Nine Lives(49)

Going to sleep that night, on several pillows because his acid reflux was back, he thought about a fantasy he used to have, one in which he was the unwitting subject of an experiment. Without his knowing it, scientists had implanted recording devices in his eyes and his ears so that a team could observe an average life—his average life—twenty-four hours a day. They would see the world as he saw it. In this fantasy, he’d imagine the group of observers watching his every move, seeing the way he made his scrambled eggs in the morning, and the way he cleaned his dishes, and the people he put up with at work without ever complaining or acting out. The scientists would take notes, and try to be impartial, but they wouldn’t be able to observe him without coming to admire his simple life, his intelligence and goodness, and they would also recognize how no one around him seemed to care. They’d recognize that he never got credit for anything. People just took him for granted, or were rude, or dismissive. Sometimes, he would let the fantasy keep running so that he would imagine one of the scientists quitting her job, quitting her profession, so that she could come and be with him. It would make a cool book, he used to think, and maybe even a better movie, and he thought about writing it himself, but knew that he probably never would.

But now that he actually was being watched by anonymous police officers in gray cars, he wasn’t sure how much he liked it. He wondered if they were looking at his browsing history as well, and for that reason, ever since telling the woman on the phone that he was on a list, he’d stopped going to certain websites. And he missed them. Lying in bed now, with his eyes closed, he conjured up the image of Evie Aurora, a cam girl who had always been happy to see him, back in the good old days before he ever got that phone call from the FBI.





4





SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 10:30 A.M.


Jay Coates, the Jay Coates that lived in Los Angeles, California, was preparing for his weekly talk with his mother by doing a couple of tai chi moves while staring out of his apartment window at the smoggy sky.

His phone rang right on cue. 10:30 his time, 12:30 hers.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

“Hi, darling. I haven’t caught you at a bad time, have I?”

“Nope. I was expecting your call.”

“Oh, good. I just finished my lunch.”

“What did you have?” Jay said, and then finished his moves with the phone in his hand as he heard her say something about a tomato salad.

“Are you there, darling? I think you’re breaking up.”

“I’m here.”

“Oh, good. Tell me about you. Did you get that commercial you were going for?”

“They wanted me for it, but I turned it down. I mean, it would have been okay money, but that’s not what I came out here to do, you know?” He went on to tell her about a fantastic play he was going to be in, and when she asked if she could come out and see it, he told her it was only being performed for industry insiders. He wasn’t sure she bought it, but she moved on. It was hard to lie about having acting success, since acting was a public performance. Sometimes he told her that he wrote screenplays as well, and that he’d sold a few, although who knew when they’d go into production. She always wanted to know if he’d written a part for himself, like Matt and Ben did in Good Will Hunting, and he’d told her that he wasn’t that egotistical. His mother had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she acted as though she were somehow related to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, talking about them constantly.

“Did you hear what I just said, Jay?”

“What? Sorry, you dropped out there, for a moment.”

“I have some news about your father.”

She often had news about his father, despite the fact that he’d left her over twenty years ago. “Oh, what’s that?” Jay said.

“You know I don’t follow him on Facebook, but my friend Stella still does, and she told me that he’s trying to sell vitamin supplements or something like that. She said it looked like a total scam, and it made me think he must be desperate for money.”

“He’s a loser, Mom, you know that.”

“As you know I don’t have very warm feelings toward your father, Jay, but I don’t like to hear you say that.”

“Then stop bringing him up.”

“Well, I hear you loud and clear, my dear. I won’t speak another word about it. What movies have you seen lately? I just saw something with Bradley Cooper that was very good.”

Twenty minutes later, after several failed attempts, Jay managed to end the call with his mother. To calm himself down, he decided to go on a run. As he was lacing up his running shoes, his mind went to Jeremy Evans, his best friend from grade school, and the time that Jeremy had gotten a pair of Air Jordans for his twelfth birthday. Jay had been so jealous of the fancy sneakers that he’d broken into Jeremy’s ground-floor bedroom through an open window during church hours, stolen the Air Jordans, and tossed them into a dumpster behind a convenience store. He hadn’t thought about that for years; it was probably the combination of hearing his mother’s voice on the phone, then lacing up his own sneakers that brought it bubbling up. He found himself luxuriating in the memory. Jeremy’s grief at losing those sneakers had been a momentous experience for Jay. He’d done something in secret that made someone else feel bad and made him feel good. It had been a transformative moment.