A Book of Dreams Read online

  Only for me, the movie kept grinding away with a vengeance after the lights went on. The morning after Makavejev left, the lake began creeping up the hill to drown me. I fled into the back fields of Orgonon, chased by dreams. Why was I even there, at my father’s place? Where could I go? Was there any place I could run to and not be implicated in my father’s movie?

  I walked from fields into forest, arms outstretched to spread apart branches and cobwebs. This was an old part, untouched by Tom’s axe, with branches slapping at me, dragging me back. But suddenly I stepped into a clearing. It was an old dump, one I had not discovered before, hidden among dense branches in a remote corner, protected by mosquitoes and a thick blanket of moss and needles. Only a few broken bottles and a rusted iron stove poked up through the earthy brown cover. For a moment the movie was forgotten. I pulled away at the soft earthy blanket that covered the dump. Thin gnarled roots ran through it like veins, holding needles and moss together so that when I pulled it away it rolled back like a huge monster skin. It was like all the dreams I had as a child, a huge blanket of tiny needles coming to cover me up and here I was, pulling it away.

  I picked up a stick and began to poke through the black and rotted mass that lay beneath the surface until I saw something sparkle. Reaching carefully into the darkness I pulled out several small glass pipettes. Only the tips were broken and I was curious to know how many there were unbroken. Digging carefully, I uncovered a whole nest of the thin glass rods gathered together in tight broken rows like little shiny soldiers, stacks and stacks of glass pipettes. It gave me goose bumps to find these neat, fairly well preserved remnants of the lab, probably a small part of a load that Tom dumped here in 1952 or 1953, after the Oranur experiment.

  With the rows of glass pipettes spread out in front of me, shining brightly, I stopped to rest. It was hot and the mosquitoes were beginning to close in. When I looked down again I saw something I had not seen before and it made my blood run cold.

  Panic ran through me as I looked around in disbelief. Where I had torn up the mossy blanket, strands of 16-millimetre film poked out of the rotten earth like plastic ferns.

  The movie was right there, all around me on the dump. Real movies. Old movies, all directed by my father.

  At first I wanted to run down to a telephone and call Makavejev, to shout to him that the movie was still here, that he should come back and shoot this grand, final, cinematic irony.

  I looked down at the film and pulled a strand out of the earth. Sweating and trembling, I held the pale film up to the sun and went into a dream.

  After we went to the dump Tom and I drove the green pickup to the post office. Tom always leaves his hand on the gearshift lever where it shakes. He spits tobacco too, and sometimes I put my hand on the gearshift lever too. Someday he says he’ll teach me to drive the tractor so I can help him mow.

  The post office is green with a black banister. Tom opened our mailbox, which is big because Daddy gets lots of mail. He handed me a red card which meant a package and said, ‘Hey, Pete, why don’t you go to the window and get this package?’ The man gave me a little box and it had my name on it. Tom said, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oh, it’s for me,’ I said.

  When we got back to the truck Tom took a bite out of his tobacco and watched me unwrap the box. I don’t know why I was excited because a lot of the doctors or people who come up in the summer send me presents. Once I got an Indian belt.

  When the box opened up I took out the white tissue paper that looked like clouds and inside there was a copper-coloured saddle ring.

  ‘What is it?’ said Tom.

  ‘I don’t know, it looks like some kind of a ring.’

  It was a tiny saddle made out of copper, with leather thongs and a western pommel, just like a real saddle. The line around the edge of the seat was funny so I pushed back on the pommel and the top of the saddle slid back. Beneath it was a secret compartment.

  ‘Oh, I remember,’ I said. ‘A long time ago I was eating Cheerios in the morning and there was a picture of this ring on the back. It said I could get the ring for fifty cents and a boxtop. Mummy gave me the money and I sent it off. But it was a long time ago and I forgot.’

  I held it up for Tom to look at.

  Tom looked at the ring and then he took another bite out of his tobacco.

  ‘Gee whiz. That’s a nice ring,’ he said.

  ‘It glows in the dark,’ I said.

  Tom let me off by the lab and I snuck across the field through the apple orchard, sending messages to the cavalry on my new glow-in-the-dark ring. The grass was tall enough so no one could see me as I came up behind the trees around the clearing and moved along the outside edge towards the far end of the clearing in the woods where Daddy was standing in his long white coat, talking.

  On hands and knees, the way Toreano taught me, I went all the way around the clearing so I was standing behind him and could look through the leaves and branches and see their faces.

  The men and women were sitting on the long brown wooden benches that Tom made and I helped paint. The clearing was sort of round, with trees all around giving shade. The grass was soft green except for the path that led through the trees to the lab, but it was long grass and came up past the bench legs and people’s feet as if they were growing there too.

  Some of them I had to call doctor because that is what they were. Some were mister but some only had one name, like Mickey.

  A doctor was Dr Baker, who was important, and Dr Raknes from Norway, with a funny accent, Dr Hoppe from Israel, who came in an airplane and landed at our dock, Dr Willie, who comes from Texas and has a star on his fence, and Dr Duval, whose daughter is named Sally, Dr Tropp is warm and fat, and Dr Wolfe is not there. Neill comes from Summerhill. Other doctors have names that we always say in a row. Then there were Mummy and Helen and Eva and Gladys and Lois and Grethe, who were taking notes too. Some of them worked in the laboratory with the mice. The mice lived in a special house in special mice boxes. They were all white.

  Daddy was standing in front of me in his white coat talking about energy. He was always talking about energy.

  Mummy saw me peeking through the leaves and smiled. She waved her hand so no one would see and said, ‘Go away’ with her lips. When I shook my head she shook hers and said, ‘Be quiet.’ So I lay in the grass watching people listen and take notes while Daddy talked. He talked a lot when the doctors came in summer for conferences. They came to learn about his discoveries which were important.

  I like it when they come because I make them laugh and they like me. Mummy says she is going to send me away to be Jerry Lewis’s assistant because I make people laugh so much. But I really don’t like to laugh a lot. Mummy says if you laugh too hard it means you are going to cry.

  After a while Daddy stopped talking and the people stood up and started talking and lighting cigarettes. I drew my gun and jumped into the clearing.

  ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’

  Everybody laughed and came over to talk to me. They all wanted to see my glow-in-the-dark ring.

  In the dream, I was down at the lake watching soldiers on the other side. There were armies of soldiers filing up and down the hills with uniforms of bright red, blue and green, glinting like swarms of bluebottle flies. While I watched they started coming across the lake, walking on stilts made out of long glass pipettes. There was a boat on the lake and I was in the boat with my mother, looking over the side, trailing my fingers in the water as she rowed back and forth, wondering if I would touch the deer that had drowned.

  Once my mother came to visit and one night we were talking about dreams. I told her I had just had a crazy dream about getting out of the Army and my mother chuckled. She said I always had crazy dreams of one sort or another.

  ‘Why in 1952,’ she said, ‘Dr Tropp gave you aureomycin for an illness you had and he didn’t tell me it could make you delirious. You were up all night raving about airplanes or something coming to get you and take you away. I wa
s terrified because I didn’t know what was happening. “They are coming! They are coming!” you shouted.’

  We chuckled about the crazy dream, but I was afraid, because I didn’t understand what was science-fiction and what was real. It scared me that as early as 1952 – when I was eight – I was having dreams about things coming from the sky to take me away. But even more frightening were reports I had read recently about flying-saucer sightings. In particular, I was alarmed by reports that two of the Apollo missions were allegedly ‘chased’ or ‘followed’ by unidentified flying objects. All records of these encounters was supposedly censored from NASA tapes.

  How much could one believe?

  It was easy for me to believe in things like flying saucers, even though it made living a ‘normal life’ confusing at times. (When I worked on the desk at the Staten Island Advance the switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree one night with reports of a UFO. I was told that to run a story would have alarmed the population, and no mention of the incident appeared in the paper. But it made me wonder about all the books about suppressed Air Force studies in the 1950s, books my father studied closely. It made me wonder about what happened in Arizona in 1954 and made it harder to dismiss it all as some crazy dream or an imaginary conspiracy.) My mother, on the other hand, found it too difficult and for a great many reasons left Orgonon in 1954 and made a new life for herself. I know it was hard. It had to do with being a woman. She said to me and she has said to others that in regard to women’s liberation, she always practiced it. Since the age of sixteen she has been financially independent, although without independent income, even when she was living with Reich. ‘I have always maintained my personal and financial integrity,’ she said.

  And that was why she left. It had to do with personal integrity. I was never faced with the kind of choices she had to make, but I know that when the going got tough she acted decisively and strongly. If the child in the dreams would not forgive her for leaving, the adult in me would, hoping she too would forgive for the bad times. Some of her dreams were broken too.

  But what happened after she left still seemed like science fiction to me now, with the movie over and lights coming on.

  Daddy was playing the organ. All the doctors had gone home for supper after the lecture, and now the music came all the way down across the fields and through the trees, slanting down the long afternoon sunbeams to the garden where Mummy was weeding and shaking her head because the deer and rabbits kept eating the lettuce.

  ‘I don’t know what we can do about these animals,’ she said, still shaking her head.

  I was keeping guard with my gun and my glow-in-the-dark ring to make sure that no Indians snuck up on us.

  ‘Come on and help me weed,’ she said.

  I put my gun away but kept it right on the edge of the holster so I could draw fast, and started to pull out weeds. Mummy had a big garden that Tom ploughed in the spring. Daddy liked little red potatoes and peas and Mummy grew things he liked. We weeded together and the music from Daddy’s organ was like a soft wind. Mummy hummed as she pulled out the long thin green weeds and threw them over the fence that even a deer could jump over.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Now that I got this special glow-in-the-dark ring, do you think I could get another pair of cowboy boots?’

  ‘I don’t know, Peter, you just had a pair last year. I think this year we’ll get regular warm boots. And besides, you said you wanted ski boots.’ She threw a handful of weeds over the fence and brushed her long black hair back from her face with the back of her hand. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Aw, I was looking in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue and they’ve got some really nice cowboy boots. And I can use the same old ski boots for another year. Please?’

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said, and moved over to start weeding under the carrots.

  What I really wanted was a two-gun set. But I knew I’d never get it because Daddy bought me this big one-gun holster set. We went to Farmington together and I wanted to buy the two-gun set that I liked but Daddy liked the one-gun set better so he bought it for me. He said it was better. I wished I had gone to Farmington with Mummy. She gets me things I like. Like my old cowboy hat that I got from Sears and Roebuck too.

  We weeded for a while listening to Daddy play songs and then we started to go inside. Mummy said, ‘Why don’t you help me set the table?’

  ‘How come we’re eating early?’

  She passed me the silverware and napkins. ‘Tonight we are showing a special film of some of the experiments Daddy did last winter.’

  ‘What is it about?’

  ‘Oh, it is about the bions and amoebas and things Daddy sees under the microscope. I thought maybe you would like to go to the Rosses’ tonight and play with Kathleen. Maybe they will go to the movies in town.’

  ‘Please can I come?’

  She stirred the pots on the stove and smiled at me. ‘I don’t think so, Peter, you wouldn’t be interested because it is mostly pictures of tiny little things from under the microscope.’

  ‘Oh, please can’t I go? I’ll be quiet. I can play with my ring. Besides, I was over at Kathy’s last night. Please?’

  ‘Well, we’ll see.’

  So I went to the movie with Mummy.

  When we got to the lab where the movie was going to be, it was dark. People were already there and standing around, looking at the stars and talking. Daddy had gone back up to the observatory and we were going to pick him up later.

  In the afternoon Tom had moved the benches from the clearing in the orchard back into the lab so people could sit and see the movie. The benches were all in rows facing the wall near the door where Tom had put up the screen. I ran back and forth between the benches while Mummy got the projector ready.

  Then the doctors started coming in. I said hello and told a few jokes to make them laugh.

  When they were all inside and sitting down, one of them got up and started talking about bions and energy. I wasn’t interested and went back to the other part of the lab.

  The lab is very long and has big picture windows on the side facing the lake. The other side, towards the hill, has little side rooms where they do experiments with the mice and glass tubes and other stuff. All the way around in the back was a room with lots of scientific stuff like jars and slides and glass things. I got into a dark corner where the lights from the big room couldn’t reach and pushed back the pommel on the saddle. Where the saddle moved, the secret compartment glowed like a window into a big green ocean. I moved it around. I didn’t even know how to write on it. It just glowed in the dark.

  I looked at it for a while and wondered if I should send a message. Toreano was probably back at the fort.

  The lights in the other room clicked out and the projector started up. As I got up to go back in and watch the movie, my arm hit something in the dark. I reached out and felt around on the table edge until I picked it up. It was a glass magic wand. Daddy used the magic wands to rub in people’s hair and put them over machines that counted energy. My hair made the wand crackle in my ear and made the hair on my arms stand up. It didn’t do anything to the glow-in-the-dark screen.

  I went around the corner slowly so I wouldn’t trip over anything and saw the white light from the projector flickering on the screen. The screen was full of small moving little squiggles that were alive, but you could only see them in Daddy’s powerful microscope. He let me look through it a lot.

  Daddy is a scientist. He is a lot of other things too and wrote a lot of books. And he was a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, I can never tell all the things with psych apart anyway. He is a teacher, too, and all these people sitting in the movie came to learn from him because he discovered Life Energy. It is in your body and everywhere. If you don’t get stiff or tight, it makes you feel good because it flows through you the way it does in a treatment. It is even in little things under the microscope.

  The doctor’s voice went on and on as he talked
about the bions. Every once in a while the picture changed. Then the doctor stopped talking and they all just watched. I went closer so I was right behind the projector, watching the reels go around and around but I couldn’t see very well.

  So I got down on my hands and knees with the magic wand in my hand and started crawling underneath the benches so I could get closer to the screen. Underneath the benches was a forest of legs. Some were crossed and some were tapping on the floor. Some people had their shoes off and their toes wiggled in and out. It all looked funny in the faint flickering light from the projector. I started to laugh but kept on going until I was in the middle of the forest and bumped into a leg. Mickey leaned down and whispered, ‘Peter, is that you? What are you doing?’

  ‘Shhh,’ I whispered back, ‘I’m trying to get closer.’

  More and more hands started reaching down beneath the benches to feel what was going on. Sometimes a hand patted my back or my head and one scared hand reached down and touched my face. I heard a few people giggle, too.

  All of a sudden I bumped into something soft. I felt all around it. It was a hat. So I put the hat on my head and kept on moving past legs until I was in the front row, leaning on my hands watching the silly blobs go around and around while the doctor talked about them. I wished they would show movies that Daddy took of me. They were more interesting than Daddy’s blobs. I waved the magic wand to make the blobs go away.

  When the movie was over someone turned on the lights and Mummy started changing the reels. Some of the doctors in the front row leaned over and said, ‘Hello, Peter, what are you doing here? And what are you doing with that funny hat and the glass rod?’

  ‘This?’ I held up the magic wand. ‘This is a magic wand.’

  I pulled myself out from underneath the benches and stood up in front of the screen. From a back row, somebody said, ‘Hey, that’s my hat!’ But in front of me someone said, ‘Are you a magician?’