Spider Lake

by Gregg Hangebrauck

  The fish were obviously there to calm down all the overly-excited lunatics who were seated in the soft leather chairs of the waiting room. Ben looked at his fellow mental patients. He expected them to be fidgeting or trying to suppress nervous ticks, but they looked comparatively normal. He walked to the receptionist’s desk. The young blonde who was sitting there was working on her chewing gum at a ferocious pace. She gave Ben the obligatory forms to fill out, and after he did, he wished he hadn’t. He wanted very badly to turn right around and head back out the door. He thought again of Jill, and stifled back the urge to bolt.

  He was too nervous to sit down. He didn’t want to sit next to any of the schizophrenics, so he decided to get a closer look at the fish. He walked from one aquarium to another, finally stopping at the largest. The tank looked as if it was a coral reef plucked right out of the Caribbean, and he watched the fish swim this way and that with great interest. The fish were doing their job. He was feeling more calm.

  He followed a puffer fish as it moved to and fro in the largest tank. It was a beautiful fish, grayish in color with pink-magenta and midnight-blue features and it had very large eyes. Ben was transfixed. The soft movement of the fish coupled with his own fatigue was lulling him to sleep. He needed sleep.

  “What a beautiful fish.” He thought to himself.

  The puffer fish swam around and around in the tank, and then it swam opposite of Ben and stopped. It seemed to be looking at him as it stayed in place, and Ben was thinking that maybe the fish was expecting a feeding. All the other fish were still swimming around, oblivious to him or the dry outside world, but the puffer fish kept watching Ben with great interest.

  The fish seemed to be in a stare-down with Ben. It’s gentle side to side motion and it’s two side-fins slowly moving back and forth were lulling the over-tired Ben into a hypnotic trance. Ben bent his head closer to the glass to see what it would do. The fish only moved its fins just a tiny bit faster, but it held its position directly opposite of Ben.

  “What an odd experience.” Ben thought.

  Suddenly in an instant, without warning, the fish inflated to three times its size. Ben was so surprised by this that he stumbled backwards and tripped over one of the plush waiting room chairs.

  As he laid there on the floor, Ben felt a sharp pain on the back of his head. He also noticed an unusual cool sensation spreading there. It felt kind of like a gentle breeze on wet skin. The room started spinning slowly around. Ben noticed that the loonies were in a state of great agitation, and as he drifted off to sleep, he smiled and mused at the chaos all around him.

  The last thing that he noticed before he closed his eyes was the aquarium and the puffer fish, still inflated like a grayish volleyball with pinkish fins and blue eyes, still looking at him with the same keen interest, and then he remembered no more.

  “Mr. Fisher, can you hear me? Mr. Fisher can you hear me? Mr. Fisher. Cathy, please go put a towel under cold water for this man’s forehead. Mr. Fisher, can you speak?”

  Ben slowly opened his eyes, and looking around, he had no idea where he was. He was lying on a soft leather couch in a richly decorated room full of wooden cabinets and book shelves. Where there were no books, the walls contained framed documents of all types, penned with fancy embellished calligraphy. The vertical blinds were mostly closed allowing a filtered light to enter from the sunny outside world. He wondered why he had fallen asleep in some strange random library.

  “Mr. Fisher, can you hear me? Do you know where you are?”

  Both the room and the man were slowly coming into focus, as was Ben’s memory, and it suddenly dawned on him where he was. He wanted to close his eyes and go back to sleep.

  “Mr. Fisher, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, yes I can hear. I had a fall. The fish.”

  “Cathy, the towel please.”

  The doctor placed the wet towel on Ben’s forehead. Ben instinctively reached back with his right hand to where the pain was, and noticed that his head was wrapped in a gauze bandage. When he touched the injured place, he felt a sharp pain. He winced.

  “Mr. Fisher, you have had a fall. I am Doctor Levine. This is my receptionist Ms. Beck. Can you tell me, how many fingers am I holding up?”

  Ben suddenly realized the gravity of his situation, and he knew he had better focus on the doctors fingers and give a proper reply before the men in white coats would show up and haul him to the happy factory. “Two. Two fingers. I’m sorry for having caused a commotion in your waiting room doctor, but the fish startled me and—”

  “Mr. Fisher, if you please. Can you tell me where you are?”

  Ben did not like the sound of that question. “Of course I know where I am! You shouldn’t have fish that blows up in front of your patients or none of this would have happened!”

  Ben was agitated and he was trying to lift himself into a sitting position. The wet towel fell into his lap. He wanted to run out of the building, but he knew that was impossible now. His head ached.

  “Mr. Fisher, the fall you took does not seem to have injured you badly. You have a small superficial wound which bled quite a bit as head wounds do, but it is my opinion and Ms. Beck’s that the fall and the bump may not have caused your blackout. I need you to answer each of my questions carefully so I can ascertain whether or not to send you down the hall for an MRI.”

  Ben thought to himself, “Now I am in for it. The good doctor thinks I should be institutionalized.” He looked for the exits. He wondered why his lap was wet. Had he peed himself? He looked down and noticed the wet towel and put it back in place on his forehead.

  “Mr. Fisher, can you tell me what day it is?”

  Ben thought about the question: “Saturday.”

  “Good Mr. Fisher. Now, can you tell me where you are specifically?”

  Ben was still agitated but he knew his freedom depended on his playing along. He answered, “Yes Doctor Levine, I am in your office which is on Corporate Drive in the town of Vernon Hills, and I am here to see you at my wife’s urging about a recurring dream. Is that specific enough, or shall I give you your address as well, or maybe—”

  The doctor cut him off again. “Okay Mr. Fisher, you have said enough. Why don’t you go into the washroom and freshen up, and then we can begin anew. Go collect yourself, and then you and I can talk.”

  As Ben was walking to the rest room adjoining the office, he thought about what he could say or do to get out of his appointment. His head was pulsing with pain. In the rest room, he looked for a possible escape route. There was no way out except the office. He splashed water on his face and collected himself. Exiting the rest room, he noticed that Dr. Levine had already sat down on a comfortable chair with notebook in hand, and glancing up, he gave Ben a friendly smile. It seemed as if nothing had happened. The nurse was gone.

  “Come and sit down Ben. May I call you Ben? Come in and sit down and tell me why you are here.”

  Ben looked over at a bust of Sigmund Freud. He knew there would be one. No self-respecting shrink would have an office without a proper bust of Freud. He sat on the couch. “Doctor, I’m sorry for the disturbance in your waiting room.” Ben noticed, this time, that the doctor didn’t interrupt him. He just sat quietly and waited for Ben to continue.

  “Yes, okay call me Ben.”

  The doctor still sat there, giving no reply. Ben continued to talk. “I have been having a dream which wakes my wife and I up each night, I mean, that is, I am having the dream and not my wife, but my shouting or rather my mumbling wakes her up and it is causing problems. We— I am not sleeping well.”

  Ben’s head ached.

  Still the doctor listened. Ben stopped talking. Doctor Levine broke the silence. “Is that all that is bothering you?”

  Ben was astonished at the question. He didn’t answer. The doctor looked down at his notebook and started jotting something down. The doctor asked again, “Is there anything else bothering you besides the dream?”

  Ben thought about wha
t he should say. “Doctor, I am not sleeping well. I am having the same dream night after night. I am waking up my wife. I am out of work. I haven’t worked in three years. My home is being foreclosed. My family and I may soon be homeless. I keep having this frigging dream, and I don’t know why, and I am not sleeping.”

  The doctor wrote more notes down in his notebook, and glancing over the lenses in his glasses he asked, “Are you depressed?”

  Now Ben was feeling really agitated.

  The doctor asked again, “Ben, please answer the question. Are you depressed?”

  Ben gave the question serious thought. He knew that his life was a mess, but he did not miss the daily grind of his job. He had learned over the last few years that he could only take each day as it comes.“No, I’m not depressed. I have plenty of troubles sure, but depression no. I guess I could say I am not depressed.” The statement made him feel better somehow.

  “Ben, I am going to ask you a few questions. Please bear with me. These questions are standard and they help me to get a sense of where your state of mind is, and afterwards we will address your dream. Is that okay with you?”

  Ben was calming down. He thought that he would play along, and that maybe this would not be as bad as he thought it would be. “Okay doctor fire away. I will give it a shot.”

  “Okay Ben, please keep in mind that this is only standard and asked of everyone. Do you have suicidal thoughts or do you want to hurt yourself?”

  “Oh sure. I almost jumped off a bridge on the way here. No!”

  “A simple yes or no is sufficient Ben. The quicker you answer, the better. Do you wash yourself regularly?”

  What an odd question, Ben thought: “Yes.”

  “Are you socially anxious?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have friends?”

  “Yes, a few.”

  “Do you have a drinking or a drug problem?”

  “I drink more beer than I should but—”

  “Just beer?”

  “Yes. Sometimes wine.”

  “What are your goals in life?”

  “Just to provide a good life for my family, nothing more.”

  “What gives you joy in life?”

  “ I don’t know. My family, my wife.”

  “Is there any mental illness in your family?”

  “No.”

  “Do you feel like you have a functioning family?”

  “I guess I do. My boys are always playing Nintendo, and my wife is pretty busy at her job, but I would say all in all I am happy at home.”

  “Do you have any siblings?”

  “No.”

  “Were you happy in your childhood?”

  “Before the monkey I was.”

  It slipped out. The doctor looked up sharply. His eyebrows were noticeably raised.

  “The monkey?”

  Now Ben thought that he had really stepped into it. “Yes, the monkey.” he said reluctantly.

  The doctor removed his glasses and gave Ben full eye contact. He stopped writing in his leather-covered notebook. Up until now, Ben thought that the good doctor was just going through the motions. Just another day at the office with a patient with a bandaged head and every-day problems, but with the mention of the monkey, the doctor seemed almost excited. Levine composed himself. He brushed his sleeves and chest with his hand. He shifted in his seat to a more forward position towards Ben. He asked slowly and deliberately: “Is the monkey in the dream?”

  “Yes doctor, the monkey is in the dream.”

  The doctor had a slight Mona Lisa smile on his face. His entire demeanor had changed since the mention of the monkey. He tried not to show it, but it was there in plain sight for Ben to see. “Tell me what you remember in the dream.”

  Ben knew that he had the shrink’s rapt attention, and he began telling the dream as best as he could. He began,

  “In my dream I am in a tourist town of some sort. It seems as if the town is in a hilly area. There are very expensive and very old mansions lining the boulevard on both sides. I am in a small line waiting for a tour bus to pick us up. While standing in the line, I notice to my left down the street where it ends, on a cross street, a man riding a very large, beautiful black horse. He is only in my vision briefly while riding past the intersection. I was thinking what a beautiful horse it was, when, in my peripheral vision on my right, I see a young woman in full riding regalia, galloping from my right to my left on a smaller, yet equally beautiful white horse. She is riding towards the intersection where the other rider was, and turning left at the intersection, she follows the other rider.

  The other tourists and I are talking about the woman on the white horse, and I am telling them about the other rider on the much larger black horse, which none of them had seen, and the conversation turns to how the wealthy two riders must have been meeting for a fox hunt or something. We all climb on the bus, which is open air, and we head down the street and to the left in the same direction as the two riders.

  As we are crossing a bridge over a narrow river with fast moving water, the driver loses control of the bus. We go flying through the air, and the bus crashes through the roof of another beautiful home along-side a river just below the bridge. There is a small, white-haired lady having tea in the room where we end up, and she looks pretty startled, but continues to sip her tea.

  All of the tourists climb out of the badly damaged bus and out of the ruined house and proceed to the next-door neighbors for a cocktail party. We are all in the living room or den being served soft drinks ( and hard drinks ) and everyone is chatting about the ordeal of the bus accident. I notice that nobody is injured, and I say to the others; “Don’t any of you realize that we all walked away without a scratch? Did any one of you even hit the seat in front of you?”

  Then a very frail old man who presumably lived in the house, perhaps the relative of one of the hosts, walks slowly up to me. He has tears in his eyes and he proceeds to hug me. I can feel his ribs as he embraces me. I can smell a mixture of his aged body and some old after-shave. I don’t know what to do, or why he is hugging me, so I kind of hug him back gently, and tell him it is alright. All the other party-goers are touched by this and I can see some of them getting emotional. I realize when we finish the embrace that he is the organ-grinder which died and left the monkey at our resort on Spider Lake in Wisconsin.

  Doctor Levine interrupted, “Ben, did you say organ-grinder?”

  “Yes doctor. Well, he really wasn’t an organ-grinder when we knew him. He may have started out as one. I think when we met him he was doing the carnival circuit.”

  Doctor Levine was relishing his patient’s story as well as the dream. He was furiously writing in his note pad. He wished he could whistle, but he knew he must suppress his joy at such rich material. Once in a great while you get something much more interesting than the garden variety bad marriage, bed-wetter, or brooding teenager and this patient had some real promise. “Go on with your dream Ben.”

  Ben continued:

  “Where was I? Oh yeah. After the dinner party I am suddenly a kid again back in northern Wisconsin in one of our yellow rental boats on Spider Lake, with my best friend Matt. We are rowing to our favorite fishing hole on the west side of the lake. We see the capuchin monkey climbing the old wooden water tower at the lake’s edge on the Rule estate, and Matt says to me “There’s that frigging monkey, I wish I had a rifle. It would be an easy shot.”

  I agree with Matt whole-heartedly and I answer that “If we shot him, my dad would hear it. It would be better to vaporize him with a ray gun. “Set your phasers to vaporize.” I hate that little monkey but my dad loves the fur-ball, and he would kill me if he found out that we vaporized or shot him.”

  The monkey continues to climb the tower and is up and out of site in a flash. Matt and I are starting to fish and a cool wind transforms the smooth surface of the lake into a rippled one-foot chop. Matt and I begin to see the western sky darken, and we hear the first rumblings of a thun
der storm.

  I say: “We better get heading back. I am not going to be turned into a skeleton rowing a boat.” And Matt laughs.

  “That was a favorite standard joke which always came out when you heard thunder. Getting struck by lightning and turning into a skeleton could be applied to any endeavor, such as riding a bike, and it always garnered a belly laugh. Anyway—”

  Matt and I are reeling in our lines, and we realize that we would never make it to the resort on time, because the storm looks like a real bad one and it is coming fast so we start rowing to the nearest shoreline which is at the Rule estate. We both know it is our only choice, and we knew it would probably get us into trouble with old man McCann.

  “There was strictly no trespassing at the Rule estate doctor. Old man McCann the caretaker guarded it as if it was Fort Knox.”

  Matt and I are now really rowing furiously directly towards the Rule estate and the storm is really coming on strong. We turn the boat over up against a large flat rock on the shore and hunker down under the boat for protection. The wind is now blowing wildly, snapping off large branches from the near-by trees. The day turns dark and grayish-green with the immensity of the storm. The bolts of lightening are striking everywhere all around us. The only view I have is the old Rule mansion and the grounds leading up to it from the lake. The wind is blowing so hard that the boat we are under is shaking.

  As I look out from my vantage-point from underneath the boat, suddenly two connected bolts of lightning directly hit the mansion. It catches fire.

  The orange light from the now blazing mansion is mixing with the dark gray-green light of the storm casting an eerie light on the mansion grounds. The lightning is coming down everywhere. The wind is driving the rain horizontally and I am getting wet underneath the boat. Then, in the light of another huge lightning bolt, silhouetted in the fire-light, I see the monkey running directly towards us from the direction of the water tower. He looks like he wants to take shelter under our boat. He doesn’t see us until he is right there upon us. When he finally notices that we are there, he hisses and bares his vicious teeth in a freakish grin-snarl. Then a bolt lands very close. So close you can smell the ozone and the simultaneous thunder is deafeningly loud. The monkey screams. Then Matt and I scream.”