A reflection of Jays resignation in the screen of a cash machine mocks him. Theres a short line of impatient people behind him; he punches the keyboard again, sure that his pa.s.sword is right, knowing before he started that federal due diligence would have blocked this path along with all the others, but stubborn, he gets nothing but irritable beeps and denial of service, and finally swirls away as the machine eats his cash card and resets: PLEASE INSERT YOUR CARD AND ENTER YOUR PIN CODE.

The dead eye of the security camera stares back at him.

A new hire, the security guard in the lobby not only didnt recognize him, but had never heard of Buckham & Buckham, and said the seventh floor was vacant and even confided that building management was having a hard time finding new tenants for several full-floor suites on account of the stagnant economy and soft commercial rental market and Jay was welcome to go up and look, the doors were open.

Upstairs, on seven, Jay rips protective paper from a window to let light fall in on the emptied low-slung span of what was once his workplace. Theres nothing here, just the faint impression of the desks and cubicle walls on the dirty carpet, and the raw guts of an IT system disemboweled and sprouting out of the floor at junction boxes.

Jay takes it all in. The quiet is awful, and the air is stale. Public wasnt kidding when he told Jay theyd make him vanish; not just him but everything that defined him. How far does it go? Hes not as upset as he should be, and he wonders why. His old life feels like a story someone told him, secondhand, unreal.

He waits, listening for a haunting of voices he remembers but cannot recall. He wonders, not for the first time, but for the first time with a kind of clarity: What happens when everything youve known is made a lie? And all the lies play true? Are you the sum of your memories, or a collection of consensual, verifiable facts?

He still has a key to her apartment, too, but decides to ring the bell so as not to frighten her, and just in case she changed the locks, not wanting to repeat the distressing episode that happened at his own apartment, earlier; he hears the familiar shuffle of her fluffy slippers on hardwood flooring and, after a moment, Stacy opens the door and comes face-to-face with Jay. Evidently, it still takes her breath away.

"Oh. My. G.o.d."

She looks good. But then, she always looks good, she works hard at it. Jay says hi quickly, moves past her, into the tiny, single-girl apartment he thinks he remembers, but where now a hard-bodied guy in a tight black T-shirt and Prada suit stands up from the love seat like a bit character in a failed 90s TV crime drama. Jay cant remember his name; its the guy he thought moved to Houston.

"Oh my G.o.d," Stacy says again, in rising pitch.

"Hi. Im sorry. Ill explain everything in a second, but first I gotta call Vaughn." Jay cuts his best indifferent look to hard body as he crosses to the phone. "Who are you?"

"Who are you?" the guy asks, standing up. Its the cage fighter: Juan Pablo. Hes bigger than Jay remembers, and not remotely South American. But not really a cage fighter, Jay reminds himself, and Jays pretty certain about it; that was just Vaughn, riffing, stoned. Wasnt it?

Jay glances at Stacy. "Tell him. Tell him who I am." He lifts the receiver from the cradle, and dials.

Stacy still hasnt closed the door. "What are you doing here, Jay? Did they let you . . . out?"

"What? Out of where? Ive been in witness protection, you wont believe what I-"

Stacy cuts him off, cold: "Your mom called me and explained to me about the, you know, breakdown, and-"

"My mom cant call anybody, Stacy. I told you that."

"Yeah, well, she said that youd say that, and that it was all part of your, you know, situation."

Jay listens to the phone ring on the other end of his call. "Come on, Vaughn. Pick up."

"This situation you have-this condition-oh, Jay, why didnt you tell me the truth to begin with? I feel like I dont even know you, I feel like Ive wasted-"

Jay, attention divided, "Stacy, trust me on this: my mom didnt call you."

But Stacys not listening. "You did this, anyway. You were the one who didnt want a commitment. Didnt want strings, take it as it comes, well lah dee dah, Jay, lah dee dah."

"What are you talking about? I proposed to you. Were engaged."

"No. Not really. Never really. I even had to buy the G.o.dd.a.m.n ring. Here. You can have it back." Its in her hand. She presses it into his palm, and the diamond bites.

"Stace."

"You didnt want it, Jay. Thats why we could never pick a date. You know you didnt, and okay, maybe neither did I and now-this-well, Im sorry but-"

"There is no 'this. Let me just-why doesnt his machine pick up?"

Hard body looks to Stacy. "Baby, do you want me to take him outside?"

Baby? "G.o.dDAMMIT!" Jay slams the phone down, and whirls on the Prada man. He inexplicably growls, "Back off, motherf.u.c.ker!" and it sounds incredibly lame and stupid coming out of his mouth.

The puzzled look from Juan Pablo. "Hey, now." Still, Prada man drifts sideways, wary, rolling his shoulders, wiggling his fingers, taking Jays measure.

"They said that you might do this, too," Stacy says. "They said-"

"What, that I went crazy? Stacy, they grabbed me, they put me into-"

Talking over him: "No, not crazy, just-"

"They?"

"The doctors. After I talked to your mom."

"Wait. Did they tell you, what, Jesus-theyve got me in some mental inst.i.tution somewhere? And you believed them?"

". . . just, more, like mixed up, and . . ."

"TOTAL strangers-"

". . . you know, and kind of delusional, baby, which the doctors said makes you think things are happening that . . . arent."

Jay, keeping tabs on the cage fighter, shakes his head. "Stacy. Somebody calls you on the phone and says Im in the mental hospital, says shes my mother, and you go, 'Oh, okay? s.h.i.t, Stacy, G.o.ddammit! I mean-"

"This is hard for me, too."

He tries to stay calm: "Okay. They, U.S. Marshals, took me into witness protection. They think Ive seen something, or know something, I dunno, its insane-the whole f.u.c.king thing is one long bad dream-"

Stacy is in her own aria. "-do you think Ive slept one night since you didnt come home? I cant stop thinking about you, and how I had no idea you were-your Facebook page? Is blocked-"

"Stacy, will you listen? Look at me. This is me-"

"-and Im just not good at this sort of thing-"

"-You know me. Ive been disappeared, and youre one of the only people I can-"

"-but I cant pretend that this doesnt like . . . change everything. I mean. I cant be your nurse, Jay, Im strong, but not that strong, and youve gotta go back, and whatever it is, whatever dark storm youre going through, let them help you, well, you gotta let them get you well again and let me . . . go-"

Jay stares at her, suddenly hearing her; hes hearing her for the first time.

Tears streaming down Stacys face. "Jay-? Jay-?"

"-what?"

Her voice soft, soothing, the way she might talk to a child: "They gave me a number. To call. In case. Let me," and shes moving to the telephone, "so let me just call the hospital and tell them youre here, and-"

"Whatever dark storm Im going through?"

"Jay-"

"No." Jay moves to intercept and stop her, but the hard-body guy grabs him, big hands on Jays arms, and spins him away.

"Let her make the call."

Jay loses it. "You want to go, Houston, here, now?" The big man lets go of Jay and takes a half a step back, frowning, putting his hands out to either side, empty.

"No. I dont think so. I dont think so, because you do not want to be where I am right now, man, because-" Jay turns, hurls the ring in his fist across the room as hard as he can and is astonished when it sticks in the drywall like one of those flying oriental nunchuk whirly blades, or whatever theyre called.

Hard body grabs Jay and lifts him a little too easily and pins him hard against the wall, knocking whats left of his breath out of him. Stunned, wheezing, Jay tries to fight back, approximating something hes seen in a movie, swings rubbery, but his fists find nothing but air, and suddenly hes stumbling out the door, colliding with the hallway wall opposite and falling to his hands and knees, woozy. Something pings off the side of his head and falls to the carpet, scattering light: the engagement ring. He looks up in time to see the door slamming shut. The man is laughing behind it and Stacy is telling him: "Im calling them. We cant just leave him out there, hes sick . . ."

Whatever the would-be cage fighter from Houston murmurs to her is m.u.f.fled, and Jay, in the empty corridor, cant decipher it. He gets up, unsteady. Attends to the sudden quiet, and surrenders to it, and walks away.

21

.

A WROUGHT-IRON ELEVATOR CAGE descends, byzantine, bottoms out at the end of a narrow foyer, and its manual-draw doors remain shut, the lift empty. Through locked gla.s.s double doors Jay peers in from outside the building, his hands laced through the security grille, b.u.t.tery light bouncing off bra.s.s mailboxes queued along one tiled wall.

He didnt dream this.

He turns away, his reflection vanishing into a silken darkness through which a crude neon red-lipped smiling mermaid perched on a c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s glows crazily. Her tail flutters and, in a sequence of neon stutters, she drops inside the gla.s.s.

He didnt dream her, either.

Inside the storefront strip club directly across the sleepy street, fixtures rattle with the rapid-fire percussion from calypso music and a tangerine-tailed real-life mermaid rises in the huge gla.s.s cylinder that serves as a watery center stage; hair black, skin white, she floats up, arches her back and does a lazy, curling flip, palest b.r.e.a.s.t.s roiling, the girl, sinking away again, down, and golden bubbles rise in a burst from both sides of her sirens red-lipped smile.

Half a dozen male patrons, none of them sitting together, watch her swim.

On the far side of the huge, glowing tank, in the darkest part of the bar, Jay looks back at her blankly, nursing a ten-dollar vodka tonic. Swirling the ice. Lost. An uneasiness has been creeping up on him, a nebulous slow-dawning understanding that its possible the relative ease with which he escaped from custody, or protection, may have been predestined: they let him get away to see where hed go. Ego prevents him from fully embracing this notion, but he cant seem to dismiss it. It travels with him like a yoke.

The mermaid floats up close to the gla.s.s in front of him, dark hair in tendrils, pale skin, glitter mascara, one pink nipple pierced with a gold fishhook. A tiny zipper tag flags from the orange scales at her hip, betraying the rubber tailfin costume this thala.s.sic stripper has zipped herself into.

The dream version of the club, softened, rippled and smeared, looms behind her: the bar, the doorway, the faceless patrons at the scuffed black laminate tables . . .

. . . and John Q. Public strolling through the entrance curtain, followed closely by the Agent Known As Barry Stone. Public scans the bar, the room. The patrons. The tank. Mermaid in slow gyration, gilded in bubbles. Barry circles the stage-front tables, casual, careful, staying in the shadows.

No Jay.

No, Jay is bursting through the door of the upstairs tank room, out of breath from his sprint up the stairs. He slams it shut, looks around for something to wedge it closed. Water rocks free in the big, circular access hole that comprises the middle of the wooden floor. Some spangly mermaid costumes hang upside down from a rack in the far corner like gutted fish.

The pockapockapocka of a tiny air compressor whose hose disappears down into the water. Club music thumps below. An orange smear curls deep in the tank. Jays desperate to discover a second way out. Theres a ladder in the corner that leads to a trap door up to the roof. Fire escape?

Water sloshes up over the edge, darkening the floor, and the orange mermaid breaks the surface, gasping, spitting out her transparent air hose, scaring the s.h.i.t out of Jay, and then groping for the railing to beach herself.

"Help me out here, w.i.l.l.ya, I cant"-she extends a slender white hand toward Jay-"this lovely fin suits like wearing a giant d.i.l.d.o, plus it leaks and fills up and probably weighs as much as I do by the time Im done." Jay braces himself and hauls her up into the room, and she flops, awkward, wet, tail spritzing heavily chlorinated moisture, frisky b.r.e.a.s.t.s going everywhichway. "I HATE IT. I just . . . hate it . . ." She finds the zipper and yanks and escapes, wearing nothing but a bikini bottom, and now she gets self-conscious: "TOWEL?"

Jay finds one, and the girl covers up, shaking the water out of her ears.

"Youre not supposed to be in here," she says. Then, squinting at him: "Jurgen?"

"No, Jay."

"Sorry. Im blind without my gla.s.ses and I cant wear contacts in the, you know. Seriously: legally blind. I want to get the laser surgery, but Im nervous about it. I hear it goes bad. Jurgies this guy I made a mistake and sucked off about a month ago." She adds, "Musta been life-changing, cuz he keeps following me, and like Im gonna go through that crazy s.h.i.t again, uh-uh, I dont even think hes German."

She finds her gla.s.ses on a shelf above the mermaid tail rack. Thick rims, retro-chic cats-eye. She turns and watches Jay as she peels off her bottom, under the towel, and hangs it, dripping, from a hook. "Never wear latex with a Brazilian," she warns him. "You walk like a rodeo cowboy for a week."

"Im looking for . . ." Jay stops himself. He sounds like a cop. He takes a different tack. "There was another girl who worked here, at the bar. Last winter."

The mermaid gives him a dead eye, teasing: "Oh, sure, okay, yeah, like now I know exactly who youre talking about."

"She worked at a flower shop during the day. This was just, nights, I guess, part time, but, well, something, this bad thing, happened to her and-"

"-Miriam."

Miriam.

The girl is suddenly sad. "Aw, Jesus, what a f.u.c.king mess. You were a friend of hers?"

"Kinda," Jay says, but, from memory, a single image: running across an empty expanse of blacktop with a mermaid in his arms.

"Super-tragic," the stripper remembers, "I mean-and she was our best swimmer, too, she was like, I think, almost in the Olympics or something, in that synchronized thing."

"No, she worked the bar. I-"

The mermaid shakes her head, wet hair dripping. "Miriam was a mermaid. Miriam Miller. I wasnt here when it happened, but," shes looking down, distracted, into the water, "hey, is somebody looking for you?"

Jay follows her eye line down through the tank and the warp of the water to Public, hands pressed against the gla.s.s, looking back up at him blindly.

"Dont worry, he cant see you," the girl says, shaking out her hair again and starting to twist it, the squeezings streaming back into the tank, "on account of, I think, the surface reflection, or something. Otherwise, all the fappers would be, you know, nose pressed to the gla.s.s and drooling-"