The Rules of Dreaming (27 page)

 
Epilogue

It seems only right that I should finish this tale, since my name, my voice, even my profoundest hopes and fears, have been appropriated to its telling.  As the real Ned Hoffmann, I think I have a right to be heard.  Ugly rumors have swirled around the Institute, especially since I was named Acting Director, and only a policy of candor and transparency can lay them to rest.  If this were a mystery novel, I would have the opportunity—perhaps even the obligation—to tie up all the loose ends and explain the discoveries and deductions that brought the murderer to justice, or he would have saved me the trouble by issuing a full confession before blowing his brains out.  But in real life the denouement is never so neat or conclusive.  Miles Palmer has not confessed his crimes and in fact has retained a firm of shameless lawyers to proclaim his innocence.  They may be correct in their assessment that the eyewitness accounts of twin schizophrenics will not stand up in court (despite the dramatic improvement Hunter and Antonia have shown in the weeks since Palmer was arrested).  But for the slow-burning fury of Frank Lynch, who risked everything to keep the killer of
Maria Morgan from slipping through his hands a second time, Palmer might never have seen the inside of a prison cell.  Lynch followed him out the door that night and arrested him before he had a chance to return to the Institute and destroy the crucial evidence: the publicity photo, the kaleidoscope—both in a locked desk drawer; a note from the librarian, Miss Whipple, warning him that a blackmailer named Dubin was trying to reach Mrs. Paterson; and a packet of love letters from Maria Morgan, dated from shortly after she became his patient until the week before her death and culminating in the revelation that she had decided to leave her husband and marry Peter Bartolli.  Further investigations of a more forensic nature—DNA tests and the like—are continuing and likely to be even more persuasive.

At the Institute, things are almost back to normal.  Poor Jeff Gottlieb was terminated after being caught
in flagrante
with Julietta, who had the audacity to file a sexual harassment charge against the Institute.  I like Jeff—he’s not nearly as bad as Hunter portrayed him—and I hope he lands on his feet.  With both Palmer and Gottlieb out of the picture, I am the only serious candidate for Director other than Dr. Neuberger (a staff psychiatrist who also treated Hunter before I arrived).  Peter Bartolli would like to come back, but that is a change I intend to resist.  The twins, as I’ve said, are doing amazingly well.  Antonia chatters incessantly and she seems to be edging closer and closer to reality.  Hunter swings between poles of depression and exhilaration, as he always has, but his speech is coherent and his memory is like a steel trap.  He can describe in exhaustive detail not only his mother’s murder but everything that happened since, including the way Palmer set him up for the deaths of Mrs. Paterson and Miss Whipple (after battering and strangling Mrs. Paterson, he roused Hunter and dropped him off in the mountains, taking care to use the same methods two days later when he murdered the poor librarian).  From the moment Hunter found the old recording of Kreisleriana in the patient lounge—where Palmer had apparently left it—and began, note by note, second by second, to reconstruct his memory of the hour his mother died, to the dramatic epiphany in Peter Bartolli’s basement theater when he finally broke through the years of fear and guilt to confront his memory of who the killer really was, and continuing since then as he has struggled to replace those years of drug-induced oblivion with something approximating reality—his recovery has been one of the most remarkable in the annals of psychiatry.  I expect that in a few months he will be able to leave the Institute and begin a new life on his own.

As for me, in the past
weeks I’ve spent many hours alone in my room trying to make sense of my life as seen through the lens of Hunter’s tape-recorded narration.  In the transcript, which I’ve read half a dozen times, his voice is so convincingly my own that even for me the events of that period have become impossible to unscramble completely.  To anyone having the same problem I will say only this: If you think something happened because Hunter said it did, you should think very carefully about what happened to the people in his story when they weren’t in his story—that is, when they were living in the third person, as it were.  That’s when they were real—and I include myself among them.  Yet still I can’t help thinking about Hunter’s imagined history of my three “loves”: Olympia, Julietta, and Antonia—three women I scarcely knew but will surely never forget.  Antonia I loved in her innocence, in her very inability to connect with this miserable world.  At the opposite pole stood Julietta, sensual, worldly, the embodiment of everything Antonia could never be; in fact I knew her only in my fantasies, which (I’m embarrassed to admit) Hunter captured with a certain degree of accuracy.  Somewhere in the middle was Olympia, the artiste—both of this world and not of this world, ultimately incomprehensible, as if she were under the control of powers beyond my imagination.  I loved them all, each in her own way; but they were impossible loves, mad loves, because each of them was absolute and therefore incomplete.  And the more I thought about it, the closer I came to understanding the message Hunter was trying to send me, a message I had been doing everything in my power to resist: that all three of my loves were really the same woman.  And that woman was Nicole.

I confessed this to Nicole one afternoon in a gloomy corridor in the county courthouse, where we waited for some proceedings against Palmer to grind on in a nearby courtroom.  Unfortunately she was standing next to Dubin, a man I have come to despise not least because he and Nicole will soon be living together in New York.  I’ve tried to counsel her against this relationship—a newly-reformed blackmailer hardly seems an improvement over the abusive Richard—but she remains adamantly loyal.  “Of course all
your loves were the same,” she said.  “Even to Hunter it was obvious that you were in love with me.”

“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” I murmured, sidling closer as Dubin seemed to be distracted by some disturbance in the corridor.  “I’m the one who’s crazy.  Or at the very least a fool.  How am I going to get on with my life?”

“Divine is the art of forgetting,” she smiled.

“I’d suggest you take up heavy drinking,” Dubin said without turning around.  “It can work wonders.”

Just then Peter Bartolli emerged from the courtroom and huddled toward us with his overcoat hunched around his shoulders.  He seemed a diminished figure, unsure in his movements and hesitant in his approach, with the indelible stamp of sadness in his dark, distant eyes.  “Miles has pleaded not guilty,” he reported.

“That’s no surprise,” Dubin said.

“I wonder”—Bartolli glanced sharply at Dubin, then let his gaze drift into the gloom of the empty corridor—“how the rest of us would plead if we were asked.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know how I would plead.  Miles has always been insanely jealous of me—I should have known that I was playing with fire carrying on an affair with his mistress.  But at the time I had no inkling of what had really happened to Maria.  It was only years later, when he ran me out of the Institute on a flimsy pretext after I started making progress with Antonia, that I began to suspect the truth.”

“Were you the one who asked the librarian for her
news clippings about Maria Morgan’s death?”

“
Yes; and then last year I foolishly set the stage for the whole tragedy to unfold again.  I gave Hunter that video of
The Tales of Hoffmann
and sent my daughter to perform her interpretive dance, acting out the murder as I envisioned it taking place.  I thought that by reviving unconscious memories I could not only cure Hunter and Antonia but expose the truth—and isn’t that always a good thing?”

“Then
when you started this…,” Nicole hesitated.

“I had no idea what I was setting in motion,” Bartolli
completed her thought. “Even at the end I was groping in the dark: I had no inkling of the mad operatic fantasy Hunter would relate about my daughter and Julietta when Dr. Klein sat him in front of the tape recorder—and no expectation that my own desperate plan for Antonia would be the last act of that bizarre melodrama.  Above all I had no idea how evil my brother really was.  And for that reason I would plead guilty.”

“Then the priests were right,” Nicole said.  “Denial of the Devil is a mortal sin, worse than denying God.”

“Possibly,” Bartolli agreed.  “Because God forgives and the Devil doesn’t.”

“That’s what Hoffmann was guil
ty of, isn’t it?” Nicole said, and before I could protest she must have noticed the sickened look on my face.  “I mean Hoffmann the poet,” she laughed.  “Not you, Ned.”

Just a coincidence, I’m sure; nevertheless she seemed to be aiming her explanation at me.  “Hoffmann was a Romantic,” she said.  “He believed in the spirit world and his whole purpose in life was to find a way into that world, through music, dreams, drugs—or madness, if that was what it took.  He imagined that the spirit world was not only real, but fundamentally beautiful and good.  What he didn’t realize, or couldn’t acknowledge, was that evil can be unlocked as easily as goodness and beauty—only more suddenly, more powerfully, more irrevocably.  He and the other Romantics unlocked an evil force that couldn’
t be controlled, a hundred-year nightmare culminating in two world wars, the Holocaust and the other horrors of the modern age.”

“You sound like the other Nicole,” I said weakly, trying to change the subject.  “The one in Hunter’s story.”

“No, I’m done with that Nicole.  Among other vanities, I’ve given up the notion that there’s some true plot that events have to follow.  If you search for what’s not there, you can be sure you’ll never find it.”

“Is that how you solved the mystery?”

“No,” she said, moving closer to Dubin.  “I solved the mystery by seeing what was in front of my face.  There’s nothing harder than seeing what’s in plain view.”  She brushed her hand across Dubin’s cheek, smoothing his moustache with her fingertips.  “Isn’t that right, Mr. Poe?”

That was the last time I saw Nicole.  The next week it was Valentine’s Day and she sent me a nice card
from New York, with a little note diplomatically omitting any mention of Dubin.  She reassured me that she was doing well and thanked me for the many hours I had spent with her.  “You made me see myself as a character in my own story,” she wrote.  “I’ll see you there for a long time to come, gently guiding me in the right direction, especially when someone else is trying to be the narrator of my life.  In his own way Hunter did the same thing for you, and I hope you can benefit from it as I did.  Here’s a little poem I wish I could claim for my own (actually it’s by William Blake):

The rules of dreaming

Are simple and few:

True is false,
and false is true;

Forgotten fire
lights

Each moment’s seeming,

And all that happens

Happens to you.

The End

Author’s Note
and Acknowledgements

I’ve dreamed of writing about
The Tales of Hoffmann
ever since I watched the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger film starring Moira Shearer and Robert Rounseville (the first of many performances I’ve seen of this beautiful work).  My interest in the opera led to a study of E.T.A. Hoffmann, a writer known in the English-speaking world almost entirely through derivative works (
The Tales of Hoffmann
,
The Nutcracker
, Kreisleriana,
Coppélia
, Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny”) and the stream of influence that traces back to him (Schumann, Poe, Baudelaire, Dumas, Offenbach, Dostoevsky).  Unconsciously standing knee-deep in that stream of influence, I recalled an image (Hoffmannesque, without my knowing it) which had occurred to me as an idea for a story: a patient in a mental hospital who sits down and flawlessly plays a difficult piece on the piano (it would have to be Kreisleriana), without the benefit of any musical training or experience.  Where did that music come from?  Where does any music come from?  Does it come from a higher, spiritual world (as Hoffmann and his Romantic contemporaries might have asked in the early nineteenth century)?  Or from deep in the unconscious (as Freud and other realists might have asked fifty years later)?

Such were the speculations that led me to
The Rules of Dreaming
.  I got off to a bad start by reading Hoffmann’s amazing but flawed novel,
Die Elixiere des Teufels
(translated as
The Devil’s Elixirs
by Ronald Taylor and recently reissued by OneWorld Classics; also available in a translation by Ian Sumter published by Grosvenor House and in an old and not very accurate translation entitled
The Devil’s Elixir
republished by BiblioBazaar), with its incoherent plot involving madness, murder and multiple identities.  Better to stick with the Offenbach opera, with its incoherent plot involving—madness, murder and multiple identities!  From there it was a small step to psychiatry, blackmail, puppetry, sexual obsession, past life regression, and the nature of evil.

Offenbach’s
Les Contes d’Hoffmann
has a fascinating history, much of which has come to light in recent years as new manuscripts have been discovered and published, by Michael Kaye, Fritz Oeser and others, resulting in innovative interpretations and a good deal of controversy.

A DVD recording of the Powell/Pressburger movie is available with an intriguing commentary by Martin Scorsese, whose film making has been influenced by a lifelong fascination with the opera and this
film.  Also well worth watching is the 1995 Opéra de Lyon production/adaptation based on the Michael Kaye edition, conducted by Kent Nagano and released on DVD under the title
Des Contes d’Hoffmann
.  In this version, Hoffmann is an inmate in an insane asylum.

I am greatly indebted to Heather Hadlock’s outstanding monograph,
Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann
(Princeton University Press, 2000), which contains a wealth of information and insights about the opera and its history.

Many of Hoffmann’s most characteristic stories are included in
The Best Tales of Hoffmann
, edited with an excellent introduction by E. F. Bleiler (Dover Publications, 1967).  Another collection in English is
Tales of Hoffmann
, selected and translated with an introduction by R.J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1982).

Freud’s classic essay, “The Uncanny,” is included in the collection entitled
The Uncanny
, translated by David McLintock (Penguin Books, 2003).

Bruce Hartman lives with his wife in Philadelphia.  His previous novel,
Perfectly Healthy Man Drops Dead
, was published by Salvo Press in 2008. Special thanks to Martha, Jack, Tom, Kelly and Isabel for helping pull this project through.

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