"Sure, but dont move. Let us-let us-"

Mulish, Jay rolls over, getting his knees underneath him, and another pair of hands helps him rise out of the garbage, the smell of it suddenly overwhelming him, his senses returning, aligning, and the worried looks of Public and the purple-faced cop who have taken him into custody for something he didnt see, and the bright sun and the glare of the whitewashed concrete side of the hospital or whatever it is, and one tall, lean laughing lunatic palm tree looming over him and shaking its unhinged head.

"Im okay," Jay says, and nods for some reason, though he most a.s.suredly is anything but.

5

.

HE TRIES TO MAKE IT A GAME.

All the unrelenting stress has sharpened his senses to a kind of jittering hyperlucidity that feels almost like a superpower.

Or just too much coffee.

His fall has taken the fight out of him. Hes a stick in the gutter after a storm, caught in the current of runoff, hurtling helplessly toward a drain.

Theyre on their way to what Public has called a transfer point; a black cloth bag is loosely draped over Jays head, his hands are free. Where daylight bleeds into the darkness at his neck and shoulders, a bright clutter of what Jay guesses is landscape pa.s.ses outside. And what else? The press against his shoulders of two fleshy U.S. Marshals in the backseat of a vehicle that smells of vanilla air freshener and cigarettes and french fries. He could take the hood off, but theyve asked him not to in a way that precludes arguing about it. The mewling hum of the car means it cant, he decides, be more than four cylinders, and a murmur of low front-seat voices, and the wheezy m.u.f.fled shoop shoop shoop of traffic pa.s.sing in the opposite direction suggests theyre still on city streets, windows up: m.u.f.fled talk radio bleats for a moment from an adjacent car, then bus brakes wheeze, a distant siren tails away and the tires click and pop across rents and seams in the roadway. Must be the 101. A turn indicator ticks. Now theyre taking an exit ramp. Stale frozen air blows back from the air conditioner; its been unseasonably hot.

One of the marshals wears an unfortunate cologne. Everything goes dark as they pa.s.s through a tunnel, or freeway underpa.s.s. A greenish flicker belies a canopy of trees, and the car slows to residential speeds, slows, stops. Hot, sweet fresh air floods the backseat as both doors gape, and the marshals on either side of him slide away, one of them pulling Jay with him, and helping him find his feet on a sidewalk.

His arm, shoulder, and hip are really starting to ache from the hard landing in the garbage bin.

Theyre walking, and hes trying not to stumble.

Leaves shiver around his feet in light breeze, the midwinter sun reflects up at him from flagstone pavers, brown shoes beneath khaki chinos on one side of him, sneakers and new jeans on the other.

"Step up."

More flagstone.

"Step up."

Sun, shade, some kind of porch; hes at the mercy of their lead. Someone knocking on wood. The wheeze of a screen door, the hands on his upper arms urge him over the threshold and inside.

Someones house? Wall-to-wall carpet, a suggestion of sectional sofa, the legs of a table. Sound of a television, more voices from another room, overlapping, and the s...o...b..-Doo theme song. Jay knows all the words.

"We ran into gridlock again on the four-level, got off at Silver Lake," Public is explaining to whoever is immediately in the room with them, "took Beverly to Highland, then cut down to Olympic, which was, I dont know, so messed up. Theyre putting in storm drains, its backed up from Hauser. Pack a snack."

"You should have dropped down to Pico," someone says.

"Yeah, but Pico sucks when you hit Robertson. That whole Cheviot Hills run? Brutal."

Jays hood is pulled up and off.

He stands in a modest, spa.r.s.ely furnished living room filled with strangers bathed in soft light. Jays focus whipsawing as Public makes introductions: "Jay, this is Gavin Patterson . . . thats Julia Del Valle. Mark Meyers from the Justice Department-" There are hands to shake, and the faces, one after the other. Jay cant possibly keep them all straight. "-Ms. Doe youre acquainted with; the marshals, Rodriguez and Kelly, who escorted you here and who are only temporarily a.s.signed to this location, so say h.e.l.lo and good-bye, you wont be seeing them again-"

Amid the mixing, shuffling cast of characters a small television screen in the far corner glows with Cartoon Network. A very small girl sits cross-legged in front of it, shoulders hunched, with her back to Jay, and on the sofa sits a tired and sulkier-looking version of the young woman with the crooked smile Jay recognizes from Publics file snapshots, back in the hospital, in another life.

"-and over there, thats Ginger. Say hi, Ginger. And her little ones Helen . . ."

Ginger raises frank black eyes to Jay and doesnt say anything, expressionless: no makeup, angry ink-black hair that could use some brushing out, an oversize pale green cardigan sweater pulled over her knees, as if shes freezing in all this empty Santa Ana heat. The little girl, Helen, doesnt turn, stays lost in her cartoons.

Under Gingers steady gaze, Jay self-consciously touches the crosshatched scab on the side of his face, and Meyers puts a hand on his shoulder and slides into Jays line of sight, blocking mother and child.

"So, hey. Listen, Jim. On behalf-"

"Its Jay."

"-Jimmy, on behalf of the entire U.S. Justice Department, I just want to say-"

Jimmy?

Public interjects, "-um, Mark, hes not-"

"-say that anything you need, you know, just holler, because were here for you on this one thousand percent-"

"-not fully on board yet," Public cautions.

He means Im uncooperative, Jay thinks. Not quite down with the program.

Meyers fronts a frown. "What?" Jay watches the mans eyes drift to Public, clouded with doubt. Public just shrugs.

"I want to talk to a lawyer," Jay says simply. Hes trying to be cool, cooperative, still holding out some thin Panglossian hope that they will come to their senses and realize their mistake. The room goes quiet, except for Helens cartoon show.

Jay feels the woman named Gingers dark eyes shift to him again. He looks at her. She pushes the hair off her face, like shes just now noticing hes there.

It occurs to him that shes not beautiful, not like Stacy. But theres something about her that makes it hard for him to look away. And when he does, she stays with him, indelible.

"Please?" Jay adds, more subdued, and probably, he understands, unnecessarily.

For a while, they leave him alone in a bedroom with crinkled Jay-Z posters taped to the wall and a NASCAR bedspread and high-school textbooks stacked haphazardly on an IKEA bookshelf. The desk is messy, but the carpet is new; theres a faint smell of fresh latex paint; its hard to say whether this is supposed to be a boys or a girls room, or, Jay thinks, maybe its neither, maybe its all for show. His reality turned inside out, Jay is no longer confident that he knows where the centerline is.

Shadows crawl into the room and settle. The comings and goings and muted conversations in the house disarrange and offer him no answers to his increasingly anguished preoccupation with what the Feds could possibly want from him.

His mind is sodden, his memory scrambled by disquiet. His recent past, as he thinks back on it, the weeks and the months, lurch and stall, rock forward, backward, an inconsequential blur, details pinwheeling into foreground and just as quickly spinning away: a breakfast at Platters in Glendales Frogtown (who was that with?), a few random lines from The Breakfast Club, the big storm that knocked the tree down across Franklin, Vaughn sick from mescal shooters (or was it Aaron Olson? Or that strange guy Vaughn calls Trey?), the White Stripes at the Wiltern playing an uninspired short set, Stacys loser Kappa sisters with the beach house at Dana Point (he can never remember their names), the six-hundred-pound drag queen in a tennis dress at WeHo Halloween. But then other years leak in and cause chaos, sc.r.a.ps of nothing: fourth grade, a trip to Mammoth, his dad sacked out on the sofa during March Madness, the unfortunate collagen lip treatment that his mom didnt need, the controller attack patterns in Nintendo Super Smash Bros. Melee, his first girlfriend Lisas lopsided b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the virginal Emmas peculiar preoccupation with feet that creeped him out, and what was that bar on New Years 06, in New York, the Village, with the grapefruit martinis?, and one particularly sweet reverse layup on a driveway backboard, among the desperate farrago of television, the scatter of Internet signal and noise, texting, posting, friending, gaming, taggings and selfies, the disconnection and loneliness, the information overload, the tedium and repet.i.tion: day, after day, after day, after day, immutable, unremitting, unremarkable.

What of this could they possibly want?

Eventually one of the escort marshals, still trailing his miasma of aftershave (Rodriguez? Jay guesses) comes to get him, and leads him out into the narrow hallway and down to a kitchen where Public and Doe wait at a Formica breakfast table with a scary-thin lady lawyer who introduces herself as Arden Richter, and smokes a Marlboro Red with abandon.

"Const.i.tutionally speaking, youre here voluntarily," she says.

Jay shakes his head. "But Im not."

"Right, well, and your government is claiming theyve brought you into custody for your own protection. So." Arden grips the edge of the table like a schoolgirl waiting to get her test back, and expecting an A.

"They can do that?"

Richter takes the cigarette from her lips and stares at it. "They can do whatever they want, and you can take them to court for it, later, and-"

"Like unlawful detention, or something."

"Youve been watching your Law and Order," Richter observes. "Yes. Or something."

"But meanwhile?"

Richters hands flutter up in what Jay a.s.sumes is a shrug of helplessness.

Jay looks to Public. "I guess I just want to know, protection from what?" He looks at Richter. "Or whom? Can you get them to tell me that?"

Doe tells Richter that Jay has already asked it, but she, they, the Federal Authorities, this group of marshals, cant answer that question without completely compromising the investigation in which Jay has been deemed a materially significant player.

"That doesnt really make sense," Jay observes aloud, "but, okay. So where does that leave me?"

Again, a fluttery shrug.

Public shows his teeth, not really grinning, unamused, but apparently interested for the first time. "You really have no clue why we brought you in?"

"I dont. No." He looks to Richter again. "This is what Ive been trying to get through to them."

Doe starts to interrupt, but Public holds up his hand, so Jay can finish.

"I didnt see anything," Jay tells everyone in the room, as calmly as he can. He still wants to believe that these are rational people who have made an honest but aggravating mistake and if hes just convincing enough, and lays it out for them, right here, right now, theyll let him go. "I dont know . . . anything. I have nothing to offer you. And because you wont give me a clue as to what it might be-"

"We cant. Dont you understand? We need it to come from you, unsolicited-its essential that you tell us without our asking for it-"

"Why?"

This causes another awkward hiccup in the conversation. Evidently, they cant tell him that, either. "This is either a case of mistaken ident.i.ty or some bad information you got on your end," Jay says. "Im nothing. Im just a regular, normal, boring guy. I lead a regular, normal, boring life, a telemarketer who sells virtual real estate on his way to a Thursday-night three-on-three roundball with some other guys, friends, when you, I dunno, accosted me, and pulled my coat over my head and drugged me and took me away and dropped me into this . . . well, yeah, Im sorry, but for me its a nightmare. Okay? You can see that, right?"

Richter looks at the marshals. "My client says he didnt 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 doesnt 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.

Its Vaughns 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 shes completely lost, and looking for sh.o.r.e. ". . . 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 dont 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 n.o.body is listening to me."

Public, to Jay, cold hard fact: "Because you arent 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 said before, 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 dont exist anymore," an impatient Public says sharply, the veneer peeling. "Weve erased you, my friend. So technically were not keeping you at all."

Erased. Jay feels like hes 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.

"Im sorry," he says. "Dont mind me."

The others stare at him, confused. "He doesnt trust us," Doe tells Public. "Which is perfectly understandable." The way she says it makes it sound like Publics 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 wont be necessary. Ms. Richter is just a prop in this play.

"Okay. Well." Public is moving to the door, lively, energized. "I guess were 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 days heat. Down two steps, hurrying under the canopy of a grapefruit tree and over manicured fescue to a wooden gate, and, in the alleyway behind the house, an idling white twelve-person van with ebony-tinted windows; everybody piling inside, the van moving forward even before the side door finishes sliding shut.

Jay, wedged again in the middle seat between Public and another marshal whose name hes already forgotten (Kelly?), cranes around to locate the little girl named Helen, sitting small in the backseat, holding hands with her mother. The girls eyes are wide, her face expressionless.