Lincoln's Dreams

by Connie Willis

  Kate brought the bibliography over to me. “I’ve starred the ones we have,” she said, pointing at ink notations in the margin, “and marked the branches these are at. Do you want me to have the branches send them over here?”

  “No, that’s all right. I’ll go get them tomorrow.”

  “What’s Broun’s new book about?”

  “Abraham Lincoln,” I said.

  “Oh, I didn’t know Lincoln was sick.”

  “What?”

  “Prodromic dreams are dreams people have when they’re sick and they don’t know it yet. What disease was Lincoln suffering from?”

  “Bad dreams,” I said.

  Broun was back when I got home, standing in the solarium looking at his African violets. I handed him the bibliography. “Did anybody call?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said stiffly. “I left the machine on so you wouldn’t miss any of your messages. Did you find out where Willie Lincoln was buried?”

  “No.” I started up the stairs. “Was Lincoln sick when he was shot?”

  “He was obsessed with the Civil War,” he said bitterly.

  I went on up the stairs and into the study and shut the door, but there were no messages on the answering machine, and Annie didn’t call.

  I spent most of the next day rounding up the books listed in the bibliography so Broun could take them with him. The galleys came Federal Express in the afternoon. It was overcast all day, and cold. Broun’s plane didn’t leave till five-thirty, and by the time we left for the airport it was getting foggy.

  “I want you to go down to Virginia for me,” Broun said stiffly as soon as we turned onto the Rock Creek Parkway. “I know you disapprove of these wild goose chases, but I need you to talk to a doctor in Fredericksburg.”

  Fredericksburg was only fifty miles away. If Annie called I could drive back in an hour and a half’s time. If she called. “What’s the doctor’s name?”

  He rummaged in his jacket pocket. “Barton. Dr. Barton. Here’s the address.” He had fished out a folded piece of paper. He unfolded it. “Dr. Stone gave me his name. This Dr. Barton has acromegaly. That’s usually treated before there are any overt symptoms, but he’s old enough that his wasn’t. I want you to find out what kind of dreams he has.” He paused as if waiting for me to object.

  “When do you want me to go? Tomorrow?”

  “Whenever it’s convenient for you to go,” he said.

  I drove past the Lincoln Memorial and onto the bridge. “I had no business saying that about the wild goose chases,” I said. “I know how important this book is to you.”

  “An obsession, I think you called it.”

  I could see Arlington House up ahead on its snow-covered hill. I thought of Richard telling Annie she was obsessed with war and killing. “I had no right to say that either.”

  We turned onto the parkway heading south. “Lincoln suffered from acromegaly,” Broun said as if he were apologizing for his rudeness before when I had asked him if Lincoln was sick. “It’s what made him so tall. It’s a gland disorder. The bones grow too much. The hands and nose get wide and the feet get big. People with acromegaly get rheumatism and diabetes and suffer from melancholia. It can be fatal.”

  “And you think that’s what killed him?” I said, sarcastically, and then was sorry.

  “I thought it might explain the dreams,” he said, and turned and looked out the side window at the foggy darkness.

  I wondered if it had occurred to him, through all these theories of repressed guilt and neural impulses, that the dreams didn’t need any explanation. Lincoln dreamed that he had been killed by an assassin, and two weeks later he lay dead in the East Room. He lost his son, and the little boy’s face came to comfort him in dreams. And where in all this did a gland disorder figure?

  I didn’t ask him. I wanted some kind of truce before Broun went off to California. When we pulled into the airport, I said, “I’ll go see this Dr. Barton tomorrow.”

  He turned and looked at me, and I knew he didn’t want a battle either. “Just have Mrs. Betts next door take the cat and tell her to water the plants. I left the answering machine on ‘message’ and didn’t say where you’d be in case you wanted to take some time off. I’ve been working you too hard. There’s a nice inn in Fredericksburg. You could drive down and stay for a couple of clays, take a little vacation. Stay till I get back from California if you feel like it.”

  “Somebody’s got to do the galleys,” I said, “and you won’t have time in California. Listen, don’t worry about me. I’ll take it easy. I’ll run down to Fredericksburg and then I’ll come back and work on the galleys.”

  “Well, at least get somebody to help you with them. It takes so long the other way. Why don’t you ask that girl to help you, the pretty little blonde at the reception the other night, what was her name?”

  “Annie,” I said. “But I doubt if she’d want to sit for hours reading a book out loud and checking for typos.”

  He scratched at the stubble on his chin. “I watched you two the other night. I got the idea she’d do about anything if you asked her. And vice versa.”

  “She’s Richard’s girlfriend.”

  “Did you hear that from the horse’s mouth? Or did Richard tell you?”

  “You’re going to miss your plane,” I said. “Don’t worry about the galleys. I’ll get them done if I have to read them onto a tape recorder and listen to myself.”

  He got his suitcase out of the back and then reached forward to give me the piece of folded paper. “Take care of yourself, son,” he said.

  “You, too,” I said. “If you find out what caused Lincoln’s dreams, let me know.”

  I went home and started in on the galleys, a long chapter about Ben’s brother, who was in Mansfield’s doomed Twelfth Corps, another, even longer one about Colonel Fitzhugh, whose men called him Old Fancypants and who went on for pages about a gentleman’s duty and the glorious South.

  “I thought the book was about Antietam,” I had told Broun the first time I’d read those chapters. “And here it is chapter two and still the spring of 1862. The battle of Antietam didn’t happen till the middle of September.”

  “It’s not about Antietam,” Broun had thundered, the only time I’ve ever seen him angry at one of my criticisms. “It’s about duty, damn it.” He had refused to take any of it out then, and now I saw that, although he had made so many changes I hardly recognized the book, all the passages about duty had been left in. It was chapter nine before we made it to the morning of September seventeenth and back to Malachi and Toby and Ben:

  It was still dark when Ben woke up. “I thought I heard something,” he said, sitting up.

  “Not yet,” Malachi said. It was too dark to see him.

  “What time is it?” Ben asked. “I thought I heard guns.” It had stopped raining and there seemed to be a little light there to the east, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “No more’n three o’clock,” Malachi said, and then Ben must have gone back to sleep because when he opened his eyes again, it was light enough to see Malachi. He was sitting by his little cookfire, stirring the cold ashes, trying to get a spark, but the fire was completely out. A cold fog was drifting through the cornfield they had camped next to, so low he couldn’t see the tassels on the corn.

  “How’ll we see to fight if there’s fog?” Ben said, huddling his blanket around his shoulders. His teeth were chattering.

  “Fog’ll burn off as soon as the sun comes up, and then it’ll be hot,” Malachi said, and he sounded as calm and wide awake as if he were back on the farm, up at three in the morning for a big day of planting.

  “What would happen if we lit out beforehand?” Ben said. His teeth were chattering so hard he wouldn’t be able to hear the guns. “Couldn’t nobody see us in this fog.”

  “I thought you was the one just had to sign up. This here’s what you signed up for.”

  “I know,” he said. “I just hadn’t figured on getting killed.�
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  “How’s a body supposed to get any sleep with you two clucking like hens?” Toby said. He yawned. “Should you run? Will you git kilt? Me, I can’t get kilt. Not Toby Banks. No, sir, I promised my mama I wouldn’t.” He pushed his blanket down so it covered his feet and rolled over, and Ben lay down again and watched the fog drift across Malachi and the coin fire.

  Toby poked him awake with his foot. “You set up all night worrying and then you sleep through the battle,” he said. “Don’t you let Old Fancypants see you sleeping.”

  Ben sat up. The sun was up and the fog was gone. Steam was rising like smoke over the cornfield, Malachi had another fire going. He was roasting ears of corn in the coals. “Me, I been up practicing my Rebel yell for close on an hour,” Toby said.

  Ben got up and folded his bedroll, trying to wake up, Toby was whistling something, a jig tune, but when Ben turned to look at him he stopped. He was writing something on a dirty white handkerchief. “I want them Yankees to know who’s shooting at ’em,” he said. He whittled a twig down to nothing and used it as a pin to stick the handkerchief to his shirt. “Not that I’m letting any of ’em get close enough to read it.” He went over to the fire and plucked one of the roasting ears out of the coals. The husk was charred. It smelled wonderful.

  She woke me out of a sound sleep. I had the idea that it was almost morning, and I couldn’t think who would be calling at that hour. I answered the phone, and, as I did, it rang again, and I thought, “It’s the answering machine,” and punched what I thought was “play” and had time to be surprised that there was no message before it rang again and I recognized the sound finally as the doorbell.

  Annie was standing on the front steps. She had her gray coat on and was carrying a duffel bag. There was a suitcase on the step beside her. It was dark and foggy out, and I thought, “That will burn off when the sun comes up, and it will be hot tomorrow.”

  “Can I stay here?” she said.

  I still had the idea that the phone had rung. “Did you call?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I know I should have given you some warning, but… if this is a problem, Jeff, I can go to a hotel.”

  “I thought I heard the phone,” I said, rubbing at my face as if I expected a scraggly stubble of beard like Broun’s. “What time is it?”

  She had to transfer the duffel bag from one hand to the other to look at her watch. “Ten-thirty. I woke you up, didn’t I?”

  No, you didn’t, I almost said. That was the problem. She had not, with all her ringing of the doorbell, managed to wake me up. I was still asleep and dreaming her, and they were not somebody else’s dreams. She looked beautiful standing there in her gray coat, her light hair curling a little from the damp fog. She looked as if she had just awakened from a long and refreshing sleep, her eyes clear and bright, and healthy pinkness in her cheeks.

  “Of course you can stay,” I said, still not awake enough to ask her why she was here, or even to wonder. I opened the door and leaned past her to pick up the suitcase. “You can stay as long as you want. Broun’s not here. He’s in California. You can stay as long as you want.”

  I led the way up the stairs to the study, still unable to shake the feeling that it was very late. The answering machine was blinking rapidly—I must have put it on “call return” in my sleepy fumblings. I wondered what poor soul I had been calling for the last ten minutes. I hit the “pause” button and yawned. I was still not awake. I’d better make some coffee.

  “Do you want some coffee?” I said to Annie, who was standing in the door of the study looking rested and wide awake and beautiful.

  “No,” she said.

  I still had my hand on the answering machine buttons. “I’ve been worried about you. I tried to call you. Did you have another dream?”

  “No,” she said. “The dreams have stopped.”

  “They’ve stopped?” I said. “Just like that?” I still wasn’t awake.

  The answering machine was still flashing. I stabbed at the buttons. The tape clicked. “Annie’s gone,” Richard said. “I think she’ll come to you. You have to make her come back. She’s sick. I only did it to help her. I didn’t have any other choice.”

  “Did what?” I asked.

  She pulled something out of the duffel bag. “He’s been putting these in my food,” she said, and handed me two capsules in a plastic bag. One of the capsules was cracked and there was a dusting of white powder along the bottom edge of the bag.

  “What are they?” I said. “Elavil?”

  “Thorazine,” she said. “I found the bottle in his medical bag.”

  Thorazine. A drug strong enough to stop a horse in its tracks. “Richard gave you these?” I said, looking stupidly at the plastic bag.

  “Yes,” she said. She sat down in the club chair. “He started putting them in my food when I got back from Arlington.”

  When I called her I had asked her if she had been asleep, and she had said Richard had made her a cup of tea and sent her to bed. She had been so sleepy she could hardly answer my questions. Because Richard had put Thorazine in her tea. Thorazine. “They use Thorazine in mental hospitals. With uncontrollable patients.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “How many of these did he give you?”

  “I don’t know. He … I didn’t eat anything last night and all day today.”

  I had taken her out to Arlington three days ago. She couldn’t have been on the drug more than two and a half days, so there couldn’t be that much in her system, but what kind of dose had Richard given her? Any dose was too much.

  “Annie, listen, let me call the hospital. They’ll know what to do. We’ve got to get this stuff out of your system.”

  “Jeff, tell me what happened to the horse,” she said quietly. “The gray horse I saw in my dream. It didn’t fall forward on its knees, did it?” I looked at her hands, expecting them to be gripping the arms of the chair, but they were lying quietly in her lap. “Please tell me.”

  I knelt down in front of her and took hold of her hands. “Annie, the dream’s not important. What’s important is that you’ve got a dangerous drug in your system. I don’t know what symptoms it can cause, but we’ve got to find out. There might be withdrawal symptoms of some kind. We’ve got to get you to a hospital. They’ll know what to do.”

  “No,” she said, still quietly. “They’ll give me something to stop the dreams.”

  “No, they won’t. They’ll try to get the Thorazine out of your system, and they’ll run tests so we’ll know exactly how much Richard’s been giving you and for how long. What if he’s been giving you drugs for weeks? What if Thorazine isn’t the only thing he’s been giving you?”

  “You don’t understand. They’ll put me on medication.”

  “They can’t give you anything without your consent.”

  “Richard did. I can’t go to a hospital. The dreams are important. They’re the most important thing.”

  “Annie …”

  “No, you have to listen, Jeff. I figured out he was giving me something when you called me. When I got up to answer the phone I was so dizzy, and then when you asked me if Richard was giving me anything, I knew that must be it. But I didn’t tell you.”

  “Why not?” I asked gently.

  “Because it stopped the dreams.” Her hands were ice cold. I chafed them gently between my hands. “When you’d called I’d been asleep all afternoon, and I hadn’t had any dreams at all. Then you called and told me about Special Order 191 and I didn’t even want to listen. I just wanted to go back to sleep. I wanted to sleep forever.”

  “That was the Thorazine,” I said.

  “I wanted to sleep forever, but I couldn’t. Even under the Thorazine, even when I was asleep, I knew the dreams mattered, and that I had to have them. That’s why I came here. Because I knew you could help me. I knew you could tell me what the dreams meant.”

  “Annie, listen.” I looked anxiously into her blue-gray eyes, trying to see if t
hey were dilated. They weren’t. They looked clear and alert. Maybe she had only been on the Thorazine for a couple of days. “Will you at least let me call Broun’s doctor? He’s not a psychiatrist or anything. He’s just a G.P.”

  “He’ll call Richard.”

  “No, he won’t,” I said, and wished I could be sure of that. If I told him that Richard had given Thorazine to one of his patients without her knowledge, he would immediately think she was a mental patient. He would call Richard, and Richard would tell him that she was highly unstable, that she suffered from delusions of persecution. He would use his Good Shrink voice and Broun’s doctor would believe him. And then what? Would he take Annie back to the Sleep Institute, or would he have Richard come and get her?

  “At least let me make you some coffee,” I said, patting her hands. “We need to get that junk out of your system.”

  She wrapped her fingers around mine. “Tell me about the horse. Please.”

  “It was D. H. Hill’s horse. It was shot out from under him.” I held on to her hands as if I expected her to pull away from me. “Its front legs were shot off.”

  “Did Lee see it happen?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I didn’t want to believe it when you told me about Tom Tita and Hill’s red shirt and the lost order,” she said, and her voice was still calm, but her grip tightened. “But I knew it was true, even under the Thorazine. I knew what the dreams were that night at the reception as soon as you told me about the house at Arlington, but I didn’t want to believe it.”

  She bent her head so that it almost touched our hands. “That poor man!” she said. “The Thorazine made me sleep all the time, and even when I was awake it was as if I were asleep. It was wonderful. I hadn’t been able to sleep before because I was so afraid I’d dream about the soldier in the orchard, and now I slept and slept and didn’t dream anything. It was wonderful. I was so glad Richard had given it to me.”