The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  Gottlieb dodged away and leaped onto an arching footbridge. I threw my arms around his neck and pulled him down onto the parapet, tugging at the gold chain until I had the room key in my grasp. Cursing and gasping for breath, he wrapped his hamlike hands around my throat and choked me while he tried to roll me over the parapet into the canal.

  I panicked. I panicked because I knew Gottlieb was either going to strangle me or drown me if I couldn’t get away from him. I was fighting for my life. I yanked my hands away from his throat but he still didn’t stop choking me. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t even beg for my life. Somehow I managed to get one hand into my jacket pocket and pulled out my knife.

  I jammed it into his lower back, which was the only spot I could reach. Hot blood spurted out all over my hand. He cried out and released his grip, staring at me with the astonished look of the dead. I pulled the key off the chain and rolled him into the canal.

  A sardonic voice sang out from the darkness beyond the end of the bridge. “And so the fool beloved of God rejoins his shadow.”

  Julietta’s sinister admirer stepped into the light, puffing a cigarette. The man was everywhere, a collector of souls come to claim his trophy. And there too, I realized, stood Julietta, smiling triumphantly. The boy with the mandolin had stopped playing; he stood watching from the balcony.

  “Julietta!” I said, moving toward her. “I’ve got the key.”

  She pulled back and clutched the old man’s arm. Her smile twisted into a sneer.

  “Polizia!” the man cried out. “Help! Police! Murder!” He flicked his cigarette onto the spot in the canal where Gottlieb had gone down.

  I heard a muffled sound behind me. It was Nicole, sobbing as she crouched on the pavement to wipe the blood off my knife. Her movements seemed to be in slow motion.

  “Help! Police!”

  The keening of sirens circled in from all sides as police boats sped toward the canal. The old man stepped over and snatched the key out of my hand, slipping it into his breast pocket with a contemptuous smile. Then he led Julietta down a flight of stone steps to a landing beneath the bridge, where a gondola waited to carry them away. I watched in stunned silence as they climbed into the boat, laughing and chattering as if nothing had happened.

  Laughing! They were laughing at me for stupidly walking into their trap! I leaped down the steps and into the gondola before they could pull away and threw myself on Julietta, choking off her laughter with my hands clenched around her bare white throat. She struggled violently as the old man and the gondolier beat me from behind and tried to pull me off, but I lowered my head and held on until the screaming stopped and her body went limp. In a frenzy I fought off the two men and jumped back on the landing.

  Nicole stood on the footbridge holding the knife. “Give me that!” I demanded. I thought about throwing the knife into the canal but instead dropped it back into my pocket. “Now get out of here!”

  She was still sobbing. “Where are you going?”

  “Never mind where I’m going! And don’t follow me!”

  “You killed him in self defense!” she moaned, as if she hadn’t noticed what I did to Julietta. “If you run away—”

  “No! I was trying to kill him.”

  I pushed her out of my way and ran back up the alleyway toward the Casino. The sirens suddenly wailed louder as the police boats began to arrive. I stepped on the vaporetto and in a few minutes found myself strolling toward the parking lot near the train station. A tiny car sped past me with lights flashing. It skidded to a halt and five or six policemen tumbled out, one after another, like mimes in a circus. By this time I should have been feeling guilt or remorse or, at the very least, fear. But all I could think about was the absurdity of the whole thing. They were coming after me in a clown car.

  Chapter 27

  When the snow started he knew he had to move on. Search parties were still combing the area and with snow on the ground they would soon track him down. He found an icy creek and waded upstream into mountain country, dodging the road that switchbacked over the stream until it turned downhill, leaving him on the shoulder of a thickly forested ridge. As he climbed higher the creek became an icicled ravine, leading nowhere. He scrabbled to the rim and found shelter from the snow under a craggy outcrop near the top of the ridge.

  The next morning he crawled out of his lair into the bright sunlight and explored the ridge summit. A hundred yards down the other side he found another road and a small hotel that looked like a Swiss chalet. He planted himself behind a huge pine tree and studied the hotel carefully. Was this the type of place Nicole would come to? he wondered. If he watched it long enough, would he find her there?

  At night, lying in his rocky hideaway, he closed his eyes and had the sensation that he was back at the Institute watching a movie. The movie stopped when he opened his eyes and started again when he closed them. He could hear his own voice as the slightly pompous narrator. 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... He was talking to Nicole, giving her an elaborate explanation for everything he had done in his life. 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...

  When he woke up he was shivering with cold. Where was Nicole? She would understand, she would grasp his meaning, if only he could find her, if only she would listen. He closed his eyes and there she was, wading toward him through the fresh snow. She tried to hold me in place with her fierce emerald eyes....

  He stood up and looked down at the ravine. You could scream all you wanted in there and no one would hear you. The world was white and quiet, muffled in the silence of fresh snow. The fresh snow, it seemed to him, made everything permissible.

  Chapter 28

  Dubin stood in Peter Bartolli’s living room examining his collection of grotesque wooden masks, which filled three of the walls and continued around the corner into the dining room. “Most of these are Polynesian,” Bartolli explained. “Eighteenth and nineteenth century, before the Christian missionaries stamped out the native religion. I show them to new patients to give them an idea of what they can expect to find in the unconscious.”

  The masks stared at Dubin knowingly, as if the secret purpose of his visit was obvious. He was there for one reason alone: to investigate the possible connection between Bartolli and the kaleidoscope found in Maria Morgan’s studio after she died.

  Bartolli seemed surprisingly eager to cooperate. He approached a closed wooden cabinet that occupied a short wall between two windows. “Let me show you my kaleidoscopes.” Pulling a key from his pocket, he unlocked the cabinet and opened its doors to reveal a collection of metallic instruments in various shapes and sizes, most of which Dubin would never have recognized as kaleidoscopes. “They come from all over the world,” he said, “and every one has its own story to tell.” He handed Dubin a brass tube that looked like a trumpet with a crank on one side, carved with images of multi-limbed Indian gods. “Here. Try looking through this.”

  Dubin peered inside and saw a colorful erotic scene that started to dissolve as soon as he raised it to the light. He turned the crank but that only chased the images farther away.

  “Our world is a transitory one,” Bartolli explained, smiling pleasantly. “If you keep turning the crank you’ll pass through every combination of color and shape in the world of appearances until eventually you come back to where you started. It might take four billion years but you will come back.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it.” Dubin handed the instrument back to Bartolli, who slipped it back into its place. “There was a kaleidoscope in Maria Morgan’s studio when she died.”

  “Yes,” Bartolli replied without looking up. “I gave it to her.”

  “Is it one of these?”

  “No. It was hers. I don’t know what became of it
after she died.”

  “It disappeared from the studio.”

  Bartolli hesitated, then shook his head and said, “That’s a shame. It was a very lovely piece from southeastern Iran.” He snapped the cabinet shut and walked away.

  In the dining room Dubin took his seat amidst the curious stares of Polynesian witch doctors while Bartolli brought the food in from the kitchen. He served a salade niçoise garnished with cold grilled tuna, ripe olives and anchovies, along with three kinds of cheese and a plate of fresh berries. There was a red wine and a white wine, both Italian and both very good.

  They ate quietly for a few minutes before either spoke again. “Have you met Antonia Morgan?” Bartolli asked unexpectedly.

  “I don’t think so. Isn’t she...?”

  “Schizophrenic? Yes, that’s her official diagnosis, though I’ve never accepted it.”

  “What is she then?”

  “I don’t know if we have a word for it. Freud probably would have called it hysteria. A couple of hundred years ago they would have said she was mad. I’d describe it as a severe personality disorder, similar to her mother’s, but much more debilitating—and aggravated by the drugs that have been prescribed to treat it.”

  “Similar to her mother’s?” Dubin could hardly believe what he’d just heard. “I thought Maria Morgan was being treated for depression.”

  “A family euphemism, I’m afraid.” Bartolli smiled bashfully, as if to acknowledge his own complicity in the deception. “Maria Morgan was a borderline schizophrenic. Most of the time she managed to stay on this side of the border, but there were times when she couldn’t resist the lure of the other side.”

  “Like Antonia?”

  Bartolli nodded. “Antonia bears an uncanny resemblance to her mother. In outward appearance that’s not unusual in a daughter. But what’s so striking about Antonia is her voice. She has her mother’s voice.”

  “I’ve heard that Antonia never speaks.”

  “She doesn’t speak but sometimes she sings. And when she sings it’s with the voice of an angel—her mother’s voice.” Bartolli opened a large bottle of sparking water, which he poured into their glasses. “You know, that was how Maria Morgan coped with her illness—by singing. That’s what allowed her to live a fairly normal life.”

  “Has singing helped Antonia?”

  Bartolli’s smile hardened. “Unfortunately she suffers from severe asthma. She was on the verge of a breakthrough when I was forced to leave the Institute. Since then, she hasn’t made any progress at all. Even now, if I were given a chance, I think I could help her.”

  “How?”

  “By completing the course of treatment she was on when I left. By putting her in touch with a world where the voice of an angel wouldn’t sound out of place.”

  Dubin lowered his eyes, wondering whether Bartolli was straying again into the strange territory they had visited on their tour of the puppet theater.

  Bartolli offered more salad, more bread, more wine. “I said the resemblance between Antonia’s voice and her mother’s is uncanny,” he resumed when Dubin’s plate and glass had been refilled. “Do you know what that means?”

  “I know what uncanny means.”

  “Do you, really?” He raised his eyebrows as if this claim were absurd.

  “It means supernatural, fantastic—”

  “What we call uncanny isn’t just what’s fantastic or supernatural. What’s uncanny is when irrational forces seem to be intruding unexpectedly into everyday life—at a time when we’ve stopped believing in them. Dolls seem to wink at us, chance patterns repeat themselves wherever we turn, the most familiar objects seem unaccountably strange. And all of a sudden—”

  Bartolli broke off and for a moment it seemed that he would not finish the sentence.

  “All of a sudden what?”

  “All of a sudden we’re not sure we can believe our eyes. When we peek into the crevices of our workaday world, a whole different universe seems to be peering out at us.”

  Dubin hesitated. “A whole different universe?”

  “You can call it the fourth dimension,” Bartolli said, “or the collective unconscious, if you prefer. You can get there through drugs, dreams, madness—and above all, through music. Madness is just a one-way ticket to the same place music can take you to and bring you back from.”

  “I’ve got to be going,” Dubin said, tossing his napkin on the table.

  “Don’t you see? It’s through music that I hope to bring Antonia back from the clutch of madness. And I need you to help me.”

  * * *

  I had parked my rental car in a long-term lot near the train station. Luckily the lot was still open and I was able to complete my escape before they closed the roads out of Venice. So this was how I would end my Getaway Vacation—fleeing with Julietta’s blood on my hands rather than lose her to a man old enough to be her father. Where had I seen that man before? It seemed that all my life I’d been hounded by some hostile force, some nemesis—usually an older man—that blocked and thwarted every love I aspired to. Not the same man, of course, but with more than a coincidental resemblance among them. If I had been watching a movie, I would have said that the roles of my tormentors were all played by the same actor, in various clever disguises that made him look completely different—young or old, fat or thin, bearded or bald—but always recognizably the same man. You could see it in the eyes, like a family resemblance. And as I pictured the eyes of Julietta’s treacherous lover I suddenly recognized the man I saw hidden there. If he but blench, I know my course. Murder will speak.

  I drove up toward the Dolomites, as they call the Alps in that country. It’s a region where they speak German as much as Italian and the bare peaks loom over your head like the pipes of a monstrous organ reaching into the clouds. In a few hours the police would trace the car and I would have no choice but to abandon it. But before I could construct my plan I had a shock. Stopped at a light in a small town, I spotted Nicole in the rearview mirror, sitting behind me in what appeared to be a Volvo. She must have been following me every minute since I fled the scene of the crime. For some reason I feared her more than the police. On my way out of town I jogged onto a dirt road that led up a steep mountainside, and as luck would have it a truck turned in behind me. The truck blocked the Volvo from following close behind, and I was able to speed up and disappear down a side road. The side road continued uphill only about a mile before it dead-ended at a scenic overlook. Looking down, I could see the Volvo winding its way up toward me. In a panic I eased my car to the edge of the embankment and jumped out just before it went over the edge into a thicket of hemlocks. Then, without looking back, I bolted down a narrow path into the forest.

  There was a light dusting of snow on the mountainside, and so my escape route was impossible to conceal. I knew Nicole would follow, and although she seemed intent on saving me I perceived her as a threat. After all, besides the old man and the gondolier—I had all but forgotten about the boy with the mandolin—she was the only witness to my crimes.

  * * *

  ‘The clutch of madness’— it was that phrase more than anything that had held Dubin in his seat across the table from Peter Bartolli. To bring Antonia back from the clutch of madness. Bartolli hurried into the kitchen and returned with a pot of coffee and an assortment of pastries. The man was bizarre, possibly in the clutch of madness himself, and Dubin found himself at once fascinated and repelled. The more he saw of Bartolli the more unlikely it became that he’d been Maria Morgan’s secret lover. No sign of an unprofessional attachment to her, or hostility to Avery Morgan, or a dog named Nero. The kaleidoscope collection, which inspired this awkward visit, had proved inconclusive, but one fact of crucial importance had come to light: Maria Morgan had suffered from the same mental disorder as her children. Did Bartolli try to rescue her from the world of madness in the same way as he was now proposing to rescue Antonia?

  “Why did you give Maria Morgan a kaleidoscope?” Dubin asked.


  “I often give little gifts to my patients.”

  “Why a kaleidoscope?”

  “A kaleidoscope is a particularly appropriate gift for someone with Maria’s illness.”

  “Was it part of her therapy?”

  Bartolli took a sip of his coffee and smiled. “Try to imagine life as a schizophrenic. It’s like living in a kaleidoscope, constantly bedazzled by the endless cycles of transformation that the rest us perceive, if at all, only as a momentary intuition.”

  “Aren’t you talking about psychotic delusions?”

  “‘Delusions’ or ‘perceptions,’ I don’t know which. There’s a part of the universe—probably the largest part—that lies beyond our ability to give it a name.”

  Bartolli set down his coffee cup and leaned forward intently. “Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think schizophrenia is normal or desirable—in fact, I’ve devoted a large part of my life to combating it. But in order to treat its victims you have to understand them on their own terms. So to answer your question: yes, it was part of her therapy. A kaleidoscope can be another route of passage into the unconscious. I was hoping that for Maria it might have been a window of escape.”

  “Might have been?”

  “Had she lived.”

  Dubin remembered what he had said about Antonia. “Did she try to sing her way out?”

  “She tried, yes.” Bartolli averted his eyes. “She tried.”

  For a few minutes they nibbled on their pastries in silence. Then Bartolli finally came to the point. “I asked you here today because I need your help.”

  “I told you the Offenbach manuscript has been sold.”

  “You never had that manuscript,” Bartolli frowned, shaking his head. “I’ve spoken with Stephen Witz and Casimir Ostrovsky.” He waved the whole subject aside with a dismissive gesture. “It’s of no importance.”