Dreams of Molly

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “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 am
using 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.”