A Book of Dreams (11 page)

‘Hold it, Herm. Wait, don’t kill him! Wait!’

He started pulling at Herm, but Herm started pushing him towards the window. Blackman turned to catch himself and then he shouted, ‘Holy shit! Look at that!’

Herm stopped shaking MacGregor and looked out the window. Under the bed I stopped laughing.

‘Hey, Reich,’ said Blackman. ‘Look at this. Man, are they here tonight!’

I slid out from under the bed and squeezed in between them to look out of the window. Three red and green balls were flying in tight formation in the sky over the lacrosse field, flashing, glowing and signalling.

Herm let MacGregor slide to the floor. ‘Wot da fock? Wot’s going on?’ He looked around the room with a puzzled expression and then back out the window. ‘Foist da radio and den da lights. Wot …? Hey, Reich,’ he shouted, pointing a hairy fist at me. ‘Wot da fock you doin’ here? Get da fock out!’

Gladly.

I raced downstairs as fast as I could and whipped into my room. Putting on a jacket, pants and shoes, I opened the window and jumped out onto the lacrosse field.

The EAs were low in the sky and didn’t seem very far away. They were green and red balls, flitting around in the sky, coming closer and closer. Coming to take me away at last.

The November wind cooled the tears of laughter on my face and now my eyes began to burn. I walked out across the field towards the EAs. Behind me I heard the murmur of voices as boys leaned out of their windows to watch the balls in the sky. From his window in Upper North, I heard Blackman call, ‘Hey, Reich! Where are you going? Come back! Come back!’

But I ignored him. The flying saucers were coming to take me away. I had to let them know I was here. If I concentrated hard enough and thought real hard, they would catch my signal. I saw them bobbing in the sky, quivering. My eyes were in give give and they went up through the sky and the wind, saying please come and take me away to the stars, please come, please come.

It could land right over there at the end of the field if I could only signal them. There must be a signal in case they don’t know. What if Daddy is in the spaceship? How will they know if it is really me and not a spy? I remembered the photograph of the two hands making an energy field, hanging in the observatory. As I walked to the end of the field I started making the energy field with my hands, holding them out in front of me, palms facing. Slowly I brought them together and then apart until I felt the energy field between them. They would be able to see it on the scope.

In the night I walked across the field, making the energy field with my hands, praying that he would come and take me away. ‘Please come,’ I said, looking long and hard at the glowing balls coming nearer out of the sky. ‘Please come and take me away please please. Please, here are my eyes, here I am sending them far out to you. To you. Giving my eyes, please come please.’ Far away in the sky there was a noise. I heard a dog bark.

The jets came from the south. They were closing in fast with blinking lights and a dull roar. My hands stopped going in and out and I stared in horror. The jets were going to chase them away! Oh my God, didn’t they understand that these flying saucers weren’t enemies now? That they had Him? O God, please don’t let them chase him away. Please come quickly. Come quickly to the field and take me. Oh, please, please! I started running across the field while at the other side of the sky
the jets circled to take bearings and then they started to close on the spaceships. I watched the sky from the middle of the earth.

The balls disappeared very fast, moving into the northeast corner of the sky. They vanished while the jets flew in swirls and webs across the sky.

The nurses unwrapped me. Slowly, they loosened the sheet. I was crying. My body was intact. My shoulder was back again but I am crying too, thinking a
deer a deer a deer.

LOOKING OUT OVER the Maine countryside from the top of the hill, at the end of a gently curving path and gathered in among trees, stood the tomb. It was big, about ten feet long and five feet wide. Its walls of cemented rock resembled those of the larger rock building at the other end of the path, only instead of a gravel porch on top, the tomb was covered with a slab of salt-and-pepper granite. Cut thick, the granite top looked like a real roof: a peak extended down the middle creating a slight
pitch and giving the rain a place to fall from, out away from the rock walls.

In the middle of the granite, on the side of the roof that sloped out towards open countryside, was bolted a larger-than-life bust. Sitting next to the bust on top of the hard, speckled granite, one might have let one’s eye be drawn over two or three miles of spruce, fir and birch forest to where Hunter Cove brought Rangeley Lake into view at the base of sloping pastures. On a clear day, Mount Washington and New Hampshire’s White Mountains gleamed on the southwest horizon. It was a good view, carefully maintained and held above groping young treetops by Tom Ross’s axe.

Nearly ten years after the death of the man who first hired him to care for that land, Tom Ross was the only one who remained. Salaried by a trust fund created by the will, he served that part of the will which established a museum and provided for upkeep of the grounds. In summer, on scheduled days at posted hours, Tom Ross and his wife, Bea, showed visitors through the museum. The rest of the time he mowed lawns, maintained the buildings, looked after his grandchildren and great-grandchildren (a growing brood) and worried about Social Security. On snowshoes in winter, he went back into the forests of Orgonon with his axe to trim trees. Working slowly and carefully with measured strokes of his axe, he cleared away underbrush and dead branches so the forests would grow straight and tall around the shoulders of the hill.

Striking out at random from the tomb, a walker might suddenly have stumbled out of thick undergrowth into the silent parts that Tom had trimmed. Or the walker might have found
other signs of activity: small holes and piles of rocks scattered about; one of many old garbage dumps hidden and forgotten beneath trees, crawling with roots, needles and moss; old cedar fences covered with thick green moss; strange circles.

The circles were barely distinguishable among blueberry bushes, squaw bush and baby evergreens, their ragged circumference held by the soft blurry limits of a strange moss that grew wherever there had been a fire in the ground.

Clouds of smoke boiled out of the trees like soft white balloons until there was nothing left to see except snow. Everything was white. On the other side of the brush fire, leaves crackled and branches broke as Tom threw armfuls of brush onto the hissing fire.

The white smoke came up around me from the fire softer than snow crunching underneath my boots. I threw a branch into the smoke and squinted away. The smoke made it harder to breathe. Daddy made it easier.

‘Pete!’ Tom hollered to me. He couldn’t see me for the smoke.

‘What?’

‘You okay?’ His boots crunched in the snow and got closer. Then his hat and face came out. ‘Here! Lie down on the snow.’

He put his axe down and kneeled down. It looked like he was floating in the smoke. ‘Lie down,’ he said again, lying down on the snow.

I put my axe down too and lay down. Suddenly the air was clear and I could breathe and see. Where we lay down there was
about a foot of clear air like a blanket between the snow and the smoke. Tom held onto his axe with one hand and took a bite of tobacco with the other. He grinned and held the tobacco out to me. I shook my head. Tom shook his head too and grinned. He always offered it to me. Past Tom, tree trunks broke out of the snow and disappeared into the smoke. The fire crackled and hissed but we couldn’t see it.

‘Hey, Tom, how come the smoke doesn’t reach all the way to the ground?’

‘Oh, I dunno. That’s how lumberjacks keep out of the smoke, ’cause it is always clear air right over the top of the snow.’

The crust was rough to my cheek and if I moved my leg or my arm the crust crunched. Animal footprints and broken pieces of leaves were frozen into the crust around us and a cold smell came up through. I pulled the axe closer to me and smelled the handle. It smelled like pitch and smoke rubbed in by Tom’s big hands.

‘Hey, Tom, are we going to cut any more trees today?’

‘Oh, I dunno. I guess we’ll let this burn down and go into town for the afternoon mail. You aren’t cold, are you?’

I shook my head. He grinned and raised his head to spit and check the fire. I wondered how far the smoke went into the forest and what it looked like from up above where there wasn’t any smoke. Maybe just the tops of the trees were sticking out of the top of the smoke, like a forest of tiny Christmas trees. It was almost Christmas but I didn’t want it to come until the third thing happened. Mummy always said bad things happened in threes and we already had two.

In 1966, Tom Ross was still at Orgonon, retracing paths through the woods that only he knew, mowing lawns in summer, burning brush in winter, keeping Orgonon clean and neat, stopping over on weekends and after hours to make sure no one broke in.

The new fad, snowmobiles, made the buildings more accessible in winter, and although there had been no major thefts one or two break-ins had occurred. Once, someone slashed some paintings. No one in the region knew how much to believe about what was in the buildings, although rumour had it that there was a lot of scientific equipment and some pretty nice furniture. Beyond the rumours and what was immediately visible to museum visitors, it was hard to know what was still there. No doubt something of a Frankenstein quality lingered in the minds of these villagers – eager to promote tourism in their region – who for nearly fifteen years had listened to the thick foreign accents of the doctors and scientists out there doing experiments with …
ENERGY
.

Tom Ross had been through it all and now he remained there, a link between past and present. Working alone there all those years he must have gone over the events and people carefully, because as time passed and more people came to see Orgonon, his stories expanded and lengthened. He spoke quietly and lovingly of The Doctor, telling stories that showed fairness, honesty, imagination and error. Wisely, Tom refused to speak into the new-fangled tape recorders that some people brought.

Ironically, in 1966, Tom Ross was one of the few people who could talk about The Doctor. Many of the others, both
with accents and without, who had participated in The Doctor’s American years, were silent, ruminating over the years with Reich. Some were bitter at the world, some were uncertain about the future, others strived in their own way to continue research into a body of work they considered immensely valuable.

Physicians in countries all over the world were making careful slow discovery of Reich’s work, always pushing back and rearranging dates and periods to redefine what was ‘acceptable’. In 1966, psychiatrists in training were still being told to stop reading
Character Analysis
halfway through, ‘because that was when Reich went mad.’

If sanity was a trivial issue separating the world of traditional medicine and science from Reich’s work, the followers of Reich had their own quarrels, which, in the perspective of history, would also seem trivial. Unwilling to accept labels such as ‘disciple’ or ‘Reichian’, a number demanded orthodoxy and defied definition with such vigour that their assertions sometimes made them appear as worshippers or fanatics.

On an international level, there was no communication at all between interested students. In America, divisive power plays, lawsuits and quarrels typified relations among many who felt themselves to be the heirs of Reich’s legacy.

And a good many were silent.

One of those who was quiet was Eva Reich. After her father’s death, she and her husband, William Moise, went to live in a small community on the coast of Maine. For many years Eva was busy with an organic garden, reading and her daughter. Bill became a full-time artist. He delved into colour with his fingers and created paintings that radiated with patterns of moving light.

As issues and arguments rose and fell around Reich’s work, Eva developed what she called ‘an unearthly detachment’ from the infighting. She worked hard to make birth control and sex education more accessible to young people and poor people throughout the state of Maine, but she refused to be drawn into the quarrels about her father’s legacy. ‘These are the power politics after the emperor dies,’ she once said after discussing a legal question. ‘The basic scientific principles are more important than the power politics.’ The core of the work, she said, would endure longer than the personal struggles.

Tom Ross was another who steered clear of the personal struggles. Extending the line of cleared forests and manicured lawns each year, he knew better than anyone that his work would endure; it would be a forest someday. Fully competent in his field and well above the power struggles, Tom might have had interesting observations on those others who occasionally reappeared out of the past to walk around Orgonon, go out to look at the tomb, reminisce with him. Few, if any, ventured into the woods, where there were many treasures, but most of them enjoyed talking with Tom as much as he enjoyed the interruptions from his routine and the opportunity to talk about The Doctor.

In October of 1966, he saw a group of young people coming across the property. Among them he recognized Peter, the son. Tom was glad to see him.

Orgonon was lonely without all the people. When we got back from town I went up to the hill to see if the smoke was still there in the snow but it was gone. All I could see from the observatory steps were fields and trees, all white and still and quiet. It smelled like snow, lonely. The rooms were always cold. Everyone left after Oranur. Oranur was the first bad thing. There had to be three before Christmas.

Oranur was when Daddy put a radium needle in the big accumulator in the lab and everyone got sick. The lab closed, the mice died. People went away. The air was so bad I had to take a bath every day and have blood tests. A lot of people got sick. Eva got sick. Mummy had to go away for a long time. She was sick too. I missed her a lot. Then she came back. I wanted her to stay.

The instruments were still and quiet in the big room downstairs in the observatory. After the lab was closed all the instruments were moved up the hill. The red linoleum floor was soft, cold grey.

I tiptoed upstairs. Daddy was sitting at his desk, working. I waited at the top of the stairs underneath the picture of two hands making an energy field.