A Book of Dreams Read online

  ‘Why are they that way?’

  ‘That’s a question of history,’ he said, looking through his binoculars. ‘You see, most people have always thought that it is wrong to feel good and to feel happy. They are afraid of the good feelings, like the streamings. They try to stop these feelings in their children. They take their children and make them miserable. Well, if you take any natural drive and block it, it twists and turns but it still comes out. But instead of coming out in a straightforward, direct way, it comes out twisted and ugly. That is why some of your friends make dirty jokes about girls. They have learned to block their feelings, so they enjoy more the perverted, secondary feelings. When the blocking starts, their bellies get hard and their breathing becomes shallow. And they begin to hate.’

  ‘But my friends don’t hate me.’

  ‘No, of course they don’t. It isn’t that kind of hate. It is a different, more subtle hatred. They put on a front of being nice and then the front becomes a real mask for the fear and hatred inside. They struggle to keep the good feelings down, inside the masks, so their mouths become tight and rigid. They are miserable and they take it out on their children because they cannot stand to see their children happy.’

  ‘Well, why can’t you just tell them all to come here and give them treatments and make them understand? And make them happy?’

  ‘It is not so easy,’ he said, smiling. Then he nodded to the hospital field. There were dark rings in the yellow grass where the tractor tyres had pressed down. ‘But someday I hope we will have a hospital in that field that will begin to help people. But it is not easy to explain all of this to people. You see, after people have been holding back their emotions for so many years – for so many generations – it becomes a way of life and people accept it. They even think they like it. Life is safer behind the mask.’

  ‘Or in the trap,’ I said. We talked about the trap a lot.

  ‘Ja. Good, Peeps. In the trap. And because it is safer there, people want to remain. They are so accustomed to killing and hating that they spend all their time justifying it and trying to destroy anyone who tells them they may be wrong. They make drugs that suppress the unhappiness and say they have cured it. But the badness is still there, eating them up. They say I am a quack and that the accumulator is a sex machine. Don’t you see, Peter? Man is afraid of the streamings in his legs and he is afraid of life. He is afraid of his basic core of goodness. That is why the FDA has attacked us and is trying to destroy us.’

  ‘But the sky isn’t afraid, is it? I mean we can help the streamings in the sky and make it better, can’t we?’

  He nodded and looked around. The sun was just above the treetops, but it was still quiet. I felt a lot better.

  ‘But why is the sky sick?’

  ‘That’s a very good question. I’m not sure I fully understand it yet. At first I thought it was all due to Oranur, but since I see trees, plants and much vegetation dying all the way down to New York, I am not sure any more. Something is killing the atmosphere.’ He shook his head and pushed his hand through the white hair. ‘Ja. It is better. Drawing from Zenith helped.’

  ‘Is drawing from Zenith like when you make my belly soft?’

  He laughed. ‘Ja. Somewhat. It sort of loosens it. Ja.’

  He looked at me hard. ‘You are a good little soldier, Peeps. You are very brave and you must be strong for the battle that may come.’ He looked at me very hard and his eyes made mine water.

  ‘All right, son.’ Nodding at the cloudbuster and looking to the mountains, he gave the gentle order, ‘Now, catch the wind.’

  A loon warbling across the lake’s black water woke me at dawn. I lay shivering in the pale morning light watching the sky change. The loon cried again and again and then there was only shimmering dew.

  Soon, before it was fully light, Tom began mowing up by the lab. The low putt of the mower came across the dark wet meadows into the bedroom changing all the time as he mowed in low places and then in high places. I slept.

  After breakfast I went into town and borrowed the 16-millimetre projector from the public school. When I finally found Makavejev after I spoke with Vernon Collins, I told him I had some old footage my father took, and he wanted to see it. That evening we tacked a sheet up to the wall in the motel and sat back to watch the movie.

  The film had no leader and started very suddenly with me bouncing a big ball in Forest Hills – it must have been 1947 – so conscious that Daddy had a camera and was watching me through it.

  And then, all of a sudden, I was terribly conscious of the fact that I was Reich’s son. Here, sitting in a dark room with a real movie crew looking at a movie – of me! – I felt stupid. Like an object, sitting there, laughing at myself looking at the camera, clowning around. I wondered what they thought of me. Here I had been friends with these strangers because … because they liked me? But they had to like me, didn’t they? Didn’t Makavejev have to be interested in what I told him back in New York? He was making a movie about my father. He wanted information for his movie.

  The projector rattled on. This must be before 1948 because we were still living in the upper cabin while the lower cabin was built. Ilse is giving me a bath in a washtub outside the cabin. We are laughing. She dries me in the doorway and our dog, Doggy, comes up and nips at me. I draw away.

  What does this movie crew think about this naked child and this person sitting naked and open in the same room with them? Playing naked, in colour now, with a friend at Mooselucmeguntic Lake. Naked at three or four, chasing a sweet naked girl into the water. Now, alone at Orgonon.

  Naked. Picking apples. I am older. It is the same apple tree that stands alone up by the road to the lab. Ilse climbs the tree and shakes the branches. I remember the way apples sound falling into the grass. I sit naked in the grass, turning an apple over and over in my hand. Was I afraid then?

  Makavejev and the cameraman talk in Serbo-Croatian. ‘We were discussing the way in which Reich holds a camera,’ Makavejev says. ‘It is quite interesting. He had a good eye.’ But I couldn’t listen any more because the last scene is with me and Tom. It must be after they tore down Tom’s grandfather’s barn in 1948, down by the birch tree where we later built the cloudbuster platform. There is a huge pile of old rotted timber we had to take to the dump. The Studebaker pickup is backed up to the pile. A younger, leaner Tom Ross looks uneasily at the camera. You can tell he is listening hard to his new boss, The Doctor, who is telling him what to do. He turns to me. I am wearing striped overalls and grin at the camera. Tom waits as I reach over for a piece of wood from the pile and hand it to him in a slow arc. He takes it from me and throws it in the truck and soon we are together in a real movie, throwing old rotten timbers into the back of the pickup truck. Maybe Makavejev would use that. It is my favourite scene.

  If only this movie could capture the irony of Tom’s being there, first as the child bringing the cows in down to the barn, then as the man in his early thirties who had just begun to work for the doctor in 1948, tearing down the same barn. And then a few years later he builds the cloudbuster platform practically on top of the foundation of that same barn. And now, at retirement age, he winds his lawnmower around and around the cloudbuster platform and the memory of the old barn.

  After the movie, we went over to the Rangeley Inn for a beer. I felt embarrassed that the movie had been all about me; Makavejev wanted footage of Reich. Furthermore, he didn’t seem interested in my idea about Tom. I asked him how the movie was coming. He looked into his beer and spoke seriously.

  ‘It is very difficult to say,’ he said. He must have been curious about how I saw myself fitting into a movie about my father. ‘It is hard to say how it will go. Right now it is very loose. It is hard to talk with many of the people who worked with your father. Many of them are silent as if they are in shock of some kind. They get very emotional when they talk about certain aspects of Reich. It is as if they have a blind spot.’

  He looked at me. Was he talking about
me? Did he know something I didn’t? He talked more about his movie:

  ‘Every man has a deep need for more freedom,’ he said. ‘And now the question of armour comes in. As you know, “The psychological armour is just the psychological part of muscular armour.” It is extremely hard to break the psychological armour. People can participate in something and then go back into their shells. The problem with this film was to make a playful structure that could lose the audience so they can be led. So gradually they are deeper and deeper in places where they never actually voluntarily or consciously go. Step by step they are in some sort of humanistic or fatalistic world but actually they are in touch with the desocialized part of themselves … deep sexual feelings. Or fears. Or terrors. Private terrors …’

  The treatment room is in between the bathroom and the library. It has a blue carpet, the picture of the man with muscles, a medicine cabinet and pictures in a frame. One of the pictures has Daddy on skis on a mountain and one is when he was a little boy with a rocking horse. I took off my clothes and looked out of the open window to where the warm sun made everything bright. The smell of hay came all the way up the hall and in the window on the wind.

  There were funny thin clouds in the sky that I forgot to ask Tom about. Tom always knew when it was going to rain.

  When Daddy came in I lay down on the couch. He sat down on the chair and watched me breathe.

  ‘Hi, Peter.’ He watched me breathing. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘I feel okay, I guess.’

  ‘Did you have a good morning mowing with Mr Ross?’

  ‘Yup. We finished the whole field.’

  He put his hand on my chest and pressed slowly down. His hand felt big and warm. I smiled.

  ‘It is time to be serious. Now, let’s see. Show me your eyes. Ja. Look at me. All right, now follow my finger. Follow it. That’s right, let your eyes go, let go, follow my finger.’ Following until it turned my eyes until they were tired, sneaky and surprised. I couldn’t any more. ‘Let go, come on, let them go.’ Finger dancing all around, pulling at my eyes until I squeezed them shut. ‘Okay. Breathe.’ I breathed. ‘Deeper, all the way.

  ‘It is all right. It is all right. Come now, let me see. Have you been stuttering any more, hmm?’

  Finger, no thumb, probing up under my chin as if it would come right out in my tongue, hurting, arrrgghhhh

  ‘That’s right, that’s right. All right, turn over, let me see your neck.’ Fingers catching my face in the neck and twisting it out into the sheets with hurting and anger, ow! More and more, biting into the sheet. ‘No! No! No! It hurts,.’ Breathing hard, alone.

  ‘Roll over.’ His voice is gentle, his eyes watch me carefully as I lie breathing. ‘All right, Peeps, now breathe out, gently.’

  inbreathingoutbreathingin. oooooph

  ‘Breathe more deeply.’ He pressed his hand down. I closed my eyes and breathed out until I could feel it down to where his hand was. I smiled.

  ‘Don’t run away, Peeps. Breathe. Breathe out.’

  ‘I am breathing out. I gotta breathe in sometime!’

  His hand pressed down harder and I felt all my air going uunnhh. Then he let me breathe in but not enough to make it feel tight against my chest before it was oooooph again.

  I breathed for a while and then it started to tickle. I giggled. ‘Don’t laugh, Peeps. That is running away. Breathe out. Let it all out. Don’t be afraid to be afraid.’ His hand, pressing against my stomach, hurting, pressing a belt in my stomach.

  ‘Uuuuuuunnnnnn oh Daddy it hurts. Please, Daddy, please uuuuunnnnnhhhh.’ My legs, pulling up to hide my stomach from the hands.

  ‘Where is it, Peeps? Don’t be afraid. Come on, keep breathing. Let it out. Breathe.’

  I didn’t feel like it. I didn’t want to do anything, just get away from his hand. It hurt. I didn’t want it there and grit my teeth and make a face. His hand was up at my throat and unlocking my jaw to let me scream with my face and my legs.

  ‘Kick, Peeps, kick. Kick, now. Ja. Hard, that’s right. Kick. Harder, harder! Come on, good. Ja. No, the pillow. Hit the pillow. Ja. Good. Harder, harder, now let it come out.’

  Gnashing my teeth and kicking, twisting to get away the sadness with my legs, the sadness coming up from my legs, and meeting my stomach at his hand the way falling hay met the earth. And I cried because I was so sad for the hay falling down and for the dead deer and the hay falling down behind the mower, falling away from behind the mower blade, and sad that all those people had left us and because Mummy was going to leave us. She did love us. My ears filled up with tears and ran over. I wanted to turn over and cry but Daddy said,

  inbreathingoutbreathing

  ‘Where is it, Pete? Come, come, where is it? Let it all out. If you don’t breathe it will be worse. Yell. Come on. Yell.’ Fingers at my jaw again telling me yelling me wide open and screaming me until my face was wrapped in the shadows of my eyes and the folds of my mouth as I cried and cried. His hand went to the muscles of my legs, to the place where even hay tickles me when I lie in it, to the muscles of my legs and I said, ‘No, don’t,’ but he caught it there and then I was kicking with my whole body, kicking and flipping on that long white scream like a fish flopping in angry silver flashes.

  When kicking stopped and crying stopped his hand was gone and the belt inside me was gone and when I breathed out it felt like a black sailboat on a black river in the evening, sailing with the current with the wake glowing and spreading out, all the way down to my legs.

  Breathing, breathing. His hand on my stomach now gently again, he said, ‘Is your belly soft now? You should always keep it soft.’ And his fingers pressed down to where the breathing was going in and out by itself now, like a black boat sailing, softer and softer. He smiled at me. His hand went from my neck to my knees only it didn’t tickle at all. It just felt quiet and soft and the breathing sailing along with his hand, streaming. ‘Good, Peeps. Now breathe.’

  All by myself I breathe. ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,’ lower and lower until I felt it moving in my legs just like Daddy’s hands.

  Daddy said, ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. That’s right. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’

  ‘AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’

  ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’

  And then we were both breathing together, smelling the hay.

  ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Of him I love day and night I dream’d he was dead,

  And I dream’d I went where they had buried him I love, but he was not in that place,

  And I dream’d I wander’d searching among burial-places to find him,

  And I found that every place was a burial-place;

  The houses full of life were equally full of death (this house is now),

  The streets, the shipping, the places of amusement, the Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, the Mannahatta, were as full of the dead as of the living,

  And fuller, O vastly fuller of the dead than of the living;

  And what I dream’d I will henceforth tell to every person and age,

  And I stand henceforth bound to what I dream’d,

  And now I am willing to disregard burial-places and dispense with them,

  And if the memorials of the dead were put up indifferently everywhere, even in the room where I eat or sleep, I should be satisfied,

  And if the corpse of any one I love, or if my own corpse, be duly render’d to powder and pour’d in the sea, I shall be satisfied,

  Or if it be distributed to the winds I shall be satisfied.

  WALT WHITMAN

  THE DREAMS, a Looney Tunes cartoon version of my childhood, began after Makavejev left, taking his movie with him.

  They began with half a deer walking up to the cabin door and rattling at it. And when I went out to open the door I saw the lake had risen and was lapping at the lawn. When I looked into the water I saw the feet of a man who had drowned and was floating upside down.

  Only in
this dream, I was the drowned man. I had passed through the surface of the water as an image passes in light through film, and in the dream I saw myself sitting, a long time ago, at the edge of the lake at Annecy, coming out of one phantasmagoric anaesthetized dream, afraid of another.

  The park in Annecy is wide and open with great white mountains towering over it, dipping their peaks into the clouds. I wandered around the park dazed, watching children play, old men at their jeu de boules. I watched couples laugh together in the sunlight.

  But I was removed from it all, just walking around with my arm in a sling beneath my ski parka, glad that after the tormented dream in the hospital, it was a gentle, sunny afternoon. The doctors and nurses had been very polite. They told me how brave I was to give them the signal like that.

  People probably thought I was an escaped patient or something because I had stuffed a box of cookies into the kangaroo pocket of my parka and reached in every so often for a cookie, and my eyes were streaked and red from the crying.

  I still didn’t know what it was I had dreamt in the hospital. I only knew that there was some other reality going on, on a different plane, and somehow, sliding around in the gas, I had bumped into it. Walking through the park with the empty sleeve of my parka flapping in the wind, I could only think of the tractor and Tom, mowing in the hot sun with Tom all day long, going around and around, watching the horizon until it was burned into my eyes so that in closing them, it was backwards, the trees bright and the sky dark. And then at dusk, still going around and around in smaller and smaller circles, there would be a moment when the trees and the sky were the same shade, separated by a fine light-blue line: the treetops etched against the sky. I knew that there was another boy on another tractor on the other side of the sky, looking back in at me. Was it that person I bumped into in the dream? Or was he in the movie?

  At one point in our conversation, Makavejev said to me, ‘Movies are like tangible dreams, colourful moving shadows. When you turn the light on, it disappears. This is a very powerful fact.’