There was a metallic taste in Bibi’s mouth, not the familiar coppery flavor of blood—she hadn’t bitten her tongue—but more like sucking on rusted iron, and a bitter lump rose in her throat, either vomit or self-pity. Her flesh stiffened even as her bones seemed to have been reduced to jelly, quivering like aspic on a plate.
“I am restricted—you have restricted me—to only indirect means of breaking through the stubborn and resistant Bibi, to reach the other Bibi that wants to remember the full truth. And so I try to make you understand what I really am by speaking out of character. Are you listening to me, Gidget?”
She thought that she said yes.
“What did you say?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“I’m listening, yes.” She heard the susurrant syllables hissing from her lips and across the quartz. “Yes.”
He said, “I tried to make you understand by speaking out of character. Chubb Coy, former homicide detective, not known to have significant interest in the classics of American literature. Jack London, Thornton Wilder, Flannery O’Connor—they all just happen to be among your admired pantheon. Are you listening, Gidget?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Listening isn’t the same as hearing,” he declared, and with the cruel authority of a stone-temple god armed with modern technology, he slammed her with a fourth Taser cartridge.
She didn’t black out. She didn’t soil her pants, either. But she didn’t feel like searching for the lost gun or like doing anything other than lying on the bright griddle of quartz, melting like a pat of butter.
His voice remained stern, but softer than before. “I try to alert you to what I am. You sabotage me, sabotage yourself with the memory trick.”
She was looking at his shoes inches from her face. They were Gucci loafers. They should not be Gucci loafers. Too expensive for him. Too effete.
He walked a few circuits around her, saying nothing.
His socks were right. Not fancy designer socks with elaborate patterns. Plain black. A blend of man-made fabrics with just a little cotton. He could have bought them at Walmart, good working-cop socks.
He said, “Would you really rather die than learn the truth of what you are?”
“No.”
“What did you say?”
“No. I don’t want to die.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“I. Don’t. Want. To. Die.”
After a silence, with pity that had an edge of contempt, he said, “Then prove it by dealing with me.”
She was lying prostrate, head turned to the right. The injured left side of her face pressed against the stone floor. Her bleeding ear began to burn and throb again as the chaotic effect of the latest Tasering wore off and coherent messaging returned to her nervous system.
“Proving yourself to yourself doesn’t mean you’ll survive,” Coy said. “You could still easily end up dead. Or insane. But dealing with me is a start. Deal with me.”
Lying in the reception hall of a building in which a new world of fascist fury was being designed, she thought about what needed to be done. Editing. Revision.
From behind her came a rustle, a couple of soft thumps. As if some length of drapery had slipped off a rod, though the room had no draperies.
She waited. She listened. She heard nothing more.
When with an effort Bibi sat up and turned her head, she saw Chubb Coy’s discarded shoes and clothing, a puddle of fabric in the jumble of which his shoulder holster and pistol and Taser could be seen. He seemed to have disrobed and disarmed and walked off naked, though she had heard no door open or close.
Earlier, in the motel, studying the London, O’Connor, and Wilder quotations, she had begun to realize not only that Chubb Coy had spoken out of character, but also that he was a character. One of her creation. The quest for Ashley Bell would have collapsed right there if she had not cut the words from the books and burned them in the bathroom sink, using the memory trick to preserve this world, which was now too fully formed to easily dissolve.
To an observer, she might have appeared defeated as she crawled on her hands and knees to the tall black-granite desk and sat on the floor with her back against its polished-slab front. She had lost her baseball cap. Her hair tumbled in disarray. If her battered face was as pale as her hands, pale almost to ash-gray, she must have looked at once weak and wild.
She was not weak, however, and wild only to the extent that she did not know what jungles waited within her or what powers, native to them, she would soon discover. She was not defeated. But she was in the cold grip of fright.
Pax and Pogo stood with Bibi’s parents, arrayed around her bed, watching her shudder and twitch under the bedclothes, as her exposed hands, palsied and plucking, seemed to flick something offensive from her fingertips, as though washing through the room were currents of stinging power that only she could feel.
The bizarre display alarmed Nancy to tears, but Murphy withheld the nurse-call button from her. Although no less distressed than his wife, he remained in the thrall of father’s intuition, convinced that his daughter was for the moment not in danger, but instead that in essence, in mind and soul, she occupied a mysterious place more real than dreams and safer than the depths of coma.
The shaking and erratic movements subsided, and then faded away completely. She lay quiet and composed. The cardiac monitor, which had recorded a mild increase in her heartbeat, now reported an equally mild decrease. As during the episode, the five brain waves continued pumping at optimal strength and in optimal patterns.
Having heard the contents of the microcassette, Pax and Pogo had more reason than Murphy to believe that his hope was rational. They also had good reason to fear there was a mortal threat to Bibi that came from within herself, that perhaps no other human being had ever faced.
They recounted the salient points of their day. The lockbox and the items in it other than the tape, including the dog collar bearing the name JASPER. The visit to Dr. St. Croix. The reason Bibi had been forced out of the writing program. The panther-and-gazelle notebook, the lines of Bibi’s handwriting that appeared before their eyes. The visit to Toba Ringelbaum. The identity of Ashley Bell: a fictional character based on fact, survivor of Dachau, brain-cancer specialist.
Nancy and Murphy were electrified by those discoveries and more than a little mystified, full of questions and keen for answers.
“We don’t have all the answers,” Pogo said. “But what’s on the tape—it comes at you like a fully macking behemoth. Beebs is all we thought she was, but a whole lot more.”
Before playing the tape for them, Pax wanted to know about the captain, Gunther Olaf Ericson. Nancy had been estranged from him for much of her life and had only found a way to let him back into her heart after he had become so important to Bibi. What was it that had come between Nancy and her father, back in the day?
From what little Pax had said upon arrival in Room 456, Nancy was aware that the tape contained an explosive revelation that might forever change her understanding of both her father and her daughter. As she strove to condense a significant portion of her past into a montage of moments, she held fast to one of Bibi’s limp hands. Her stare fixed sometimes on the floor, sometimes on the night pressing at the window, and sometimes on Bibi’s face, but it darted often to the small tape recorder, which Pax kept in his hand as if it was too precious to put down and risk that it might be knocked to the floor, broken.
Gunther had been a good man, Nancy said. Basically good. He wanted to do the right thing. The problem lay in his priorities. He was perhaps a man who should never have married or, having married, should not have had children, yet he’d had two daughters, Nancy and Edith. A warrior at heart, and for the right reasons—love of country and family—he signed up for one tour of duty after another, making of the Marine Corps not solely a career but also a full life of such intensity that his domestic life as husband and father became pale to him, became like the
episodes of a bland television program that he watched from time to time when war and cold war would allow. He loved his wife and his daughters, but he lacked the language of the heart in which that love might be properly expressed. He was fluent in the language of honor and integrity and sacrifice, able to understand men who risked their lives for their country, who would die to protect a comrade in arms. But he couldn’t relate as easily to a wife who loved the small things of life, the quiet details in which it was said that you could discern the meaning of existence. Or to the daughters whose temperament was more like their mother’s. Anyway, as children, they possessed no awareness of the dangerous nature of the world or of the sacrifices required to keep America safe, to spare them from the horrors and deprivations that so many people in other countries endured as the given nature of existence.
When Nancy’s mother died in an accident, Gunther was away at war and didn’t get home in time for the funeral. If he understood what his grief-stricken children needed from him, he didn’t know how to give it. He seemed to be shaken if not devastated by his loss, but also bewildered, as though he had thought that all risk of death arose from the violence an enemy nation could wreak on his homeland, as if for him such threats as car accidents and house fires and cancer were abstractions, likely only as the consequences of enemy attack. He genuinely believed that a woman’s touch was required to raise two girls, and as he didn’t intend to remarry—“No one could ever replace your mom”—the woman he had in mind was his dead wife’s sister, who did indeed welcome Nancy and Edith into her home.
“I never felt I really knew him,” Nancy said, “until he came to live in the apartment over the garage. The way he was with Bibi…well, he found the father in himself, once war no longer needed him.” Her attention returned once more to the tape recorder in Pax’s hand. “You said he left that tape for Bibi. You’re sure it’s all right for us to listen?”
“It’s not only all right,” Pax said. “It’s essential.”
Pogo agreed. “But if a nurse or anyone walks in, we switch it off. It’s too big, too radical, too freakin’ wild to let it go beyond the four of us.”
“If it ever goes beyond us—that’s not ours to decide. That’s Bibi’s call,” Pax said.
He put the tape recorder on the bed as Nancy and Murphy moved closer. He pressed PLAY. From the small speaker came a tinny but nonetheless impressive version of Captain’s voice.
“My sweet girl, dear Bibi, this is my apology if it turns out one is needed. I have had a few years now to think about what I did, and I am less sure than I once was that it was the right thing. I am at times eaten by regret. I’m talking about the frightening event that I helped you to forget, but also about the memory trick itself, which you might have forgotten not because you were made to forget it, too, but because children naturally forget so much from their early years….”
In spite of its brightness, the crypto-fascist atmosphere of the cavernous reception hall so oppressed Bibi that it called to mind a passage of music from Disney’s Fantasia—“Night on Bald Mountain” by Moussorgsky. Recovering from four Taserings, she sat on the floor, her back against the black-granite desk, half seriously wondering if, when the lights went out, trolls would caper in the dark and ogres rise through the quartz floor from a world below, having ascended to devour the unwary.
She was über-wary. She was alert to the unfathomed dangers of being Bibi Blair. She had edited Chubb Coy out of existence. His clothes and other gear had lingered behind, but they had faded away when she looked steadily at them, as if her stare could function as an eraser. She thought she must be going mad. What seemed to have happened couldn’t have happened. She couldn’t eliminate someone by imagining him gone. Since shortly after leaving the hospital two days earlier, since she had allowed Calida Butterfly to seek hidden knowledge on her behalf, Bibi had been aware of supernatural forces at work in the world. But perhaps they had not been supernatural at all. Couldn’t they as easily have been the delusions of a deranged mind? If Chubb Coy was so little real as to be vanquished with a mere wish, wasn’t it possible that Calida, too, and Hoffline-Vorshack and the tattoo artist and the motel clerk and the nameless thugs and Robert Warren Faulkner—alias Terezin—were likewise no more than phantoms caused by a disorder of the stomach, by an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese…? Surely she could eliminate them by imagining them gone—if she had imagined them into existence in the first place. Derangement would not necessarily be apparent to the deranged.
Except…
Except that her struggle to stay free and alive during the past forty-eight hours, her arduous quest, and the search for Ashley Bell had been real enough, excruciatingly actual, verifiable by the myriad pains in her muscles and joints. By the hot throbbing ache in her torn and half-crushed ear. By the alternately recurring and receding pain in her jaw, a paroxysm that flared into higher waves when she clenched her teeth or touched her bruised face. If she couldn’t edit away her pain, then the people who had inflicted it—and the person whom they served, their mother-killing cult leader—had to have been real, as well. Didn’t they?
If Robert Warren Faulkner was a figment of her imagination, so was Terezin, and so was Terezin, Inc. If such a corporation did not exist, the building in which she sat did not exist, either, other than in her fevered imagination. Studying the acre of white quartz dazzling all around her, she tried to edit the structure out of existence, strove to revise recent events backward to the moment when she parked the Honda along Sonomire Way, before she ventured onto the property and encountered Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack. But the reception hall and the building that contained it did not dissolve.
Bibi wasn’t certain if the seeming permanence of the building confirmed its reality or if, in her stubborn insistence on the reality of Terezin, Inc., she resisted editing the place out of the narrative. Regarding the rules of its delusions, a deranged mind was not likely to be consistent.
Adding to her confusion, further testing her sanity, she heard Captain speaking to her. The voice flowed into the reception hall as if from a public-address system, but it must be entirely in her head, remembered or imagined.
“My sweet girl, dear Bibi, this is my apology if it turns out one is needed. I have had a few years…”
She couldn’t listen to this. Captain was dead. He had been dead for more than twelve years. In the months after his aneurysm, she had wanted him back. She had desperately wanted him to be alive again. She had been wrong to want such a thing. If she was unconsciously calling him back, his return would be no more right now than it would have been then.
“…talking about the frightening event that I helped you to forget, but also…”
She refused to listen. By listening, she would begin wanting him back. She could not want him back. Dared not. Long ago, hadn’t she learned why not? Hadn’t she?
She struggled to her feet, leaning for a moment against the black-granite desk. Then she set off across the white quartz toward a distant dark object that could be nothing other than her pistol.
The captain seemed to think she might have forgotten about the memory trick. He began to tell her how it was done.
She reached the pistol and picked it up and turned in a circle, surveying the enormous room, wondering what to do now. Who would come after her next?
The captain kept talking. She could see his face clearly in her mind’s eye. His smile. How much better things would be if Captain were alive. No.
Room 456. Five ideal wave conditions on the EEG. Bibi walking the board somewhere. The four witnesses around the bed. The girl not sleeping, not awake, yet also both of those things, lying in the bed, existing as well in a mysterious Elsewhere.
From the tape recorder, the captain spoke first about the memory trick, but not about why he’d used it. Nancy’s face hardened perhaps with some of the resentment that had embittered her in the days when, as a child herself, she had felt abandoned by him. “What is he saying…that he brainwashed h
er?”
“It may have been a mistake,” Pax said, “but he had a reason that seemed good to him. Listen.”
He knew that the next revelation would incense both Nancy and Murphy, but the greater shock would come when the captain revealed what it was that he helped the girl to forget.
“The memory trick worked so well not because I got it from a Gypsy or a hundred-year-old shaman, or from any place magical, like I made it sound. It worked because it was developed by a lot of smart people in the intelligence community, a defense against interrogation by the enemy. Once you were hypnotized and made to believe that the memory trick worked, it would work the rest of your life, whenever you needed to wipe something from your memory.”
Murphy’s tan had acquired a gray cast. “He hypnotized her?”
“Listen,” Pax said.
“This next part is a little tough for me, Bibi. It sounds worse than it is. But I knew it wouldn’t harm you in any way. See, sweetie, the hypnotism works so well to support the memory trick because the hypnotism itself is supported by a drug that puts the subject—in this case, you—in a state highly receptive to hypnotic suggestion. The night I taught you the memory trick, your mom and dad were out for the evening at a concert. We had dinner in their kitchen. Chili-cheese dogs and oven-baked fries. After dinner and before we had Eskimo Pies, I taught you the memory trick. The drug I mentioned was in your Coca-Cola.”
Such outrage fired Nancy’s face, Pax thought she might grab the recorder and throw it. He shielded it with one hand. “Just listen.”
“…your mom and dad were out for the evening at a concert…”
The voice wouldn’t stop. Bibi couldn’t keep it out because it came from within her. The longer that she listened, the warmer the voice sounded, the more clearly she remembered Captain, how he had protected her. She had felt safe with Captain living above the garage and looking down on the bungalow, where her bedroom window faced the courtyard, Captain up there keeping a watch over her.