The Rules of Dreaming (19 page)

Chapter
21

The search for Hunter Morgan slogged into its second week in an atmosphere of grim determination, as morale among the staff sank to an all-time low.  Julietta never left my  thoughts as I agonized over her trip to Venice with Gottlieb.  With each passing day I grew more angry and depressed.  I wrote myself a prescription for Zoloft and took double the recommended dose, with no discernible effect.  One morning—it was about nine days after Hunter disappeared—Dr. Palmer called me into his office.  I was sure I was about to be fired.  But he smiled paternally as I came in and offered me a seat in the leather chair in front of his desk.

“I can tell that you’re very troubled by what’s happened,” he said.

“Yes,” I admitted.  Obviously he was thinking of Hunter, not Julietta.  “I’ll never forgive myself.”

“It’s not your fault.”

It surprised me to hear him say that, but I thought I knew what he meant.  The image of Peter Bartolli peering through the fence was still fresh in my mind.  “You shouldn’t blame y
our brother, either,” I said.

“No,” he agreed.
“It’s not his fault.  These things happen sometimes.  There’s nothing anyone can do.”

I appreciated his sympathy but it didn’t alleviate my professional and spiritual crisis.  Having been trained in modern psychiatry, I had no way of dealing with an event that went beyond any conceivable scientific explanation.  It wasn’t just that we didn’t know yet what particular chemical imbalance could cause this type of thing to happen; it was whether we should even attempt to understand it in those terms.  I had begun to feel that what Hunter had done could only be described as evil.

Dr. Palmer smiled grimly when I told him that.  “Look on the wall behind you,” he said.

I turned around and saw a framed print which I had often noticed but never examined in any detail.  It depicted a fantastic scene that
reminded me of Hieronymus Bosch, with a hideous dragonlike creature that must have represented the Devil hovering over a number of lesser demons and some cowering humans.

“What is it?”

“The Temptation of St. Anthony, by Jacques Callot.  Seventeenth century etching.”

“It’s grotesque.”

Dr. Palmer nodded in agreement.  “Do you know the story of St. Anthony?  He gave away all his wealth and lived as a hermit in the desert, where he was tormented by every kind of temptation imaginable, in the form of beautiful women, wild beasts and demons that tore at his flesh—and even the Devil himself, who appeared in this monstrous shape and proclaimed himself the ruler of the world.”

“Why did he do it?”

“To find God he first had to find the Devil.”

I laugh
ed grimly.  “Whatever that is.”

“Today we know that the Devil is a human artifact, a superstition we created for ourselves.  The same thing is true of evil itself.  We know they don’t really exist except in our minds.”

Part of me couldn’t accept that this was true.  “Then why resist them?”

“That’s the question a psychiatrist has to wrestle with every day of his life.”

Dr. Palmer stood up and I assumed our meeting was over.  But then he stepped toward me and put his arms around my shoulders and pulled me toward him for a brief embrace.  I was deeply moved.

“I’ve had this print on my wall ever since I started practicing twenty-five years ago,” he said.  “As a reminder of how powerful these superstitions can be.”

St. Anthony stared back at us from the print, terrified in the desperate isolation of his conscience.

“And I look at it every day—to remind myself that even though the Devil doesn’t exist, that doesn’t mean you can’t be tempted by him.  Tormented by him.  And even destroyed by him.”

*   *   *

Thinking back on the afternoon he’d spent with Peter Bartolli, Dubin wondered if his memory was playing tricks on him.  It was almost as if he’d been dreaming, especially after he followed Bartolli down into his dank subterranean theater.  There was the stage—and beside it a grand piano, of all things—and on the stage an elaborate puppet theater with a stage of its own, arrayed with a dozen hanging figures that looked like corpses on a gibbet.  When Bartolli pulled the canvas cover off the puppet theater, announcing it as his passion in life, Dubin dropped into the nearest seat, sensing that he was intended as the audience.  Bartolli had dimmed the lights, leaving only a single spotlight fixed on himself.  Darkness poured in from the farthest corners of the room, which seemed impossibly far away, as if the basement were much
larger than the house itself.

Bartolli’s face throbbed under the lurid glow of the spotlight.  “I personally designed all the marionettes,” he boasted, “which were then hand carved by Austrian craftsmen.”  He climbed behind the puppet theatre and removed all the puppets from view; then he opened a little hatch above the proscenium so he could talk to Dubin as he introduced them.  “The production I’m working on—in case you haven’t guessed—is
The Tales of Hoffmann
.”

The first marionette he brought out was a languid female with stringy blond hair and a ghoulish expression on her face.  “This of course is Olympia.  The ballerina Hoffmann falls in love with at first sight.  She appears to be a woman but in fact she is a doll.  Of course in the opera the actor who plays her is a woman.  So in this case she’s a puppet pretending to be a woman pretending to be a
doll pretending to be a woman.  She’s specially designed so that at the flick of a wrist she falls apart and crumbles into a heap of cloth and sticks.  I won’t show you that just yet.”

He left Olympia hanging while he selected another marionette.  “This one’s a real woman,” he said, dangling another female form, darker and more sensuous than the first.  “She can seduce a man into madness.  Do you know her?”

The puppet’s jet black eyes gleamed back at Dubin with lifelike penetration.   “No,” he whispered, without knowing why he was whispering.

“Her name is Giulietta.”

Bartolli clattered around behind the stage for a few minutes as he raised some new equipment into position.  “Now,” he said, as if talking to himself.  “Hoffmann.  Who shall Hoffmann be today?”  He peered at Dubin through the little hatch.  “You see, the marvel of my invention is that I can move the heads around and change the characters’ identities at will.  I can make Hoffmann look like any number of men, depending on my mood.  And that’s fitting, don’t you think?  After all, Hoffmann could be anyone.”

“How do you mean?”

“Even if—as your manuscript undoubtedly portrays him—he’s an obsessionally jealous serial killer, he could be any man, couldn’t he?  Or to put it another way, any man could be Hoffmann.  He could even be you.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing who he is.”

“Oh, it doesn’t really matter whose face he has.  In fact, I think we’ll keep it covered.”  He lowered the Hoffmann figure over the stage, and Dubin felt a chill when he realized that the marionette’s head had been covered with a neatly sewn hood, and that his hands—possibly because the strings were a little tangled—appeared to be tied behind his back.  He looked like a man being led to the gallows.  “It could be anyone,”  Bartolli said, peering down at Dubin through the hatch.  “I mean, we all have a little of the Hoffmann in us, don’t we?”

Dubin glanced over his shoulder toward the stairs, which had been swallowed in darkness.

“Maybe it’s just because I’m a psychiatrist,” Bartolli went on, “but I like to think of my little puppet theater as a microcosm of the human mind.”

“The human mind?  I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Then let me explain,” Bartolli said pleasantly.  “Contrary to popular belief, the mind does not function like a machine.  The parts of a machine are all subordinate to one overall purpose.”  He marched the marionettes across the stage in a lockstep formation.  “But the mind has a multitude of parts which each want to function autonomously, forming their own purposes and personalities, the goal of which is to dominate all the others”—he jiggled the strings and the three marionettes skittered helplessly across the stage—“like a ruthless tyrant.” 

“Personalities?”

“Plural, yes.”  Bartolli shook the strings and each of the marionettes danced a different dance, knocking into each other erratically.  “Remember, we’re here as the result of evolution, which has bequeathed us with a collection of fragmentary selves, each of which is perfectly willing to sacrifice all the others for the sake of its own survival.”

As he thought back over this conversation, Dubin could almost feel the magnetism of Bartolli’s gaze and the magisterial certainty of his voice.  But what he remembered most was his reaction to Bartolli’s ideas—they made him feel queasy, restless, eager to escape, as if the puppet theater was indeed a microcosm of his own mind and they were the strings that were entangling him under the puppet master’s control.  He wondered: Who is that hooded figure on the stage?  What does he mean by saying it could be anyone?

“Nothing is ever lost in evolution,” Bartolli went on.  “Each part of the brain is a survivor.  We have the brain of a lizard, a rodent, an ape, and all the stops along the way.  Each has its own complete vision of the world, and can operate independently as a complete self if the need arises. And each has the Darwinian will to survive, even if it can do so only by suppressing or extinguishing all the others.”

Bartolli disappeared from the hatch and the Hoffmann figure trudged painfully across the stage and turned his hooded face toward Dubin, raising his hands as if in a silent plea for recognition.  “In our darker moments we perceive these separate selves for what they are, but for public consumption we try to integrate them together into one big personality that we present to the world as
if it were a coherent whole.”

The Olympia puppet danced out to pirouette beside Hoffmann, leaving him spinning in his attempt to follow her movements.
“When people can’t do it well enough, we call them schizophrenics.  They’re incapable of normal social functioning because each one of their fragmentary selves must have its own way, contending with the others like lunatics in an asylum.”

Bartolli’s face popped into the hatch, smiling his ironic smile.  “Or, if you prefer, like prima donnas in an opera company.”  He ducked down again as the salacious Giulietta slithered on stage beside Olympia.  “Our minds shelter a whole repertory company of small, self-important characters, each competing to be the center of attention.
There’s usually a king, or a duke, and a beautiful princess.  Or perhaps a courtesan or an artiste.”  Olympia took an awkward bow as Giulietta tried to shove her aside.  “Every one of them wants to be the center of attention at all times.”

Bartolli lowered the curtain, leaving the puppets to their jealous machinations, and stepped down onto the main stage, his face sober.  Dubin lurched to his feet, but Bartolli had ensnared him in his ideas; there was no possibility of escape.

“They are the gods,” Bartolli concluded, “the angels, the demons, the furies, the inner voices we are all familiar with.  And although you may imagine yourself pulling the strings, or sitting in the audience, I will tell you something: There isn’t any audience and there isn’t any puppeteer.  There isn’t any ‘you’ other than them. They are who you are.”

Chapter
22

The search parties were easy to avoid.  He watched them through the leafless trees in the harsh light of the early winter landscape, plodding across the countryside in their orange vests like dull-witted insects.  With the drugs finally out of his system, he felt as if he were discovering the world for the first time.  Every day there were new shapes, new colors, all as bright and sharp at the edges as the knife he’d stolen from the old woman’s kitchen.  He knew they would never catch him.  He spent the day sleeping in a culvert and at night he’d roam the woods searching for food.  Avoiding the paved roads, he’d make his way to the edge of town, where a surprising number of people slept with their doors unlocked.  He didn’t know what he would do if anyone caught him sneaking into their house.  He always kept the knife in his pocket, and sometimes he’d take it out and watch it glisten in the moonlight but that was all.  He remembered hiding in the barn and eating the rotten apples and it made him sick to think about it.  What had happened before that?  His mind teemed with memories but they seemed to belong to someone else.

Nicole, he thought, watching the knife glisten in the moonlight.  Eventually she would find him, or he would find her.

Chapter
23

At our next session I told Nicole about my conversation with Dr. Palmer on the subject of evil.  Her reaction was surprisingly angry, and it led to a major breakthrough in her therapy.  “A superstition?” she scoffed.  “Is that the scientific view?  Then there’s no reason why I shouldn’t get a gun and blow your brains out.”

“Why don’t you?”

She glared back at me with a look in her green eyes that was almost enough to make me believe in supernatural evil.  “I was expelled from school for not believing in the Devil,” she said in a softer voice.  “Did I ever tell you about that?”

And she proceeded to tell me the most extraordinary story about her girlhood in the west of Ireland, a subject she’d carefully avoided in all our previous sessions.  I learned for the first time about the younger brother who died after falling onto some rocks and the sanctimonious priest who blamed her for not accepting the Devil as the agent of his death.  For that sin she was expelled from school and sent to London to live with an aunt.  She was fourteen.

“I don’t understand why they sent you to London,” I said.  “So far away.  Why didn’t you just go home?”

“They didn’t want me at home.  They knew that I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Knew that my father did it.”

“Did what?”

“Killed my brother.”

I kept a poker face.  “Your father killed your brother?”

“He beat him for every infraction.  He beat me too, but not as badly because I was a girl and I was away at school.  But Sean was only ten and when Father was drunk he used to slap him and push him around and I know as well as I know my own name that he pushed him or pummeled him off that cliff and down onto those jagged rocks.  That’s why they wouldn’t let anyone see the body, there were marks on him and bruises that were already there when he died—doctors can tell that, can’t they?—and it would have proven that Sean was being beaten and that he was pushed or chased or maybe he just jumped off out of desperation.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I know it because I was sitting next to my father at the funeral and I could smell it on him, and on my mother as well.”

“The alcohol?”

“No.  The guilt.”

“What does guilt smell like?”

“It smells like guilt.  And I know what guilt smells like because I’ve plenty of my own.  Don’t you see?  I should have helped him.  I should have protected him.  I knew it was going to happen and I did nothing to stop it.”

She lowered her face and started to cry, the first time she had shed any tears in our many therapy sessions.  The crying continued for several minutes, and I made no attempt to stop it or comment on it.  When she seemed almost done I handed her a
tissue and she blew her nose.

“Why haven’t you told me about this sooner, Nicole?”

She raised her eyes blankly, aloof from her own emotions.  “It has no relevance to my present life.”

“It seems that it does, or you wouldn’t be so upset.”

She blew her nose again and smiled.  “Perhaps you’re right.”

“Do you believe in the Devil now?”

“I don’t think of it as the Devil.  That’s not my word for it.  But I do believe in... something evil.”

“What is it?”

“It’s not something out of Dante or Milton or even Stephen King.  It’s not ‘out there’ somewhere.  It’s inside us—Dr. Palmer’s right about that.  But it’s not a superstition.  It’s real.”

“What is it?”

She shook her head, as if to deny that she could answer my question.  “If you think evil exists only in your mind, it can take you over in a way that couldn’t have happened to St. Anthony, who kept it outside of himself.  Because when it gets inside you it doesn’t let go.  It can take over your consciousness and direct your actions and it can pass from one mind to another.”

“How can it do that?”

“Through images, ideas, symbols.  It can move from one mind to another and be passed forward through the generations along with language and literature and art.  It can take over a person’s life.”

I had listened to Nicole with growing fascination.  Her mode of expression was unique, reflecting her unusual background and verbal abilities, but the content of what she said was easily recognizable as a variation on one of the standard fantasies of deeply troubled patients: evil forces at large in the world, communicating magically from one mind to another, directing their words and actions.  “This evil force,” I asked her, “has it taken over your life?”

“No,” she said, staring back at me with eyes that looked as tormented as St. Anthony’s.  “But I’m afraid—”

“You’re afraid of what?”

“I’m afraid it’s taking over yours.”

*   *   *

Dubin was now spending every night with Nicole.  At about two o’clock in the morning, lying hopelessly awake in his bed, he would finally admit to himself that he couldn’t face another sleepless night.  He would down a shot of reposado and drive the forty-five minutes to Nicole’s apartment, where he would find her, as often as not, slumped over her keyboard with little to show for a night’s work.  Sometimes they would drink tea, sometimes white wine or whisky, talking and laughing and helping each other through the night, and then just before dawn—like Scheherazade, she said—she would discreetly fall silent and crawl into bed and he would lock the door behind him and drive back in a daze to his apartment.  With her wild red hair and her restless green eyes, she was an intellectual street urchin, unlike any woman he’d ever known.  He knew she could help him finish what he’d started.

They still talked constantly about the letter the librarian had given her.   Dubin read it and reread it every time he came to the apartment.  “There’s something in here I don’t understand,” he said one night.  “‘A textbook obsession’ was how
Maria’s lover described how he felt.  I can understand that.  But what do you think he meant by ‘like Hoffmann in the Venice act?’”

“You don’t know?”  They were drinking Jameson’s that night and Nicole had fueled herself to a cheeky defiance.  “You ought to read your manuscript.”

“What manuscript?”

“The manuscript of
The Tales of Hoffmann
you’re trying to sell to Peter Bartolli.  Remember?  That’s what you told me the first time you came here.  Or was that just a ruse?”

“Absolutely not.”  Dubin gulped down the rest of his Jameson’s and rapped his empty glass down on the table.  “But the manuscript isn’t mine—as a matter of fact I’ve never seen it.”

“Well, if you ever get a chance to read it—assuming it really exists—you’ll know what our distraught lover was talking about.  But I’m surprised you even have to ask.  Wasn’t
The Tales of Hoffmann
the opera Maria Morgan was rehearsing when she died?”

“Yes, it was—and I ought to know more about it but I don’t.  What happens in the Venice act?”

Nicole smiled at Dubin’s helplessness.  “Hoffmann goes to Venice and becomes obsessed with a courtesan named Giulietta.”

“A ‘courtesan,’” he repeated.  “I’ve always
wondered what a courtesan is.”

“It’s a high-class whore.”

“That’s what I thought.  All right, what happens next?”

“In the traditional version, Giulietta tricks Hoffmann into killing his rival S
chlemiel and then sails away in a gondola to the music of the famous Barcarolle.”

“What happens to Hoffmann?”

“He’s left crying his heart out on the canal bank.  But now we know that the traditional version was nothing but a bowdlerized afterthought.  The Venice act was supposed to be the grand finale, with Hoffmann killing Giulietta and her gigolo boyfriend in an orgy of death and degradation.”

Dubin reached for the Jameson’s and poured himself another shot.  “So much for comic opera.”

“
The Tales of Hoffmann
was decidedly not intended as a comic opera,” Nicole said, pulling the bottle away so he couldn’t drink any more.  “But you must know that.  In that manuscript you’re selling, it turns out even worse, doesn’t it?”

In the hour just before dawn, when the night is supposed to be at its darkest, Nicole felt weighed down with alcohol and melancholy and fatigue and could think of nothing but collapsing into her bed.  But Dubin had to wait, as he always did, until the first light of day before he would leave her there alone.  He perched on the edge of the couch lost in thought, tapping his fingers on the boxful of books that served as her coffee table.  “There’s something else I meant to tell you about,” he said suddenly.

“What is it?”

“You know I’ve been over
Maria Morgan’s studio with a fine-toothed comb, and I’ve compared what I found there with the inventory Frank Lynch made right after she died.  There are three things in that inventory that are no longer there today—a promotional photo of Maria Morgan, a kaleidoscope, and an old fashioned phonograph record.”

“You’ve told me that before.”

“The question is, what happened to them?”

“All right.”  Nicole could not begin to answer any more questions.  “What’s the answer?”

“Anyone could have taken them from the studio.  Susan says it didn’t used to be locked.  But she also says Avery Morgan wanted the place to remain just as Maria left it.  So why would just those three things disappear?”

“The lover took them?”

“Exactly!  Avery Morgan wouldn’t have taken them, but the lover would have—because they must have some sentimental value to him.  And if he went to the trouble of taking them for that reason, he probably still has them stashed away someplace.”

Nicole stood up and stumbled toward her bedroom, hoping that the first light of dawn would light her way.  “So all we have to do,” she said, “is find someone with a picture of
Maria Morgan, a kaleidoscope, and a phonograph record, who also has a dog named Nero.”

“Exactly.”

She turned to face Dubin, hopefully to say good night.  “What record was it?”

“
Piano Music of Robert Schumann
, played by Alicia de Larrocha.”

The sky suddenly lightened and Dubin stood up to leave.  Nicole felt a little queasy.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said.  “Nothing.”