The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  Dr. Bartolli found his umbrella and stood by the door waiting for Olympia to return. “You’ve seen something here tonight,” he said, “that I hope will change the way you think about your work with Hunter. We’ve already brought him a few steps closer to the real world. Don’t you agree?”

  “The real world?” I laughed. “What he described was some kind of bizarre fantasy world that’s not a whole lot different from the one he usually lives in.”

  “No. But at least it was describable. At least he could paint a picture of himself dancing with the girl and trying to escape.”

  In Olympia’s absence I felt I could speak freely to Bartolli, as one physician to another. “It seems to me,” I said cautiously, “that you’re just layering one form of delusion on top of another.”

  “This is no delusion.”

  “Surely you don’t expect me to believe in reincarnation?”

  Bartolli nodded respectfully, dismissing my skepticism with the authority of his imperious eyes. “Not in any literal sense,” he allowed. “But psychologically each of us is reincarnated many times a day, forging new personalities that operate outside of our own experience. You see the extreme forms of this in bipolar disorder, multiple-personality disorder, the savant syndrome. Schizophrenia, or spirit possession as it is known in some cultures.”

  Before I could respond, Olympia appeared at the door and took her father’s hand. “We’ve got to be going,” she said.

  He smiled at his daughter and then back at me. “Memories are built along the same lines as dreams,” he said. “Little pieces of the past are floating around in the world we experience, waiting to coalesce into a memory in the same way that little pieces of memory coalesce into a dream.”

  Olympia tugged at his arm. “Come on, Dad. It’s ten o’clock.”

  “In other words,” he smiled, disappearing with his daughter out into the rainy night, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on. And right now it’s time for my little life to be rounded with some sleep.”

  Chapter 10

  Dubin had been brooding about the Offenbach letter he’d found circled in the Stephen Witz catalog at the library. “There was someone who really wanted it,” Witz had told him—and it was probably someone right here in Egdon who had kept Maria Morgan’s obsession with The Tales of Hoffmann alive for seven years. That letter, if he could find it, might be the kind of tangible evidence he needed to link the past to the present. In his business suspicions, beliefs, even certainties, had no value: letters, diaries, photographs, were the only things you could put a price tag on, and they usually turned up in the same place. Who bought the Offenbach letter? Was it Avery Morgan? The dealer would never tell, and Susan probably didn’t know. There was only one thing left to do. He would have to ask Avery Morgan himself.

  He called the house—luckily the au pair answered—and asked to speak to Mr. Morgan.

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “This is Stephen Witz, in New York. I have personal business with Mr. Morgan.”

  Morgan took his time coming to the phone. “Hello?” He seemed surprised, even a little annoyed, to receive the call. That was a good sign, Dubin thought. It meant he didn’t speak to the autograph dealer very often.

  “Mr. Morgan,” Dubin said, “this is Stephen Witz in New York. The autograph dealer?”

  “Oh, sure. How are you?”

  “Very well. And yourself?”

  “Fine, thank you. What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Morgan, I’m calling about the letter you purchased last year. A related manuscript may be coming on the market, the manuscript mentioned in the letter. It’s an important item, and I wondered if—”

  “I’m a little confused,” Morgan interrupted. “What letter are you talking about?”

  “The Offenbach letter you purchased last year. Jacques Offenbach to Albert Wolff, August 28, 1880.”

  A long silence. Morgan must have been more than a little confused. “There must be some mistake,” he finally said. “I haven’t purchased any Offenbach materials from you. Or from anyone else. You know I only collect Americana.”

  “Perhaps I’m mistaken, but my records show that you purchased the letter.”

  “You are mistaken. Mr. Witz. And your records are inaccurate.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “You know my collecting interests. If you get anything I’d be interested in, please send me a note. But if it’s not in my area, I’d rather not be bothered.”

  When the conversation ended, Dubin picked up the phone again to dial information. There were two other people he wanted to talk to. One was Casimir Ostrovsky, the opera director who selected Maria Morgan for her last role as the female lead in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. The other was Frank Lynch, the retired cop who investigated her death.

  * * *

  Frank Lynch had retired down to the Jersey shore and now occupied himself with fishing. He and his wife shared a mobile home in Toms River backing on a lagoon where he docked his 20-foot Grady. Dubin sat waiting for him on the patio behind the house, sipping a glass of lemonade supplied by Mrs. Lynch, a talkative lady who quickly made it clear that she had no interest in fishing. When Dubin told her why he wanted to talk to her husband she also lost interest in talking and disappeared into the house, leaving Dubin to pass the time with a restless labrador retriever who eyed him expectantly but seemed totally at a loss for words.

  It was an unusually warm day for October, and unusually humid for that time of year. The afternoon sun slanted through the heavy salt air, stifling the lagoon in an oppressive silence. A few seagulls hovered indifferently while others waited on the pylons that marked the entrance to the bay. Dubin stood up to peer through the mist and across the bay to the barrier island with its amusement rides and white vacation homes crowded along the shore. After half an hour Frank Lynch chugged into the lagoon standing in the rear of the Grady like a gondolier cruising the canals of Venice. He was in his mid-fifties, tall and a little ungainly, with a toothy smile that had a couple of blank spaces in it. His smile faded when Dubin told him why he was there.

  “You a private cop?”

  “No. I’m a writer. I’m writing a story about her for New York magazine.”

  Lynch ignored him while he finished mooring the boat and cleaned a coolerful of fish in an outdoor sink. The seagulls swooped around him but he didn’t seem to notice. “Could you use a couple of bluefish?”

  Dubin shrugged. “Sure.”

  “We’ve got enough in the freezer to make it to the next Ice Age. How about a beer?”

  Lynch took his fish into the house and came back out with a six-pack of Coors Light. They sat in folding chairs facing the steamy lagoon, as if they were talking about fishing or baseball.

  “So what do you think I can tell you about Maria Morgan that you don’t already know?”

  “I’ve heard a lot about her, but it’s all the official version. I thought maybe you could give me a few more details.”

  “Details.” Lynch tilted his head upwards and poured one of the beers down his throat. “You want to know what color her face was? Were her eyes bulging out? That sort of thing?”

  Dubin took his time answering. “I might be interested in those types of details if you think they’re significant.”

  “Significant?”

  “Yeah. Significant.”

  Lynch crushed his empty beer can with one hand and popped open another one. “Why don’t you talk to the police?”

  “I did,” Dubin said. “The new chief”—Dubin pretended to be searching through his notes—“what’s his name?”

  “Wozniak.”

  “Wozniak. He seemed to think your investigation left something to be desired, and he said you’d retired and moved away. I had the feeling he was trying to get rid of me.”

  Lynch sat quietly for along time, emptying and crushing one beer can after another until the whole six pack was gone. “Stay here,” he finally said, and he went inside the hou
se.

  When he came back out he was carrying a cardboard box full of files and loose papers, which he set down next to the patio table. “I kept copies of all my notes.” A mischievous grin flashed across his face. “You know, to wrap fish in and stuff.”

  Digging through the box, he found a manila folder labeled “Morgan” and handed it to Dubin. “You can look at the stuff in this file,” he said, “but don’t ask to take it with you.”

  When Dubin opened the file, the first thing he saw was Maria Morgan’s autopsy report.

  “And if you find something,” Lynch went on, still grinning, ”and you tell anybody you got it from me, I swear to God I’ll cut your balls off and use them for bait.”

  Dubin spent the next hour reading—and in some cases, copying into his notebook—the documents in Lynch’s file. There was the death certificate, the autopsy report, the police incident report, notes of dozens of interviews Lynch had conducted after Maria Morgan’s death. He had talked to everyone—Avery Morgan, Mrs. Paterson, the twins Hunter and Antonia, the opera director Casimir Ostrovsky, and a “Susan McGuire,” identified as a “babysitter” but presumably the current Mrs. Morgan, as well as a number of other people Dubin had never heard of. At the bottom of the pile Dubin found Lynch’s notes on the room where the death had occurred, the upstairs studio in the barn Dubin had visited twice with Susan. Lynch had made a meticulous inventory of everything he saw in that room, including the title of every book and the length of all the scuff marks and dents on the floor and furniture, and Dubin spent twenty minutes copying it word for word into his notebook.

  While Dubin worked, Lynch hosed off his boat and tinkered with the engine, whistling some old tune that Dubin didn’t quite recognize. Each note of the tune seemed to hang in the heavy air like a seagull before drifting away.

  “Can I ask you some questions?” Dubin asked when he had finished.

  “You can ask but I probably won’t answer,” Lynch said.

  Dubin ignored his warning. “This autopsy report—”

  “You can forget about that,” Lynch interrupted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a piece of crap.”

  It was a little less still now. Dubin could hear waves nibbling at the edge of the lagoon.

  “Here,” Lynch said. With his big hands, he picked up the bluefish he had cleaned for Dubin and wrapped it in the autopsy report, sealing the package with white freezer tape. “I told you that’s what I saved this stuff for.”

  Dubin thanked him and said good-bye. The smothering air, the stinking fish, the jeering gulls—all this made him want to get as far away from there as possible. Lynch wasn’t going to tell him anything he didn’t already know.

  After a few minutes he stopped his car and dumped the bluefish in the weeds by the side of the road. He salvaged what he could of the autopsy report, but most of it was illegible. The seagulls, which must have followed him from Lynch’s house, swooped down and encircled him with their shameless gaze. Like blackmailers, he thought. Predatory but always afraid.

  * * *

  I really didn’t know what to make of Peter Bartolli. Was he a wise, all-knowing Prospero, as he pretended—that little quote from The Tempest about “such stuff as dreams are made on” was totally predictable—or just a fatuous windbag, a Polonius, as Hunter implied in his quotations from Hamlet?

  Those questions, I admit, came from Nicole, not from me. She’s the one who recognized the quotations and proposed some analogies between certain Shakespeare plays and recent happenings at the Institute. I had been unable to resist telling her about Hunter’s past life regression at her next session. After a bit of maneuvering on her part, I even let her read the transcript. Admittedly this was unprofessional, even unethical, but I felt I needed her input—the only other person I could have confided in was Gottlieb, and that would have been suicidal. Nicole seemed fascinated by my depiction of Hunter falling under Bartolli’s hypnotic spell and she read the transcript with total absorption in about five minutes. But her main interest in the event seemed to be what it showed about my relationship with Olympia.

  “Are you sure you want to be going down this path?” she asked, boring her eyes into mine.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This whole thing was Olympia’s idea, wasn’t it?”

  “No, not at all. Her father’s been wanting to do a regression on Hunter ever since he worked here.”

  “Uh, huh,” she nodded. “But it was Olympia who got you involved.”

  “Sure, she’s the one who asked me. I’d never met Bartolli until the other night.”

  “Don’t you see? That’s why he sent her here in the first place.”

  “Sent her?”

  “Of course he sent her. To get power over you—and it worked. Are you going to let him come back and finish the job?”

  “I’m thinking about it. You realize”—I lowered my voice, realizing at once how absurd that was since we were sitting in my office with the door shut—“that this is not for public consumption. Dr. Palmer doesn’t know anything about it and he would be furious if he found out.” I glanced at my watch, even though I could see the wall clock behind my desk. “I’m afraid our time is up.”

  She stood up awkwardly, perhaps embarrassed by the abrupt way I had dismissed her. I realized at once that I had overreacted.

  “Nicole,” I said gently, “I’d like you to come back sooner than a week this time. Today’s Wednesday. Could you come in again on Saturday?”

  “I think so.”

  I reached for my calendar. “How about Saturday afternoon? Would two o’clock be all right?”

  As I wrote up my notes of that session with Nicole, I realized that she was tottering on the edge. Some of the things she’d said when we were discussing the past life regression—not to mention her fixation on Olympia—told me that trouble was on the way. My intuition was borne out on Saturday afternoon when she returned for the visit we had scheduled for 2:00 o’clock. Since Nicole’s actions leading up to that visit are so important—and since she described them to me in detail on several occasions—I will try to relate them just as they occurred, saving my own comments for later.

  She left her apartment a little after 1:00 o’clock and stopped at a specialty market to pick up a few things she needed. When she returned to her car it was after 1:30, and the weekly broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera was on the radio. According to Nicole, the featured work was The Tales of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach with an all-star cast. Nicole could hear the audience buzzing and the orchestra tuning up as the announcer delivered a synopsis of the first two acts. “The curtain rises on Luther’s tavern in Nuremberg,” the announcer said, “where a chorus of lively spirits celebrate the arrival of the poet Hoffmann and his servant Nicklausse.…”

  As Nicole listened she felt her head swimming and her chest tightening. She pulled the car over to the side of the road, her mouth parched, her face flushed, and tried to concentrate on what the announcer was saying: “Act Two begins in the home of the inventor Spalanzani, who has constructed a mechanical doll so lifelike that he introduces it to Hoffmann as his daughter Olympia....”

  When the announcer finished his introduction, Nicole threw the car into gear and raced the fifteen minutes to the Institute, hurtling into my office at exactly 2:00 o’clock with a look of panic in her eyes. I could tell at a glance that her condition had worsened. She described her drive to the Institute in minute detail, as if she were afraid that I might miss some critical point. Then, noticing the stereo receiver on the bookshelf beside my desk, she turned on the radio and tuned it to the station she’d been listening to in the car. “Listen!” she said. “Wait till you hear this!”

  All I could hear was some insipid classical music, violins punctuated by high-strung singing in a foreign language and bursts of wild applause. As I’ve mentioned, I have no use for opera, especially The Tales of Hoffmann, which is what this turned out to be. “What’s this all about?” I de
manded.

  “When I was driving over here,” Nicole said, “the announcer was giving a synopsis that was almost exactly the same as what Hunter related in his past life regression.”

  “And?”

  “Don’t you see? Hoffmann wrote these fantastical stories and became so famous that Offenbach put him into an opera, surrounded by the characters he’d created. They seem like fantasy figures but Hoffmann was a real person who probably knew real people who were the models for the characters in the opera.”

  “All right. That makes sense so far.”

  “And who was Hoffmann? He was the same person who inspired Schumann to write his Kreisleriana, which Hunter can play without having ever touched a piano before.”

  “OK. Go on.”

  “And now Hunter does a past life regression, and the past life he remembers turns out to be Hoffmann’s, as related in the opera.”

  “Or,” I said, “his so-called past life is nothing but the plot of the opera, which he heard on one of these Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, or saw on television.”

  “That’s possible,” she admitted. I was surprised that she acceded so readily to what I intended as a devastating blow to her argument. And I was even more surprised when she leaned forward with a condescending smile; not for the first time, she looked as if she were the therapist and I the patient. “But there’s more,” she said in a low voice, “and this is where things start to get weird: The life that Hoffmann is living in the opera, and in Hunter’s past life regression—isn’t it a lot like your life?”

  “My life?”

  “Yes. Yours.”

  “Mine? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s as if you were the protagonist of Hunter’s past life regression.”

  It took me a moment to grasp the significance of what she’d said. Her illness had evidently deepened into a full-blown delusional psychosis that was somehow connected with the dissertation she was writing. And in her delusional state she had come to believe that I, her psychiatrist, was actually living the fantasized past life of Hunter Morgan, another of my patients. What could that even mean? Did it make me part of Hunter’s delusion—or Nicole’s? My hands suddenly felt clammy, my face hot and drenched with sweat. “Why do you think that?” I asked, as casually as I could.