Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(87)

“What things?”

“Things you see in war that will destroy you if you can’t stop thinking about them.”

“Tell me one.”

“If I hadn’t played the memory trick on myself, if I could remember those things, I still wouldn’t tell you.”

“Yeah, but I told you about what happened to me. I showed you how it happened and everything.”

“And I almost wish you hadn’t, missy.”

Having eaten their hotdogs by the light of six candles in small red-glass votives, they sit now in that warm flickering glow, the captain nursing a second beer and Bibi pretending that her Coke with a lime slice is a grown-up drink that might give her a hangover.

She says, “I like tricks. There’s this magician, he comes in Pet the Cat sometimes. I saw him make cards just disappear in front of my nose.”

“Making bad memories disappear is a thousand times harder. It’s true magic. I bet that magician fella brought the cards back—”

“Yeah, he did. Like poof!”

“—but once you burn memories with this trick of mine, they won’t ever come back. Are you still sure forgetting is best?”

“I’m sure,” Bibi says. “I don’t want to be afraid all the time. Aren’t you sure, Captain?”

“Sometimes…” He falls quiet. Then he begins again. “Sometimes, I start thinking around the edges of one of the holes. One of the memory holes. Thinking around the edges, trying to pull the burnt threads together. I try to fill it in. The hole. I get obsessed with filling it in. Sometimes what I fill it in with is maybe even worse than what was there in the first place.”

Bibi doesn’t know how to respond to that. The captain seems almost to be talking to himself, so maybe she doesn’t need to say anything.

In sunlight or in shadow, the captain is a striking figure, so tall and strong, with his mane of white hair and weather-beaten face and eyes that are full of sorrow even when he laughs. In candlelight, he is yet more compelling, like someone in movies, the man you must go to when everything goes wrong, the one the hero seeks out when he’s at rope’s end and needs guidance.

After considering her question through the remainder of his beer and after getting a third from the refrigerator, he says, “Yes, I do think it’s for the best, though God help me if I’m wrong. You know what hypnotism is, missy?”

“Sure. The guy swings a watch on a chain, like in front of your eyes, and makes you cluck like a chicken.”

“It isn’t just for stage shows. It can be used to break someone of smoking cigarettes or to overcome, say, a fear of flying. And for other good, healing purposes. For the memory trick to be useful, the voodooist had to hypnotize me first.”

“Why?”

“While I was under hypnosis, he implanted the unshakeable belief that the memory trick would work. Later, because I believed that it worked, it did work. You understand?”

She squinches her face. “Maybe not.”

“Well, that’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to understand it for it to work.”

“Maybe I don’t understand that, either.” Bibi sips her lime-slice Coca-Cola and tries to give Captain the same serious look he gives her, so that he’ll know she isn’t being a baby, that she’s thought about this and wants it for good reasons, though she can’t imagine one reason that would be bad to want it. “Help me. Please. You’ve got to, Captain. Help me like the Gypsy voodoo helped you.”

For a while, the captain says nothing. He is full of silences this evening, not his usual self. He doesn’t look at Bibi but at his can of beer, at the candles, at his left hand and the two stumps where his little finger and ring finger should be.

Finally he picks up one of the red-glass votives. Although he holds it by the thick bottom, it must still be hot, but he doesn’t seem to mind the heat. He looks at Bibi, and there is something in his eyes that she couldn’t in a million years put a name to, but it makes her terribly sad, though not just sad, it makes her afraid for the captain.

He tells her to push aside the glass of Coca-Cola and to put her hands in her lap, palms up, and relax. Everything is going to be all right, he says. She has nothing to worry about, nothing she needs to fear. He is going to make everything right. She must listen to his voice, which has become softer and lower, listen to his voice and watch the candle flame pulsing in the red-glass cup, watch the flame, watch it without turning her head, follow it just with her eyes, the flame, and listen to his voice. He begins to move the votive back and forth before her eyes, back and forth in slow, smooth, shallow arcs, like a pendulum….

When she returns, she has no awareness of having been gone. She thinks nothing has happened, but he says that the hypnosis part is over. Now they are ready to play the memory trick. He provides her with an index card and a pen. Together they decide on the words. She must forget not only what crawled across her room that night eight months earlier, but also why and how it had gotten there. When the petition is airtight, when it leaves no loose end that might unravel, Captain retrieves a pair of tongs from a kitchen drawer and presents them to her for the burning.

She is convinced that the memory trick will work, that it is magic of the highest order and will make her life normal again, that the ugly scary memories will vanish like the magician’s deck of cards and, unlike the deck, will never return.