The Rules of Dreaming (7 page)

Miss Whipple had recommended a battered old book from the Classics section, the sole volume remaining
from a complete set of the writings of Alexandre Dumas, author of 
The Count of Monte Cristo
.  This volume contained a short novel entitled
La Femme au Colliers de Velour
—“The Woman With the Velvet Necklace”—and its protagonist was none other than E.T.A. Hoffmann.  Nicole read the novel twice in growing astonishment.  The Hoffmann in this story is an aspiring artist who leaves his fiancée—a musician’s daughter named Antonia—and  journeys to Paris during the darkest days of the Reign of Terror.  There he falls in love with a ballerina who is really an automaton under the control of a mysterious doctor.   One night he finds the ballerina in a daze beneath the guillotine and brings her to his hotel where she seems to revive.  They dance wildly, but he is haunted by the fear that she is not really alive—and in the morning, when the doctor removes her velvet necklace, her head rolls off onto the floor.

All the characteristic themes and elements of Hoffmann’s tales were there—a sinister doctor, an eccentric musician with a daughter named Antonia, a ballerina who may or may not be an automaton.  Madness, hypnosis, love at first sight.  Unexplainable synchronicities.  Drunkenness, madness, and the suggestion (after the doctor rescues Hoffmann from the guillotine) that much of the preceding narrati
ve was the raving of a madman.

“It’s as if Hoffmann has come full circle,” Nicole thought, “to become a characte
r in his own nightmare world.”

Dubin had been sitting in his car outside Nicole’s
apartment house since his return from the city.  He knew she was there because he’d watched her jog around the corner in her running clothes and let herself in through the side door that led up to her garret.  Dusk had fallen but no lights had come on in the apartment.  Had she gone straight to bed?  Dubin slipped out of his car and strolled around the building, peering upward as if to glimpse the rising moon.  He could see the bluish glow of a computer screen in one of the windows.  Pushing the side door open, he crept up the dark staircase to her door.  He knew exactly what he was going to do.  When he knocked, he could hear the floor creaking inside as she edged warily toward the door.  Then suddenly the door flew open and she stood facing him in wide-eyed amazement. 

From that moment nothing happened the way he had planned or expected.

“Edgar Allan Poe!” she exclaimed.  “I knew it was only a matter of time before you’d come knocking on my door!”

Chapter
7

“Edgar Allan Poe?”

Dubin stood frozen in the doorway staring back at Nicole as if she’d caught him in the middle of some unspeakable crime. 

“Just joking,” Nicole smiled, her emerald eyes twinkling in the dim light.  “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that you look like Edgar Allan Poe?”

“Yes, actually, someone has,” he stammered, trying to smile.  “But why did you expect Poe to show up at your door?”

“It’s a long story,” she laughed.  “I’m sorry.  What can I do for you?”

“My name is Dubin and I—”

“
Dubin
!” She said the name as if it were French, with the accent on the second syllable.  “That’s perfect!  Are you a detective?”

“Y
es, as a matter of fact, I am.”

“And tell me, are you working with the
préfecture du police?
”

“The police?  No, I despise the police.”

“Ah!  You despise the police!  Just as I’d expect!”

Dubin grimaced.  “Would you m
ind telling me what’s going on?”

“I’m sorry!  You poor man!  Please come in.”

Nicole led him through the dimly-lit apartment to the cluttered kitchen table, where she offered him a seat.  “Don’t mind me at all.  I’ve been going stir crazy up here trying to think of a topic for my dissertation and I have Edgar Allan Poe and Alexandre Dumas and E.T.A. Hoffmann on the brain.  Can I get you some tea?”

He smiled and hesitantly sat down while she poured two mugs of tea from a ceramic tea pot.  “You arrived at a perfect time,” she said, perching on the chair across from him.  “I just had a brilliant
inspiration for my thesis topic.  I even have a title: Authors as Characters, Characters as Authors:  The Semiotics of Authorship in Literary Romance.  Isn’t that fantastic?”

“Yes,” he said.  “That sounds fantastic.”

“It’s about writers appearing as characters in other writers’ fictional works, where they meet characters from their own stories who were based on people they knew in real life, only now they’re characters in somebody’s else’s story, not their own, and—well, you can see how convoluted it gets and why I could imagine that you were Edgar Allan Poe knocking on my door and why sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“Sure.”

“And you probably know,” she added, “that I actually am a little crazy, don’t you?  Or used to be.  You must work for the Institute.”

“The Palmer Institute?  No, I have no connection with the Institute.”

“Oh.  Then why have you been following me around?”

Dubin shifted uncomfortably in his chair.  “You’ve noticed, then?”

She nodded, keeping her eyes locked on his.  “It’s been fairly obvious.  The Seven Eleven.  The laundromat.  Sitting out there in your BMW.  I thought you must be working for Dr. Hoffmann.”

“Dr. Hoffmann?”  The name surprised him, but he tried not to show it.  “Not at all.  It’s an investigation into something that happened a long time ago.  Something that has nothing to do with you.”

She seemed confused, even a little alarmed.  “Then why are you here?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you about the investigation.  But I was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”

“OK.”  She glanced around nervously.  “But I hope it won’t take too long.  I was working.”

“No problem,” Dubin smiled.  “It’ll just take a few minutes.  What I wanted to ask you about is the Morgan twins.  Hunter and
Antonia.  Did you meet them while you were staying at the Institute?”

“Sure.  They were my best friends.”

“Then they’re fairly normal?”

Nicole grinned as if the question was a joke.  “Antonia never speaks—she hasn’t said a word in years, according to Dr. Hoffmann.  Though sometimes she sings quite beautifully when she thi
nks no one is listening.”

“And Hunter?”

“Hunter tries on a different identity every day, as casually as other people change their socks.  And he never stops talking.  They all think he’s talking gibberish, but most of what he says is quotations from Shakespeare or something else he’s watched on a video.”

“Do the doctors know that?”

“I tried to tell Dr. Hoffmann,” she laughed, “but he thought I was crazy.  They think Hunter has a memory disturbance.  He can’t remember the most basic facts about himself, like what he was doing yesterday, so how could he memorize the works of Shakespeare from watching videos?”

“That’s a good question.”

“What the doctors don’t seem to appreciate is that for Hunter it’s not a matter of memory.  The reason he can’t remember what he was doing yesterday is that he was a different person yesterday, or any number of different people.  So it’s hardly fair to expect him to remember, is it?  I mean, would it be fair to ask you to remember what I was doing yesterday?”

“No, I see what—”

“If you weren’t stalking me, that is.”  She frowned at Dubin with mock indignation.  “Admittedly that’s a special case.”

“Right.”

“And lately Hunter has started playing the piano.  Schumann’s Kreisleriana.”

“From memory?”

“No one has any idea where it came from.”

Dubin sensed that he was finally getting somewhere.  “And what about their father?  Avery Morgan.  Have you met him?”

“Sure.  He comes to see his kids every day.  Sort of a squeaky, ungainly man.  But he’s very nice, actually.  Seems to really care about them.”

Nicole picked up her teapot and carried it back to the stove.  “I think our time is up,” she said.  “I have to get back to work.”

“Just one last question?”

She smiled indulgently, as if she had been humoring Dubin and not the other way around.  “All right.  A short one.”

“Do you know who Maria Morgan was?”

“She was Hunter and Antonia’s mother.  She committed suicide a long time ago.”

“Did you ever hear anyone talking about her?  Or the way she died?”

“No.  They wouldn’t talk about anything like that with the patients.”

Dubin hesitated in the doorway before retreating down the dark stairs.  Nicole looked small and beautiful and somehow heroic in her cluttered apartment.  He said good-bye, he thanked her for her time, but there was still one thing he needed to ask before he left.  “Why would Dr. Hoffmann arrange for someone to follow you around and spy on you?”

“I don’t know,” she sighed.  “I guess I’m a little paranoid.”

*   *   *

Living at the Institute, ironically, was taking its toll on my mental health.  The isolated setting, the hushed, padded corridors, the inexorable routine of endless days and boring nights (punctuated by my obsessive encounters with Olympia), and in general the atmosphere of suspension and futility that permeated the place—all of these, week after week, made it difficult for me to maintain a sense of reality.  Add the cynicism of the staff and the hopelessness of the patients—in spite of the chemical warfare that was designed to obliterate it, you could read the despair in their toneless voices
and their empty eyes—and I can only say it’s a wonder I was able to avoid psychological contagion as long as I did.  Like all psychiatrists, I had undergone extensive psychotherapy as part of my training, and I’d learned some things about myself that I preferred not to think about.  In fact my therapist,  Dr. Neuberger, had recommended that I continue seeing him even after I finished my residency, but of course that was impossible now that I was living at the Institute.  There must have been something in the dark, asphyxiating atmosphere of that place that triggered a recurrence of the symptoms Dr. Neuberger had been so concerned about.  I wish I could have stepped back and looked at myself with the practiced eye I focused on my patients.

The first sign of trouble was a sense of foreboding, a malaise of impending evil and shame.  Around the beginning of October
, I had my first nightmare.  It was after one of those marathon sessions with Olympia, though I doubt if she noticed—she’d dropped almost instantaneously from orgiastic excitement into a deep sleep.  Exhausted but still aroused, I listened to the rhythm of her mechanical breathing and imagined myself climbing an endless series of numbered steps that rose through a dark tower.  At the top of the steps I came to a door, which looked like one of the doors at the Institute.  It was the door to the twins’ nurse’s—Mrs. Paterson’s—room.  I knocked politely and when there was no answer I quietly opened the door and stepped inside.  Mrs. Paterson was lying on top of her bed, fully clothed even though it was the middle of the night.  With the back of my hand I touched her forehead and it felt cold.  I picked up her wrist and tried to take her pulse, but she had no pulse. She was dead.  There was an empty bottle of pills and a glass of water on the night table.

Then I did something I am ashamed to relate.  I wish I could say that the person in the dream wasn’t really me.  But the first rule of dreaming—and there are many of them, as I’ve come to realize—is that in a dream you’re always yourself.  No excuses are possible.  Even if you dream that you’re someone else, or you say to yourself, ‘I’m only dreaming,’ you’re really you and you’re really
doing what you seem to be doing.  And what did I do?  When I was sure the nurse was dead, I pulled the nylon belt out of my bathrobe and tied a noose on one end.  I slipped the noose around her neck, lifted her over my shoulders and carried her into the bathroom.  Then I wrapped the other end of the cord around the light fixture and tightened it until her feet were dangling a few inches above the floor.  I tied the cord to the light fixture and waited until the body had stopped swaying.

There was a mirror in the bathroom.  It was behind me, on the door to the medicine cabinet.  I knew the mirror was there and before I left the room I glanced over my shoulder, the way I used to do when I was a teenager, just to see what I looked like when I struck a certain pose.  Ned Hoffmann, I’d say.  This is what Ned Hoffmann looks like.  But the person I saw in the mirror—just for a flash before the image jolted me awake—was Hunter Morgan.
 

I lay sweating beside Olympia on the narrow bed, my heart pounding.  I was afraid to move.  I couldn’t hear Olympia breathing, just the ticking of a clock—and my own screaming thoughts.  Why did I do that to Mrs. Paterson?  Had anyone been watching?  Don’t tell anyone, whatever you do, even Olympia—especially Olympia.  I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep
, and when I closed my eyes I saw the body dangling from the light fixture.  Only now it didn’t look like Mrs. Paterson—it looked like Maria Morgan.

It was only a dream, I told
myself.  And it wasn’t even me.

The morning after
that first nightmare, I made a point of being especially friendly to Mrs. Paterson in the dining room.  As usual she sat with Hunter and Antonia, sipping her coffee and helping them concentrate on their breakfasts.  She suddenly seemed small and vulnerable, and when I remembered my dream I felt small and vulnerable too.  Mrs. Paterson smiled when she noticed me staring at their table, and I smiled back as amiably as I could.  But I avoided her eyes and when I passed a mirror on my way back upstairs I looked away, for fear of seeing the image of Hunter I’d seen in the mirror in my dream.

Late one nigh
t Olympia and I were snuggling in her bed, talking about the progress of Hunter’s therapy.  “Have you considered doing a past life regression?” she asked, quite seriously.

“A what?”  I knew what she meant but I wanted to express my skepticism as forcefully as possible.

“A past life regression,” she repeated, sitting up to face me.  “You hypnotize the patient and take them back to a prior life, where you can find the source of their bad karma.  My father does it all the time.”

Peter Bartolli.  No wonder Dr. Palmer had warned me about him.  “Sorry,” I said.  “I’m not a witch doctor.”

“My Dad thinks it’s the only way you’re going to find the explanation for Hunter’s piano playing.”

“What do you mean?  He played the piano in a past life?”

“He keeps playing a piece by somebody named Schumann, right?”

“So I’m told.”

“Well, maybe Hunter was Schumann.  Or maybe part of him was Schumann, or somebody else who played Schumann’s works.”

“The possibilities are endless.”

Irony was lost on Olympia.  “They are,” she nodded.  “That’s why you’ve really got to do the regression.  You said yourself the piano playing could be the key to Hunter’s psychosis.”

“I don’t believe in reincarnation.”

“Metempsychosis,” she said, correcting me.  “Technically, what we’re talking about isn’t reincarnation.  It’s metempsychosis.  It’s Greek; from the Greek.  M-E-T-E-M-P-S...”

“It’s definitely a psychosis.”

“It’s not a psychosis.  It’s the transmigration of souls, and it’s completely normal.”

I stopped her chatter with a kiss, followed by a passionate embrace that carried both of us quickly away from the impasse we
had reached in our conversation.  I loved her in spite of her nutty ideas, or maybe even because of them.  She pulled off my shirt, and I gently removed hers.  She ran her lips down my neck and across my breast, and I covered her body with kisses.  I felt a stirring inside me that brought my lips back to hers.  She pulled away, rolling on top of me.  “About that past life regression,” she purred, stroking my breast.  “Won’t you do it?  Won’t you do it for me?”