Rachel put away the groceries that she didn’t eat and headed over to Wilkes’ house in the Civic. Puff she would have to see to later. She got lost but nothing too drastic. The little bungalow seemed shabby and neglected in the grey afternoon. Snow bottomed thefront lawn pit, weeds poking through. In the picture window a strip of aluminum foil hung down, unstuck. Rachel knocked. No answer. She found the key under the mat and went in.
Same place, dustier. “Cam!” From the kitchen Rachel stepped into the dining area and from there into the living room, saw the phone on a low table with drawers and continued to a room she had never entered before. It seemed to be a bedroom. Had he moved up from the basement? A narrow bed, neatly made; closet, orderly and unrevealing; above the dresser a framed photograph of the Downtown 16 from Madison. Rachel could see plants in the bus windows, next to the grille the outline of a silver propane tank against a darker background of corrugated metal.
She returned to the kitchen. Stood at the door to the basement and called to Wilkes. No answer. She switched on the light and went down. This was a first. She found a rumpus room with imitation pine panelling, big old sofa, braid rug, cot, music stand, TV. Not bad really. And all those weeks she had pictured him squatting on concrete. This was actively homey. Funny how people were always saner than you thought. Also, of course, crazier. But right now she wouldn’t mind holing up down here herself. Hibernate, perchance to dream. Perchance, hell. There was also a laundry room with a little washroom, and a gas furnace exactly the same model as hers and Leon’s.
She looked everywhere, even checked behind that furnace: Wilkes was not here.
It took Rachel half an hour to get out of the Millpond, but once she had done that and was headed east on the 303 she gotlucky, looped around on the 37 intersection, came west into the setting sun on the south service road, and there it was. She pulled up to the padlocked chain-link gates and got out to take a look.
Wilkes’ bus yard was just as he had described it, although late on a November afternoon with the wind and powdered snow making shifting patterns across the heaving, potholed asphalt, it was even less inviting than Rachel had first imagined—and yet here it was so close to the chartered tracts and comfortable freeholds of the Millpond. One of the four-metre gateposts canted in such a way that she could squeeze through. Hugging herself—should have worn a thicker coat—she headed for the battered metal shed. A sheet of roof metal the wind was flapping seemed to beckon. All about, at various angles, as if they had been blown there, were buses, ten or twelve of them, discarded hulks.
Don’t ask Rachel what she was doing here. Looking for a clue, she might suppose. But inside the shed were only huddles of blown refuse; crushed and fallen metal shelving; a pit for grease monkeys, brimmed with garbage; a filthy foam mattress kept from blowing away by a cement block; a vandalized tap; remains of half a dozen hobo fires, the inside walls and ceiling black from smoke. A sooty pissoir. But what did they burn? Shredded truck tires harvested in summer along the 303? Stolen Millpod sod for make-believe peat? Bus seats? Asphalt?
Rachel left the terrible shed and walked from bus to bus. By the third she found that she could see all she needed by standing on the front or rear bumper, the setting sun more or less at her back, her eyes following its shafts down the inside of the vehicle.
Ransacked interiors. At the rear window of the eleventh and last bus a cadaverous face rose exactly with hers, like the face from the jail roof, like her own sad haggardness reflected, like a devastated Harry, and Rachel jumped down screaming. Two ravaged old mugs rose then in that window, like characters for a Muppet remake of Night of the Living Dead. Rachel backed away, the right side of her brain furiously studying those faces—Had Cam found a friend? But no. Just a couple of wasted people living in a bus. Rachel turned and walked away fast. Looking back, she saw one hand waving, another toasting her with a can of varnish thinner: a double-headed person, toasting and waving. Twin skulls split in toothless grinning.
It wasn’t until Rachel was back at the Civic that she noticed a vast sign high above the ditch that ran between the fence and the service road. It was mounted on raw timbers with big mounds of oyster-coloured clay around their bases. She climbed back through the gate and crossed to the other side of the service road to read the monster credits:
Opening soon on this site
ARCADIA CENTRE of VILLAGE-ON-THE-MILLPOND
World’s Largest Shopping and Residential Mall
Now Renting
784,876 sq. metres of retail space
243,753 sq. metres of residential space
The finest in condominium living
Enquire today.
Dial REALITY. A Mortprop Investments Project
Architect: Stanley A. Jardine Construction by Mortprop Construction
Mortprop: The Folks Who Put the “I” Back in REALTY
Stanley A. Jardine.
Holy shit.
Rachel sat with the engine going and the heat turned all the way up. Was this what they called serendipity? Felt a lot like shock. All she could think was, Harry. And after that, all she could think was, If Jardine’s here and he’s working with Sirocco, maybe he knows where Cam is.
She drove to the nearest phone she knew, inside the main doors of the old Mortprop Mall. There she called Mortprop Investments. The woman who answered, very much like a receptionist with her coat on to leave, denied the existence of Stanley A. Jardine. When Rachel told her he was designing Arcadia Centre, there was a pissed-off pause. The woman went to ask. She came back. “Mr. Jardine’s the architect, but he’s not here.”
“I was told he was.”
“I’m sorry. Mr. Jardine is in Paris. That’s where his office is.”
Rachel called her mother. “Any news from Elmer?”
“He thinks he might have found your father. Beyond that he won’t say. I’m worried sick. Elmer usually calls at least every other day.”
“How long has it been?”
“Two days.”
“You’re being neurotic. Tell me what he finds, OK?”
“Your voice still sounds funny. Are you dieting?”
“No!” and hung up.
Now what. Dieting, hmm? Now she wanted to walk into the Mortprop Mall Surf ‘n Turf over there and eat a steak, two lobsters, four or five baked potatoes with sour cream, carrots, beans, pie, cheese, ice cream—
This Rachel did. And it was all great, just great, except maybe a half cup too much cornstarch in that raisin pie, and the green beans didn’t really need to be canned, did they? But the best part was, while she ate she did not have to think. And afterwards all she could think was sleep. So she drove back to the Dream Centre to do exactly that and wake up even more out of control in the morning.
But first at 2:23 the Hewlett Packard audio-oscillator climbed from fifty to ninety dBs without waking Rachel. And the hand that had to shake her out of REM onset—Rachel crawling across a Plexiglas desk like one of those trompe l’oeil checkerboard surfaces that infants are placed on to see if they are crazy enough to trust their mothers more than to fear gravity—did not seem to belong to Alex Silver. But Rachel’s eyes would not open.
Sometime later the hand had to wake her again.
This time she mumbled, “Where’s Alex?” Did not quite catch the response.
Not long after 6 a.m. somebody started rustling printouts. Later the same person sharpened a pencil and crossed the room to check on everybody’s electrodes. Rachel, a little irrationally, considering that whoever it was could glance at the spindle andread exactly how awake she was, kept her eyes shut. The footsteps went on to Babs, then Frankie. Five minutes later they returned along with wafts of coffee. “Wake up, everybody. Time for another day of escalating psychosis.” The voice moved in close to Rachel, whispering, “I know you’re awake under there, Rachel. Thanks for coming back.”
That’s when she drew the water gun free of the bedclothes and got him in the ear, twice.
“Hey—!”
Maniacal laughter from Rachel.
“Cooperation and Interpersonal Agression Quotients are gonna hear about this,” promised Silver, grim. He wiped at his ear with his sleeve.
“Who woke me in the night?”
“Harry?”
“Seriously. A trainee?”
“No, no trainee. Me. The Hewlett Packard wasn’t waking you up, so I did it myself. What did he look like?”
“Couldn’t open my eyes.”
“A dream, right? I’ll make a note.”
Babs went by for the bathroom, still breathing hard from sleep. The Gorgon Look. Frankie sat on the edge of her bed, scratching her narrow shanks.
At his desk Silver made harried jottings, glancing over constantly. He was back. “Hey, Rachel, listen. Maybe you should stay around here for the rest of the study.”
“What are you talking about? I can’t stay around here!”
“Why not? Take off work. And anyway. The point is, you don’t dream and he comes to you.”
“OK, but I have to find Cam Wilkes.”
“The PAGO Wilkes? Why? Where’d he go?”
Babs came back from the bathroom.
“Took you long enough—” Frankie growled as she passed.
“Run, Frankie, run,” Babs replied. “Run, run, run.”
Rachel did not want to talk with those two around. Silver noticed and suggested Sunday brunch at Chez Pond, the freshwater vegetarian restaurant below his office at Village Market Square. A glare from Babs. To which Silver returned a mad scientist laugh. If breakfast went OK, he said, turning to Rachel, she could do what she liked the rest of the day. As long as she promised not to leave the Millpond or curl up somewhere unauthorized and go to sleep. He also made her promise to surrender her car keys the first time she hallucinated Harry on the road, to call as soon as everything became too much, and otherwise be back at the Dream Centre by 9 p.m. From here on better take this one day at a time.
“Alex, why are you giving me orders?”
“Harry may be your responsibility now, Rachel, but as long as you’re dream-deprived, your safety is mine.”
“How’s Puff?”
Silver winced. Spread his hand horizontal and waggled it to mean so-so.
Chez Pond had a mud brown floor, a blue ceiling of water lilies viewed from below, and pondweed wallpaper. Diners were intended to feel they were eating at the bottom of a millpond.
But why?
Rachel also could not imagine where Silver was. She was starving. Fidgety, she looked around and understood that he had been right: She was no longer fit to be out. Here at Chez Pond her brain was now and then giving over all pretense to any sort of experiential flow, opting instead for successive frozen shots crystallizing out of a ground of wedgelike streaks and blurs. An incoherent slide show instead of the usual movie. Strobe Brain, except that the flashes succeeded each other on just about every principle except chronology. A face, for example, would flash a survey of its own physiognomic type—e.g., “Swine”—not a guy shovelling down breakfast.
And then Silver did arrive, stout, harried, in a cotton suit, a lavender pocket handkerchief. “Sorry I’m late. ‘Unavoidably detained,’ as they say. Tell you about it sometime—” A local celebrity, Silver had also been obliged to sign autographs for Chez Pond diners before actually sitting down to join Rachel, who immediately focussed on what seemed to be a fan of white powder around his nose. Not—!? Her sanity had been in the hands of a celebrity coke addict?
Slipping his crimson frames into his jacket pocket with that lavender hankie—”Never should wear the old trademark in public, but I love it”—Silver reached for the menu. He had not yet shaved, was grizzled, somewhat wild-eyed, smelled powerfully of … lavender. Of course. Rachel gaped. Those wild eyes were all pupil. Even as they studied a menu they were all pupil. He removed his jacket. His shirt was white, collarless. That white stuff powdered more than his nose. It was all over his face. It was even in his hair!
The waitress was waiting.
“Think I’ll have the Water Lily Popovers,” Silver said and looked at Rachel over his menu. “They dry and grind the roots for the flour right here on the premises—” He looked at her more closely. “How are you doing?”
Flour! It was flour! The man was dusted with the stuff! What was happening?
“Um, fine,” Rachel said. “I’ll have everything under ‘Breakfast,’ please: The Pondweed Cereal and the Fillet o’ Mock-Chub, with a side order of Popovers. A large Willow Juice.”
“One Pond and a Mock!” the waitress shouted. “Side o’ Lily, big Willow to start!”
“Hungry, eh,” Alex said. “We should come here on a Thursday sometime. They do cattail crepes on Thursdays. You could tell your grandchildren.”
Rachel just smiled. Even dream deprived she was too discreet to bring up the business of the flour. Equally embarrassing for both of them if her brain happened to be extrapolating from a coke clod stuck to a nostril hair. Like him smelling so strongly of lavender just because of the colour of his handkerchief. This is what schizophrenics must have to put up with, day in and day out. What a grind. Grind, hmm. Talk about the powder of suggest—I mean flour of—
Looking around, possibly wild-eyed, Rachel understood ina flash of insight that the coke/flour, like this whole brunch here, was an integral part of the experiment. This Chez Pond situation was a test of her rapport with the reality principle, in fact the test Silver required her to pass if breakfast was going to qualify as having gone “OK” and she was not to be forcibly confined to quarters. No way could these be run-of-the-Millpond diners. One man in here this morning seemed to be suffering from Tourette’s syndrome—convulsing and swearing; a woman was talking with animation to a man who made no acknowledgement, simply stared stonily at his plate; that young fellow over there seemed to be nodding out over a bowl of something phosphorus green (must be the Algae-Style Muskrat Milk). Clearly these people were hired, crazy, or both. Or were they?
Fortunately Rachel’s brain was working at maximum speed, so she had plenty of time to scrutinize Silver’s face for clues. Less fortunately this only made things worse. The closer she examined it the less sure she could be whose face exactly that was. It was like staring into a fanned deck of the day’s snaps from a Photomat booth.
He was holding up his thumbs. “They say millers have gold thumbs.”
“Pardon?”
“You said I looked like a miller.”
“I did?”
“Right. And I said, millers have gold thumbs.” He looked at his thumbs. “Would you be satisfied with short, fat thumbs?”
Rachel smiled nervously.
“Hey,” Silver added. “Bet you didn’t know a ‘miller’s thumb’ was a kind of freshwater fish. Sort of appropriate—or do I mean inappropriate—in here—”
Rachel felt that she was in trouble.
“Listen, Rachel. You’re sure you’re up to being out? So far you’re testing a lot more sensitive than Frankie and—” he ruffled his hair; a cloud of white powder filled the air … a smell of lavender—”well, than Frankie, anyway—”
“Oh yes, I’m fine, fine,” a shaky smile. He did look like a miller. A fat little miller with giant pupils and heavy thumbs. All dusted with some poor cheated farmer’s flour. With a wretched cat’s bleached braindust.
“So tell me about Wilkes.”
Rapidly, breathlessly, to the best of her crippled ability, Rachel did this. Silver kept nodding. She also told him about the Arcadia Centre architect’s being one Stanley Jardine. As she finished, their orders came. Silver seemed to eat thoughtfully, occasionally drumming his fingers on the table in an irritating way. Rachel felt that she herself was eating too fast, exactly how much too fast she could not be sure. The food was simply awful. Really bitter and impossible to chew.
“Weird food, eh?” commented Silver.
Rachel just smiled and went on eating.
“You know,” he said, looking sadly around Chez Pond, “that’s the trouble
with conceptual living. The quality of the experience does tend to suffer. Man cannot live by thought alone. But he’ll try.” Silver sighed. “He sure as hell will try.”
Not by bread alone, Rachel amended. He is a miller. So what does he mill? Problems? Cats? Lives? What do the Gods mill? Destinies? Hailstones? Buckwheat? In her pocket Rachel fingered the water gun. Flour and water. What’s that?
Glue.
“You know how I got into dreams?” Silver asked. “Fletcherism. Know what that is?”
Rachel shook her head.
“Chew therapy, first promulgated a hundred years ago by Horace Fletcher. Slow and lengthy chewing. As soon as calves are weaned and start grazing, their dreaming goes way down. No ruminant dreams much. Of course, ruminants don’t have very challenging lives. Human adolescents do have challenging lives, and that’s why they chew gum, to handle the emotional material their dreaming can’t keep up with. Compulsive eaters, bulimics, etc. don’t just care about food, they also need to chew. Dreams connect with chewing via speech—‘jawing’—muscular adjustment patterns, body image, ego.
“Eventually I said, OK, so it’s all true, but there’s no future in it. Sure chewing calms people, helps them order their lives. But where’s the grabby general theory? With no grabby general theory there’s no sustained market. Also it’s base. I felt like Freud listening to all these women describe how their fathers and uncles and friends of the family molested them when they were children. Super depressed. Where can you go from there? Career suicide, that’s where. You don’t attack the family and its friends! Chew therapy? So it works as well as everything else. But what about me?I’m a psychologist, not a vet. You don’t attack people’s humanness! Freud saved his neck by dreaming up psychoanalysis, and it took him a long way. I’m saving mine by being the cutting edge of dream deprivation for therapy. You see, Rachel. I finally figured out that the only way around the Doomed Expert bind is long-term commitment to an experimental position. That way you can stress the commitment or the experiment, depending on how the larger situation evolves. So suddenly I’m doing clinical work. And Rachel, believe me, the feel-good stuff you can spin off this is a PR dream. I mean, I can write three bestsellers without even touching the material I’ve got already on you, Babs, and Frankie.”
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