Chapter 3
You wake up at Paris International.
Every turn and curve, when the bus leaned too much to one side, I prayed or a crash. That moment cures my insomnia with narcolepsy when we might die helpless and packed human tobacco in the triple-decker.
This is how I met Lord Voldemort.
You wake up at Aberdeen.
You wake up at Madrid.
You wake up at Istanbul.
Voldemort worked part-time as a Memory Charmer. Because of his nature, Voldemort could only work night jobs. If a Charmer called in sick, the union called Voldemort.
Some people are night people. Some people are day people. I could only work a day job.
You wake up at Aberdeen.
Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip. I prayed for a spell failure. I prayed for the disruption of Sidney's Sudden Stoppage Spell so we would slam into a Muggle courthouse at a thousand miles an hour. A disruption of the Somebody Else's Problem Enchantment that kept the Muggle drivers from noticing the ridiculous triple-decker barrelling down their highway, weaving in and out of traffic and going the wrong way. On departure, as the bus raced out the terminal and into the Muggle's road system, with the seats in full upright position and our beds sliding around like billiards on a pool table during an earthquake and all personal carry-on baggage in the overhead compartment, I prayed for a crash.
You wake up at York.
With the Memory Charmers, Voldemort would modify the memories of Muggles who had glimpses of the wizarding world. A game of Quidditch goes out of control, a troll appears in downtown London, a witch flies drunk on her broom in broad daylight. These things have to be kept under wraps. A flick of the wand, a muttered incantation, and the Muggle's memory is erased.
I know this because Voldemort knows this.
Walking from point A to point B, with so much on your mind you don't think about where you're going. Your feet move out of instinct, eyes staring blankly at nothing, and your immediate surroundings are the last thing on your mind. You blink, and you're at work, home, school. Where did the time go? Seems like it just vanished. That's what it feels like to have your memory modified by the Charmers.
You wake up at Munich.
I study the people on the laminated Knight Bus safety card. A witch floats in the ocean, her brown hair spread out behind her, her pillow clutched to her chest. The eyes are wide open, but the woman doesn't smile or frown. In another picture, people calm as Befuddled cows reach up from their seats toward oxygen masks sprung out of the ceiling.
This must be an emergency.
Oh.
We've lost thaumaturgical integrity.
You wake up, and you're at Oslo.
Voldemort's a banquet waiter, waiting tables at a hotel, downtown, and Voldemort's a Memory Charmer with the Memory Charmer's union. I don't know how long Voldemort had been working on all those nights I couldn't sleep.
Sometimes, with training, you can pinpoint the part in your memory where it is modified. If it's a rush job, or you have a particularly strong will, things will seem disjointed. Images, sounds, smells will leak through. The most common form of leakage is the memory of the charm being cast. A pair of white spots of light leaping from a wand to your eyes. If you ever think you saw something like this darting across the sky, focus your memories around that point, but carefully. You don't want to miss it.
"Mana burns," they're called in the business.
The first white dot, this is the Obliviate charm. It wipes your memory to a blank, to give a fresh slate for the second spell.
The second white dot is the new memory. It's not practical to customize every single Memory Charm, so usually it's a self-guided spell. It highlights and emphasizes the mundane aspects of what was going on before and after the Oblivate charm. Like swirling wet paint around on a canvas, or going over a sketch in charcoal, everything gets jumbled together. Immediately after the casting, this can manifest itself as the feeling of deja-vu. That's the charm doing a brute-force cut-and-paste job on your memory. You think it's happened before, because it has.
Even if your memory gets reverted back to the way it originally was, the spots of light are still there. The spell was cast, after all.
A Muggle who sees something he shouldn't gets his mind mixed up and rearranged, and he suddenly blinks and he's standing at the front door to his house, looking at his watch and wondering where his mind was the whole ride home. He shakes his head, and goes in to his wife and kids, and completely forgets about his momentary confusion, because that's another side effect of the Memory Charm. It's so mundane and normal, it makes itself disappear.
And life goes on.
Nobody in the Muggle world has any idea.
You wake up at Tours.
The charm of traveling is everywhere I go, tiny life. I go to the hotel, tiny soap, tiny shampoos, single-serving butter, tiny mouthwash and a single-use toothbrush. Dinner arrives, a miniature do-it-yourself Chicken Cordon Bleu hobby kit, sort of a put-it together project to keep you busy.
The driver has turned on the seat-belt sign, and we would ask you to refrain from moving about the cabin.
You wake up at Dublin.
What else a Charmer shouldn't do: Voldemort implants sex into a Muggle's memory. You're a charmer and you're tired and angry, but mostly you're bored so you start by taking a single lustful memory of your own, that you personally have experienced or seen in a pensieve, and you slip this flash of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina closeup into Muggle's memory.
This is after a Muggle family witnessed a wizards' duel in the middle of the street, Peter Pettigrew being blown to pieces. In the third minute of the fake memory, just as they're arriving home, there's a flash of an erection.
Voldemort does this.
A single image in your memory can last as little as one-thousandth of a single second, but the effects can linger. That's how long the erection is. Stretching days, weeks, months, years ahead into the future, and no one sees it. Sometimes, it's uncovered during therapy, and the Muggles blame each other for it.
You wake up at Logan, again.
This is a terrible way to travel. I go to meetings my boss doesn't want to attend. I take notes. I'll get back to you.
--
Wherever I'm going, I'll be there to apply the formula. I'll keep the secret intact.
It's simple arithmancy.
It's a story problem.
If a new broomstick built by my company leaves London travelling north at 60 miles per hour, and the dorsal bristles stiffen up, and the broom crashes and burns killing the ten-year old orphan trying out for Seeker on the neighborhood Quiddich team, does my company initiate a recall?
You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).
A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall.
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the brooms and no one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.
Everywhere I go, there's the burned-up crumpled-up stick of a broom waiting for me. I know where all the skeletons are. Consider this my job security.
Hotel time, restaurant food. Everywhere I go, I make tiny friendships with the people sitting beside me from Cardiff to Madrid to Rejkavik.
What I am is a recall campaign coordinator, I tell the single-serving friend sitting next to me, but I'm working toward a career as a dishwasher.
You wake up at London, again.
--
Voldemort spliced a penis into all the memories after that. Usually, close-ups, or a Grand Canyon vagina with an echo, twitching with blood pressure as they resumed their boring Muggle lives. Nobody complained. People ate and drank, but the evening wasn't the same. People feel sick or start to cry and don't know why. Only a hummingbird could have caught Voldemort at work.
You wake up in Venice.
I melt and swell at the moment of arrival when the bus slams to a stop but inertia hangs about for a split second in the decision to keep trying to move the bus into the building or be shunted off into a pocket dimension created by the enchantment. For this moment, nothing matters. Look up into the stars and you're gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the brakes are squealing. Inertia decides to tell the wizarding world to go hang, and you will never have to file another expense account claim. Receipt required for items over twenty-five sickles. You will never have to get another haircut.
A thud, and the gentle bump of inertia going elsewhere. The staccato of a hundred seatbelt buckles snapping open, and the single-use friend you almost died sitting next to says:
I hope you make your connection.
Yeah, me too.
And this is how long your moment lasted. And life goes on.
And somehow, by accident, Voldemort and I met.
ALL THE USUAL blood imps are here, tonight. Above and Beyond always gets a big turnout. This is Peter. This is Regulus. This is Marsha.
Hi.
The introductions, everybody, this is Ginny Weasley, and this is her first time with us.
Hi, Ginny.
At Above and Beyond, we start with the Catch-Up Rap. The group isn't called Impish Blood Parasites. You'll never hear anyone say "parasite." Everybody is always getting better. Oh, this new medication. Everyone's always just turned the corner. Still, everywhere, there's the squint of a five-day headache. A woman wipes at involuntary tears. Everyone gets a name tag, and people you've met every Tuesday night for a year, they come at you, handshake hand ready and their eyes on your name tag.
I don't believe we've met.
No one will ever say imp. They'll say, agent.
They don't say cure. They'll say, treatment.
In Catch-Up Rap, someone will say how the agent has spread into his spinal column and now all of a sudden he'll have no control of his left hand. The agent, someone will say, has dried the lining of his brain so now the brain pulls away from the inside of his skull, causing seizures.
The last time I was here, the woman named Cho announced the only good news she had. Cho pushed herself to her feet against the wooden arms of her chair and said she no longer had any fear of death.
Tonight, after the introductions and Catch-Up Rap, a girl I don't know, with a name tag that says Kim, says she's Cho's sister and that at two in the morning last Tuesday, Cho finally died.
Oh, this should be so sweet. For two years, Cho's been crying in my arms during hug time, and now she's dead, dead in the ground, dead in an urn, mausoleum, columbarium. Oh, the proof that one day you're thinking and hauling yourself around, and the next, you're cold fertilizer, worm buffet. This is the amazing miracle of death, and it should be so sweet if it weren't for, oh, that one.
Ginny.
Oh, and Ginny's looking at me again, singled out among all the blood imps.
Liar.
Faker.
Ginny's the faker. You're the faker. Everyone around when they wince or twitch and fall down barking and the crotch of their jeans turns dark blue, well, it's all just a big act.
Guided meditation all of a sudden won't take me anywhere, tonight. Behind each of the seven palace doors, the green door, the orange door, Ginny. The blue door, Ginny stands there. Liar. In the guided meditation through the cave of my power animal, my power animal is Ginny. Smoking her cigarette, Ginny, rolling her eyes. Liar. Black hair and pillowy French lips. Faker. Italian dark leather sofa lips. You can't escape.
Cho was the genuine article.
Cho was the way Sybll Trelawney's skeleton would look if you made it smile and walk around a party being extra special nice to everyone. Picture Cho's popular skeleton the size of an insect, running through the vaults and galleries of her innards at two in the morning. Her pulse a siren overhead, announcing: Prepare for death in ten, in nine, in eight seconds. Death will commence in seven, six . . .
Oh, this should be so sweet, the remembered warm jumble of Cho still in my arms and Cho dead somewhere.
But no, I'm watched by Ginny.
In guided meditation, I open my arms to receive my inner child, and the child is Ginny smoking her cigarette. No white healing ball of light. Liar. No chakras. Picture your chakras opening as flowers and at the center of each is a slow motion explosion of sweet light.
Liar.
My chakras stay closed.
When meditation ends, everyone is stretching and twisting their heads and pulling each other to their feet in preparation. Therapeutic physical contact. For the hug, I cross in three steps to stand against Ginny who looks up into my face as I watch everyone else for the cue.
Let's all, the cue comes, embrace someone near us.
My arms clamp around Ginny.
Pick someone special to you, tonight.
Ginny's cigarette hands are pinned to her waist.
Tell this someone how you feel.
Ginny doesn't have testicular cancer. Ginny doesn't have tuberculosis. She isn't dying. Okay in that brainy brain-food philosophy way, we're all dying, but Ginny isn't dying the way Cho was dying.
The cue comes, share yourself.
So, Ginny, how do you like them apples?
Share yourself completely.
So, Ginny, get out. Get out. Get out.
Go ahead and cry if you have to.
Ginny stares up at me. Her eyes are green. Her earlobes pucker around earring holes, no earrings. Her chapped lips are frosted with dead skin.
Go ahead and cry.
"You're not dying either," Ginny says.
Around us, couples stand sobbing, propped against each other.
"You tell on me," Ginny says, "and I'll tell on you."
Then we can split the week, I say. Ginny can have bone disease, blood imps, and tuberculosis. I'll keep testicular cancer, blood parasites, and organic brain dementia.
Ginny says, "What about ascending bowel curses?"
The girl has done her homework.
We'll split bowel curses. She gets it the first and third Sunday of every month.
"No," Ginny says. No, she wants it all. The cancers, the parasites. Ginny's eyes narrow. She never dreamed she could feel so marvelous. She actually felt alive. Her skin was clearing up. All her life, she never saw a dead person. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. Oh, but now there was dying and death and loss and grief. Weeping and shuddering, terror and remorse. Now that she knows where we're all going, Ginny feels every moment of her life.
No, she wasn't leaving any group.
"Not and go back to the way life felt before," Ginny says. "I used to work in an old ghosts' home to feel good about myself, just the fact I was breathing. So what if I couldn't get a job in my field."
Then go back to your old ghosts' home, I say.
"Ghost homes are nothing compared to this," Ginny says. "Ghosts spend all their time
remembering when they were alive. Here, you have a real experience of death."
Couples around the two of us are drying their tears, sniffing, patting each other on the back and letting go.
We can't both come, I tell her.
"Then don't come." I need this. "Then visit ghosts." Everyone else has broken apart and they're joining hands for the closing prayer. I let Ginny go.
"How long have you been coming here?" The closing prayer. Two years. A man in the prayer circle takes my hand. A man takes Ginny's hand. These prayers start and usually, my breathing is blown. Oh, bless us. Oh, bless us in our anger and our fear.
"Two years?" Ginny tilts her head to whisper. Oh, bless us and hold us. Anyone who might've noticed me in two years has either died or recovered and never came back. Help us and help us. "Okay," Ginny says, "okay, okay, you can have testicular cancer." Big Ron the big cheesebread crying all over me. Thanks. Bring us to our destiny. Bring us peace. "Don't mention it."
"Maybe we should exchange Floo numbers?" I ask.
"Should we?" she says.
"In case we want to switch nights," I say.
"Okay." and she hands me a torn-off piece of parchment with her name and home scratched on it with a cheap quill.
This is how I met Ginny Weasley