A Book of Dreams (14 page)

The snow was light and powdery falling out of the sky. I walked away from the house so I wouldn’t break the crust and then I knelt down and used my hand like a saw to cut a round hole out of the crust. It didn’t break. It came out perfectly round, so maybe the third bad thing wouldn’t come at all and we could all not worry and be happy. I lifted the circle of snow crust out like a manhole cover and licked snow off the bottom, where it is best. I wondered if there were still coals glowing up on the hill where Tom and I burned the brush.

The fire was dying.

Ed looked around the room and saw that a couple of people had fallen asleep. He realized it was very late. ‘Shall we stop?’ he asked.

Peter was leaning forward, staring into the fire. He shook his head. Peter d’Errico leaned towards Peter and said, ‘Are you sure you want to go on?’

Peter nodded. ‘Snow,’ he said. There was a long silence. Someone put a new log on the fire and they watched the flames lick at it. ‘Snow was really something up here in winter. You should really come up here sometime and see Orgonon when there is snow all over everything. Tom used to take his shovel and cut huge tunnels in snowbanks for me and Kathy to play in. I spent a lot of time with Tom. We used to cut brush together and make big fires in the snow. That axe handle right there that
we use for a fire poker came off one of his old axes. He gave me one so I could help him. We had a lot of fun with the axes. I remember once we spent a long time cutting brush and burning it, and then that night I went outside and started digging a tunnel under the crust.’

I raked the dry grainy snow out from the hole and when I had a big pile I pushed it away.

I did that for a long time with new snow falling on my face, licking at it and pulling more and more snow out of the hole. When the hole was deep enough so I could almost get in it, I put my head inside. It was dark and little grains of dry snow made falling noises as the sides of the tunnel caved in slowly.

I ran inside to get a flashlight and propped it up in the snow so it was shining into the tunnel. Soon it was so long I had to get inside to keep digging. But I still had to be careful or the crust might break.

After a while it was a regular cave. It was like a little house. The flashlight on the crust made it look like millions of diamonds in a snow palace. I pretended it was a long palace dance hall and Daddy and I were dancing with Mummy in a pretty white slip and the three of us danced around and around, and we were all happy. I was so happy I wanted to show them the snow cave. Very carefully, I crawled out and ran inside. ‘Mummy, Daddy, come and look at the house I made in the snow! Come and look!’

‘There was an incredible crust on the snow that day. It was so thick you could walk on it. After dinner, in the dark, I went outside and started digging a tunnel underneath the crust. The walls inside were soft snow. I ran back into the house to get a flashlight to help me dig and that is why I remember it. It was beautiful inside that white snow tunnel with sparkling cold walls of snow sliding around me as I scooped it out. Then I remember I heard a noise outside. It was snowing and underneath the light over the door I could see my father and mother standing in the doorway, watching me and laughing. I just think that is one of the nicest memories I have, of being in that hole and seeing my mother and father laughing at the way I must have looked to them.’

I ran out ahead of them and crawled into the little snow house with the flashlight. When I got all the way inside I went all the way to the end of the tunnel and turned around slowly so that I could look out the round castle doorway and see the circle of light at the real door where Mummy and Daddy were standing in the doorway laughing. We were happy again together. It was snowing harder already and I had to squint to see them in between all the thousands of white snowflakes and I saw that Mummy had stopped laughing. She watched the snow fall and she looked very sad.

In the middle of a sentence, Peter suddenly stopped talking. He stared into the fire. For a moment Ed thought he could feel Peter’s mind stumbling around in open darkness. After a few moments of silence, Peter stood up. He turned and walked quickly into the large dark bedroom that had been his parents’ and in a few minutes they heard him crying.

When he returned a while later, he went to a bookshelf and came back with a book. He sat down in front of the book. ‘I want to read you a story,’ he said.

He began reading. It was a children’s story about knights living in a castle. The special thing about these knights was that the bravest of all knights had a shining star in their shields. At the time of the story, however, there was no knight who had a star. A war came and the knights went off to fight the giants. The youngest knight, much to his distress, was left to guard the castle. He really wanted to go and fight, to win a star, but he knew his duty and stayed at the castle. While the knights were in battle, three giants came in disguises and tried to enter the castle but the youngest knight, Sir Roland, obeyed the orders and refused to let them in.

Soon the knights returned to the castle, victorious. They went into a great hall

‘… and Sir Roland came forward with the key of the gate, to give his account of what he had done in the place to which the commander had appointed him. The lord of the castle bowed to him as a sign for him to begin, and just as he opened his mouth to speak, one of the knights cried out.

‘“
The shield! The shield! Sir Roland’s shield!”

‘Everyone turned to look at the shield that Sir Roland carried on his left arm. He himself could see only the top of it, and did not know what they could mean. But what they saw was the golden star of knighthood, shining brightly from the centre of Sir Roland’s shield. There had never been such amazement in the castle before.

‘Sir Roland knelt before the lord of the castle to receive his commands. He still did not know why everyone was looking at him so excitedly.

‘“Speak, Sir Knight,” said the commander, as soon as he could find his voice after his surprise, “and tell us all that has happened today at the castle. Have you been attacked? Have any giants come hither? Did you fight them alone?”

‘“No, my lord,” said Sir Roland. “Only one giant has been here and he went away silently when he found he could not enter.”

‘Then he told all that had happened through the day.

‘When he finished, the knights all looked at one another but no one spoke a word. Then they looked again at Sir Roland’s shield to make sure that their eyes had not deceived them, and there the golden star was still shining.

‘After a little silence, the lord of the castle spoke.

‘“Men make mistakes,” he said, “but our silver shields are never mistaken. Sir Roland has fought and won the hardest battle of all today.”

‘Then all the others rose and saluted Sir Roland, who was the youngest knight that ever carried the golden star.’

When he finished reading the story, Peter looked up. He closed
the storybook and put it away. They were all silent, watching the last coals of the fire glimmer and glow.

To Ed, it was a simple, gracious way for Peter to explain what had happened. His father’s world was still locked away inside him; he was a kind of young soldier, guarding a mystery that nobody seemed to understand. Ed did not know why Peter had cried; perhaps their questioning had been the giant, perhaps Peter felt himself wavering. But in the end, he had guarded successfully. He was the knight. His childhood was running through him as if on some private projector, impenetrable, private, guarded. It had almost broken through, but something held it back. Ed wondered what it would take to break Peter’s shield.

The next morning they all left Orgonon early. From the observatory, Tom watched their cars pull out of the driveway. It had just begun to snow, which was not that unusual for October, and the thin flakes were like a veil between him and the tiny cars slowly turning out of the driveway. Tom watched the cars leave and then he watched the gentle snow falling. It fell on the bright leaves that still clung to the trees. At the other end of the path, light grains of snow tumbled and fell down the dark-brown crevices in the bust. In the forest, it would have made a light noise coming through the branches. Tom sat by the window for a long time and then he stood up. It was time to sharpen his axe and varnish his snowshoes.

COMING HOME!

To make a movie!

Beep! Beep!
Canoers paddling down the mighty Androscoggin River wave as my trusty blue VW cruises up Route 16 towards Rangeley, a hand waving out of the sunroof.

Coming home! The moon’s crescent hangs onto the afternoon as if it is going to slip off the day and fall down with all the blinking strawberry blossom stars along the shoulder of this road that takes me home.

To make a movie! Already my eye is the camera and photographs rear up at me with each turn of the road: Along the river, heavy old pilings from lumber days rest on the reflection of
frail reeds. They glisten with moss. In places, the river splits, yawns slowly past an island and closes up again with a string of bubbles. It is exciting to be in a movie about my father. A real movie! And I’m in it! I’ve got all kinds of ideas to tell the director, a Yugoslav named Makavejev, and I wish he could have his movie camera right here for this road.

Zooming into back country now, past Thirteen-Mile Wood, the ribbon road bounces up over a thank-you-ma’am and the VW enters a straightaway, a great green channel of birch trees just glowing in the afternoon sun. A perfect day to come home. I haven’t been back since that weekend, that crazy weekend in 1966. I’ve been in the Army, and worked for a newspaper. And now I’m going to be in this movie.

In the background, rich hazy mountains loom up, shadowed by thunderclouds over Mooselucmeguntic Lake and the Rangeley Lakes. The movie crew will be coming today or tomorrow. Too bad it is June, and not July, when the flowers are better. I told Makavejev when he was here in the fall that the flowers are best in July. That was when I first met him, in the fall of ’69.

Dusan Makavejev, the Yugoslav film director, came to the United States to explore the possibilities of a film that would capture some of Reich’s ideas on film. We met once or twice and he invited me to screenings of two earlier films,
Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator
and
Innocence Unprotected
. The way he mingled fiction and documentary, as if he always wanted to remind the audience that they were watching a movie, was great and the prospect of being in a movie like that really turned me on.

I was glad when Makavejev telephoned me the night before 
he was to return to Europe to seek additional financial aid for the film. He said he wanted to talk with me again. At the time, in the fall of 1969, I was an editor at the Staten Island
Advance
and told him I could finish work by 10
PM
if he wanted to take the Staten Island Ferry over from Manhattan.

A little after 10 he bounced into the city room wearing soft European clothing and grinning through his beard. As we drove to my small cottage in South Beach, in the shadow of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, I told him about Staten Island’s largely conservative population and apologized for its remoteness.

‘No, no,’ Makavejev protested, waving his hands in the air, ‘I love the people on Staten Island. In Manhattan the people are always walking around looking angry at each other as if they want to fight. But they never speak a word. They just look angry. Here, I come off the ferry onto Staten Island and I see two people yelling at each other! Looking at each other and yelling! It was wonderful!’

He flipped through a stack of my photographs while I prepared two huge helpings of bacon, eggs and home fries and a pot of coffee.

While we ate, Makavejev talked about my father, but I was really interested in talking about movies. Since that crazy weekend in 1966, I had thought little about my childhood. It was safer to go to science-fiction movies where there were happy endings. When I met Makavejev I had been out of the Army barely a year and was working at becoming a journalist. Besides, my father’s name was still regarded as a joke in most places except Europe, where radical students had discovered
his early political work. I was ignorant of most of his work in politics, sociology and psychology; I was into media.

Makavejev told me how as a student in Belgrade he had discovered Reich’s work and felt it was terribly important. He told me that in 1933 a Yugoslav was imprisoned for reading Reich.

Like most Europeans who were familiar with Reich, Makavejev was especially interested in the early political writings. He said he felt that Reich had looked at politics creatively and that what he wanted to do was see the same way only with a camera, visually. ‘When society is alive and healthy, there are snake dances in the streets,’ he said, snaking his hands through the air, ‘and you can see just by looking at the shoes that there are many different people. But when society is repressive you only see identical boots, marching in rigid lines.’

By the time we finished our coffee, it was nearly midnight. We were still talking, so we went down to the South Beach boardwalk and walked up and down, watching the sparkling lights of Brooklyn and Coney Island reflecting off the bay.

Jokingly, I told him that only a few months before, I had ‘guarded’ that same beach, a few hundred yards up, at Fort Wadsworth, the small Army post that lurked beneath the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

He didn’t believe me.

‘Yup. I was a real soldier.’

He asked me about my life and I told him what I had done. ‘After college I spent a year in VISTA – the domestic peace corps –and then I decided I was sick of draft-dodging and wanted to work for a newspaper. So I decided to let myself be
drafted and worked in a drug-addiction rehabilitation centre in Boston for a few months until I got my greetings. After Basic Training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, I spent my whole tour at Fort Wadsworth, right up there, first as a key-punch operator and then as a public-information specialist. I did articles and took photographs and wrote speeches for the generals and colonels. For the last eleven months of my tour, I worked part-time evenings at the
Advance
and went full-time when I got out. Just a few weeks ago I was promoted to copy editor.’

‘And your father’s work?’ asked Makavejev. ‘You aren’t interested? You have feelings?’ He held his hand up and turned it from side to side, smiling, leaving it open.

I didn’t know what to say. It
was
open. I hadn’t given it much thought. ‘I guess I’ve been trying to live my own life,’ I said. ‘I guess I’m thinking about a career in journalism. I took a month’s leave of absence this summer to do some writing. Maybe I’ll quit and write a book or something. But I’m not involved in carrying out his work, if that is what you mean. He always told me to live my own life.’

‘Maybe if you have quit when I come back with the movie crew you could come to Maine with us. You could help, perhaps, telling about visual things.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’d like that.’

Driving back to Manhattan, Makavejev talked about his films, his family, his politics and his plans. If all went well, he said, he would return in midwinter or at least by spring to begin shooting. Yes, it would be a sort of documentary but well, there might be some fiction. He wasn’t sure. The best he could say, as
we drove up the West Side Highway past a darkened Manhattan, was that it would be a film ‘inspired by Reich’.

Parked in front of his hotel, we talked more. He asked about Orgonon. Pleased by someone’s interest in that place that had been so quiet in my mind for so long, I talked.

‘Well, there are lots of flowers. The best time to start would be around the Fourth of July because the place is mad with daisies and Indian paintbrushes. Thick flowers. On some fields it looks as if there is nothing but a blanket of red and white. It shines when the wind rolls over it. You could get great shots just panning the camera around in those back fields where we used to go for walks together, if you could get it at dusk. Dusk is great. Even after the sun goes down this soft green-golden light hangs over the fields like magic and after it is dark, the new tips of the fir trees glow in the dark. And when evening winds come up, it becomes all blurry.’

‘And do you have a bust of Reich?’

‘Yes. There is a bust in the lower cabin – that is the cabin that is in my name – and there’s one on the tomb as well.’

‘Perhaps we could do something with a double image, using the bust….’

‘Yeah,’ I cut in, imagination racing, electrified by the idea of others seeing all those things in a real movie, a movie that was already going on in my head. ‘Yeah, another possibility is the lake. The lake, first thing in the morning, with mist rising off it. You saw a picture of it in that stack I showed you at my house. It would be great to have a scene on this misty lake and then right beneath the surface of the lake or even on the surface, yeah, on the surface, floating right across the top of the lake without even
making a ripple, sailing through the mist towards the camera comes the bust of Reich!’

Makavejev sat up. ‘Yes. Perhaps with a boat or a raft….’

We threw out ideas faster and faster until we were yelling at each other. The movie seemed like a great catalyst, reminding me of scenes and things I had not remembered for years. Makavejev, of course, was interested in practical and immediate information. He called it ‘informations’.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘In winter. Could we get there in winter?’

‘Winter. Wow. Sure. My cabin is winterized. We used to live there. But of course the observatory is closed. It is a museum, you know. You’d have to contact the trust fund about that. But you could still walk around on snowshoes and see it. Of course, the water is off. But there are motels. And some great scenes. When it rains and freezes it makes an incredible crust and whole fields are like huge unbroken pages of snow. Huge white football pads of snow on trees, scrimmaging the wind. The wind is a whole nother thing, coming over the mountains and across the lake…. The lake … why sure! The lake!’

The whole picture slid into my mind as if someone had turned on a projector.

‘Hey! Listen to this! You start the movie in winter, with the movie crew struggling down from the cabin in the wind, trying to get to the lake. Lots of wind, yelling and tromping around through the snow. The movie crew finally gets to the lake and of course it is frozen. Everything is frozen at the beginning. But they have to get to water, right? You need to get the lake. So with snow and wind flurrying all around they start chopping away, with pickaxes and axes. As they chop, all overexposed
with steamy breath and grunting ice, the camera pans away. Down the shore, swinging his axe against alder, cleaning out the scrub brush, is Tom. Tom! Burning the branches. Making a cloud of white smoke. Then you pick up on Tom and make the whole movie from his angle, going into the whole story about Reich from Tom’s point of view….’

What a great movie! I could hardly wait.

All winter I waited to hear from Makavejev. He finally arrived in May 1970 and after shooting some interviews in New York was going to be in Rangeley now, the first week in June. I had quit my job. I didn’t know what would happen. Makavejev even said he might do a scene of me and Tom together. It would be great to have a scene with me and Tom in this movie.

Driving up the last stretch of Badger Road before the cabin turn-off, late afternoon shadows ragged across the fields, I see Tom, a lone figure pushing his lawnmower over the lawns in front of the lab. He’s already had supper and come back to finish the mowing. I beep and wave going down the drive. I’m anxious to open the cabin. Windows and doors flung open, old dark winter air rushes out into the evening. The water has not been turned on, so I grab a pail and head to the lake. At dusk, I am mopping the cabin floor with cold lake water, getting ready for the movie.

Shimmering, vibrating in the invisible leaves of heat. All the way around the sunny, hot field.

Tom steered the tractor in square circles and behind us the grass fell back in the tractor’s noise, lay straight, turned yellow, and made a sweet smell.

I hung onto the grey fender and watched Tom bounce on the seat, waiting for him to stop the tractor and let me drive. He promised. And then later Daddy said we could do stuff together.

All around us the trees that ran along the hospital field’s stone fences moved past, slowly poking into the bright sky. If I closed my eyes tight all of a sudden the place where the trees were stayed white hot behind my eyes and the sky turned dark. It was like a reflection.

Once Mummy and I were rowing in the lake and two men came by in a boat and said have you seen a dead deer floating around in the water? They said they had shot him and tracked him to the lake but he disappeared. They thought he had drowned and was floating somewhere just beneath the surface. We said no, but I was scared that I would see it brown and dead in the water and that my feet would touch it.

Rowing is okay but I don’t like swimming that much. I get scared swimming at our dock because I can’t see bottom. There are ants and big spiders between the boards and there may be a dead deer floating around somewhere. Tom taught me how to swim up at Quimby Pond where the water is shallow for a long ways out and Tom came over and said ain’t you learned to swim yet? I said no and he picked me up and just threw me into the water. When I came up, I said, ‘Gee, Tom, I dwownded!’ He always tells me that story. Now I can dive pretty good when I go swimming at the town dock. It isn’t as scary there. I have to stand on the dock for a long time, holding my hands, out in
front of me, but I can do it. When I dive it is just like when the mower blade dives into the grass after we lift it over a rock. It is funny the way Donald Duck dives because he holds his hands in front of his face like he is praying. Maybe he is afraid too. I tried diving like that once but I got water in my nose. Some of the boys wear ear plugs and nose plugs but I don’t dive that deep because they say there is a pipe in the deep part, sticking up, and if you dive on it, it will drill a hole through your head and kill you. There is a special way of shaking your head sideways to make water in your ears come out and when it comes out, it is hot like the sun was in my head. Once I asked Daddy if there was a place in the sky where the sky is what is hard and the place where trees are is all wind, an upside-down world like when I close my eyes on the tractor. He said it was a good question.