The Rules of Dreaming (20 page)

Chapter 24

One morning Julietta greeted me wearing a gaudy new necklace.  “These are diamonds,” she said, her eyes glistening.  “Eighteen carats.”  She pulled back her sweater so I could get a better view of the necklace.

“Did Gottlieb give you that?”

“I’m not saying.  An admirer like you.  And if you buy me something this nice, I’ll personally come down to your room to thank you for it.”

“Is this what Gottlieb does?  He pays you for sex—”

“Shhh!” she hushed me.  “Who said anything about sex?  Now get out of here and let me do my work.”

The phone rang and she answered it, dropping into a conversation with one of her girlfriends.  As she spoke she held the telephone receiver clamped under her chin so she could continue with her “work,” which consisted of filing her nails into stiletto points.  I started down the hall toward my room, hoping in some foolish way that Julietta would follow me, even though it was ten o’clock in the morning.  But when I turned around I saw Gottlieb lolling in front of her desk, exactly as I’d been doing a few minutes before—smiling as I’d been smiling, gesturing as I’d been gesturing, like a monstrous reflection that had finally been released from the agony of the mirrors to ape my steps.  And Julietta was laughing, chatting merrily, just as she’d been doing with me a moment earlier.  My fingers tightened around the knife in my pocket and my vision clouded.  I ran to my room and slammed the door behind me.

It was during our next session that I finally understood how far away Nicole was from being able to function in the real world.  She took a seat across from my desk as she always did, and after a friendly greeting I sat quietly waiting for her to begin the conversation.  Admittedly I was distracted by my own problems and I might have been a little less warm and forthcoming than usual.

“God is a comedian performing for an audience that refuses to laugh,” she said solemnly.

Neither the tone nor the content of what she said surprised me.  In our last session she had cried hysterically when we talked about the death of her brother, and so I took her solemnity at face value.

She held her stern expression as long as she could and then burst out laughing.  “Rousseau said that,” she giggled.  “Not me.”

I was not amused.

“You’re one of the people who refuses to laugh,” she teased.

I managed a weak smile.  “You think of life as a comedy?”

“No, not a comedy, exactly.  But somewhere there’s an intelligence at work—probably not God or the Devil, just some indifferent cosmic scribe writing and rewriting the book of the world in a thousand different plots and a thousand different styles.  And I’m one of the very, very minor characters.”

“The book of the world,” I nodded.  Accustomed to her habit of seeing the world in literary terms, I assumed I could safely indulge her in this metaphor.  I had no idea that I was following her right down the rabbit hole.  “What kind of book is that?  A mystery?  A tragedy?”

“True Crime.  That’s what Miss Whipple would have called it.”

“Does that imply that the entire world is based on crime?”

“Not everything fits into that category.  For example, if you asked me about what’s been going on around here lately, I’d have to classify it as Post-Modern Neo-Gothic Horror.”

“Horror?”

“Sure.”  Reaching in her jeans pocket, she pulled out a crumpled piece of writing paper which she then ironed flat on her knee.  “Would you like to hear a synopsis?”

I suppressed a thrill of expectation mixed with dread.  This was the first time she’d offered to share any of her writing with me.  “Sure.  Go ahead.”

“’A beautiful opera singer hangs herself on the eve of her debut at the Met.  Seven years later the opera she was rehearsing—Offenbach’s
Tales of Hoffmann
—begins to take over the lives of her two schizophrenic children, the doctors who treat them and everyone else who crosses their paths, until all are enmeshed in a world of deception and delusion, of madness and ultimately of evil and death.  Onto this shadowy stage steps Nicole P., a graduate student who discovers that she too has been assigned a role in the drama.  What strange destiny is being worked out in their lives?’”

She stared at me as if she expected an answer.  “I don’t believe in stories taking over people’s lives,” I said.

“You believe in madness, don’t you?  What is madness but a story breaking through from the other side?”

It was time to pull Nicole away from literary fantasy and back to her own life and emotions.  “Obviously you feel very close to Hunter,” I said.  “You want to help him, to save him, probably because of what happened
to your brother and what you—”

“Hunter isn’t the only character in the story,” she interrupted.  “There’s Antonia, who can’t speak but could sing if her father and her doctors would let her.  There’s Peter Bartolli and his otherworldly daughter who dances around the Institute like a sex-crazed wind-up doll.”

“Let’s not go into that.”

“And there’s you, Dr. Ned Hoffmann, who must struggle with his ill-fated loves—artiste, ingénue and
courtisane
—whoever they may turn out to be.”

I rose to my feet, ready to end the session if she pursued her usual trick of turning the spotlight on me.

“And of course there’s me.”

“Yes,” I agreed, a little embarrassed to have reacted so abruptly.  I sat back down.  “And what’s your role in the story?”

“I stumbled into all this blindly—against my will, in fact—when I was brought to the Institute in the middle of a mental breakdown that I can hardly remember.  It’s obvious now that I’m here to play the role of Nicklausse, the faithful handmaiden of the other characters’ self-destruction.  I know what’s going on, even if they don’t.  I’m a Cassandra who can foresee what’s about to happen to them but I can’t prevent it because no one will listen to me.”

She seemed to have finished, but her words hung in the air like a half-finished cadence, impatient for resolution.  “Even if I knew who the killer was, no one would listen to me.”

That was my last session with Nicole before I left for Venice—in fact the last time I saw her until this morning when she finally succeeded in tracking me down.  We had an awkward moment when I tried to escort her out of my office.

A few steps from the door she suddenly stopped and pointed at an empty spot on the wall.  “What became of the mirror that used to hang there?”

I tried to keep her moving towards the door.  “Well, that’s all the time we have for today.  I’m sure that next week—”

“It’s already happened, hasn’t it?  She’s stolen your reflection.”

I held the door open and nudged her out into the hall. “Actually, our next session won’t be for two weeks.  Next week I’ll be on vacation.”

“You’re going to Venice, aren’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“You’re following her to Venice.”

“Please!”  I whispered.  “Keep your voice down.  People will think you’re crazy.”

It was ridiculous, perhaps, but true.  I was leaving for Venice on Sunday, flying Air France to Paris and then connecting to Venice on Alitalia.  I had told Dr. Palmer about a psychiatric conference and I suppose that even in my own mind I imagined that my trip had a professional purpose.  But I’d made a point to reserve my room at the same hotel
where Gottlieb had booked his “Romantic Getaway Vacation For Two.”   In the meantime my headaches and nightmares grew more frequent and intense. Every night I had the same dream: a woman hanging from the ceiling, her hands motionless at her side.  I touch her and she sways slightly, rotating towards me.  In a mirror on the wall I can see her face: she is bloated, unrecognizable—it’s not Mrs. Paterson, but someone else.  There’s another figure in the mirror, standing beside her, touching her, spinning her around.  Is that me?   No, I tell myself, it couldn’t be—Julietta has stolen my reflection.  It must be someone else.

*   *   *

It was the last time Dubin and Nicole discussed the murders—and by this time there was no doubt in Nicole’s mind that what they were talking about were murders.  Four o’clock in the morning, Nicole in a playful mood, Dubin a little vulnerable.  They’d split a bottle of chardonnay and for the first time Nicole felt that their relationship could turn in an amorous direction.  He wasn’t the kind of man she usually found attractive, but that was probably a good thing, given her track record with men she found attractive.  A little too old and careworn, he was, and far too cynical.  And the resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe would definitely count as a negative on those long winter evenings when you didn’t want your life to read like a horror story.  Then there was this matter of his being some kind of criminal—a blackmailer, Frank Lynch had told her.  Blackmailers generally aren’t the right sort of people, and Dubin was definitely cynical enough to be one.  But what about all the kindness he’d shown her?  And the sense of honor he tried so hard to conceal behind his cynicism?

They sat side by side on the couch, almost touching.  The night’s conversation had seemingly run its course.  Playfully, perversely, she decided that it was time for a test.

“If this were a detective story,” she said, “we’d consider all the possibilities.  No one would be beyond suspicion, even ourselves.  Especially ourselves, if we were using the tools of post-modernist critical theory.”

Dubin seemed more bored than curious.  “What are you talking about?”

“For example,” she asked, “how do I know you’re not the murderer?”   In spite of her playful smile she made it clear that she was waiting for an answer.

“Are you serious?”

“I’ve heard that you’re a blackmailer.”

“Who told you that?”

“Never mind who told me.  Is it true?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Naturally if you were a blackmailer you’d deny it.”

Dubin shifted around to face her, trying to see if this was just one of
her pranks.  She looked away.

“All right,” he said evenly.  “Just for the sake of argument, assume I am a blackmailer.  What I’ve been focusing on is the death of
Maria Morgan.  So I couldn’t very well be the one who killed her, could I?  Or the others, for that matter.  I’d have to be blackmailing myself.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Nicole said.
“In literature and probably in life as well.  Maybe, for you, blackmail is an elaborate form of denial and defense, a game of cat and mouse between yourself and the rest of the world.  Or maybe it’s an indirect form of confession—don’t criminals really want to get caught?—or just a convoluted way of returning to the scene of the crime.”

He ventured a smile.  “This is really very funny.”

“Or maybe on the subconscious level you imagine that you can expiate your sins by exacting blood money from someone else for the crime you committed.”

“I’d prefer to stay on the conscious level, if you don’t mind.”  He was still smiling but he sounded annoyed.
  “My subconscious isn’t someplace you’d want to go.”

“In that case the whole thing would appear to be even more cunning and diabolical.  You could be trying to pin the blame on someone who isn’t guilty by blackmailing them for your crimes.  If they pay you, that would look like an admission of guilt and then you could say what you said a few minutes ago—that you couldn’t possibly be guilty of murder and blackmail at the same time.”

“I didn’t even know I was a suspect.”

Nicole laughed.  “The killer is always the last person you’d suspect, isn’t it?  If you’re the detective, that would be yourself.”

Dubin’s smile had faded.  “It’s getting light,” he said, standing up to leave.  “I’d better be going.”

Nicole sat on the edge of her bed, lighting matches one after the other and letting them drop to the floor as they started to singe her fingers.  She felt bad about driving Dubin away, yet grateful for his absence.  This was the most difficult part of her day and she needed to face it alone.  In a few minutes she would fall asleep, and while she slept a new chapter would open in the book of the world.  We’re like fictional characters, she thought, highly complicated ink blobs
which through natural selection have come to believe that we are different.  Memories, dreams, personalities—these are the tales we tell ourselves to create a character we can identify with.

*   *   *

The search for Hunter Morgan spread like a slow-burning fire through the wooded backcountry that hangs like a shadow just beyond the bright lights of Megalopolis.  Within a week there had been sightings from Maine to Florida, along with reports of strangled livestock and satanic inscriptions on barns and chicken coops.  Avery Morgan moved his army of volunteers upstate, fanning desperately through the misty bare mountains before their hopes would vanish under winter’s first snow.   Frank Lynch stuck closer to home, in radio contact with the volunteers, digesting the intelligence that came in from all directions—none of which, in his opinion, was worth the time of day.  By the end of the week, he would have no choice but to ask the state police to bring in their dogs.  Sniffers, they called them.  They could smell anything, even a dead body that no one wanted them to find.

Lynch sat in the cruiser wi
th Tom Wozniak in front of the Seven Eleven, listening to the country music station as they drank coffee out of huge styrofoam cups.  “Researching, then disappearing,” he mused.  “Researching, then disappearing.  Quite a job description, isn’t it?”