Long Time No See
Page 11
The sergeant was an attractive blonde—in her early thirties, he guessed—wearing her olive-drab uniform with all the authority of a fashion model, low heels clicking rhythmically on the tiled floor of the corridor, hips swaying, blue eyes catching the flat November light and reflecting it.
“Makes you think they were expecting the damn war, doesn’t it?” she said. “Otherwise, why would they have built two hospitals here? You know what they call this one, don’t you?”
“Yes. General Hospital.”
“Do you know the joke?”
“No, what joke is that?”
“Is there one for the enlisted men?”
Carella looked at her.
“The enlisted men,” she said.
“Oh. General Hospital.”
“Right, you’ve got it,” she said, and laughed. Carella suddenly wondered if she was flirting. He decided she wasn’t. But maybe she was. No, he decided she wasn’t.
“Here we are,” she said, and stepped swiftly to a massive wooden door on the right-hand side of the corridor, and opened it.
Carella followed her into a huge room crammed with metal filing cabinets. Again there were vaulted ceilings and tall windows streaming light. The cabinets were arranged in rows, like cemetery markers, stretching from the door to the farthest end of the room. The task of finding James Harris’s medical history in this room that echoed filing cabinets suddenly seemed overwhelming. Not five minutes ago Colonel Anderson had told him the sergeant would help him locate whatever he needed. Now Carella wondered if anything less than a full platoon could manage the job. His dismay must have showed on his face.
“Don’t let it scare you,” she said. “It’s really pretty well organized. We’ll find the file in a jiffy, and then I’ll help you wade through it. Do I call you Detective Carella or Mr. Carella, or what?”
“What do I call you?” he said.
“Janet.”
“Steve.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
They might have had trouble finding the file in the jiffy Janet had promised, if it weren’t for James Harris’s middle name. Over the years since the hospital was built, no fewer than forty-seven James Harrises had passed this way, the victims of no fewer than four wars; it had been a busy time for America. But only two of the wounded soldiers were named James Randolph Harris, and one of them was white and the other was black, so that ended the five-minute search. The folder was thicker than the search had been, if girth could be measured against minutes like apples against oranges.
Janet led Carella to another wooden door and then through it into an adjoining smaller room that seemed almost monastic—severe white walls, small windows, a simple wooden table with high-backed chairs around it. He realized all at once that many of his references today were ecclesiastical in nature: the squadroom resembling a cathedral, the corridor a cloister, and now a room he equated with a monastery cell. He all but expected a tonsured man in a brown hooded habit to come through the other door carrying a manuscript to be illuminated.
“This is my favorite place in the entire hospital,” Janet said, and pulled a chair from the table, and sat.
“How shall we work this?” he asked.
“Depends on what you’re looking for,” she said, and crossed her legs. She had good legs. He wondered again if she was flirting. And decided she wasn’t.
“I’m looking for anything that mentions the nightmares Harris was having.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s split the file. You work forward from the back, I’ll work toward the middle from the front. How does that sound?”
“Fine,” Carella said.
“Has anyone ever told you your eyes slant downward?” Janet said.
“Yes.”
“They do.”
“I know.”
“Mm,” she said, and nodded, and smiled briefly.
“Well,” he said, “let’s get to work. I really appreciate your helping me this way.”
“Orders is orders,” she said, and smiled again.
They worked in silence, sampling the file as they might have vintage wine—tasting, discarding, tasting again, cup by cup, page by page. It was Janet who came across the first mention of the nightmares.
“Here’s something,” she said.
The something was a memo from a Major Ralph Lemarre to Lieutenant Colonel Paul Konigsberg regarding a dream related to the major by Pfc. James Randolph Harris.
It is shortly before Christmas.
Jimmy’s mother and father are decorating a Christmas tree. Jimmy and four other boys are sitting on the living-room floor, watching. Jimmy’s father tells the boys they must help him decorate the tree. The boys refuse. Jimmy’s mother says they don’t have to help if they’re tired. Christmas ornaments begin falling from the tree, crashing to the floor, making loud noises that startle Jimmy’s father. He loses his balance on the ladder and falls to the floor, landing on the shards of the broken Christmas tree ornaments and accidentally cutting himself. The carpet is green, his blood seeps into it. He bleeds to death on the carpet. Jimmy’s mother is crying. She lifts her skirt to reveal a penis.
“What do you make of it?” Janet asked.
“I can’t even figure out my own dreams,” Carella said.
“Let’s see what Major Lemarre thinks.”
The major thought little or nothing at this point. This was the first time the dream had been related to him, and there was no indication in his memo that he believed it would become a recurring nightmare. His only comment related to information he had gleaned from previous interviews with Jimmy. The boy’s father had been killed in an automobile accident when Jimmy was six, and his mother had taken on the responsibility of raising the family alone. Major Lemarre speculated that the part of the dream attributing male sex organs to a female might have had something to do with Sophie Harris becoming both mother and father to young Jimmy.
“Well,” Janet said, and shrugged. It was clear that the interpretation of dreams left her cold.
Carella understood her position. He had grown up in a family where dreams were thought of as omens of events to come. If you dreamt that seven men were carrying eight bales of cotton up four steps, then you had best run to your local bookie and bet 784 for that day’s number. If you dreamt that Aunt Clara fell off the roof, it would be a good idea to contact your neighborhood mortician or at least reserve a room at the nearest hospital. Nobody in Carella’s family thought of dreams as clues to personality or behavior. It was only when he joined the police force, or more specifically when he became a detective, that he began to think of dreams in a different way. It was a police psychiatrist who told him that a recurring dream could be thought of as a dimly lighted tunnel to the past. The patient and the analyst, working together, could illuminate that tunnel, reconstruct whatever trauma was causing the persistent dream, and thereby free the patient to deal with it on a realistic level rather than a fixated one. None of which made too much sense to Carella at the time.
He was, however, the sort of man who, once presented with an idea, would not let go of it until he understood it to his satisfaction. This did not necessarily mean understanding it completely. He still didn’t know exactly how Ballistics figured out the rifling twist or the number of lands and grooves on a suspect bullet, but he had a fair working knowledge of how they went about it, and that was enough. Similarly, he thought he understood the psychoanalytic process as well as a layman might. He did not subscribe to the theory that all homicides were rooted in the distant past; he would leave such speculation to California mystery writers who seemed to believe that murder was something brewed in a pot for half a century, coming to a boil only when a private detective needed a job. The last time Carella had met a private detective investigating a homicide was never.
But this morning Sophie told him that her son had recently contacted an old Army buddy. All right, that was a link to the past, a link to a man Jimmy had not seen, literally, for the past ten years
. If he was going back into his past for something—and Sophie seemed to believe it was for assistance with an illegal enterprise—then perhaps Carella should go back into the past as well. Which is why he was here today. To explore that dimly lighted tunnel, to learn whether or not anyone here at the hospital had been able to unravel the nightmares that caused Jimmy to wake up sweating and trembling in the night.
The next mention of the dream came in a report dated six days after Lemarre’s initial memo. The dream was identical in every respect. When Lemarre asked Jimmy what he thought of the fact that in the dream his mother had a penis, Jimmy answered, “Well, it’s a dream. Anything can happen in a dream.”
“Yes, but she has a penis, isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you think of her as a particularly masculine person?”
“My mother? You got to be kidding.”
“Then why does she have a penis?”
“It’s a dream,” Jimmy answered.
At their next session, two days later, Lemarre asked Jimmy if it would be all right to tape-record what they talked about. Jimmy wanted to know why, and Lemarre said it would enable him to transcribe their sessions word for word later on, and study what was said, and perhaps reach some meaningful conclusions. Jimmy gave his permission. There followed in the file at least fifty closely spaced typewritten pages dealing exclusively with Jimmy’s exploration of the dream that continued to haunt him night after night. Janet lost interest after they’d waded through twenty pages of the transcript.
“Would you like some coffee?” she asked.
“I could use a cup.”
“I think I know where I can find some,” she said, and winked. “Did you plan on going back tonight?”
“What?” he said.
“To the city, I mean.”
“I guess so, yes.”
“Because with all this stuff,” she said, indicating the mountain of papers on the table, “we’re liable to be here all afternoon.”
“You know, I think I can manage the rest of it alone, if you—”
“No, no, I’m enjoying it,” she said. “Let me get the coffee, okay?”
“Sure. But seriously, if you want to go back upstairs…”
“I’m enjoying it,” she said, and her eyes met his, and he knew now that she was flirting and he didn’t know quite what to do about it.
“Well…sure,” he said. “Fine.”
“I’ll get the coffee,” she said.
“Fine.”
“And then later you can decide about going back to the city.”
“All right.”
She nodded. She turned then and went out through the door opposite the one they’d entered. He caught a brief glimpse of the corridor outside, the windows leaping with November sunlight. She closed the door behind her, and he listened to her heels clicking into the distance. He looked at his watch. The time was 3:10 P.M. He turned back to the transcript.
Exploration upon exploration.
Is the Christmas tree a Christmas tree? Is this really your father? Where does he cut himself when he falls? Are you sure your mother has a penis? Over and over again, the same questions and virtually the same answers until the nightmare took on nightmare proportions for Carella himself, making him as eager to be rid of it as had been Jimmy and Lemarre.
He looked at his watch again. It was almost 3:30, he wondered where Janet had gone for the coffee. He wondered what her last name was. Colonel Anderson had said only, “The sergeant will take you downstairs and give you a hand finding what you need.” Maybe the colonel had run into his sergeant in the hallway and demanded that she return upstairs to his office to resume her sergeantly duties.
Carella found it difficult to think of her as a sergeant. A sergeant was Sergeant Murchison who manned the muster desk at the Eight-Seven. A sergeant was any one of a dozen hairbags who rode in radio motor patrol cars checking on patrolmen. Janet Whatever-Her-Name was not a sergeant, definitely not a sergeant. He really did find it extremely difficult to think of her that way. He wondered why he was thinking of her at all, in any way, shape or form. Then he wondered how the words “shape” and “form” had crept into his mind as regarded the sergeant, and he decided he’d been reading too many psychiatric reports and was beginning to examine with undue scrutiny his own id, ego or libido, as the case might be. He sighed and turned back to the file.
The first words he saw were “major breakthrough.” These were Lemarre’s words referring to a session that had occurred a month and a half before Jimmy was released from the hospital and simultaneously discharged from the Army. The major showed no appreciation of the fact that he had inadvertently used the word “major” to describe the breakthrough. Carella smiled, and wondered what Lemarre might have thought of Janet’s little joke about the General Hospital. There was Janet again, but where was Janet again? She had undoubtedly gone to Colombia for the coffee. He delayed reading about the major breakthrough; once he solved the mystery of Jimmy’s Christmas nightmare, he would have to climb into his car and start the long drive back to the city. He delayed, he delayed, he delayed for three minutes. When he began reading the word-for-word transcript, the time was 3:35.
LEMARRE:
All right, Jimmy, let’s talk about this one more time.
HARRIS:
What for? I’m sick to death of talkin’ about that.
LEMARRE:
So am I.
HARRIS:
So let’s forget it, Doc.
LEMARRE:
No, let’s not forget it. If we forget it, you won’t be able to forget it.
HARRIS:
Shit.
LEMARRE:
Tell me about the Christmas tree.
HARRIS:
It’s a Christmas tree.
LEMARRE:
What kind?
HARRIS:
A regular Christmas tree.
LEMARRE:
And your mother and father are decorating it, is that right?
HARRIS:
Right, right.
LEMARRE:
And you and your friends are sitting on the floor watching them.
HARRIS:
Right.
LEMARRE:
How many of you?
HARRIS:
Five, countin’ me.
LEMARRE:
Just sitting there, watching.
HARRIS:
On the couch, yeah.
LEMARRE:
You said on the floor.
HARRIS:
What?
LEMARRE:
You said you were all sitting on the floor.
HARRIS:
The floor, the couch, what’s the difference?
LEMARRE:
Well, which was it?
HARRIS:
The floor.
LEMARRE:
In the living room.
HARRIS:
Mm.
LEMARRE:
In your living room, is that right?
HARRIS:
Right, right, I told you.
LEMARRE:
And how old are you in the dream?
HARRIS:
I don’t know. Eighteen, nineteen. Something like that.
LEMARRE:
But your father died when you were six.
HARRIS:
Yeah.
LEMARRE:
Yet in the dream you’re a teenager watching him decorate the tree.
HARRIS:
Well, it’s a dream, right?
LEMARRE:
There was a carpet on the floor, you said.
HARRIS:
A green carpet.
LEMARRE:
In the living room.
HARRIS:
Yeah.
LEMARRE:
Is it a thick carpet?
HARRIS:
Yeah.
LEMARRE:
But when the Christmas ornaments fall, they break, don’t they?
H
ARRIS:
Yeah.
LEMARRE:
On the thick carpet.
HARRIS:
Yeah.
LEMARRE:
And they make a loud noise.
HARRIS:
Yeah.
LEMARRE:
What kind of a noise?
HARRIS:
Crashing. They’re Christmas balls crashing, that’s the noise.
LEMARRE:
Uh-huh.
HARRIS:
Drums. Like drums, you know.
LEMARRE:
Is that what they sounded like? Drums?
HARRIS:
Yeah. On the record player.
LEMARRE:
What record player?