The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  She nodded, keeping her eyes locked on his. “It’s been fairly obvious. The Seven Eleven. The laundromat. Sitting out there in your BMW. I thought you must be working for Dr. Hoffmann.”

  “Dr. Hoffmann?” The name surprised him, but he tried not to show it. “Not at all. It’s an investigation into something that happened a long time ago. Something that has nothing to do with you.”

  She seemed confused, even a little alarmed. “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you about the investigation. But I was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”

  “OK.” She glanced around nervously. “But I hope it won’t take too long. I was working.”

  “No problem,” Dubin smiled. “It’ll just take a few minutes. What I wanted to ask you about is the Morgan twins. Hunter and Antonia. Did you meet them while you were staying at the Institute?”

  “Sure. They were my best friends.”

  “Then they’re fairly normal?”

  Nicole grinned as if the question was a joke. “Antonia never speaks—she hasn’t said a word in years, according to Dr. Hoffmann. Though sometimes she sings quite beautifully when she thinks no one is listening.”

  “And Hunter?”

  “Hunter tries on a different identity every day, as casually as other people change their socks. And he never stops talking. They all think he’s talking gibberish, but most of what he says is quotations from Shakespeare or something else he’s watched on a video.”

  “Do the doctors know that?”

  “I tried to tell Dr. Hoffmann,” she laughed, “but he thought I was crazy. They think Hunter has a memory disturbance. He can’t remember the most basic facts about himself, like what he was doing yesterday, so how could he memorize the works of Shakespeare from watching videos?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “What the doctors don’t seem to appreciate is that for Hunter it’s not a matter of memory. The reason he can’t remember what he was doing yesterday is that he was a different person yesterday, or any number of different people. So it’s hardly fair to expect him to remember, is it? I mean, would it be fair to ask you to remember what I was doing yesterday?”

  “No, I see what—”

  “If you weren’t stalking me, that is.” She frowned at Dubin with mock indignation. “Admittedly that’s a special case.”

  “Right.”

  “And lately Hunter has started playing the piano. Schumann’s Kreisleriana.”

  “From memory?”

  “No one has any idea where it came from.”

  Dubin sensed that he was finally getting somewhere. “And what about their father? Avery Morgan. Have you met him?”

  “Sure. He comes to see his kids every day. Sort of a squeaky, ungainly man. But he’s very nice, actually. Seems to really care about them.”

  Nicole picked up her teapot and carried it back to the stove. “I think our time is up,” she said. “I have to get back to work.”

  “Just one last question?”

  She smiled indulgently, as if she had been humoring Dubin and not the other way around. “All right. A short one.”

  “Do you know who Maria Morgan was?”

  “She was Hunter and Antonia’s mother. She committed suicide a long time ago.”

  “Did you ever hear anyone talking about her? Or the way she died?”

  “No. They wouldn’t talk about anything like that with the patients.”

  Dubin hesitated in the doorway before retreating down the dark stairs. Nicole looked small and beautiful and somehow heroic in her cluttered apartment. He said good-bye, he thanked her for her time, but there was still one thing he needed to ask before he left. “Why would Dr. Hoffmann arrange for someone to follow you around and spy on you?”

  “I don’t know,” she sighed. “I guess I’m a little paranoid.”

  * * *

  Living at the Institute, ironically, was taking its toll on my mental health. The isolated setting, the hushed, padded corridors, the inexorable routine of endless days and boring nights (punctuated by my obsessive encounters with Olympia), and in general the atmosphere of suspension and futility that permeated the place—all of these, week after week, made it difficult for me to maintain a sense of reality. Add the cynicism of the staff and the hopelessness of the patients—in spite of the chemical warfare that was designed to obliterate it, you could read the despair in their toneless voices and their empty eyes—and I can only say it’s a wonder I was able to avoid psychological contagion as long as I did. Like all psychiatrists, I had undergone extensive psychotherapy as part of my training, and I’d learned some things about myself that I preferred not to think about. In fact my therapist, Dr. Neuberger, had recommended that I continue seeing him even after I finished my residency, but of course that was impossible now that I was living at the Institute. There must have been something in the dark, asphyxiating atmosphere of that place that triggered a recurrence of the symptoms Dr. Neuberger had been so concerned about. I wish I could have stepped back and looked at myself with the practiced eye I focused on my patients.

  The first sign of trouble was a sense of foreboding, a malaise of impending evil and shame. Around the beginning of October, I had my first nightmare. It was after one of those marathon sessions with Olympia, though I doubt if she noticed—she’d dropped almost instantaneously from orgiastic excitement into a deep sleep. Exhausted but still aroused, I listened to the rhythm of her mechanical breathing and imagined myself climbing an endless series of numbered steps that rose through a dark tower. At the top of the steps I came to a door, which looked like one of the doors at the Institute. It was the door to the twins’ nurse’s—Mrs. Paterson’s—room. I knocked politely and when there was no answer I quietly opened the door and stepped inside. Mrs. Paterson was lying on top of her bed, fully clothed even though it was the middle of the night. With the back of my hand I touched her forehead and it felt cold. I picked up her wrist and tried to take her pulse, but she had no pulse. She was dead. There was an empty bottle of pills and a glass of water on the night table.

  Then I did something I am ashamed to relate. I wish I could say that the person in the dream wasn’t really me. But the first rule of dreaming—and there are many of them, as I’ve come to realize—is that in a dream you’re always yourself. No excuses are possible. Even if you dream that you’re someone else, or you say to yourself, ‘I’m only dreaming,’ you’re really you and you’re really doing what you seem to be doing. And what did I do? When I was sure the nurse was dead, I pulled the nylon belt out of my bathrobe and tied a noose on one end. I slipped the noose around her neck, lifted her over my shoulders and carried her into the bathroom. Then I wrapped the other end of the cord around the light fixture and tightened it until her feet were dangling a few inches above the floor. I tied the cord to the light fixture and waited until the body had stopped swaying.

  There was a mirror in the bathroom. It was behind me, on the door to the medicine cabinet. I knew the mirror was there and before I left the room I glanced over my shoulder, the way I used to do when I was a teenager, just to see what I looked like when I struck a certain pose. Ned Hoffmann, I’d say. This is what Ned Hoffmann looks like. But the person I saw in the mirror—just for a flash before the image jolted me awake—was Hunter Morgan.

  I lay sweating beside Olympia on the narrow bed, my heart pounding. I was afraid to move. I couldn’t hear Olympia breathing, just the ticking of a clock—and my own screaming thoughts. Why did I do that to Mrs. Paterson? Had anyone been watching? Don’t tell anyone, whatever you do, even Olympia—especially Olympia. I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, and when I closed my eyes I saw the body dangling from the light fixture. Only now it didn’t look like Mrs. Paterson—it looked like Maria Morgan.

  It was only a dream, I told myself. And it wasn’t even me.

  The morning after that first nightmare, I made a point of being especially friendly to Mrs. Paterson in the dining roo
m. As usual she sat with Hunter and Antonia, sipping her coffee and helping them concentrate on their breakfasts. She suddenly seemed small and vulnerable, and when I remembered my dream I felt small and vulnerable too. Mrs. Paterson smiled when she noticed me staring at their table, and I smiled back as amiably as I could. But I avoided her eyes and when I passed a mirror on my way back upstairs I looked away, for fear of seeing the image of Hunter I’d seen in the mirror in my dream.

  Late one night Olympia and I were snuggling in her bed, talking about the progress of Hunter’s therapy. “Have you considered doing a past life regression?” she asked, quite seriously.

  “A what?” I knew what she meant but I wanted to express my skepticism as forcefully as possible.

  “A past life regression,” she repeated, sitting up to face me. “You hypnotize the patient and take them back to a prior life, where you can find the source of their bad karma. My father does it all the time.”

  Peter Bartolli. No wonder Dr. Palmer had warned me about him. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not a witch doctor.”

  “My Dad thinks it’s the only way you’re going to find the explanation for Hunter’s piano playing.”

  “What do you mean? He played the piano in a past life?”

  “He keeps playing a piece by somebody named Schumann, right?”

  “So I’m told.”

  “Well, maybe Hunter was Schumann. Or maybe part of him was Schumann, or somebody else who played Schumann’s works.”

  “The possibilities are endless.”

  Irony was lost on Olympia. “They are,” she nodded. “That’s why you’ve really got to do the regression. You said yourself the piano playing could be the key to Hunter’s psychosis.”

  “I don’t believe in reincarnation.”

  “Metempsychosis,” she said, correcting me. “Technically, what we’re talking about isn’t reincarnation. It’s metempsychosis. It’s Greek; from the Greek. M-E-T-E-M-P-S...”

  “It’s definitely a psychosis.”

  “It’s not a psychosis. It’s the transmigration of souls, and it’s completely normal.”

  I stopped her chatter with a kiss, followed by a passionate embrace that carried both of us quickly away from the impasse we had reached in our conversation. I loved her in spite of her nutty ideas, or maybe even because of them. She pulled off my shirt, and I gently removed hers. She ran her lips down my neck and across my breast, and I covered her body with kisses. I felt a stirring inside me that brought my lips back to hers. She pulled away, rolling on top of me. “About that past life regression,” she purred, stroking my breast. “Won’t you do it? Won’t you do it for me?”

  At that moment she was every woman who ever lived, and I was every man. Naturally I agreed.

  Chapter 8

  Dubin’s phone rang as he was stepping out of the shower. It was Susan Morgan and she didn’t bother to introduce herself. “Avery’s gone to Washington for the day,” she said with an air of authority. “Can you come over about ten o’clock?”

  “At ten o’clock I’m still sobering up from the night before.”

  “Then get good and sober and come over at eleven.”

  The Morgan estate looked the same, only quieter. No kids, no au pair. Even the golden retriever seemed to have taken the day off. Susan came out to greet him, wearing a white tennis dress that displayed her legs to good advantage and a sun visor that kept her cold eyes in the shadows. He followed her into the barn where they had talked before. She led him into the little furnished apartment in the back and invited him to sit down at an oak kitchen table.

  “I just made some coffee,” she said. “Would you like a cup?”

  “That sounds like a great idea.”

  She set two coffee mugs on the table and sat down across from him, watching him spoon sugar into his coffee.

  “Well,” she said, as if she was disappointed that he didn’t have more to say. “Have you got anything?”

  “Only this.” He pulled her $5,000 check from his shirt pocket and pushed it across the table.

  “No,” she smiled, pushing it back to him. “I mean have you found anything?”

  “Only this check,” he repeated, returning her smile. “It’s the closest thing I have to a smoking gun.”

  She gazed at him in ironic incomprehension.

  He said, “I don’t know whether to tear it up or put it in my safe.”

  “Why don’t you just cash it?”

  “I haven’t earned it.”

  “That’s very ethical of you.”

  “I know.”

  “Considering your line of work.”

  Dubin nodded, as if agreeing with her skepticism. He folded the check and put it back in his pocket. “The question is why did you give it to me? I didn’t have any information to sell. I still don’t. Until you called this morning I thought it might have been to make me go away. But that wasn’t it either, was it?”

  She shook her head. “I knew it would cost more than that to make you go away. In the meantime maybe I wanted to see what you could come up with.”

  “So you could use it against your husband?”

  “It’s like insurance. You buy it hoping you’ll never need it.”

  They sat quietly for a few minutes sipping their coffee. She fixed her gray eyes on Dubin, smiling girlishly as if to say that she wasn’t as cynical as she seemed. He stood up in an attempt to change the subject. “Could I take another look at that upstairs studio?”

  “Sure.”

  Climbing the stairs behind her, he kept her muscular thighs at eye level and she seemed to be doing her best to make them worthy of his attention. Once through the door at the top of the stairs she stepped to one side like a weary real estate agent waiting for a client to make up his mind. Dubin’s earlier tour of the studio had been quick and impressionistic. Now he took his time and went from one end of the long room to the other making careful mental notes of everything he saw. He examined each of the portraits, prints, and posters that lined the walls—one poster that grabbed his attention, from the Salzburg Marionette Theater, depicted an array of haunted, bug-eyed marionettes that all looked furniture he found an upright piano, a music stand, a high wooden stool, a CD player and an old record player with a turntable on a wobbly platform with half a dozen boxed sets of long-playing records—Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, Tchaikowsky’s The Nutcracker, Delibes’s Coppélia—filed on the shelves below. And on the wall there were more shelves containing more records, tapes and CDs, and dozens of dusty books, many of them in German or French.

  Susan waited by the door, looking bored and ironic.

  “Are you an opera lover?” he asked her as he pawed through the books looking for a title he had heard of.

  “Only if you include soap operas.”

  Dubin laughed. “Everything here is Hoffmann. Hoffmann this, Hoffmann that. Who the hell was Hoffmann anyway? Was he a composer?”

  “A writer, I think.”

  “She must have been obsessed with him.”

  Susan nodded in agreement. “Maria’s method of preparing a role was to get obsessed with whatever opera she was rehearsing. She’d surround herself with books, pictures, music, whatever she could find that took her into the role. ‘Get obsessed and stay obsessed,’ she used to say. I guess it worked.”

  Dubin thought of the Stephen Witz catalog he’d found at the library—in which someone, less than a year ago, had circled the Offenbach letter about The Tales of Hoffmann—and wondered if Maria Morgan’s obsession had somehow outlived her. “So you knew her then?”

  “Sure I knew her. I lived here. I was the babysitter.”

  Dubin was taken aback. “You were the babysitter for the schizophrenic twins?”

  “They weren’t schizophrenic then,” she said, “or if they were I didn’t know it. Maria told me they had learning disabilities. Mrs. Paterson was the one who really took care of them and gave them their medications. I was just an extra hand, mostly for when they were traveling. Mr
s. Paterson doesn’t like to travel.”

  “Did your husband buy an autograph letter by Offenbach within the past year?”

  “Fortunately he doesn’t include me in his collecting mania.”

  “You don’t know whether he bought the Offenbach letter?”

  “What Offenbach letter?”

  Dubin stood peering out the small gable window that looked over the duck pond behind the barn. “There’s something about all this that doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Susan watched him expectantly.

  “Here’s Maria Morgan,” he said, turning toward her. “Talented, still young, headed for a glamorous, exciting future. What was she doing here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know if I can say this without being offensive.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking away. “You mean Avery.”

  He nodded.

  She raised her eyes to meet his. “You mean, what would a woman like that be doing with Avery?”

  “Forget it. I’m sorry I opened my mouth.” He wanted to escape downstairs, out of this dusty mausoleum and back into the world of the living. He stepped toward the door, but she stood in his way.

  “She probably felt the same way I do,” Susan said.

  Dubin said nothing.

  “It’s a mistake to marry someone who’s that much older than yourself.” Her eyes were still gray but they were no longer cold, no longer bored or cynical. Vulnerability spread across her face like the freckles she carried from childhood. Dubin smiled, hesitated, then slipped around her and headed down the stairs. She brushed his hand as he passed.

  At the bottom of the stairs she was blushing. “Would you like more coffee?”

  “I didn’t realize you were the babysitter,” Dubin said as he stirred a spoonful of sugar into his coffee.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, looking past him. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s what everybody thought—that Avery and I were already an item before Maria died and then we just waited a year and got married. But that wasn’t it at all. It was so innocent and stupid.”

  “You were young.”

  “I still am.”