Standard Dreaming

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Standard Dreaming Page 4

by Hortense Calisher


  He reports that he is trying to give up his habit of mentally addressing us—we, the imaginary amphitheater he has made real.

  As he went up Baba’s gaudy stoop, he felt them over his shoulder, the four, none from the same division of the hospital—three men, and one woman whose female partner didn’t know she had a child boarded out with a foster family—whom he had approached singly, secretly at the outset, and finally met with together.

  “How did you find us?” Dr. Lee said.

  One or two had led him to the others; misery seeks. Gossip had helped. Twice he had made mistakes, stumbling on some other kind of suffering. Although he had come to believe there must be none of it—once the multiplicity of the human picture was pushed aside—that nature itself was not at the bottom of. “Faces—” he said. “When you work on a face, there’s a point when the flesh itself tells you it can’t take anymore. Yours were like that.”

  Some of the others, all from varying morphologies, nodded. What a rubber glove could feel, the eye could sometimes see. Or what a microscope couldn’t. They looked briefly at each other’s faces that night in his office. And long at his. No confidences were exchanged; unlike the lay group, they weren’t personal. Later that night the morgue, as was proper, had brought them to it.

  To Berners, who as a boy had pored over his father’s facsimile of the Sepulcretum—the seventeenth-century Swiss physician Theophile Bonet’s study of postmortem appearances—their faces, as open to the arc lights as the dead purples and fatty waxes they leaned over, were like some classic study-to-be of twentieth-century morbid anatomy. None had commented. Meanwhile the handmaiden voice of the social worker, whose fact-finding zeal had chanced to bring Berners here, had gone round the histories of the corpses, which that day numbered six.

  This worker, a man by the name of Mervyn Le Pine, had known none of the dead; their children had been older than any of his clients at the hospital. But he knew his community. He was the worker on Mei-ling. And in his conversations with Berners, of interest in his own right. Of French-British Canadian stock, Le Pine, in either of his ancestor countries, would have known his comfortable place among the civil-servant salt of the earth; here, his job placed him at the nation’s breastbone, or the nation did, in consequence of which his own sternum was pinched, and his complexion greenish with social woe. Actually, he was uneasy with larger interpretations of the social system, and was shortly moving himself and family out of New York to some more northerly state, where he could be surer of being underpaid for doing good. He seemed to Berners intensely American, a man whose reverence for the facts fell short of perception, or would always steer him clear. But because of this, the case outlines he gave came through pure, as if strained through that agar in whose substance their death-reason couldn’t yet be defined.

  All the bodies had been émigrés, in their youth. All with “one or more children” ill or disgraced, missing or “gone the New York way.” The community had made that phrase, and the connection too, he told them—not him. Le Pine had been curious enough to go for the lab reports; here they were. Plus a statistical projection—primitive, but indeed plain. After which Le Pine rested, with his air of not being a philosopher though keeping himself handy for them on reason’s steps. “A disease of separation, they call it. Look at the next of kin.”

  The four had all shaken his hand—and gotten rid of him. Berners waited for them to do the same with him, but they hadn’t. They had closed the door on Le Pine, as if the bodies were a treasure inside it. He would wonder, in the weeks to come, if these researchers ever remembered that they too, their bodies, might be part of the same.

  “Funds won’t be a problem,” Cohen, a Rockefeller Fellow, said, when they got back to Berners’ office. At his suggestion, officially they would be investigating the snail disease which came from the use of human feces as fertilizer, and could arrive in New York any day. “On an illegal entry,” he said, smiling. “No disease ever arrives in this country in any other way, it seems. But all diseases are anybody’s now.”

  Autopsy permissions had been a problem, until Dr. Lee had solved that for them. A noted Hodgkins disease man, he himself had it—“Got double coverage, you might say.” Or triple. His son, twice breaking bones in a bike fall, had just been tested; as in old people, the bone had broken first, for another reason not mysterious. He had been “not at all surprised” to hear that Lasky’s son was fat. Though Berners’ hypothesis on the accelerated decline of the species more than interested him, Berners’ ideas on the thinning or fading of its children—“Swiss poetics, worse than German”—certainly did not. “All degenerations would be included,” he said somberly. “Nature doesn’t hide.” He himself was separated from his father, a rich importer who had very morbidly taken his son Wing Li’s Western marriage, and uptown residence and habits. “But yes, there is a way I can arrange this in the community.” So Dr. Li-Lee had become their liaison. He too had—gone back.

  “No, she doesn’t hide,” Dirck Smitters, their microbiologist, had said. “That’s why single causes are so hard to find.” He believed that his own field had contributed little to the cure of disease, and would in the future do even less. “Finding the process doesn’t cure it.” Gossip had it that his weekly trips to California were to hunt for one of his children who had disappeared in the Haight-Ashbury district two years before. Who might be in India now, for all he knew, or Woodstock or Taos, or Cambridge, he said when he told them; he has become an expert on the stations of youth flight. “Thousands of them are missing, all over America.”

  But all four were refreshed, excited to their depths at the idea that a force moving behind certain human events might be physical. “Once again,” Cohen said.

  Though Minna their anesthesiologist, in her own country once a pathologist, a bulky girl, too beetle-browed for her shyness, said, “But that’s neo-fascist, isn’t it? You’ll deny all the value of human thought.”

  Berners said, “We don’t deny it. We are asking it.” To pursue itself to the end. Whatever end. He was still swaying from the emotion brought on by the acquiescence of these men, these, in his proposal. While they were making the physical studies, he would keep on with the group of parents he had joined—a group of ordinary people—and make his report. “But Minna is right; we must give the nonphysical every chance.” He shrugged. “As usual.”

  Maybe it would be wisest if they all kept diaries, he told them—what would it be for medicine if all patients were required to, in terms of their disease! Like Keats and other phthisics had often almost done for T.B. Meanwhile they of course must have him preexamined. “After all, I was brought up a Christian, this may be only my fantasy; Evangelicals especially are full of it. To us Swiss, Jung himself was no surprise. To trust his own fantasy, he had to bring the whole human race into it. Maybe I am doing the same.”

  But they had decided—no. They had agreed with his own gloomily modest self-estimate—and with the battery of physical and psychological tests he had insisted on—if a man could be median, he was it; he would do.

  “You will consider it though. That this may be my own expiatory dream.”

  Smitters said, “And ours. Niels, why else do you think we believe a word you said?”

  So, while they and their subordinate teams continued to enter the corpses of cells or to breed them, he would be their live control, live dreamer. And the placebo they gave themselves? Very carefully listened to. “The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to,” Cohen said. They were modern men, and knew the significance of dreams. If there were such a thing as standard dreams, they felt his were as likely to be, as any. He felt as if he had been given an award.

  Outside the hospital, when they left it, the moon was still shining on the lustered streets. Low, rolling on the tile edge of an 1880 tenement, it seemed only ten feet from the caving window shadows of the shops. Men were crawling on it that very night. The biology of the race was a moon he and these men and women would crawl on—knocking, k
nock knock.

  “Nobody’s watching biology anymore,” he said. “Only disease.” And machines.

  Cohen, a dermatologist who had studied four years in a leprosarium in Ceylon and at the moment worked with psoriasis, held his own hand up to the light. Covered with black hair, to Berners it looked perfectly healthy, the nervously graceful human power-tool, grown out of the ape. Nobody else but he knew why Cohen had joined them; his face had moved Berners to ask him to, one day finding him alone in the cafeteria at lunch. “Come with me,” Cohen had said, when they were finished.

  They had taken a bus uptown to a Herald Square corner, where in the midst of the passing crowds, a group of them—one thinks of them as a species now, one’s children, Berners thinks, his bowels turning—were performing. Or believing. Berners is faithful to Raoul where he can. Though Raoul has never given him a clue to what he believes.

  “Hare Krishna. Hare Rama.” The naked feet slapped, fanatic bare, on Macy’s pavement; the tambourines shivered tinny, with the rags they wore; the beardless boys carrying India in a cup to this corner, staring at the crowd over their own hoarse voices, have sword-swallowers’ remote faces—we have swallowed your sword. One girl, shaking two gourds at cricket-leg angles above her head, is convulsed rhythmically waist to navel, which protrudes like a baby’s; the head moving like a turkey gobbler’s on the neck, is autonymous. She has tied the scant blond hair to a feather at the top of her long, patchy-scalped crown, reminding Berners of a “bird-woman” freak he had once seen at a circus, but the face below, tranced and jerked as it is, is neat, suburban schoolgirl, that chub kind, seen at the best colleges, which would never have needed to buy its features from him. But she isn’t with the shoppers; she is here. Berners, watching, almost admires the century that has managed this miracle.

  Cohen, at his elbow, says, “She’s mine.”

  Two mornings later, he comes to Berners’ office. “She saw me. I got this in the mail.” The note, with no return address, reads, “I don’t have to hate you anymore. Don’t you know you have leprosy?” So Cohen, who no longer has a telephone number for her—“She used to tell me her hate, and I would hang on just to keep her there”—now simply follows her.

  And in the moonlight outside the hospital, Cohen held both his hands before him, turned them hopefully over, but found them perfect. He grimaced at Berners. “My dream.”

  Tonight at Baba’s, Berners is the first one in. He knew where the key was, they all did—in case she is still out hunting the child, they will hold the meeting, but wait. Keys are often exchanged, at the rise of special sympathies between two members, until these shift. Rebecca has never given him hers, though she has to others. Mimi has never had any of them to the house. Sylvia has given keys to them all, never used since she never pursued her daughter except by phone; except for her job, and vacations with a sister in Texas, she was always there. Though she has the money for Europe, and a liveliness that should have taken well with people and places, the terror-shame of her daughter’s rejection keeps her immobilized in the heart. Nobody has Jacob’s key because of the wife. And because Jacob knows where his daughter is. Jacob has the key of the unit within the hospital annex that Berners now uses as home; sometimes when Berners came in from his office day he found Jacob there, and they would go to a restaurant. “You’re all making yourselves into a family,” Dirck Smitters said. “Watch out.”

  Did the group know, suspect a process after all?—had occurred to Berners; was there a hint of it passed with the keys?—if I die, you can get in. For there were no other overtures. In spite of clearly possible matchmates—Rebecca liked Jacob, and Berners, in another eon, perhaps that fine spring when Raoul was still at Harvard, could well have pillowed himself on Sylvia—the burden they shared had kept the sex away. We all smell of anesthetic to each other, he thought.

  While in the other group, each one continued to conceive the process in terms of his or her self. Even when hunting what their humanity might doom them to, they could not seem to escape it. Minna Williams hadn’t been surprised to hear the members of parents’ group had found no sex impetus toward each other; she thought the species itself had likely crossed the climacteric, or was very near. “Exactly like a man or woman does. Why shouldn’t the death of the race follow the same pattern men and women do, to its grave!”

  She believed that a gradual loss of sex differentiation, just as in any old person, was racially imminent. “Of course you can say I think this because my friend and I don’t do much in bed anymore.”

  Cohen said, “Not at all”—the world was fast approving the eerie reality over the old-style evidential, more and more—“Look at the streets.” He told them of a pre-Druid dance he’d seen done in a British village, men in reindeer masks piping their antlered way down the hillside out of the wood onto the green where the whole town awaited them; how the dons in the crowd, prattling learnedly among themselves of the legend, had grown quiet, slanting their eyes exactly like the proprietor of the George, the baker and the dustman, watching the men deer go back. “We’re entering the primal wood again. With all our gold knowledge on our heads. And there we shall lie down.”

  How extraordinary, Berners thought, that people of this caliber should already half-believe him! He said so. Dr. Li-Lee, whose father’s body had come in for autopsy the week before, said, “Or share your dreams.”

  Baba, who had an “in” at fabric houses, had covered the broken-down walls here, and all the sofas, good and bad, of her marriages, with a green-white leaf pattern of enormous scale. People sat in it like fauna, and showed their temperaments, idling against a chair’s jungle back, or sitting upright in the stiff fernery conversation was for them. None of the near neighbors she invited to visit the group had stayed; as black if not quite poor, they were still priding themselves that their troubles were not individual.

  It took most people a lifetime to join the human race. Berners sees himself sitting in this green artifice, a tall specimen, fair, stolid except for the hands and maybe the eyes, and with the pallor now of an advancing vegetarianism; though he has never cared for the bloody Anglo-Saxon cookery, a year ago he had been as fond of a sedate European bifteck as any one. As a boy, just before coming over here, a neurasthenic aunt had dragged his mother all over spa-Europe, and Niels with them; he had learned early how the aging clocked their flesh and were martyr to it, sitting humbly in the midst of their own body-wires, listening. They liked to grab his pinkness to their gray selves and tell him why. Their future was missing. Yet when he thought of death in those days, as the young do, it was always romantic death. Nowadays, strain as he does against these cellular reveries, the roles seem to him reversed.

  The young-in-flesh were now its sadder campaigners. Whether for the sake of its purity—or for its jump-quick poisons, he thinks suddenly—they know they are animals. And “beautiful,” as they like to call themselves, yes beautiful in that sad hegemony. A sight nature didn’t hide.

  While we, the ugly optimists, closed our eyes to it. The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it. And Cohen, standing in the street to catch sight of his daughter, Jacob at the prison, Sylvia at the phone, Minna secretly visiting a child who calls her “Uncle,” Dr. Li holding his son as his bones fall, Dirck Smitters haring across continents, even poor Rebecca, whose son, safe at his milksop distance, bleeding away at the sight of her, has just come home to die of it—do we all really wish the tie were less, the gap more? As we are drawn, drawn back into it?

  And he, Berners, who in recent weeks, though as he thins his chaps fall, looks more and more not like his father, his ancestors, but like his son.

  Over the mantel there are two pictures, one painted on black velvet, in tongue pink and ochre and bluejay, the other made of silverpaper crumpled behind glass, both by the great-grandmothers of Baba, nee Betty, of Marblehead, Mass. “And both castles,” Baba once said, grinning. She’s a hinterland girl, born to suck at all the city sophistications its homeborn don’t bother with.
Not his sort.

  None of them are. They are his family. He sits in their midst like a federal spy, from the amphitheater of what he and we are afraid we know. After a winter of these people, we are only our theories; they are his experience. He schemes how to bring us and them together. Tonight he wants to confess us to them. Somehow. Easy enough to tell theory about experience. But life works another way. It knows it lives and dies. What dream can tell it more?

  Baba has a mirror in the hallway. He goes to it. Those eyes—see them not as yours, Berners, but the experienced eyes of some man whose son starves himself for a reason the son can express only in that way. The eyes, for instance, of the father of that girl who, the papers said, dwindled herself to death on a macrobiotic diet somewhere out in Jersey—if you brought him a dram of the evolutionary-universe described, would he drink of it?

  Into the oasis behind him Sylvia Fisher steals, closing the door against the night’s steam and a stray cat, and sits down, slinging a travel bag to the floor. She won’t ask what he’s doing at the mirror or anywhere; the group has learned not to ask.

  He comes over to her. “Why don’t you ask—why I’m looking at myself?” If she asks, maybe he can find the words to tell her.

  “Really want to know?” She’s taking off her hat and pushing back her hair; he’s seen actresses do it that way in old Broadway-style plays, when they want it known they bring messages. “Because everything anyone of us does here; the others have done it too.” With the least complaint of anyone here—after all, widowhood, even a thankless child, is only a common portion—her voice is the bitterest.

 

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