A Book of Dreams (21 page)

And guilty. I had armoured myself with an incredible military dream which shielded me from the realities of becoming a real person. It was easier to feel guilty and afraid of disobeying the great celestial commands which echoed in all my dreams than it was to grow up. Either way I seemed to lose. I would feel guilty for obeying and for not obeying. Either way I could always, in a human failing, let Him down.

Each time I looked, it was different. But a few things always stayed the same. What always puzzled me about the lake was that wherever you are, the waves always come towards you. But it was still scary. This water was cold and dark out in the middle but if you looked straight down from the dock it was brown and a flaky scummy layer of dead wood and organic matter rose and fell with the heaviness of having already drowned. What happens when you swim without armour?

Being alive means having dreams but without armour. Doing the same thing for different reasons. Keeping my belly soft because I want to, not just because he wanted me to. Standing out there in the middle of my fantasy thirteen years ago, beckoning the lights to take me away, I was not making the energy field and praying because I wanted to go to another planet, it was because I was afraid to stay here. A. S. Neill said to me once, ‘I am not afraid of dying, I am afraid of not living.’ And I wasn’t even close enough to life to feel that! I hadn’t let myself live! I was not seeking life, I was fleeing it. I fled for thirteen years until I stumbled onto this blinding projection of my childhood and here, now, finally, I am looking at it, naked, at the lake.

The waves hypnotized me. It would be easy to just slip in the water and swim slowly out into the brown mud and monsters. Maybe my foot would touch the carcass of a dead deer floating just beneath the surface. I would panic and die breathing water.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

The first thirteen years of my life always seemed most real to me, more real than anything that happened afterwards. And now, suddenly, with the infant soldier fading away in the bright
lights after the movie, I felt afraid that my life would be empty and lost.

The last thirteen years were lost and unhappy. The infant was frozen in fear inside me, unable to live. I bumped into him in Annecy in a cloudy gassy dream but he eluded me. Three years later, when I was at Rangeley with those friends, he was still a good soldier, defences strong. It took a movie to break my shell, maybe because movies are so close to dreams and I loved my dreams more than reality. There had been too much sadness; not enough laughter.

As an unhappy adolescent I followed the
Playboy
ethic assiduously. Big tits. Love ’em and leave ’em. Sex as a diversion, like sports. I fucked a lot. I masturbated a lot, not as a release of energy, but because fantasy was easier to come by than the dream world portrayed in movies. It ran deeper, too, like the lake which only got darker and darker, because being a real person and letting myself love a woman would have meant sharing all that fear. It would have meant sharing who I was, and I was too loyal for that. In my own way, I wanted his penis too.

One night I met a nice girl at a party. We talked for a while and then stopped talking. She was very pretty and her eyes were very deep. After we sat in silence for a while I asked her if she wanted to come to my house.

‘To spend the night?’ she asked.

I nodded.

She agreed. We came to my house and went into the bedroom. Fully dressed, we fell on the bed. I started to touch her. After a few minutes she said, ‘I don’t want to make love with you.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because I don’t know who you are,’ she said.

Without thinking, I answered and then knew it was wrong. I felt the scream rising within me, a scream that left me spinning and falling alone, lost in space.

‘I’m Wilhelm Reich’s son,’ I said.

Aaaaaaaaaa.

And so I scream and scream. I gag or vomit every morning. Sometimes I scream in the car, driving along lost in the roar of turnpike driving, screaming, letting it out, making the windows vibrate. I need it, it helps me to have a soft belly. It makes me think life is a process of expansion and contraction. It pulsates. There are good things and bad things, but it is always shifting and changing, pulsating. Freedom, an elusive sensation, comes only in sudden spontaneous bursts like the wind that afternoon on the dock, when I was caught between sky and water. It came up suddenly, out of the west when the sun was behind the trees pouring huge sunbeams all over the land. A soft green golden glow came out onto the smooth lawns that Tom so carefully mowed, and in the sky all the clouds raced away to make it all blue for the wind. And the wind made me shiver in my nakedness. When the sun broke through the trees I dove into the wind, following beams of sunlight into darkness. When I burst to the surface I was blinded by the shining water, swimming in the sun’s path, bathed in light.

Some of the doctors were dissecting a mouse and I got up real close where I could see his skin all stretched out on the board with pins in him and his organs all purple and smelly.

Some people were working at the row of microscopes and holding glass jars up in the air. I thought of a couple of jokes but didn’t feel like making anyone laugh. Around in the back where I found the magic wand, Mummy was sitting on a white lab stool making glass pipettes. I sat on the stool next to her and watched her hold them over the little flame until they turned red, draw them apart and break them. She looked at me.

‘Hello,’ she said, putting the new pipettes down.

The stool went around faster and faster until I felt myself getting dizzy as I kicked it higher and higher. When I was as high as the table I looked at the little stack of glass pipettes.

‘Have you been crying? What’s the matter?’

She put her hand out to take a tear away from my cheek. Her fingers were warm from the glass and it made me cry. She pulled me close to her and held me while I cried. She brushed my hair with her warm hand.

‘It’s okay, Peter, it’s okay. Everything will be all right. Now tell me what happened.’

I told her what Daddy said and how Tom had helped me bury the ring. She frowned and squeezed me.

‘Well, there are some things we just can’t have. We didn’t know that it was a dangerous ring and if we had, we wouldn’t have bought it. It wasn’t your fault. And Daddy may be right. It might not be good for you.’

‘But he wouldn’t even let me play with it.’

‘Well, it is just one of those things. Maybe you will get a pair of cowboy boots for Christmas and that will make up for it. Hmmm?’

She held my face back from her and with her warm thumbs stroked the tears from my eyes. She smiled and I smiled. She hugged me again and said, ‘All right. Now, I have to make some more pipettes. Do you want to help?’

I helped her put little wads of cotton in the ends of the pipettes and then we made droppers. Mummy took a long piece of glass and heated it in the middle. When it turned red she pulled it apart very slowly until it almost broke and then she took it out of the flame. When it cooled, she broke it and turned it around. She heated the end and just when it began to melt, she pressed it against a hard board to make it just a little bit flat at the other end. Then she put the finished pipette in a row. At the other end of the row I picked them up and put rubber nipples on them.

‘Nipple’ was a funny word. Mummy had big ones. She told me I used to suck on them for milk. Once I tried to get milk out again but there was none left. I only have little ones. Daddy’s are bigger than mine and have hair all over them and smell of his skin oil.

I put one of the rubber nipples in my mouth and tried to suck on it, but it didn’t taste good.

‘What are you doing?’ said Mummy.

‘I was just sucking on it. You called it a nipple and I wanted to suck it. Will I ever be able to suck yours again?’

She smiled. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

I wheeled the stool down until I was dizzy again and walked back through the lab.

I walked into the big room where the movie had been. People
were all leaving for lunch, going out the door, talking and laughing. Just as I was passing one of the little side rooms where they did experiments, someone said, ‘Wait for me!’ and ran past me out the door. He left the door to the room open so I went in.

The door closed by itself behind me and made the room pitch-dark. It smelled of metal because it smelled of accumulators. There were many accumulators, big and small, and in the darkness they all smelled of steel wool. One of the accumulators was a twentyfold one which was very strong.

It was pitch-black in the room except for the smell and a small buzz. After a while I could see faint shapes on the counter but I couldn’t see where the noise came from. I shuffled through the darkness until I came to a small accumulator where the noise was. The accumulator had a little square window. Inside the square window crackling very softly was a vacuum tube and in it, glowing at me in the darkness, was a clear cloud of blue Orgone Energy.

Mosquitoes were biting badly. I put the faded blue movie film back on the dump next to the little mound of glass pipettes and looked at them lying against the cold, dark rotten earth. The film curled gently around the stack of sparkling glass. I pulled more strands of film out of the earth from wherever it poked out and threw it on the pile and then I buried it all with moss and pine needles, roots and broken bottles and walked back through the trees into the fields of Orgonon.

It was late afternoon and I walked slowly through the grass
and flowers, feeling a peaceful kind of relief. I had the feeling everything was going to be all right. Look, even after Makavejev left, the flowers came out, and I walked through a mass of swaying colour across the fields: Indian paintbrushes, daisies and, hidden beneath their leafy camouflage, wild strawberries.

As I came over the top of a small rise I could see all of Orgonon: the weedy, overgrown meadows rolling right up to Tom’s bright lawns extending from the laboratory, and barely visible through tall trees at the top of the hill, the Observatory. And then moving backwards across the green lawn in front of the lab came Tom’s truck. He backed his old red Chevy pickup right up to the cloudbuster platform and I walked over to see what he was doing.

When I got there, he had opened the tailgate and was throwing timbers from the platform onto the truck. The cloudbuster was gone, crated up in the barn. Tom pushed his hat back on his forehead and explained that the wood was rotten and that sightseers who came to Orgonon often ignored the ‘danger’ signs and clambered up the rickety steps to crank the cloudbuster around like a toy.

He shook his head and grinned. ‘Why, last summer Bea told me I ought to come over here and chain it down. That’s right, chain her right down because people was coming up and messing with it all the time.’ He leaned over and spat a quid of brown tobacco juice onto the grass. ‘Once some folks came up and messed with it five days in a row and didn’t we have rain every day for a week!’

He raised his eyebrows like Groucho and spat some more.

We talked for a while in the late afternoon sun and then I got
up on the old platform and started handing pieces of the rotten structure to Tom, who threw them into the bed of the truck.

We stood there together in the late-afternoon sunlight with his old Chevy idling and pouring clouds of blue smoke over us, passing pieces of wood over to the truck slowly and methodically, not talking, just working together. We worked easily together as if we had been doing it for a long time and it was as if the swinging arcs of wood were already there and all our arms had to do was find the place in space where they were.

Soon the truck was nearly full; the platform nearly gone. Soon grass would be growing where the platform had been, but nothing would be forgotten. And when I straightened up to wipe away the sweat I saw that the long golden sunbeams had come down and stretched out across the treetops as the sun sank into shimmering leaves etching brightness against the sky’s edge. For an instant I thought I could look across that thin line glowing on the horizon and see through to the other side. I closed my eyes and it was still there, happening again and again, over and over, and I am not afraid of going there now or afraid of having been there. And when I opened my eyes, the light had already gone and I was here.