A Book of Dreams Page 10

  Striking out at random from the tomb, a walker might suddenly have stumbled out of thick undergrowth into the silent parts that Tom had trimmed. Or the walker might have found other signs of activity: small holes and piles of rocks scattered about; one of many old garbage dumps hidden and forgotten beneath trees, crawling with roots, needles and moss; old cedar fences covered with thick green moss; strange circles.

  The circles were barely distinguishable among blueberry bushes, squaw bush and baby evergreens, their ragged circumference held by the soft blurry limits of a strange moss that grew wherever there had been a fire in the ground.

  Clouds of smoke boiled out of the trees like soft white balloons until there was nothing left to see except snow. Everything was white. On the other side of the brush fire, leaves crackled and branches broke as Tom threw armfuls of brush onto the hissing fire.

  The white smoke came up around me from the fire softer than snow crunching underneath my boots. I threw a branch into the smoke and squinted away. The smoke made it harder to breathe. Daddy made it easier.

  ‘Pete!’ Tom hollered to me. He couldn’t see me for the smoke.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You okay?’ His boots crunched in the snow and got closer. Then his hat and face came out. ‘Here! Lie down on the snow.’

  He put his axe down and kneeled down. It looked like he was floating in the smoke. ‘Lie down,’ he said again, lying down on the snow.

  I put my axe down too and lay down. Suddenly the air was clear and I could breathe and see. Where we lay down there was about a foot of clear air like a blanket between the snow and the smoke. Tom held onto his axe with one hand and took a bite of tobacco with the other. He grinned and held the tobacco out to me. I shook my head. Tom shook his head too and grinned. He always offered it to me. Past Tom, tree trunks broke out of the snow and disappeared into the smoke. The fire crackled and hissed but we couldn’t see it.

  ‘Hey, Tom, how come the smoke doesn’t reach all the way to the ground?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. That’s how lumberjacks keep out of the smoke, ’cause it is always clear air right over the top of the snow.’

  The crust was rough to my cheek and if I moved my leg or my arm the crust crunched. Animal footprints and broken pieces of leaves were frozen into the crust around us and a cold smell came up through. I pulled the axe closer to me and smelled the handle. It smelled like pitch and smoke rubbed in by Tom’s big hands.

  ‘Hey, Tom, are we going to cut any more trees today?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. I guess we’ll let this burn down and go into town for the afternoon mail. You aren’t cold, are you?’

  I shook my head. He grinned and raised his head to spit and check the fire. I wondered how far the smoke went into the forest and what it looked like from up above where there wasn’t any smoke. Maybe just the tops of the trees were sticking out of the top of the smoke, like a forest of tiny Christmas trees. It was almost Christmas but I didn’t want it to come until the third thing happened. Mummy always said bad things happened in threes and we already had two.

  In 1966, Tom Ross was still at Orgonon, retracing paths through the woods that only he knew, mowing lawns in summer, burning brush in winter, keeping Orgonon clean and neat, stopping over on weekends and after hours to make sure no one broke in.

  The new fad, snowmobiles, made the buildings more accessible in winter, and although there had been no major thefts one or two break-ins had occurred. Once, someone slashed some paintings. No one in the region knew how much to believe about what was in the buildings, although rumour had it that there was a lot of scientific equipment and some pretty nice furniture. Beyond the rumours and what was immediately visible to museum visitors, it was hard to know what was still there. No doubt something of a Frankenstein quality lingered in the minds of these villagers – eager to promote tourism in their region – who for nearly fifteen years had listened to the thick foreign accents of the doctors and scientists out there doing experiments with … ENERGY.

  Tom Ross had been through it all and now he remained there, a link between past and present. Working alone there all those years he must have gone over the events and people carefully, because as time passed and more people came to see Orgonon, his stories expanded and lengthened. He spoke quietly and lovingly of The Doctor, telling stories that showed fairness, honesty, imagination and error. Wisely, Tom refused to speak into the new-fangled tape recorders that some people brought.

  Ironically, in 1966, Tom Ross was one of the few people who could talk about The Doctor. Many of the others, both with accents and without, who had participated in The Doctor’s American years, were silent, ruminating over the years with Reich. Some were bitter at the world, some were uncertain about the future, others strived in their own way to continue research into a body of work they considered immensely valuable.

  Physicians in countries all over the world were making careful slow discovery of Reich’s work, always pushing back and rearranging dates and periods to redefine what was ‘acceptable’. In 1966, psychiatrists in training were still being told to stop reading Character Analysis halfway through, ‘because that was when Reich went mad.’

  If sanity was a trivial issue separating the world of traditional medicine and science from Reich’s work, the followers of Reich had their own quarrels, which, in the perspective of history, would also seem trivial. Unwilling to accept labels such as ‘disciple’ or ‘Reichian’, a number demanded orthodoxy and defied definition with such vigour that their assertions sometimes made them appear as worshippers or fanatics.

  On an international level, there was no communication at all between interested students. In America, divisive power plays, lawsuits and quarrels typified relations among many who felt themselves to be the heirs of Reich’s legacy.

  And a good many were silent.

  One of those who was quiet was Eva Reich. After her father’s death, she and her husband, William Moise, went to live in a small community on the coast of Maine. For many years Eva was busy with an organic garden, reading and her daughter. Bill became a full-time artist. He delved into colour with his fingers and created paintings that radiated with patterns of moving light.

  As issues and arguments rose and fell around Reich’s work, Eva developed what she called ‘an unearthly detachment’ from the infighting. She worked hard to make birth control and sex education more accessible to young people and poor people throughout the state of Maine, but she refused to be drawn into the quarrels about her father’s legacy. ‘These are the power politics after the emperor dies,’ she once said after discussing a legal question. ‘The basic scientific principles are more important than the power politics.’ The core of the work, she said, would endure longer than the personal struggles.

  Tom Ross was another who steered clear of the personal struggles. Extending the line of cleared forests and manicured lawns each year, he knew better than anyone that his work would endure; it would be a forest someday. Fully competent in his field and well above the power struggles, Tom might have had interesting observations on those others who occasionally reappeared out of the past to walk around Orgonon, go out to look at the tomb, reminisce with him. Few, if any, ventured into the woods, where there were many treasures, but most of them enjoyed talking with Tom as much as he enjoyed the interruptions from his routine and the opportunity to talk about The Doctor.

  In October of 1966, he saw a group of young people coming across the property. Among them he recognized Peter, the son. Tom was glad to see him.

  Orgonon was lonely without all the people. When we got back from town I went up to the hill to see if the smoke was still there in the snow but it was gone. All I could see from the observatory steps were fields and trees, all white and still and quiet. It smelled like snow, lonely. The rooms were always cold. Everyone left after Oranur. Oranur was the first bad thing. There had to be three before Christmas.

  Oranur was when Daddy put a radium needle in the big accumulator in the lab and everyone
got sick. The lab closed, the mice died. People went away. The air was so bad I had to take a bath every day and have blood tests. A lot of people got sick. Eva got sick. Mummy had to go away for a long time. She was sick too. I missed her a lot. Then she came back. I wanted her to stay.

  The instruments were still and quiet in the big room downstairs in the observatory. After the lab was closed all the instruments were moved up the hill. The red linoleum floor was soft, cold grey.

  I tiptoed upstairs. Daddy was sitting at his desk, working. I waited at the top of the stairs underneath the picture of two hands making an energy field.

  After a while, he looked at me over the top of his glasses.

  ‘Hi, Peeps.’ He smiled.

  ‘Hi, Daddy.’

  ‘I’m glad you came. We can have a talk after I finish this. Why don’t you read a book.’

  I got out the Sears and Roebuck catalogue and sat down next to the fireplace. They had a really nice two-gun set and all kinds of cowboy boots. I liked the ones with pointed toes.

  After a while the pen stopped scratching and Daddy came over to the fireplace. I built a fire like Tom showed me and we sat together in front of the fire, looking at the catalogue.

  ‘What do you want for Christmas?’ asked Daddy.

  ‘I want a two-gun set!’

  ‘But I just gave you that nice holster set last year. Why do you want another? What more do you want?’

  I wanted a two-gun set. I turned the pages to the cowboy boots. The cowboy boots had red and yellow swirls in the sides. Roy Rogers tucked his pants in, but real cowboys didn’t. Mummy said she would get me cowboy boots for Christmas.

  ‘How about a little golden watch?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A little golden watch for the little prince?’

  ‘I’m not a prince.’ I turned the page hard. Sometimes he teased me about being a prince and it made me confused. All I really wanted was a two-gun set and cowboy boots. And a cowboy hat.

  ‘It will be harder when you grow up,’ said Daddy.

  We turned to the pictures of ladies standing up and smiling in soft white underwear. I liked the soft curves of their breasts and the warm soft way the white part was close to their skin. All the ladies were smiling at us. Daddy said, ‘Do you have a girl friend?’

  It always made me funny when he asked that because I didn’t know what he meant. The ladies in the picture smiled at us and held their hands in funny positions. They stood in long rows of clothing.

  ‘Well, not really, I guess. I like Candy a lot. And Kathleen.’ Kathleen and I played Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

  ‘Have you kissed them?’

  Some of the ladies in the Sears and Roebuck held their hands up in the air like they were pointing to the ceiling.

  ‘No….’

  He looked down at the rows of ladies and pointed to a nice one. ‘Do you like her?’

  She was pretty. Her hands pointed off to the side as if she was going to turn around and then walk right out of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue so she could come and sit next to us on the couch wearing a soft white slip.

  ‘Yes, she is pretty,’ I said. I looked at the fire and thought that if it were magic, when I looked back at the couch she would be sitting there in a white slip, smiling at Daddy with her fingers pointed at the ceiling.

  Daddy said, ‘Are you glad that Mummy came back?’

  She disappeared. Over the fireplace was the picture Daddy painted of an eagle standing alone high on a mountain looking over the world. I nodded.

  She had to go away. She said it was because she got sick after Oranur and had to have an operation. Sometimes when Daddy got mad he yelled at her and said he hated her and wanted her to go away. Everybody went away after Oranur. I wanted her to come back but I didn’t want them to fight. I had to stay with Daddy for the three bad things.

  As they walked across the rolling Maine fields that autumn weekend in 1966, the young people who accompanied Peter felt strange. As a group they knew little about Dr Reich and had no idea what had ended at Orgonon, nine years earlier. They saw only abandoned, decaying buildings and a quiet caretaker. There was something dreamlike about the place: some strange things had happened here with a strange and unearthly kind of energy.

  One or two of the guests, who had notions of Reich as some old Victorian type, were surprised to find Orgonon decidedly rough-hewn. In the cabin they used, the cabin Peter had inherited, the knotty-pine walls and open fireplace led one of the group to describe Orgonon as having a distinctly American quality.

  But the mood of the place was more complicated than simple, honest American dilapidation. Behind the locked doors of those buildings lurked the disquieting mystery of that energy.

  Exploring the grounds together, they learned – although not from Peter – that the long, low building called the laboratory was closed and had been unused since 1952, when an unusual experiment called Oranur was conducted. The building could not be used because it still carried a charge from that experiment with energy.

  At different locations around the property, on large wooden platforms, stood great gunlike machines with rows of long, dull aluminium pipes extending like barrels. The guests were told this apparatus was used in experiments to control atmospheric energy.

  Wandering around the cabin, one of the group, a young psychologist from Boston named Ed Carmel, found the place haunted with energy things. In a corner he found a casting of the same bust they had seen on top of the tomb. This bust, it was explained to him, was given to Peter by a physician who found that its presence put a high energy charge in his home. He could not keep it in his own house because it seemed to ‘radiate energy’.

  The six visitors were perplexed by the ominous presence of this energy everywhere, and the more they sought answers to their questions, the more they were frustrated. Most unnerving to them was their host, Peter, at twenty-two silent and uncomfortable about what had happened here. Much of what they learned about what transpired years ago came from a young law student named Peter d’Errico, who had roomed with Peter in college. Several times during the weekend, the others had the very distinct feeling that d’Errico was acting as a kind of interpreter for his former roommate. D’Errico had spent a summer working in Rangeley and during that time learned much about Dr Reich. He told them what he could about Reich’s work in atmospheric research, the Food and Drug Administration injunction, Reich’s refusal to comply, the trial, imprisonment. He explained that because of the legal complications, much of Reich’s later work remained untested and unexplored. But even he was confused by Peter’s behaviour, his silence and uneasiness.

  One afternoon, the seven were walking up past the lab and tamed off the road to walk through the autumn-browned fields. The road split. They left the crumbling asphalt road that led up to the observatory and took a faded tractor trail out between trees to the back fields. Suddenly, Peter walked away from them. He stood in the middle of the ‘V’ created by the two diverging roads and looked at them. Then he looked at the ground. There was nothing but dying grass and earth. He started to say something but only shook his head and led them out into the field.

  What was going on? they wondered, watching him standing in the clearing between the two roads. What is going on?

  All of this nonverbal communication was of much interest to Ed Carmel. At the time, he and Peter both worked as attendant nurses at Boston State Hospital’s drug-addiction unit. Ed had, in the weeks preceding the trip to Maine, learned a great deal about Peter. In particular, Ed was puzzled by the narrow determination of this person who had recently returned from a year in VISTA and was biding his time at the hospital, waiting to be drafted. The way he talked about it, it sounded as if Peter wanted to be a soldier. He even talked of enlisting! In 1966, when the US was pouring troops into Southeast Asia like ants! It didn’t make sense.

  Ed hoped that Peter might get some insights into some of the things that were going on inside his head, things about the military or his p
arents that he was blocking. Once, after Peter and Ed had smoked a joint together, Ed put on a record of Laura Huxley reading poetry. ‘Turn it off!’ Peter shouted. ‘Turn it off! It sounds like my mother!’ Peter was blocking a lot of feelings.

  As the group emerged from the cabin periodically that weekend to walk around Orgonon, Ed wondered if their talks would ever get to the point where they could talk about some of the things they were all feeling about Orgonon. Including Peter.

  ‘Peeps, I know it was difficult for you when Mummy left. It was difficult for all of us. I have told you many times that people are afraid of my work. That is why they all left.’

  They all left. Maybe that was a whole bad thing. It was different after Oranur because no one laughed any more and one by one they left. I started to smile. I always wanted to smile when it got serious.

  ‘Peeps, don’t run away. This is very serious. It is going to get very tough. Many people have run away. Even Mummy. But she came back. It is very difficult for her. Do you understand? It’s okay, you can cry. Go ahead, cry.’

  He always wanted me to understand everything and I had to because no one else would but I didn’t understand why he had to yell at Mummy or why the tears from one eye hit the lady on the head and the tears from the other eye went into the writing and made the page wrinkly.

  ‘Look at me, Peeps,’ he said, and held his arms around me until I cried. He was sad too and I loved him too. It was so sad when the lab was empty and Mummy and Daddy fought. I wanted them to be happy. He touched my hair and his hand felt good.

  ‘But Daddy, why does everyone run away?’

  ‘Because they are afraid of the work, Peter. Many people became afraid when the attacks started but everyone was afraid after Oranur because the Oranur experiment showed them how powerful Orgone Energy really is. All the people who were saying they believed and understood really didn’t. When they saw the truth of it in the experiment, they all ran away. Truth is very powerful, Peeps, I know.’