Secret Dreams (9 page)

“Thank you anyway,” he slurred through his rotten jaw. “I know the way.”

The reedy nurse tried to hide a wince at the sight of his sagging face, the recent scar. He wondered if the corner of his mouth was leaking; he touched his fingers to his dead cheek. Dampness. A thin stream of saliva, darkening his white collar. He had long since failed to notice when his mouth leaked. The nurse managed a thin smile.

Everyone smiled at him now.

Professor Praeger was a small, tidy man who looked more like a ferret than anything else. A middle-aged ferret, with a pointy face, quick black eyes, and a small mouth that didn't seem made for kissing. He combed his glossy hair very slick, with a graying band along one side. The sharp pointy face betrayed nothing, yet, like a chunk of dry ice, Praeger's mind let off a chill vapor, A cold mind, of logic and calculation. Desk bare, except for a pen set, with two black pens darting up like insect antennae. This was the place dying men came to, to be told the worst. This was the place where the faces stopped smiling.

The quick black eyes saw everything,- they knew the condition of the man's jaw and the medical history of the rest of the parts. On the tip of the ferret's tongue you could almost hear the steady clinical catalog, the sad summary of the case. Not my patients case, not Herr Freud's case — but the Subject's case. The same frank language used for case notes,- the cold catalog going something like this:

Subject's mouth cleaned ten days ago,- brown crusts removed from upper gums. Crusts histologically negative. Three pits of cancer discovered, which retained bits of food,- the area was painful. The diameter of the cancerous pits was five millimeters, coagulated,- they have not reappeared. Evidence of puffiness under the right eye. Suspected narcosis in the first nasal tube. Possible tumor developing in the cheek.

Then a decidedly unscientific opinion sneaking in: Subject's eyes losing clarity,- suspect film over cornea due to radium treatments.

And finally a touch of pity: Subject complained of headaches.

The ferret spoke: “How's your bladder, Herr Doktor?”

“Fine, Professor Praeger, and yours?”

The ferret grinned a sharp black grin. “And the headaches? Are they still troubling you?”

“No, the morphine did well. I stopped taking the grains after a few days.”

The old man felt a slight twinge poke his bladder, a nagging discomfort distracting him from the pressing ache on the side of his face. It hurt to lie to Praeger, The morphine had been useless. Without the narcotic his mind seemed to dull the pain, become used to it, pushing it into the background. But the morphine destroyed all that. The pain ceased to matter, yet when the drug's dulling effect had run its course the pain came back stronger than ever, a claw on the side of his head. And he felt betrayed. Better to deal with each wave of pain as it washed over him … only to recover, weak and shaken, facing the truly unbearable thing: the thought of his mind going out like a candle. For when the pain ebbed he remembered how sweet life was. Should he try to tell Professor Praeger any of that? He had long ago grown sick of himself complaining, whining feebly, I have pain, I have pain….

His bladder nudged him again. Soon he would have to find a place to urinate. Professor Praeger's face said something he couldn't catch,-how could he interrupt the professor and ask him for a place to go? The pain in his jaw came in a wave that clouded his vision, clogging his head.

He closed his eyes and stopped listening.

There was always the back porch of his parents' house. How grateful he felt to be able to visit there right now. Not much of a porch, just some slats of wood nailed into a deck where people sat on summer evenings as the dusk closed around them.

He was crawling under the big people's legs. Past his father's trousers, past his shoes. They weren't interesting. His father gave off a man's smell: healthy sweat, a touch of tobacco. The smell warm and hard at the same time.

Then his mother's legs,- like towers rising up into her skirt, disappearing into the press of her thighs. À different smell, like moist cut flowers and fresh cotton shirts. In the summer heat she had her dress hiked up, so he saw all the way to her knees and the curved undersides of her thighs. She shifted her legs for him as he crept past.

“He's five years old. He can walk, can't he?”

This from his father. The man seemed to expect some kind of answer, but when none came:

“So why doesn't he walk?”

Again, no answer.

Then his mother, finally:

“He likes to crawl.” Obviously she didn't mind, really. Maybe even liked him staring up her dress. Admiring her that way.

Again, his father:

“We didn't raise him to crawl. So if he can walk, he should
walk.”
This settled it for his father.

At last he crawled to the end of the porch and stood up by the white picket fence that surrounded the deck,

‘Thank God,” his father said. “He stands.”

Then as he stood by the picket fence he unbuttoned his little wool shorts and they fell to his ankles. He peed in a long stream that arched beyond the edge of the deck and through the fence and fell in some disordered clover, The clover bent and trembled as he rained on its leaves. His father barked, “Is that what you teach him?”

Henny, their big-bottomed cook, came out on the porch just in time to see him pee, She was scowling, but with a glint of laughter around her eyes. Then she cackled like an old bird.

“Just like you used to go,” she cawed at his father in Slovak. “Only you didn't hold it as nice as he. You used to wave it around.” Henny showed how Father used to go, her plump red hands waving about.

His father sat down gruffly, crossing one leg over the other. He fumbled with his pipe. Then frowned darkly at Henny as he got it going. Henny gazed back at the man, nodding serenely like a cow in a meadow.

Mother's eyes were laughing. “Oh, you little Hun!” she cried. “Come here and show Mama how you put your pants back on.”

He ran to her, his wool shorts catching around his ankles.

The reedy, bitten-faced nurse accepted the vial of his urine as if it were a glass of wine. A Vouvray with drops of blood. He had a brief fantasy about her. That once upon a time this fine, compact lady had not been a nurse at all but an Irish convent nun who had somehow broken her vow … broken it with a handsome, devil-may-care auto mechanic, who took her in a water closet in a pub. Without wooing her, without words, simply ripping open her black habit with his grease-stained hands and plunging into her standing up in the filthy toilet —

Ach!

He wanted her raped because he was a broken wreck while she was complete and alive, the master of her face. Even his bloody urine had not made her wince. She stood with her back to him, calmly writing out a specimen label as easily as you'd check off a grocery list. When she finished marking the vial, she glanced at him. “You needn't put your pants back on.”

He had not bothered but remained perched on a tall metal stool like the classroom dunce. Ja, the class dunce, with his skinny legs dangling over the floor like an idiot. No point in dressing, because they always gave him a bath before the X rays. The problem was his limbs trembled, and his head shook — ruining the plate. So instead of endless exposures, they hit upon the idea of a bath. The warm steam and the hot water soothed his limbs to stillness, nearly putting him to sleep. And in the warm afterglow, the clinic technicians always got a good X-ray plate of his jaw.

When the nurse showed no signs of leaving, he slid carefully off the high stool and took off the rest of his clothes. The water enveloped him as he let himself down into the, stainless-steel tub. First his ankles, then his legs, then his cold groin. He sucked his breath as the warm water reached his ribs. Lying back, he closed his eyes….

The reedy nurse was still there.

She must have been a substitute for the regular one: a silent old crone, who left him alone.

This new one did not know she was free to go. He felt her fidgeting — at a loss, not knowing what to do. She adjusted the water temperature for him but didn't ask if he liked it. He thanked her anyway. And a brief human smile flitted across her face. She was missing an eyetooth.

She bit her lip as if weighing whether to tell him something. At last she blurted out, “When Î knew you were coming here — to the clinic, I mean—-I started to read one of your books. My friend Martha” — the crone — “she said you were a perfect gentleman and spoke English too.” The young nurse sighed as if the confession had let a little pressure escape from inside that taut uniform.

“Oh, really!” he replied. He hadn't realized people in the hospital talked about him. A celebrated case, apparently. He felt sorry he didn't know the young woman's name. “Well, what did you think about what you read?”

Her hand hung over the rim of the tub; it dabbled in the bathwater, a gesture both flirtatious and awkward. “I'm afraid I don't understand very much, sir,- you see, I never went to university. Though my mum always made me read hard books, mind you — but I guess the truth is I hate looking up all those big words.” She said this in a long, gushing spew.

He grumbled to himself, annoyed. He had heard more of this than he cared to think about. His translators had loaded up the English editions with big, obtuse words. But it was too late to do anything about it now.

“Which one?” he asked her gruffly.

“Pardon me?”

“Which one did you read first?”

“Civilization and Its Malcontents,”
she stammered.

He sighed at the mishandling of the title. “It's the wrong one to start with,” he mumbled into the bathwater.

“What?” she cried. She seemed terribly dismayed, as if she'd done something wrong
already
, made some false step, something a smart “university girl” wouldn't do. He patted her arm, gripping the edge of the bath.

“That's all right. You broke the ice, you tried. Now try the dream book. The short one if you can get it. If not, read the long one. But if you pick up the long one, you can skip the first hundred pages, where I'm just a smart fellow trying to prove all the sages wrong. Go direct to Chapter Two — then you'll be able to start interpreting your dreams right away.”

Her hands went to the hot-water tap, and she turned it up a little. “Oh, thank you! Thank you so much! Your book was so frightfully complicated. I was really afraid” — her voice dropped — “afraid even to talk to you in the hall. I thought you'd see right through me.” Then, whispering, “I hate carrying bedpans.”

“If you find anyone who likes it, send them to me.”

She laughed,- the gap from her missing tooth flashed blackly at him. Her finger strayed to the water in the tub/ she yanked it away, scalded. “So hot! I'm sorry.”

He had gotten used to it.

“Why were you trying to prove all the sages wrong?” she asked.

He had not thought about why, but now he said, “I was unsure of myself. My practice was flagging. Ï was forty. I was in debt. And yet I had discovered a secret of the universe. The beginning of the dream book is merely an incomplete summary of what others wrote about dreams and how they were wrong. ! was showing off. I thought it would help.”

“Did it help?”

“No …” He smiled.

“But that's all changed now," the nurse said.

He rapped the steel tub with his knuckles for good luck, a hollow empty sound. “It has changed.” He laughed. “But I
was
right back then. More right than all the others.” He sank back contentedly into the tub, the warm water lapping at his chin. “In a little while there'll be
other
others, more right than me.”

He slurred so badly when he talked. It was impossible to tell where one word began and another left off. “How can you understand me?” he asked.

“I'm a mind reader,” she replied.

“Of course …” He drifted, the warm water doing its work. The pain in his jaw dulled, dispersing like a tendril of steam. He closed his eyes and went back to the bathroom of his parents' house of long ago. There they had a white bathtub with brass claw-and-ball feet. His mother sat behind him in the water. His little self curled into the hollow of her thighs. He put his head back against her breasts and felt the rich contained press of them, and the droplets that ran down over his ears. She was his, and he was hers….

The bathroom door eased open a crack. His father's man-smell stole into the steamy room on a draft of cold air. He stared into the widening doorway, pressing his cheek over his mother's breast; he groped for it, feeling it swell and shift in his hand. It gave and pressed back at him.

Suddenly his father stood in the doorway, his shirt open, his collar clinging by a stud in the back. He rolled his shirtsleeves over his forearms, a dark smile on his face. The man's hair swept wildly apart in the middle, as though two black antler stubs had risen from his skull

“How long do you think you can hide in there?” his father growled.

He squirmed back against his mothers breasts to capture them again. But when the grown man knelt by the side of the tub, Mother's breasts were no longer his. When they gave and pressed back, they swelled for the new face that hung above. Water dripped from his father's hand; he noticed the soft hairs growing out of the skin. Then the hand stroked the thigh stretched out in the water.

“You can't hide there.”

If only he could press down into the well of his mother's thighs, escape the wild man with the wild hair that rose off his scalp like horns. He writhed in the shallow puddle of his mothers lap. The big man's hand reached deeper along the length of her thigh. His small fist struck it, the water splashing over his father's shirt. Mother's thigh moved beneath the fingers just as the breast had swelled behind his head. He hit the hand again and again. And the water splashed everywhere. The steam had vanished from the bathroom, leaving it cold and clear and empty. His mother kissed him again, laughing.