Overheard in a Dream (9 page)

One morning when he arrived, Conor said, “In here, you decide,” at the doorway of the playroom, almost as if it were a greeting.

“Good morning, Conor. Won’t you come in?” James replied.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

For a long moment Conor remained in the doorway. He pressed the cat against his face, over his eyes, then lowered it and pointed it around the room.

“In here, you decide,” he said again. “In here, you go around the room.” He began his usual counter-clockwise perambulation. Once, twice, three times he went around the room.

“Where’s the boy’s auroch?” he said suddenly. “In here, you decide.”

“Yes,” James said. “In this room you can decide for yourself if you want to play with the toy animals.”

“Where’s the boy’s auroch? You decide.”

“Would you like me to help you find the basket?” James asked.

“Find the basket with the animals,” Conor replied, although James couldn’t discern if it was a genuine response or simply an incomplete echo.

Rising from his chair, James crossed over to the shelves. “Here are the animals,” he said, and lifted the red wire basket out. “Shall I take it to the table for you?”

“In here, you decide.”

“That’s right. You decide if you want me to take it to the table.”

“Take it to the table.”

Conor followed. Lifting the cat up, he scanned the basket, then reached in and lifted an animal out. “Here is a dog,” he
said and set it on the table. This seemed to please him. There was almost the hint of a smile on his lips. “Here is a duck.” He set that up too.

James watched him as he progressed through the basket of animals. While the boy’s actions were slow and obsessive, they were not quite the same as the rote repetitions of an autistic child. They were nuanced in a way that made James quite certain they had meaning, although he couldn’t even speculate at this point what it might be.

“
Here
is the boy’s auroch,” Conor said with emphasis. “The auroch will stand with the others.” He surveyed them. “There are many animals. How many? How many is many?” Then he started to count them. This was new. James hadn’t heard him count before. “Forty-six. Forty-six is many. Forty-six in all,” Conor said.

“You like seeing many animals,” James said. “I hear a pleased voice counting.”

“There is no cat.”

“No, there’s no cat among them.”

“Many animals. Forty-six animals. But no cat,” Conor said.

“No. All of those animals, but none of them is a cat,” James reflected back to indicate he was listening carefully.

“Now they will die,” Conor said matter-of-factly. “The dog will die.” He pushed the dog on its side. “The duck will die. The elephant will die.” One by one he went through the plastic animals, pushing them over on to their sides. There was no distress in his voice. The animals all died with the same equanimity as they had lined up.

“Died. Many animals have died,” Conor said. “No more in-and-out. No more steam.” He pulled his toy cat out from under his arm where it had been stashed. He scanned it over
the fallen animals, pushing the cat’s nose up against each individually. “The cat knows.”

The cat knows
? James thought. The cat knows what? Or perhaps he had been misunderstanding all this time. Perhaps it was “the cat nose”. Perhaps Conor believed the cat was capable of scenting something.

“Where’s the rug?” Conor said suddenly and looked at James.

James looked up blankly.

Conor turned his head and glanced around the room. Abruptly his face lit up and he crossed over behind James to get the box of tissues.

Coming back to the table, Conor pulled tissues out of the box and laid them one by one over the plastic animals. This took up most of the space on the table. And most of the tissues too.

When he was finished, Conor surveyed his work. “Where is the dog?” he asked. Then he lifted one tissue. “The dog is here. Where is the duck? The duck is here.” Repetitively he went through all the animals, asking where an animal was and then lifting the tissue to say that here it was. There was a repetitive, sing-song quality to his questions and answers. This reminded James of a baby’s game of peek-a-boo. However, there was also a stuck-record quality to it, as though once started he couldn’t stop himself.

“You are concerned that the dog won’t be there, that the dog might not be under the tissue, if you can’t see him,” James ventured to interpret. “You want to look again and again to make sure.”

For a brief moment, Conor looked up, looked directly at James, his eyes a cloudy, indistinct blue. He had registered
James’s comment and by his reaction James guessed his interpretation must have been correct.

“You are worried about what you will find under the tissue, so you must look,” James reiterated.

“The dog is dead,” Conor replied.

“You think the dog is dead and so that’s why you’ve put a tissue over it.”

“A rug.”

“So you’ve put a rug over it.”

“The cat knows.”

“The cat knows the dog is dead?” James asked.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

“You are making your worried sound,” James said.

“The dog is dead,” Conor said very softly. “The duck is dead. The auroch is dead.” He looked down at the toy cat in his hands. “Someday the cat will die too.” And as he stood, a single tear fell, wending a wet path down over his cheek.

“S
o what exactly happened to you that night you first saw Torgon?” James asked, once Laura was settled for her next session. “When you experienced this intense imaginative episode?”

Laura sat in silence for a few minutes. “Well, as I followed Torgon towards the lilac hedge, I was in her world. One moment I was on the path through Adler’s vacant lot and the next moment I was on this high promontory of chalky white stone. The soil itself was white. Not crumbly like in the Badlands, but actual rock that was pushed up in great, distinct ribs to form the cliff, as if a giant had slammed together a handful of blackboard chalk. Below us was this massive broadleaved forest that stretched off in all directions. Sort of what I’d expect the Amazon Basin to look like, if you viewed it from high up. I remember the trees undulating restlessly in the breeze, almost like waves in an ocean. That’s how it got its name. From that point on, I always called it the Forest because of that view from the cliff.”

Laura paused pensively. “When I say ‘I went there’ or ‘I went with her’, that’s not quite right. It’s hard to describe what really happened, because I was aware ‘I’ myself wasn’t there. This was one thing that was different about the Forest from my other fantasies. In all of those, I was always at the centre of the action, imagining myself as the star, doing things with the characters I created. The Forest was completely different. It was more like seeing a movie.

“At first I couldn’t figure out what Torgon’s role was. It was immediately obvious that she was a leader of some kind. You could tell that straightaway from the way people treated her. I assumed at first that she was a queen, but came to realize that she was, in fact, a kind of holy person. Not a priestess exactly, but of that type. The word in the Forest people’s language for her role was
benna.
”

“So they had their own language?” James asked.

“Yes. Although the only time I was aware of it was with words like
benna
that didn’t have an equivalent in English. I’d ‘hear’ those words.”

James listened with fascination. He had always found children’s imaginary companions intriguing, partly because he’d had no similar companions himself so it was hard to conceptualize the experience. Becky, however, had gone through a phase at three when an invisible tiger named Ticky had accompanied her everywhere, so that had given him a valuable second-hand experience. He knew that imaginary companions, outlandish though they could seem, were a normal, healthy part of childhood and usually indicated a child of above-average intelligence. It was unusual that Laura’s imaginary world had come into being so late, as the more usual age for this sort of thing was between three and
six, but it wasn’t unheard of, especially in highly creative children

James looked at Laura. As she talked about the Forest, she relaxed. The anxiety of the previous session had entirely gone and she sat back in an open, comfortable position. Her eye contact was excellent, her smile ready.

“Torgon didn’t live in the village where the others lived she said,” because she was considered divine by her people, an embodiment of their god, Dwr. So she lived in a walled compound in the forest, a sort of monastery. There was another high-status holy person living there as well. His name was Valdor, but he was always called the Seer because he had divine visions. This was actually his role, sort of like an oracle. He wore long, heavy white robes with gold embroidery on the edges and he was very old when I first saw him – in his mid-seventies, perhaps. There were some women also living in the compound. Like nuns. And children. Lots and lots of children of all ages. They came from the village, from wealthy families mostly, to get an education at the compound. They were called acolytes, even though they didn’t do anything very religious.

“That first night I went …” Laura gave a small quirky smile. “I was actually a bit disappointed to find out all this. Up until then my life had been all about comic books and TV shows. I was passionate about Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and I can remember thinking, why couldn’t it have been Dale Evans who popped up in Adler’s lot? But it took no time at all for me to fall in love with Torgon. She was this amazing person. Very charismatic. And intelligent. Really savvy, you know? In a streetwise sort of way. But she was also very emotional. Her moods could change with breathtaking suddenness and she was never the least bit inclined to rein
them in. Yet she could still be so appealing, so charming, even in the midst of the most unreasonable behaviour. I loved that about her, that complicated wildness.”

“Who knew about Torgon? Did you tell anyone? Your father, for instance?”

“Kind of,” she replied and became thoughtful for a moment.

“I’m hearing something more in your voice,” James said. “Did your father not approve?”

“It’s not so much that he disapproved. Just that he didn’t get it, so there wasn’t much point in telling him. I spoke to him about it, but he didn’t ‘hear’ me, if you know what I mean.”

“Can you clarify that a bit?”

She considered James’s request, then nodded. “Like, for example, I remember once when I was eight. I was on my annual visit to his house here in Rapid City. I came every August to stay a week with him and my brothers. It was the highlight of my life in those days. Not Christmas, not my birthday, but that last week in August when my dad took his vacation and I got to come and stay with him.

“I slept on this rollaway bed that he put in the corner of his bedroom. For a long time, it had become my practice to go to the Forest during that period between getting in bed and falling asleep. I liked to do it then as it was a nice relaxing time and I didn’t get interrupted. At the Meckses no one ever even noticed because I was up in the attic, so I’d never paid much attention to whether I was talking out loud or not. But, of course, in Dad’s small apartment, he heard me and came in to see what I was doing. I remember him silhouetted in the doorway, asking, ‘Are you talking to one of us?’ I said no, that I was just playing.

“He came on into the room then and sat down on the edge of the bed and said, ‘You seem to be having an awfully good time in here by yourself. What are you playing?’

“Torgon had been coming to me for about a year by then and I was really into all the details of her life. For example, she was the elder of two daughters and had this sister four years younger who was named Mogri, and I knew all about the kinds of things they had done together growing up. I knew tons of other stuff too. The Forest society had an incredibly rigid hierarchy of castes and which caste you were born into counted for everything there. It determined who you were, what work you could do, which other members of society you could associate with. The highest caste was a religious ruling class that consisted of the Seer, the
benna
and their offspring. They were almost like a royal family, because they had absolute rule. The next highest caste was the elders, who made laws and arbitrated on civil matters. Then it was the warrior caste, and then the merchant caste and the traders, and so on and so forth. The very lowest caste was composed of the workers, the people who did manual labour. They weren’t even allowed to live in the same part of the village as those of the higher castes. They were actually walled off and kept out of the main village, except to do their work. Torgon and her family belonged to this lowest class. Her mother was a weaver, and her father built and repaired carts. Because she was low-born, it had come as a huge shock to everyone – including Torgon herself – when she was identified at nineteen as the next
benna
. So suddenly here she was, thrown from the lowest class to the highest. She was twenty-three at the point she had appeared to me in Adler’s vacant lot, and even then, she was still finding it hard to adjust in her work.”

“Goodness, that
is
all complex,” James said, thinking these were most extraordinary thoughts for an eight-year-old to be having. Trying to envisage Becky saying things like this to him, he could easily imagine how disconcerted he would feel as a once-a-month father to find out Becky spent most of her time playing pretend games about holy people and caste systems, and worrying over an imaginary twenty-three-year-old’s vocational problems.