Secret Dreams (35 page)

He can't come home because he's with the —

A damp sigh ebbed slowly down in Emma, a sigh that sounded like
die Fräulein
. She hadn't even read her husband's note.

In the middle of the next morning she found his shirt from the day before slung limply from the wooden bedpost. Streaks of blood ran along the collar and down the shirtfront, slashes of bright red on the starched white cotton. And along one side, the warped smear of a finger. He must have killed the Cunt, Emma thought instantly. What'll we tell the police?

Later, as she tried to work, a great blackness descended on her. like a stone pressing upon her head. She turned from books to notes and back to books again. While Geschrei flicked her orange tail to beat the band. Before noon, Emma crept into his study again, tiptoeing around the edge of his desk, sitting stealthily in his chair, Her hands hovered over the layers of papers, Sifting through the heap, she searched for some clue to the blood.

I'll only stay for an hour, she promised herself. An hour. But when the long shadows grew to dusk, Emma had still not solved the riddle of his bloody shirt, for he had yet to write that into his case notes. But she did learn other things. About Fräuleins twiddle, and about the girl's first speech. About their word association tests: and chuckled to herself over the abject nonsense of it. Blue sky. Longing. Family. Hospital. Was he really going to tell the man in Vienna any of that?

Then suddenly, in panic: how could she keep her husband from making a fool of himself? Was it already too late?

Her next day's search answered that. Yes, much too late.

She found the page describing the Ritual. So now Emma knew. Her husband let the girl smear feces on him. Even her menstrual blood. And they danced together alone in her room. Playing a game of murder. Her husband doing Fräulein s bidding, crawling to her, killing for her.

Emma hid her face in her hands. She wanted to scream. How had it ever come this far?
Yes, how?
asked the Whisperer in mock tenderness.
After all, he's your “husband,”

The weeks of waiting for an answer from the man in Vienna turned to weeks of pacing, of grumbling to himself, his voice rambling about the empty rooms of the house…. Then it came. The Reply. A thin standard mailer. Reluctantly she laid it aside on the gilded table under the long hall mirror, beside a crystal vase. She primped the yellow roses in the glass. There! find it yourself. And I hope he tells you to forget the whole thing. Give up. Send her back — wherever she came from.

Emma caught her face in the mirror. Lines of spite had appeared about her eyes. A stark, malicious face. Her chapped bottom lip had taken to growing a new layer of skin every other day. And her blouse misbuttoned —- walking around half the morning with her collar askew. Looking like the school dunce, her shirt bottom hanging out and her shoes untied, the little girl all the other little girls laughed at. Emma raised her fist over the glass tabletop,- she saw herself flinging the yellow roses to the floor, tearing up the letter, pretending it never came —

That night at dinner he sat through the meal, reading and rereading the Vienna man's answer: saying nothing, picking at his food, finally shoving it away. A spoon clattered to the floor,- he ignored it. He pushed his empty coffee cup in her general direction. Without a word, she went to fill it.

When she brought the coffeepot, she put the cup back near his elbow — then accidentally poured the burning liquid across his sleeve. He jumped, glaring at her. “Goddammit to hell!” A few drops had touched the edge of the Vienna letter. The Reply! And his eyes went murderous, as if some sacred totem, scroll, or tablet had been defiled. Now a price must be exacted to purify the thing again.

She was crushed with remorse,- and she furiously dabbed the coffee drops from the letter, nearly weeping. “I'm sorry. So sorry!”

But he did not notice her welling tears. The glare had vanished, and he mindlessly repeated, “It's all right. I'm all right. It's all right.” After a moment forgetting all about her, sinking even more deeply into the Reply. Emma's tears dried in her eyes. She cleaned the table coldly and efficiently. When she had set the place to rights, his empty coffee cup reminded her it wanted filling. She brewed another batch in the kitchen. Back in the dining room, she finally poured him the long-awaited cup.

Spilling it
again
.

Soaking the letter this time.

For an awful moment he stared at her clumsiness in frowning disbelief, then said in a thoughtful way, “I know you went through all my notes. Do you think I'm stupid? Why don't you write your own paper and stop mucking about with mine? You're about due, aren't you?”

Emma set the coffeepot down with a clang and listened to him rant.

“They say at the hospital I'm in love with her. They say I like menstrual blood smeared on my face. They say I taught her how to do tricks with her shit. You think that's true? Then say it. Say it to my face!”

Emma said nothing. She silently tried to mop up the soaked letter.

He grabbed her hand to stop its fussing. She snatched her hand away and clutched it to her breast. His words hammered into her.

“When she first came she was wrapped like a cadaver. Now we see her face! She smelled like a goat. Now she bathes! Every second she shrieked like a banshee. Now she talks! So you
talk
. What the hell is wrong with you? Come on, tell me. Let's have it!”

Suddenly a vision overcame Emma. A picture of herself tipping over his chair until he fell flat on his back with his legs up, still shouting, “Let's have it! Let's have it!” Hiking up her dress, ripping open her underwear, to straddle his face, to shut his jabbering mouth, while he thrashed helplessly and she grinned down in an angry sexy rage, grinding her hips into his face.

“You have it now?” she said down to his muffled head. How wonderful finally to have the last word, finally getting his loose tongue just where she wanted it, all pressed into her open ready —

Cunt!
grunted the Whisperer from between her legs. Emma went red hot with shame. She squirmed off the vile thing's head, flying right up to the ceiling. But he came after her, zeroing in again, long nose to skewer her to the ceiling, to splay her just like a rag doll —

The dining room came back. The table empty. No Whisperer. No husband either. Carl had gone off to his study, leaving her alone with the orange house cat, purring watchfully in the empty chair.

The hearth fire in the Bollingen Tower had crumbled to ashes, the night was burned away. The old man had not stirred from the bunk. After lying long hours on the thin, rag-stuffed mattress, his brittle back ached as the wooden slats dug quietly into him. Then, in the endless remembrance, he had ceased to care. Pain no longer mattered.

Gray morning light peeped in at the window. He swung his stiff, cold feet onto the stone floor. Mein Gott! His legs felt old, so weak and fleshless…. Sweat from his fingers had ruined the faded photo of the Burghölzli Hospital. How long had he worried the sad relic as he wandered those long forgotten halls in his mind? Was it only last night he stumbled downstairs from the tower in a fit? Only yesterday he read the old Faker's obituary in the paper? Oh, his body ached. Too much ancient history. Living whole lifetimes in the past — a sixty-five-year-old man doing the work of a thirty-year-old. He wondered idly if Freud had kept that first letter about Fräulein Schanderein. What a sincere youthful bit of fluff!

And yet…

He rolled up his sleeve and looked at the scar: a small brown patch where Emma's spilled coffee had soaked through his shirt and burned him. Funny how a little burn hardly noticeable at the time had blistered and broken and left a dark mark. The scars you carried with you …

Should he start the fire again? See the bright tongues of flame warming his bony hands and smoky coals glowing darkly red … ? He tried to rise. But no. His thighs were glass strings. Another seizure, then. Hah! to die a day after the old Faker. While the other man's body was still warm almost. And the idiots would all write about the poignant coincidence of it, the two of them dying a day apart like that. Headlines like: TRAGIC SYNCHRONICITY! Giving the old Faker his last death rattle of revenge. Oh, they were all idiots: the smart writers, the smug critics, the clever editorialists — anyone who made their middling way in life by judging other people's talent for a living. Well, no third-rate hack aspiring to the editorial board was going to scrib his obit with some sanctimonious crap like “Enigmund Freud, the world's greatest living
blank”

His breath came sluggishly in his chest. À lifeless hand rested on the sill as if it belonged to somebody else. More flies had returned. He tried to shoo them away, twitch his hand, flick them off. Simple.

The hand ignored him.

One of the flies creaked its head sideways and looked wisely at him, then rubbed its forelegs together as if immeasurably pleased with the state of things. Thousands of hairs bristled from its watchful black face like spikes from a black iron helmet. Its horned jaws worked: saliva gleamed wetly in its mouth. At last he understood … it had come for him.

When you died, a fly came and took you away. The beaked face tried to say something — but its fly's jaws were no good for words. He could barely make out what it was saying…. Come along, Herr Doktor. Follow me, please. This way now …

The little black fly leaped from his hand, whirring off on a wing of grim-reaper wind. So I'm going to die after all, he thought. How nice.

The shaft of sunlight went on forever, as he fell through its brightness, sparkling motes of sun-trapped dust whirled pleasantly around him like a universe of stars. Enduring … continuing on like a bright blindness that never died. He heard the great babble of humanity's common voice, like a thousand people laughing and crying, singing and shouting, all at the same time.

Of course! The gales of light were a
brain
… his
own
brain. The whole world in the arched cathedral of his thought! Oh, what a confusion of noises and tastes: a wailing siren heard at noon yesterday, a bitter gulp of seawater swallowed thirty years ago — all the memories of the mind existing side by side. The brain was eating a thousand meals and living a thousand days. Every moment, every tear. Even the skin had memories: cuts and bruises, scrapes and bumps, a lifetime of minor accidents all clamoring for attention. Then came the kisses and caresses, beginning with Mama's and Papa's — to a little cousin's in a dark closet, to a girl in school, to a fiancée, to a wife's — to where yours and hers became mixed together.

While never far away the emotions slumbered like restless mountains. Some towering, some crumbling, some at rest like dead stones. Years of terror and happiness, despair and joy, boredom and loneliness, triumph and defeat. Yet sitting high above it all, on a throne of its own design, Formal Learning gazed down upon the rabble. There was A-B-C and One-Plus-One and Pir, A miserable page of physiology memorized intact and the touch of fingers on a cool scalpel as it sliced some cadaver's heart in sections. While the words of a teacher droned on forever: “Well, have you finished that dissection yet? Have you finished that dissection? Have you …”

And finally the little thoughts too, resting comfortably like old married couples on a bench in the park. Washing his wife as she sat in the bath, smelling her wet fragrant skin, feeling the simple pride in the act of running a washcloth along her arm … Then a lash of anger: he was shouting at someone recently —- an orderly? Then a moment of peace as the body slipped off to sleep.

But even in his sleep there were memories and dreams: Herr Doktor dressed as Brunhild in a circle of fire while Nanny Sasha galloped on horseback and armor to save him …

The brightness and the noise seemed to lessen,- a dirty lightbulb filled his vision. An old, naked bulb — was he waking up? Not in the tower, surely. The tower had no electric.

An annoying feeling persisted, as it did in dreams, that no matter how hard you looked at a thing, the object stayed blurred, obscure. Whereas other things, on the perimeter, stood out sharp and clear. But never what you wished to see when you tried to pin it down. He saw only the pale, sickly glow of the yellow bulb, while the rest of the room kept slipping from his view.

Yet he sensed other rooms … the feelers of his thoughts wandering through half-open doors and down deserted hallways. He went past huge dust balls and dropped coins, past a sleeping cat, and around a corner. Then came a narrow flight of steps, leading down. Bleak twilight seeped from a round compass window, vistas of slate roofs and chimney pots leaking weak streams of smoke into a dying sky. A cold wind beat against the glass. Flecks of black ash flitted across, and then the lazy flakes of an afternoon snow swirled down, the big white flakes falling with the black flakes of ash. While off in the distance, the deep, lonely hoot of a boat whistle sounded.

He found himself within a town house. An institutional kitchen with large pots and pans hanging from metal ceiling racks, strainers and slotted spoons. Skillets clung to a wall near a huge black grill. Something burned on the range, smoking away. An old wolverine of a woman, puffing a filthy cigarette, snatched the pot off the flame, then darted back to the slop sink to redouble her attack on a battalion of dirty dishes. Her cigarette fell from her mouth, hissing into the gray, soapy water. A trembling film of grease closed over the sinking butt. She paused and rested her elbows on the sink, shaking her shaggy head, mumbling stubbornly, “This will never do, Madame! If you weep now, I shall get very angry. What would Frau Direktor say?” But she remained there with her head bent, motionless and silent, a ragpicker of defeat….

The kitchen door banged open. A younger woman and a child bustled in on a gust of wind, clutching sacks of groceries. The bag in the little girl's arms spilled, sending its insides rolling across the kitchen. A sack of sugar split, and the child went straight for it, greedily licking the sweet grains off her damp palm.