ENEVIEVE IN A STARFISH BLUE SUMMER DRESS AND A French girl’s wide brimmed straw hat. We were strolling hand in hand through Funland, a warm slow purple dusk with the lights of the rides twinkling. Young soldiers in uniform hugging their narrow-waisted girlfriends … heaving baseballs at towers of iron milk bottles or flinging darts at a wall of breast-like balloons. Swing music from the dance hall … the scent of hot pretzels.

The couples and the peppermint ice-cream faced children wavered like silver gelatin ghosts. Their voices and laughter continued but it seemed to come from a distance. Gradually they began to fade, receding like sweaty handprints on stainless steel.

She led me behind the skating rink to what appeared to be an old bath-house, built out over the rocks where the seawall would later be. I heard the sad faint harmony of the Andrew Sisters singing “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time” dwindling away with the ping and clank of the rides. Then we were inside the dank smelling baths.

The only illumination came from candles in hurricane lanterns. There were long copper troughs of trickling water, and a maze of square stone pools with steps cut into the side. Around the edges and all across the slate floor, ancient naked men lounged like reptiles—and real reptiles skittered—frill-necked things and iguanas—while rusted ladders descended into saltwater smelling darkness and iron catwalks extended out of sight, their railings embellished with ultraviolet salamanders.

From hidden chambers and platforms, and from the depths of the cement pits, there came sighs as in an opium parlor. Genevieve’s dress was gone. She was nude now except for black glass stiletto heels, and as she stepped between the withered reptile men, the more deformed the figures became. Skin scaled … limbs contracting … gills forming. Misshapen heads of bass and sea turtles.

Water flowed through bars in the wall into a series of pools. Chameleons dotted the stone floor. Faces hung like damp masks from hooks in the wall in the shape of hands—and in the center of the room was what looked like an operating table positioned beneath a skylight.

“Take off your clothes,” she commanded, and I found myself doing as she directed.

“Now lie down on the table on your back.”

I was seized with fear. The sheeted bench beside the operating table was laid out with glinting scalpels and surgical implements—and a single luxuriant peacock feather.

“What are you going to do to me?” I demanded.

“Trust me, it’s part of the healing,” she said cryptically. “It’s the most intimate thing that’s ever happened to you.”

I couldn’t help myself. Intimacy with her was all I wanted. I lay down and looked up. The skylight was shaped like a human figure, radiant, like the reverse of a silhouette. An angel. I felt myself drawn up toward it, as if it were my own outline suspended from the ceiling. My voice was lost in anxiousness as I saw her hands move across the bench of blades. What was she going to do? The terror and the yearning to know was more than I could take. Instead of one of the scalpels, she picked up the peacock feather.

“Now lie very still,” she whispered. “I don’t want to hurt you. Yet.”

I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I had to withdraw into my mind. Then I smelled her flesh draw near. I thought maybe she’d exchanged the feather for one of the scalpels because I felt a ripping pain, deeper than anything I’d ever experienced—and yet somehow pleasurable. Beyond pleasure. Like some ecstasy massage. But when I snuck a peek, I saw that the sensation was achieved with the peacock feather alone. Where for a second I thought she was going to castrate me, suddenly I craved the touch of the soft vanes … the simulation of slicing, an incision more extreme for being imaginary. She teased me with the soft feather and I felt every millimeter of skin tingle and wrinkle with the gorgeous agony. She whispered something I didn’t understand—I thought she said, “Now it’s time to cut out the past.”

The feather stroked the scar where Briannon had shot me, a livid weal. The ridges of plume triggered a fire of nerve ache and then release. I felt my body go into seizure—the tremor starting deep inside the bullet hole and spreading in vibration after vibration up my spine … into the dead wings of my shoulder blades … and down my legs … burning my toes. The sheet beneath me was soaked, sweat pouring—and something else—a viscous substance like ectoplasm … and out came things I’d had inside in a mess of crystal scales.

She opened up the old wound and removed a handful of plastic Apaches that I’d once buried in our back yard … and then an Illya Kuryakin Palm Pistol from The Man from U.N.C.L.E show. She pulled out Pabst Blue Ribbon beer bottle caps that used to have little rebus puzzles inside … condoms, cigarette butts and a half-pint of Vat 69. And then she said, “Hold very still, this is going to really hurt.”

And it did. More than I could believe. It hurt so much I cried out like a baby slapped into breathing air, and then she held up a .25 caliber slug. From a Beretta Bobcat 21.

“That can’t be!” I moaned. “They pulled it out!”

“They didn’t remove your sorrow,” she said as she took the slug in her mouth and swallowed it like a Communion wafer. “I have. The memory wound is clean now.”

I was naked, soaked and limp. She helped me to rise from the table, psychoplasm and sweat shining like a film of respiring algae.

“Approach the water,” she said, pointing to the pools.

I stepped … between the chameleons and the lost time trinkets she’d extracted … into the water, as she held my head under. Beneath the surface, I could hear the ticking of the antique French clock that had sat on the mantel in Eyrie Street … and I remembered back to days long ago in the valley … to times before my father died … when we were happy.

Late August nights, my friends and me, we’d scale the fence and dive in the public pool, the light beneath the springboard undulating like a submarine moon. We’d become shapes, gliding and frogging in the pale green water luminously pleated against the tiles. Tadpoles and torsos jack-knifed, hoarding air to tunnel toward the drain where potato bugs unwrinkled—clawing up through thick bubbles back into the warm air that smelled of chlorine and the trampled weeds in the field that bleed milk when you squeeze them.

Night after night we swam in each other’s bodies. Then waded single-file out of the shallow end and lay on the cement, phosphorescent, panting—until the silhouette prints of our wet skin diminished to single drying points, satellites blinking overhead. Sirens sounded across town, but not for us, not yet. Frank and the others gone, the light extinguished—I’d float on my back in the black water listening to my heart, my breath, the breathing of distant swimmers.

Now, held under the water by Genevieve, my skin had been stripped away like a costume I’d been wearing. My face. Organs, bones and all. I was just a bright reflection like the shape of the skylight. Liquid light … becoming bubbles … becoming mist … becoming …