Dreams of Molly

68th Night

The doctors lie when they say I have no memory. Look, I remember everything. To tell them they have it wrong is only going to make them angry so I keep this wisdom to myself. It could be that I have already told the doctors they lie and it slipped my mind. It is also possible that the doctors say I have no memory (while knowing it isn’t true) to protect me from the team of interrogators who refuse to believe my answers to their questions.

Something happened to me a while back from which I haven’t fully recovered. I am strapped to a cot in what appears to be a hospital ward, though that was true yesterday. It may be true again tomorrow. Reality changes in this place from day to day, from hour to hour.

“What is this place?” I sometimes want to know.

“We’re the ones that ask the questions, dummy,” the interrogators say.

I like that they call me dummy. It is something to hang on to, a familiar name. Otherwise, I am no one.

The interrogators — there are three who interchange — like to get the answer they are looking for, the one they have in mind before they ask the question. I do my best to please, but my best tends to fall short.

An example: they’ve asked on several different occasions where I met Antonia and Winifred for the first time and when this meeting took place. Each time, they’ve asked, I’ve come up with a different answer, which is always, it seems, the wrong answer.

It stands to reason if I keep on inventing new answers, eventually I’ll hit on the right one.

If I get it right, they tell me, if I tell the truth (meaning their truth), the quality of my life while strapped to this cot would improve immeasurably.

On certain days, I never know in advance which ones, visitors are allowed.

Today, as a matter of fact (perhaps it is no longer today), my parents, recently dead, come to see me.

“The authorities informed us of your accident,” my mother says. “Your father and I were most unhappy to hear of it.”

“What did they say?” I ask, wanting to get the whole picture or at least complete the patchy jig saw puzzle I carry around in my head.

“Well,” my mother says.

“We can’t say anything,” my father says. “We’ve been sworn to secrecy.”

My mother winks as if to say wait until old stick-in-the-mud is out of the room.

Moments later, as if on cue, my father announces he’s going to the men’s room, having rushed from home without taking time to do his business. My parents embrace and tears fall on both sides before my father actually departs.

“So?” I say to my mother when we’re alone.

“What so?” she asks, so I spell it out for her. I need to know what the authorities said about me.

“Please,” she says. “Are you asking me to betray your father? Is that what you’re asking your mother to do. In a marriage, if one person has a deep dark secret, so has the other. That’s the nature of a marriage.”

“Not really,” I say.

“I will never betray your father without his permission,” she says. “What did I always tell you when you were a child?” she says.

“There was more than one thing,” I say, curious as to what she has in mind.

“I distinctly remember telling you on several occasions: you can never go wrong, son, by telling the truth people want to hear.”

I can’t remember her ever saying that to me, but maybe she has.

“What if you don’t know what the truth is?” I ask her.

“That’s the kind of question that’s gotten you in trouble before,” she says, “isn’t it? Everyone has a right to make a mistake once if they admit it afterwards.”

At this point my father returns, drying his hands on the side of his pants. “I can see something’s going on here,” he says. “What has mother said to you behind my back?”

“Nothing bad,” I say. “Nothing about you.”

“What did you tell him?” he asks her.

“The two you,” she says, “you’re so much alike which is why you’re so suspicious of each other.”

“What did you tell him?” he says as if it were the recording of the first question.

“I told him,” she says, winking at me, “that your father and I believe that if you tell them the truth, they’ll let you come home to us.”

“Nah,” my father says. “Don’t listen to your mother. The truth won’t do you any good. You tell them what they want to hear, you hear me. Now we have to go, I’m sorry to say. You’re not our only child.”

Funny. I thought I was.

“If dad says so, it must be so,” she says without perceptible irony.

In a flash, they’re out the door, my mother blowing a kiss, my father saluting.

Dinner doesn’t arrive at the usual time, but of course the wall clock has stopped and so my only gauge of time is whether I’m hungry or not. Not is the preferred alternative. They haven’t fed me in a dog’s age.

When there is food, I usually spend the first hour or so trying to identify its source.

Soon the interrogators will return, sometimes in a group of three (in reverse size place), more often one at a time and I will be urged to confess yet again.

I work on a confession that could well be appropriate to whatever they might ask.

67th Night

“Fuck you,” I answer. It is the voice of outrage speaking.

“Fuck you is not going to get it done,” the number two interrogator (he’s the Klaus Kinski type with the ripe German accent) says. “You want to get your hands untied, you got to do better than that. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your arms were coming out of their sockets.”

“Please untie me,” I say. “I’ll give you what you want.”

“You got to give us something first,” says the head man.

“Why don’t you untie him,” says number three, who is a woman and less abrupt in her manner than the others. “If you don’t get what you want, you can always tie him up again. I think he ‘s ready to cooperate.” She puts her hand on my crotch.

“Yesterday, you told us you knew those girls in high school,” number one says. “The thing is, we know Winifred and Antonia didn’t go to the same high school. So what’s the real story?”

“Fuck you is the real story,” I say.

“You’re a terrorist, aren’t you?” two says.

I’m wondering which answer will get them to untie me. “No,” I say, which induces no response. “Actually, yes.”

“Were the girls working with you?” the woman asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Yes.”

“Cut him down,” one says. They look around for a knife, find a pair of scissors in one of the drawers and, after a few agonizing minutes, cut the ropes, permitting me to lower my arms.

I am prepared to tell them anything not to have my arms strung to the pipe thing again.

“Did they take orders from you or you from them?” one asks, placing a recorder on the edge of the bed.

“Sometimes one way, sometimes the other,” I say. “They were driving alone in their open car and when they noticed me on the side of the road with my thumb in the air, they slowed down.”

“And when was that?” two asks, interrupting my train of thought.

“Five years ago,” I say.

“You’ve known them for five years?” the woman asks, seemingly surprised by my answer.

“Perhaps it was three years ago,” I say.

They look at their notes, huddle in the far corner of the room.

Buzz buzz buzz buzz. “In our first interview,” says the woman, “you said you only knew them for a short while. Were you lying then or are you lying now?”

“In my profession,” I say, “which I have only the vaguest recollection of having practiced, I feel obliged to tell whatever seems the best story at the time.”

The interrogators leave the room, the woman returning moments later. “When you say ‘in my profession,’” she asks, “what profession exactly are you referring to?”

The answer comes to mind, then slips away. “Don’t you know?” I say. “Who do you think I am?”

“It’s an old trick,” she said, “to try to turn the tables on the questioner. Would it be accurate to say that the profession you’re referring to is the commission of seemingly random acts of violence? Please answer if you don’t wish to be tied again with your arms in the air. I think you know that I’m the only friend you have in here.”

“I appreciate your kindness,” I say, only half aware that I am dissembling. “The profession I was referring to is that of storyteller.”

“You are saying that you’re a professional liar, is that it?” she says, turning away. “And I was beginning to like you, sweetheart.” She takes a tiny cell phone from her pocket to answer a call or perhaps to make one.

The word “storyteller” makes itself known from time to time.

“Look, I am not a professional liar,” I say when I have her attention again, “though I admit there is a connection between liar and teller of stories.”

I confess that I have violent mood swings and a bad temper and that a former therapist said — I think he meant it in a positive way — that I tend to be self-involved.

“That isn’t anything I want to know,” she says. “Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless it was your uncontrollable temper that got you into the situation we’re talking about,” she says.

“I made every effort to avoid fights because of my temper,” I say. “I knew that once I got started I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. So I avoided all provocations except for this one time.” I have no idea what I am going to say so I pretend I am censoring myself from telling the story while at the same time trying to come up with something vaguely credible.

“Were you with Toni and Win when this happened, storyteller?” the woman asks.

“I must have been,” I say. “I mean, your asking me about them must have stirred up this memory. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

She turns on the tape recorder, which she holds out in my direction and clicks it on. “I’m listening,” she says, but that isn’t what she means.

“One of them was dancing with this drunk aggressive guy who was leaning into her. It might have been that I was the guy. I don’t think so. I think it was someone else and that I was sitting across from them. I had the sense that Win was appealing to me to help.”

“Where was Toni?”

“I think she was in the bathroom at this time. The drunk — he was a big guy, burly — forced Win to go outside with him. I seemed to be the only one aware of what was going on, which urged a certain responsibility on me, wouldn’t you say. Win had this imploring look on her face.”

“Did she?” the woman says. “Would you repeat that? You had your head turned. …Questioner is asking prisoner to repeat his remarks.”

“So I went outside to see what was going on.”

“Was this man who was in your words forcing Win to leave the establishment in his custody a law enforcement officer”

“If he was, and I can’t be sure one way or another, he wasn’t wearing a uniform.”

“Describe what the man was wearing.”

I’m not very observant so even if my memory was working on all gears, I wouldn’t be able to answer her question. “He had on a plaid shirt,” I say, “and shit-kicking boots.”

“And as you say, you followed them outside. Is that right? To what purpose?”

“To protect her if there was no other way.”

“And why would you think she needed protection? The man, who you say was forcing her, might have been taking her outside in his capacity as a law enforcer. Isn’t that a possibility?”

“You’re right, of course,” I say. “I’m just describing what I saw and what I did.”

“Go on.”

“I didn’t see them at first but then I heard what sounded like a call for help and I went in the direction it was coming from. I was holding a wrench in my hand, though I’m not sure how I acquired it.”

“Go on.”

“The woman, Win, was being shoved into the back of an SUV parked at the side of the road. I could see bruises on her face where she had been punched. When her assailant saw me coming towards them, he pointed a gun at me and said to mind my own business if I knew what was good for me. I don’t know why but I kept moving toward him and then Win bit his hand and the gun came loose. Crying out, her assailant hit her with his fist knocking her head into the back of the car. The other woman, Toni, who I hadn’t seen before, picked the gun up off the ground.”

“Where did Toni come from? You said she was in the restroom.”

“Well, maybe it was Win who had picked up the gun and Toni was somewhere behind me coming on to the scene.”

“He had just knocked Win unconscious, how could she have picked up the gun?”

“I take your point. It wasn’t likely that Toni would have gotten to the gun before me. So I must have been the one to pick up the fallen gun. I had never fired a hand gun before and my intent was to rescue Molly, although it was Win this time, wasn’t it, by keeping the gun away from her assailant. Win wasn’t moving so I gave the gun to Toni, who had just come up behind me and told her to cover me while I carried Win to safety. Before I could react, Buck, I think that was his name, had Win in a stranglehold and was using her as a shield. And then I noticed that two of his redneck friends had come out of the bar and were calling to him and we had lost whatever limited advantage we had.”

“I’m losing you,” the interrogator says.

“When Toni shot Buck in the leg, Win was able to free herself and we got into a pink Cadillac convertible which had been left unattended about a hundred feet away.”

“So you admit to having stolen the car.”

“Yes, but we would have returned it if given the chance. The three of them chased us in Buck’s Blazer and we exchanged gunfire and I got lucky and must have blown out a tire because their van went off the road and crashed into a tree.”

“And after that you stopped to see if anyone had survived the crash.”

“No. Not that I remember. I think we just continued on.”

“Didn’t you want to know what happened to your pursuers?”

An image flashes before my eyes of a large man slumped over a steering wheel, his face crusted in blood. The interrogator removes her blouse and sits down on the side of the bed. She removes her bra and invites me to put my head between her breasts. I am not usually so reticent. An unseen hand lingers on my crotch as if it were the only possible resting place.

“I wanted them dead,” I say. “I killed them all. I fucked both girls that night.”

“You lovely man,” she says.

60th Night

The following is the transcript of my first confession. They write down everything you say here. No falsehood, no specious sigh, is left unrecorded.

I was hired and subsequently trained by an ultra-secret subgovernment organization as an assassin. I was at loose ends at the time and looking to do something adventurous. For some reason, perhaps shyness, I never bothered to verify the credentials of the shadowy men that hired me.

Initial contact was established through an unstamped letter dropped through my mail slot, offering me the opportunity for well-paid, fulfilling work with the added bonus of exotic travel while serving the unannounced interests of my country.

Nothing in the recruiting flyer suggested that killing might be part of the job description. The offer came with a questionnaire, which would indicate or not whether I had the right stuff for the job. I filled out the questionnaire in my usual fanciful way and expected of course never to hear from whoever it was again. Three weeks later I got a check in the mail for fifty dollars, which if signed and deposited would represent acceptance of their offer including an all-expenses-paid invitation to their training facilities in New Mexico.

I agonized over the decision, but when a week later a check for two-hundred dollars arrived in the mail, I provisionally accepted their offer.

The training was very much like the preparations for the football season at my high school. A lot of it had to do with the testing and sharpening of reflexes. A notable exception was the weaponry work in our regimen. I suppose I should have known that if they put guns in your hands for practice, eventually they’ll ask you to use them for real. The thing is, they kept us so busy we didn’t have time to reflect on the implications of what we were doing.

Anyway, my weaponry instructor, a woman virtually my own age, was very encouraging, complimented virtually everything I did in the shooting-at-human-targets class, said I had a natural gift for this kind of work.

My first assignment was to serve as my final exam for the course so they sent a shadowy figure with me to grade my performance.

I assumed that this would not be a actual assassination, just a realistic approximation, that we were just going through the motions to test how well I had assimilated the training. Consequently, it was a shock to discover, watching the news on TV that night, that the public figure I had lined up in the sights of a high-powered rifle had been shot between the eyes from some unseen distance.

The discovery threw me into a funk and my immediate supervisor sent me home for rest and recovery. Eventually, obsessive regret turned into amnesia and I felt absolved for whatever it was I had done. So I was feeling okay about myself when my second assignment arrived through the mail slot in my door in an unstamped envelope.

The assigned target was a public figure I had always instinctively disliked so I thought to myself, I’ll do this one for the payday and then quit, change my name (which they had already changed) and go somewhere unexpected, a place no one would think to look.

As much as I disliked the target, and possibly for that very reason, I couldn’t kill the man when faced with the opportunity. It made no sense, but that’s the way it was.

When I reported my failure to my superior, she said not to move from the booth I was phoning from, that they would send someone I knew to bring me in for debriefing. The someone they sent, a man I had trained with in New Mexico, took a shot at the phone booth from a roof across the street.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, there was someone else in the booth at the time. Instinct had led me to wait elsewhere.

When they discovered their mistake, they came after me again, and again, and in the process, mostly in self-defense, I ended up killing more people (sometimes bystanders got caught in the crossfire) than if I had continued my aborted career as assassin.

So the killing didn’t stop, as I had hoped, but became a way of life predicated on the instinct to survive, the body count far beyond anything I could have imagined.

When the secret government agency got tired of sending their own operatives after me, they framed me for capital crimes in places I sought sanctuary so that the local authorities would do the job for them. Even in places I had never been before, I was an established public enemy, thought to be armed and dangerous, my face on file on virtually every electronic screen.

During this period, I was in constant motion, eating and sleeping on the move, so tuned to impending danger that everyone on my radar screen seemed a potential assassin.

If there was no safe place to go, the only way to break the pattern was get myself killed. The idea came to me when I met this derelict, who looked enough like me to pass as my twin. This is not a story I am particularly proud of so I will not go into the unappetizing details.

Suffice to say, a week or so after I was reported dead, the agency that hired me and had been doing their damnedest to get me off their books, gave up their pursuit.

When I surfaced again with a new identity, new fingerprints, new face, I was a free man until unfortuitous circumstance dumped me in your lap, if indeed you are the same bloody-minded super-secret agency that I worked for in happier times.

73rd Night

They must have believed something I told them. Today Molly, who has been eluding me for the longest time, waltzes into my room. Her appearance, if anything, is an even greater surprise than the visit last week from my dead and cremated parents. Is it a good surprise? Any company in this place, even the company of someone who has lost all her illusions about you, is better than being alone.

“I was hoping to rescue you from your kidnappers,” I say, “but as you can see I got kidnapped myself on the way. They keep pressing me to confess but then they don’t believe what I tell them.”

“Before we go any further,” Molly says, “I need to get this said. Okay? This is not intended as a friendly visit.”

“No?” I say, reaching out an imaginary hand to her (my hands are tied behind my back), which she slaps away, “Anyway, I’m pleased to see you.”

“Every time I see you, I feel angry,” she says. “It makes me angry to feel angry all the time. I know you understand what I’m saying, though I also know you’ll do your best to pretend not to know what I mean… I’ll tell you what I’m here for. I’d like to review our time together so I can internalize the total experience and so, you know, move on. You owe me this, okay?”

“You’ve already moved on,” I say. “You’ve moved on and on and on.”

She cries, a sudden unpredictable change in the weather, a local storm with larger implications. “I can’t do this by myself,” she says. “Will you help me or do I have to go back into therapy with the hormonal Dr. F?”

She puts on her recently removed denim jacket, which resembles — I have been noting this since her arrival — a former jacket of mine.

“You dumped me for greener pastures,” I say.

“Not at all,” she insists. “You may have been my greenest pasture. Anyway, the abominable Dr. F says the process will only work if we start from the beginning. So?”

There is no beginning, I want to say, or this is the beginning. Instead, I apologize for not having lived up to her expectations.

“I told Dr. F that it was a mistake to come here,” she says. “Everything is amusing to you, even pain. You have no capacity for…” She leaves the sentence unfinished. “Did we like each other when we met. I can’t remember. We must have, don’t you think?”

“We met in a supermarket,” I say. “You asked me why I had only one item in my cart. I didn’t think it was any of your business but I was too polite to say so. The next thing I know we were in a motel room together.”

She smiles wistfully through her tears. “We had a catch,” she says, “do you remember, with a balled up pair of socks before we made out.”

“It sounds familiar,” I say, “but I remember it not as socks but as rolled up silk panties. Even in a ball, they were hard to hold on to. They had no weight.”

“It was socks,” she insists. “You were showing off and throwing the ball — the ball of socks — behind your back.”

“It could have been socks,” I allow.

“It was totally socks,” she says. “And how did we get from throwing the socks back and forth into the bed?”

“One of my errant behind the back throws landed on the bed,” I say. “Then we each made a mad dash to the bed, each of us hoping to retrieve the socks before the other.”

“I have this flash image in my mind of you pushing me out of the way,” she says. “You were always so competitive.”

The way I remember it, Molly was the one pushing me out of the way.

“After the pushing, whoever was doing it, there was a readjustment of priorities.

We forgot about the socks and the socks forgot about us.”

“That’s your story,” Molly says. “Even while we were making love, I was thinking that as soon as this is over, I’m going to get my hands on the socks before he does.”

“For me,” I say, “the love-making interlude in a socks-catching game has more enduring interest than the game itself. You know, I don’t remember where we went from there.”

“I went back to graduate school,” Molly says, “and we wrote letters back and forth. That was a time when people still wrote letters. Between the letters, when the socks were still floating in the ether of memory, we each married different people.”

I had forgotten all of this. It’s hard for me to remember anything when my hands are tied behind my back. Still, it’s a relief not to have my arms strung up over my head, which was the former regimen. “Am I right in thinking that the people we married were not the kind to throw smelly balled-up socks back and forth?” I say.

“You were the only one I ever had a socks catch with,” she says. “I lost my socks-catching virginity with you. And then we met again wholly by chance. Is that the way you remember it? We had to have met somewhere or we never would have ended up married to each other. No?”

“It seems to me,” I say, “that we never met again, though managed to get married anyway.”

“That’s why we didn’t last,” Molly says. “We didn’t last because nothing is serious to you.”

“Everything is too serious to take seriously,” I say, feeling misunderstood.

“When we made connection again you were sitting next to me and you were jabbing me with your elbow. You were born with a sense of yourself as someone with a divine right to public armrests.”

Molly sticks her tongue out at me in unspoken dispute. “After the movie,” she says, “the four of us went to a restaurant together. When no one was looking, I stuck a card with my phone number on it in your jacket pocket.”

“So we ended up in a motel room again,” I say, “though this time it was a hotel, wasn’t it? And there was another ball of socks catch.”

“That’s not the way it was,” Molly says. “When I was getting back into my clothes, you threw your balled up socks at me. ‘Think fast,’ you said. There was no back-and-forth, nothing that might be construed as a socks-catching episode. When you hit me in the breast with your socks, it touched me. I knew in that moment that it would take me years to get free of you… Look, I forgot to mention it. They’re recording this conversation. They wouldn’t have let me in unless I agreed.”

I make no complaint.

“Anyway,” she adds, “they say it’s for training purposes only.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ve long since run out of shameful stories to tell them,”

“A few months after your socks touched my heart,” she says, “we were living together. In memory, it seems like the next day, and also as if it never happened.”

“I only threw socks at you for training purposes,” I say.

“Right,” Molly says. “Our life together was for training purposes. We lived together for two years, for more than two years, before we made it official. In all the time we were together, I can’t remember you ever throwing socks at me again.”

Could that be true? “Do you think our marriage an anti-climax, that all the good stuff happened before we were married?”

Molly sits down on the side of the bed next to me and pokes me with her finger. “I could do that all day and you couldn’t hit me back.”

“Forget it,” I say.

“All through our marriage,” she says, “I had this feeling that something was missing. This feeling, this absence, is something I’ve been carrying around with me forever. It was all anti-climax after our first time. Whimsical episodes become mawkish when willfully repeated.”

I am suddenly distressed by the turn in the conversation. “Then why did you move in with me?” I ask. “Why did you live with me as long as you did?”

“If I knew the answer to that question,” she says, “I wouldn’t have bribed my way in here to see you.”

“You stayed with me,” I say, having what seems like a moment of clarity, which I immediately distrust, “to collect information. You were teaching yourself to know what to avoid the next time around.”

“You goose,” she says almost affectionately. “You never understand me because you’re too busy reading other people as if they were less subtle versions of yourself. Given the same opportunities, I most likely would play out our time together all over again. Some things can’t be usefully avoided. Isn’t that so?”

“If I knew anything useful,” I say, “I wouldn’t be in this awful room with my hands tethered behind me… So why did you dump me after what was it, eight years together, nine, seven, eleven?”

“For the usual reason,” Molly says, slightly abashed. “There was someone else.”

Now we’re getting somewhere, or nowhere. I hesitate before asking the inevitable next question. “And why was there someone else?”

“I’m figuring it out,” Molly says, hunkering down on the narrow cot. “There was someone else because I needed to dump you.”

“Isn’t that a circular argument?” I can feel the heat of her body next to me, though we are not actually touching.

“What if it is,” she says. “I’m feeling like I’m getting what I came for.”

“And?” I ask, unable to remember the reasons offered for the visit.

“It no longer matters,” she says. “Close your eyes, sweetheart, and let the past forget us.”

I don’t close my eyes and then I do — what else is there to do in this place — and then nagged by a discovery that refuses to stay in focus — I open my eyes one at a time, an extended interval between right and left, aware of her absence before registering that she is actually gone.

There is someone else in the room, the number three interrogator, watching me from a dark corner.

94th Night

It’s been so long since my last visitor, I can no longer remember having ever been visited. The tray with my inedible food is slipped under the door whenever they remember I’m still here. Not even an interrogator has come by in a while to ask the idle probing question. I suspect the word on the street is that I’ve already sung all the songs I have in me to sing. What do they know? Really?

The texts of confessions I haven’t yet made, haven’t even thought of before this moment, keep running through my mind. I’ve been to the north pole of violation and back and the worst of it is, the most unforgivable, is that there’s no one to tell about it. You reach a point in this place where you would gladly put up with some official nastiness just for the company.

“If you’ve lost your interest,” I shout at the recording system in the wall, “send me home.”

Toward evening, two attendants deliver another cot to what had been for some time now a private room.

When they first brought me here, there was a second bed in the room occupied by an almost skeletal figure. He never spoke, though tended to let out heart-rending moans during the night. A day or so after the moaning stopped — changes tend to happen in the dark here — I woke one morning to find bed and occupant disappeared. When I asked the interrogators about my roommate’s absence, they insisted no one else was ever in the room with me.

The new guy is a lot younger, a teenager maybe, but it’s hard to tell his age. He’s painfully thin, virtually emaciated, has an IV in his arm. At first, jealous of my space, I don’t acknowledge him. When the silence becomes intolerable I hear myself say, “How’s it hanging, bro?” I mean what else is there to say to someone you don’t know who’s moved into your room uninvited.

“Do I know you?” he asks, his yards of unearned self-assurance intolerable.

The question attacks a nerve, makes me immediately suspicious though I couldn’t say what of. “You don’t know me,” I say. “Do I look like someone you know?”

“Everyone looks like someone I know,” he says.

“You know what I think, kid. I think they put you in here to spy on me.”

He laughs, which breaks into a wracking cough. “If I have,” he says, “no ass-wipe bothered to tell me about it. You know, Pops, you’ve always been fucking paranoid.”

“What do you mean always, kid?” What does he mean always? I take another look at him (watch him out of the side of my eye) to see if I know him. He looks like any other emaciated nineteen-year-old. “Look, you can’t say always to someone you’ve just met.”

“Who says I can’t?” he says. “Fuck anyone who says I can’t.”

After that we stop talking, each pretend we’re alone in the room. Later in the day, though it could be the next day, the number three interrogator makes an unscheduled appearance. I salute her as she enters, but she ignores me and sashays over to the interloper’s bed.

“I like the way you’ve done your hair,” I call to her.

She gives me one of her characteristic inscrutable smiles. “Put a sock in it,” she whispers, returning her attention to the boy. “Has everyone here treated you well?” she asks. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you if anyone here abused you.”

He shields his mouth with his hand, presumably to keep me from hearing him. “The guy with the beard on the other side of the room,” he says.

“It won’t happen again,” she says. “You have my promise, Tick. Tick — you like to be called Tick, isn’t that right?4">I have a few questions for you. Your answers are very important to us so be careful to tell us the whole truth as you know it.”

“Tick’s got nothing to hide,” he says.

The interrogation goes on for a while and I do my best to tune it out — a pillow over my head doesn’t quite do it — and it drives me bananas hearing her ask the kid the same questions more or less they asked me when I was their favored suspect.

At the close of the interrogation, she puts her hand between his legs and kisses him on the forehead, which is unacceptable in my view. This is only his first on site interrogation. It wasn’t until my third that I got the forehead kiss and the hand on prick caress, which in my case turned out to be a false promise.

After she leaves, he has this shit-eating smile on his face, which further intensifies my displeasure with him. “Kid, she touched my prick too,” I tell him. “It’s no big deal. From what I can tell, she probably does the same thing with everyone she questions.”

“Hey Pops,” he says, “I know it’s no fun to be left out. Look, I want to say I’m sorry, you know, your day is over. When it’s over, it’s over, Pops. Lights out.”

I don’t want to get into a pissing contest with the kid so I turn on my side away from him while a slew of witty retorts crowd the inside of my head. “And don’t you ever call me Pops again,” I say under my breath.

“Anything you say, Pops,” he says, snorting air.

I wake up from a brief nap, sniffing smoke. “Who’s smoking? There’s no smoking allowed in this room.”

The kid brushes the smoke away with one hand while holding what looks like a cigarette behind his back. “You’ve been dreaming, old man,” he says. “Whatever smoke you think you see in this room is a natural part of the atmosphere.”

I see what’s going on. They’ve put the little bastard in here to aggravate me, to break me down and my only revenge is to not let that happen. I sit up and I wonder if my legs will hold me if I climb off the bed. At the same time, he is also working his way off his bed with the intent (the same as mine) of reaching the floor in an upright position.

It would be hard to prove without an exceptionally precise slow-motion replay, but I am the one who gets to his feet first. I am fractions of a second ahead of him. The business of balance is tricky. I sway from one side to the other, watch myself teeter in the echo of his totter. I am, I believe, ready to risk my first step.

I watch him stumble while awkwardly, at seeming great risk, retain his precarious balance.

We are now moving irrevocably toward the other, though in what seems like mock slow motion, huffing and raging, while making virtually no progress.

As we get closer, I work on the rudiments of a defensive strategy.

Perhaps if I punch him in the face before he can land the first blow, it will be sufficient to claim victory. It strikes me that it might be prohibitively difficult to maintain my balance while thrusting my clenched fist in his direction.

“Back off,” I say to myself, to him, to myself, but he keeps approaching and so do I, so it is hard to tell who is closing the distance faster.

We are at the moment no more than two small hesitant steps apart.

As the space between us recedes, I trip and fall toward him with my arms out. “Watch it, Pops,” he says.

“Watch it yourself.”

We grab at each other as we meet, holding on to keep from falling, caught by the hidden camera in a parody of an embrace.

95th Night

They come during the night, two men in stocking feet, and lift me out of the bed, while I am still, for all they know, asleep and carry me between them down a narrow hallway that seems to go on forever. We are serenaded by night cries from unseen quarters as we shuffle along to a door that leads to a narrower hallway and then to another door. And through the second door into the moonless night.

I am dropped off onto the back seat of a black van which stays in place only long enough for the door that admitted me to be slammed shut.

I have been pretending to be asleep, though I’m not at all sure if it’s the most useful way to go on this occasion. This is the first time I’ve been outside the prison/hospital complex since they brought me here blindfolded, however long ago it was.

A heated discussion goes on in the front seat between a man and a woman — the man in the driver’s seat — in a language that is not one of mine.

It’s all in the tone of voice. As I hear it, the man is arguing for a quick and painless slaughter while the woman supports a more subtle and dire retribution.

After a while — perhaps I’ve misunderstood all along — I am pulled out of the car from behind and dumped like a bag of trash in the wet spiky grass of an overgrown field.

“You are lucky soldier,” the woman calls to me in heavily accented English moments before the unmarked van races off, spraying exhaust and dirt in its wake.

I collect myself as if I were several different random parts held together with tape.

The exhilaration of being my own man once again lasts a few ragged moments. “I am free man,” I say to myself in imitation of the woman’s fake accent. No doubt, they’ve left me here to die.

I don’t know how much time has passed when someone — perhaps the wind — asks, “Are you alive?”

When I open my eyes (how else can I know?) there is a small person — perhaps a child — standing over me, prodding me with a long stick.

“What about you?” I say. “Are you alive?”

He takes a step back, offering in the process a barely perceptible nod.

I hold on to the end of his stick. “You have any food, a cookie, chips, fruit, nuts, anything?”

He takes another step backwards, testing his options, looks as if he’s about to run away. Then slowly, divesting himself of his stick, backing up as if I might not notice if he were quiet about it, he edges away.

I do what I can to keep up, move after him on all fours. He can lose me if he wants to, but he turns back from time to time to keep me in sight. Or so I interpret his turn of the head gesture until at some point he flat out vanishes.

“Hey,” I hear myself say, but when the thin echo of sound is gone, it’s hard to imagine it ever was.

I continue in my subhuman locomotion, hoping to pick up his trail when the indistinct path I seem to be following splits off into two opposing indistinct paths.

Too weak to make a meaningful choice, I lie down at the crossroads and listen to myself breathe as if it were the latest news.

It may be five minutes later, it may be the next day, but the child — the boy — is standing over me again. a larger person at his side. The larger person has something round in her hand which she extends in my direction.

I assume it is some kind of food and, in no condition to be picky, I reach out for it with open mouth, rotted teeth at the ready.

The larger person pulls back her hand with a startled cry and whatever she was holding drops to the ground, unclaimed on either side.

The boy retrieves what may be an apple and holds it close to my face (for inspection?), an inch or so from my mouth.

After sniffing my prize to determine that it is as sight advertises, there seems nothing else to do but take a bite out of the apple.

The boy claps his hands, jumps up and down, and I have to pull my head out of the way to avoid an approving pat.

“Can we?” the boy says. “Please.”

“If it will make you happy,” the woman says, not without some reluctance. “I’m going to need your help, Bobby. I can’t take something like this on all by myself.”

They help me to my feet, and I am upright for a few seconds before collapsing to the ground.

“Don’t fall too far behind,” the woman says to one or both of us as I follow them on all fours to a cabin in the deep woods where the boy and his mother apparently live.

Once inside, I am able to stand by leaning against a wall.

After they feed me — a chicken thigh reheated for the occasion with a side of apple slices — I am treated to a series of questions not unlike those from my former interrogators.

“Could you tell me where you were approximately 10 years and 9 months ago?” the woman asks. She is sitting in a kitchen chair facing me while I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. The boy sits on the floor at her feet, studying me.

I have fallen into the habit of evasion and so stall by asking her to repeat the question, which she does.

“If you could show me a newspaper for the day in question, it might help refresh my memory,” I say.

“Of course,” she says and opens an old trunk I hadn’t noticed before, and after some shuffling of papers, presents a San Francisco newspaper for the very day she had inquired about.

“Checkmate,” I say which enlists no reaction from the woman. The boy laughs.

“It’s an important question to Bobby,” the woman says.

I say I can barely remember yesterday let alone 11 years ago, though I will do my best. “Yesterday, to the best of my recollection, I was lying on a bed of thorns when a boy showed up…”

“That was me,” Bobby says.

“And asked me if I was alive.”

Two days ago or was it three, I was in unofficial custody at some nameless prison hospital.

Months before that, Molly was kidnapped with her consent by a posse of rogue government agents and taken to an unspecified island off the coast of Maine. Or so it was rumored.

Almost two years ago, I was a guest scholar at the Villa Mondare in northern Italy, reworking the first sentence of a new novel.

At some semi-distant point in the half-forgotten past — it could have been ten years ago — Molly announced that she was leaving me and was out the door before I could insist on an explanation.

When Molly left, I was vulnerable to the touch of air.

There were a succession of women in my life after that, some a product of my fantasies, perhaps all.

And years before that, Molly and I had what I think of as a shotgun wedding, the wounds from which still alive and complaining.

That’s as much as I want to remember, and I ask the woman who calls herself Mina (short for Wilhemina) if I can have a few more days to sort things out.

The next morning — I spend the night on a hammock on the screened-in back porch — Bobby wakes me by slamming a door. When I open my eyes, trying to come to terms with where I am, he says, “Good morning, Papa.”

Mina calls to Bobby from the next room, which may or may not be the kitchen. “Tell your father,” she says, “that breakfast is being served.”

How long have I been lost to myself? I knock at the door of memory and no one answers.

Is there something I’ve missed?