The Throat

ready to step back if I stepped forward. I groped for the worn plush of the chair beside me, pushed down the seat, and slid into it. I heard Tom moving into the seat directly in front of me and sensed him turning around. I put out my right hand and felt his arm on the back of the seat. I made out the faint shape of his head and upper body. 'All right?' he asked.

'I usually like to sit closer to the screen,' I said.

'We're probably in for a long wait.'

'What do you want to do when he comes in?'

'If he comes through the exit door, we do what we have to do until he settles down. If he checks the place out with a flashlight, we get out of our seats and crouch down here in the aisle. Or we flatten out under the seats. I don't think he's going to be very thorough, because he'll be confident about being the first one here. The point is to get him comfortable. Once he sits down to wait it out, we split up and come toward him from opposite ends. Silently, if possible. When we get close, scream your head off. I'll do the same. He won't know where the hell we are, he won't know how many of us there are, and we should have a good chance to take him.'

'What happens after that?'

'Are you thinking about disarming him and taking him to Armory Place? Do you think he'll confess? Or that we'd ever walk out of Armory Place? You know what would happen.'

I said nothing.

'Tim, I don't even believe in the death penalty. But right now, the only alternative is to get out of here and go back home. In a couple of years, maybe ten years, he'll make a mistake and get caught. Is that good enough?'

'No,' I said.

'I've spent about fifteen years working to get innocent men off death row—saving lives. That's what I believe in. But this isn't like anything else I know—it's as if we discovered that Ted Bundy was a detective with so many fallbacks and paper trails that he could never be brought to justice in the normal way.'

'I thought you said you weren't interested in justice.'

'Do you want to know how I really see this? I don't think I could say this to anyone else. There aren't many people who would understand it.'

'Of course I want to know,' I said. By now I could dimly make out Tom's face. Absolute seriousness shone out of him, along with something else that made me brace myself for whatever he would say.

'We're going to set him free,' he said. As a euphemism for execution, the phrase was ludicrous.

'Thanks for sharing that,' I said.

'Remember your own experience. Remember what happened to your sister.'

I saw my sister sailing before me into a realm of utter mystery and felt Tom's psychic assurance, his depth of understanding, strike me like a tide.

'Who is he now? Is that worth saving? That person is a being who has to kill over and over again to satisfy a rage so deep that nothing could ever touch it. But who is he, really?'

'Fee Bandolier,' I said.

'Right. Somewhere, in some part of himself he can't reach, he is a small boy named Fielding Bandolier. That boy passed through hell. You've been obsessed with Fee Bandolier even before you really knew he existed. You almost made him up out of your own history. You've even seen him. Do you know why?'

'Because I identify with him,' I said.

'You see him because you love him,' Tom said. 'You love the child he was, and that child is still present enough to make himself visible to you, and he makes himself visible to your imagination because you love him.'

I remembered the child who came forward out of swirling dark, on his open palm the word that cannot be read or spoken. He was the child of the night, William Damrosch, Fee Bandolier, and myself, all of whom had passed through the filthy hands of Heinz Stenmitz.

'Do you remember telling me about your old nurse, Hattie Bascombe, who said that the world is half night? What she didn't say was that the other half is night, too.'

Too moved to speak, I nodded.

'Now let's get to the important stuff,' Tom said.

'What?'

'Give me that thermos you've been carrying around. I don't want to be asleep when he finally gets here.'

I handed him the thermos, and he poured some of the coffee into its top and drank. When he had finished, he passed the thermos back to me. I didn't think I would ever sleep again.

11

He's psychic, I thought. It was as if Tom Pasmore had seen into my mind. I felt intense gratitude and another, darker emotion combining resentment and fear. Tom had probed into private matters. My early memories, those that had refused to come on command in front of my old house or my family's graves, came flooding into me. One of these, of course, was Heinz Stenmitz. Another, equally powerful, was my sister's last day of life and my brief journey across the border into the territory from which she had never returned. I had never spoken of these moments to Tom—I had just learned of one, and of the other I never spoke, never, not to anyone. Every particle of my consciousness fled from it. That moment could not be held in the mind, because it held terror and ecstasy so great they threatened to tear the body apart. Yet some portion of the self retained and remembered. While knowing nothing of this, Tom Pasmore still knew all about it. My resentment vanished when I realized that he had read a version of it in one of the books I had written with my collaborator; he was smart and perceptive enough to have worked out the rest by himself. He had not probed: he had just told me what he knew. I sat in the dark behind Tom, realizing that what had sounded like sentimental froth made me chime with agreement— I wanted to release Fee Bandolier. I wanted to set him free.

12

I sat in the dark behind Tom Pasmore, wide awake and loose in time. Forty years collapsed into a single endless moment in which I was a child watching a movie called From Dangerous Depths while a huge blond man who smelled like blood ran his hand over my chest and spoke the unspeakable, I was a soldier in an underground room staring at an altar to the Minotaur, a greenhorn pearl diver unbuttoning the shirt of a mutilated dead man named Andrew T. Majors, a shred of infinite being speeding toward an annihilating ecstasy, a wounded animal in St. Mary's Hospital, a man with a notebook walking through a city park. I turned around to look six rows back and saw myself kneeling before Heinz Stenmitz, doing what he wanted me to do, what I thought I had to do to stay alive. You survived, I said silently, you survived everything. His pain and terror were mine, because I had survived them. Because I had survived them, they had educated me; because they were a taste always in my mouth, they had helped to keep me sane in Vietnam. What was unbearable was what had to be borne. Without the consciousness of the unbearable, you put your feet where Fee had placed his, or ended up as unaware as Ralph Ransom. I thought of John, whose life had once seemed so golden to me, peering into the depths of Holy Sepulchre, and of the closed-off place where his readiness for experience had taken him.

I thought for a long time of what had happened to John Ransom.