A Book of Dreams (17 page)

Makavejev and the cameraman talk in Serbo-Croatian. ‘We were discussing the way in which Reich holds a camera,’ Makavejev says. ‘It is quite interesting. He had a good eye.’ But I couldn’t listen any more because the last scene is with me and Tom. It must be after they tore down Tom’s grandfather’s barn in 1948, down by the birch tree where we later built the cloudbuster platform. There is a huge pile of old rotted timber we had to take to the dump. The Studebaker pickup is backed up to the pile. A younger, leaner Tom Ross looks uneasily at the camera. You can tell he is listening hard to his new boss, The Doctor, who is telling him what to do. He turns to me. I am wearing striped overalls and grin at the camera. Tom waits as I reach over for a piece of wood from the pile and hand it to him in a slow arc. He takes it from me and throws it in the truck and soon we are together in a real movie, throwing old rotten timbers into the back of the pickup truck. Maybe Makavejev would use that. It is my favourite scene.

If only this movie could capture the irony of Tom’s being there, first as the child bringing the cows in down to the barn, then as the man in his early thirties who had just begun to work for the doctor in 1948, tearing down the same barn. And then a few years later he builds the cloudbuster platform practically on top of the foundation of that same barn. And now, at retirement age, he winds his lawnmower around and around the cloudbuster platform and the memory of the old barn.

After the movie, we went over to the Rangeley Inn for a beer. I felt embarrassed that the movie had been all about me; Makavejev wanted footage of Reich. Furthermore, he didn’t seem interested in my idea about Tom. I asked him how the movie was coming. He looked into his beer and spoke seriously.

‘It is very difficult to say,’ he said. He must have been curious about how I saw myself fitting into a movie about my father. ‘It is hard to say how it will go. Right now it is very loose. It is hard to talk with many of the people who worked with your father. Many of them are silent as if they are in shock of some kind. They get very emotional when they talk about certain aspects of Reich. It is as if they have a blind spot.’

He looked at me. Was he talking about me? Did he know something I didn’t? He talked more about his movie:

‘Every man has a deep need for more freedom,’ he said. ‘And now the question of armour comes in. As you know, “The psychological armour is just the psychological part of muscular armour.” It is extremely hard to break the psychological armour. People can participate in something and then go back into their shells. The problem with this film was to make a playful structure that could lose the audience so they can be led. So gradually they are deeper and deeper in places where they never actually voluntarily or consciously go. Step by step they are in some sort of humanistic or fatalistic world but actually they are in touch with the desocialized part of themselves … deep sexual feelings. Or fears. Or terrors. Private terrors …’

The treatment room is in between the bathroom and the library. It has a blue carpet, the picture of the man with muscles, a medicine cabinet and pictures in a frame. One of the pictures has Daddy on skis on a mountain and one is when he was a little boy with a rocking horse. I took off my clothes and looked out of the open window to where the warm sun made everything bright. The smell of hay came all the way up the hall and in the window on the wind.

There were funny thin clouds in the sky that I forgot to ask Tom about. Tom always knew when it was going to rain.

When Daddy came in I lay down on the couch. He sat down on the chair and watched me breathe.

‘Hi, Peter.’ He watched me breathing. ‘How do you feel?’

‘I feel okay, I guess.’

‘Did you have a good morning mowing with Mr Ross?’

‘Yup. We finished the whole field.’

He put his hand on my chest and pressed slowly down. His hand felt big and warm. I smiled.

‘It is time to be serious. Now, let’s see. Show me your eyes. Ja. Look at me. All right, now follow my finger. Follow it. That’s right, let your eyes go, let go, follow my finger.’ Following until it turned my eyes until they were tired, sneaky and surprised. I couldn’t any more. ‘Let go, come on, let them go.’ Finger dancing all around, pulling at my eyes until I squeezed them shut. ‘Okay. Breathe.’ I breathed. ‘Deeper, all the way.

‘It is all right. It is all right. Come now, let me see. Have you been stuttering any more, hmm?’

Finger, no thumb, probing up under my chin as if it would come right out in my tongue, hurting, arrrgghhhh

‘That’s right, that’s right. All right, turn over, let me see your neck.’ Fingers catching my face in the neck and twisting it out into the sheets with hurting and anger, ow! More and more, biting into the sheet. ‘No! No! No! It hurts,.’ Breathing hard, alone.

‘Roll over.’ His voice is gentle, his eyes watch me carefully as I lie breathing. ‘All right, Peeps, now breathe out, gently.’

inbreathingoutbreathingin
. oooooph

‘Breathe more deeply.’ He pressed his hand down. I closed my eyes and breathed out until I could feel it down to where his hand was. I smiled.

‘Don’t run away, Peeps. Breathe. Breathe out.’

‘I am breathing out. I gotta breathe in sometime!’

His hand pressed down harder and I felt all my air going uunnhh. Then he let me breathe in but not enough to make it feel tight against my chest before it was oooooph again.

I breathed for a while and then it started to tickle. I giggled. ‘Don’t laugh, Peeps. That is running away. Breathe out. Let it all out. Don’t be afraid to be afraid.’ His hand, pressing against my stomach, hurting, pressing a belt in my stomach.

‘Uuuuuuunnnnnn oh Daddy it hurts. Please, Daddy, please uuuuunnnnnhhhh.’ My legs, pulling up to hide my stomach from the hands.

‘Where is it, Peeps? Don’t be afraid. Come on, keep breathing. Let it out. Breathe.’

I didn’t feel like it. I didn’t want to do anything, just get away from his hand. It hurt. I didn’t want it there and grit my teeth and make a face. His hand was up at my throat and unlocking my jaw to let me scream with my face and my legs.

‘Kick, Peeps, kick. Kick, now. Ja. Hard, that’s right. Kick. Harder, harder! Come on, good. Ja. No, the pillow. Hit the pillow. Ja. Good. Harder, harder, now let it come out.’

Gnashing my teeth and kicking, twisting to get away the sadness with my legs, the sadness coming up from my legs, and meeting my stomach at his hand the way falling hay met the earth. And I cried because I was so sad for the hay falling down and for the dead deer and the hay falling down behind the mower, falling away from behind the mower blade, and sad that all those people had left us and because Mummy was going to leave us. She did love us. My ears filled up with tears and ran over. I wanted to turn over and cry but Daddy said,

inbreathingoutbreathing

‘Where is it, Pete? Come, come, where is it? Let it all out. If you don’t breathe it will be worse. Yell. Come on. Yell.’ Fingers at my jaw again telling me yelling me wide open and screaming me until my face was wrapped in the shadows of my eyes and the folds of my mouth as I cried and cried. His hand went to the muscles of my legs, to the place where even hay tickles me when I lie in it, to the muscles of my legs and I said, ‘No, don’t,’ but he caught it there and then I was kicking with my whole body, kicking and flipping on that long white scream like a fish flopping in angry silver flashes.

When kicking stopped and crying stopped his hand was gone and the belt inside me was gone and when I breathed out it felt like a black sailboat on a black river in the evening, sailing with the current with the wake glowing and spreading out, all the way down to my legs.

Breathing, breathing. His hand on my stomach now gently
again, he said, ‘Is your belly soft now? You should always keep it soft.’ And his fingers pressed down to where the breathing was going in and out by itself now, like a black boat sailing, softer and softer. He smiled at me. His hand went from my neck to my knees only it didn’t tickle at all. It just felt quiet and soft and the breathing sailing along with his hand, streaming. ‘Good, Peeps. Now breathe.’

All by myself I breathe. ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,’ lower and lower until I felt it moving in my legs just like Daddy’s hands.

Daddy said, ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. That’s right. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’

‘AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’

‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’

And then we were both breathing together, smelling the hay.

‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’

THE DREAMS, a Looney Tunes cartoon version of my childhood, began after Makavejev left, taking his movie with him.

They began with half a deer walking up to the cabin door and rattling at it. And when I went out to open the door I saw the lake had risen and was lapping at the lawn. When I looked into the water I saw the feet of a man who had drowned and was floating upside down.

Only in this dream, I was the drowned man. I had passed through the surface of the water as an image passes in light through film, and in the dream I saw myself sitting, a long time ago, at the edge of the lake at Annecy, coming out of one phantasmagoric anaesthetized dream, afraid of another.

The park in Annecy is wide and open with great white mountains towering over it, dipping their peaks into the clouds. I wandered around the park dazed, watching children play, old men at their
jeu de boules
. I watched couples laugh together in the sunlight.

But I was removed from it all, just walking around with my arm in a sling beneath my ski parka, glad that after the tormented dream in the hospital, it was a gentle, sunny afternoon. The
doctors and nurses had been very polite. They told me how brave I was to give them the signal like that.

People probably thought I was an escaped patient or something because I had stuffed a box of cookies into the kangaroo pocket of my parka and reached in every so often for a cookie, and my eyes were streaked and red from the crying.

I still didn’t know what it was I had dreamt in the hospital. I only knew that there was some other reality going on, on a different plane, and somehow, sliding around in the gas, I had bumped into it. Walking through the park with the empty sleeve of my parka flapping in the wind, I could only think of the tractor and Tom, mowing in the hot sun with Tom all day long, going around and around, watching the horizon until it was burned into my eyes so that in closing them, it was backwards, the trees bright and the sky dark. And then at dusk, still going around and around in smaller and smaller circles, there would be a moment when the trees and the sky were the same shade, separated by a fine light-blue line: the treetops etched against the sky. I knew that there was another boy on another tractor on the other side of the sky, looking back in at me. Was it that person I bumped into in the dream? Or was he in the movie?

At one point in our conversation, Makavejev said to me, ‘Movies are like tangible dreams, colourful moving shadows. When you turn the light on, it disappears. This is a very powerful fact.’

Only for me, the movie kept grinding away with a vengeance after the lights went on. The morning after Makavejev left, the lake began creeping up the hill to drown me. I fled into the back fields of Orgonon, chased by dreams. Why was I even there,
at my father’s place? Where could I go? Was there any place I could run to and not be implicated in my father’s movie?

I walked from fields into forest, arms outstretched to spread apart branches and cobwebs. This was an old part, untouched by Tom’s axe, with branches slapping at me, dragging me back. But suddenly I stepped into a clearing. It was an old dump, one I had not discovered before, hidden among dense branches in a remote corner, protected by mosquitoes and a thick blanket of moss and needles. Only a few broken bottles and a rusted iron stove poked up through the earthy brown cover. For a moment the movie was forgotten. I pulled away at the soft earthy blanket that covered the dump. Thin gnarled roots ran through it like veins, holding needles and moss together so that when I pulled it away it rolled back like a huge monster skin. It was like all the dreams I had as a child, a huge blanket of tiny needles coming to cover me up and here I was, pulling it away.

I picked up a stick and began to poke through the black and rotted mass that lay beneath the surface until I saw something sparkle. Reaching carefully into the darkness I pulled out several small glass pipettes. Only the tips were broken and I was curious to know how many there were unbroken. Digging carefully, I uncovered a whole nest of the thin glass rods gathered together in tight broken rows like little shiny soldiers, stacks and stacks of glass pipettes. It gave me goose bumps to find these neat, fairly well preserved remnants of the lab, probably a small part of a load that Tom dumped here in 1952 or 1953, after the Oranur experiment.

With the rows of glass pipettes spread out in front of me, shining brightly, I stopped to rest. It was hot and the mosquitoes
were beginning to close in. When I looked down again I saw something I had not seen before and it made my blood run cold.

Panic ran through me as I looked around in disbelief. Where I had torn up the mossy blanket, strands of 16-millimetre film poked out of the rotten earth like plastic ferns.

The movie was right there, all around me on the dump. Real movies. Old movies, all directed by my father.

At first I wanted to run down to a telephone and call Makavejev, to shout to him that the movie was still here, that he should come back and shoot this grand, final, cinematic irony.

I looked down at the film and pulled a strand out of the earth. Sweating and trembling, I held the pale film up to the sun and went into a dream.

After we went to the dump Tom and I drove the green pickup to the post office. Tom always leaves his hand on the gearshift lever where it shakes. He spits tobacco too, and sometimes I put my hand on the gearshift lever too. Someday he says he’ll teach me to drive the tractor so I can help him mow.

The post office is green with a black banister. Tom opened our mailbox, which is big because Daddy gets lots of mail. He handed me a red card which meant a package and said, ‘Hey, Pete, why don’t you go to the window and get this package?’ The man gave me a little box and it had my name on it. Tom said, ‘What is it?’

‘Oh, it’s for me,’ I said.

When we got back to the truck Tom took a bite out of his
tobacco and watched me unwrap the box. I don’t know why I was excited because a lot of the doctors or people who come up in the summer send me presents. Once I got an Indian belt.

When the box opened up I took out the white tissue paper that looked like clouds and inside there was a copper-coloured saddle ring.

‘What is it?’ said Tom.

‘I don’t know, it looks like some kind of a ring.’

It was a tiny saddle made out of copper, with leather thongs and a western pommel, just like a real saddle. The line around the edge of the seat was funny so I pushed back on the pommel and the top of the saddle slid back. Beneath it was a secret compartment.

‘Oh, I remember,’ I said. ‘A long time ago I was eating Cheerios in the morning and there was a picture of this ring on the back. It said I could get the ring for fifty cents and a boxtop. Mummy gave me the money and I sent it off. But it was a long time ago and I forgot.’

I held it up for Tom to look at.

Tom looked at the ring and then he took another bite out of his tobacco.

‘Gee whiz. That’s a nice ring,’ he said.

‘It glows in the dark,’ I said.

Tom let me off by the lab and I snuck across the field through the apple orchard, sending messages to the cavalry on my new glow-in-the-dark ring. The grass was tall enough so no one could see me as I came up behind the trees around the clearing and moved along the outside edge towards the far end of the
clearing in the woods where Daddy was standing in his long white coat, talking.

On hands and knees, the way Toreano taught me, I went all the way around the clearing so I was standing behind him and could look through the leaves and branches and see their faces.

The men and women were sitting on the long brown wooden benches that Tom made and I helped paint. The clearing was sort of round, with trees all around giving shade. The grass was soft green except for the path that led through the trees to the lab, but it was long grass and came up past the bench legs and people’s feet as if they were growing there too.

Some of them I had to call doctor because that is what they were. Some were mister but some only had one name, like Mickey.

A doctor was Dr Baker, who was important, and Dr Raknes from Norway, with a funny accent, Dr Hoppe from Israel, who came in an airplane and landed at our dock, Dr Willie, who comes from Texas and has a star on his fence, and Dr Duval, whose daughter is named Sally, Dr Tropp is warm and fat, and Dr Wolfe is not there. Neill comes from Summerhill. Other doctors have names that we always say in a row. Then there were Mummy and Helen and Eva and Gladys and Lois and Grethe, who were taking notes too. Some of them worked in the laboratory with the mice. The mice lived in a special house in special mice boxes. They were all white.

Daddy was standing in front of me in his white coat talking about energy. He was always talking about energy.

Mummy saw me peeking through the leaves and smiled. She waved her hand so no one would see and said, ‘Go away’ with
her lips. When I shook my head she shook hers and said, ‘Be quiet.’ So I lay in the grass watching people listen and take notes while Daddy talked. He talked a lot when the doctors came in summer for conferences. They came to learn about his discoveries which were important.

I like it when they come because I make them laugh and they like me. Mummy says she is going to send me away to be Jerry Lewis’s assistant because I make people laugh so much. But I really don’t like to laugh a lot. Mummy says if you laugh too hard it means you are going to cry.

After a while Daddy stopped talking and the people stood up and started talking and lighting cigarettes. I drew my gun and jumped into the clearing.

‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’

Everybody laughed and came over to talk to me. They all wanted to see my glow-in-the-dark ring.

In the dream, I was down at the lake watching soldiers on the other side. There were armies of soldiers filing up and down the hills with uniforms of bright red, blue and green, glinting like swarms of bluebottle flies. While I watched they started coming across the lake, walking on stilts made out of long glass pipettes. There was a boat on the lake and I was in the boat with my mother, looking over the side, trailing my fingers in the water as she rowed back and forth, wondering if I would touch the deer that had drowned.

Once my mother came to visit and one night we were talking
about dreams. I told her I had just had a crazy dream about getting out of the Army and my mother chuckled. She said I always had crazy dreams of one sort or another.

‘Why in 1952,’ she said, ‘Dr Tropp gave you aureomycin for an illness you had and he didn’t tell me it could make you delirious. You were up all night raving about airplanes or something coming to get you and take you away. I was terrified because I didn’t know what was happening. “They are coming! They are coming!” you shouted.’