Dreams of Molly

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “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?

  PART THREE

  (Flight Dreams)

  96th Night

  I was, I fleetingly told myself, too old to run, but on the other hand not played out enough to stay. For days after I was more or less on my feet, my old (if older) self again, I was doing improvisatory rehearsals of my escape. Each morning, at the whisper of first light, I would take an extended walk from the house, varying direction in the continually thwarted hope of coming to some place I actually wanted to go, and then, not always easily, find my way back to what I thought of as a circumstantial domestic arrangement.

  It was what they bargained for, wasn’t it? They knew when they took me in, or should have known, that I had made a secondary career out of running away from seemingly comfortable situations. I had nothing against Mina and Bobby, but I had trouble imagining a scenario that included spending the rest of my life with them in a secluded cabin buried in the woods. The future I saw for myself was elsewhere.

  Actually, I had no future in mind for myself. That is, I was open to a variety of futures and I didn’t want to recapitulate the present routine indefinitely.

  It was not in my scenario to be Bobby’s father and Minna’s prodigal husband returned.

  Squeezed against her in her narrow bed, I would ask the uncommunicative Mina how and why she happened to live in an isolated cabin in the deep woods.

  One time she said, “Oh this cabin has been in the family for at least a hundred years.”

  Another time, she said, “My mother gave me this place as a gift when Bobby was born.”

  Another time, she said, “Two guys from Denmark built it in the Danish fashion with imported logs to have a homelike home away from home. Things didn’t work out as planned—one killed the other and fled no one seems to know where, leaving the house available for the first passerby, which was mother.”

  There were several other versions which contradicted in part some of the earlier versions. When she said, “Why do you think you have a right to know?” I decided to leave (setting gratitude and whatever aside) and not, not ever, come back.

  The problem was, I hadn’t to this point discovered a way out of the woods. I assumed—why wouldn’t I?—that if I traveled long enough in any direction, I would eventually come to some outpost of civilization. Whatever there was.

  Have I neglected to mention that there was a car on the premises, an ancient VW Beetle, which Mina would take off in periodically to bring in provisions? I never got to go with her, never found out where she went. Whenever Mina left the cabin for an extended period, it fell to me—it was my job by unspoken agreement—to babysit Bobby.

  When I asked her how far it was to the nearest town, the answer I got was, “Far enough.”

  “How many miles exactly is far enough?” I asked, as if I didn’t mind not knowing.

  The only answer I ever got to that question was, “You don’t want to know,” said with a sassy smile.

  I considered taking her ancient VW to make my escape, gave serious consideration to the idea about before rejecting it as unthinkable.

  I could leave them in good conscience, but I couldn’t take their transportation away from them.

  I avoided sex with Mina the night before my planned escape so as not to deplete my limited energy.

  I woke myself in the dark, tired as usual with a hard-on from sleeping pressed against Mina’s ass, dressed in whatever came to hand, assuming as I started out—this my first go on the northern path—that first light was no more than an hour way.

  I found myself taking small methodical steps in the dark, not wanting to lose the tricky path. Odd sounds emanated from the woods, but I had no idea, had not troubled to discover, what creatures might be out there.

  I had a broomstick with me to use as a walking stick and as an emergency protection against the otherwise unforeseen.

  As a precautionary measure, I swung my stick out in front of me like a blind man, driving off imaginary demons.

  It seemed to be getting lighter, though it may only have been that my eyes had made private peace with the dark. It troubled me that the morning was so long in arriving. I worked myself into a frustrated rage at the night’s protracted sway.

  So I increased my pace, began to run, wanting to leave the night behind in my wake, aware as the path danced away and the brush swiped at me that it was a madman’s
hope.

  Abruptly it was light and I reclaimed the path. It was a well-lit morning and I noticed a small black bear up ahead on its hind legs snatching berries from a bush. He was a few feet off the narrow path, too close to pass without calling attention to myself.

  Impatience prodded me. Perhaps there was a way of getting by the bear, who was after all preoccupied with his breakfast, without his noting me.

  I hunkered down, moved slowly ahead, tiptoed by him with apparent success, when a fallen branch snatched my ankle and I tripped noisily, grasping air. With a show of annoyance, the bear looked over in my direction—I pressed myself against a tree to avoid being seen—then after he had taken my measure (or had missed seeing me altogether), he returned to his task.

  I hid behind the tree while considering what I might do to defend myself if the bear took it into his head to come after me.

  And then the bear moved away, seemed to disappear briefly.

  It was a while after I had passed his spot—I was still moving with extreme caution—perhaps a half-mile further along the path, when I heard footsteps behind. I quickened my pace at first but when the footsteps sounded behind me at the same or similar distance, I spun around to see who was there.

  It was the same damn bear, tiptoeing on his hind legs, mimicking my pace in his deceptively quick lumbering manner. I fought back the impulse to run—surely he could have caught me if that was what he was up to—and continued warily at the pace I had set myself.

  I knew very little about the habits of bears outside of folk lore and movies, though I had never heard of bears in any context trailing after people. I assumed that eventually—what could he possibly be thinking?—that he would discontinue his aberrant behavior.

  But in fact what seemed like another hour passed and with it the five or six miles I had covered and the bear—I glanced back from time to time—was still the same relative distance behind me.