A Book of Dreams (12 page)

After a while, he looked at me over the top of his glasses.

‘Hi, Peeps.’ He smiled.

‘Hi, Daddy.’

‘I’m glad you came. We can have a talk after I finish this. Why don’t you read a book.’

I got out the Sears and Roebuck catalogue and sat down next to the fireplace. They had a really nice two-gun set and all kinds of cowboy boots. I liked the ones with pointed toes.

After a while the pen stopped scratching and Daddy came over to the fireplace. I built a fire like Tom showed me and we sat together in front of the fire, looking at the catalogue.

‘What do you want for Christmas?’ asked Daddy.

‘I want a two-gun set!’

‘But I just gave you that nice holster set last year. Why do you want another? What more do you want?’

I wanted a two-gun set. I turned the pages to the cowboy boots. The cowboy boots had red and yellow swirls in the sides. Roy Rogers tucked his pants in, but real cowboys didn’t. Mummy said she would get me cowboy boots for Christmas.

‘How about a little golden watch?’

‘A what?’

‘A little golden watch for the little prince?’

‘I’m not a prince.’ I turned the page hard. Sometimes he teased me about being a prince and it made me confused. All I really wanted was a two-gun set and cowboy boots. And a cowboy hat.

‘It will be harder when you grow up,’ said Daddy.

We turned to the pictures of ladies standing up and smiling in soft white underwear. I liked the soft curves of their breasts and the warm soft way the white part was close to their skin. All the ladies were smiling at us. Daddy said, ‘Do you have a girl friend?’

It always made me funny when he asked that because I didn’t know what he meant. The ladies in the picture smiled at us and held their hands in funny positions. They stood in long rows of clothing.

‘Well, not really, I guess. I like Candy a lot. And Kathleen.’ Kathleen and I played Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

‘Have you kissed them?’

Some of the ladies in the Sears and Roebuck held their hands up in the air like they were pointing to the ceiling.

‘No….’

He looked down at the rows of ladies and pointed to a nice one. ‘Do you like her?’

She was pretty. Her hands pointed off to the side as if she was going to turn around and then walk right out of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue so she could come and sit next to us on the couch wearing a soft white slip.

‘Yes, she is pretty,’ I said. I looked at the fire and thought that if it were magic, when I looked back at the couch she would be sitting there in a white slip, smiling at Daddy with her fingers pointed at the ceiling.

Daddy said, ‘Are you glad that Mummy came back?’

She disappeared. Over the fireplace was the picture Daddy painted of an eagle standing alone high on a mountain looking over the world. I nodded.

She had to go away. She said it was because she got sick after Oranur and had to have an operation. Sometimes when Daddy got mad he yelled at her and said he hated her and wanted her to go away. Everybody went away after Oranur. I wanted her to come back but I didn’t want them to fight. I had to stay with Daddy for the three bad things.

As they walked across the rolling Maine fields that autumn weekend in 1966, the young people who accompanied Peter felt
strange. As a group they knew little about Dr Reich and had no idea what had ended at Orgonon, nine years earlier. They saw only abandoned, decaying buildings and a quiet caretaker. There was something dreamlike about the place: some strange things had happened here with a strange and unearthly kind of energy.

One or two of the guests, who had notions of Reich as some old Victorian type, were surprised to find Orgonon decidedly rough-hewn. In the cabin they used, the cabin Peter had inherited, the knotty-pine walls and open fireplace led one of the group to describe Orgonon as having a distinctly American quality.

But the mood of the place was more complicated than simple, honest American dilapidation. Behind the locked doors of those buildings lurked the disquieting mystery of that energy.

Exploring the grounds together, they learned – although not from Peter – that the long, low building called the laboratory was closed and had been unused since 1952, when an unusual experiment called Oranur was conducted. The building could not be used because it still carried a charge from that experiment with energy.

At different locations around the property, on large wooden platforms, stood great gunlike machines with rows of long, dull aluminium pipes extending like barrels. The guests were told this apparatus was used in experiments to control atmospheric energy.

Wandering around the cabin, one of the group, a young psychologist from Boston named Ed Carmel, found the place haunted with energy things. In a corner he found a casting of the same bust they had seen on top of the tomb. This bust, it
was explained to him, was given to Peter by a physician who found that its presence put a high energy charge in his home. He could not keep it in his own house because it seemed to ‘radiate energy’.

The six visitors were perplexed by the ominous presence of this energy everywhere, and the more they sought answers to their questions, the more they were frustrated. Most unnerving to them was their host, Peter, at twenty-two silent and uncomfortable about what had happened here. Much of what they learned about what transpired years ago came from a young law student named Peter d’Errico, who had roomed with Peter in college. Several times during the weekend, the others had the very distinct feeling that d’Errico was acting as a kind of interpreter for his former roommate. D’Errico had spent a summer working in Rangeley and during that time learned much about Dr Reich. He told them what he could about Reich’s work in atmospheric research, the Food and Drug Administration injunction, Reich’s refusal to comply, the trial, imprisonment. He explained that because of the legal complications, much of Reich’s later work remained untested and unexplored. But even he was confused by Peter’s behaviour, his silence and uneasiness.

One afternoon, the seven were walking up past the lab and tamed off the road to walk through the autumn-browned fields. The road split. They left the crumbling asphalt road that led up to the observatory and took a faded tractor trail out between trees to the back fields. Suddenly, Peter walked away from them. He stood in the middle of the ‘V’ created by the two diverging roads and looked at them. Then he looked at the ground. There was
nothing but dying grass and earth. He started to say something but only shook his head and led them out into the field.

What was going on? they wondered, watching him standing in the clearing between the two roads. What is going on?

All of this nonverbal communication was of much interest to Ed Carmel. At the time, he and Peter both worked as attendant nurses at Boston State Hospital’s drug-addiction unit. Ed had, in the weeks preceding the trip to Maine, learned a great deal about Peter. In particular, Ed was puzzled by the narrow determination of this person who had recently returned from a year in VISTA and was biding his time at the hospital, waiting to be drafted. The way he talked about it, it sounded as if Peter
wanted
to be a soldier. He even talked of enlisting! In 1966, when the US was pouring troops into Southeast Asia like ants! It didn’t make sense.

Ed hoped that Peter might get some insights into some of the things that were going on inside his head, things about the military or his parents that he was blocking. Once, after Peter and Ed had smoked a joint together, Ed put on a record of Laura Huxley reading poetry. ‘Turn it off!’ Peter shouted. ‘Turn it off! It sounds like my mother!’ Peter was blocking a lot of feelings.

As the group emerged from the cabin periodically that weekend to walk around Orgonon, Ed wondered if their talks would ever get to the point where they could talk about some of the things they were all feeling about Orgonon. Including Peter.

‘Peeps, I know it was difficult for you when Mummy left. It was difficult for all of us. I have told you many times that people are afraid of my work. That is why they all left.’

They all left. Maybe that was a whole bad thing. It was different after Oranur because no one laughed any more and one by one they left. I started to smile. I always wanted to smile when it got serious.

‘Peeps, don’t run away. This is very serious. It is going to get very tough. Many people have run away. Even Mummy. But she came back. It is very difficult for her. Do you understand? It’s okay, you can cry. Go ahead, cry.’

He always wanted me to understand everything and I had to because no one else would but I didn’t understand why he had to yell at Mummy or why the tears from one eye hit the lady on the head and the tears from the other eye went into the writing and made the page wrinkly.

‘Look at me, Peeps,’ he said, and held his arms around me until I cried. He was sad too and I loved him too. It was so sad when the lab was empty and Mummy and Daddy fought. I wanted them to be happy. He touched my hair and his hand felt good.

‘But Daddy, why does everyone run away?’

‘Because they are afraid of the work, Peter. Many people became afraid when the attacks started but everyone was afraid after Oranur because the Oranur experiment showed them how powerful Orgone Energy really is. All the people who were saying they believed and understood really didn’t. When they saw the truth of it in the experiment, they all ran away. Truth is very powerful, Peeps, I know.’

‘What is going to happen?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know what will happen. I am convinced that someone in the government knows how important this work is. I think President Eisenhower is the kind of person who would help us, but he may not be able to actually come out and help. I don’t know. I think there is going to be a big battle, but we must be brave.’

‘But why is it a battle?’

He squeezed me and looked into the fire. The flames were pretty. They were in the window too, but if I opened the window they would be gone. I wondered if the hole in the snow would still be warm in the morning.

‘It is a battle because I have discovered the Life Energy, Peeps. Orgonomy provides a whole new way of freeing man from the emotional armour he has worn for centuries. But mankind has learned to hate what it loves. Men do not want to be free or healthy, so they attack anybody who says that man can be free and happy. It is an emotional plague that is attacking me, and it is deadly. That is why people are running away. They are afraid.’

‘Are you afraid?’

‘Yes, of course.’

They were sitting in the cabin in front of the fire when the October sun broke through the clouds and sparkled on the dying grass. Peter jumped up and said, ‘Come on, come on. I want to show you something,’ and they trooped out of the cabin and made their way once again up the long hill to the observatory.

It had rained and they had been cramped inside the cabin for a long time, so it was good to get out and walk vigorously. At the top of the hill they stopped and pressed cupped hands to the observatory’s big picture windows. It was strange for Ed to find Reich’s working place so closed. He would have thought it would be open, welcoming and alive. Yet even if he had come in summer, he might have found many museum-goers coming away confused, feeling as if the museum had no point to it. But here, in the fall, he could look through the reflection of lovely leaves on the big windows inside to the red linoleum floor with rugs and furniture neatly arranged. There were paintings on the wall, many of naked women. Two paintings in particular caught Ed’s eye. One was a picture of a man or a woman holding a child in front of a burning building. He wondered if it reflected some incident in Reich’s life, a tragedy, perhaps. On the other side of the room, hanging over a huge stone fireplace, was another fire picture. This one showed a person sitting in profile in front of a fire. It was hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. He wanted to ask Peter about the fire paintings, but all morning long Peter had been avoiding questions.