by Robert Stone
When he was outside, he picked up one of the weights he had bought to keep himself in condition and lay down with it. Lying on his back, he held the weight at arm’s length for quite a long time. Sweat welled from his body. Then he lowered the weight and looked at the sky.
“Willie Wings,” he said to Willie Wings, “I went up that mountain, right? You were there, you saw me do it, right?”
“Yeah,” Willie said. “Not all the way. But you went up the mountain.”
“Right,” Fletch said. “I went up.” He leaned his head back to look at Willie. “I went up. And you should have been there to see me come down, man. Because that was really something else.”
Willie Wings watched him for a little while.
“Fletch, babe,” he said. “I had you wrong, brother. You really are a poet.”
HELPING
ONE GRAY November day, Elliot went to Boston for the afternoon. The wet streets seemed cold and lonely. He sensed a broken promise in the city’s elegance and verve. Old hopes tormented him like phantom limbs, but he did not drink. He had joined Alcoholics Anonymous fifteen months before.
Christmas came, childless, a festival of regret. His wife went to Mass and cooked a turkey. Sober, Elliot walked in the woods.
In January, blizzards swept down from the Arctic until the weather became too cold for snow. The Shawmut Valley grew quiet and crystalline. In the white silences, Elliot could hear the boards of his house contract and feel a shrinking in his bones. Each dusk, starveling deer came out of the wooded swamp behind the house to graze his orchard for whatever raccoons had uncovered and left behind. At night he lay beside his sleeping wife listening to the baying of dog packs running them down in the deep moon-shadowed snow.
Day in, day out, he was sober. At times it was almost stimulating. But he could not shake off the sensations he had felt in Boston. In his mind’s eye he could see dead leaves rattling along brick gutters and savor that day’s desperation. The brief outing had undermined him.
Sober, however, he remained, until the day a man named Blankenship came into his office at the state hospital for counseling. Blankenship had red hair, a brutal face and a sneaking manner. He was a sponger and petty thief whom Elliot had seen a number of times before.
“I been having this dream,” Blankenship announced loudly. His voice was not pleasant. His skin was unwholesome. Every time he got arrested the court sent him to the psychiatrists and the psychiatrists, who spoke little English, sent him to Elliot.
Blankenship had joined the army after his first burglary but had never served east of the Rhine. After a few months in Wiesbaden, he had been discharged for reasons of unsuitability, but he told everyone he was a veteran of the Vietnam War. He went about in a tiger suit. Elliot had had enough of him.
“Dreams are boring,” Elliot told him.
Blankenship was outraged. “Whaddaya mean?” he demanded.
During counseling sessions Elliot usually moved his chair into the middle of the room in order to seem accessible to his clients. Now he stayed securely behind his desk. He did not care to seem accessible to Blankenship, “What I said, Mr. Blankenship. Other people’s dreams are boring. Didn’t you ever hear that?”
“Boring?” Blankenship frowned. He seemed unable to imagine a meaning for the word.
Elliot picked up a pencil and set its point quivering on his desktop blotter. He gazed into his client’s slack-jawed face. The Blankenship family made their way through life as strolling litigants, and young Blankenship’s specialty was slipping on ice cubes. Hauled off the pavement, he would hassle the doctors in Emergency for pain pills and hurry to a law clinic. The Blankenships had threatened suit against half the property owners in the southern part of the state. What they could not extort at law they stole. But even the Blankenship family had abandoned Blankenship. His last visit to the hospital had been subsequent to an arrest for lifting a case of hot-dog rolls from Woolworth’s. He lived in a Goodwill depository bin in Wyndham.
“Now I suppose you want to tell me your dream. Is that right, Mr. Blankenship?”
Blankenship looked left and right like a dog surrendering eye contact. “Don’t you want to hear it?” he asked humbly.
Elliot was unmoved. “Tell me something, Blankenship. Was your dream about Vietnam?”
At the mention of the word “Vietnam,” Blankenship customarily broke into a broad smile. Now he looked guilty and guarded. He shrugged. “Ya.”
“How come you have dreams about that place, Blankenship? You were never there.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Blankenship began to say, but Elliot cut him off.
“You were never there, my man. You never saw the goddamn place. You have no business dreaming about it! You better cut it out!”
He had raised his voice to the extent that the secretary outside his open door paused at her computer.
“Lemme alone,” Blankenship said fearfully. “Some doctor you are.”
“It’s all right,” Elliot assured him. “I’m not a doctor.”
“Everybody’s on my case,” Blankenship said. His moods were volatile. He began to weep.
Elliot watched the tears roll down Blankenship’s chapped, pitted cheeks. He cleared his throat. “Look, fella…” he began. He felt at a loss. He felt like telling Blankenship that things were tough all over.
Blankenship sniffed and telescoped his neck and after a moment looked at Elliot. His look was disconcertingly trustful; he was used to being counseled.
“Really, you know, it’s ridiculous for you to tell me your problems have to do with Nam. You were never over there. It was me over there, Blankenship. Not you.”
Blankenship leaned forward and put his forehead on his knees.
“Your troubles have to do with here and now,” Elliot told his client. “Fantasies aren’t helpful.”
His voice sounded overripe and hypocritical in his own ears. What a dreadful business, he thought. What an awful job this is. Anger was driving him crazy.
Blankenship straightened up and spoke through his tears. “This dream…” he said. “I’m scared.”
Elliot felt ready to endure a great deal in order not to hear Blankenship’s dream.
“I’m not the one you see about that,” he said. In the end he knew his duty. He sighed. “OK. All right. Tell me about it.”
“Yeah?” Blankenship asked with leaden sarcasm. “Yeah? You think dreams are friggin’ boring!”
“No, no,” Elliot said. He offered Blankenship a tissue and Blankenship took one. “That was sort of off the top of my head. I didn’t really mean it.”
Blankenship fixed his eyes on dreaming distance. “There’s a feeling that goes with it. With the dream.” Then he shook his head in revulsion and looked at Elliot as though he had only just awakened. “So what do you think? You think it’s boring?”
“Of course not,” Elliot said. “A physical feeling?”
“Ya. It’s like I’m floating in rubber.”
He watched Elliot stealthily, aware of quickened attention. Elliot had caught dengue in Vietnam and during his weeks of delirium had felt vaguely as though he were floating in rubber.
“What are you seeing in this dream?”
Blankenship only shook his head. Elliot suffered a brief but intense attack of rage.
“Hey, Blankenship,” he said equably, “here I am, man. You can see I’m listening.”
“What I saw was black,” Blankenship said. He spoke in an odd tremolo. His behavior was quite different from anything Elliot had come to expect from him.
“Black? What was it?”
“Smoke. The sky maybe.”
“The sky?” Elliot asked.
“It was all black. I was scared.”
In a waking dream of his own, Elliot felt the muscles on his neck distend. He was looking up at a sky that was black, filled with smoke-swollen clouds, lit with fires, damped with blood and rain.
“What were you scared of?” he asked Blankenship.
“I do
n’t know,” Blankenship said.
Elliot could not drive the black sky from his inward eye. It was as though Blankenship’s dream had infected his own mind.
“You don’t know? You don’t know what you were scared of?”
Blankenship’s posture was rigid. Elliot, who knew the aspect of true fear, recognized it there in front of him.
“The Nam,” Blankenship said.
“You’re not even old enough,” Elliot told him.
Blankenship sat trembling with joined palms between his thighs. His face was flushed and not in the least ennobled by pain. He had trouble with alcohol and drugs. He had trouble with everything.
“So wherever your black sky is, it isn’t Vietnam.”
Things were so unfair Elliot thought. It was unfair of Blankenship to appropriate the condition of a Vietnam veteran. The trauma inducing his post-traumatic stress had been nothing more serious than his own birth, a routine procedure. Now, in addition to the poverty, anxiety and confusion that would always be his life’s lot, he had been visited with irony. It was all arbitrary and some people simply got elected. Everyone knew that who had been where Blankenship had not.
“Because, I assure you, Mr. Blankenship, you were never there.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Blankenship asked.
When Blankenship was gone, Elliot leafed through his file and saw that the psychiatrists had passed him upstairs without recording a diagnosis. Disproportionately angry, he went out to the secretary’s desk.
“Nobody wrote up that last patient,” he said. “I’m not supposed to see people without a diagnosis. The shrinks are just passing the buck.”
The secretary was a tall, solemn redhead with prominent front teeth and a slight speech disorder. “Dr. Sayyid will have kittens if he hears you call him a shrink, Chas. He’s already complained. He hates being called a shrink.”
“Then he came to the wrong country,” Elliot said. “He can go back to his own.”
The woman giggled. “He is the doctor; Chas.”
“Hates being called a shrink!” He threw the file on the secretary’s table and stormed back toward his office. “That fucking little zip couldn’t give you a decent haircut. He’s a prescription clerk.”
The secretary looked about her guiltily and shook her head. She was used to him.
Elliot succeeded in calming himself down after a while, but the image of black sky remained with him. At first he thought he would be able to shrug the whole thing off. After a few minutes, he picked up his phone and dialed Blankenship’s probation officer.
“The Vietnam thing is all he has,” the probation officer explained. “I guess he picked it up around.”
“His descriptions are vivid,” Elliot said.
“You mean they sound authentic?”
“I mean he had me going today. He was ringing my bells.”
“Good for Blanky. Think he believes it himself?”
“Yes,” Elliot said. “He believes it himself now.”
Elliot told the probation officer about Blankenship’s current arrest, which was for showering illegally at midnight in the Wyndham Regional High School. He asked what Probation knew about Blankenship’s present relationship with his family.
“You kiddin’?” the P.O. asked. “They’re all locked down. The whole family’s inside. The old man’s in Bridgewater. Little Donny’s in San Quentin or somewhere. Their dog’s in the pound.”
Elliot had lunch alone in the hospital staff cafeteria. On the far side of the double-glazed windows, the day was darkening as an expected snowstorm gathered. Along Route 7, ancient elms stood frozen against the gray sky. When he had finished his sandwich and coffee, he sat staring out at the winter afternoon. His anger had given way to an insistent anxiety.
On the way back to his office, he stopped at the hospital gift shop for a copy of Sports Illustrated and a candy bar. When he was inside again, he closed the door and put his feet up. It was Friday and he had no appointments for the remainder of the day, nothing to do but write a few letters and read the office mail.
Elliot’s cubicle in the social services department was windowless and lined with bookshelves. When he found himself unable to concentrate on the magazine and without any heart for his paperwork, he ran his eye over the row of books beside his chair. There were volumes by Heinrich Muller and Carlos Castaneda, Jones’s life of Freud and The Golden Bough. The books aroused a revulsion in Elliot. Their present uselessness repelled him.
Over and over again, detail by detail, he tried to recall his conversation with Blankenship.
“You were never there,” he heard himself explaining. He was trying to get the whole incident straightened out after the fact. Something was wrong. Dread crept over him like a paralysis. He ate his candy bar without tasting it. He knew that the craving for sweets was itself a bad sign.
Blankenship had misappropriated someone else’s dream and made it his own. It made no difference whether you had been there, after all. The dreams had crossed the ocean. They were in the air.
He took his glasses off and put them on his desk and sat with his arms folded, looking into the well of light from his desk lamp. There seemed to be nothing but whirl inside him. Unwelcome things came and went in his mind’s eye. His heart beat faster. He could not control the headlong promiscuity of his thoughts.
It was possible to imagine larval dreams traveling in suspended animation undetectable in a host brain. They could be divided and regenerate like flatworms, hide in seams and bedding, in war stories, laughter snapshots. They could rot your socks and turn your memory into a black and green blister. Green for the hills, black for the sky above. At daybreak they hung themselves up in rows like bats. At dusk they went out to look for dreamers.
Elliot put his jacket on and went into the outer office, where the secretary sat frowning into the measured sound and light of her machine. She must enjoy its sleekness and order he thought. She was divorced. Four red-headed kids between ten and seventeen lived with her in an unpainted house across from Stop & Shop. Elliot liked her and had come to find her attractive. He managed a smile for her.
“Ethel, I think I’m going to pack it in,” he declared. It seemed awkward to be leaving early without a reason.
“Jack wants to talk to you before you go, Chas.”
Elliot looked at her blankly.
Then his colleague, Jack Sprague, having heard his voice, called from the adjoining cubicle. “Chas, what about Sunday’s games? Shall I call you with the spread?”
“I don’t know,” Elliot said. “I’ll phone you tomorrow.”
“This is a big decision for him,” Jack Sprague told the secretary. “He might lose twenty-five bucks.”
At present, Elliot drew a slightly higher salary than Jack Sprague, although Jack had a Ph.D. and Elliot was only an M.S.W. Different branches of the state government employed them.
“Twenty-five bucks,” said the woman. “If you guys have no better use for twenty-five bucks, give it to me.”
“Where are you off to, by the way?” Sprague asked.
Elliot began to answer but for a moment no reply occurred to him. He shrugged. “I have to get back,” he finally stammered. “I promised Grace.”
“Was that Blankenship I saw leaving?”
Elliot nodded.
“It’s February,” Jack said. “How come he’s not in Florida?”
“I don’t know,” Elliot said. He put on his coat and walked to the door. “I’ll see you.”
“Have a nice weekend,” the secretary said. She and Sprague looked after him indulgently as he walked toward the main corridor.
“Are Chas and Grace going out on the town?” she said to Sprague. “What do you think?”
“That would be the day,” Sprague said. “Tomorrow he’ll come back over here and read all day. He spends every weekend holed up in this goddamn office while she does something or other at the church.” He shook his head. “Every night he’s at A.A. and she’s home alone.”
Ethel savored her overbite. “Jack,” she said teasingly, “are you thinking what I think you’re thinking? Shame on you.”
“I’m thinking I’m glad I’m not him, that’s what I’m thinking. That’s as much as I’ll say.”
“Yeah, well, 1 don’t care,” Ethel said. “Two salaries and no kids, that’s the way to go, boy.”
Elliot went out through the automatic doors of the emergency bay and the cold closed over him. He walked across the hospital parking lot with his eyes on the pavement, his hands thrust deep in his overcoat pockets, skirting patches of shattered ice. There was no wind, but the motionless air stung; the metal frames of his glasses burned his skin. Curlicues of mud-brown ice coated the soiled snowbanks along the street. Although it was still afternoon, the street lights had come on.
The lock on his car door had frozen and he had to breathe on the keyhole to fit the key. When the engine turned over Jussi Bjorling’s recording of the Handel Largo filled the car interior. He snapped it off at once.
Halted at the first stoplight, he began to feel the want of a destination. The fear and impulse to flight that had got him out of the office faded, and he had no desire to go home. He was troubled by a peculiar impatience that might have been with time itself. It was as though he were waiting for something. The sensation made him feel anxious; it was unfamiliar but not altogether unpleasant. When the light changed he drove on, past the Gulf station and the firehouse and between the greens of Ilford Common. At the far end of the common he swung into the parking lot of the Packard Conway Library and stopped with the engine running. What he was experiencing, he thought, was the principle of possibility.
He turned off the engine and went out again into the cold. Behind the leaded library windows he could see the librarian pouring coffee in her tiny private office. The librarian was a Quaker of socialist convictions named Candace Music, who was Elliot’s cousin.
The Conway Library was all dark wood and etched mirrors, a Gothic saloon. Years before, out of work and booze-whipped, Elliot had gone to hide there. Because Candace was a classicist’s widow and knew some Greek, she was one of the few people in the valley with whom Elliot had cared to speak in those days. Eventually, it had seemed to him that all their conversations tended toward Vietnam, so he had gone less and less often. Elliot was the only Vietnam veteran Candace knew well enough to chat with, and he had come to suspect that he was being probed for the edification of the East Ilford Friends Meeting. At that time he had still pretended to talk easily about his war and had prepared little discourses and picaresque anecdotes to recite on demand. Earnest seekers like Candace had caused him great secret distress.