Secret Dreams (11 page)

The thrush turned its head this way and that, inspecting him with black, glossy eyes. Then the bird flitted from the branch and swooped off toward the house.

He lost sight of it for a moment in the streams of sunlight dappling the ground. Then his eyes caught up. The thrush had landed next to the chow on the garden doorstep. But Lün paid no heed, neither barking nor pouncing…. And there they sat, inches apart, as in that odd Hicks painting
The Peaceable Kingdom
, where the wild animals of the jungle reposed calmly side by side. The dog looked down at the bird and the bird looked up at the dog, as if they knew each other's thoughts. Then they both stared straight at him.

He wanted to call someone, to come and see such an odd thing. But now he couldn't even whisper. He groped for his wife's warm hand, to show her, but the lawn chair lay empty. He looked back at the doorstep: the chow and the thrush still sat there. What intelligent faces they had. How lucky they were. The sun came down through the pink blossoms of the almond tree, and he decided to go meet it. He could fly. Right through the soft pink petals and into the sun if he wished. He was free.

So had he found heaven? Or was this just the glow of his own mind continuing on for infinite moments, like the heated coal after the flame had gone out? Trains of thought feeding on the currents of a trillion living brains … where all the minds that had long known his person now suddenly thought of him at once? He fell along a shaft of sunlight, through a wire-mesh cellar window, and into the dark bowels of a city building. The shaft of sunlight fell on an old desk in a narrow corridor of metal shelving; row upon row, canyons of file boxes rising to the ceiling. How amusing: at last he had found the Almighty's Hall of Records! But that meant he would presently be held accountable — a rather disagreeable prospect, considering the volume and content of his lifetime's work.

A young man sat at the desk with a folder of London
Times
newspaper clippings open before him and several dozen scattered around. What a relief to discover that the most prominent thought on the lad's mind was a pretty twenty-year-old clerk up in Editorial named Nancy, who wore very tight sweaters.

True, God might employ such young men, but probably not in his holy Hall of Records. More likely the Almighty's clerks were skinny Quaker schoolmarms or Eton-educated male librarians with socialist vegetarian tendencies —
-
not frothy bucks smitten by visions of tight sweaters. Between burning glimpses of Nancy, the Times feature writer was furiously estimating how quickly he could absorb all the periodicals before him and knock out a draft of an obituary about a dead duck whose works he had never read.

Easy, Spence, you're a ^nick study, A draft in an hour, two at the most
.

À wicked thought: if only the obituary's first line could be planted in Spence's open and slightly desperate mind. The line should read: “Sigmund Freud, the world's greatest living [blank], is dead.” Not a bad opener.

Let that quick study struggle over the blank. But Spence showed no signs of having taken the bait. The young man looked suspiciously over his shoulder, as if he felt someone breathing down his neck. Then he shot a disconcerted glance along the stacks.

“Who's there?” he called nervously.

Silence yawned on the linoleum floor,- the empty corridor between the stacks marched off into the distance. Then a girlish giggle escaped from a tight sweater somewhere in infinity.

The shaft of sunlight drew him back along its path. Up and up into the sky and clouds, to where the spores lived upon thin air. The great earth below existed like a huge, curved, pregnant woman. The translucent sky, the deep blue of the oceans, and along the coast of southern India the lighter blue aquamarine of coral reefs and shoals. Great bands of clouds drove across the brown-and-green continents, covering and uncovering the ripe surface of the planet like that same swollen pregnant Venus covering and uncovering her belly with a veil.

Indochina passed slowly, and then the great lap-water of the Pacific, with the dark speckles of the Mariana Islands, a green crescent in the pale blue. A huge monsoon had risen, a coiling swirl of cloud hiding the ocean beneath. A creeping unease came with the gray-purple clouds, but it wasn't the storm itself —for the monsoon seemed safely remote, a mere hypnotic pattern. No, something
about
the storm, something wrong … Then he understood. The clouds in the monsoon's dark galaxy had stilled on the surface of the ocean, like a photograph laid upon the sea.

Now came the conviction that his souls dying spark no longer moved across the face of the earth but hovered — flickering in a fixed spot in the heavens as the earth below ground to a halt. How long could the spark of the soul float above the world as the earth stood still? While the chaos and turmoil below froze in time, midstep, midbreath, between the beat of a heart and the blink of an eye? Ages seemed to pass without an answer, nothing moving, the planet holding its breath…,

Then with a silent groan the engine of the world began once more her immense rotation — a ponderous surge — now rolling backward, east to west. The gray-purplish monsoon evaporated into itself, vanishing into white nameless clouds that quickly melted away. Watching it had a profoundly irritating effect, like trying to read handwriting in a mirror.

So were all the people down below doing likewise? Writing backward, putting verbs before their nouns, or spouting nonsense like “Market to went piggy little this?” Were all the crops returning into the ground and disappearing? The rain falling upward and all the drains in the Northern Hemisphere sucking water down the wrong way — or were they sucking water down at all? Could water flow upward into a faucet? Did gravity work? Was the Eiffel Tower lifting off its moorings? Or was it being
unbuilt
, demolished by its own ironworkers, rivet by rivet and girder by girder? Moving back in time presented so many problems.

And yet he sensed that far, far below, the timepieces of the world were keeping perfect time: every wristwatch, every clock tower, every clock on every mantelpiece steadily winding backward, lap after lap, tock-ticking back through the years.

Did that mean people were growing young again?

Or was this all a singular absurdity only his soul spark saw, a private fancy lasting his eighty-three years, unraveling in the moments of his own brief span like a spool of thread and then running out forever?

He wanted a closer look.

The rugged coast of California grew hard and clear. Each time the land rippled, a great pressure surged upon him, like a voice about to speak into his mind but holding back with all its strength. As the searing white expanse of the Nevada desert rolled below, the pressure be-came a suffocating blanket. Night came. And then day and then night … He lost count of the sun and moon,- they passed and flashed and came again.

His soul spark floated in the rarefied atmosphere, a thistle upon the winds — where seeds kept aloft for years were swept along, eventually to fall and root in strange forests or lie fallow for eternity on the dry sands of nameless shores. Up here the cirrus clouds drifted like thin gauze across the sky. And then the earth rolled slowly to a stop; the going back had ceased. The thistle of himself fell like a stone.

The cirrus clouds streamed by, and the planet rushed up with a smile.

Tiny blue veins grew into rivers. Green fields blossomed. Blue lakes spread from puddles into ponds, mountains erupted from the soft wrinkles of the hills. The thistle flashed over the Black Sea: water sparkling, with ships rocking upon its waves. The land of the Crimea rose and vanished. The wind whipped across the small Sea of Azov, turning it into a panic of whitecaps. The thistle plummeted into the dark blotch of a city by a river. Ships and barges plowed their way up the channel. Smoke rose from the city's chimneys. A hundred rooftops came at him. Alleyways, and people scurrying to and from their many tasks. The thistle fell right toward a slanting gray roof near the dockside wharves. The grimy slate came closer, close enough to see the soot everywhere. So the last spark of his soul was merely a thistle, plunging through the stratosphere to crash upon a roof. Destined to lie dormant then, until the end. Too bad, too bad …

The hard sooty shingles came up in a rush. He wished he could blink, but he quietly passed through the stone instead.

The plummeting stopped with one great suffocating thump. For a long time the fall left him black. But this smothering concussion was a calming pause, for his passing had been endured and the natural order of things restored: after the enduring, the blindness…. How many years had gone by? Three or four or a hundred?

If he listened closely, would he be able to detect his living self somewhere on the European continent? He tried, and faintly — yes faintly — even in the blindness, far off he heard a patient murmuring familiar words. He knew the year now: if the thistle had plummeted upon Vienna, falling into 19 Berggasse, he would have found himself a mere five or so years younger and listening to a patient consumed with a nervous tic and boils. Dimly he could taste the cigar that burned between the listening man's fingers. How easy to attach himself once again to his old self and travel about with the charming fellow, like a fly on his shoulder.

But he had already listened to that patient's problems, for better or worse, and already ground out the cigar that burned between those fingers. It held little appeal. Besides, what could the dry thistle of a soul spark do? Consult in the treatment of the patient? More than likely he would give the same advice and concur.

In the consulting room of 19 Berggasse, his old self squirmed in the chair with a touch of indigestion. À bubble of lunch gas was moving through the listening man's lower quarters. Presently his old self would have to break wind.

So that's how your old ghost speaks to you! It haunts you quietly from a great distance, sending you a curse: a phantom of flatulence to punish you for your gastronomic misdeeds!

No death? No dying, then? No end? Just hollow repetition, like the ticking seconds within the workings of a clock with no hands to mark the passing time? Oh, God, he wished the Lord would come and take him….

The enduring was passing on. Frau Direktors blindness slowly coming to an end, her strangling asthma drawn off for the moment. So it wasn't so easy to die after all. What a mad dream! Flying about the world and poor old Herr Professor sick … À deep hush lay upon the Rostov clinic. Her weary eyes rested on the wooden bedpost by her head. And there on the post sat a tiny fluff of thistle, waving feathery arms.

How very odd: just like in the dream …

She stared at the thistle on the worn post for a minute or an hour without the slightest inclination to move her gaze elsewhere. Sometimes the thistle became a little fly, staring back with weary eyes,- then her own eyes would blink, and no more fly! Only a wavy bit of fluff upon the bedpost.
So I'm really not dead
…
but spared for today
. … But the wooden bedpost filled the world, and the sounds outside her door hardly mattered.

What a wonderful old bedpost it was, cracked down the center, with a worn knob at the top. And a bit of fluff. Or was it a fly?

She woke again in the darkened sickroom. Bare wooden lath showed through the cracked plaster on the ceiling. The electric lamp with a blue paper shade on her bedstand burned with a dim light. And the asthma had returned, like an unpleasant friend. The bed creaked. The floor cold. She found her slippers. Standing was a problem. Clutching the bedpost helped. Her breath steamed into the chill of the room. The stuffing had fallen from a broken windowpane, letting in the winter air. She crammed the stuffing back.

Voices echoed in the lower reaches of the house, the sounds of people talking like disconnected motes. And the asthma, which had been hovering like a black angel, closed its wings. She was slipping off again. Back to the mad dreams.

A tiny fly lit on the bedpost, its buzzing innocuous and far away. How puzzling: a fly in winter. A winter fly …

Talk to me! it said. Talk!

Ah, the Herr Kinderweise fly, come all the way from Vienna to keep her company. What was there to talk about? Nightmares and bad dreams? And then it became clear. All this time the falling sparks of their minds had been hovering around each other. Touching and retouching while they gazed at the great rolling earth, all throughout each other's long enduring. Each one had felt the other's presence, familiar and reassuring like a silent companion. Yes, even as she choked alone in her bed — and yes, even while he lay dying, years and years apart. Long ago their pasts had mingled, so they could relive, must relive, one last time, he and she.

Forever.

Frau Direktor would endure her passing just as Herr Professor a few years later: passing in and out of their last precious days like jumbled puzzle pieces, one upon the other, joining spark to spark in their infinite final moments. Herr Kinderfly and Frau Asthma would travel together for a time. A meeting of minds, their resurrection …

So you are here
,

Yes, I am here
,

I must tell you something, Herr Professor
,

Tell me
.

Yes, tell him. Before the asthma took her away Before the huddled lump died in the bed, gripping the cracked bedpost of her future. Before the others took her children out of the country, safe and far away … But not right now. Not this second. No, rest a moment. Rest and drift along a memory. Visit her old friend and grope her way into his hidden, secret places. Back to the stone madhouse where she was truly born. Back to the whitewashed solitary room where she floated like a bubble in the air. Where she finally met jung Herr Doktor Young, No! Not right! What he said was: “Hello, I'm young Herr Doktor Jung.” Crucial difference. You should always get a person's name right, But young Herr Doktor Jung never knew her proper name. So she kept him waiting at the throne room door. Waiting for a thousand years while young Herr Doktor Jung peeked at her through the viewing slit. Didn't he know the viewing slit was really a rectum? The madhouse had devoured him and was now expelling him into her private room. Funny, he didn't seem particularly worried that his head had become a turd…. Perhaps in a clean and efficient Swiss institution —