A Book of Dreams Read online

  ‘Well, what other kind of stuff is he researching?’

  ‘Unh, he wrote me that in prison he’s been doing a lot of mathematics and … uh … he might even give me some formulas to memorize and keep until he gets out.’

  It was the formula for negative gravity, and no one would ever know if he really gave it to me or not. That was my insurance. I would never tell anyone if he actually gave it to me because that way if three men in black suits came to get me, they would not kill me, because I had the formula. And one day when Daddy was free I would be a captain or even more in the Cosmic Engineers. When everything was better, they would all drive up in a fleet of cloudbuster trucks, right up the tree-lined driveway, and stop in front of study hall, waiting for me. I would walk out of Latin class or history and get my uniform. All the kids, even the seniors, would be jealous as I went out and saluted my men in the Corps of Cosmic Engineers and we drove off to have cloudbuster bases all over the world. Maybe they would even come to get me in a flying saucer. Maybe with the formula we could make friends with them and there wouldn’t be any war any more.

  We walked and talked all afternoon. Ed told me about his family and how he was a conscientious objector. I told him I was going to the Air Force Academy.

  ‘Well, how come you’re going to Oakwood, then? I mean, the Quakers are pacifists, you know.’

  But the Air Force, well, the Air Force knew. They were going to help me.

  ‘Oh, I’ll get in.’

  It was dark when Mummy came and we loaded the car and drove on Route 44 back up to Sheffield. I hadn’t seen Mummy since the last time I went to see Daddy and she wanted to know all about it.

  Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary was big and barren. They let you in through two sets of locked doors so there were always bars between you and whatever you looked at. Inside the main hall were high ceilings and shadows on the polished floors. Around by the entrance were old glass cabinets with wallets and combs the prisoners made and sold for pocket money. In the middle of the big hall there was a desk where you signed in and then you turned left and footsteps followed you down the hallway.

  At the end of the hall was a big room with chairs and couches in it arranged so that the prisoner sat in a chair in front of the table and guests sat on the couch opposite. The upholstery was plain green and red plastic. There was an open space by the entryway with a black rubber mat. It was a runway for hugging. Guards stood around by the walls. Daddy wore a blue uniform, only it was denim and his face was sad. I went with Aurora. Daddy said they were going to get married in the prison chapel. He started going to church in prison and sent me prayers and a piece of the chapel bulletin that had a print of Dürer’s praying hands. We talked in low voices. He asked me about school and I said it was okay. He asked me about girls and I told him there had been a girl in Maine, at Bill and Eva’s that summer. Her breast fit into my hand just right and made me feel like I was running through the grass. He didn’t talk too much about himself, but he said that he heard from one of the other prisoners that he was supposed to have been killed in his cell but for some reason it didn’t happen. When the time was up we hugged on the long rubber mat and a guard took him away to a barred door at the end of the room. We watched. After the guard closed the barred door, Daddy turned around in his blue shirt and his eyes reached out all the way across the big room and he gave me his eyes and then he waved and he was gone behind the bars. Footsteps followed us all the way back down the hall.

  ‘It was all right,’ I said. ‘Kind of sad.’

  ‘Did he ask about me?’

  ‘Yes. He said to send you his love. I wrote you that. That was about all.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I think Mummy was jealous of Aurora. Mummy said she spent fourteen years with Daddy and that was just about the longest any woman had. She tried to go down and visit him once but he didn’t want to see her.

  Sheffield is a nice little town in the country and we lived in a small apartment on the top floor of a big old New England house, right off Route 7. Ed and I had fun together, even did some trick-or-treating on Halloween. We spent the evenings doing homework for Oakwood or watching TV. On Sunday morning, 3 November, the telephone rang and Mummy answered it. From the bedroom I shared with Ed I heard her say, ‘Hello? Yes. What?’ Then her voice got tight and high. ‘When? Oh my God! Oh my God!’

  I ran into the living room and listened. She was crying into the telephone, saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’ I looked at her.

  ‘Mummy, what is it?’ She shook her head. ‘What is it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’

  She had collapsed onto the couch and was holding the telephone, crying.

  ‘Is it Daddy?’

  She nodded, rocking back and forth, crying into the telephone.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  She nodded oh my god.

  The morning went by slowly and I watched it all blurred through storm windows. Outside it didn’t look as if trees should be moving, but they did, dropping the last leaves on the road and the lawn, clacking branches back and forth with no sound. It was sad to see a window holding so many movements still.

  His heart had stopped and they found him in the morning when he didn’t show up for roll call. I wanted to know if it had made him wake up or if it just happened. In between telephone calls coordinating how we were to get to Maine for the funeral, it was decided that Mummy would take Ed back to Oakwood and drive up to Maine on the fourth. Bill Steig the cartoonist, and his wife, Kari, driving up from New York, would pick me up in the evening and we would drive all night.

  I watched Ed and Mummy through the window as they got in the car and waved, and then I was alone. I went back away from the window and it felt like it did at first when Mummy nodded, that my arms were rising, lifting all by themselves and I would rise with them. My arms were light and empty. They lay on the pillow in front of me and then they smoothed against my eyes, my stomach, and lay my fingers between my legs.

  After a while I got up and went to the special brown envelope where I kept notes and mail from Daddy. He had given me a lot of my own papers to keep. I put them out on the table and looked at them.

  The first thing was a poem. It was in my own handwriting:

  On a mound

  On the ground

  On a hill lies

  The body of a great man

  Thoughts—

  To one side he cried

  And thought of the life he led

  As it grew late he thought of Orgonon

  The great which

  He discovered then

  He thinks of his

  Son whom he loved

  So, on the hill

  On the ground

  In a mound, he rests

  Thinking.

  And with it, the exact same poem copied in Daddy’s handwriting. At the end it said, ‘Peter wrote this Feb. 27, 1954.’

  There was a picture I took of tubes from a DORbuster in the bathtub in Washington showing the energy field around the pipes.

  Then there was another poem. On top of the page was ‘CCA— Cloudbuster CORE of America’. The poem read:

  A POEM BY PETER REICH

  The dry lands will soon be wet

  with a special gentle rain

  for people who have important crops.

  On the cloudseeders we will gain

  for their silly old ‘rain’

  and those funny cloud makers.

  On top of all this

  Mushy, mush

  Just one man will do it all alone.

  And then in my handwriting: ‘Dear Daddy here is a poem for you Pete’.

  A couple of telegrams from the trial, telling me to be brave, and telling me to keep my belly soft. The picture of Dürer’s hands. Daddy wrote on it:

  To Pete to pray from

  May 10, 1957, Dad.

  Outside it was raining and it was almost dark. Cars went past on Route 7 and their headlights wobbled on the ceiling. The
trees reached up into the sky, barely moving. But there was no sound.

  The Steigs arrived after it was dark. The big green finned Plymouth drove in the driveway and I met them at the door under a light that dripped with rain. Kari was pregnant. We drove up through the night with the dashboard glowing green on our faces. We talked quietly about things that had happened and what would happen. Kari said she felt good going to the funeral carrying a child.

  The day of the funeral was grey and I wore a black suit and a red tie and the floor was red. Tom had waxed the linoleum floor so it was shiny and held onto people’s legs. Bill and Dr Baker arranged the funeral and it all happened in dark shadows on the linoleum. Outside there were yellow and red leaves on the ground and I went underneath a dripping spruce tree to kick at the dirt and look for something I remembered burying once. The leaves held shiny still drops on their bellies. We got a record player so we could play ‘Ave Maria’ and other music and the label on the record was red but not as red as the floor. In the middle of the floor the casket was a soft copper colour. Outside it was blowing and drizzling. I watched the clouds for a minute but the floor was so red. Dr Baker got up to say something, with his feet sinking into the linoleum. My shoes turned around and ran up the carpet upstairs to where the carpet was soft purple and rough on my hands and cheeks, my burning cheeks. I lay on the floor of the study for a long time, whispering, ‘Come back, come back,’ and when I got up there was a red spot in the carpet.

  Outside the wind was cool on my cheeks and hair and there were many faces moving around, all hunched up in shoulders against the November wind. The wind was blowing and someone was standing on top of the tomb, getting ready to lower the casket down. Leaning against the wall to put on top of the tomb was a big piece of plywood. It was yellow and the wind was going to blow it over. I held it up as the casket went down. I wanted to put Daddy’s razor in it so he could shave. Then some men came and took the plywood, grunting as they lifted it on top of the tomb. Then they put a carpet over the plywood and put Daddy’s bust on the carpet. The carpet was red.

  Afterwards I helped Bill clean up. We went upstairs to the study and I looked out of the window. Clouds stumbled over each other to run across the sky fastest and sometimes rain came and fell against the window, streaking the windows and my face. Bill came over to me and put his arm around me. We both looked out of the window for a while, watching the last leaves blow off the trees. He squeezed my shoulder.

  ‘Well, Peter,’ he said slowly, ‘I guess you’re a captain now.’

  His voice was soft in the quiet of the study, and it made me feel better. The soft wooded walls were so quiet without the big clock ticking. The war was over and even though Daddy had said we won, I didn’t feel as though we won. Outside the trees were empty and the soldiers were gone.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to smile bravely, ‘and I guess you’re a colonel.’

  On the way back down to New York, we stopped at Bill and Eva’s. The sky had cleared on the way down from Rangeley and after dinner I took the old beat-up Stetson and went outside alone. It was dark and bright with a cool wind. A sliver of moon hung abandoned in the empty branches. In the garden, dry golden cornstalks wobbled shoulders together.

  Toreano waited for me on his pony, half hidden in the shadow of the barn. He waited until I came away from the house and then nudged his pony into the brighter darkness.

  I tugged at the brim of the Stetson, pulling it down over my eyes.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ I said slowly.

  He nodded and waited for me to say more. The fringes on his deerskin jacket swayed as the pony leaned down to nibble on wet grass.

  ‘Are they ready?’

  He nodded again. It had been so long since I had been with Toreano and the men. I felt older and sadder. My battle scars were inside me. There was a kind of battle fatigue, a feeling like after pressing my arms against a doorjamb, when they rise all by themselves with a tired lightness. I really hadn’t spent time with Toreano since the summer after the trial when I visited Daddy at Orgonon. We played some cowboy-and-Indian games but it bored us sometimes. Once in a while he guarded while I walked naked in the grass. On some sunny hot days he brought the Indian Princess out of the forest and she was earth, grass and wind beneath soft tall trees or in a place where deer had slept, a gentle brown hollow in the grass where the earth felt good to my legs. The princess was soft and graceful and I held on tighter and tighter until I was sweating and relaxed. The wind made all the fuzzy grass brush against my skin and cool it, and the soft wet moss was sparkling in the sun.

  We ran together in the back fields, climbing trees to look around for Indians, charging across the hospital field and galloping down the dusty road towards home.

  In the evenings Daddy and I walked together in the fields with our rifles and then the scouts and cavalry waited in the shadows of the forest in case something happened. We had good talks, walking quietly across the fields with our rifles, sometimes shooting a squirrel or a porcupine. I walked there after the funeral. It seemed a long time ago, and tucked in between a small cluster of fields looking west towards the hospital field, there was a wooden chair. It had warped and the finish was almost weathered away. He must have come there to sit when he was alone. All alone at Orgonon. With Toreano watching.

  I wanted to ask Toreano what it was like then, when I was not there and he was there alone, riding at easy gallop behind Daddy’s big white car. I wanted to know if he had seen Daddy cry when he sat in that chair, and if he still played the organ, letting the music float out and mingle with the air. I wanted him to tell me what it was like to stand, as I ordered him to stand, at the top of the stairway in the observatory, watching Daddy work and look out of the windows.

  Toreano shifted in his saddle as if he were uncomfortable with my silence as I watched the sky. Yes, this was the cavalry. ‘Well,’ I said, straightening up, ‘let’s get on with it.’

  I started walking to the cloudbuster platform that Bill and Eva had built next to their garden. Toreano rode ahead of me. His pony was skittish and whinnied as he reined to a halt next to the platform. I could feel his eyes watching me as I slowly climbed the stairs onto the platform.

  Standing at the edge, facing west, I could see way across the dry tops of the cornstalks into the western sky. The men stood very still, at rest, with their eyes on me. Most of them were very young. They hadn’t been there for many of the battles. Their eyes shone with a kind of respect I wasn’t used to. They would be good soldiers. And brave. My fingers traced the soft wood of the railing as I tried to think of words.

  ‘Men, some of you were in battle and some of you are new. Many of you will be able to tell your children about what has happened. And you should be proud. You men are part of the newest outfit in the world, the Cosmic Engineers, and you have experienced things that most people wouldn’t understand. Together, we have opened up a whole new world for exploration. First with the cloudbuster, making rain, and then, when the flying saucers began to attack, with the spacegun.

  ‘And most of you know what happened then. They put the general in jail and he died. They were afraid of the truth and they killed him. So now the big battle is over. We’ve come over a new horizon into a new way of thinking and feeling. But it will be a long time, men, before we are ready to fight again.’

  My voice choked and I felt a terrible emptiness inside, like losing something. Only it wasn’t like losing something because when you lost something it just got lost and you didn’t know until it was already lost. And now I felt sad because I knew I was going to lose something and in some funny way I knew I had to lose it myself and that made it harder because if I lost it on purpose, it meant that I would always know where to find it again, even if I couldn’t. It was something I didn’t understand, but had to.

  ‘And so the reason Toreano called you here tonight is because we’re going to break up the outfit. You can keep your rifles and your uniforms. Use your horses to start farms. Raise famil
ies. Be good citizens. But always be ready. Raise your children free and happy and let them be ready for the next time because they will be the children of the future.’ The wind rose sharply and the men nodded their heads, turning to look at the wind. ‘I …’ was very sad ‘… am going to miss you all. But we will be together again, I know it. We are on the side of truth. Thank you.’

  I stood up straight, at attention, and looked at them for a long time. They all looked at me. I waited for a minute until the wind died down, and then very slowly and very seriously I saluted. ‘Dismissed.’

  The formation broke up quietly and Toreano and I watched them go to their horses, mount and ride away in all the directions there are. We could hear their saddles creaking for a long time. When they were gone, Toreano nudged his pony up so that he was sitting directly in front of me. His eyes were full of words.

  I wanted to ask him what he really thought. If he thought we had really won, and where he would go, what he would do. But I knew we would meet again.

  ‘Goodbye, Toreano. I …’

  He smiled quietly and his eyes flashed underneath the dark brim of his hat. We looked at each other for a long time. Then he leaned forward in the saddle, holding his hand out to mine. We shook hands firmly. He flicked the reins and was gone.