Secret Dreams (33 page)

Subconscious. Unconscious. Censorship. Distortion.

Stilted words like that only got in the way.

He crawled case by case. And circumstance by circumstance.

What
method
was there in any of that?

As for the “analytic” part, it lay in paying attention to what people said and recalling what they overlooked the day before. A misrepresentation. A little fib. And by examining these “oversights/' penetrating the disguise to reveal a truer thought. A finer perception. Deeper sympathy Cowardice. Or hate.

Then how did you cure people afflicted with hysteria? Nobody knew. Anything else was a lie. But none of that mattered anymore. Only the young man's question. The wise man's answer.

He had gone in to lunch/ a plate of steamed noodles and goulash sat before him at the kitchen table. The paprika scent in the meaty gravy rose into his face, but he sensed another smell inside his head, more delicious than the plate of goulash, sweeter than the orange tea he drank. The scent of victory.

Because he knew how to cure this sick girl for young Whosis.

Indeed, he did.

The pungent steam from his plate curled into the nothingness of air. The kitchen seemed far away. He hoped that if he went for a brief trip, no one would notice his absence. Just go on with their meal without him. He glanced back and saw them still engrossed in their food.

Ah, all was well, then….

Around him the dark wound like an eyeless shroud. Church bells tolled the midnight hour, and he heard the distant whistle of a train moaning to silence on the outskirts of town. Herr Professor found himself standing in the street. A curved cobblestone carriageway led to a tall, iron-spiked gate. Lights burned behind the blue glass of the lanterns. The iron gates swung silently open, and he passed inside. Before him the fortress of the Burghölzli towered, floor upon floor, window upon window. He remarked the absolute murkiness of the night itself: no moon, no stars … impenetrable.

By chance he glanced at his own hands. They gave off a luminescence, a faint radiance, as when you cupped a candle flame. But this glow came from within himself, without any outside source.
He
was the candle.
He
the flame. Glowing into the dark of the lifeless hospital.

Then he went inside. The clean marble halls glided by He drifted past doctors and interns sitting in their offices, reading or writing, never bothering to look up or wonder at the puff of air at his passing…. Then the hallways slid away, and he stood in a huge glass-enclosed room swarming with crazy people talking and howling, whispering and laughing. Ah … the solarium where they kept the Incurables. A horse-faced chap wearing a homemade reverend's collar stood by himself, braying, ‘‘We stuck it in! We twirled it round! She took it all! Right on the ground!” While off in one corner a mad barber shaved a catatonic man's genitals with a cardboard razor. Curled on the floor, a huge woman licked her fingers and toes like a cat, pausing every so often to mew. Two pinheads with silly Chinese eyes swam into his vision, their heads bobbing on rubber necks. Herr Professor felt himself slowly sinking. A gleeful dwarf darted out of a musty corner, masturbating furiously —

He saw the pulsing glow of his inner light dying. The dwarf babbled at him. “So you think you can cure her, eh, my good man? We'd like to see that. Indeed, we would. But can you cure this, eh? How about this?” The little shrimp was flicking his tiny slug right in Herr Professor's face. “Let's see you cure it right now!”

“No! No!” he cried. “I can't help any of you! It's the others I want. The
curable
Incurables!”

Fräulein and Herr Junior Whosis! Find them and never mind the mentals. No man could save them. They were too far gone. Just like himself. Why, look now! Look at him crawl on the floor.

Walking like a dog.

Ja, just like the children's red corgi, Hansel, back home. Crawling between everyone's legs. If they're crazy, he barked, I'm crazy. If they are, me too! He scratched himself behind his ear, sniffing the ground for somewhere good to pee. Now barking. He gripped somebody's leg between his paws, just like Hansel back home. Oh, what a fine, attractive leg! He gripped it more firmly and began humping it with great ardor and affection. Just as the children made Hansi do when guests were in the house. Oh, what a beautiful leg!

After a few minutes of fruitless humping, the great overpowering affection for the leg began to wilt. His humping ebbed. A bottomless remorse took him. Please don't let this fine leg belong to Herr Junior Physician Jung. But as he looked warily along the leg, he knew he'd prayed in vain. Just as bad as he imagined. Worse, in fact. For the leg he'd been humping with so much love belonged to none other than Herr Direktor
Bleuten

What a terrible first impression.

At last, a little shamefacedly, he discovered his hands and feet and brushed himself off with as dignified an air as possible. What could he say? He tried to think of some gracious remark to show Herr Direktor that being a dog was really all in a day's work…. But nothing suitable came to mind. Except:

“Herr Direktor, I presume.”

And then:

“Would you be so kind as to introduce me to Herr junior Physician Jung?”

Direktor Bleuler tugged doubtfully on his thick beard for some time, as though deciding whether to answer. Perhaps they wouldn't let him see Herr Junior Physician after all! Perhaps they'd misdirect him, or pretend the fellow had left the hospital. He almost dashed off, calling, Jung! Doktor Jung! When Direktor Bleuler cleared his throat and said in a bleating voice:

“Ah yes, Judas, we've been expecting you. Why don't you look for your new friend over there.” Bleuler waved a vague hand in no particular direction.

He saw the shadow of a man and woman in silhouette, heads bent together in private conversation. All at once he felt the pulse of life return to his limbs. He held his hands out and they glowed with a golden light. He thrust his warm fingers into the gloom, touching the huddled figures' wrists. Watching his own warmth flow into them …

“Come,” he beckoned. “Let me lead you out.”

They followed his touch, fluttering after him. He drew them through the crowded solarium, weaving among the tangle of madness. Even as he tried to save them, droves of Incurables gathered about to block their escape. Yet each time he shone his outstretched palm to the mob of deformed faces, some shielded their eyes and shrank away,- while others, as if transformed by magic, shed their madness, becoming whole again. The cured ones following in a line, their thread growing longer …

Once safely beyond the dayroom, in the hospital garden, the shadowy cloak fell from young Jung and the girl like rags. Their faces were lit by the dawn sun coming over the garden trees. Herr Junior Physician bowed gravely to him. And then Fräulein Schanderein dipped her knees in a curtsy. Oh, so demure, such a lady, so obviously touched by her cure — but too thankful and smitten for words.

A few paces off, the entire staff of the Burghölzli stood in ascending rows as though gathered for a formal photograph. Worshiping him, enthralled, in awe of such a sacred being. And now Herr Direktor Bleuler walked across the gravel path to greet the Blessed One.

To offer his supreme respect.

To make the most wonderful gesture.

Bleuler turned to face the assembled staff and raised his arms like the conductor of a great orchestra. The chirping of the garden birds ceased one by one — so too the rustling leaves in the trees, until the very air stilled. Then, as the man's hands dropped slowly to his sides, the staff of the Burghölzli knelt silently to the ground, prostrating themselves for the Blessed One, like the shepherds at the manger. Kneeling to him, one and all.

And to Mankind's Second Dawn!

“Your Method is a gift to us all …,” Bleuler whispered gravely. “How can we ever repay you, my dear Freud?”

And for a happy, breathless moment, his mind went totally blank. The thralls had finally bowed to him.

What was there to repay?

The plate of goulash had been devoured and pushed aside. A hunk of bread lay beside drops of the fragrant reddish sauce. The life of the kitchen bubbled around him. Across the table, Donna the maid dipped her spoon into a small bowl of stew. She smiled briefly and then turned her attention back to the bowl. Near the sink, one of the boys scrubbed the goulash pot with great mounds of suds that seemed to crawl into his hair, while the other boy was clanging two rinsed pot lids like cymbals. Through the racket, Herr Professor's daughter had been trying to ask him a question. “Are they going to marry?” she asked him. When he did not answer immediately, she insisted, “Well, is he going to marry her? Yes — or no?”

“Is he what?” Herr Professor yelled over the din. “Who?” “Those papers!” she retorted, completely exasperated. He had brought the gray envelope to the table. The pages were spread about and splattered with goulash drops, He had been eating as he went over Herr Whosiss crazy case again. “You've been ruffling them and shuffling them and mumbling, Young man and a girl. young man and a girl. And so I asked: is he going to marry her?”

“No, I don't think so,” he said over the noise, “He's probably married already. To somebody else.”

“Married to somebody else!” His daughter rocked back in her chair, completely scandalized, then crossly blurted out, “Well, he'd better stop fooling around, then, and make up his mind.”

Herr Professor gaped at her, speechless.

She was his wife, wasn't she? With her own title. Everyone called you Herr Doktor Frau. Just an empty title, no? The “wife” tacked on as an afterthought, making her
his
Frau. The forgotten fluff at the end of his name, with everyone assuming the man did the thinking for the both of them. But what
was
she supposed to think? Didn't you ever wonder?

The way he spoke to her changed in the passing months as the new patient took over more and more of his time. Nothing drastic. A tiptoe of slow degrees … And then it hit Emma all at once, in one of those sickening revelations that made her feel physically ill. The revelation came after a dream.

She dreamt of the Burghölzli Hospital in the time of his terrible head cold, during which she stayed by his bedside across the hall from room 401. What were they waiting for? Then she remembered drearily: the girl had retained her stools, and they were waiting for her to go again. Where was Carl? He should have been in bed, delirious with fever, sweating and twisting.

As she left the room a horrible loathing came over her … as though what waited in the hallway beyond was something supremely repulsive. A lump in her stomach worked its way into her throat, a gag to keep her from screaming.

She went out into the fourth-floor hall, but instead of standing on cold marble she waded ankle-deep in a river of slow-moving feces, like a river of lava. So! His patient had gone at last, she thought. Won't he be pleased! Yet she made no effort to pull her feet from the flowing mire. Instead her eyes riveted on the door of 401, The patients door.

The lump in her throat stifled her to silence. She tried sticking her fingers down her gullet to pry it free, but she couldn't get a grip on the slippery thing. The patient's body had trapped her husband in the room. It had grown huge, reminding Emma of that illustration in Lewis Carroll's Alice
in Wonderland:
poor Alice grown immense inside the rabbit's house, with her head pressed to the ceiling, her elbow jammed out the window and her foot stuffed up the chimney. Only, the patient had grown far, far bigger, Fräulein Schanderein had swollen to fill the whole boxlike room. Grown so huge she crammed every corner of the box, bulging out the open doorway, the layers of flesh and skin packed like meat. Emma had the impression of a gigantic cooked ham, squashed into a tiny tin: solid flesh with a sheen of jellied aspic dripping off.

“That's her,” Emma said in her dream.

And then she saw her husband.

Carl had tried to crawl from the girl's room before her body engulfed him. His outstretched arm protruded beneath the packed layers of flesh. He had scored the marble floor with his fingernails, trying to pry himself free.

Emma woke up in a silent groan. Their house cat, Geschrei, sat amicably on the empty pillow next to her head. She stared incuriously at Emma with that infuriating aloofness so common to well-fed house cats. Without warning Emma struck her, sending the cat off Carl's pillow in a streak of orange fur. Geschrei halted at a safe distance, pinning Emma with a look of indignant reproach. And now, as the dream faded, Emma clearly heard the changes in the way he spoke to her.

When he said, “I'm off to the hospital. See you later.” When he said, “Let me concentrate. I'm writing a letter.” When he said, “No, I'm not hungry. Take it away.” When he said, “God, I'm starved! Why isn't there ever any food in this house?”

It all meant the same thing: Never mind. I can't think about you right now.
Dammit, just leave me alone!

Emma remembered how it used to be.

At first they shared the Schanderein business. Talking in bed at night, discussing the events of the day as man and wife. The early nights of September lingered with summer's heat, while their skin on the sheets seemed blessedly cool.

The nights ran together as they pondered the meaning of Fräulein Schanderein's shrieks and the question of how to examine her without resorting to force. Emma felt a secret thrill at the thought of him making the girl strip and show herself for examination. Then, subtly, Emma put her own self in the girl's place, fantasizing her submission in bed. Seeing him as the devil when he roughly pulled the covers off, and when she thrashed about to get away, imagining his hooves leaving streaks across the sheets, hearing his long, scaly tail whipping back and forth through the air in the darkness of the room. How forbiddenly delicious to have the devil in your room at night and feel his strong body press you down in bed. It made her want to faint and snarl foul language, mouthing words she did not even know she knew….