Ashley Bell: A Novel (57 page)

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
her?”

“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.

Bibi found herself behind the black-granite desk without quite knowing how she’d gotten there. Two tall stools would allow security men or receptionists to work at the desk. She occupied neither stool. Somehow she had retreated into the kneehole. Like a child seeking a refuge. A hiding place.

The captain said
, “I don’t know what I might have done. I mean, how having a big hole in your memory might affect you over time. Too late I realized maybe there might be some…disruption of a child’s psychological development. Using the memory trick when you’re a grown man, that’s different, your personality is formed. But what if…God help me, I hope nothing happens. Anyway, I don’t see how you could have lived and had a normal life with that memory…more than memory…with that knowledge of what had happened, of what you could do.”

Bibi realized that the moment was approaching when she would learn the central truth of the half-recovered memory, the identity of the intruder—the
thing
—in her bedroom when she was five years old. She tried to shrink farther back into the kneehole as dread overcame her, a double dread born of the fact that it was Captain making this revelation. If her imagination were inspired to a bright and terrible creativity, maybe both he and the bedroom thing would be conjured here tonight, to prowl the reception hall for the one hiding place that it provided. And what the hell did
that
mean? Conjured? She was no witch.