Dreamcatcher (4 page)

“S . . . S . . . D . . . D.” She is writing it down. “Will he know what—”

“Oh yeah,” Pete says, “he'll know.”

By midnight he's drunk in some New Hampshire dive, the Muddy Rudder or maybe it's the Ruddy Mother, he's trying to tell some chick who's as drunk as he is that once he really believed he was going to be the first man to set foot on Mars, and although she's nodding and saying yeah-yeah-yeah, he has an idea that all she understands is that she'd like to get outside of one
more coffee brandy before closing. And that's okay. It doesn't matter. Tomorrow he'll wake up with a headache but he'll go in to work just the same and maybe he'll sell a car and maybe he won't but either way things will go on. Maybe he'll sell the burgundy Thunderbird, goodbye, sweetheart. Once things were different, but now they're the same. He reckons he can live with that; for a guy like him, the rule of thumb is just SSDD, and so fucking what. You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big
OUT OF ORDER
sign on it.

In November he'll go hunting with his friends, and that's enough to look forward to . . . that, and maybe a big old sloppy-lipstick blowjob from this drunk chick out in his car. Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

Dreams are for kids.

1998: Henry Treats a Couch Man

The room is dim. Henry always keeps it that way when he's seeing patients. It's interesting to him how few seem to notice it. He thinks it's because their states of mind are so often dim to start with. Mostly he sees neurotics (
The woods are full of em,
as he once told Jonesy while they were in, ha-ha, the woods) and it is his assessment—completely unscientific—that their problems act as a kind of polarizing shield between them and the rest of the world. As the neurosis deepens, so does the interior darkness. Mostly
what he feels for his patients is a kind of distanced sympathy. Sometimes pity. A very few of them make him impatient. Barry Newman is one of those.

Patients who enter Henry's office for the first time are presented with a choice they usually don't register as a choice. When they come in they see a pleasant (if rather dim) room, with a fireplace to the left. It's equipped with one of those everlasting logs, steel disguised as birch with four cunningly placed gas jets beneath. Beside the fireplace is a wing chair, where Henry always sits beneath an excellent reproduction of Van Gogh's
Marigolds.
(Henry sometimes tells colleagues that every psychiatrist should have at least one Van Gogh in his or her consulting space.) Across the room is an easy chair and a couch. Henry is always interested to see which one a new patient will choose. Certainly he has been plying the trade long enough to know that what a patient chooses the first time is what he or she will choose almost every time. There is a paper in this. Henry knows there is, but he cannot isolate the thesis. And in any case, he finds he has less interest these days in such things as papers and journals and conventions and colloquia. They used to matter, but now things have changed. He is sleeping less, eating less, laughing less, too. A darkness has come into his own life—that polarizing filter—and Henry finds he has no objection to this. Less glare.

Barry Newman was a couch man from the first, and Henry has never once made the mistake of believing this has anything to do with Barry's mental condition. The couch is simply more comfortable for
Barry, although Henry sometimes has to give him a hand to get Barry up from it when his fifty minutes have expired. Barry Newman stands five-seven and weighs four hundred and twenty pounds. This makes the couch his friend.

Barry Newman's sessions tend to be long, droning accounts of each week's adventures in gastronomy. Not that Barry is a discriminating eater, oh, no, Barry is the antithesis of that. Barry eats anything that happens to stray into his orbit. Barry is an eating machine. And his memory, on this subject, at least, is eidetic. He is to food what Henry's old friend Pete is to directions and geography.

Henry has almost given up trying to drag Barry away from the trees and make him examine the forest. Partly this is because of Barry's soft but implacable desire to discuss food in its specifics; partly it's because Henry doesn't like Barry and never has. Barry's parents are dead. Dad went when Barry was sixteen, Mom when he was twenty-two. They left a very large estate, but it is in trust until Barry is thirty. He can get the principal then . . .
if
he continues in therapy. If not, the principal will remain in trust until he is fifty.

Henry doubts Barry Newman will make fifty.

Barry's blood pressure (he has told Henry this with some pride) is one-ninety over one-forty.

Barry's whole-cholesterol number is two hundred and ninety; he is a lipid goldmine.

I'm a walking stroke, I'm a walking heart attack,
he has told Henry, speaking with the gleeful solemnity
of one who can state the hard, cold truth because he knows in his soul that such ends are not meant for him, not for him, no, not for him.

“I had two of those Burger King X-tras for lunch,” he is saying now. “I love those, because the cheese is actually hot.” His fleshy lips—oddly small lips for such a large man, the lips of a perch—tighten and tremble, as if tasting that exquisitely hot cheese. “I also had a shake, and on my way back home I had a couple of Mal-lomars. I took a nap, and when I got up I microwaved a whole package of those frozen waffles. ‘Leggo my Eggo!' ” he cries, then laughs. It is the laugh of a man in the grip of fond recall—the sight of a sunset, the firm feel of a woman's breast through a thin silk shirt (not that Barry has, in Henry's estimation, ever felt such a thing), or the packed warmth of beach sand.

“Most people use the toaster oven for their Eggo waffles,” Barry continues, “but I find that makes them too crispy. The microwave just gets them hot and soft. Hot . . . and soft.” He smacks his little perch lips. “I had a certain amount of guilt about eating the whole package.” He throws this last in almost as an aside, as if remembering Henry has a job to do here. He throws out similar little treats four or five times in every session . . . and then it's back to the food.

Barry has now reached Tuesday evening. Since this is Friday, there are plenty of meals and snacks still to go. Henry lets his mind drift. Barry is his last appointment of the day. When Barry has finished taking caloric inventory, Henry is going back to his apartment to pack. He'll be up tomorrow at six
A.M
.,
and sometime between seven and eight, Jonesy will pull into his driveway. They will pack their stuff into Henry's old Scout, which he now keeps around solely for their autumn hunting trips, and by eight-thirty the two of them will be on their way north. Along the way they will pick up Pete in Bridgton, and then the Beav, who still lives close to Derry. By evening they will be at Hole in the Wall up in the Jefferson Tract, playing cards in the living room and listening to the wind hoot around the eaves. Their guns will be leaning in the corner of the kitchen, their hunting licenses hung over the hook on the back door.

He will be with his friends, and that always feels like coming home. For a week, that polarizing filter may lift a little bit. They will talk about old times, they will laugh at Beaver's outrageous profanities, and if one or more of them actually shoots a deer, that will be an extra added attraction. Together they are still good. Together they still defeat time.

Far in the background, Barry Newman drones on and on. Pork chops and mashed potatoes and corn on the cob dripping with butter and Pepperidge Farm chocolate cake and a bowl of Pepsi-Cola with four scoops of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream floating in it and eggs fried eggs boiled eggs poached . . .

Henry nods in all the right places and hears it all without really listening. This is an old psychiatric skill.

God knows Henry and his old friends have their problems. Beaver is terrible when it comes to relationships, Pete drinks too much (
way
too much is what
Henry thinks), Jonesy and Carla have had a near-miss with divorce, and Henry is now struggling with a depression that seems to him every bit as seductive as it does unpleasant. So yes, they have their problems. But together they are still good, still able to light it up, and by tomorrow night they will be together. For eight days, this year. That's good.

“I know I shouldn't, but I just get this
compulsion
early in the morning. Maybe it's low blood sugar, I think it might be that. Anyway, I ate the rest of the pound-cake that was in the fridge, then I got in the car and drove down to Dunkin' Donuts and I got a dozen of the Dutch Apple and four of—”

Henry, still thinking about the annual hunting trip that starts tomorrow, isn't aware of what he is saying until it is out.

“Maybe this compulsive eating, Barry, maybe it has something to do with thinking you killed your mother. Do you think that's possible?”

Barry's words stop. Henry looks up and sees Barry Newman staring at him with eyes so wide they are actually visible. And although Henry knows he should stop—he has no business doing this at
all,
it has absolutely nothing to do with therapy—he doesn't
want
to stop. Some of this may have to do with thinking about his old friends, but most of it is just seeing that shocked look on Barry's face, and the pallor of his cheek. What really bugs Henry about Barry, he supposes, is Barry's complacency. His inner assurance that there is no need to change his self-destructive behavior, let alone search for its roots.

“You
do
think you killed her, don't you?” Henry asks. He speaks casually, almost lightly.

“I—I never—I resent—”

“She called and she called, said she was having chest-pains, but of course she said that often, didn't she? Every other week. Every other
day,
it sometimes seemed. Calling downstairs to you. ‘Barry, phone Dr. Withers. Barry, call an ambulance. Barry, dial 911.' ”

They have never talked about Barry's parents. In his soft, fat, implacable way, Barry will not allow it. He will begin to discuss them—or seem to—and then bingo, he'll be talking about roast lamb again, or roast chicken, or roast duck with orange sauce. Back to the inventory. Hence Henry knows nothing about Barry's parents, certainly not about the day Barry's mother died, falling out of bed and pissing on the carpet, still calling and calling, three hundred pounds and so disgustingly fat, calling and calling. He can know nothing about that because he hasn't been told, but he
does
know. And Barry was thinner then. A relatively svelte one-ninety.

This is Henry's version of the line. Seeing the line. Henry hasn't seen it for maybe five years now (unless he sometimes sees it in dreams), thought all that was over, and now here it is again.

“You sat there in front of the TV, listening to her yell,” he says. “You sat there watching Ricki Lake and eating—what?—a Sara Lee cheesecake? A bowl of ice cream? I don't know. But you let her yell.”

“Stop it!”

“You let her yell, and really, why not?
She'd been crying
wolf her whole life.
You are not a stupid man and you know that's true. This sort of thing happens. I think you know that, too. You've cast yourself in your own little Tennessee Williams play simply because you like to eat. But guess what, Barry?
It's really going to kill you.
In your secret heart you don't believe that, but it's true. Your heart's already pounding like a premature burial victim beating his fists on the lid of a coffin. What's it going to be like eighty or a hundred pounds from now?”

“Shut—”

“When you fall, Barry, it's going to be like the fall of Babel in the desert. The people who see you go down will talk about it for
years.
Man, you'll shake the dishes right off the shelves—”

“Stop it!”
Barry is sitting up now, he hasn't needed Henry to give him a hand this time, and he is deadly pale except for little wild roses, one growing in each cheek.

“—you'll splash the coffee right out of the cups, and you'll piss yourself just like she did—”

“STOP IT!”
Barry Newman shrieks.
“STOP IT, YOU MONSTER!”

But Henry can't. Henry can't. He sees the line and when you see it, you can't unsee it.

“—unless you wake up from this poisoned dream you're having. You see, Barry—”

But Barry doesn't want to see, absolutely will
not
see. Out the door he runs, vast buttocks jiggling, and he is gone.

At first Henry sits where he is, not moving, listening to the departing thunder of the one-man buffalo
herd that is Barry Newman. The outer room is empty; he has no receptionist, and with Barry gone, the week is over. Just as well. That was a mess. He goes to the couch and lies down on it.

“Doctor,” he says, “I just fucked up.

“How did you do that, Henry?

“I told a patient the truth.

“If we know the truth, Henry, does it not set us free?

“No,” he replies to himself, looking up at the ceiling. “Not in the slightest.

“Close your eyes, Henry.

“All right, doctor.”

He closes his eyes. The room is replaced by darkness, and that is good. Darkness has become his friend. Tomorrow he will see his other friends (three of them, anyway), and the light will once more seem good. But now . . . now . . .

“Doctor?

“Yes, Henry.

“This is a bona fide case of same shit, different day. Do you know that?

“What does that mean, Henry? What does that mean to you?

“Everything,” he says, eyes closed, and then adds: “Nothing.” But that's a lie. Not the first one that was ever told in here.