Pax stood watching numbers roll up on the tape counter and the twin hubs turning as tape moved through the guide rollers. He didn’t listen as closely to the captain’s words as did Murphy and Nancy, for he’d heard them in the car with Pogo and would never forget them. As the magnetized strip of acetate spooled from reel to reel, paying out the past, he felt it pulling him toward the future. He wondered, with a reverent awe but also with some apprehension, what the years ahead with Bibi would be like, this remarkable woman, if she survived to share her life with him.
During Captain’s account, Room 456 seemed to emerge from the building in which it had been located, like a bubble from a bubble-blower’s loop, becoming a world unto itself, afloat, so that if one were to open the door, no hospital corridor would wait beyond, but instead an intolerable nothingness. His voice grew as mesmerizing as the drug that he’d put in young Bibi’s Coca-Cola. In spite of the outlandish nature of the story he told, none in his audience of four expressed disbelief, because they knew now of other instances when Bibi’s imagination had shaped her life for better (Jasper, who was renamed Olaf) or worse (the writing assignment for Dr. Solange St. Croix). At one point, Nancy needed a chair, and Murphy brought one bedside for her. Throughout, the girl lay apparently insensate to this world, living in a different one of her vivid imagining.
After recalling for Bibi the incident in her bedroom, which he had helped her to forget, the captain recounted how she had brought the creature out of the storybook again, this time in the kitchen of his apartment above the garage, to prove the truth of her claim. That experience had been terrifying for both of them, though less so for Bibi, because she had once vanquished the thing and knew that she had power over it.
Speaking now from the cassette recorder as from the grave, the captain said, “Bibi, considering that you lived with that secret for eight months before you shared it with me, and considering that you were haunted by what had happened and were fearful of what you might unwittingly conjure up next, I still think the best solution was the memory trick. There are no coincidences. I came into your life with the knowledge necessary to heal you, protect you, and I believe that I was meant to do just that.”
Getting up from her chair, as if her father stood in the room to be confronted, Nancy said, “Drugs, hypnosis, brainwashing?” But then she seemed to resign herself to the situation as it was and sat once more, still weak-kneed, as the captain continued.
“You have such a powerful imagination, so colorful and detailed and…deep. In time I saw it was a gift. An extraordinary gift. I think you’re born to tell stories, Bibi. That’s a wonderful thing. I’ve read more truth in fiction than in nonfiction, partly because fiction can deal with the numinous, and nonfiction rarely does. The human heart and spirit. The unknown. The unknowable. Storytelling can heal broken hearts and damaged minds. As a writer, Bibi, you could be a doctor of the soul. I began to worry that, with the memory trick, I stole from you part of your precious gift, denied you the chance to control it and to become all that you might be. So I began collecting quotations from famous writers, their thoughts about the great value of imagination. A foolish exercise? God, I hope not. Over the years, as I’m sure you remember, we talked a lot about those quotations, and in my fumbling way, I tried to make sure that you would develop your gift, that the knowledge lost to you regarding the full extent of your talent, the knowledge burned away with the memory trick, would not prevent you from becoming all that you could be.”
“…in my fumbling way, I tried to make sure you would develop your gift, that the knowledge lost to you regarding the full extent of your talent…would not prevent you from becoming all that you could be.”
Bibi had crawled out of the kneehole. She stood in the reception hall, a small figure in the vastness of white quartz, staring up at the circle of red stone and the two stylized lightning bolts centered in it.
Over the years, she had been troubled by a repetitive nightmare in which two robed and hooded figures, tall and shambling, deformed in limbs and spines, had carried a corpse wrapped in a shroud. Under a Cheshire moon, they brought the dead man through the brick-paved courtyard behind the bungalow, as she watched them from a window, terrified by their intent. They were, of course, returning Captain to the apartment above the garage, where he had died.