacking, and we know only indirectly that the "now" must be identical with the "then"; yet we receive in this way a no less valid proof for its existence during the intervening time. As more exact observation teaches us, the occurrence of these involuntary reproductions is not an entirely random and accidental one. On the contrary they are brought about through the instrumentality of other immediately present mental images. Moreover they occur in certain regular ways which in general terms are described under the so-called "laws of a.s.sociation."

-HERMANN EBBINGHAUS (1885).

Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology

20

.

HIS KEY IN THE DEADBOLT LOCK.

His lock.

His apartment door, which hes unlocked at least a thousand times. Jiggling metal against metal, but the deadbolt wont budge and a womans voice calls out querulously from inside: Who is it?

Who is it? For a moment hes confounded, and he steps back to make sure that hes at the right door, even though he knows he is, this door hes opened and closed and gone in and out of without thinking about it, instinctive, but after a month in the shifting sands of witness protection, his senses are dulled again, his compa.s.s broken. Anything could be true. Or nothing.

The tiny security peephole in the door ripples with the black-and-hazel smear of a tiny, distant eye pressed against it. Jay removes the key from the lock and steps back.

Jay says that this is where he lives.

The voice disagrees, and points out that, in fact, it lives here, evidenced by the fact that it is inside and Jay is out in the hallway with a key that doesnt work.

Erased.

Embarra.s.sed, he corrects himself: he used to live here: there is no response to his apology.

His body still aches from the impact of the Cessnas crash landing, his legs are dead from running, he reeks of smoke and sweat and maybe, he considers, hes been concussed, because if he was thinking straight he should never have come here to begin with, should have known that his apartment would be emptied and re-rented as part of the deletion that Public claimed was foundational to the program.

Jay puts his head to the door and asks if he could just, for a moment, look inside and see it again. He wants to know that something he remembers is true.

He hears the woman, farther back in the apartment, moving around, calling out to him to go away before she calls the police.

His Los Angeles, washed-out, uninviting, dour.

Mid-city, disgorged from a 720 rapid bus, it feels to him like a foreign country. The squat, blunt, tawny sage hills rising above the crazy quilt of architecture, malignant scatter of stucco boxes, and the intermittent cl.u.s.ter of high-rises or skysc.r.a.pers, louvered parking structures, the theme-park shopping malls, the food trucks, phone stores, walking Sikhs, cut fruit vendors, hot dogs wrapped with bacon, inflatable toys on sticks. The scream of billboards, branding, half-naked boy-hipped women youll never know gazing down with hollow promises, someone elses dreams.

The long-shadowed rectilinear moil.

The shimmering rivers of traffic.

The mad, quailing palms.

At the boxy, tan, Beaux Arts Hollywood Y, Jay pushes from bright, flat flaxen daylight in through the side gymnasium doorway, a stark silhouette that resolves into a man, and he stands for a while with hands in pockets, watching basketball players run the court, sneakers squeaking, bark of voices, slap of bodies and limbs colliding, the sharp percussion of the ball on the floor.

There are familiar faces, a couple of heads turn, with partial recognition: the equivocal look, half-nod, but the game flows on. Jay forgotten.

He doesnt see anyone from his old employer, Buckham & Buckham. Theyre still at their desks, he thinks.

He wants to take a shower, but the Sikh at the desk says Jays membership has lapsed, in fact, he owes more than a hundred dollars in delinquent fees and theres only seventeen and change in his old wallet, so he turns and goes back outside, where a dim, bloodshot descending sun is still trying to burn through the fog, fat in a nankeen sky.

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