The Rules of Dreaming (10 page)

I had never actually met Peter Bartolli until the night appointed for the hypnosis session with Hunter.  It was a rainy, moonless night, with the north wind whisking in the first shudder of an autumn chill.  Bartolli appeared in my office shaking the rain from his black umbrella after having been spirited into the Institute’s
service entrance by Olympia.  The umbrella was almost as large as he was and it seemed to enfold him like a pair of black wings.  He kept it furled around him as he made his way down the darkened corridors to my office, presumably to avoid being identified by the staff.  But no one who’d ever seen him before could have failed to recognize his wiry frame or the agitated, insistent movements of his long, slender hands.  As he shook the rain off the umbrella and reached out to greet me, a wide smile stretched beneath his bottomless eyes.  “Dr. Hoffmann,” he said with an air of satisfaction.  “Peter Bartolli.  I’m so very pleased to meet you.”

Bartolli wore black shoes, black wool slacks and a black turtleneck.  But in spite of this lugubrious color scheme he projected a warmth that made me like him immediately.  He spoke perfect English—almost too precise to be perfect—but there was something Old World, possibly Middle European about him.  I tried to remember what Olympia had told me about his background.  “I’m delighted to meet you, doctor,” I said.  “Olympia has told me so much about you.”

“That’s unfortunate,” he said, making a face at his daughter.  Then he laughed, “I hope she didn’t tell you any of my secrets.”

Olympia joined in his laughter, and I took the cue and laughed too.  “Even though,” he winked, “she has told me all of yours.”

Olympia and her father enjoyed another round of laughter, though I felt like squirming out of the room.  Fortunately Hunter, who had been sitting quietly in the wing chair across from my desk, with his back turned to the door, chose that moment to make his presence known.  “Dr. Palmer!” he called out.  “Where’s Dr. Palmer!”

“Dr. Palmer is out of town,” I answered.  “He’s at a meeting in London.
He won’t be back till next week.”

Bartolli stepped forward and leaned around to face Hunter.  “Do you know me?”

“Excellent well, sir. You are a fishmonger.”

“Ha!” Bartolli smiled.  “Still playing Hamlet!”  He pulled up a small chair and sat down.  “No, Hunter, I’m Dr. Bartolli.  You remember me, don’t you?”

“Have you a daughter?”

“Yes.  You know Olympia, don’t you?”

“Let her not walk in the sun.”

Bartolli knew the script.  “Still harping on my daughter!”

Hunter laughed.  “Gone, far gone!”

Bartolli took his hand and squeezed it lightly.  “Yes, you’re gone, far gone, but you can come back if you do as I say.  You feel better lately, don’t you, Hunter?”

Hunter nodded.

“Well, tonight we’re going to try something a little different, and I think you’ll feel even better than you do.  We’re going to try to go back in time.  Would you like to do that?”

Hunter nodded again.

Bartolli signaled to Olympia and me to take seats in the back of the room where Hunter wouldn’t see us.  Before I sat down I pushed a button to start the tape recorder beside my desk.  “What I’d like you to do is just relax,” Bartolli said, gently laying Hunter’s hand on the arm of the wing chair.  “Close your eyes and just listen to my voice and relax. You know what ‘relax’ means.  It means not to worry about anything or care about anything or think about anything.  So just relax.  That’s right.  Just relax.”

Bartolli’s voice was so entrancing that even Olympia, sitting beside me in the back of the room, seemed to be drifting under his control.  I squeezed her hand and she jolted awake just as her father glanced in our direction to let us know that Hunter had fallen into the desired hypnotic state.  “Now let’s try to think back to an earlier age,” he said softly,  “a time when everything was different.  You’re still you, although you’re different too, and there you are and there’s everyone else and it’s an entirely different time and place.  Just relax, and in your mind look around you and try to tell us what you see.”

Hunter’s voice sounded low, almost growling.   “Dark,” he said. “Dingy.”

“It’s a dark and dingy place.  Where are you?”

“Noisy too.  Lots of men.”  He rolled his head from side to side, growling in that strange voice that none of us had ever heard before.  “Dancing in circles, drinking out of mugs.”

“You’re someplace dark and dingy and noisy where there are a lot of men dancing around drinking.  And are they saying anything?”

“Shouting.  Singing.  Drinking and singing and shouting.”

“Are they speaking English?”

“English, sure.  They’re speaking English.”

Bartolli leaned forward and lowered his voice.  “Can you tell us what you’re doing?”

“I just walked in.
I’m looking around.”

“When is all this happening?”

“Oh,” Hunter whispered, as if he didn’t want the men to overhear.  “It’s a long time ago.  A big barrel, men in funny clothes, drinking beer and jumping around singing and drinking beer.”

“Now if you could just go back and give us the whole picture again.”

“It’s a place like a bar, sort of dark, no windows, noisy...”

And so it went.  Bartolli had the uncanny ability to draw a
coherence out of Hunter’s “past life” that was completely absent from his present one.  Hunter answered his questions in meaningful phrases, sometimes even complete sentences, with none of the breathless gibberish that usually poured out of him.  It was as if he’d recaptured a life in which he was not schizophrenic—though the world he described was a very strange one indeed.  It was all as Olympia had predicted, but I could hardly believe my ears.  And as for Olympia: I had my hands full just trying to keep her out of Hunter’s trance.  She sat with her eyes closed, smiling, bobbing her head as she listened, and more than once I had to clamp down on her arm to keep her in her seat.

We recorded and transcribed the entire session, filling thirty-five pages with Hunter’s disconnected answers to Bartolli’s questions.  Let me try to give a condensed version, without all the fits and starts:

“I’m in a dark, dingy tavern filled with noisy men dancing and shouting, drinking and singing. It’s a long time ago, I don’t know where it is.  They’re speaking English, but their clothes look funny and old fashioned.  They’re singing some kind of drinking song, waving their beer mugs around in the air as they sing.  They shout at me when I arrive—it’s like they all know me—and I sit down at a big round table and drink a glass of wine, keeping my eye on an evil-looking man who wears a cape and a hat like George Washington’s.  Everyone’s laughing at a weird little midget who looks like a court jester.  The men light a fire in the middle of the table—it’s some kind of flaming punch—and we drink toasts and smoke pipes and talk about women. Everyone looks at me, and I offer to tell the story of the three women I have loved.”

At this point Hunter started shouting incoherently, almost violently, and Bartolli had to calm him down and renew the painstaking process of drawing out his memories one by one.  In fragmentary moments of lucidity over the next half hour, Hunter described the following scene:

“A beautiful young woman lies sleeping on a swinging couch, dressed in a kind of ballet dress.  I walk in with an old man, who refers to the young woman as his daughter, though she doesn’t wake up.  Another old man runs into the room, with white hair and long eyebrows that stick out in front of his face.  He shows me a pair of eyeglasses, and when I try them on the room comes to life.  The girl wakes up and the two old men fight over her—apparently each of them thinks she’s his daughter—and she starts dancing like a ballerina.  I’m in love with her, and before long we’re dancing together, she’s spinning me around and we whirl wildly down a long staircase.  Her father chases after us, shouting for us to stop.”

Hunter grew increasingly agitated as he related these events, and by the time the “father”—I couldn’t tell which one—started
chasing them down the stairs, he was shouting and gasping for breath and all the color had drained from his face, as if his deepest fears were being realized.  Bartolli had no choice but to pull him back from the regression and release him from the trance, and in a few minutes he had caught his breath and sat gazing around the room with his accustomed lack of affect.

I had never seen anything remotely like it.  To be sure, the second half of the narrative sounded more like a fantasy or a nightmare than a historical recollection, but for Hunter even that was a momentous leap forward.  He had gone “back in time” into a world that he could describe and other people could begin to understand.

It was time for Hunter to return to his room and go to bed.  I rang for Mrs. Paterson and she appeared so quickly that I wondered if she’d been listening outside the door.  She took Hunter’s hand and spoke softly to him, almost as if she were soothing a horse.  “Okay now Hunter.  It’s time to go back to your room.  Can you stand up?”  With Olympia’s aid, she stood him up, and the two of them walked him out of the room.

Dr.
Bartolli found his umbrella and stood by the door waiting for Olympia to return.  “You’ve seen something here tonight,” he said, “that I hope will change the way you think about your work with Hunter.  We’ve already brought him a few steps closer to the real world.  Don’t you agree?”

“The real world?” I laughed.  “What he described was some kind of bizarre fantasy world that’s not a whole lot different from the one he usually lives in.”

“No.  But at least it was describable.  At least he could paint a picture of himself dancing with the girl and trying to escape.”

In Olympia’s absence I felt I could speak freely to Bartolli, as one physician to another.   “It seems to me,” I said cautiously, “that you’re just layering one form of delusion on top of another.”

“This is no delusion.”

“Surely you don’t expect me to believe in reincarnation?”

Bartolli nodded respectfully, dismissing my skepticism with the authority of his imperious eyes.  “Not in any literal sense,” he allowed.  “But psychologically each of us is reincarnated many times a day, forging new personalities that operate outside of our own experience.  You see the extreme forms of this in bipolar disorder, multiple-personality disorder, the savant syndrome.  Schizophrenia, or spirit possession as it is known in some cultures.”

Before I could respond, Olympia appeared at the door and took her father’s hand.  “
We’ve got to be going,” she said.

He smiled at his daughter and then back at me.  “Memories are built along the
same lines as dreams,” he said.  “Little pieces of the past are floating around in the world we experience, waiting to coalesce into a memory in the same way that little pieces of memory coalesce into a dream.”

Olympia tugged at his arm.  “Come on, Dad.
  It’s ten o’clock.”

“In other words,” he smiled, disappearing with his daughter out into the rainy night, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on.  And right now it’s time for my little life to be rounded with some sleep.”

Chapter 10

Dubin had been brooding about the Offenbach letter he’d found circled in the Stephen Witz catalog at the library.  “There was someone who really wanted it,” Witz had told him—and it was probably someone right here in Egdon who had kept
Maria Morgan’s obsession with
The Tales of Hoffmann
alive for seven years.  That letter, if he could find it, might be the kind of tangible evidence he needed to link the past to the present.  In his business suspicions, beliefs, even certainties, had no value: letters, diaries, photographs, were the only things you could put a price tag on, and they usually turned up in the same place.  Who bought the Offenbach letter?  Was it Avery Morgan?  The dealer would never tell, and Susan probably didn’t know.  There was only one thing left to do.  He would have to ask Avery Morgan himself.

He called the house—luckily the au pair answered—and asked to speak to Mr. Morgan.

“Who’s calling, please?”

“This is Stephen Witz, in New York.  I have personal business with Mr. Morgan.”

Morgan took his time coming to the phone.  “Hello?”  He seemed surprised, even a little annoyed, to receive the call.  That was a good sign, Dubin thought.  It meant he didn’t speak to the autograph dealer very often.

“Mr. Morgan,” Dubin said, “this is Stephen Witz in New York.  The autograph dealer?”

“Oh, sure.  How are you?”

“Very well.  And yourself?”

“Fine, thank you.  What can I do for you?”

“Mr. Morgan, I’m calling about the letter you purchased last year.  A related  manuscript may be coming on the market, the
manuscript mentioned in the letter.  It’s an important item, and I wondered if—”

“I’m a little confused,” Morgan interrupted.  “What letter are you talking about?”

“The Offenbach letter you purchased last year.  Jacques Offenbach to Albert Wolff,  August 28, 1880.”

A long silence.  Morgan must have been more than a little confused.  “There must be some mistake,” he finally said.  “I haven’t purchased any Offenbach materials from you.  Or from anyone else. You know I only collect Americana.”

“Perhaps I’m mistaken, but my records show that you purchased the letter.”

“You are mistaken. Mr. Witz.  And your records are inaccurate.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“You know my collecting interests.  If you get anything I’d be interested in, please send me a note.  But if it’s not in my area, I’d rather not be bothered.”

When the conversation ended, Dubin picked up the phone again to dial information.  There were two other people he wanted to talk to.  One was Casimir Ostrovsky, the opera director who selected Maria Morgan for her last role as the female lead in Offenbach’s
Tales of Hoffmann
.  The other was Frank Lynch, the retired cop who investigated her death.

*   *   *

Frank Lynch had retired down to the Jersey shore and now occupied himself with fishing.  He and his wife shared a mobile home in Toms River backing on a lagoon where he docked his 20-foot Grady.  Dubin sat waiting for him on the patio behind the house, sipping a glass of lemonade supplied by Mrs. Lynch, a talkative lady who quickly made it clear that she had no interest in fishing.  When Dubin told her why he wanted to talk to her husband she also lost interest in talking and disappeared into the house, leaving Dubin to pass the time with a restless labrador retriever who eyed him expectantly but seemed totally at a loss for words. 

It was an unusually warm day for October, and unusually humid for that time of year.  The afternoon sun slanted through the heavy salt air, stifling the lagoon in an oppressive silence.  A few seagulls hovered indifferently while others waited on the pylons that marked the entrance to the bay.  Dubin stood up to peer through the mist and across the bay to the barrier island with its amusement rides and white vacation homes crowded along the shore.  After half an hour Frank Lynch chugged into the lagoon standing in the rear of the Grady like a gondolier cruising the canals of Venice.  He was in his mid-fifties, tall and a little ungainly, with a toothy smile that had a couple of blank spaces in it.  His smile faded when Dubin told him why he was there.

“You a private cop?”

“No.  I’m a writer.  I’m writing a story about her for
New York
magazine.”

Lynch ignored him while he finished mooring the boat and cleaned a coolerful of fish in an outdoor sink.  The seagulls swooped around him but he didn’t seem to notice.  “Could you use a couple of bluefish?”

Dubin shrugged.  “Sure.”

“We’ve got enough in the freezer to make it to the next Ice Age.  How about a beer?”

Lynch took his fish into the house and came back out with a six-pack of Coors Light.  They sat in folding chairs facing the steamy lagoon, as if they were talking about fishing or baseball.

“So what do you think I can tell you about
Maria Morgan that you don’t already know?”

“I’ve heard a lot about her, but it’s all the official version.  I thought maybe you could give me a few more details.”

“Details.”  Lynch tilted his head upwards and poured one of the beers down his throat.  “You want to know what color her face was?  Were her eyes bulging out?  That sort of thing?”

Dubin took his time answering.  “I might be interested in those types of details if you think they’re significant.”

“Significant?” 

“Yeah.  Significant.”

Lynch crushed his empty beer can with one hand and popped open another one.  “Why don’t you talk to the police?”

“I did,” Dubin said.  “The new chief”—Dubin pretended to be searching through his notes—“what’s his name?”

“Wozniak.”

“Wozniak
.  He seemed to think your investigation left something to be desired, and he said you’d retired and moved away.  I had the feeling he was trying to get rid of me.”

Lynch sat quietly for along time, emptying and crushing one beer can after another until the whole six pack was gone.  “Stay here,” he finally said, and he went inside the house.

When he came back out he was carrying a cardboard box full of files and loose papers, which he set down next to the patio table.  “I kept copies of all my notes.”  A mischievous grin flashed across his face.  “You know, to wrap fish in and stuff.”

Digging through the box, he found a manila folder labeled “Morgan” and handed it to Dubin.  “You can look at the stuff in this file,” he said, “but don’t ask to take it with you.”

When Dubin opened the file, the first thing he saw was Maria Morgan’s autopsy report.

“And if you find something,” Lynch went on, still grinning, ”and you tell anybody you got it from me, I swear to God I’ll cut your balls off and use them for bait.”

Dubin spent the next hour reading—and in some cases, copying into his notebook—the documents in Lynch’s file.  There was the death certificate, the autopsy report, the police incident report, notes of dozens of interviews Lynch had conducted after Maria Morgan’s death.  He had talked to everyone—Avery Morgan, Mrs. Paterson, the twins Hunter and Antonia, the opera director Casimir Ostrovsky, and a “Susan McGuire,” identified as a “babysitter” but presumably the current Mrs. Morgan, as well as a number of other people Dubin had never heard of.  At the bottom of the pile Dubin found Lynch’s notes on the room where the death had occurred, the upstairs studio in the barn Dubin had visited twice with Susan.  Lynch had made a meticulous inventory of everything he saw in that room, including the title of every book and the length of all the scuff marks and dents on the floor and furniture, and Dubin spent twenty minutes copying it word for word into his notebook.

While Dubin worked, Lynch hosed off his boat and tinkered with the engine, whistling some old tune that Dubin didn’t quite recognize.  Each note of the tune seemed to hang in the heavy air like a seagull before drifting away.

“Can I ask you some questions?” Dubin asked when he had finished.

“You can ask but I probably won’t answer,” Lynch said.

Dubin ignored his warning.  “This autopsy report—”

“You can forget about that,” Lynch interrupted.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a piece of crap.”

It was a little less still now.  Dubin could hear waves nibbling at the edge of the lagoon. 

“Here,” Lynch said.  With his big hands, he picked up the bluefish he had cleaned for Dubin and wrapped it in the autopsy report, sealing the package with white freezer tape.  “I told you that’s what I saved this stuff for.”

Dubin thanked him and said good-bye.  The smothering air, the stinking fish, the jeering gulls—all this made him want to get as far away from there as possible.  Lynch wasn’t going to tell him anything he didn’t already know.

After a few minutes he stopped his car and dumped the bluefish in the weeds by the side of the road.  He salvaged what he could of the autopsy report, but most of it was illegible.  The seagulls, which must have followed him from Lynch’s house, swooped down and encircled him with their shameless gaze.  Like blackmailers, he thought.  Predatory but always afraid.

* * *

I really didn’t know what to make of Peter Bartolli.  Was he a wise, all-knowing Prospero, as he pretended—that little quote from
The Tempest
about “such stuff as dreams are made on” was totally predictable—or just a fatuous windbag, a Polonius, as Hunter implied in his quotations from
Hamlet?

Those questions, I admit, came from Nicole, not from me.  She’s the one who recognized the quotations and proposed some analogies between certain Shakespeare plays and recent happenings at the Institute.  I had been unable to resist telling her about Hunter’s past life regression at her next session.  After a bit of maneuvering on her part, I even let her read the transcript.  Admittedly this was unprofessional, even unethical, but I felt I needed her input—the only other person I could have confided in was Gottlieb, and that would have been suicidal.  Nicole seemed fascinated by my depiction of Hunter falling under Bartolli’s hypnotic spell and she read the transcript with total absorption in about five minutes. But her main interest in the event seemed to be what it showed about my relationship with Olympia.

“Are you sure you want to be going down this path?” she asked, boring her eyes into mine.

“What do you mean?”

“This whole thing was Olympia’s idea, wasn’t it?”

“No, not at all.  Her father’s been wanting to do a regression on Hunter ever since he worked here.”

“Uh, huh,” she nodded.  “But it was Olympia who got you involved.”

“Sure, she’s the one who asked me.  I’d never met Bartolli until the other night.”

“Don’t you see?  That’s why he sent her here in the first place.”

“Sent her?”

“Of course he sent her.  To get power over you—and it worked.  Are you going to let him come back and finish the job?”

“I’m thinking about it.  You realize”—I lowered my voice, realizing at once how absurd that was since we were sitting in my office with the door shut—“that this is not for public consumption.  Dr. Palmer doesn’t know anything about it and he would be furious if he found out.”   I glanced at my watch, even though I could see the wall clock behind my desk.  “I’m afraid our time is up.”

She stood up awkwardly, perhaps embarrassed by the abrupt way I had dismissed her.  I realized at once that I had overreacted.

“Nicole,” I said gently,  “I’d like you to come back sooner than a week this time.  Today’s Wednesday.  Could you come in again on Saturday?”

“I think so.”

I reached for my calendar.  “How about Saturday afternoon?  Would two o’clock be all right?”

As I wrote up my notes of that session with Nicole, I realized that she was tottering on the edge.  Some of the things she’d said when we were discussing the past life regression—not to mention her fixation on Olympia—told me that trouble was on the way.  My intuition was borne out on Saturday afternoon when she returned for the visit we had scheduled for 2:00 o’clock.  Since Nicole’s actions leading up to that visit are so important—and since she described them to me in detail on several occasions—I will try to relate them just as they occurred, saving my own comments for later.

She left her apartment a little after 1:00 o’clock and stopped at a specialty market to pick up a few things she needed.  When she returned to her car it was after 1:30, and the weekly broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera was on the radio.  According to Nicole, the featured work was
The Tales of Hoffmann
by Jacques Offenbach with an all-star cast.  Nicole could hear the audience buzzing and the orchestra tuning up as the announcer delivered a synopsis of the first two acts.  “The curtain rises on Luther’s tavern in Nuremberg,” the announcer said, “where a chorus of lively spirits celebrate the arrival of the poet Hoffmann and his servant Nicklausse.…”

As Nicole listened she felt her head swimming and her chest tightening.  She pulled the car over to the side of the road, her mouth parched, her face flushed, and tried to concentrate on what the announcer was saying:  “Act Two begins in the home of the inventor Spalanzani, who has constructed a mechanical doll so
lifelike that he introduces it to Hoffmann as his daughter Olympia....”