By the time Bibi reached her bedroom, she understood as never before that home wasn’t a place but rather a place in the heart. In this troubled world, everything was transient except what we could carry with us in our minds and hearts. Every home ceased to be a home sooner or later, but not with its demolition. It survived destruction as long as just one person who had loved it still lived. Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.
In the barren bedroom, where the plaster was now cracked and pocked and scaling, where the once lustrous wood floor was scarred and dull and splintered, Bibi felt the deepest chill of all. With only the inadequate brush and palette of the flashlight beam, she could not paint a picture of how the room had been. All the joy of the books that she had read here, all the glamor of distant rock-’n’-roll radio stations to which she had listened late into the night, marveling at differences in local cultures expressed in the style and patter of the DJs: None of that helped her to recall what a nurturing haven this had been. Instead, she saw it now as a somber and lonely space, where she had begun to lose a part of herself, where fear had driven her to sequester from recollection things of enormous importance.
She had come here with the hope that something she saw would free the imprisoned truth of what had happened in this room seventeen years earlier. What intruder had terrorized her, crawling in the dim glow of the Mickey Mouse night-light, and ultimately into her bed and under the covers?
The memory she regained, however, was of another conversation with the captain. It had taken place in the kitchen, a day or so after their tête-à-tête on the balcony above the courtyard. Murphy and Nancy were out for the evening at a concert. Captain cooked for Bibi and himself: his favorite recipe for chili-cheese dogs, with oven-baked fries bought at a supermarket from the special freezer section known only to currently serving and retired members of the Marine Corps. After they had finished eating at the kitchen table, as they were waiting to see if they could free up enough stomach room for an Eskimo Pie each, the captain raised the subject of forgetting.
Captain says, “I was taught a memory trick by this Gypsy in the Ukraine, after it wasn’t a part of the Soviet Union anymore. Is that right? Come to think of it, I might have learned it from this hundred-year-old shaman in Vietnam. Wherever and whoever, it’s a good trick and I’ve used it to forget terrible things I saw and couldn’t live with.”
“What things?”
“Things you see in war that will destroy you if you can’t stop thinking about them.”
“Tell me one.”
“If I hadn’t played the memory trick on myself, if I could remember those things, I still wouldn’t tell you.”
“Yeah, but I told you about what happened to me. I showed you how it happened and everything.”
“And I almost wish you hadn’t, missy.”
Having eaten their hotdogs by the light of six candles in small red-glass votives, they sit now in that warm flickering glow, the captain nursing a second beer and Bibi pretending that her Coke with a lime slice is a grown-up drink that might give her a hangover.
She says, “I like tricks. There’s this magician, he comes in Pet the Cat sometimes. I saw him make cards just disappear in front of my nose.”
“Making bad memories disappear is a thousand times harder. It’s true magic. I bet that magician fella brought the cards back—”
“Yeah, he did. Like poof!”
“—but once you burn memories with this trick of mine, they won’t ever come back. Are you still sure forgetting is best?”
“I’m sure,” Bibi says. “I don’t want to be afraid all the time. Aren’t you sure, Captain?”
“Sometimes…” He falls quiet. Then he begins again. “Sometimes, I start thinking around the edges of one of the holes. One of the memory holes. Thinking around the edges, trying to pull the burnt threads together. I try to fill it in. The hole. I get obsessed with filling it in. Sometimes what I fill it in with is maybe even worse than what was there in the first place.”
Bibi doesn’t know how to respond to that. The captain seems almost to be talking to himself, so maybe she doesn’t need to say anything.
In sunlight or in shadow, the captain is a striking figure, so tall and strong, with his mane of white hair and weather-beaten face and eyes that are full of sorrow even when he laughs. In candlelight, he is yet more compelling, like someone in movies, the man you must go to when everything goes wrong, the one the hero seeks out when he’s at rope’s end and needs guidance.
After considering her question through the remainder of his beer and after getting a third from the refrigerator, he says, “Yes, I do think it’s for the best, though God help me if I’m wrong. You know what hypnotism is, missy?”
“Sure. The guy swings a watch on a chain, like in front of your eyes, and makes you cluck like a chicken.”
“It isn’t just for stage shows. It can be used to break someone of smoking cigarettes or to overcome, say, a fear of flying. And for other good, healing purposes. For the memory trick to be useful, the voodooist had to hypnotize me first.”
“Why?”
“While I was under hypnosis, he implanted the unshakeable belief that the memory trick would work. Later, because I believed that it worked, it did work. You understand?”
She squinches her face. “Maybe not.”
“Well, that’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to understand it for it to work.”
“Maybe I don’t understand that, either.” Bibi sips her lime-slice Coca-Cola and tries to give Captain the same serious look he gives her, so that he’ll know she isn’t being a baby, that she’s thought about this and wants it for good reasons, though she can’t imagine one reason that would be bad to want it. “Help me. Please. You’ve got to, Captain. Help me like the Gypsy voodoo helped you.”
For a while, the captain says nothing. He is full of silences this evening, not his usual self. He doesn’t look at Bibi but at his can of beer, at the candles, at his left hand and the two stumps where his little finger and ring finger should be.
Finally he picks up one of the red-glass votives. Although he holds it by the thick bottom, it must still be hot, but he doesn’t seem to mind the heat. He looks at Bibi, and there is something in his eyes that she couldn’t in a million years put a name to, but it makes her terribly sad, though not just sad, it makes her afraid for the captain.
He tells her to push aside the glass of Coca-Cola and to put her hands in her lap, palms up, and relax. Everything is going to be all right, he says. She has nothing to worry about, nothing she needs to fear. He is going to make everything right. She must listen to his voice, which has become softer and lower, listen to his voice and watch the candle flame pulsing in the red-glass cup, watch the flame, watch it without turning her head, follow it just with her eyes, the flame, and listen to his voice. He begins to move the votive back and forth before her eyes, back and forth in slow, smooth, shallow arcs, like a pendulum….
When she returns, she has no awareness of having been gone. She thinks nothing has happened, but he says that the hypnosis part is over. Now they are ready to play the memory trick. He provides her with an index card and a pen. Together they decide on the words. She must forget not only what crawled across her room that night eight months earlier, but also why and how it had gotten there. When the petition is airtight, when it leaves no loose end that might unravel, Captain retrieves a pair of tongs from a kitchen drawer and presents them to her for the burning.
She is convinced that the memory trick will work, that it is magic of the highest order and will make her life normal again, that the ugly scary memories will vanish like the magician’s deck of cards and, unlike the deck, will never return.
She grips the index card with the tongs.
From his chair across the table, Captain picks up one of the votives and holds it out to her.
The quivering flame stands as high as the rim of the glass.
Bibi turns the tongs so that one corner o
f the index card points into the votive, cleaves the flame, and is ignited.
In the jaws of the tongs, the burning object might be a cocoon, for from it arises a bright butterfly of fire that flexes its wings across the white cardstock, which peels away in gray ribbons. The butterfly appears about to leap free, to shake loose the remnants of the white chamber of resurrection that its larval form had woven for it and soar into luminous flight, but instead it collapses into a midge of flame.
Captain tells Bibi to open the tongs, so that the fragment of card trapped between its jaws will be consumed.
Bibi obeys, and the burning scrap falls to the red-Formica top of the dinette table, the same cool chrome table that one day will be in her first apartment, the table at which ten lettered tiles will years later spell the name ASHLEY BELL.
The final twist of combustible paper has its bright moment, and in two seconds dwindles into ashes.
The captain sweeps the ashes off the Formica, carries them to the trash compactor, and blows them off his hands, into the trash.
When he returns, he stands watching his young granddaughter for a moment before he asks, “What are you afraid of, Bibi?”
“Afraid of? I don’t know. Well, there’s this old dog, two blocks over, it’s not friendly. And I sure don’t like wasps at all.”
“Have you ever been alone at night in your bedroom and been afraid that something else was there with you?”
She frowns. “How could something be with me when I’m alone?”
Instead of answering her, he says, “I guess the night-light makes you feel safe.”
“Stupid silly Mickey Mouse,” she says, and makes a face that no one could mistake for anything other than exasperation. “I’m not a baby anymore. They shouldn’t treat me like a baby. I’m not a baby anymore, and I’m never gonna be a baby again—that’s how it works.”
“You’ve not even once been glad to have Mickey there?”
“Nope. I’d break him, you know, by accident, if that wouldn’t be wrong. I might do it anyway.” She notices the tongs still in her right hand. She sniffs the air. Her eyes widen. “We just did it, didn’t we?”
“Did what?”
“The voodoo Gypsy memory trick.”
“Yes, we did. How do you feel?”
“I’m okay. I feel good. Wow, that was cool, huh?”
“Do you have any idea what memories you burned?”
She tries to think, but then she shakes her head. “Nothing. I guess I didn’t need them. What did I forget?”
At the refrigerator, he opens the freezer compartment. “Are you ready for that Eskimo Pie?”
The memory is so vivid that when it wanes and leaves Bibi once more in a house prepared for demolition, she can for a moment smell the lingering scent of the burned index card.
For sixteen years, she had neither recalled the incident in her bedroom nor dreamed of it, until the previous night, when she’d fallen asleep in the armchair in her father’s office, above Pet the Cat. The architecture of forgetfulness was at last collapsing, but not quickly enough. She still could not recall the nature of the thing that had stalked her in this room, neither the how nor the why of it, only that the incident had occurred.
Although of low wattage, the glow from Mickey Mouse had been more diffuse than the brighter but narrow beam of the flashlight, which revealed less of the room than had the cartoon guardian. As Bibi probed here and there, she realized that she had gotten all she could—and less than she hoped—from this trespass.
She thought of something she had learned about the captain during a conversation with her mother, a month after his death. Psychological warfare, interrogation-resistance techniques…
Nancy had been estranged from her father for both justifiable and petty reasons. During his four-plus years in the apartment above the garage, the valley between them had been bridged; Nancy’s real father-inflicted wounds had healed, and she had come to recognize those that were imaginary. After his death, she had been struck hard by grief, and over the weeks following his burial, she had talked about him at greater length and in more depth than ever before.
He had remained a combat soldier and officer far past the age when other men needed to switch to desk work. A stint as a trainer of recruits did not give him satisfaction. For the last decade of his career, he’d become an intelligence officer, in part supervising the gathering and analysis of information about the nation’s enemies, but primarily committed to development of defenses against psychological warfare and to formulating interrogation-resistance techniques that soldiers, when captured and held as prisoners of war, could employ to deny crucial information to the enemy.
That detail hadn’t seemed relevant when Bibi was ten and first heard it from her mother. Of the thousands of things, both important and trivial, Nancy told her about her grandfather, that was one of the least interesting. But now she realized that one way to resist interrogation would be to have a memory trick, a way of forgetting those facts the enemy might most need to know.
Surely the other presence in the vacant bungalow must have made small noises as he worked his way toward her. She must have been too lost in memories to separate the telltale sounds of a stalker from the ticks and creaks of an old house easing toward the ruin that was wanted of it.
Her flashlight was a beacon that made of her an easy target, and it revealed her attacker only in the penultimate moment, when abruptly he abandoned stealth and rushed her from the doorway.
In the instant before impact, the ice-white flashlight beam stuttered across his looming face. Broad and blunt, cleft-chinned and beetle-browed, it was a countenance familiar to victims through thousands of years, seen on marauders and plunderers, on those who tortured with hot irons and exquisitely sharp skewers, on those who lynched and beheaded and those who wielded the clubs in the gulags.
He crashed into her with devastating force, he the bull and she the china shop, so that she thought something essential inside her broke on that first contact. As he collided with her, he seized her and lifted her, his momentum barely diminished, and carried her with furious intent, slamming her into a wall. Pain flashed down her spine and through her hips, around her ribs, up her spine and across her shoulders and down her arms, her breath bursting from her with such violence that with it went the ability to inhale.
The flashlight had flown from her hand and now lay in a far corner of the room, washing the juncture of two walls. The backflow of light was too dim for Bibi to make out the details of the face immediately before her, only the shape of the skull, like the head of some demented and hornless minotaur in a nightmare. That terrible moment was only prelude to worse.
As she gaped in shock and in a failed attempt to draw breath, his mouth found hers, and he thrust his tongue between her lips in a loathsome imitation of a kiss, his breath hot and spittle foaming. She wanted to bite his tongue all the way through, bite it off, but she couldn’t get her breath or work her jaws, the impact having paralyzed her. Pinned, arms useless, she wasn’t able to reach for the pistol in her shoulder rig. Pressing obscenely against her, the attacker realized that she was armed, eased up on her just enough to thrust a hand under her blazer, tore the Sig Sauer from the holster, and threw it across the room. He yanked the T-shirt out of her jeans and got his hands under it and groped her breasts, as she at last inhaled, drawing into her mouth his exhalation scented with onions and bacon grease.
With breath came muscle control, coordination, and fierce determination. She raised her right foot to plant the sole and heel flat against the crumbling plaster, tensed calf and thigh. Although jammed between wall and beast, she managed to drive her knee between his legs. The shot was not the ball-crusher she hoped, but it made him grunt and relent just enough so that she could shove him back a half step and slip past him.
He swung one hand and swatted her alongside the head. The blow rang through her skull, and though she didn’t see stars, concentric rings of darkness welled through her eyes and made a vorte
x of the room. She staggered, stumbled, dropped to one knee. He booted her in the backside, and she sprawled facedown, terrified but also mortified by her near helplessness when contesting with brute strength and savage purpose. He dropped to his knees and roughly rolled her onto her back, knocking aside her flailing fists to seize her by the throat and apply just enough force to make her understand that he could choke her to death one-handed if he wished.
She could see his face again, shadowed but complete enough to reveal his demonic and implacable intention, a deeply perverse desire unmistakable in his green eyes. Hulking, bull-strong, as broad-faced as a steer, he seemed at the same time reptilian, as if he gave out from every pore the poisonous smell of the venom in which his brain was steeped. Clutching her throat, his face a pale moon of madness floating above her, he said, “I can screw you and then kill you or kill you first. But if you make me kill you first and I can’t have the fun of doing you alive, then I’ll kill you so slow and nasty, you’ll think it’s taking half a lifetime.” When she gagged out a curse, he pulled back his left fist, big as a sledgehammer, aimed it at her face, and said, “You want to say that again, bitch?” One punch would shatter her nose and the orbit of one eye, and a second would split her lips, break out teeth, fracture her jaw, after which no surgeon in the world would be able to put her back the way she had been, supposing that she survived. For this monster, sex and violence were one and the same desire, and either would be as satisfying as the other. When she hesitated, he pulled the fist back farther and worked her tender throat with the steel fingers of his right hand, and he repeated his question: “You want to say that again? You want to curse me, you stupid skank?” She wheezed out, “No.” He asked if she’d take the quick kill or the slow, and she said, “Quick,” meaning that she would endure rape in return for the minimal mercy of which he might be capable. “Terezin,” he said, “put a guard on places you might go, and I lucked out. He doesn’t want you. He just wants you dead. But I get my fun first, like he’ll get his birthday fun with that little bitch.”