The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  Bartolli stared at him unforgivingly. “All right, then,” he finally said, swinging the door open. “Please come in.”

  Dubin followed him through a gloomy entrance hall decorated with primitive masks into an equally gloomy library lined with glassed-in bookcases. Bartolli unlocked a wooden cabinet and pulled out a buckram folder.

  “Have a seat. Please. I want to show you something. This is one of my recent acquisitions. I think you’ll recognize it.”

  He handed Dubin a clear plastic pouch labeled “Jacques Offenbach to Albert Wolff, 28 August 1880.” Inside the pouch was a yellowed, ink-blotched letter in French covered with the impatient scrawl of a man in the last weeks of his life. Dubin nodded as if he knew all about it.

  “I assume your client’s manuscript is the one mentioned in this letter?”

  “It’s the one,” Dubin assured him.

  “Does your client realize what it is?”

  “Absolutely. But she has little interest in such things, other than for family reasons.”

  “Then your client’s a descendent of Wolff’s? Or is she a member of the Offenbach family?”

  “I’m not here to talk about my client. I’m here to talk about you. My client wants to know why you’re so interested in this manuscript.”

  Bartolli fixed his all-consuming stare on Dubin for what must have been a full thirty seconds. “Then by all means,” he said, suddenly smiling, “let me tell you something about myself.” He put the pouch back in the folder and replaced the folder in the cabinet. “Shall we sit down in my office? It’s stuffy in here.”

  He led Dubin down the hallway into a paneled study that looked like the captain’s quarters in an old-fashioned ocean liner. This was the office, Dubin realized as he settled into a leather armchair, where the psychiatrist saw his patients. The lighting was soft, the artwork unobtrusive; there was even a couch along one of the walls. But the usual roles were reversed—it was Bartolli, ensconced behind his walnut desk, who had to give an account of himself. “I am the son of an Italian nobleman and an American heiress,” he began. “I was born in Rome and educated in Italy and Switzerland—”

  “But aren’t you Miles Palmer’s brother?”

  “His half-brother,” Bartolli corrected, his eyebrows arching scornfully. “Miles’s father was a British distiller who made a fortune in real estate and dropped dead a year after he married my mother.” He flicked an invisible piece of lint off his sleeve and ran a hand through his tuft of gray hair. “I can’t account for her behavior. Miles spent most of his childhood in English boarding schools and in fact we have very little in common.”

  “You’re both psychiatrists.”

  “True. And for a few years we were able to do some excellent work together at the Institute.”

  “Why did that end?”

  “We have fundamentally different beliefs about the human psyche.”

  With a quick gesture, he waved aside any further questioning on that topic. “Now,” he said, “as to the Offenbach manuscript: I bought the letter hoping that it would shed some light on The Tales of Hoffmann, but by itself it doesn’t prove anything. I need the manuscript.”

  “But why?” Dubin asked. “I still don’t understand where your interest is coming from.”

  Bartolli stared past Dubin at the bookshelves that lined the back wall of the study. “For the past several years, my work has taken me back to the early psychoanalysts and their studies of literature and folklore. Freud, of course, wrote a famous essay about Hoffmann.” He shot an inquisitorial glance at Dubin. “You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He eyed Dubin skeptically, as if convinced that he was lying. “It’s well worth reading.” He focused his gaze on Dubin and went on. “Offenbach’s version of Hoffmann’s tales has been bowdlerized since its inception with the purpose of concealing its true meaning. But in this letter—and in your manuscript, I assume—Offenbach tells us what he really wanted to do: to create a modern, existential work about a man driven to insanity and murder by sexual jealousy and obsession.”

  Bartolli had grown more and more breathless and excited as he spoke, his hands circling in broad spirals as if he were trying to conjure his words out of the air. Now he stood up, his face glowing, and walked around the desk to take hold of Dubin’s arm. “If you want to know why I must have that manuscript, come with me! I want to show you something.”

  Reluctantly, Dubin followed him back toward the entrance hall and then down a narrow staircase to a dimly-lighted basement that smelled of sawdust and mildew. One end of the basement had been set up as a miniature theater, decorated with opera posters and kabuki masks. Rows of seats faced a low stage, most of which was occupied by some sort of structure draped with canvas.

  “As you can tell, I am a man of many interests, many perspectives on life.” Bartolli stepped onto the stage and pulled off the canvas, revealing a puppet theatre with a dozen marionettes grotesquely hanging in the proscenium, their heads drooping, their eyes bulging, as if they had been the victims of a mass execution. “I have many interests, but this,” he said softly, “this is my passion.”

  Chapter 21

  The search for Hunter Morgan slogged into its second week in an atmosphere of grim determination, as morale among the staff sank to an all-time low. Julietta never left my thoughts as I agonized over her trip to Venice with Gottlieb. With each passing day I grew more angry and depressed. I wrote myself a prescription for Zoloft and took double the recommended dose, with no discernible effect. One morning—it was about nine days after Hunter disappeared—Dr. Palmer called me into his office. I was sure I was about to be fired. But he smiled paternally as I came in and offered me a seat in the leather chair in front of his desk.

  “I can tell that you’re very troubled by what’s happened,” he said.

  “Yes,” I admitted. Obviously he was thinking of Hunter, not Julietta. “I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  It surprised me to hear him say that, but I thought I knew what he meant. The image of Peter Bartolli peering through the fence was still fresh in my mind. “You shouldn’t blame your brother, either,” I said.

  “No,” he agreed. “It’s not his fault. These things happen sometimes. There’s nothing anyone can do.”

  I appreciated his sympathy but it didn’t alleviate my professional and spiritual crisis. Having been trained in modern psychiatry, I had no way of dealing with an event that went beyond any conceivable scientific explanation. It wasn’t just that we didn’t know yet what particular chemical imbalance could cause this type of thing to happen; it was whether we should even attempt to understand it in those terms. I had begun to feel that what Hunter had done could only be described as evil.

  Dr. Palmer smiled grimly when I told him that. “Look on the wall behind you,” he said.

  I turned around and saw a framed print which I had often noticed but never examined in any detail. It depicted a fantastic scene that reminded me of Hieronymus Bosch, with a hideous dragonlike creature that must have represented the Devil hovering over a number of lesser demons and some cowering humans.

  “What is it?”

  “The Temptation of St. Anthony, by Jacques Callot. Seventeenth century etching.”

  “It’s grotesque.”

  Dr. Palmer nodded in agreement. “Do you know the story of St. Anthony? He gave away all his wealth and lived as a hermit in the desert, where he was tormented by every kind of temptation imaginable, in the form of beautiful women, wild beasts and demons that tore at his flesh—and even the Devil himself, who appeared in this monstrous shape and proclaimed himself the ruler of the world.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  “To find God he first had to find the Devil.”

  I laughed grimly. “Whatever that is.”

  “Today we know that the Devil is a human artifact, a superstition we created for ourselves. The same thing is true of evil itself. We kno
w they don’t really exist except in our minds.”

  Part of me couldn’t accept that this was true. “Then why resist them?”

  “That’s the question a psychiatrist has to wrestle with every day of his life.”

  Dr. Palmer stood up and I assumed our meeting was over. But then he stepped toward me and put his arms around my shoulders and pulled me toward him for a brief embrace. I was deeply moved.

  “I’ve had this print on my wall ever since I started practicing twenty-five years ago,” he said. “As a reminder of how powerful these superstitions can be.”

  St. Anthony stared back at us from the print, terrified in the desperate isolation of his conscience.

  “And I look at it every day—to remind myself that even though the Devil doesn’t exist, that doesn’t mean you can’t be tempted by him. Tormented by him. And even destroyed by him.”

  * * *

  Thinking back on the afternoon he’d spent with Peter Bartolli, Dubin wondered if his memory was playing tricks on him. It was almost as if he’d been dreaming, especially after he followed Bartolli down into his dank subterranean theater. There was the stage—and beside it a grand piano, of all things—and on the stage an elaborate puppet theater with a stage of its own, arrayed with a dozen hanging figures that looked like corpses on a gibbet. When Bartolli pulled the canvas cover off the puppet theater, announcing it as his passion in life, Dubin dropped into the nearest seat, sensing that he was intended as the audience. Bartolli had dimmed the lights, leaving only a single spotlight fixed on himself. Darkness poured in from the farthest corners of the room, which seemed impossibly far away, as if the basement were much larger than the house itself.

  Bartolli’s face throbbed under the lurid glow of the spotlight. “I personally designed all the marionettes,” he boasted, “which were then hand carved by Austrian craftsmen.” He climbed behind the puppet theatre and removed all the puppets from view; then he opened a little hatch above the proscenium so he could talk to Dubin as he introduced them. “The production I’m working on—in case you haven’t guessed—is The Tales of Hoffmann.”

  The first marionette he brought out was a languid female with stringy blond hair and a ghoulish expression on her face. “This of course is Olympia. The ballerina Hoffmann falls in love with at first sight. She appears to be a woman but in fact she is a doll. Of course in the opera the actor who plays her is a woman. So in this case she’s a puppet pretending to be a woman pretending to be a doll pretending to be a woman. She’s specially designed so that at the flick of a wrist she falls apart and crumbles into a heap of cloth and sticks. I won’t show you that just yet.”

  He left Olympia hanging while he selected another marionette. “This one’s a real woman,” he said, dangling another female form, darker and more sensuous than the first. “She can seduce a man into madness. Do you know her?”

  The puppet’s jet black eyes gleamed back at Dubin with lifelike penetration. “No,” he whispered, without knowing why he was whispering.

  “Her name is Giulietta.”

  Bartolli clattered around behind the stage for a few minutes as he raised some new equipment into position. “Now,” he said, as if talking to himself. “Hoffmann. Who shall Hoffmann be today?” He peered at Dubin through the little hatch. “You see, the marvel of my invention is that I can move the heads around and change the characters’ identities at will. I can make Hoffmann look like any number of men, depending on my mood. And that’s fitting, don’t you think? After all, Hoffmann could be anyone.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Even if—as your manuscript undoubtedly portrays him—he’s an obsessionally jealous serial killer, he could be any man, couldn’t he? Or to put it another way, any man could be Hoffmann. He could even be you.”

  “I’m looking forward to seeing who he is.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t really matter whose face he has. In fact, I think we’ll keep it covered.” He lowered the Hoffmann figure over the stage, and Dubin felt a chill when he realized that the marionette’s head had been covered with a neatly sewn hood, and that his hands—possibly because the strings were a little tangled—appeared to be tied behind his back. He looked like a man being led to the gallows. “It could be anyone,” Bartolli said, peering down at Dubin through the hatch. “I mean, we all have a little of the Hoffmann in us, don’t we?”

  Dubin glanced over his shoulder toward the stairs, which had been swallowed in darkness.

  “Maybe it’s just because I’m a psychiatrist,” Bartolli went on, “but I like to think of my little puppet theater as a microcosm of the human mind.”

  “The human mind? I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Then let me explain,” Bartolli said pleasantly. “Contrary to popular belief, the mind does not function like a machine. The parts of a machine are all subordinate to one overall purpose.” He marched the marionettes across the stage in a lockstep formation. “But the mind has a multitude of parts which each want to function autonomously, forming their own purposes and personalities, the goal of which is to dominate all the others”—he jiggled the strings and the three marionettes skittered helplessly across the stage—“like a ruthless tyrant.”

  “Personalities?”

  “Plural, yes.” Bartolli shook the strings and each of the marionettes danced a different dance, knocking into each other erratically. “Remember, we’re here as the result of evolution, which has bequeathed us with a collection of fragmentary selves, each of which is perfectly willing to sacrifice all the others for the sake of its own survival.”

  As he thought back over this conversation, Dubin could almost feel the magnetism of Bartolli’s gaze and the magisterial certainty of his voice. But what he remembered most was his reaction to Bartolli’s ideas—they made him feel queasy, restless, eager to escape, as if the puppet theater was indeed a microcosm of his own mind and they were the strings that were entangling him under the puppet master’s control. He wondered: Who is that hooded figure on the stage? What does he mean by saying it could be anyone?

  “Nothing is ever lost in evolution,” Bartolli went on. “Each part of the brain is a survivor. We have the brain of a lizard, a rodent, an ape, and all the stops along the way. Each has its own complete vision of the world, and can operate independently as a complete self if the need arises. And each has the Darwinian will to survive, even if it can do so only by suppressing or extinguishing all the others.”

  Bartolli disappeared from the hatch and the Hoffmann figure trudged painfully across the stage and turned his hooded face toward Dubin, raising his hands as if in a silent plea for recognition. “In our darker moments we perceive these separate selves for what they are, but for public consumption we try to integrate them together into one big personality that we present to the world as if it were a coherent whole.”

  The Olympia puppet danced out to pirouette beside Hoffmann, leaving him spinning in his attempt to follow her movements. “When people can’t do it well enough, we call them schizophrenics. They’re incapable of normal social functioning because each one of their fragmentary selves must have its own way, contending with the others like lunatics in an asylum.”

  Bartolli’s face popped into the hatch, smiling his ironic smile. “Or, if you prefer, like prima donnas in an opera company.” He ducked down again as the salacious Giulietta slithered on stage beside Olympia. “Our minds shelter a whole repertory company of small, self-important characters, each competing to be the center of attention. There’s usually a king, or a duke, and a beautiful princess. Or perhaps a courtesan or an artiste.” Olympia took an awkward bow as Giulietta tried to shove her aside. “Every one of them wants to be the center of attention at all times.”

  Bartolli lowered the curtain, leaving the puppets to their jealous machinations, and stepped down onto the main stage, his face sober. Dubin lurched to his feet, but Bartolli had ensnared him in his ideas; there was no possibility of escape.

  “They are the gods,” Bartol
li concluded, “the angels, the demons, the furies, the inner voices we are all familiar with. And although you may imagine yourself pulling the strings, or sitting in the audience, I will tell you something: There isn’t any audience and there isn’t any puppeteer. There isn’t any ‘you’ other than them. They are who you are.”

  Chapter 22

  The search parties were easy to avoid. He watched them through the leafless trees in the harsh light of the early winter landscape, plodding across the countryside in their orange vests like dull-witted insects. With the drugs finally out of his system, he felt as if he were discovering the world for the first time. Every day there were new shapes, new colors, all as bright and sharp at the edges as the knife he’d stolen from the old woman’s kitchen. He knew they would never catch him. He spent the day sleeping in a culvert and at night he’d roam the woods searching for food. Avoiding the paved roads, he’d make his way to the edge of town, where a surprising number of people slept with their doors unlocked. He didn’t know what he would do if anyone caught him sneaking into their house. He always kept the knife in his pocket, and sometimes he’d take it out and watch it glisten in the moonlight but that was all. He remembered hiding in the barn and eating the rotten apples and it made him sick to think about it. What had happened before that? His mind teemed with memories but they seemed to belong to someone else.

  Nicole, he thought, watching the knife glisten in the moonlight. Eventually she would find him, or he would find her.

  Chapter 23

  At our next session I told Nicole about my conversation with Dr. Palmer on the subject of evil. Her reaction was surprisingly angry, and it led to a major breakthrough in her therapy. “A superstition?” she scoffed. “Is that the scientific view? Then there’s no reason why I shouldn’t get a gun and blow your brains out.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  She glared back at me with a look in her green eyes that was almost enough to make me believe in supernatural evil. “I was expelled from school for not believing in the Devil,” she said in a softer voice. “Did I ever tell you about that?”