A Book of Dreams Read online

  Tom leaned back and yelled, ‘You see that over there?’ He pointed to a big place in the grass we hadn’t mowed, where it was all matted down.

  ‘That’s where a deer been sleepin’. They leave the grass all pressed down like that.’

  I looked at it as we drove past. The grass was pressed down. It was like a place where someone had slept.

  ‘She must have been a pretty big one,’ said Tom.

  The circles got smaller and smaller like the field was a big box and we were unwinding it going around and around making hay. Down across the road the pond sparkled in the sunlight. Sometimes there was a black speck that was a boat with fishermen or maybe the hunters looking for the deer.

  When Tom takes us swimming over to Quimby Pond we have to dodge cowpies and thistles in the pasture to get over to the shore. Coming back across I always look up the road to the house where that girl and her mother lived. They came here one summer and invited me over a lot. It was a funny house because the kitchen sink was black and water drops looked silvery in it. One day I was there and the girl said do you want to play doctor? I said okay. We went up to her bedroom and closed the door. She got undressed and then I got undressed. She had breasts that moved smoothly in the light. When she lay down they went away except for the darker part. And there was hair between her legs that I don’t have. When it was my turn to lie down her fingers touched my legs like grass when I run naked in the trees. When I went downstairs her mother was at the sink, working the pump. Water was coming out and swirling in the flat, black sink. She said, ‘You’ll come and visit again, won’t you?’ Tom takes us to Quimby Pond a lot. The water isn’t deep at all and there is foam at the place where the pasture meets the water.

  When we came around again, Tom shook his head and said, ‘See right there.’ He pointed to the place where the deer slept. It disappeared under the cutter blade. ‘She sure was a big one,’ said Tom.

  Tom always calls things ‘she’, but I can’t tell how he knows. He says I guess she’ll rain today or I guess she’ll be a hot one. Or when I’m oiling the mower blade he says, ‘You got her yet?’

  ‘Hey, Tom,’ I said. ‘Do you suppose she needs gas?’ We had gone around the field in square circles many times.

  ‘Oh, in a little while, I guess.’

  Grasshoppers raced us across the field.

  Tom’s mower woke me up before sunrise: he was out mowing in the grainy morning light, walking near the lab with oil smoke from the old mower hanging in a low blue cloud over the dark, dew-hung grass.

  I wished Makavejev could get that on film, and was anxious to discuss it with him. I still wasn’t sure how he wanted to use me in the movie. The arrangement was that he would come over to the cabin sometime, perhaps in the evening.

  The noise from Tom’s mower followed me around the cabin as I fixed breakfast and put on my work clothes. My mower, a bright-red one that I bought the year before, was in the garage. It started up quickly and we began mowing in long straight swaths across the yard. It would have been great to have Makavejev come down, cameras whirring, and catch me doing the same thing Tom was doing up the road.

  But they didn’t come.

  After a while I went up to the lab looking for Tom but he was gone too. Looking through the windows, I could smell the way it was even though the windows were tightly shut: a combination of cold concrete and the liquids of science. The sound of instruments at rest, the smell of hot glass, all mixed with cool air. Through the windows, it looked cold and barren. The tables were yellowed and cracked. Chairs and boxes stood around just where they had stood for the last thirteen years, as if someone suddenly walked out and left everything. The very first cloudbuster, a fabrication of wood and metal pipes, stood in one corner next to a sink with jars, glass bottles with glass tubing. My father wanted it for a museum. Maybe someday it would be in one. At the next window, I was looking into a room lined with shelves holding rocks, bits of wood, more jars and crumbled, wrinkled cards and notes tacked to the wall. The light was diffused and showed me instruments and cobwebs, dust and black lichen on the floor, arranged like shadows of the people who were no longer there.

  All around the back of the lab, the concrete pilings had rotted and were decaying, falling into rubble on the ground. In places the building had shifted and a section of lab clung to a piling by fractions of an inch, as if the whole thing would sigh in a heavy wind and sink slowly around the pillar.

  I walked around the sagging barn and shed. It was all locked and closed, cobwebbed and dusty. Only the lawns were open. It didn’t really bother me that the estate was closed to me. The management of the estate was carried on by the trustee in a very independent manner. Perhaps it was just as well that I was not involved in my father’s affairs. I had to live my own life.

  But I was in the movie. Makavejev told me I was, and I wondered where he was. Walking out over the smooth, green grass I went to the apple tree where Daddy took movies of me and my mother picking apples. I stood right in the same place where I stood naked in that other movie that he made, laughing and clowning, picking up apples.

  Just beyond the apple tree I could make out the faint outline of a large rectangle in the grass. This was what I wanted Makavejev to see. You see, my father bought Orgonon from Tom’s grandfather. Tom grew up at Orgonon. When he was a kid he used to bring cattle in for milking from pastures that are now the forests he cares for. So the movie should have that too, Tom, perpetually working on this land.

  Imperceptibly at first, and then more and more distinctly, outlines of buildings that once dotted his grandfather’s farm show through the cropped grass. Tom stops where the old forge was and picks bits of iron and slag from the earth. He mows carefully around the cloudbuster platform, which stands on the imprint of the old barn’s foundations.

  No doubt there existed somewhere, in an attic or antique store, an old daguerreotype or glass-plate negative of Jesse Ross himself, proprietor of the farm on Dodge Pond. In this photograph, Jesse Ross would have held himself proudly, in his best store-bought clothing, putting forth the best image he could muster of himself as a landowner for the gaze of all future viewers.

  He would have had no inkling that a hundred years later the same box that froze his image would have developed so that it could make the images move, come to life in such a way that had he wished, he could have made a movie of his grandson, Tom. Tom the child bringing cows into the barn. Tom working for The Doctor, tearing the same barn down. Tom building a platform for a strange machine over the very same spot and then mowing around and around the same grass, mowing with his, Jesse Ross’s, great-great-grandson so that, in all, five generations would have put their sweat into the same land.

  Now that was a movie!

  I turned back towards the cabin to get my car. I was going to Rangeley to find Makavejev and talk to him about the movie.

  Driving to town with Daddy, I reached into the glove compartment and took out the tyre gauge. I flicked it and the measuring part slipped out to 23. That meant that scouts and Indians were alert within a 23-mile radius of the car. Looking out of the window, I could see them sitting on their ponies in the fields, watching us. They nodded as we drove past and I nodded back, smiling. It was good. They were watching.

  I pushed the gauge back in and flicked it again. Thirty-three. They were at watch up to 33 miles away.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Daddy.

  ‘Oh, this is how I tell my cavalry where to patrol and stuff.’

  ‘I see.’

  The road dipped down sharply, making it look as if we were going to fall off a cliff right into the lake.

  ‘Are they good soldiers?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Good.’

  The car slowed down at the turn and Rangeley Lake slid sideways off the window as we turned onto the main road. I checked the tyre gauge.

  ‘Peeps?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you frightened?’

  ‘A little bit, I gue
ss. Are you?’

  ‘Yes, somewhat.’

  At Doc Grant’s we sat at our special table next to the stuffed deer and the setting sun came in through the screens so it rested on the deer’s yellow-brown back.

  Daddy looked at me for a long time because I was quiet. ‘Let’s go home and call Mummy before we go to the movies,’ he said.

  The sun on the deer’s back was like the sun on the hay where the deer had slept. I closed my eyes when the mower came to cut the place where the deer had slept. When I put my hand on the deer’s back, dust came up into the sun. The deer’s nose was painted red and I felt around to see if I could find the bullet hole that killed him.

  ‘Daddy,’ I said, ‘what is going to happen?’

  Makavejev wasn’t in town. I didn’t know where he was. I worried. The movie had to be good. All those bad things that were scary in that night with Ed Carmel and those people that weekend, why am I thinking of them now? I want the movie to have good things, like Tom.

  As long as I was in town, I went into Collins’s to get some paint. Vernon Collins, the man who built Orgonon, still tends the store while his son, Elden, manages the firm.

  Makavejev had been there already. He had spoken with Collins already.

  ‘Yessir,’ said Vernon, ‘wasn’t that something? I don’t know if I’ll live to see it but wasn’t it something? Yessir. They come right in here with cameras and everything and asked me about the doctor. Yessir. Half the town knew about it and people was coming up to me and sayin’, “I hear you’re a movie star.” Yessir, I don’t know that it’ll ever get over here. I told them that it was just going to be in Europe and if they wanted to go over there to see me, they was welcome to.’

  He picked a gallon can of creosote stain off one of the shelves and we walked back to the paint shaker.

  ‘Yessir, he was a real nice fella. He spoke pretty good English too, even though there was a couple of them that didn’t speak much English at all. Yessir, he asked me about the doctor and I told him that I’d been working with the doctor all along. Yessir, I told him that he was a good man to work for. Why, in all them years we worked together we never once had an argument. Yessir.’

  Screwing the can into the paint shaker, he flipped the switch and the can began its hard vibration. ‘Yessir. He asked me if folks in town was shy of the doctor and I said that a lot of people just didn’t get to know him. Why, if there was a family burned out or something he was the first one to make a contribution. Yessir.’

  He looked out of the window for a while, shaking his head.

  ‘What you think of that storm on Saturday? Wasn’t that something? Rain all day.’

  ‘Yeah, but we sure needed it.’

  ‘Oh, we needed the rain all right but gee whiz, you couldn’t go oudoahs. Nosir, there wasn’t too much you could do. Yessir, we haven’t had rain like that in a long time. Funny how rain seems to come just on days when you don’t want it. Coss there’s not much you can do about it.’ And then he added, ‘Since your dad died.’

  The paint shaker stopped with a thud, putting a new silence in the store. Vernon leaned down and unscrewed the creosote. Yessir. As we turned to walk back to the counter, a friend of Vernon’s walking out of the store stopped and asked Vernon if he’d heard that Dr Nile had died Saturday. They chatted for a minute about how he had been ailing for a while. Vernon was serious.

  ‘How old you say he was?’

  ‘He was seventy-six,’ answered the man.

  ‘Is that all?’ said Vernon, shaking his head. ‘Well, we all got to die sometime.’

  He carried the can of creosote back to the counter, walked around to the back and pulled out the account book. ‘Yessir,’ he said, adding the cost of creosote and a pair of work gloves to our account.

  ‘Yessir. You know, I was down at the University of Maine that time when they called him up, must have been back 1952 or 3 on account of that drought they was having.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember that, I was along and helped operate.’

  ‘Yessir. You know a lot of people laugh at that business with the cloudbusters, but I seen it work. Yessir.’

  ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. Those blueberry growers weren’t really too sure it was going to work. But when it started raining the next day …’

  ‘Yessir, it was really something to see. I remember one day I was drivin’ around up near Orgonon with some friends and they seen the cloudbuster sitting there by the lab and they said, “What’s that?” and I told them about it, but they just laughed so I said, “Well, let’s go up and see if the doctor is there and he can show you.” So we drove up and I went in and the doctor was there and I said, “Doctor, I’ve got some friends down here who’d like to see the cloudbuster work,” and by gosh, he come down and went up on the one right there by the laboratory and he said, “Do you see that cloud right over there?” and pointed to a cloud up in the sky. Then he said, “And do you see that one over there?” and pointed to another one. And then he started working and by gosh, didn’t those two clouds come right together into one big one. Yessir. And they just looked at it for a minute and the doctor said, “Now watch,” and he started workin’ on the cloudbuster again and in a couple of minutes that cloud opened up like a great big doughnut. Yessir.’

  I put the tyre gauge back in the glove compartment and ran across the grass to the cloudbuster while Daddy parked the car. I started pulling the plugs and extending the pipes so by the time Daddy came to the platform I was finished and we stood quietly for a moment.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘First let’s feel what it is doing.’ We both looked at the sky and the mountains. It was warm. Afternoon clouds had already begun to bunch up on the mountains. With no wind at all, we could look down to the lake and see the clouds moving there, too. Up the road from the lake sunlight glowed on the new hay. Saddleback was purple, not blue like it should have been. The birds were quiet, hopping in the branches of the droopy birch next to the cloudbuster platform.

  ‘Ahem, ahem,’ he said. ‘So. Let’s start by working with the flow. The energy isn’t moving at all. Start in the west and draw it over to the east.’

  I cranked the cloudbuster around, raising the pipes at the same time. Inside the base of the cloudbuster, gears clicked as it went around.

  We started in the west because Orgone Energy flows from west to east and when we operate, it helps the flow. Daddy said never to draw from the east because that interrupts the streaming energy and causes storms.

  The cloudbuster pipes moved around to the east, rubber plugs dangling.

  ‘Good. All right. Come back now, slowly.’

  Creaking the wheels slower, I nursed the flow around to the south. I think the reason we go south is because south is warmer and if we went north, we would get colder. But sometimes we go to the north too.

  A car came up the road and we both stopped to look. It drove past and people looked out of the window. The car slowed down but kept on driving past us down towards Badger’s Camps at the end of the road, with the people staring out of the window at us.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Daddy.

  ‘I don’t know….’ It might have been spies. Sometimes Daddy had to chase agents and spies off Orgonon with a gun. There were all kinds of strange people coming and bothering him.

  ‘It is okay, Peter. Let’s continue. Bring it around again.’

  I raised the pipes, turned them around and dropped them in the west. I held it for a minute to let the flow catch up and then started to swing around to the east again. It felt good, cranking the cloudbuster around. That’s why I like cloudbusting, because you feel better as the air gets better and you can go up, down or sideways, or any way it wants to go. There aren’t any rules.

  ‘Okay. Now sweep the horizon. All the way around.’

  Cranking hard with both hands, I guided the pipes over the observatory hill and back down again, following the line of treetops all the way around to where it stops for the gap which is the tractor road out to the go
lden field of hay, and then on around.

  ‘Ja. Now some more. Keep it going.’ Past the road, the lake, Saddleback, around the sky.

  ‘You see, we are stroking it gently to get it moving again. When it moves, it is just like the streaming in your legs during treatment.’

  The gears made their dull, oily, metallic noise as we went around the hill once more, over the top of the observatory, back down again until the cloudbuster faced west, straight out through the opening in the trees to where the smooth grass had turned golden. We could smell it.

  ‘Now. Zenith. All the way up.’

  He leaned back and looked straight up. I cranked the pipes straight up too until the little plugs hung straight down.

  ‘Ja. Good. We’ll leave it there for a while.’

  I came away from the controls and stood next to Daddy.

  ‘I feel better,’ I said.

  ‘Ja. It is better already. Look at the mountains.’ Saddleback’s purple was gone and it sparkled clear blue. It even looked closer to us. I felt better.

  ‘Why are the streamings in my legs like the streamings in the sky?’

  He smiled. ‘That is a good question. You see, Orgone Energy flows in your body the same way it flows in the atmosphere, or perhaps even in the universe. When I give you a treatment, I loosen up your body and get the energy streaming again.’

  ‘Why does it stop in the first place?’

  ‘Well, sometimes I can see it when you have been playing with some of your friends. They have been brought up in an armoured way, a way that makes them feel guilty when they touch their genitals, a way that makes them feel ashamed to cry. Some of that rubs off on you. It makes you tight and I have to loosen you up again.’