A Book of Dreams (18 page)

We chuckled about the crazy dream, but I was afraid, because I didn’t understand what was science-fiction and what was real. It scared me that as early as 1952 – when I was eight – I was having dreams about things coming from the sky to take me away. But even more frightening were reports I had read recently about flying-saucer sightings. In particular, I was alarmed by reports that two of the Apollo missions were allegedly ‘chased’ or ‘followed’ by unidentified flying objects. All records of these encounters was supposedly censored from NASA tapes.

How much could one believe?

It was easy for me to believe in things like flying saucers, even though it made living a ‘normal life’ confusing at times. (When I worked on the desk at the Staten Island
Advance
the switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree one night with reports of a UFO. I was told that to run a story would have alarmed the population, and no mention of the incident appeared in the paper. But it made me wonder about all the books about suppressed Air Force studies in the 1950s, books my father studied closely. It made me wonder about what happened in Arizona in 1954 and made it harder to dismiss it all as some crazy dream or an
imaginary conspiracy.) My mother, on the other hand, found it too difficult and for a great many reasons left Orgonon in 1954 and made a new life for herself. I know it was hard. It had to do with being a woman. She said to me and she has said to others that in regard to women’s liberation, she always practiced it. Since the age of sixteen she has been financially independent, although without independent income, even when she was living with Reich. ‘I have always maintained my personal and financial integrity,’ she said.

And that was why she left. It had to do with personal integrity. I was never faced with the kind of choices she had to make, but I know that when the going got tough she acted decisively and strongly. If the child in the dreams would not forgive her for leaving, the adult in me would, hoping she too would forgive for the bad times. Some of her dreams were broken too.

But what happened after she left still seemed like science fiction to me now, with the movie over and lights coming on.

Daddy was playing the organ. All the doctors had gone home for supper after the lecture, and now the music came all the way down across the fields and through the trees, slanting down the long afternoon sunbeams to the garden where Mummy was weeding and shaking her head because the deer and rabbits kept eating the lettuce.

‘I don’t know what we can do about these animals,’ she said, still shaking her head.

I was keeping guard with my gun and my glow-in-the-dark ring to make sure that no Indians snuck up on us.

‘Come on and help me weed,’ she said.

I put my gun away but kept it right on the edge of the holster so I could draw fast, and started to pull out weeds. Mummy had a big garden that Tom ploughed in the spring. Daddy liked little red potatoes and peas and Mummy grew things he liked. We weeded together and the music from Daddy’s organ was like a soft wind. Mummy hummed as she pulled out the long thin green weeds and threw them over the fence that even a deer could jump over.

‘Mummy?’

‘What?’

‘Now that I got this special glow-in-the-dark ring, do you think I could get another pair of cowboy boots?’

‘I don’t know, Peter, you just had a pair last year. I think this year we’ll get regular warm boots. And besides, you said you wanted ski boots.’ She threw a handful of weeds over the fence and brushed her long black hair back from her face with the back of her hand. ‘Okay?’

‘Aw, I was looking in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue and they’ve got some really nice cowboy boots. And I can use the same old ski boots for another year. Please?’

‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said, and moved over to start weeding under the carrots.

What I really wanted was a two-gun set. But I knew I’d never get it because Daddy bought me this big one-gun holster set. We went to Farmington together and I wanted to buy the two-gun set that I liked but Daddy liked the one-gun set better so he
bought it for me. He said it was better. I wished I had gone to Farmington with Mummy. She gets me things I like. Like my old cowboy hat that I got from Sears and Roebuck too.

We weeded for a while listening to Daddy play songs and then we started to go inside. Mummy said, ‘Why don’t you help me set the table?’

‘How come we’re eating early?’

She passed me the silverware and napkins. ‘Tonight we are showing a special film of some of the experiments Daddy did last winter.’

‘What is it about?’

‘Oh, it is about the bions and amoebas and things Daddy sees under the microscope. I thought maybe you would like to go to the Rosses’ tonight and play with Kathleen. Maybe they will go to the movies in town.’

‘Please can I come?’

She stirred the pots on the stove and smiled at me. ‘I don’t think so, Peter, you wouldn’t be interested because it is mostly pictures of tiny little things from under the microscope.’

‘Oh, please can’t I go? I’ll be quiet. I can play with my ring. Besides, I was over at Kathy’s last night. Please?’

‘Well, we’ll see.’

So I went to the movie with Mummy.

When we got to the lab where the movie was going to be, it was dark. People were already there and standing around, looking at the stars and talking. Daddy had gone back up to the observatory and we were going to pick him up later.

In the afternoon Tom had moved the benches from the
clearing in the orchard back into the lab so people could sit and see the movie. The benches were all in rows facing the wall near the door where Tom had put up the screen. I ran back and forth between the benches while Mummy got the projector ready.

Then the doctors started coming in. I said hello and told a few jokes to make them laugh.

When they were all inside and sitting down, one of them got up and started talking about bions and energy. I wasn’t interested and went back to the other part of the lab.

The lab is very long and has big picture windows on the side facing the lake. The other side, towards the hill, has little side rooms where they do experiments with the mice and glass tubes and other stuff. All the way around in the back was a room with lots of scientific stuff like jars and slides and glass things. I got into a dark corner where the lights from the big room couldn’t reach and pushed back the pommel on the saddle. Where the saddle moved, the secret compartment glowed like a window into a big green ocean. I moved it around. I didn’t even know how to write on it. It just glowed in the dark.

I looked at it for a while and wondered if I should send a message. Toreano was probably back at the fort.

The lights in the other room clicked out and the projector started up. As I got up to go back in and watch the movie, my arm hit something in the dark. I reached out and felt around on the table edge until I picked it up. It was a glass magic wand. Daddy used the magic wands to rub in people’s hair and put them over machines that counted energy. My hair made the wand crackle in my ear and made the hair on my arms stand up. It didn’t do anything to the glow-in-the-dark screen.

I went around the corner slowly so I wouldn’t trip over anything and saw the white light from the projector flickering on the screen. The screen was full of small moving little squiggles that were alive, but you could only see them in Daddy’s powerful microscope. He let me look through it a lot.

Daddy is a scientist. He is a lot of other things too and wrote a lot of books. And he was a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, I can never tell all the things with psych apart anyway. He is a teacher, too, and all these people sitting in the movie came to learn from him because he discovered Life Energy. It is in your body and everywhere. If you don’t get stiff or tight, it makes you feel good because it flows through you the way it does in a treatment. It is even in little things under the microscope.

The doctor’s voice went on and on as he talked about the bions. Every once in a while the picture changed. Then the doctor stopped talking and they all just watched. I went closer so I was right behind the projector, watching the reels go around and around but I couldn’t see very well.

So I got down on my hands and knees with the magic wand in my hand and started crawling underneath the benches so I could get closer to the screen. Underneath the benches was a forest of legs. Some were crossed and some were tapping on the floor. Some people had their shoes off and their toes wiggled in and out. It all looked funny in the faint flickering light from the projector. I started to laugh but kept on going until I was in the middle of the forest and bumped into a leg. Mickey leaned down and whispered, ‘Peter, is that you? What are you doing?’

‘Shhh,’ I whispered back, ‘I’m trying to get closer.’

More and more hands started reaching down beneath the benches to feel what was going on. Sometimes a hand patted my back or my head and one scared hand reached down and touched my face. I heard a few people giggle, too.

All of a sudden I bumped into something soft. I felt all around it. It was a hat. So I put the hat on my head and kept on moving past legs until I was in the front row, leaning on my hands watching the silly blobs go around and around while the doctor talked about them. I wished they would show movies that Daddy took of me. They were more interesting than Daddy’s blobs. I waved the magic wand to make the blobs go away.

When the movie was over someone turned on the lights and Mummy started changing the reels. Some of the doctors in the front row leaned over and said, ‘Hello, Peter, what are you doing here? And what are you doing with that funny hat and the glass rod?’

‘This?’ I held up the magic wand. ‘This is a magic wand.’

I pulled myself out from underneath the benches and stood up in front of the screen. From a back row, somebody said, ‘Hey, that’s my hat!’ But in front of me someone said, ‘Are you a magician?’

‘Yes!’

The hat was squashed down over my eyes. I raised the magic wand and everybody laughed. Somebody clapped.

I waved the wand back and forth and turned around in a circle. ‘And now, folks, the show is about to begin!’ I waved the wand over all of them. ‘The greatest show on earth is about to begin!’

Everybody laughed and I laughed too. It made me feel good and happy. But then Mummy walked down the side of the benches next to the wall and whispered, ‘Peter, stop it at once. Don’t be a silly fool. Stop it or I shall tell Daddy.’

But I just remembered the thing that Bill taught me so I said it, waving the wand: ‘Yessir, folks, he walks he talks he eats ice cream and he crawls on his belly like a reptile. Step right up, folks, only one thin dime!’

Waving the wand up and down I danced back and forth in front of the benches and everyone was laughing.

Mummy came over to me and held my arm. She took the wand away and said, ‘All right. Go outside. I warned you.’ I looked at her and she was mad. Some of the people had stopped laughing so I waved goodbye, feeling funny and empty inside.

I went outside and sat on the lab porch. When my eyes got used to the dark I could see the stars. Then I heard the projector start up again and looking through the windows all I could see was the blobs moving around on the screen and I was terribly, terribly scared that Mummy was going to tell Daddy.

The lights went out and the movie came on. It wasn’t a very good print; the faded garish colours added to the intensity of this 1950s science-fiction spine-tingler,
The Fly.

Halfway through the movie, just when the monster appears, a freak walks into the theatre. He staggers down the aisle, stoned out of his skull, freaking on the fly monster. ‘Aaaaaargh!’ he shrieks, pressing his hands to his temples. ‘Shit! What is this!?’

The movie is about a scientist who has discovered how to send matter through space. He has developed a special kind of box. When he puts an object in the box and pulls the lever, presto, the object disappears in a puff of smoke and reappears in a similar box at the other end of the lab.

After repeated success sending objects back and forth through space, the scientist decides to send himself. Alas, unnoticed, a common housefly buzzes into the sending box. When the scientist emerges from the other box, molecules have shifted in transmigration. The scientist now has the fly’s head and one of his arms. Somewhere, the fly has his.