Secret Dreams (29 page)

The winter deep of February surrounded him in a frozen silent hush. Broken only by the crackle of ice underfoot as he walked home from the tram stop. A few flakes of snow drifted down from a clear night sky. No moon, the stars glittered cruelly. He dawdled before his door, reluctant to enter. The thought of warmed-over dinner, of talking to anyone or sleeping, choked him. He thought of the hospital….

Did the girl twiddle in the dark and in her sleep? He crawled into bed beside the warm body of Emma. She barely stirred.

When Fräuleins twiddle didn't cease after a few days, and when their conversation failed to proceed much further than “Queen of Sparta, you'll never do it, lecture me!” Herr Doktor gave up — he gave up exhausted, incapable of any fresh reaction to her. Idiotic rantings weren't communication, just complicated riddles, nasty taunts. He had opened box after box, only to find yet another box, this one with a mouth. While his own life slipped away. He liked her better mute.

Unknown to the girl, her most immediate problem was not her twiddle or the nonsense spewing from her wrapped head, but the fact that her room bill was unpaid. Her father had let it slip two months, with several hundred francs due on hospital room and board. Herr Doktor settled it himself, along with an additional two months.

So when Fräuleins spastic twiddle kept on, he finally began the letter to Herr Professor S. Freud of 19 Berggasse, Vienna, Austria. Avoided for so long in the vain hope of gaining ground with the girl, which he could tout and brag about. Now the letter he wrote struggled before him — torn up, or started again with a line lifted from another version. He lost count of the days…. But as the letter evolved, so did his picture of the Schanderein girl's situation. A short conversation with Herr Tom Thumb accidentally sharpened his insight.

“Well! Well! Well! How wonderful to see you at last, Herr Doktor. Ah, but don't fret
—
1 can see what you're going to ask me. Yes, yes, just the same. But I must say, Nurse Bosch has been quite liberal with the petroleum jelly. It fell off for a time — the dosage, I mean — and that caused some anxiety…. But over all a great comfort. I've got a little pot of it, you see. Get it filled when necessary…. But enough of me! What of you? We've heard all sorts of things down here” — he cast a dark glance about the room — “that is, those of us who listen….”

“What kind of things?”

Tom Thumb began to chuckle, his fat body quivering with delight. ‘That you got the little bitch to eat and shit and talk and show you her face. Wunderbar! What next, Herr Hofrat?” Then, conspiratorially, “But they also say you're paying for her room. Tsk-tsk-tsk, paying for your patients. What a shame …”

The remark rolled around in his head like a bean rattling around in a gourd. That he got her to talk and shit and show him her face. He had done something after all. And so had she. Even if he did dole out money for her keep, in his gut he knew she paid deeply too. The letter began to write itself:

Even as he wrote these lines the girl's situation changed,- one morning he entered her room to find its familiar disorder completely gone, as if recently cleaned by the maids. Had he entered the wrong room? But no, there stood the books he brought her, in a neat row along her dresser. And the dresser itself dusted, the wood gleaming darkly. Automatically he looked to the wall by the door where the girl threw the plate of food during the meteoric passing of Nurse Simson. The brown stain no more … a shocking pale streak in its place, cleaner than the surrounding wall. Her shallow sink basin gleamed too.

She had made the bed, the covers turned down in proper girls' school fashion. The pillow fluffed — but no girl. She had crawled un-derneath, wound in a sheet of her mummy wrappings, which bore the dirty marks of all her cleaning. He peered cautiously under the bed. Her hand still sawed her thigh in that furtive spastic twiddle. She had brought along the neurology text, free hand clutching it in her dark little cave.

Within ten days she began to parrot some of the ordinary things he said. So different from the harsh bitter caw when she croaked, ‘Tell him I'm the Queen!”

“May Î come in?” he would ask her. And she would mumble, “may i come in.”

Then he'd ask, “How are you?” And she'd answer, “how are you.” Speaking softly as if recalling the echoes of words long forgotten … Unnerving at first. Voices in room 401 — rising and falling while the thrum of the-hospital rumbled beyond their door.

During his lectures she often went in his presence, half shielding herself with a scrap of blanket as she squatted, She even dabbed him with flecks of food and bits of dung. Often, at the close of his visits, bodily matter and the remains of dinner clung to him, to the chair, the room…. Yet each morning, when-he appeared in fresh attire ready for her daily assault, he found her place clean as well, dirt vanished as though a host of fairy elves had helped her through the task at night.

But there
were
limits. She once managed a bowel movement so quietly he failed to notice. Hovering over his chair for a moment, as if to sit where he usually sat. And his heart leaped. Ah! she wants to sit where I do …

But she returned to the bed. He had the vague notion of sitting luxuriously, showing her the great comfort of the chair. See, Fräulein, see how wonderful it is to sit here…. So he sat — only to slide in the warm dampness. A surge of giddy revulsion raced through him. She twiddled on the bed, her wrappings loosened, her free hand twirling a lock of hair, pulling it around the curve of her mouth. A strange coy gesture.

“I am really awed, Fräulein,” he said, aghast.

And she repeated, flat and hollow, “I am really awed fräulein.”

As Fräulein ate more food her sickly pallor receded, though she remained thin in the flesh. She began to gorge herself. Orderly Zeik often ran to the kitchen to fetch her another portion. One day in the middle of February she languidly uncovered her arm. A dried red smear flashed at him. Burnt lightning on the bare whiteness of her skin. At first Herr Doktor panicked, thinking she had wounded herself somehow.

But in a moment better sense took hold, with a dull shock…. Under the covers her thighs were spread open, her twiddle hand going in between them. It came out smeared red. With a toss of her head the burnoose fell away,- she had smeared some on her face. Now she smeared more, around her mouth and eyes.

The regular meals, her recent gorging, had all taken effect. Now fatter, she had gained enough weight to start her menstrual blood flowing. Her first period since coming to the hospital: he made a note of it in her case file.

On the second day of her period she included him. Her red-tipped fingers went to his face. She used quite a bit, going back between her legs again and again,- her fingers going around his eyes and over his eyebrows. Then last of all his mouth. At the very end she pushed her wet finger inside and ran it across his teeth.

He let her do it. First under a wave of disgust, then with a growing sense of amazement. He went to the mirror over the dresser for a look. A bloody-faced wild man stared out at him, a splattered savage with dripping teeth from where he plunged his fevered face into the pulsing stricken body of his kill. Here at last, the real face of the Stag King, needing only the twigs in his hair and a knife in his hand.

What was she doing to him? Her hand came again for a last touch, and he flinched. What final outrage? Rings of blood around his nostrils, where he inhaled his enemy's last dying breath? But the hand stopped short of his face. She gripped his bow tie. She tugged at it, untying the knot. Leaving it limp around his throat.

And then he heard the oddest thing. She laughed, flat and shrill, “Heh-heh …” A pause. “Heh-heh …” Slightly evil. Wholly mirthless. But finally a human expression on her dull face. Pleasure in cruelty. His own hand fluttered to his limp bow, and he smiled weakly back at her.

The laughter ceased. Her face blank again. He caught a flicker of movement in the comer of his eye. The rectangle of stiff construction paper had slipped from the viewing slit.

Direktor Bleuler's watery blue eyes gazed through the thick glass. Herr Doktor stared into the white-bearded face. No shock. No revulsion. Yet somehow sensing, as though reading the old man's mind, Direktor Bleuler felt deeply ashamed for his young colleague. Disgraced that some sacred laws of intimacy had been transgressed, rules of conduct between doctor and patient, man and woman … But wholly fascinated, terribly drawn by the audacity, the subtle skill. How many years had the old man wished for an impossible patient to unravel bit by bit? Longing to do what his junior was doing in this very hospital? A lifetime.

And so they struck a silent bargain, the terms of which both men understood without speaking. That the younger man would never embarrass the elder by calling him a failure. And that the older man would say nothing of what went on inside the room. Nor stand in his way. Bleuler to keep his cloak of dignity, and Jung his naked patient. The white-bearded face nodded tightly once and vanished from the viewing slit.

Alone with her again, the smell of menstrual blood wrapped him like a damp towel. Terribly familiar, waking the souls of his primitive ancestors in the cells of his veins. Deeply personal, private. Making him Fräuleins
possession
. The heavy scent so like the warm air space under the bedsheets where he used to crawl to be near Nanny Sasha, the smell of her smooth, strong legs …

How had men come to revile a woman's monthly time? Come to name it unclean? Ja, it smelled damp, muddy. But healthy and living. Alive and seductive … The smell of fullness and fertility and the fearful power of life. How many barren centuries had passed into dust since man craved the damp life-odor of his woman's monthly time? Craved and feared it as he craved and feared the passing of life's power. Eons of progress and civilization, of coats and boots and forks and spoons and clean linen on the table. Of which wineglass to use. And which hand to wipe your ass.

Now under she laughed so cruelly. What pitiable foppery. All the frivolous tatters of mankind's finery conspired to hide a person from the knowing sight of others-, everything from clothes that distorted your shape to polite society's pretty white lies that hid your meaning. Every woman a whore, every man a secret enemy. How many times had he said, “So good to see you, Herr Bump,” when he really thought,
Drop dead, you old fart?

And with all the niceties the very pulse of life had faded — gone into the long, ancient Before Time, when the blood of life streaked the face of the world. When it meant something to hunt down an enemy in the dark, hunt him alone and catch him alone, and then tear your teeth into his raw flesh. Feeling his life pour into your heart as you tore his lungs out, his death scream shivering into the wild lands.

What would Emma think if she saw him now?

Or Nanny Sasha?

She, who broke the antler plaque to scratch raw welts down his father's back. Ja, she'd laugh the bitter, mirthless laugh too.

“You're laughing at me,” he said.

“You're laughing,” he persisted.

“Laff,” she repeated stupidly, showing her teeth. Blood on them too, as if the girl had eaten from the same carcass. He smiled, showing her his bloodied teeth as well. “Laugh,” he said.

Her lips drew back in answer. “Laff,” she repeated. Now, distinctly, “Laugh,” He wanted the next word, the one that would add to what they had,

“Laugh,” he tried again, But she had wilted, going dull again, With a sigh, he rose from his chair. “Well, perhaps tomorrow.”

“Always,” she said.

He paused at the door. Her face withdrawn into the cowl, a spray of tangled hair covering her eyes.

“Tomorrow,” he tried again.

“Always,” she whispered.

A reply! Hoping he would always come tomorrow? Or saying that she'd always be there waiting? He didn't care. His words were with her words. Hers with his. Tomorrow and always. At last. At last…