by Daniel Quinn
Franklin shrugged indifferently.
“I won’t make more of it than it was. I was a boy and yearned to be deemed an original, and experimenting with drugs certainly made me that. If you’ve read Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler—sophisticated men of the time—you’ll know that in those days drug use was associated with depravity of the very blackest kind. In fact, it was such a rarity in middle-class circles that it was difficult even to locate drug dealers. These were not at all like the magnates of today, who handle nothing but what can be moved quickly at a tremendous profit. The dealers of my day—at least the good ones—were rather surprisingly like antiquarian booksellers. Their back room stock wasn’t fifty kilos of cocaine, it was five hundred one-ounce phials of truly exotic materials collected from all over the world, each a treasure, each distinctive in its effect. Nowadays I’m sure you couldn’t locate even a tenth of the great variety of drugs I sampled during my college career.
“I wasn’t, you understand, looking for anything in particular in these substances, beyond novelty. Yet one night I found something, in the leaves of a plant from the interior of Brazil. I’d been told it was a hallucinogen used in the initiation of shamans of the Juruna, a tribe even then nearly extinct and now almost certainly so. Drugs of this sort were always a gamble. In their native habitat they were taken with foods that enhanced their effect, and these were unknown or unavailable to us. And the native users knew precisely what effect to look for, which we didn’t, and success usually depends heavily on that. As a result, one’s reward was often no more than a heavy sleep, perhaps with a vivid dream or two.
“That appeared to be the case with this drug, which was a smoke. I fell asleep and had an extraordinarily vivid dream. In fact, it was so vivid I didn’t think it was a dream at all. I was quite certain I’d slipped out of my drugged body and was standing in the middle of my room, fully awake. I expected to see my body in the bed, sleeping away, and was surprised when it wasn’t.
“I went out into the hall. A few yards away two black men in police uniforms were opening a door to another student’s room. I didn’t know what to make of this, and went over to see what was happening. The interior of the boy’s room had been transformed into a prison cell, and the boy himself was handcuffed to a bunk, naked. The two black men were taunting him, pinching him, poking him with their nightsticks, and he was writhing, begging them to stop. Then they started taking off their clothes, and I hurried away. I didn’t have any clear idea about what was about to happen there, but I wanted no part of it. The rest of the house was quiet, and I went outside.
“There was a meadow where the street should have been. I entered it and, soon came across a boy and his mother sitting beside an ornamental fish pond. Suddenly a small bird flew up out of the water, then another and another, and within a few moments the air was filled with birds rising out of the pond, and I realized that each bird was a drop of water. This phenomenon seemed to fill the child with an ecstatic delight, but it quickly ended when the last bird flew away and the pond was empty. A chauffeured limousine drew up, and a man I recognized as the actor Adolphe Menjou stepped out of the back and ushered the boy and his mother inside. They drove off, and the meadow dissolved and became a street once again.
“I won’t bore you with a full account of that night’s adventures. I went from one strange episode to another without even slightly understanding what I was seeing. When, in my dream, I was tired, I returned to my room, fell asleep, and on awakening was myself again. I didn’t give much thought to the experience. Though they were uncommonly vivid, the things I’d witnessed seemed like perfectly ordinary dreams, and I attached no significance to the fact that they were peopled almost entirely by strangers. Then, returning from the library in the evening, I ran into the student who had figured in the first episode. I told him jokingly that he should watch who he admitted to his room. Giving me a rather belligerent look, he asked what the hell I was talking about, and I said, ‘I’m talking about the two black men with clubs who visited you last night.’
“I didn’t in the least expect him to understand what I was talking about—it wasn’t even a shot in the dark. I was just maintaining my reputation as an exotic conversationalist. But under-stand it he plainly did. The blood drained from his face, and he cringed away from me as if I’d seared him with a blowtorch. Before I’d fully registered his appalling dismay, he’d scurried into his room and slammed the door.
“Even with this hint, I didn’t begin to suspect the truth. I just assumed I had subconsciously noted a masochistic tendency in his behavior and had randomly worked this into my dream.
“I had enough material for another smoke, and I used it that night, hoping for more interesting results. I was a bit disappointed when, after drifting off to sleep, I awoke in my room, exactly as before. Once again I felt I’d left my sleeping body behind, was completely conscious and in control of myself and my environment. I left the room half expecting to find the two black policemen in the hall, but it was empty. I went to the student’s room and without hesitation opened the door; it was just a normal room tonight and was untenanted. It was only later that I realized why it was untenanted; although he was sleeping, the boy was not as yet dreaming and so was absent from the realm of dreams.
“During that night’s journey I decided, as a matter of experiment, to visit someone I knew, a young professor of English. I found him outside his apartment house—perched comically on the eraser end of a giant pencil standing in the middle of the street. He was stranded perhaps fifty feet up in the air—and he was truly stranded, because the only way he could keep the pencil balanced on its point was to sit right where he was. As soon as he tried to rescue himself by climbing down the side, the pencil began to topple, and he had to scramble back up to the top. I thought it was an amusing metaphor; it was well known that he’d spent years working on a paper that was vital to his career—but, rather than risk submitting it to one of the scholarly journals, he kept revising it endlessly.
“The next day, I decided to test an improbable theory. I caught the professor after one of his classes and asked him if he’d ever managed to find a way down off the pencil. For a moment he just blinked at me without comprehension, then he got it and his jaw dropped down to around the middle of his chest. Naturally he wanted to know how the devil I’d learned about a dream he hadn’t even mentioned to his wife, but I was too excited to bother with explanations. I rushed back to my room and called the dealer who’d supplied the drug. He told me he had no more of it and might never have it again.
“I was disappointed but not in despair, because I knew a little of how these things are used in shamanistic cultures. As they view it, there exists a special realm of power that the shaman can reach and master to his benefit. It is a vast realm comprised of many interconnecting principalities, and to each of these there is a path, which is hidden to ordinary vision. The function of any drug is simply to open the shaman’s eyes to one of these paths. Once he’s seen it for himself, he should, in theory, be able to find it on his own thereafter—without having to resort to the drug.
“I knew exactly where I’d been. The drug had taken me along the path and left me fully conscious in one principality of the shaman’s realm of power—the principality of dreams. Now that I knew such a thing was possible, I felt sure I could do it on my own. After all, I visited that principality nightly in my own dreams—but only passively, rather like a clueless tourist limited to the movements prescribed by his guidebook. I felt that all I had to do was become aware of where I was. I had to be able to look around and say, ‘This must be the realm of dreams. I can step out of the dream I’m having and order this reality to suit myself.’ Then I could throw away the guidebook and enjoy the freedom I’d had under the influence of the drug.
“It was easy enough to imagine. Achieving it in fact was another matter. It isn’t enough just to tell yourself very firmly that the next time you dream you’re going to be aware that you’re dreaming. It must b
ecome an obsession, so much so that the determination to achieve awareness-of-dreaming becomes itself the subject of dreams. Then one night—almost inevitably, I think—you find yourself in the midst of a dream and wondering if you are in the midst of a dream.
“That’s all it takes: the slightest suspicion. Almost instantly—just on the basis of the suspicion—you sense a new sort of vitality and alertness in yourself. You’re no longer just passively wallowing in sleep; suddenly you’re filled with purpose. You have a hypothesis to test; if you are in fact in the realm of dreams, then certain things should be possible that are not possible in the waking world. You test the hypothesis . . . and then you know. And this knowledge sets you free—instantly, totally. Oh, at first you’re a bit clumsy, like a lifelong cripple abruptly given the body of an Olympic athlete. It takes a while to discover how much or little exertion is required to perform the feats of a godling.”
Franklin’s eyes glowed with pride.
“Oh, yes. A godling. That’s what I am in the realm of dreams. But what does that make me in the waking world? You might imagine it makes me nothing—but you’d be wrong. I am, in a way, the most powerful man in the civilized world.
“Does that statement strike you as grandiose? If it does, it’s because you haven’t had a chance to consider what I am capable of. In your own dreams, you travel across the world at the speed of thought, you visit the past and the future without hindrance, you converse with persons you could not possibly meet in waking life. All these things I can do as well; but I can do them consciously and deliberately, which you can’t. If I wish to, I can meet with the President and ferret out the nation’s most carefully guarded secrets; he will tell them to me happily. There is literally no secret I cannot learn, provided it’s housed in a living mind. But, to tell the truth, I’ve never spent much time at this. Secret knowledge is worth having only if you make use of it, and I have no taste for that; it’s too much like work.
“The entire realm, alas, is never under my hand at once, and this is why I say I am a godling there and not a god. I can only be in one place at a time, can only focus my attention on one matter at a time. Nevertheless, within any given locale in the realm of dreams, I am truly like a god, ordering all to my pleasure: conjuring events, conjuring people, sending delight to one, terror to another. And through dreams I extend my power into the realm of waking reality. A suggestion offered by night becomes a hunch by day—a hunch in the subject’s conscious life; repeated night after night, it becomes an obsession. Things I want done by day are associated in dreams with blissful rewards. Things I don’t want done are associated with calamities and horrors. And if such tactics fail, there are others less subtle—but these you can readily imagine for yourself.”
Franklin Winters sighed and sank back into his chair. He closed his eyes for a moment and then looked up with a smile.
“A few years ago, Ginny, you asked me quite ingenuously if I were a monster. Now you have your answer. Of course I’m a monster. The beast who stands at the center of the maze is always a monster.
“I’ve talked for quite a while now, my dear, and a pause is in order for both of us. When I return—”
Ginny cut him off. Then, without a word, she walked into the kitchen and began making a pot of coffee.
XXV
“I THINK I UNDERSTAND MOST OF IT,” Greg said, breaking a silence that had lasted for more than half an hour while Ginny organized a sketchy breakfast and they ate it.
“There are parts of my own story you haven’t heard,” he added, and told her about the dunning phone call that had come after the dream at Armando’s and about the gun that had been produced after the “suicide” dream at her father’s house.
“Obviously,” he said, “it was your father himself who called me posing as the bookkeeper from Armando’s. And, posing as me, he set Phil Dobson to searching out the Reising Target Automatic.” He shook his head in grudging admiration. “I must say, they were devastating tricks. I was ready to call in the men in the little white coats and have them take me away.
“But here’s something I don’t understand. Franklin didn’t try to stop us from meeting—he practically arranged for us to meet. I mean, if he hadn’t been putting you in my dreams for a week before the design show, I might not have talked to you at all. What sense does that make?”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Greg. He wanted us to meet, wanted us to fall in love.”
“But why? That’s crazy.”
Ginny shuddered. “You haven’t got the point of his little demonstration yet. It wasn’t meant to warn you. It was meant to warn me. He’s shown me exactly what it’s going to cost to become involved with anyone but him.”
“Good lord.” He closed his eyes, thinking, and shook his head. When he looked up, Ginny was staring into her coffee cup, her jaw propped on a fist.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.
She gave him a twisted smile. “The demonstration’s over, Greg. I guess we shake hands and say good-bye.”
“Don’t be silly. I won’t do that.”
“You won’t, huh? You’ll put up with another night like last night? And another one after that? And another one after that? How long do you think you’d last, Greg? A week?” He said nothing. “My mother lasted for two years—but Franklin wasn’t giving her his full attention.”
“You know this?”
She nodded. “It’s on the second half of the tape.”
“He actually admitted it?”
“He didn’t admit it, Greg. He bragged about it. As one monster to another.”
“He thinks you’re a monster?”
“Of course. What else can the offspring of a monster be? He assures me I’ll be reconciled to it once I’ve been initiated into the delights of monsterhood.”
“What else does he say?”
“Oh,” she said, jauntily waving a hand in the air, “he talks a lot about his plans for us. His—” She shook her head. “I don’t want to discuss it, Greg. He’s insane.”
“Nothing that could help us?”
“Nothing.”
“I know it sounds feeble, but haven’t you explained to him that what he wants isn’t going to happen?”
She twitched her shoulders in a weary shrug. “I told you—he’s insane. He’s perfectly sure that, once I get over my girlish scruples and accept the inevitable, I’ll be happier than I ever could have imagined. No amount of reasoning, no amount of pleading can shake him from that.”
Greg stared out into the brilliant sunshine of a perfect summer day for a few minutes. “You realize, of course,” he said at last, “that he’s depending on us to be less ruthless than he is. He’s depending on us to throw up our hands in despair and meekly give up.”
“Yes, I suppose he is. What else can we do?”
“Be as ruthless as he is.”
“All right. And what would we do if we were as ruthless as he is?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t had a whole lot of practice being ruthless.” Ginny’s shrug said, This is hopeless.
“Is there anyone he cares about besides you? Anyone we could put pressure on?”
She thought for a moment and shook her head. “I’m sure there isn’t. He’s been almost a total recluse for years.”
“Well . . . is there anyone he depends on?”
“In what way?”
“In any way. For example, does he have people who look after him—take care of the house, do the cooking, and so on?”
“There’s a housekeeper and a handyman, yes. At least there used to be.”
“Could you command any loyalty from them?”
“God,” she said, blinking. “I don’t see how. What do you have in mind?”
“Could you get in touch with them, convince them that Franklin is ruining your life, and then . . .”
“And then what?”
“I’m not sure. I’m just groping for some leverage somewhere.”
“Not there, believe me. These peopl
e are nothing to him. The most they could do is quit, and if he couldn’t replace them, he’d do without them.”
He took in a long breath and pushed it out. “You never heard from your mother after coming to Chicago?”
“No, why?”
“I thought maybe she wrote a letter—something that could be used against him somehow.”
“Sorry. She didn’t.”
“Jesus. Let’s see. You mentioned a man who looked after you when you first arrived in Chicago. Something Herne. From the way you talked, it sounded like he knew what was going on with your father.”
“He may have. Unfortunately, he died while I was still in school.”
He grunted, then produced a hollow laugh. “Do you know what Agnes told me—at the ‘sanatorium’ down there in Kentucky? She said that when God was passing out gifts and came to me, he said, ‘Let’s give this one lots of brains but no survival instincts at all.’”
“So?”
“Ginny, that was your father putting those words in her mouth. That’s the way he’s come to perceive me.”
She said nothing.
“What do you think, Ginny?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you do tend to. . .”
“Yes?”
“. . . leave yourself wide open.”
“I don’t remember to put on my bulletproof vest when I go out to play.”
“‘That’s right.”
“Shit. Well, hell. How would I handle this thing if I was Michael Corleone?”