A Book of Dreams Read online

  I called it the ballroom because it was so big I thought there should be dances in it. The saddle rode over the tops of the chairs to the fireplace and then around to the big picture window. Next to the window was the walkie-talkie that Daddy used when he wanted to talk to people downstairs.

  The saddle rode around to the organ and galloped across the keys to the windows that looked over the pond. The lake was all silvery blue.

  Voices came down the stairs loudly and then there were hands on the banister. Dr Baker, Dr Duval and Dr Raphael came down the stairs. They waved to me and went out the door.

  The saddle rode across the ballroom and slowly glided up the wooden banister. Extra quiet like a scout we got to the top of the landing and inched up the last couple of steps to watch Daddy working at his desk. After a while he looked over the tops of his glasses and saw me. He smiled. He wasn’t mad any more and I ran across the carpet to him.

  ‘Daddy Daddy! Look! I got this cowboy ring with a secret compartment just like the Lone Ranger! Look!’ I came around the side of the desk and showed him the ring.

  He took it from me and looked at it. He frowned.

  ‘Where is the secret compartment?’ he said, putting his pen back in the penholder.

  I leaned over and slid the pommel back.

  ‘See, it is supposed to glow in the dark and you can write messages on it. Here, cup your hands and you can see it. I want to send messages on it. Could you figure out how to write on it?’

  He looked at it for a minute, sliding the pommel back and forth. Then he cupped his hand around it to make it glow, but it wasn’t dark enough.

  ‘Have you seen it glow in the dark?’

  ‘Sure. I was just down in the cellar and it glowed real bright. Come on down.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Don’t you remember? A long time ago it was on the back of a Cheerios box and Mummy gave me fifty cents to send away with the box top. It came back in the mail yesterday only … only I didn’t get to show it to you.’

  He looked at me seriously, holding onto it so his fingers were right over the pretend stirrups. It was really nice. ‘Let’s just go over to the closet,’ I said. ‘You’ll see, it really works.’

  ‘Peeps, I’m sorry but you cannot keep it.’

  ‘What?’ He dropped it into his palm. ‘But I just got it. I’m going to use it with the cavalry to send messages about the Indians!’

  ‘I’m sorry. You can’t keep it and that is final.’

  ‘But Daddy, I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to be silly and make you mad.’

  ‘It is not that, Peeps. This glow-in-the-dark substance may harm you. It may be very dangerous. Right now we are preparing an experiment to help us understand it. I’m sorry. I know you like it as a toy, but we must get rid of it. I shall ask Mr Ross to bury it.’

  He reached out and pressed the button on the intercom. ‘Mr Ross? Mr Ross. Please come to the study.’

  ‘Bury it? But Daddy, wait. Maybe we can take the glow-in-the-dark stuff out and save the ring. I don’t care if it doesn’t glow in the dark!’ Tears started to blur him and I wiped my arm across my face.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m very sorry, son, but I am afraid the whole ring may be contaminated.’

  ‘No fair. I just got it. It was fifty cents. I didn’t even get to write a message. Please, Daddy, can’t I please keep it?’

  ‘Peter, I am sorry. I have much work to do, preparing lectures, writing articles, and I don’t have time to explain it all to you. The substance in that ring is dangerous. Especially when we are making our own experiments. I don’t know how this material reacts with Orgone. Now you must understand and go with Mr Ross…. Ah, Mr Ross.’

  Tom came in and walked over to the desk. ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  ‘Mr Ross, please take Peter and help him bury this ring. It may have very dangerous material in it and I don’t want him to play with it. Perhaps you can bury it where we have buried some of our other equipment.’

  He handed the ring to Tom and looked at me.

  ‘All right, Peter. Now I have work to do. Please go with Mr Ross.’

  I tried to look angry at him but I couldn’t even see him because my eyes were so blurry and mad. He didn’t even want to let me play with it a little bit. All he thought about was his energy.

  After we buried the ring Tom said I could help him saw wood in the barn but I didn’t want to. He walked around the side of the observatory with his shovel and I made the special call.

  Toreano came out of the trees on his pony leading mine and we rode down the hill slowly.

  I came down the hill running, still running away.

  I had been at the tomb, talking to my father. Sitting next to the bust on the huge granite slab, looking out over the fields and forests, I talked to the bust for a long time. It was hard to say some of the things I felt. Makavejev was gone. My father was gone. For the first time I felt really alone, at tabula rasa, ready for a new reality, a reality that would be better than fantasies. And yet I was still surrounded by my own dreams. The military dream that had been my armour for so long was cracking and softening and I was afraid because I had only reached the surface of things that had been too long buried.

  As I talked I examined the bust, running my fingers along the lines that were his hair; long on top, cropped short at the sides and in back. He had a set of hand clippers and liked to clip his own hair, pausing to run his fingers through it in a way that left it standing out at the back as if the wind was always blowing through it.

  There had been a thunderstorm during the night and some rainwater was still caught in the rim of one eye. It looked as if the eye was crying. My father was terrified of thunder and lightning. He used to run around and make me hide under tables. Once lightning hit a cloudbuster next to the cabin. Streaks of electricity shot through the house spinning sparks off the wire we used for a radio aerial. My father paced back and forth, afraid. I thought he was afraid that the thunder was directed at him, for understanding it, for being able to play with it. And I guess I have never totally believed that it wasn’t, just as I will never be totally sure that a flying saucer won’t come and take me away. I just don’t know. Perhaps it is the easy way out, keeping one foot in the dream – but it is deeper than that. My childhood is the dream. It is all there, and real.

  I brushed the tear away. I didn’t like it that the iris and pupil of the eyeball were hollow. In the middle of the eyeball it suddenly fell away and there was a concave hollow. His head is hollow too. Except once some hornets built a huge nest inside his head. I think Tom removed it because the hornets came zooming out and buzzed people who came to look at the tomb. A hero’s tomb.

  Is it wrong to have heroes? Aren’t heroes part of the authoritarian misunderstanding? Or is there a separate, tragic, category? He was plagued all his life for saying things that are gradually being accepted. No one dared to stay with him to discover what lay at the end of his thoughts. Nothing he said has ever been disproved, only dismissed. People attack him for personal reasons … me too.

  I’m sorry he gave me an attitude towards military authority that was consistent with his paternity (and his century, because in many ways he was a man of the nineteenth century) but inconsistent with his philosophy. I resent it in him that at the end he sought approval and aid from the higher-ups and institutionalized authorities who killed him.

  But that is my personal grudge. Perhaps he had no choice at the end. And as Eva said, in a hundred years those personal things won’t matter; the important thing is the process, the scientific principles. And until I learn more about what science does not know about Life Energy I have no choice but to believe in everything I experienced as a child. I think my father understood more about the life process than most people are emotionally prepared to accept. And that includes myself. I have a lot of catching up to do and I’m still running. Running away, away from the tomb and down the hill. Running hard, through the hard, new blueberry buds o
n the side of the hill, across Tom’s lawns, down the road to the cabin and past the cabin, Indian paintbrushes and daisies whipping against my legs all the way down to the dock.

  Breathing hard and sweating, I stripped and sat on the wooden planks facing out over the water, rising and falling slowly. Way out across the tops of the trees on the other side of the lake Saddleback held the late afternoon sun on its flanks. Clouds reflected in the water were broken up by the bobbing waves and every time it looked as if the reflection of a cloud would reach the dock a wave bobbed up and broke it. I felt confused about how freedom worked – every time I thought I was free of one thing, another popped up.

  Splinters of clouds dissolving in the late afternoon sun disappeared and returned. Naked in this silent movement I still felt trapped, afraid of lake monsters beneath the water and terrified of flying saucers from the sky; trapped in the real world.

  And guilty. I had armoured myself with an incredible military dream which shielded me from the realities of becoming a real person. It was easier to feel guilty and afraid of disobeying the great celestial commands which echoed in all my dreams than it was to grow up. Either way I seemed to lose. I would feel guilty for obeying and for not obeying. Either way I could always, in a human failing, let Him down.

  Each time I looked, it was different. But a few things always stayed the same. What always puzzled me about the lake was that wherever you are, the waves always come towards you. But it was still scary. This water was cold and dark out in the middle but if you looked straight down from the dock it was brown and a flaky scummy layer of dead wood and organic matter rose and fell with the heaviness of having already drowned. What happens when you swim without armour?

  Being alive means having dreams but without armour. Doing the same thing for different reasons. Keeping my belly soft because I want to, not just because he wanted me to. Standing out there in the middle of my fantasy thirteen years ago, beckoning the lights to take me away, I was not making the energy field and praying because I wanted to go to another planet, it was because I was afraid to stay here. A. S. Neill said to me once, ‘I am not afraid of dying, I am afraid of not living.’ And I wasn’t even close enough to life to feel that! I hadn’t let myself live! I was not seeking life, I was fleeing it. I fled for thirteen years until I stumbled onto this blinding projection of my childhood and here, now, finally, I am looking at it, naked, at the lake.

  The waves hypnotized me. It would be easy to just slip in the water and swim slowly out into the brown mud and monsters. Maybe my foot would touch the carcass of a dead deer floating just beneath the surface. I would panic and die breathing water. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

  The first thirteen years of my life always seemed most real to me, more real than anything that happened afterwards. And now, suddenly, with the infant soldier fading away in the bright lights after the movie, I felt afraid that my life would be empty and lost.

  The last thirteen years were lost and unhappy. The infant was frozen in fear inside me, unable to live. I bumped into him in Annecy in a cloudy gassy dream but he eluded me. Three years later, when I was at Rangeley with those friends, he was still a good soldier, defences strong. It took a movie to break my shell, maybe because movies are so close to dreams and I loved my dreams more than reality. There had been too much sadness; not enough laughter.

  As an unhappy adolescent I followed the Playboy ethic assiduously. Big tits. Love ’em and leave ’em. Sex as a diversion, like sports. I fucked a lot. I masturbated a lot, not as a release of energy, but because fantasy was easier to come by than the dream world portrayed in movies. It ran deeper, too, like the lake which only got darker and darker, because being a real person and letting myself love a woman would have meant sharing all that fear. It would have meant sharing who I was, and I was too loyal for that. In my own way, I wanted his penis too.

  One night I met a nice girl at a party. We talked for a while and then stopped talking. She was very pretty and her eyes were very deep. After we sat in silence for a while I asked her if she wanted to come to my house.

  ‘To spend the night?’ she asked.

  I nodded.

  She agreed. We came to my house and went into the bedroom. Fully dressed, we fell on the bed. I started to touch her. After a few minutes she said, ‘I don’t want to make love with you.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I don’t know who you are,’ she said.

  Without thinking, I answered and then knew it was wrong. I felt the scream rising within me, a scream that left me spinning and falling alone, lost in space.

  ‘I’m Wilhelm Reich’s son,’ I said.

  Aaaaaaaaaa.

  And so I scream and scream. I gag or vomit every morning. Sometimes I scream in the car, driving along lost in the roar of turnpike driving, screaming, letting it out, making the windows vibrate. I need it, it helps me to have a soft belly. It makes me think life is a process of expansion and contraction. It pulsates. There are good things and bad things, but it is always shifting and changing, pulsating. Freedom, an elusive sensation, comes only in sudden spontaneous bursts like the wind that afternoon on the dock, when I was caught between sky and water. It came up suddenly, out of the west when the sun was behind the trees pouring huge sunbeams all over the land. A soft green golden glow came out onto the smooth lawns that Tom so carefully mowed, and in the sky all the clouds raced away to make it all blue for the wind. And the wind made me shiver in my nakedness. When the sun broke through the trees I dove into the wind, following beams of sunlight into darkness. When I burst to the surface I was blinded by the shining water, swimming in the sun’s path, bathed in light.

  Some of the doctors were dissecting a mouse and I got up real close where I could see his skin all stretched out on the board with pins in him and his organs all purple and smelly.

  Some people were working at the row of microscopes and holding glass jars up in the air. I thought of a couple of jokes but didn’t feel like making anyone laugh. Around in the back where I found the magic wand, Mummy was sitting on a white lab stool making glass pipettes. I sat on the stool next to her and watched her hold them over the little flame until they turned red, draw them apart and break them. She looked at me.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, putting the new pipettes down.

  The stool went around faster and faster until I felt myself getting dizzy as I kicked it higher and higher. When I was as high as the table I looked at the little stack of glass pipettes.

  ‘Have you been crying? What’s the matter?’

  She put her hand out to take a tear away from my cheek. Her fingers were warm from the glass and it made me cry. She pulled me close to her and held me while I cried. She brushed my hair with her warm hand.

  ‘It’s okay, Peter, it’s okay. Everything will be all right. Now tell me what happened.’

  I told her what Daddy said and how Tom had helped me bury the ring. She frowned and squeezed me.

  ‘Well, there are some things we just can’t have. We didn’t know that it was a dangerous ring and if we had, we wouldn’t have bought it. It wasn’t your fault. And Daddy may be right. It might not be good for you.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t even let me play with it.’

  ‘Well, it is just one of those things. Maybe you will get a pair of cowboy boots for Christmas and that will make up for it. Hmmm?’

  She held my face back from her and with her warm thumbs stroked the tears from my eyes. She smiled and I smiled. She hugged me again and said, ‘All right. Now, I have to make some more pipettes. Do you want to help?’

  I helped her put little wads of cotton in the ends of the pipettes and then we made droppers. Mummy took a long piece of glass and heated it in the middle. When it turned red she pulled it apart very slowly until it almost broke and then she took it out of the flame. When it cooled, she broke it and turned it around. She heated the end and just when it began to melt, she pressed it against a hard board to make it just a little bit flat at the other end. Then
she put the finished pipette in a row. At the other end of the row I picked them up and put rubber nipples on them.

  ‘Nipple’ was a funny word. Mummy had big ones. She told me I used to suck on them for milk. Once I tried to get milk out again but there was none left. I only have little ones. Daddy’s are bigger than mine and have hair all over them and smell of his skin oil.

  I put one of the rubber nipples in my mouth and tried to suck on it, but it didn’t taste good.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Mummy.

  ‘I was just sucking on it. You called it a nipple and I wanted to suck it. Will I ever be able to suck yours again?’

  She smiled. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  I wheeled the stool down until I was dizzy again and walked back through the lab.

  I walked into the big room where the movie had been. People were all leaving for lunch, going out the door, talking and laughing. Just as I was passing one of the little side rooms where they did experiments, someone said, ‘Wait for me!’ and ran past me out the door. He left the door to the room open so I went in.

  The door closed by itself behind me and made the room pitch-dark. It smelled of metal because it smelled of accumulators. There were many accumulators, big and small, and in the darkness they all smelled of steel wool. One of the accumulators was a twentyfold one which was very strong.

  It was pitch-black in the room except for the smell and a small buzz. After a while I could see faint shapes on the counter but I couldn’t see where the noise came from. I shuffled through the darkness until I came to a small accumulator where the noise was. The accumulator had a little square window. Inside the square window crackling very softly was a vacuum tube and in it, glowing at me in the darkness, was a clear cloud of blue Orgone Energy.

  Mosquitoes were biting badly. I put the faded blue movie film back on the dump next to the little mound of glass pipettes and looked at them lying against the cold, dark rotten earth. The film curled gently around the stack of sparkling glass. I pulled more strands of film out of the earth from wherever it poked out and threw it on the pile and then I buried it all with moss and pine needles, roots and broken bottles and walked back through the trees into the fields of Orgonon.