Secret Dreams (26 page)

Herr Doktor touched his lips to make sure he'd left off mumbling.

He had reached the office door.

Nekken sat poised behind his desk in a chair of the Empire style; carved lions'-head armrests and lions' paws at the feet. The upholstery was malachite-green satin, the backrest crowned with a gilded crest, the imperial Napoleonic N, which now stood for the physician himself.

The only thing moving in the room was Nekken's white, languid hand, flowing leisurely across the creamy slip of paper. The hand seemed to move by itself, straight from the elbow: a department store mannikin writing a letter. The mannikin did not look up.

A few papers — one of his own innumerable reports on Fräulein — lay beneath Mercury's winged feet, the nonchalant sign that Herr Jung had long been one of the great man's daily concerns, displayed intentionally to dismay and to intimidate. His own papers trapped under the god's feet, as if to say:

You're underfoot, Herr Jung. You might get squashed.

Off to one side hung a small oil painting. A finely executed Tiepolo, a detail from some larger work. It showed the pudgy, twisting body of a cherub, Cupid himself. The painting hung on the same level as Herr Nekken's narrow, cadaverous face: a pudgy yearling with baby angel wings, laughing across the sundown blues and pinks of a Venetian sky. Tiepolo's Cupid with a pink rosy bottom, a fresh, moist bottom that begged to be lovingly spanked.

At last Herr Senior Physician Nekken deigned to recognize his colleague's presence. Slowly the long, pale face looked up from his writing paper. He smiled cautiously, as if quietly delighted to see Herr Doktor coming into his office.

“Why, Herr Jung! At work already? We didn't know when to expect you.”

But the smile flickered as Herr Doktor leaned heavily over the green-blottered desk. His hands instantly darkened the blotter with sweat. He spoke quietly and clearly, as though to a slow learner:

“How would you like it if I ordered Bolzen to sit on your legs while Nurse Bosch ripped down your pants and gave you an enema?”

He felt the sweat run down his arms. At last Nekken replied, “Your patient was nine days overdue —”

“My patient” — Herr Doktors voice sank — “is my patient.” A drop of sweat fell from his chin and splashed on the blotter. His voice sank lower. “And she will evacuate. Without being tortured. Eventually. On her own.”

He caught a whiff of his own perspiration. Sickly. Violent. And across from him, Nekken's controlled, calm face, smoothly shaved to the point of waxiness. The skin so taut and flawless, Herr Doktor wanted to slap it.

“You are losing control, my friend,” Nekken said in a sympathetic whisper. “You see progress where there is only mindless parroting. In the past months you have turned this staff and this place inside out with the ceaseless demands of a petty tyrant. And you have neglected whatever other duties you may have had. What happened to that young man I sent you last week, the one with the fluttering eyelid?”

“I sent him away. He wasn't sick. He was nervous. A vacation. A few days drunk, a few nights with a girl — that's what he needed.”

Nekken leaned back in the chair, folding his hands. “You sent away a paying patient. Tell me, what are we paying
you
for, Herr Jung?”

He had no answer for that. Herr Doktor saw more droplets fall from his chin. Oddly, he didn't feel hot…. He found an answer:

“I have been employed these many months establishing a rapport with Fräulein Schanderein. A paying patient. You destroyed that this morning.”

“Then it wasn't much of a rapport, was it?” Nekken said, his fingers touching in a church roof,

“It was the best we could do,”

“The best? Really? Then you define a rapport as no talking, no eating, and wiping up excrement all day long … ?”

Herr Doktor noticed that Nekken had a very prominent Adam's apple, almost grotesque in the way it protruded from his throat. He wondered what it would feel like to crush the ugly lump between his thumb and forefinger. Would Nekken scream the way the girl screamed? The way he wanted him to scream right now? The way Herr Doktor himself wanted to scream? How amazing when his voice came out stern and severe, commanding:

“Leave my patient
alone.”

Nekken gazed at him over his praying hands, saying nothing. Then he seemed to relax, chuckling and folding his fingers together; “All right, all right, my dear Jung. Ill leave her alone.” He rose from the Empire chair, coming around the side of the desk. Gently he took the junior physician by the elbow, leading him to a full-length gilded mirror against one wall.

“But tell me, what should we do about you, Herr Doktor?” the man demanded gravely. “What should we do about you?”

The morning flew back at him in a rush: the waking, the panicked dressing, flying through the rain, sprawling in the hall, sneezing all over himself…. The mirror showed it all. His tie had come out of his collar,- the torn pocket of his jacket flapping. And God, his face.

His hair plastered sideways,- his spectacles bent and crooked. His nose ran wetly into his mustache. Face ghastly pale, lips redder than normal life. A pathetic vampire.

Herr Senior Physician stood next to him in his crisp swallowtail coat. Impeccable. Daunting. “Yes, what
shall
we do with you, my friend?”

Herr Doktor started to laugh. He found a rain-damp handkerchief in his breast pocket and began to wipe his face. “I don't know, Herr Nekken, Î really don't know.” He blew his nose, “Perhaps we should check me in as a paying patient, file a report with Direktor Bleuler, and work up a diagnosis,”

He pried his bent glasses back into shape, more or less, With them perched on his nose, he looked merely dim-witted. Straightening his tie helped. So did tucking in his shirt, He combed his hair. Better. He left the mirror and made his way around the end of the desk. He lingered for a moment over the statuette of Mercury, gently touching the god's muscular bottom. “Sweet lad. Very engaging.”

He looked to Nekken for a reply, but the man stood silently by the mirror. Now two Nekkens watched him: the real one and his reflection, Ach! Two Nekkens! One was enough…. Herr Doktor went to the Tiepolo portrait of the pudgy cherub. He shook out his wet handkerchief like a sheet.

“That's just how I caught my cold,” he remarked to the little laughing Cupid. “By running around outside at all hours with nothing on.” Then aside to Nekken, “You should cover him up, or hell catch his death.” The older man seemed to be wondering whether Herr Doktor had lost his mind or was merely playing a poor joke. How delicious to see the senior physician irked by a touch of doubt.

“You don't want this child getting sick, do you?”

Without waiting for an answer, he delicately held his damp handkerchief from both corners and smoothed it carefully over the pudgy bottom of Tiepolo's laughing infant. The wet rag clung to the canvas. Now the imp peeked over the sheet in glee, no longer indecently exposed.

“That's better, my little fatty,” Herr Doktor said. “Just like a patient I know, in 401.” He bowed sharply to his colleague, clicking his heels. “Shall we file a report of our conversation,” he asked, “or will a gentlemen's agreement be sufficient?”

Nekken did not return his bow. He had gone to the Tiepolo cherub. Taking a compact manicure case of shiny black leather from his coat pocket, he extracted a pair of silver tweezers and began trying to pick the damp nappy off the painting without using his fingers. The man's thin face had grown ashen with silent anger.

“À gentlemen's agreement, then, Herr Senior Physician?”

Nekken's hands shook, the tweezers unable to pinch the dirty rag from the rosy buttocks of his beloved oil painting. “Just get out.”

THE DREAM

He was quite sick for the next few days. Chill, fever, vomiting. Zeik waited for him to emerge from Nekken's office, led him to a free room across the hall from Fräuleins 401. He clung to Zeik, climbing up the stairs, letting the orderly undress him and put him to bed. He felt too wretched to care how it looked. But bedridden or not, his patient still retained her stool, and going home to recuperate wouldn't help.

It must be said of Nurse Bosch that in the days following the enema attack, she did as much as she could for their cause, bringing Herr Doktor constant doses of beef bouillon at all times of the day or night, which gave him the strength to crawl across the hall, to sit for an hour or so in room 401.

A grim afternoon followed the attack. In a lull between waves of chill and fever, he stood outside Fräuleins door, listening to her gasp, “Ah —! Ahh —!” until he was nearly faint. When at last he found the courage to enter the room, she kept on as if he weren't there. Sitting with her until a mounting bout of diarrhea forced him to leave. All through the night he heard the muffled beat of her gasps through his own door. Then at some point in the blackest hours he awoke to silence. She had left off…. And he passed into sleep again.

The next day Fräulein let him into the room but began gasping hoarsely the moment he asked permission to sit. So he stood with her, sweaty with chill as the pulse of her howling throbbed in his head…. He'd heard of sailors cast adrift in small boats not defecating for weeks. But only because they had little food and what they did eat was absorbed almost wholly into their bodies. They were prone to attacks of tenesmus, the futile effort to defecate. Painful, like dry-heave vomiting. The body going through all the motions with none of the results … But this girl wasn't even going through the motions.

Back in the quiet of his private room he fell asleep in the chair, his head dropping to his chest for a moment. Eyes fluttering, he dreamt one word:

Dokpox
,

He awoke with a start.

Dokpox
, Ja … The parents had brought the girl to Zurich to enroll in medical school. But at the last moment she had become sick with an attack of nervous hysteria. ‘That is the right word for it, isn't it, Herr Doktor Jung? Nervous hysteria?” The mother's bosom heaved for him. The beautiful, ornate china-blue silk of her dress, dotted with the masks of Comedy and Tragedy. Her daughter had come to Zurich to become a Doktor — so once they thought she could master the art. But the poor creature had fallen sick instead. First medical school, then sick:
Dokpox
.

Well, if the mountain won't come to Mohammed — Mohammed would go to the mountain. He decided to lecture her.

He found Leaman's
Anatomy
pushed under her bed.

“I presume you've had a look at this,” he began. “There's a first-year lecture that goes with it. Old Groaten at the university used to give it. He's dead now.”

He paused for a second. Did she even hear? Ah, it didn't matter. He hadn't thought of old Groaten for years. If only he gave the lecture half as well as that dry old goat. The anatomy book opened in his hands,- when he stared at it, the print glided in and out of focus. He must really get back to bed soon.

Outside her window he saw the rain of the last few days had stopped. The sun shone in great shafts that struck down from the clouds, which were torn and ragged, with slashes of blue showing through. He fancied he heard birds chirping and even saw the flickering of a bright leaf peeking in at the window. Oh, he must be really sick to be seeing springtime leaves in the dead of winter.

“I'm sorry, Fräulein,” he said brittlely, “but I'm not feeling well. We'll start the lecture properly tomorrow.”

He didn't remember lumbering up from his chair, or going across the hall. Or falling into bed.

* * *

While he lay in the room across the hall from 401, people came and went before his eyes. He tried to speak to them, but they ignored him. He found it difficult to forgive them. He pondered this for a while. People were so naturally rude. Then he perceived that they were actually trying to help him. First off, his old underwear was gone and he lay naked in bed, the sheets cool and crisp. Then he heard voices, worried but gentle. At last the faces came. Nurse Bosch's round piggy face hovering over him, her small eyes glistened. She was swabbing his forehead.

But even as she drew the cool washcloth across his burning head, her face changed — and now Emma dipped the washcloth into a basin of water.
Emma
wiping the sweat from his forehead and wringing the drops away. Emma. Owl-eyed, sharp-beaked Emma the maid. (The maid! Never tell her that.) No, Emma his wife — that's what he meant to think. How had she ever come to marry him? Did he actually ask her once? Or had they just silently agreed on it? He thought of her body, which sometimes hung above him as they lay in bed. A soft, fleshy rail that squirmed this way and that until he grabbed it by the thighs and speared it, spread it open, and searched its quivering insides. He must be laughing, for Emma looked at him strangely, as if he were mad. Feebly he tried to take her hand and draw it down below to show her how big and warm he felt. He wanted to make her understand. But she freed her hand from his, placing it back on the sheet, saying, “Rest now, darling…. Rest now.” If only he could show her the huge beastie under the covers. Why didn't she let him? Was she afraid? He just wanted to
show
her.

Then she went away. Or did he close his eyes for a moment? He still felt a bit of washcloth trailing across his face, its annoying frayed ends tickling his skin. No, not the washcloth — the mummy's hand. Frayed bits of the mummy's swathings draped from the girl's arms as she gently touched his face. Would Fräulein Schanderein uncover herself for him now? He peered intently at her: the eyeless, sightless burnoose encased her head. The mummy stopped patting his fore-head, and the sweat ran freely into his eyes. If he looked at it again, would he see the girl's swathings — or the empty-hooded cowl of nothingness? The black void of the shit doll staring down at him? He prayed as the sweat ran down his neck: Please don't be an empty head, please don't be a cowled head.