The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  I stood up to adjust the window shade. The windows in my office reach to the ceiling and on a late summer afternoon the sunlight can be blinding. Nicole receded into darkness as I lowered the shade, and a thin blade of sunlight slashed across the dust and seemed to cut her in half at the waist. “It’s possible,” I said, “that there’s a chronic chemical imbalance in the part of his brain that processes language. So far we haven’t figured out a way to fix it.”

  “You make him sound like a malfunctioning robot.”

  “No, a malfunctioning human.”

  “But this isn’t a malfunction. It’s something he’s doing on purpose.”

  “On purpose? What do you mean?”

  She leaned forward, and the blade of sunlight swung upwards to cut across her throat. “Where I grew up in the west of Ireland—about as far away from Dublin as you can go without getting in a boat—English is still thought of as the devil’s tongue. There are people in my family who deliberately use the wrong English word just to throw the Devil off their track.”

  “You think Hunter’s doing something like that?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes he looks at me with a fear in his eyes that seems to come from somewhere beyond the merely human. Couldn’t he be trying to keep the Devil off his track?”

  I knew I had to tread carefully. Listening to patients, there often comes a time when you realize that metaphorical language is being used literally. “Do you believe in the Devil?” I asked.

  A sudden breeze jostled the window shade and the blade of sunlight flashed across her face. She didn’t flinch or blink but gazed back at me with a solemnity that took me completely by surprise. “Something like that,” she said. “Only human.”

  We sat in silence for what seemed like several minutes while I tried to make sense of what she had said. And then the clock chimed the hour, signaling that our session was over. She shook my hand and thanked me warmly for everything I had done for her, and then she hurried toward the door, saying that she’d look forward to seeing me again the next week at our scheduled follow up visit.

  “Nicole,” I said, “did you hear Hunter playing the piano this afternoon?”

  “Yes I did.” She stopped in the doorway, framed in the shadows that darkened the adjoining hall. “It was impressive, wasn’t it?”

  “Impressive isn’t the word, when you realize that he’s never had a lesson or even touched a piano before.”

  Her smile faded. “That’s uncanny.”

  “Do you know much about music?”

  “I learned to play the piano at school. The teacher was a nun who used to rap my knuckles every time I made a mistake.”

  “Do you know what piece of music he was playing?”

  “I think I’ve heard it before. One of the German Romantics, I think, maybe Schumann.”

  She started through the door, but just before she disappeared into the shadows she turned back around and her eyes caught a sparkle of the afternoon light. “He went mad, you know.”

  “Who went mad?”

  “Robert Schumann. The composer. Died in an insane asylum.”

  Chapter 2

  “A detective without a client,” Susan Morgan said. “Isn’t there a word for that?”

  Dubin stood facing her in the shade beside the stone barn as she struggled to keep her golden retriever from knocking him down. He was a slender man with quick dark eyes and a delicate moustache. Most women found him irresistible, but Susan Morgan—she was much younger than he’d expected, a tawny blonde with freckled cheeks and a wide, skeptical smile—glared back at him with amused contempt. Dubin never argued with people who thought they were more important than he was. He was thirty-nine years old and his goal was to retire at forty. In the meantime he wanted people to know that he was a fair man, a man who could be trusted. And he wanted them to know that he was very good at what he did.

  The Morgans lived in a classic country mansion surrounded by cypresses and boxwood hedges, with a long tree-lined driveway and a handsome stone barn standing to one side. Dubin had parked on the gravel next to the barn and followed a shady path back to the house along a row of hosta in late-summer bloom. From somewhere in back came the sound of children and barking dogs. He wondered who would answer the door. A butler or a maid? Not likely. Even rich people don’t have servants anymore. They have children, and the children have servants—in this case a pretty Scandinavian au pair with a pierced nose who opened the door clutching a squirming toddler under her arm. She greeted him with a smile and led him into a small room off the foyer that looked like a miniature museum. The walls were hung with original documents signed by the likes of Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft. Not that Avery Morgan couldn’t afford Washington and Lincoln—but to display them might have attracted too much attention from the wrong kind of people. People like Dubin, in fact. They might try to take advantage of you.

  Avery Morgan was well over six feet tall but he had a high chirping voice that seemed out of place in a man his size. His hair was gray and the whites of his eyes were the color of a bloody mary. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said as they shook hands. “Is something the matter? Please sit down.”

  Dubin lowered himself into an uncomfortable chair. “This will come as a shock,” he said, “but I think your wife may have been murdered.”

  “Susan? She’s in the garden.”

  “No, I’m sorry. Your first wife. The opera singer.”

  Morgan frowned and lowered his voice. “My first wife committed suicide. She had been very depressed.”

  “Was there a note?”

  He squinted at Dubin suspiciously. “Didn’t you say you were from the police?”

  “No.”

  “But you said you were a detective.”

  “That’s right. I am a detective.”

  Morgan shifted in his chair as he tried to grasp where the meeting was taking him. “Mr. Dubin”—he chose his words carefully—“I don’t know who you are or exactly why you’re here, but if you have some information I’d like to hear it. Have you found evidence that Maria was murdered?”

  “Let’s just say I have more than a hunch.”

  “When a terrible thing like that happens,” Morgan said, his eyes darting toward the door, “you want to know the truth, of course. But you can’t keep stirring up the past in hopes of finding an explanation for something that probably doesn’t have an explanation in the first place.”

  “I understand.”

  “Unless some specific information comes to light. Do you have something specific?”

  “Not right now,” Dubin said. “But I’m looking.”

  “Good. Let me know if you find anything.”

  A little girl ran into the room and climbed on Morgan’s lap. He set her down gently and rose to his feet. “I’m going to have to ask you to excuse me.”

  Morgan had three children with his second wife. Dubin had caught a glimpse of the two from his first marriage the evening before, watching a strange dance performance on the lawn behind the Palmer Institute. The twins Hunter and Antonia—how old were they now? Twenty? Twenty-one? They sat with the other patients in sedated rows on a terrace beneath the Institute’s looming silhouette while Dubin watched through the fence at the edge of the woods. There was something dark, almost subterranean about the Institute, as if its steeply gabled roof and its Victorian turrets had just emerged from underground, tangled in a net of vines.

  Dubin rolled the scene over in his mind as he navigated through Morgan’s musty hedges back to his car. The smell of boxwood—that was one of the drawbacks of his line of work. What money smells like when it’s been in the same place too long.

  A suntanned woman in a jogging suit flounced out from behind a huge cypress and stood in his path. “I heard you talking to my husband,” she said with an insinuating smile. “I’m Susan Morgan.”

  “My name’s Dubin,” he said.

  “Do you have a first name?”

  “Not really.”

/>   “Are you from the police?”

  “No. I try to avoid the police.”

  She paused to pet an enormous golden retriever who had lumbered up beside her like the village idiot. Panting and drooling, the dog tried to climb into her lap even though she was standing. Then the dog noticed Dubin and lurched toward him, but she caught it by the collar and pulled it back.

  “Who are you, then?” she asked.

  “I’m a detective.”

  “A private detective? Who’s your client?”

  “I don’t have one yet.”

  She stared at him for a moment and then broke into a low, conspiratorial laugh. “A detective without a client. Isn’t there a word for that?”

  Dubin tried his most winning smile. “Unemployed?”

  “No,” she said, returning his smile. “I think it’s called a blackmailer.”

  * * *

  Today the only people who spend their lives in places like the Palmer Institute are the criminally insane and the very rich. I didn’t need to be told that the Morgan twins fell into the latter category. Their father, Avery Phelps Morgan, whose money goes back at least as far as the Big Bang, had put them there to please his young second wife Susan, who objected to their presence at home. Frankly the Institute’s almost medieval atmosphere—with its masonry walls, its mazelike corridors and its lack of natural light—was less conducive to good mental hygiene than to a lifetime of seclusion. To his credit, Avery Morgan visited often, spending more each year on his children’s care and treatment than more fortunate parents spend on summer camps and Ivy League educations. The day after Hunter’s amazing piano performance, Avery Morgan arrived just before noon and spent a few minutes conferring with Jeff Gottlieb, who was officiating in Dr. Palmer’s absence. Then he stepped into the cavernous patient lounge where I sat with Antonia and the nurse, Mrs. Paterson, while Hunter, wearing headphones, watched Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Hamlet for the three or four hundredth time. The lounge—which contained the piano, a TV and video player, a stereo system and other electronic gear—served also as the patient library, with floor to ceiling shelves housing a vast collection of books and videos that Hunter spent most of his time devouring in the dim light. This is not something I would have recommended. It fed Hunter’s tendency to try on fictional personalities instead of finding his own—one day he’d be the Terminator, the next day Cool Hand Luke. On that particular day he was Hamlet, the melancholy Prince of Denmark, and like Hamlet he was not overjoyed to see his father.

  “Good morning!” chirped Avery Morgan. He was a tall but uninspiring man of about fifty who always tried to sound cheerful, though he usually succeeded only in being condescending. He wore a pair of gabardine slacks, an expensive golf shirt and the kind of deep tan that only a rich man can afford. He took a seat on one of the wicker chairs across from Hunter and Antonia and smiled at them hopefully.

  “Good morning,” I said, glancing at the others to signal that I expected them also to respond. Mrs. Paterson nodded curtly and looked away. Antonia smiled as she always did but said nothing; she was in the middle of one of her asthma attacks, which gave her silence a breathless, expressive quality, as if she was overcome with longing or exasperation. Only Hunter seemed to be considering a thoughtful reply. He paused the movie and eyed his father suspiciously.

  “Smile and smile,” he said. “Smile and smile. Sweet bells jangled in a nutshell though it have no toys, smile and smile, kiss and kiss...” He continued in this vein for several minutes, stringing random words together as if they meant something. Antonia nodded fervently as if in complete agreement with her brother’s meaningless babble.

  Morgan responded as usual to their nonsense by smothering it with nonsense of his own. “I hope you’re both doing well,” he interrupted. “Your mother and I”—he always referred to Susan as their mother, though she never paid them the least attention—“are going down to Washington today to visit Uncle Graham and Aunt Ingrid. Do you remember Uncle Graham and Aunt Ingrid? They’re very nice people and they have a very nice house just outside Washington, with a huge swimming pool and a big fuzzy dog named Ralph....” This is the way he spoke to them—as if they were six years old instead of in their early twenties—and frankly I had a hard time telling which was more demented, the father or the children.

  But that morning there was a desperate edge to his condescension. His color was high, his eyes were bloodshot, and he seemed out of breath even before he started his breathless monologue. When he finally stopped talking he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his balding forehead. “Hot as the devil in here, isn’t it?”

  “Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous,” Hunter said.

  Morgan stood up and asked me nervously, “When is Dr. Palmer coming back?”

  “He should be back by Friday.”

  I rose to leave and Morgan followed me out of the dimly-lighted lounge. “Say, Dr. Hoffmann”—he lowered his voice—“has anything unusual been going on? With the twins, I mean.”

  Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. I had sensed an air of malaise, even menace, in the past few days, as if something monstrous had happened or was about to happen. I was careful not to mention Hunter’s piano playing. “Nothing really. I think Hunter’s a little tired this morning. You’re right—it’s very hot in here. I think the air conditioning needs adjustment.”

  He squinted at me skeptically. “All right then. I’ll talk to Dr. Palmer on Friday.”

  That night Hunter sat down to play the piano for the second time. It sounded like the same frenetic piece he’d played before, though I couldn’t be sure. Again, after about ten minutes he suddenly broke off playing and rushed out of the lounge without a backward glance. From the next room I could see Nicole sitting beside the piano, recording the performance on a portable cassette recorder. When it was over she applauded with the rest of the audience, kissed Antonia good night and left the room with her tape recorder.

  It was Nicole’s last night at the Institute. Why had she taped the music? Was it just a keepsake, or did she have some other purpose in mind? I stopped at the office on the way back to my room and checked the schedule to find out when I would be seeing her again.

  I spent the rest of the week anxiously awaiting Dr. Palmer’s return from San Francisco. Not that I was worried or upset by the prospect of his return, but listening to the paranoid Gottlieb had set my mind on edge. What would he say about my decision to reduce the dosages of Hunter’s medications? I knew he would question me closely. Miles Palmer had been one of the leaders of the movement that finally succeeded in consigning Freudianism and similar theories to the dustbin of history, and he was committed to the view that human behavior is ultimately a biological phenomenon. But this, in my opinion, does not mean that every patient should be dosed with an escalating regimen of chemical agents whose effects are still poorly understood. I felt confident that even if Dr. Palmer disagreed with my ideas, he would do so in a way that wouldn’t jeopardize our relationship. He was a compassionate physician, a fair-minded boss and altogether the most generous spirit I had encountered in the psychiatric field. Since I did not consider myself guilty of “heresy,” as Gottlieb had foolishly suggested, I had nothing to fear from his reaction. I could only assume that when he returned we would have a rational discussion of the pros and cons of reducing the dosages. And in the meantime there were some issues in my own life that I had to deal with.

  Chapter 3

  Dubin’s investigation had begun by chance, as such things almost always did. One steamy afternoon in August, cruising the shady back roads in his BMW convertible, he discovered an area where a steep barrier of hills had unaccountably turned the tide of suburban sprawl. Here they still had woods and fields, brooks and ponds, family farms and secluded estates—it was amazing to think that such a place could still exist a little more than two hours from New York—and before long he found himself in a quaint little town he’d never heard of. It was calle
d Egdon and it had no gas stations, no bars, no fast food—in fact, none of the emblems of modern life other than a famous psychiatric institute—but it did have a small public library housed in a tiny brick building on one end of the main street. In that library he came under close inspection by the town librarian. Her name, as he later learned, was Miss Francine Whipple and she was 68 years old. Miss Whipple ran the library singlehandedly, with assistance two afternoons a week from a high school student whose alphabetical skills remained open to question. She wore sensible shoes with laces and flat heels, a cardigan sweater even on the warmest days, and a pair of no-nonsense trifocals through which she could simultaneously read the mail, keep an eye on the door, and shoot piercing glances all the way across the room in her lifelong struggle against whisperers, misfilers and book defacers.

  “What brings you to the library this afternoon?” Miss Whipple inquired as Dubin stood leafing through the local newspaper.

  “Research,” he answered without thinking.

  “Are you a writer?”

  “Yes. I’m a kind of journalist.”

  “Now let me guess.” She peered at Dubin over the tops of her trifocals, as if in the suspicion that none of their refractions would reveal the truth about him. “Do you write about politics?”

  “Not really,” he smiled. “I’m primarily interested in unsolved crimes.”

  “True Crime,” she nodded. “My favorite category.” She pointed to a crowded shelf along the wall. “It’s an excellent collection.”

  Her tone of voice told him that she was referring to the True Crime section, and that he ignored it at his peril. “Oh, I’m sure it is,” he assured her. “It’s just that—well, those stories have already been told. I’m always on the lookout for something new.”

  She smiled knowingly. “Some unsolved crime that everyone seems to have forgotten?”

  “Exactly.” There was something in her manner that told him he’d better start paying attention. “Do you know of any?”