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?”