Spin Dry

by Greg Hollingshead

  “Superego as good buddy. Just your kind of take on this, right?”

  “And he isn’t—?”

  “Check, as I knew all along. Harry is your problem, Rachel, and if you can’t accept that, then he’s your even bigger problem.”

  “Leon, how do you know he isn’t your dad?”

  “See? There you go.”

  “Just tell me why you’re so sure.”

  “Because unlike you I remember my father, and Harry isn’t like him at all.”

  “Is Cam Wilkes?”

  “Why should he be? I never knew the guy until the other day! I never rode the Downtown 16 from Madison in my life!”

  “Are you still dreaming about Harry?”

  “You have to remember, Rachel. All that ever came through strong and clear was the melody. Harry was more confused, as if his personality was just something the melody conjured—”

  “Conjured for you, Leon. That’s the important thing—”

  “Exactly, and for me Harry was like dreaming somebody from their signature—”

  “And are you still doing that?”

  “Who knows. I’m fed up with remembering my dreams—”

  “But how can you know if your theory that Harry connects to Cam Wilkes is right if you don’t keep a close watch on your dreams while you spend time with Cam Wilkes? You can’t find out about yourself by just always doing what you feel like!”

  “Don’t get moral with me, Rachel—”

  “I’m not getting moral, I’m getting scientific. You’re turning your back on crucial evidence!”

  “Who’s turning their back?” Leon mad now, sitting straight up, bath water sloshing. “Who refuses to believe that Harry is her problem? Who can’t accept that her proud and heartless behaviour seventeen years ago is behind all this and the reason she can’t is she can’t accept that she’s not the beauty now she was then! Don’t you see? I’ve moved on. I’ve finished with being a head person. Now I’m a gut person. I’m way beyond any one-and-one-makes-two understanding now, Rachel, so don’t try toreason with me. I’m into something you obviously can’t understand. I’m just feeling my way here, like an animal in the dark.”

  Rachel walked slowly away from the bathroom to turn these statements over quietly in her mind.

  The thing was, Leon’s dumping Harry onto her hinted at a mad genius logic that went deeper than either Leon’s reasons or his buck-passing, and deeper too than her fair intake of Millpondish longing. Her husband had moved on, or thought he had, to leave her square in the place that every day now it seemed a little clearer she had more or less always been.

  In the shadow of Harry.

  And then, just as Hal had become Harry, everything seemed to stay the same but in fact was radically different. For one thing, cooler, wetter weather set in. The pond rose again to meet its white border, and the garbage bags grew quiescent. For another, a whole year after he had forgotten about applying, Leon got accepted to real estate school. For another, about the time of Leon’s acceptance, Cam Wilkes not-so-coincidentally, probably, stopped leaving his basement. Nothing Leon said or did could change his mind. PAGO went into extended recess, and Leon stopped wearing dark glasses. For still another, Rachel started her own search for Harry. At first it was the kind that’s unbroken only in retrospect, when entire days of absent-mindedness are completely forgotten and all sorts of directionless stumbling get reclassified as dead ends and nice tries. The actual here and now was not so committed. Other things kept cropping up. And if they didn’treally, then her brain circuitry in that area must have kept getting tired and closing down, because Harry kept misting out of priority. When he wasn’t right there in the background he didn’t seem to be anywhere at all, except in the shape of a faint axiom of emotion deep in her head. Like some old anxiety, or longing. But slowly, as the days passed, he, or his absence, emerged a little more steadily for her, invisible of course, in shadows, watching her, waiting, beyond the sunshine of circumstance, after the clamour, above the confusion of fumbling imagination …

  Inspired, Rachel turned to her own dreams, did what she had been wondering for a whole year about Leon for doing. While he dreamt the dreams of a man no longer interested in inner things, his pad in the morning empty, she struggled to get down whatever brainwave had just tossed her onto the beach conscious enough to close strengthless fingers around a pencil. The trick was to write backwards in time, the last dream image evoking the one before, effects triggering causes, and so on back until memory flagged and sleep took over once more. Unfortunately, after an eight-hour day at Millpond Indemnity, memory was too numb not to yield to sleep almost as soon as Rachel’s slack fingers touched the old HB Venus Imperial. No signs of Harry dreaming in the anxious little scenarios she did get down.

  Meanwhile, busy with real estate classes, Leon at first fell into the habit of leaving Egg McMuffins and Big Macs on the dark stairs to Wilkes’ basement. Sometimes on rainy evenings Rachel would tag along to listen to the beautiful, sad music that Wilkes played down there. Wistfully, behind a scrim of tears, she wouldtry to guess which other of those melodies had been written expressly for her. This while Leon, no longer interested in Hal’s (now Harry’s) Theme, a.k.a. Melody for the Girl on My Bus, and others almost as heart-wrenching, doggedly carried miscellaneous bus parts from Wilkes’ kitchen to the den. He wanted the cooking area clear because he had been finding it easier to throw together a fried egg sandwich for Wilkes than to stop by McDonald’s or hang around waiting for the Lickin’ Chicken man. The pressure of a crash course in real estate had caused all those hours that had been weighing so heavily on Leon’s shoulders to lift off like enormous gulls. The challenge of learning the fine points of real estate and how to earn a living selling it had him taking a voluntary cut in profile from Cam Wilkes’ saviour to his keeper.

  “Leon,” Rachel said one night in Wilkes’ kitchen as she watched him make a tuna sandwich for the man in the basement, “if I really was the Girl on His Bus, don’t you think Cam would be coming out more now that he knows, instead of retreating like this?”

  “Not necessarily,” Leon replied, squeezing brine from the tuna can. “Maybe the reality was too much of a blow.”

  “God, Leon. You sure know how to make a woman feel attractive.”

  “Still can’t get past that part of it, eh Rachel? You know, for somebody keen on looking at things scientifically, you sure do think just like a woman.”

  “Oh go to hell.”

  Rachel went out to wait in the car.

  There, musing, with the music of Cam Wilkes coming faintly through the basement windows, she could see a familiar pattern emerging. As a Leon enthusiasm crackled across its apportioned synapses, it tended to scar and pit the site of its inspiration so badly that eventually the whole thing died into gloom and darkness, leaving Leon in need of a new charge. Provided this time by a fresh start in real estate. And so Leon’s Harry obsession had merged into the Cam Wilkes, and the Cam Wilkes in its turn, as Leon worked his way deeper into the groove of real estate school, had continued to melt on down until it was no more than a puddle of bitter sweat. By now, indeed, Leon was all but completely into real estate. “These little pieces of paper, Rachel—” he had cried the other night, shaking a fistful of expired listings in her face— “are gonna make our fortune!”

  And that was how Rachel, who could not so easily as the man she married drop everything and rush off in a different direction, came to be left alone to search for the elusive Harry.

  A good thing for her she knew the tune.

  ——

  Early morning at the Silver Dream Research Centre and Rachel is being crowded to an edge of the bed by alpine snoring. Leon, she thinks. At it again. This time the dreamer’s fight for lost mattress takes the form of a struggle up those wet and craggy bluffs, a confused idea that somewhere high above, compassionate in clouds, will be Harry. But foot-and handholds turn out icky and flaccid, this mountain hasn’t gelled yet, she’s not getting anywherea
t all, and then Alex Silver swings past on a trapeze … disappears … swings past … disappears … swings past … talking now: “… you doing dream … the whole experi … ously machine is mal … on! Wake …”

  So Rachel woke up, found those snore snags not Leon’s but one of those other two women’s. Tearful then, she lay in the full wretchedness of the sleep-short failing-marriage sufferer until Alex Silver came by to see how she was doing.

  “I was dreaming,” Rachel told him.

  “A sad one.” He passed her a Kleenex. His hand was bandaged.

  “I’m not supposed to—am I?”

  “A waking-up dream, right? A non-REMer, for sure. They’re not always just colourful thoughts, you know.” Silver stepped back to throw an arm around the Hewlett Packard. “Don’t worry. This baby don’t make mistakes.”

  “But I hardly slept at all. And when I did it only woke me up once or twice—”

  Silver tore off a printout and held it in front of Rachel’s face. “Five times.”

  “Oh.”

  He handed her a non-REM dream report form and a pencil. “Here you go—And there’s plenty more where that came from.”

  He wasn’t kidding. Before Rachel went to work she had to complete an arithmetic test; a vigilance test (a letter of the alphabet intoned on a tape every 2.5 seconds: press the buzzer when it’s Q); the Stroop Colour-Word Test (match ‘em up); the Holtzman Inkblot Test—a nouveau-Rorschach—charting on aseven-point scale the Intensity of Her Need; the Reuben Ambiguous Figure Test; and the Nowlis-Green Mood Checklist (71 adjectives factor-analyzed into eight scales: Activation-Deactivation, Aggression, Anxiety, Concentration, Depression, Egotism, Pleasantness, and Social Affectation).

  She was still on the Reuben Ambiguous Figure Test, sitting up in bed, when one of the other women in the study, small and sallow, stumbled past from the washroom. Oh dear. A sinking feeling told Rachel she knew that profile from somewhere. Somewhere oppressive. As she dressed for work she tried for a peek, but both her colleagues were under their covers, sleeping—not dreaming—it off. Wires emerging.

  ——

  In her office at Millpond Indemnity that first day of dream deprivation Rachel could already feel the blunt dead fingers of the Nowlis-Green Checklist fumbling around in her brain. Otherwise it was a lot like any other Monday.

  At eleven her mother phoned, her first question, “How’s Leon?”

  “Oh—Fine—”

  “Is he still looking?”

  “Mother, how many times do I have to tell you? Leon’s in real estate now! He’s been doing it for weeks!”

  “On commission.”

  “Of course.”

  “Commission selling isn’t a job. A man should be in business for himself, like your father was—still is, I’m certain—or on salary.”

  “I’ll tell Leon you said so.”

  “Things are OK between you?”

  “Pretty good—”

  “Rachel, if you’re not happy you don’t have to tell me. Just like you don’t have to get blown up by a garbage bag.”

  “They stopped blowing up when it stopped being hot, in the summer.”

  “And you’re happy.”

  “Mother, Marg from Road Accidents just came in—”

  “Rachel, I know when you’re not. All I’m saying is all I’ve ever said. I’m here when you need me.”

  Rachel’s forehead came to rest on her desk as the receiver came to rest in its cradle. Five minutes later Marg from Road Accidents really did come in. “You just talked to your mother.”

  Rachel’s forehead remained on her desk. “Says she’s there when I need her.”

  “Aw, she’s OK. It’s hard when you’re old.”

  “She’s not old. She’s fifty-six.”

  “She cares about you, Rachel. That’s all—Rachel?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There isn’t by any chance something to tell?”

  “Not a thing. I’m fine. Leon’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “You wouldn’t want to look at me when you say that?”

  “No. I want to leave my head right here on my desk.”

  So long did Rachel’s head remain on her desk that she began to wonder if she should go back to the Dream Centre at all. Alex Silver was not necessarily the most confidence-inspiring oftherapists, was he? And then there was his mother. And Rachel remembered the very first time she had called Silver’s office in Village Market Square.

  ——

  Twice there was no answer. The third time a woman said in a flat voice, “What is it.”

  “Is this Dr. Silver’s office?” Rachel thinking she must have grown careless with dialling so often, and this was one of those wrong-number glimpses into a life you are sorry to know even this much about.

  “Did you dial 427-4263?”

  “Yes—”

  “And so what did you expect to get?”

  “I only asked because I tried four times and nobody answered.”

  “And the fifth time they did. This is what matters. What does not matter is that somebody should step out for a few minutes. Or are the bodily functions of an old woman interesting to you?”

  “Sorry. I’d like to make an appointment with Dr. Silver.”

  “You can’t, because this is not his number.”

  “It’s not?”

  “You would know this already if you used the correct phone book. Let me tell you what year this is. Do you have a pen?” She told Rachel the year. “Now, you tell me please. What phone book are you using?”

  Rachel looked at the phone book in her lap and giggled. It was two years out of date.

  “Why don’t you use the 1910 phone book? Then you would really get a good conversation.”

  The woman hung up.

  Some people. Rachel went down to the living room and found the right phone book, where Silver’s number was listed as 427-4275, which she dialled.

  “Dr. Silver’s office.” Funny. Sounded like the same woman. “Hang on a minute.”

  Rachel hung on for five minutes, drumming her fingers, telling herself the next time the second hand came round she would hang up and call again.

  “Yes.”

  “Hello, I’d like—”

  “Name.”

  “Rachel Boseman.” Obediently, Rachel waited for the next question. It did not come. “Hello?”

  “Hello. Name.”

  “Rachel Boseman.”

  Again Rachel waited. Nothing. “Look,” she said. “I’d like to make an appointment to see Dr. Silver.”

  “Just because you had to wait a little, you don’t have to act high and mighty. It happens we are getting a lot of crackpot calls on the other line. Are you a client of Dr. Silver’s?”

  “Didn’t I just talk to you?”

  “You think that should make you a client?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I am sorry too. You would not believe how sorry I am. But he can see only his own clients.”

  “How do I become a client? Do I need a referral?”

  “A referral? Do you think the man is a head-shrinker?”

  “Is he booked up?” Rachel tried, still polite. “Should I call back at a certain time?”

  “And what time would that be?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “And I should?”

  “Well, can you put me on a list?”

  The woman sighed. “There is no ‘list.’” And then she seemed to mutter something that sounded like paranoid.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said. There is no list.” And then, as if writing, the woman murmured, more quietly, “Hard, of hear, ing.”

  “Pardon?”

  “No list! There is no list!”

  “This is hopeless.”

  “You’re telling me. An ear doctor you should try.”

  “Please. Is there a better time I should call?”

  “Better for what? For who? Me? You? Him? The stars? What is this ‘better tim
e’?”

  “Listen, I just want to know. Are you going to give me an appointment with Dr. Silver or not?”

  A long pause, and the voice, very calm, said, “You should understand. This office does not respond to threats.”

  “I’m not threatening! I want an appointment!”

  Silence. Then, as if resuming an interview, “What other problems do you have?”

  “Is this a serious question? I mean, are you screening me?”

  “Sar, casm,” slowly, half under her breath, a careful speller. “Schiz, oid ten, dencies. Delu, sions.” Then, returning to her phone voice: “Looks like we have another problem to add to the list.”

  “What problem?”

  “No appointment with Dr. Silver. Do you think a busy man like him has time for people who are such a mess? Take my advice. Try medication. There are some very good products on the market these days. I am thinking of one of the minor tranquillizers. Some you won’t even remember you’re on them.”

  “I don’t want medication! And I’m not sick!”

  No answer.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “Just a little or you wouldn’t be calling?”

  “Look, I have a straightforward problem—”

  “They all do.”

  “And I want to talk to Dr. Silver about it.”

  “Maybe you need a lawyer. A good notary. An accountant can solve many of life’s problems. You would be surprised.”

  “I don’t need a lawyer!”

  “A justice of the peace?”

  “No! It’s a psychological problem!”

  The woman snickered.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “Don’t you people realize there is no such thing as a psychological problem? The head is not a filing cabinet. Believe me. It’s all one big mishkebibble in there.” Muttering again: “Naïve, poor so, cial skills. Bad, on phone.”

  “Would you stop that!”

  “And what is it exactly you believe I am doing?”

  “Making notes about me! Or pretending to!”

  “Uh-huh.” And as if writing, “Para, noid.”

  “I’m not paranoid!”

  “And not, I suppose, violent either?”

  Here Rachel slammed down the receiver and threw the phone book across the room.