The Sleepless (32 page)

‘All right,’ agreed Dr Rice. ‘If you think going under can really help. But let me tell you again: you won’t experience anything under hypnosis that you don’t already know. And maybe you’d better think about what it is that you already know.’ 

‘Hunh?’ Michael asked him, turning his head around as Dr Rice circled behind him. 

‘I like you,’ said Dr Rice. ‘I can’t say any more than that.’ 

‘Please ... ‘ said Michael. ‘Take me under, okay?’ 

Dr Rice dragged over a chair and sat down next to him. Michael could smell the Binaca on his breath. ‘Are you comfortable?’ he asked, and Michael nodded. 

Dr Rice said, ‘Lay your left hand on top of your left knee, palm upwards, and lay your right hand on top of your left hand, also palm upwards. 

‘Relax ... ‘ he said. ‘You’re anxious, you’re frightened, you don’t know what to do ... but you’ve come to find help, and I’ll give you help. Rotate your head around, let those muscles go. Relax.’ 

Michael relaxed – really relaxed. He let his soul flow out of his feet, until he was nothing more than a marionette, slumped in the armchair, stringless, empty, completely suggestible, ready for anything. 

Dr Rice took out his hypnotizing disc of zinc and copper, and pressed it into Michael’s open palm. 

‘Fix your eyes on the middle of the disc, on the copper spot. Keep your eyes fixed on it and don’t look away.’ 

Michael stared down at the copper spot, and saw it dancing in front of his eyes.
This time,
he thought,
he’ll never get me under. This time he’s going to fail.
 

‘You feel like sleeping,’ said Dr Rice. ‘Do not fight the temptation to sleep ... allow sleep to cover you, as soon as it wants to. When I tell you to close your eyes, close them.’ 

Dr Rice passed his hands in front of Michael’s face, over and over. ‘You feel sleepy,’ he said. ‘Your eyes are so heavy that you can scarcely open them. You don’t have any feeling in your arms or legs. Your body is numb. Your eyes are closing, you are going to sleep.’ 

He touched Michael’s eyelids, and then he murmured: ‘You find it impossible to keep your eyes open. You are going to sleep, sleep, sleep. You cannot open your eyes: they are stuck completely fast. You are sleeping now. You are asleep.’ 

Michael didn’t want to fall asleep. Not so easily, anyway. This time, he wanted to show Dr Rice that he could resist him. But even while he was thinking
no, not this time, no,
he was sliding into unreality, sliding into that warm, dark welcoming ocean of unconsciousness, and he couldn’t open his eyes, no matter how much he tried. He simply couldn’t. And didn’t really want to, because the ocean was deep and the ocean was so relaxing, he could swim deeper and deeper, and sleep as he swam. 

He saw that bright, pinkish flare that he always saw before Dr Rice put him completely under, and this time it seemed brighter than ever. Then, he was enveloped in darkness. 

He knew that he was standing on the beach. He still didn’t want to open his eyes, but he knew that he was standing on the beach. He could hear the surf tirelessly dragging itself all along the shoreline, and he could feel the salt wind blowing in his face, and he could hear the seagulls screaming. He heard Jason saying,’ –
bicycle – ‘
and then he opened his eyes. 

A tall man was standing close by, watching him. The man had bone-white hair, long and silky and swept back, although some of it was flying in the onshore wind. He had a long, sculptured face with a straight, narrow nose and distinctive cheekbones and dark, commanding eyes. He was frighteningly handsome, the kind of man whose presence makes husbands take a protective hold on their wives’ arms. 

He wore a long, expensive overcoat of light grey softly-woven wool, which billowed and rumbled in the wind. He was meticulously peeling a lime, and letting the fragments of peel drop onto the sand. 

‘You’ve come to join us, then, Michael,’ the man said, smiling, although his voice didn’t seem to be synchronized with his lips, like a badly dubbed foreign-language movie. 

Michael was flooded with fear, from his head to his feet, but the man laid his arm around his shoulders and said, ‘Come along ... you shouldn’t be frightened ... you’re among friends now ... friends and relations.’ 

‘I don’t understand,’ said Michael. He looked around at the seashore, at the wind-whipped dunes, at the small crouched saltbox houses, at the gulls silently circling. In the middle distance he could see something greyish and pale lying on the beach, something that could have been a washed-up mail sack or a slimy collection of flotsam or something worse. Some of the seagulls were stalking proprietorially around it, snatching at it with their beaks. 

The man gently guided Michael away. His coat kept on curling around Michael’s legs, making it difficult for Michael to walk. He said, ‘You’re very privileged, you know. Not many of you still have any memory of what you are 

They climbed the dunes, their legs sinking into the soft sand. Michael couldn’t help turning around one more time, to stare at the shape that was lying on the beach. It couldn’t be Sissy O’Brien, could it? He didn’t like the way the seagulls were tearing at it, and the way in which one seagull lifted off into the air with a huge chunk of something wet and shredded dangling in its beak. 

‘Come on, now,’ the man urged him. ‘We don’t have much time.’ 

Michael said, ‘Where are we going?’ 

The man said nothing, but took hold of his elbow with a strong, clawlike hand, and pushed him on. They mounted the top of the dunes together, with the wind whipping at their backs, and then they began to descend a wide sandy slope toward the white lighthouse that Michael had seen in his last hypnotic trance. 

‘I’m dreaming,’ said Michael. ‘Tell me I’m dreaming.’ 

The man turned to him, and his face was angular and white, like a chalk quarry, and his eyes were as red as liquid rubies. ‘No, Michael, you’re not dreaming. This is real ... this is the here-and-now. If you were dreaming, then I would have to be dreaming, too, and you and I would be sharing this dream.’ 

‘I’m not really here, though,’ Michael insisted. 

‘Of course you’re here! Can’t you feel the wind? Can’t you hear the sea?’ 

‘I’m in a trance. I’m sitting in Dr Rice’s office in Hyannis. He’s hypnotized me.’ 

‘You’re
here,
Michael. Why try to pretend?’ 

Michael stumbled in the sand as the man dragged him nearer and nearer to the whitewashed lighthouse. The wind whistled and sizzled in the grass. The lighthouse was so white that even on a dullish morning like this he could scarcely look at it, because of the glare. 

‘Will you quit pulling me!’ he shouted at the man, and snatched his sleeve away. ‘I don’t want to go here anyway!’ 

The man stopped and stared at him, his legs planted far apart, his back straight, his hands resting on his hips. He looked biblically stern. 

‘You must,’ he commanded. 

Michael shook his head. ‘I’m not going anywhere. This is a dream.’ 

The man leaned over him. ‘I never sleep. Because I never sleep, I never dream. This is no dream. This is reality. You are
here,
Michael, out on the shore; and you are coming along with me.’ 

He seized Michael’s arm and dragged him forward. Michael was partly aware that it was Dr Rice who was dragging him forward. He was partly aware that he was still in Dr Rice’s office. Yet the sea breeze was strong and salty; and he could feel the sand sliding under his feet, and the man’s coat wrapping itself around his legs, and he thought to himself:
How can this be? how can this possibly be? Where am I, for God’s sake? Am I hypnotized or dreaming or am I dead?
 

The man pulled him yard by yard to the base of the lighthouse. Close up, Michael could see that it was constructed out of brightly whitewashed concrete, although it was much more stained and weathered than it had appeared from a distance. 

‘Come inside,’ the man ordered him, and pulled him around to a low, heavy door of brown-stained oak. He turned the iron handle, and swung the door back. Then he grabbed Michael’s arm again, and jostled him inside. 

Michael looked around him. He was standing in a large, gloomy, damp-smelling chamber, with a high ceiling and thickly-rendered walls. All around him, in a semi-circle, stood sixty or seventy young, white-faced men, dressed in blacks and greys and thunderstorm greens. They stared at him without surprise. They stared at him with chilly curiosity. He turned from one to the other, and all he could see was expressions of cruelty and hostility; as if they were almost too dismissive of him to pinion his arms and skin him alive. 

‘This is a dream,’ he insisted, turning from one arrogant white face to another. ‘This must be a dream.’ 

‘No dream,’ the man insisted. ‘You want me to prove it to you?’ 

‘It’s a dream,’ said Michael. ‘I’m in Hyannis, not in Nahant Bay. I’m sitting in Dr Rice’s office in a hypno-therapic trance. Can you hear me, Dr Rice? I want you to get me out of this! I want you to get me out of this now!’ 

He didn’t know whether he was speaking coherently or not. Perhaps his waking self was talking gibberish – in which case, Dr Rice would probably let him continue. But he needed to be out of this trance. He couldn’t stand the wind; and he couldn’t stand the coldness on these young men’s faces; and he couldn’t stand the idea of the mail-bag bundle on the seashore suddenly rising to its feet, and coming after him, because he was sure it was Sissy O’Brien, with her grey face and her weed-flecked hair and the terrible cat that was hidden so deeply inside her, ferocious and vengeful, and ready to tear out his eyes. 

‘You frighten me,’ he told the white-faced man. ‘You frighten me, and I have to leave now.’ 

The white-faced man laid a restraining hand on Michael’s arm. ‘Everything’s fine now, Michael. Everything’s fine. All you have to do is go right back to your family, and forget about us. You wouldn’t want anything
bad
to happen, would you?’ 

‘No,’ said Michael, nervously. 

The white-faced man came toward him and stared into his eyes. Michael had never seen blood-red eyes like this before, and he backed away. 

‘What are we frightened of?’ the man asked him, teasingly. ‘We’re not frightened of blood-red eyes, are we? Did you never see the eyes of a man who hasn’t slept in three thousand years? Did you never see the eyes of a man who has stayed awake night after night, month after month, year after year, while Caesar rose and Caesar fell, and the pyramids were built, and Vikings rowed across the ocean, and Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock?’ 

‘I’m dreaming,’ said Michael. He closed his eyes, and repeated, ‘I’m dreaming.’ 

When he opened them again, the white-faced man was still leaning over him; and all the other men were still clustered around, staring at him, as if they would rather see him dead. 

The white-faced man prodded him forcefully in the chest, so that he could feel it. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked. 

Michael shook his head. 

‘You’ve been looking for me, you’ve been searching for me, although you don’t know it yet.’ 

‘What do you mean?’ Michael shivered. ‘If I don’t even know who you are, or
what
you are, how could I possibly have been searching for you?’ 

‘They call me Mr Hillary,’ the white-faced man told him. ‘And you have been looking for me without even knowing it. But now – ‘ 

He paused, and stood up straight, and slowly walked around the room, with his long grey coat billowing out behind him like a trail of smoke. ‘Now you know who I am, now you have
sensed
who
I am ... and I am here to warn you to leave me undiscovered; to forget that you saw me, to forget that I spoke.’ 

He said, almost regretfully, ‘The world has never been easy, Michael. Neither easy nor virtuous. You can’t get rid of your sins by praying to God. You can’t get rid of your sins by wrapping all of them up into one person’s soul, and then sacrificing that one person to the Lord your terrible God. You can’t get rid of your sins by confession or absolution or saying you’re sorry. 

‘A sin is a sin is a sin, whether you enjoy it or not. It’s there to stay, and you have to live with it. And even if you manage to absolve yourself somehow, that absolution can only be temporary ... do you understand me? ... because no matter how much you try to hide your sins or forget your sins or pretend that you never committed them, they will always, always,
always
find you out.’ 

He pointed to his eyes. ‘Do you know why? Because we’ve got them.
We’ve
got them, and even if you’ve forgotten them, we remember them. We never sleep, we never forget. For us, there is no “feeling better in the morning”. For us, there is no saying “well ... it was just like a dream”. For us, there is nothing but pain and punishment, until we give you your wickedness back, and return you to all that chaos and cruelty in which you lived before Aaron atoned for your sins. You haven’t paid, Michael. You haven’t paid! But the day is soon coming when you shall!’