Suddenly Paxton felt that they were running out of time. The sensation came out of nowhere, for no apparent cause, an impression of a brink looming, a void beyond. He became certain that Bibi was receding from him, captured by someone sinister and being carried away at high speed, in what direction and to what destination he couldn’t know. Which made no sense. She was comatose in the hospital. Nobody could abduct her from a secure medical facility. And if her condition had changed, Nancy or Murphy would have been on the phone to him.
The fourth item in the black metal box was a small recorder. It contained a microcassette, but they couldn’t listen to it because the batteries were dead.
While Pogo searched pantry shelves and kitchen drawers for spare batteries, Pax examined the fifth item, a twice-folded sheet of lined yellow paper on which were written a number of quotations and the attributions of their sources. The handwriting wasn’t Bibi’s, neither her precise adult script nor the decorative girlhood variant. The strong, slanted cursive seemed to suggest that a man had composed the list. The cheap paper was deteriorating at the corners, foxed by time and skin oil; and it had been opened and closed so many times that, at some point, the folds had been reinforced with Scotch tape.
Pax began reading the quotations aloud for Pogo’s benefit. “?‘This world is but canvas to our imaginations.’ That’s from something by Henry David Thoreau.”
Pogo said, “The Walden Pond guy.”
“So you paid attention in school, after all.”
“No matter how much you try to keep that stuff out of your head, some of it gets in.”
“The next one’s also from Thoreau. ‘If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’?”
Having found a package of Duracell AAA batteries, Pogo brought two of them to the table. “Was Thoreau the Walden Pond guy and the power-of-positive-thinking guy?”
“No. That was Norman Vincent Peale. This next one’s by someone named Anatole France. ‘To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.’?”
“Maybe I’m seeing a theme,” Pogo said as he removed the dead batteries from the recorder.
“Me, too. Imaginations, imagined, imagine. Here’s one from Joseph Conrad.”
Pogo said, “The Heart of Darkness guy.”
“Kid, you are such a fraud.” Pax cleared his throat and then read, “?‘Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.’?”
“That’s heavy, dude.”
The sense of time running out, of some catastrophe looming over Bibi, grew stronger. Pax glanced from his watch to the wall clock, where the second hand swept smoothly around the face but where the minute hand twitched from 2:19 to 2:20, clicked like a trigger.
“Here’s another one. Kenneth Grahame wrote—”
Pogo interrupted. “He’s the Wind in the Willows guy. Mr. Toad, Mole, Badger, Ratty, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and all that.”
“So he wrote, ‘As a rule, indeed, grown-up people are fairly correct on matters of fact; it is in the higher gift of imagination that they are so sadly to seek.’ You know who Wallace Stevens was?”
“A poet guy. New batteries don’t help. The recorder is biffed.”
“Biffed?”
“Biffed, totally thrashed, broke, whatever. But I know someone who can fix it.”
“So this Wallace Stevens poet guy wrote, ‘In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.’ There’s one more. You might have heard of him. Shakespeare. ‘And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.’?”
Pogo considered Shakespeare, and then shook his head. “It’ll give me a migraine. What do you figure the list means?”
“Whatever it means, I think her grandfather wrote it.”
“Captain. Yeah. And I think she’s the one who opened it and read it so often, she wore out the creases.”
Pax glanced from his wristwatch to the digital time readout on the microwave, to the digital readout on the conventional oven, to the window, where the afternoon light had not begun to wane to any appreciable degree. Nevertheless, within him, a clock spring of worry wound tighter, tighter.
“You got a dance to go to?” Pogo asked.
“Bibi’s talking to me again,” Pax decided.
“What’s she saying?”
“It’s not words this time. It’s a feeling. That time’s running out. That someone bad is coming after her, and fast.”
Pogo looked grim. “The brain cancer.”
“Not something bad—someone.”
“Nancy and Murph are with her, one or the other, usually both, and not just them.”
“It’s not something that’ll happen in the hospital. It’s going to happen…wherever else she is.”
Pogo said, “I know we’re in the Twilight Zone. I accept that. But it still sounds nuts when you say things like that.”
Pax took the sixth item from the document box, a children’s picture book with a story told in short sentences and simple words. Cookie’s Big Adventure.
“That’s been in print forever,” Pogo said. “It was Nancy’s favorite when she was little. She gave me a copy when I was five.”
“Didn’t Bibi like it?”