Perhaps the cancer had already metastasized to the extent that her thinking was less clear than it had been. She knew what he said was half true, but she couldn’t reason her way to an understanding of the other half. Her confidence declined, and apprehension stole upon her.
In the chair, the beautiful child maintained the expression that she’d had in the photograph: a hard-won serenity, a mask to deny her captor the pleasure of seeing her true emotions.
“Tell me,” Terezin said, “in the swoon of writing, haven’t you at times created a character who seems as real to you as anyone in your daily life?”
“Of course. But you’re not one of them.”
“And have you ever been surprised when a character evolves such a degree of free will that he repeatedly does things that you don’t see coming, that you don’t plan, but that seem truly in character?”
“Every writer who trusts her intuition has that experience. It’s when you know a character is working, is true and right.”
Even a superior smirk could pass for an amused smile on his appealing face. “And has there ever been a time, during your writing, when you’ve had the uncanny feeling that one of your characters seems almost aware of your hand in his life, of being imagined and shaped, and he rebels, makes you struggle to keep him as you want him?”
“No,” she lied. “That doesn’t happen.”
“Fiction is a dangerous art, Bibi Blair, creating new worlds populated by people as real as you can make them. Do you know how scientists explain the universe?”
She tried again to remove him, this time by the expedient of an aneurysm. Then by imagining him dropping dead of a heart attack.
He regarded her with an infuriating expression of forbearance, a smile tart with pity. When enough time had passed to make it clear that he would not succumb to editing, he repeated his question. “Do you know how scientists explain the universe?”
“What do you mean?”
“They don’t explain it. Oh, after the Big Bang, they can explain why and how it expanded as it did. But as to where it came from—that defeats them. Some say it came from nothing. They concoct grotesque unprovable theories that purport to show not only that something can come from nothing but that it happens all the time. Happens without reason, is an effect without a cause.”
In the chair, Ashley Bell closed her eyes in resignation, as though she detected some clue in the cadences of his speech by which she knew he would soon arrive at a crescendo that he intended to emphasize by slitting her throat.
“Quite a few philosophers,” Terezin continued, “including some of the most respected and enduring, say the world was imagined into existence. The scientists who insist something can come from nothing will ridicule the philosophers. But at least imagination suggests a cause and a power behind it. Considering that I exist by virtue of the story you’ve been telling yourself, I come down on the side of the philosophers.”
“What’s your point?”
He took the knife away from Ashley’s throat, allowing the light to wink off its point. “Fiction is a dangerous art,” he said again. “Creating worlds involves risks. Not risks just to readers who may be influenced toward darkness instead of light, evil instead of good, despair instead of hope, but also to the author.”
As long as the knife was not pressed to Ashley’s throat, Bibi could rush Terezin, bowl him off his feet. He might hit his head on the granite desktop, drop the knife. She could see how it might be done. Surprise him by going for the office chair in which the girl sat. Use her momentum and all her strength to wheel it backward into him. Imprudent, heedless of consequences. But considered action was always better than considered inaction. Yet she hesitated.
“When the author creates her characters,” Terezin said, “she may think she knows what suffering should and will befall those who, like me, choose power over anything else. However, with your imagination, linked as it is to paranormal abilities, you empowered me in ways you couldn’t anticipate.”
With his left hand, he gripped Ashley by her brow and pulled her head back and put the point of the blade against the skin behind her chin bone. The opportunity to attack him was lost.
“Another way to do her would be to thrust the blade straight up through her mouth, through the soft part of her palate, and into her brain. That would be quite a moment, don’t you think?”
Behind her closed lids, the girl’s eyes rolled.
Terezin’s eyes, which met Bibi’s and challenged her, were lustrous but absent all warmth, black ice.
Hitler had established the policies that led to the systematic extermination of millions, but he had never visited a death camp to watch whole families being shot or gassed and sometimes conveyed into crematoriums while half alive. He’d never visited a slave-labor camp to watch political prisoners, captured enemy soldiers, and Christian activists being starved and worked to death. When his cities were bombed, he did not once walk the ruins to encourage his citizens and improve their morale. He could order savage violence, but he was too fastidious to witness it.
If ever Terezin and his cult came to power, he would without compunction order mass murder, but he would also participate in it with pleasure.
“If you mean to kill this girl no matter what,” Bibi said, “you would’ve done that by now. You want something from me. What is it?”
“I’ll let you save her and save yourself. All I want in return is, when you walk out of this story of yours, you leave this world intact. You leave it to me as my playground.”
She thought he must be toying with her. “But this is all…imagined.”
“Somewhere Huck Finn lives in his world, having adventures Twain never dreamed of. Sherlock Holmes is solving new cases even now.”
Bibi hesitated to answer, afraid of saying the wrong thing.
He was a megalomaniac, insane by any standard, though capable of functioning—and succeeding—in society, not unlike Hitler. If he truly believed that a fictional world continued to exist when the book ended, that on some mystical plane it was real and eternally rotating on its axis, there might be a way out of this impasse.
“Leave all this intact?” she said at last, playing along with him, indicating the grand room and the fogbound world beyond. “How does that work?”
“Finish the story. Publish it.”
“You want me to sit down and write—”
“No. You’ve already imagined most of it. It’s in your head, just imagine it being on your computer, the computer in your apartment, in the world you were born into.”
She almost protested that he had confiscated the computer in her apartment and that she had thrown away her laptop, tossed it into the back of a landscaper’s truck, when she was being sought by his men in the helicopter. Then she realized that those things had happened in this world, in this story, not in the real world, where she was dying of gliomatosis cerebri.
Her confusion, even if brief, seemed to be evidence that the brain cancer was corrupting her intellectual capacity.
“I could jam this shiv into her brain through an eyeball,” he said. “I could cut off her lips first, and her nose, and you couldn’t stop me.”
“You can have this world,” Bibi said, certain that he would not be this easily deceived, that violence was coming no matter what she said or did.
His stare was glacial, but his voice contained a suggestion of childlike delight. “You’ll publish the full story as a novel?”
“Yes.”
“And this world will be all mine?”
“If it works the way you think.”
“Of course it does. You surprise me, lovely Bibi. You should have more faith in fiction. It lets you come sideways at the truth, which is the only way anyone ever gets near it.”
He closed the knife and tossed it on the desk. The weapon slid across the black granite and came to rest, spinning lazily like the indicator on some game of chance.
When he came toward her, she prepared to dodge a punch, another
knife. But he only smiled and walked past and continued toward the open door at the farther end of the room.
She imagined him dead of a cerebral thrombosis. Imagined a lethal aortal blockage in his heart. Imagined with great intensity spontaneous combustion, Terezin consumed by fire, a lurching figure from which seethed blue-white flames as hot as the core of the sun, his body showering into glowing coals and ashes.
He pivoted, drawing a pistol from under his suit coat. Stepped close to her. “Sometimes a character understands the author as well as she understands him.” The muzzle of the gun, an empty eye socket in a fleshless skull, eternity rimmed in steel. He waited while she considered it and finally raised her stare to meet his. “Somehow, each time you target me and fail, I grow stronger. Do you sense that, lovely Bibi? I do. I sense it clearly.” When she said nothing, he took her silence to be confirmation. He holstered the gun, turned his back on her, and walked away once more.
She still did not believe that he was finished with her. Perhaps she should have said nothing. There was one question she felt sure that he expected her to raise, however, and if she didn’t ask it, he would conclude that her promise must be insincere.
“How do you know I’ll really do it?” she called after him. “How do you know I’ll leave this world intact for you?”
Halfway across the room, he paused and looked back. “You’re a girl who tries her best, who values truth, who keeps her word. You’re my creator, aren’t you? Well…if we can’t trust our gods, who can we trust?”
She thought of a piece called “The Creative Life” by Henry Miller, in which he had written that madmen “never cease to dream that they are dreaming.” She was surprised that those eight words should come to mind just then, so apropos to Terezin. But after a moment, she thought perhaps they cut too close to home, and she did not dwell on them.
She watched Terezin until he left the room and walked the corridor to the elevator alcove.
The impossible Mojave fog, a ghost of the sea that had existed there millions of years ago, washed against the portholes. Deep in the whiteness, gliding shadows passed, immense and strange, as though Bibi’s busy imagination could not resist supplying those intimations of the behemoths that plied the ocean of an earlier creation.
Approaching the lovely girl, who sat with eerie equanimity, Bibi did a small editorial revision involving the manacle that cuffed her to the chair, and it clattered to the floor.
Ashley Bell stood and stepped forward. She wore black patent-leather shoes, white stockings, a white pleated skirt, and a crisp white blouse with pale-blue embroidered butterflies on the cuffs and collar.
They met face-to-face, no more than a foot apart. Her skin was flawless, as in the photograph, her features in exquisite proportion. Those wide-set eyes, the singular violet shade of certain hyacinths, were remarkable not solely for their color but also because they were unusually pellucid, her stare direct and piercing, as if she didn’t merely see Bibi but also read her soul.
“You’re thirteen and I’m twenty-two, but we’re the same height,” Bibi said. “How can that be?”
Ashley Bell smiled and said, “How, indeed?”
Bibi was surprised to hear herself say, “I know you. We’ve met before.”
“Yes. Eight years ago.”
“Where?”
“In a book,” said Ashley Bell.
Wonder rose in Bibi. “You survived Dachau.”
“Yes. And wound up in America.”
“Those are the clothes you were wearing when the SS came for your family.”
“My mother and father resisted. They were murdered, and I was dragged from the house.”
Astonishment of the emotions. Amazement of the intellect. And wonder growing. “That’s where I saw the house before. In Toba’s first book,” Bibi said. “Toba Ringelbaum. It was a house in a German city, not in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave desert. How could I forget you, Toba’s wonderful book, Toba herself?”
She had taken from fact only what she had needed to craft her fiction, and blocked from memory anything that might have made her realize that she was in a dreamlike state of creation, anything that would have allowed her to understand that she remained cancer-riddled and unable to go on any real quest for a cure.
“You grew up to be a surgical oncologist,” Bibi remembered. “Specializing in brain cancer.”
“You don’t need an oncologist, Beebs. Don’t need me anymore,” Ashley said. “I was never really in danger. How could I be, with my story told and finished long ago, in a book now out of print? It was you who needed to be saved.” Her voice changed. Now she spoke with Bibi’s voice. “And you needed to overcome Captain’s memory trick, so that you could discover that you had the power to cure yourself.”
“Do I really? Do I have such power?”
“If you can imagine Jasper so vividly that one day a Jasper comes to you…Well, surely then you can imagine yourself free of cancer.”
As she spoke, Ashley Bell underwent a metamorphosis, her blond hair darkening nearly to black. Her hyacinth eyes darkled as well, and her features became a mirror image of Bibi’s.
The Bibi who had been Ashley put a hand on Bibi’s brow and then reached into her head as though flesh and bone presented no obstacle, her fingertips blindly tracing the surface of the brain, the gyri and sulci, the folds and fissures. This was an intimacy beyond Bibi’s experience, and she stood breathless, for the brain was the throne of the soul. Some said that the soul did not exist, and we all wondered from time to time if the skeptics might be right, if we might be only animals. But the Bibi who had been Ashley not only traced the gyri and the sulci, peeling away the web of cancer, but she saw what her fingers felt, saw the brain in all its complexity, and Bibi saw it as well, a masterpiece of gray matter and within it a soft light that wasn’t merely the current of brain waves, but the shining and eternal essence of the girl whom Paxton loved.
When the other Bibi withdrew her hand, tangled in her fingers were black skeins of tissue, alien and foul, which could be nothing other than the hideous threads of gliomatosis cerebri. She worked her fingers, rolling the spiderweb filaments into a glistening bundle as big as a golf ball before throwing them aside. She leaned forward, embraced Bibi, and whispered, “Let’s finish this, Beebs. Close your eyes. Let’s finish this and go home.”
When Bibi opened her eyes a moment later, there was only one of her—as should always have been the case.
Alone, she moved slowly through the colossal room in a condition of purest awe, as she might have felt if she had been born and raised in a deep cavern and had come aboveground after nearly a quarter of a century to see the starry night sky for the first time.
She did as Terezin asked, imagining the entire quest onto her home computer and her laptop, though not for his benefit, only for her own, that she should never forget all that had happened. She harbored no intention of publishing the story. And she would not leave this world that she had imagined for the mother-murdering monster to use as his playground. Let him perish with it. She was no god; she was a mortal liar.
No need to walk the corridor or take the elevator, now that she understood the true nature of this place. She imagined floating like a haunting spirit down through the higher floors of the building, down-down-down into the reception hall, and a moment later she found herself there.
When she raised her eyes to the big red circle with twin bolts of stylized lightning, the inlaid stone melted as if it were wax and streamed to the floor. Around her, the white quartz walls began to lose their opacity, until they became as transparent as sheets of glass, while at the same time Room 456 appeared like a heat-veiled mirage and began rapidly to solidify, though it was without patient or visitors.
She didn’t walk but floated across the disintegrating reception-hall floor toward the hospital bed, as the transparent walls of the building could no longer hold back the sea of fog. Billowing white mist flooded across the scene, claiming forever what had been the future
headquarters of Terezin, Inc., as it would claim the rest of this world that she had imagined into existence during the past four days, which for her had seemed to be only two. By the end, even the fog would cease to exist.
The bedrail was down. She climbed onto the mattress. Put her head upon the pillow. Closed her eyes.
And opened them to the sight of the four people whom she loved most in all the world.
What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?
That she was three years older than Bibi Blair. That she was the ill-fated heroine of Love Story by Erich Segal. That she never had a chance, and she broke millions of hearts in her dying.
When Bibi opened her eyes, she saw four hearts waiting to be broken. She at once gave them a reprieve by saying, “Wow. I’m not going through that again. Brain cancer sucks.”
As Bibi pulled the electro cap off her head, Nancy said, “Honey, wait, no, what’re you doing?”
“My hair’s a mess,” she said, as the EEG went into alarm mode, “and it stinks like stale sweat. I stink all over. Yuck. I can’t wait to take a shower.”
When she sat up in bed and examined the catheter taped to the crook of her left arm, wondering if she might be able to remove it herself, Murphy went a bit nuts, seized simultaneously by tentative joy and trepidation, hands shaking and mouth trembling as he hovered, babbling, “You’re awake, you’re talking, baby, don’t get up, chill out, Beebs, you can’t get up, you’re talking, look at you, I love you, you’re scaring me.”
To Pax, Bibi said, “Hi, hunk. I love you more than oxygen.” And to Pogo she said, “You were there when I needed you, dude, loaning me your car. No, wait. I invented all that. But if it had been real, you would have lent it to me, wouldn’t you, sweet boy?”
“Mi jalopy es su jalopy,” Pogo said.
Pax and Pogo seemed to be riding with her abrupt recovery much better than were her mom and dad, almost as if they understood and had internalized a little of what had happened, though she couldn’t figure out how that could be possible.