City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (28 page)

The funny little man flickered across the glasses of Sigmund Freud. Running, falling, eating, waddling forward with his odd little walk, dabbing at the black smudge of moustache just below his nose. He seemed to exist in a state of constant, frenetic turmoil: his black bowler hat bobbing along on the tide of humanity that engulfed him whenever he stepped out the door—the same tide they had taken refuge from up on the roof garden.

Before the little tramp, up on the screen, there had been another frantic comedy about a gang of incompetent policemen who went charging around after a fire engine, wrecking everything. Before that some sort of kitchen drama from the ghetto with everyone, right down to the humble mother in her apron, throwing their arms about with the gestures of grand opera stars—

It was the first time any of them had seen a moving picture. Freud had to admit they were innately engrossing, creating a world of their own on a two-dimensional screen. What kind of psyche would it create in the future, he wondered, once they perfected the process, and people were sure that they could
see
all of life?

Ferenczi especially seemed to love it, laughing out loud and clapping his hands like a little boy. Freud himself only smiled quietly, content to sip his beer and puff on his cigars—while Jung, to his annoyance, was even more enigmatic, peering out at the screen through his large pince-nez like a biologist examining a rare bug.

“Herr Doktor,
the clinic is closed,” Freud called over to him, still smiling, noting to his further displeasure that Jung had returned to his abstemious ways. Since they had been in America he drank nothing but seltzer water, or a bilious tonic called celery soda, which the Americans claimed aided the digestion but which tasted to Freud like old socks.

“In our profession, the clinic is never closed,” Jung smiled back at him. “That’s the joy of it—we never have to stop working.”

“Yes, I
know,”
Freud said quickly, but Jung cut him off, waving an arm to indicate the roof garden all around them.

“Take this place, for instance. Think of how much is hidden here, in between the palms.”

Freud gritted his teeth, and turned back to the movie. In fact, to his further chagrin, Jung was right. The roof garden seemed very strange to him indeed—another thoroughly disconcerting American place. It was up in one of the newer districts of the city, on a Street brimming with theatres—yet just a couple blocks from a slum; where everyone gleefully, even proudly, warned them not to walk.

The theatre itself was another mass of contradictions, a spectacular art nouveau palace called the New Amsterdam. Up on the roof garden, next to the whole louche scene—the tuxedoed businessmen, fat as pigeons; the glittering, jaded women; hungry young gigolos prowling through the potted palms—was a homey little recreation of the
old
New Amsterdam: complete with miniature windmills, and gabled Dutch houses, a real cow and a buxom set of milkmaids who sashayed around the tables, selling buckets of their warm, fresh milk to the customers.

“They are like children, these Americans, with their insistence on innocence,” Freud sniffed, faintly annoyed by Ferenczi still giggling like a schoolboy next to him.

There had been dinner, and dancing to a small orchestra, everyone around them laughing and talking so loudly they could barely hear each other. Then, out of nowhere, the great blank, white screen had been put up. The droning, clattering projector was pulled out, overruling everything else; everyone turning their full attention to the screen.

The whole trip had been just as strange and unsettling, from the moment they pulled out of Bremerhaven. He had grown close again with Jung on the boat over. He had been Carl the crown prince, the good student, once more—even proposing to give his own lecture about childhood sexuality first, to break the ice for Freud by citing the case of his daughter, Agathli, and her anxiety over his wife’s pregnancy.

Freud had been grateful. He thought it was a sacrifice worthy of the Torah, for Jung to offer up his own daughter. Agathli would indeed serve as an ideal battering ram, as it were, softening up their audience at Clark for the shocking idea that sexuality began before puberty.

Yet there was a price: Jung, he was aware, still wanted to psychoanalyze the Master. Freud had put him off. He had no intention of being stuck on the
George Washington
with a triumphant Jung, smugly confident that he had uncovered some part of Freud he had not previously suspected in himself. Perhaps not even telling him what it was—

There had been a disturbing incident, as well, a small thing, but one that had bothered him all the way over. On their second day out, they had run into another of the ship’s company after breakfast, a certain Professor Stern, from Breslau, on his way over to Clark himself to give a lecture on the psychology of court testimony.

This Stern had had the temerity to question
The Interpretation of Dreams
in a review a few years ago, and Freud had neither forgotten nor forgiven. He prided himself on being able to endure any and all attacks on his person, but he would tolerate nothing against the Cause. He cut the professor himself, but Stern had succeeded in cornering Jung. While Freud waited a few feet away, impatiently tapping his walking stick, the little
ekel
had gone on and on, discussing theories of word association. He had finally felt obliged to call out to Jung:

“Now,
Herr Doktor,
when are you going to bring that conversation to an end?”

Stern had blushed then, and excused himself. Freud reclaimed his crown prince, hooking their arms together and guiding him off down the deck.

“Look at the shabby little Jew go,” Freud said with satisfaction, glaring back over his shoulder at the retreating Stern.

In New York Harbor he had stood by the rail, staring at the famous green statue of Liberty, standing like a colossus over her brood. It was modeled on the sculptor’s mother, he recalled from Ferenczi’s Baedeker.

What a thing for the Land of Rebellious Sons: a stern mother-figure, wielding a phallic symbol!
But was its real purpose to substitute for the mothers they had left behind—or to warn off more bad boys?

He left the question for later as their ship was towed through the bustling harbor, and over to the Hoboken docks. Contemplating the heroic statue, the soaring, vertical city awaiting him, he felt like a conquistador again, invincible and roguish, capable of anything.

The mood lasted until the men from the American press came aboard.

“Isn’t this all about sex,
Herr Professor?”
one of them shouted out, and the others had all laughed while he fumed and stammered, unable to get out a quick answer in their promiscuous, careless language.

“What are your lecture fees?”

“Do you expect to get many society clients?”

“Are any of you married, doctors?”

—this last query bringing another great laugh, as Ferenczi and even Jung blushed red as schoolgirls. They scribbled in their notebooks and popped their flash pictures until the doctors were quite blind—still obviously convinced their whole trip was no more than some kind of traveling con game, the latest sensation for their front pages. Even worse, he noticed the next day that his name had been universally misspelled as
Freund.

“Professor, whattaya think of America so far?”

“Well, we have only just got in the harbor,” he hemmed, fighting down the impulse to point out what an astonishingly stupid question it was. Yet it was all the reporters really wanted to know.

“Professors, are ya gonna take in a baseball game?”

“Are you gonna visit the Grand Canyon?”

“Are you gonna go up to the Statue of Liberty? How ’bout the subway?”

“Well, whattaya think of the harbor
so far?”

Dr. Brill, from Columbia’s Psychiatric Clinic, had finally succeeded in shooing the reporters away. Brill was an old friend; he had done his practicum at the Burgholzli, and been analyzed for a time by Freud, and he took them in hand—leading them off the boat, down through endless tunnels to a taxi, then a train in the subway—a deafening, terrifying experience—and then finally back up more tunnels and through the kitchen of their hotel.

“It is a great world city now, New York,” Brill informed them. “I will take you everywhere—everywhere! You won’t want to miss a bit!”

“I will be perfectly satisfied if I can just get to see a porcupine,” Freud tried his standard joke again, but actually, as it happened, he would have been satisfied if he had been able to keep anything down. The American cooking had proved unbearable, and since landing they had all taken turns being laid up with stomach maladies. At least it had given him a further excuse to avoid Jung’s demands to analyze him.

Jung himself had recovered first, and thrown himself enthusiastically into American culture: jumping up on the rushing, clanging streetcars that swooped down like birds of prey on anyone trying to cross the street. Running out to buy the newspapers everyday. He was avidly following an inquiry over which man, Peary or Cook, had made it to the North Pole first.

“Can you think of anything more crazily American?” Freud scoffed. “Two men, risking their lives on such a race? And to where? Not even a continent, but a drifting ice floe! How can anyone determine a winner?”

“But what finer example of the hero myth in action?” Jung had chided him. “America is full of heroes—or at least, people who think they are. That’s why it’s the country for us!”

“A whole country full of
ubermenschen,”
Freud said darkly. “But tell me, please, what do such marvelous creatures need with us?”

“Surely,
Doktor,
there is always a need for analysis, even of the healthiest ego. When are you going to let me have a go at you?” Jung had baited him.

“Soon, soon,” he had muttered, flustered and annoyed again.

Since their arrival, he had analyzed Jung’s and Ferenczi’s dreams, but it had been a one-way street; he was not prepared yet to let his crown prince at his.

In the dream, he leapt off the ocean liner and pulled it ashore after him, Jung and Ferenczi struggling to keep up. In one hand, he carried a great, green torch, and as they watched he lowered it to the boat, setting it aflame.

“There will be no turning back now,” he told them gleefully.

But when he turned around again, the shore was littered with soldiers. The general in his absurd, parakeet uniform leaned in at him, eyes furious behind his pince-nez. In one hand he still held up the list of terrible wounds.

“Prepare!” he bellowed. “Prepare!”

The little man, the tramp, was not nearly so frantic as he was clever, Freud decided, outwitting the larger, angrier characters for all his clownish bumbling. Beside him, he watched Ferenczi laugh again. Jung snapped out his notebook, making a quick, furtive note before shoving it back into his dinner jacket, pushing his pince-nez back up on his nose as he returned to the movie.

The Rat Man had worn a pince-nez, Freud realized—the sweet, neurotic young doctor who had come to him in such despair.

Freud had taken him into his own household, shared meals with the man—like Jung before him. He had been sure he was going mad, but Freud had saved him, tracing his neurosis to a story the Rat Man’s superior officer—the figure Freud had labeled the Cruel Captain—had told the man during military training.

It was all about some legendary Oriental punishment—a cage of starving rats strapped to the buttocks of a convict. Something so cruel and sadistic that Freud even questioned whether someone could really have told his patient such a story.

But no, the young man had insisted: the Cruel Captain had described it all to him with great relish—leaving no doubt that he would like to carry out such a punishment on the young doctor himself.

Later, the young doctor had lost his pince-nez during maneuvers, and had to send for a new pair from Vienna. He had entrusted the Cruel Captain, of all people, with the postage due—an incredibly masochistic move! Of course, somehow the money had never been paid, the glasses never delivered. There had been accusations, and charges of insubordination. The Cruel Captain had haughtily denied that he had ever been entrusted with any money. He threatened to lock the young doctor up in the guard house—to come to him at night with his cage of rats—

The pince-nez, then, had been the token at the center of it all. But what did it mean for Freud? Was Jung
his
Rat Man—the sweet, young doctor he had taken in, somehow turned on him? Or could he be the Cruel Captain?

Slowly, methodically, he did the
Traumdeutung
—the dreamwork—in his head. On one level it was easy enough, as it always was: the Aula, the great ceremonial hall in Vienna, filled with the best minds of science, stood for the upcoming lectures at Clark. His need to use the toilet demonstrated his nervousness over this great opportunity. Burning the ship came from his identification with the great conquistadors, with Cortés, who had burned his boats before conquering Mexico.

The dream of waiting in the train station with the old, one-eyed man he had had before. The man was his father, he had already concluded. The urinal referred to the time, when he was seven or eight, that Freud had peed on his parents’ floor, and his father had railed at him:
The boy will come to nothing!
Yet now, obviously, he had come to something, even holding up before the old man’s face the totem that was the symbol of his success.

That was the surface. But what lay beneath it all—all his recent anxiety? That was always more difficult. Dreams, he found, slept in layers. They were like the ruins of Troy, one city buried beneath another.

What were the beautiful rooms that he had passed through in the Aula? What did the officer, and the dead soldiers mean—the detritus of his military experience? And why was it necessary in the first place to disguise his father with the totem, the savage mask?