Everything Solid has a Shadow

by Michael Antman

  We sat down in his living room, which was crowded with hundreds of books. Though I looked at the spines in vain for names like Adler, Jung, or Freud, most were volumes of European history or fiction. There were dozens of framed woodcuts, every one of them, without exception, hanging askew. And yet not a single one of them was hanging at the same angle, so I surmised that it couldn’t have been the fault of a tremor or a passing moving van.

  “So,” Dr. Nemerov said. “My first name is Donte. Please call me that. Not Dante with an ‘a,’ Donte with an ‘o.’ And you’re Carlos, or Charlie?”

  “Correct.”

  “I hope you don’t mind if I finish this cigar,” he said with a clear lack of expectation that I would object. His voice was measured and calm, and, if I had closed my eyes and pinched my nostrils, I would have guessed that it issued from someone with regular features wearing a pair of well-pressed slacks and a crisp dress shirt.

  “I don’t mind,” I said, though I did, a bit; I guess my thinking was something along the lines of “in for a dime, in for a dollar,” and I supposed, as well, that the cigar smell would keep the cat stench at bay.

  “So I read the form you filled out. We’re not going to start at the very beginning, although that’s where everyone’s troubles come from without exception. The beginning, that is, infancy and the few years that follow, the years where all the damage is done.

  “But just for today, let’s start from today. Now. This moment. Tell me what’s troubling you and what led you to make an appointment with me, and we’ll work our way backward and see if we can help you feel better and be more effective. Because that’s the goal, isn’t it? If you can walk out of here and be more effective in your daily life, then I’ve done my job. But I want you to bear something in mind. If you are a murderer, for example, and my treatment makes you feel better about murdering people and more effective at this task, then I will have done my job but I will have failed at the same time. I’m telling you this because there’s a common misperception that a psychiatric patient can say anything he wants to say in the course of treatment, and the therapist is there merely to listen rather than to judge. But I am a moral and ethical human being, and I do, in fact, judge, and in the process I try to help guide people toward what I would call right and just behavior. This is my responsibility as a therapist and as a human being. I have never walked away from a patient, but under certain extreme circumstances, I would do so. Just so you understand the ground rules.”

  “Is there a particular reason you’re warning me about this?” I thought for a moment of Elizabeth.

  “Don’t take it personally, Carlos. I’m only telling you the rules. Rules are incredibly important, don’t you think? Without rules, we have no civilization. But once you know the boundaries of any given situation, you can act with complete freedom within those boundaries with no self-censoring or timidity. And you should know that I detest timidity. So tell me what’s troubling you.”

  “Well, I hardly know where to begin, because it’s too strange, I guess.”

  “I have seen and heard a lot of strangeness in my career.”

  Yeah, just looking in the mirror, I thought to myself, and a little semi-laugh inadvertently escaped my lips. And to my delight, Dr. Nemerov laughed too, and spread his arms wide to indicate his surroundings, and then pointed both hands at himself. He’d understood my silent joke and, incredibly, appreciated it.

  Right there, he had me.

  “Well,” I continued, “on a practical level, all of a sudden I’m having some very disturbing dreams.”

  Dr. Nemerov stubbed out the last little bit of the cigar he’d been smoking, fished in one of the myriad deep pockets of his overalls for another one, and lit it with a gold lighter he extracted from still another pocket. “So what is the nature of these dreams? Are they nightmares?”

  “No, I don’t really have nightmares per se. Nightmares I can handle. It’s just that this woman, this casual friend, is dying of ALS, and she keeps coming into my brain. I mean it’s not like a normal dream, it’s like she walks right into my head while I’m sleeping and says things that I shouldn’t be able to know.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, the first time, she told me in my dream that there was something wrong with her brain. And this was before I knew she’d been diagnosed with ALS. When I told her about the dream the next day, she was shocked, I mean she almost fainted, because no one knew except her girlfriend. And we were never even that close. She’s just a waitress at a club where I play music sometimes. I’m afraid of losing my job and my father has huge gambling debts, but I don’t dream about those things, just this waitress.”

  “So you’re fearful of several different things, I would imagine. The first is that she, this ‘waitress’ as you call her, really is communicating with you in a telepathic way, which would mean that not only can you read her mind, but she’s inside your brain so perhaps she can read yours.”

  “Which she denies. She says she has no idea why I’m having these dreams.”

  “So the second thing you might be fearful of is that by seeing things that you believe people shouldn’t be able to see, like the thoughts of others, you are doing something that is somehow forbidden, and worse, you are doing so without any conscious control. I will tell you that from the moment we are first placed on the potty to learn how to shit, most of our energies are devoted to maintaining control over our bodies, our minds, and our social connections. This is where civilization comes from, controlling where and when we shit, so to speak. You think this civilization is corrupt? Try living in a place where people shit in the streets and tell me what you think then. So suddenly, when you are asleep, you have lost this control over your thoughts, over all the shitty stuff you like to keep inside, and suddenly things enter your skull without your permission. Is this a possibility? Yes? And are you torn between wanting this all to just go away and wanting to experience it even more often, except at your own volition instead of as a sort of frightening random occurrence?”

  “I would say that both are possible. Maybe both at the same time, kind of swirled together. Like I’m proud of this gift I’ve been given, but terrified of it, and embarrassed when I can’t just pluck it out of my, you know…”

  “Quiver. Like an arrow you can aim. So tell me about the other dream.”

  “Well, I had this other dream where she told me to wake up my girlfriend Alisa and tell her something, but I don’t know what it was because the dream just ended.”

  “You’ve described this young woman as only a colleague and a casual acquaintance. Does she know your girlfriend?”

  “No, I mean only casually, not really.”

  “So what could this young woman possibly have to say of any importance to your girlfriend, other than that she loves you? Or that you love her? Is there anything else? ‘What are you wearing to the prince’s royal ball?’ I don’t think so. This is a dream about love.”

  I sat there, stunned. “But it’s only a dream!”

  “Ah, now it’s only a dream. But it wasn’t only a dream when you called me and made an appointment, and it wasn’t only a dream a few seconds ago. The moment I point out consequences to you, you retreat behind this ‘only a dream’ business.”

  “But I don’t understand, exactly. What consequences are you referring to?”

  “Well, there are a couple. One is that you do indeed love her, but you’ve been suppressing this for some reason. All this business about this so-called ‘waitress,’ and ‘she’s just an acquaintance’ and ‘I really don’t know her that well,’ and referring to her as ‘her’ instead of by a name.”

  “MariAngela,” I said.

  “Okay, MariAngela. That’s a pretty name. Who is she?”

  “South Side Irish girl. Very nice.”

  “So: the suppression I’m referring to. We don’t know what th
e reason for this is yet, and we don’t even know if it’s the case. You mentioned her girlfriend; is she gay? Partially, at least?” I nodded. “Well, maybe that ‘partially’ is part of the problem. It isn’t easy to deal with ambiguity, though as I’m sure you’re aware, women’s sexuality is far more fluid than ours or certainly mine. On the other hand, it may be that this is utterly irrelevant to your situation. And the second is that she is the one who loves you and, equally, has been suppressing this fact for some reason. Except now we know the reason for both of your suppressions, don’t we?”

  “We do?”

  “Understand that dreams are funny things. There are a lot of dream theories out there, but very few of them acknowledge that there are many different categories of dreams, some that might mean a great deal to the dreamer, and some that are merely ways of passing the time while the body repairs itself during sleep. Yours, I think, mean a great deal.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  He held up his slimy cigar. It looked like the fetus of an alligator, fished from an algae-covered lagoon. “Let me finish. Most of the dreams that mean a great deal reveal those meanings only with a tremendous amount of effort on behalf of the dreamer, sometimes with the help of a therapist like me. But yours? Yours are right on the surface, it would seem to me, and the only difficulty here is in your facing the terror you feel at acknowledging the obvious.”

  “What obvious? That I love her and she loves me? Again, we don’t really know—”

  “No, you have mentioned your girlfriend, and we’ll delve deeper on that score, but I don’t get an initial sense that you’re the type who’s afraid of being in a relationship or afraid of sex.”

  “I’m not. Getting a girl pregnant, that’s another matter.”

  He laughed, not fully understanding my meaning. “Nor on the other hand that you are prone to playing around with multiple women at once. So if we accept that for the time being, then we have to draw the conclusion that what is terrorizing you is the thought of loving someone who is about to die. Either because you will lose her, which of course is painful enough even if I believed that business about ‘acquaintance,’ or because she, by dying, will lose you, or because somehow, I don’t know how, you will feel as if you will have been responsible for her death.” He paused. “Or, to put it more accurately, that after her death, you will contrive to feel a certain guilt about her death that will stay with you long after she is gone.”

  He waited a moment. “These are all just initial speculations. I need to know you much, much better. And like I said, we’ll need to start at the very beginning, with your parents and your upbringing, because invariably, that is where these false perceptions or inefficient ways of dealing with reality invariably begin.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “I don’t think you’ll have to dig too deeply in my case.”

  He said, “We’ll see. People don’t want to acknowledge the reality that their personalities and their characters are formed either in vitro or while they are still too young and helpless to have any influence over the process. That’s why they don’t want to talk about their parents. They say, let’s talk about the here and now. Let’s talk about the ‘practical level,’ as your very first words to me said. Well, fine, we can do that at our first session, but what got you to the kind of ‘here and now’ that’s so ‘practical’ that it’s making you see a psychiatrist is inevitably something your parents or others quite close to you did to you, whether they intended to or not, when you were young. Does that mean it’s hopeless? No, but it means we have to acknowledge the damage before addressing it.”

  He took a deep drag of his cigar and went on. “And let’s bear in mind, as we explore who you are in the here and now, the very particular nature of your dreams. They came on suddenly as I understand you to say, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And they are not symbolic, as we’ve discussed, but rather very direct, as if she’s walked right into your brain. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “This would suggest a certain desperation on your part to break through your very thick defenses after many years of allowing those defenses, these euphemisms you use, this ‘acquaintance’ stuff, to control your life. Please pardon the expression, Mr. Alessandro, but as skinny as you are, you strike me as a pipe backed up with so much sewage that it’s about to explode.”

  Again, I thought to myself, Yeah, you’d know about sewage, in this stink hole of an apartment, and I laughed again, and again he caught on, but this time he raised a minatory eyebrow at me. “You are a very blocked-up person, because the kind of people who have dreams literally knocking on the inside of their skulls are either very open to these sorts of phenomena, or very closed, and you are certainly not the type that strikes me as the least bit open.”

  “No.”

  “And I have yet to hear you object to my somewhat insulting description of you as a blocked-up sewer pipe filled with shit.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “You agree with me a lot. You seem to be very respectful of authority. Would you say this is the case?”

  “Yes.”

  “In my case, that’s a wise course.” He laughed and then thought for a moment. “You are respectful, above all else, I think, to your own authority, which is to say your conscious mind. But as I hope you understand by now, we can do things deliberately without doing them consciously. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “I also don’t want to entirely discount the possibility that this young woman really is walking into your brain at night, which is to say that her consciousness is somehow becoming implicated in yours. I have read quite a bit in the literature and am more or less of an agnostic tending toward outright skeptic on the question of psychic phenomena, although I think some of us may have weak vestigial powers and a very tiny minority may have something more than that.”

  There was that word again, I thought. Vestigial!

  “So let us assume that there is a psychic element at play here, and either you are somehow capturing her thoughts at night without her knowledge, or she is sending her thoughts your way, either with volition or without. With any of these possibilities, but especially with the latter two, there is another thing that I think you are, in a very deeply buried way, terrified about.”

  My lips were so dry in that overheated, malodorous room that I had to actually wiggle my jaw a bit to peel them apart and speak. I said, slowly, “What is that?”

  “Well, you said she had ALS, correct? I think you may well be terrified that she will continue to communicate with you after she has died.”

  There was a long and odiferous silence. I didn’t especially like where this conversation had gone and how quickly it had gotten there. I suddenly couldn’t wait to get on the plane for Hawaii and drink mai tais. “Dr. Nemerov, all of what you say is very interesting and insightful, but dreams strike me as being mostly pretty random, and maybe I just randomly happened to have a couple of dreams that in my waking hours strike me as more meaningful than most. And maybe, coincidentally, one of them happened to coincide with something real.”

  “Yes, Charlie, dreams are so random that you coincidentally drove all the way down to Hyde Park to see me. Let me ask you a question, okay? Where do you think dreams come from?”

  “Well, I know you said there are a lot of theories and—”

  “They come from you. You yourself create your dreams. I said a moment ago that I don’t entirely discount the possibility that she is either inadvertently or with volition sending her thoughts your way. But I think that is very, very unlikely—at the outer edges of human possibility. No, when you are asleep, you are partially unconscious and for all intents and purposes you might as well be in a darkened cellar somewhere, with no sound and no light and no way for any external stimuli to reach you. But note that I say partially un
conscious. You have just enough consciousness to feel bored and thus to create stories to alleviate that boredom. But you cannot see and you cannot hear, and more importantly you cannot remember where you are and how you got there, so the stories you tell yourself have only the slightest relationship to your waking reality. They’re nonsense. You’ve forgotten, even despite a lifetime of knowing, what you look like and what other people look like, and if you could dream yourself looking at a mirror, you wouldn’t recognize your face if you remembered it upon waking. Are you with me so far? Good. So every dream you dream is like a sock puppet acting out a primitive story, except that you are controlling the sock puppet yourself, and your eyes are closed so you cannot even see what you, yourself, are making the puppet do. The dreams are yours, Charlie, not that woman’s, not your girlfriend’s, no one else’s, and as fragmentary and puzzling as they may be, they are you trying in a very awkward but real way to tell yourself something, and I think by now you must know what that something is.”

  14

  The day before my Hawaii trip, Bowen popped into my office looking excited, so I naturally assumed that he’d managed to negotiate a higher cut of the gate, or an extra day’s stay at the hotel, or something of that sort. But I was way off.

  After I opened up the office door, he sort of waddled forward to force me to walk backward into my office. Then he shut the door very slowly, so that the click echoed in the silence. He ran his fingers—seven out of ten of which contained rings of various sorts—through his thinning, curly hair.

  “So, Charlie, my man? Pumped about Hawaii? Alisa? She okay with it?” I’d told him earlier that day about our argument, but before I could explain, Bowen rushed ahead. I noticed the Jamaican/Irish accent he deployed in order to impress clients and women was practically gone; that would mean this was a serious matter. “Listen, I don’t have much time, we can talk about the gig later, but I’ve got some bombshell news. Gilbert is selling out to a bigger agency in New York called Glennis Communications, or Glennis Partners, something like that. And wait, that’s not even half of it. Gilbert’s already planning his retirement, but the whole sale is predicated on Glennis getting their hands on ClickEver. I mean, that’s the only reason they’d want us, right?”