The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (4 page)

He walked out of the garage and over to Bunche Hall. It stood on huge stilts, its entire facade made of some metallic-like material reflecting the other buildings and trees. It was a beautiful day, clear and sunny and very warm for December. Groups of students, the boys in beards and Levis, the girls also in Levis, with hair long-flowing, sprawled on the grass, or near the gnarled old olive trees on the south side of Bunche Hall, or on the low brick wall bordering the parterre in front of the building.

He walked into the lobby, then paused briefly to study some of the cards tacked up on a student bulletin board. There were the usual announcements: Pad to rent. Roommate needed, female, non-smoker. Charter trips to New York and Europe. Somebody wanted to sell a Showman Kustom Electric Bass Guitar. Somebody else wanted to unload a rebuilt Yamaha motorcycle, CASH! Must Sacrifice! The Kung Fu Club was meeting again.

But these were far outnumbered by announcements pertaining to the occult and their practitioners. Tarot Readings by Cassius. The Voice of Isis, Cosmic Mother. Tanya Sings Poems of Myth and Infinity—Small Gatherings Only. Guru Ram Das, Karmic Reader.
Spiritualist Center—Expand the Brotherhood of the Source. Cosmic Joy Workshop. Christ on the Tree of Life. Breath, the Key to Spiritual Attainment. Bio-Energetic Anal Workshop. Hexing, Institute of Human Abilities. Astro-Psycho-Logical Encounters. And THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE Workshop.

Everybody was Edna, these days. The world was full of idiots, all of them looking for answers.

And so was he.

Peter’s second graduate student of the day, Ed Donan, came in for his dissertation interview. He was tall and bearded and a little uneasy. He carried a thin folder containing a brief outline of his proposed dissertation subject.

“Sit down, Ed.”

“Yes, sir.”

Peter could never quite get used to the “sir?” part. Or the Doctor Proud part. He was only a couple of years older than Donan.

“Now,” he said, nodding toward the folder. “Tell me all about it.”

“The area I’d like to examine is the parallel between Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams
and the divinity-of-dreams culture of the Iroquois.”

My God, he thought,
what is this?
First Nora, now Ed Donan. This is going to be some day.

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, there’s no evidence that Sigmund Freud had ever heard of the Iroquois divinity-of-dreams idea. Yet their dream rites offered the same ‘therapeutic strategy’ of catharsis. They had ritual opportunities for wish fulfillment through dreams. They had dream guessing games, and they were a dream gratification society.”

“What’s your documentation, Ed?”

“The reports the Jesuit missionaries sent back to their superiors. From 1611 to 1768.”

“You mean
The Relations?
” Donan nodded. “And particularly
the
Relation
sent back by Father Regueneau in 1649—he uses language that might have been used by Freud himself.”

“Go on.”

“The Iroquois knew, just as Freud did, that the dream might conceal, rather than reveal, the wish of the soul. I’m talking of both their personal and visitation dreams. Their idea of therapy was to actually reenact their dreams—make them come true. If the dream desire was not granted, it revolted against the body, causing various diseases. They called it
Ondinnonk
, a secret desire of the soul manifested by a dream. I could give you a few examples….”

“Yes?”

“For instance, the personal dreams of the Senecas, as reported by a Father Fremin.”

Yes, sir. This is going to be some day
.

“A Seneca warrior dreams during the night that he was taking a bath. Just as soon as he wakes up, he runs naked to the other cabins. There, he asks them to throw kettlefuls of water all over him, no matter how cold the weather may be. Some Senecas have been known to go as far as Quebec, a hundred and fifty leagues away, according to Father Fremin, just to get a dog which they have dreamed of buying there. The same idea runs through the other nations of the confederacy—Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Cayugas. And even their relations, the Hurons of Canada.” Here Ed Donan checked his folder. “In 1656 an Onondaga dreamed that he slept with two married women for five days. Other men willingly gave their squaws to him so that the dream could be fulfilled and thus satisfy
Ondinnonk
. In 1642, a Huron dreamed he was taken alive in battle by non-Hurons. This was a bad dream, and there was a tribal council held to discuss it. The dreamer, with his consent, was tortured and burned with flaming sticks. Another Huron dreamed he had been taken by enemies and that they had cut off his finger. He then cut off his own finger. Another dreamed his cabin had burned down. The chiefs, after due deliberation, ceremoniously burned down his
cabin to satisfy the dream command. And so on.” He peered at Peter through his thick glasses. “Well? What do you think?”

“Sounds fine. Only there’s one hitch.”

“Yes?”

“I vaguely recall that a man named Anthony Wallace has already done considerable work in this field.”

“Yes,” said Donan hastily, “I know Wallace. I’d use his stuff as source material and give him proper credit, of course. The thing is, I want to go deeper, research the
Relations
further, elaborate the parallel to Freud.”

“You’re still on somebody else’s ground, Ed,” said Peter. “Unless you can really make a number of new points. Tell you what. Why not investigate some of the other tribes? The Plateau Indians, maybe.

Or the tribes of the Southwest. Or the Great Basin. Maybe they’ve got some kind of
Ondinnonk
of their own. Then you’d have something quite different.”

Donan blinked through his glasses, apparently unsure whether he was happy about Peter’s suggestion or not. But he said, “Good idea. You might have something there, Dr. Proud. I’ll look into it.”

When Donan left, Peter leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He felt very tired and a little shaken. He picked up the phone and dialed Nora’s number.

“Ondinnonk,”
he said.

“What?”

“Indian word. It means ‘Somebody up there is playing games with me.’ ”

“Oh.”

“How about lunch?”

“I can’t,” she said. “Got two conferences.” Then: “Pete, I did some reading this morning. On the subject of somniloquy.”

“What?”

“Somniloquy. Sleep talking. And I really feel a lot better about it now. They don’t know too much about it yet, but they’ve drawn
some conclusions. For example, some people talk in their sleep almost every night. Some even when they take a nap, or daydream. Women talk in their sleep more than men do.”

“That figures.”

“Don’t be funny,” she said, “I’m serious. Anyway, some sleep talk is slurred. I mean, it’s gibberish nobody else can understand. Some people whisper; some yell out, the way you did. And some speak in different voices entirely. The way you did. So it isn’t that unusual, after all.”

“Exit Mr. Hyde.”

“Yes. Even though I still get gooseflesh thinking about it, I feel a lot better. And I hope you do.”

“Oh, I do,” he said. “I do.”

Just as he hung up, the pain hit him. It came suddenly, as always. And, as always, in the same place—on the left side, just above the hipbone. It was excruciating. As though some assassin had plunged a red-hot dagger into his side.

He arranged with his teaching assistant to take the class, then called Dr. Tanner’s office. He told the girl that it was an emergency—the same crazy thing as before—and he was coming right over.

He hung up. Then he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

Score Two for Edna
.

A nurse led him into one of the cubbyhole examination rooms, Finally Dr. Charles Tanner carne in. He was a few years older than Peter, a friend, and also a tennis buff.

“Hello, Pete. Back again, I see.”

“And sitting here like a dummy for half an hour.”

“Sorry. Heavy traffic today. I understand it’s the hip again.”

“Yes.”

“Bad?”

“Murder.”

“Let’s have a look.”

He probed the area in and around the hip with his fingers.

“Any reaction to this? More pain? Or less?”

“No. Just the same.”

He put Peter through a series of bending and leg-raising exercises. “Any new strain?”

“No. Just the same.”

He looked at the folder. “Let’s see. You first came in with this about six months ago. Then two more visits. Two x-rays, the last one taken only a month ago. Negative. No evidence of any intrinsic pathology. No objective evidence of any disease. All good healthy bone and tissue.”

“Then why the pain?”

Tanner looked puzzled. “I’m damned if I know. There’s no history of previous injury in the area. It doesn’t occur during, or as a result of, any active exercise,” He looked at the folder again. “Just comes and goes at random. Duration, one to three hours. And then,
suddenly, it isn’t there anymore.” He stared at Peter. “How did it happen this time?”

“I was just sitting at my desk. Talking to someone. Hung up the phone. And bang.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s all.”

Tanner shook his head. “Look, this may sound like some kind of cop-out. It’s barely possible the pain could be psychosomatic. But this particular area would be a very unusual place to get a reaction of this kind. People usually get psychosomatic pains in the back or legs. Or they suffer from headaches, stomachaches, chest pains, ulcers. Still, I suppose any area of the body is vulnerable.” He laughed. “Now, if you had a wooden leg, I could come up with a
real
diagnosis.”

“Yes?”

“Amputees sometimes feel pain. In a phantom limb. A leg they don’t have anymore. Their experience has been so traumatic that they imagine they have the same kind of pain they’d have in a real leg. The same with women, in post-mastectomy breast phantoms. But hell, Pete. I don’t know what to tell you. Except that you’re absolutely sound, organically, in that particular area. Look, I’ll give you a shot. Maybe it’ll relieve the pain.” Then, as he prepared the needle: “How about some tennis this coming week?”

“Okay. When?”

“Wednesday. Doctor’s day off. When else?”

He walked out of the office and got into the elevator. Going down, he suddenly remembered the scar on X’s hip.

He lay back in the dentist’s chair.

His mouth gaped open like that of a dead fish. His jaw was numb from the Novocain. He kept his eyes closed as the drill burred into his tooth. The fingers of Martin Stein, DDS, smelled antiseptic, slightly peppermint, as they pried into his mouth. The burring stopped.

“All right, Pete. You can rinse now.”

He had almost canceled this appointment. But the pain in his side had vanished ten minutes after he had left Charlie Tanner’s office, and he had decided to keep it after all. This, apparently, was his day for the doctors.

Before the injection, Stein had given him a liquid tranquilizer, some pink stuff in a paper cup. Now he felt relaxed, a little sleepy.

“Open wide.”

He felt his mouth being stuffed with hardware. The plastic saliva drain, some cotton batting, something metallic, a clamp. Finally Stein told him to bite down and hold it. It would take a while, he said, before it hardened.

The dentist walked out to attend to another patient in the next room. Peter suspected that there was still another in a third room. Probably had everything timed perfectly. Inject one, drill two, fill three. And be sure and send out all the bills on the first of the month, Miss Delaney.

The sound of Muzak filtered through the offices, vapid but soothing. His eyes grew heavy. The streamlined chair glided along the curve of his spine. He lay almost flat on his back, an astronaut waiting for blastoff. The red of the California sunset filtered through the half-closed shutters of the window and glinted off the stainless steel tubes and chrome gadgets.

He stared up at the rectangular band of light in the fixture just above him. The name of the manufacturer was inscribed on the panel: Castle. It seemed to him he had seen this name inscribed on the equipment of every dentist he had visited.

C-A-S-T-L-E.

White letters on a dark background. He stared at them hypnotically. He started to break them up into four-letter words, the way you played those word games they sometimes featured on the puzzle page of newspapers.

Cast, case, cleat, cale, Celt, stale, steal, scat, seat, last, least, lest, east …

It gets dark early in December. Through the shutters of Marty Stein’s window he could sense that night threatened the sunset. He could barely make out, between the shutters, the roof of a high-rise building farther down on Wilshire Boulevard. There was a sign on the roof. He could not make it out clearly, but it seemed to advertise a bank. Bank of America? United California Bank? He was not sure.

Then the shutters opened, and he saw that he had been mistaken. The big sign on the rooftop actually read: PURITAN.

However, it was rather hard to see the sign because it was snowing. Coming down hard, whipping against the windowpane. A big blizzard. He could hear the howl of the wind. It rattled the walls. The window was frosted now. It felt cold as he pressed his nose against it, trying to peer through. But he could no longer see the sign. There was too much snow.

It was piled on the street in high banks all about him. He was on a busy street. Traffic and shops. He could make out a few signs: Puritan Dress Shop, Puritan Lunch. People passed him, jostled him. They wore boots and galoshes and were buried in big coats against the cold. He saw their faces clearly, but he didn’t know anyone. Farther down the street an arched railroad overpass built of gray stone spanned the street. At the moment a train was rumbling over it. And beyond that, he saw a kind of municipal tower.

Now the snow had gone away. It was a beautiful, hot summer’s day. He was standing on the observation balcony of the tower. He was quite small, and he could barely see over the guardrail. It was high, very high above the city. From here he could see the broad river, its shape a reverse “S” lying in the sun. Across the river were buildings and factories, their chimneys tracing delicate patterns of smoke across the parchment blue sky. By looking down between the guardrails, he could see the cars crawling below, and what seemed to be some kind of public’ square. There were two monuments in the square, each with a figure on a pedestal. From this
high up he could not identify them. There were diagonal walks and benches.