‘Yes, of course, right. Which is another reason your slacker behavior is particularly distressing. The truck from Chapin just dropped off a hundred feet of the oval top walnut molding. It’s got to be unpacked, the footage measured, and put away. You can’t take the day off.’
‘Tommy, don’t whip the guilt on me. I’m a goy, remember?’
‘If it weren’t for guilt, the goyim would have wiped us out three thousand years ago. It’s more effective than a Star Wars defense system.’ He puffed air through his lips for a moment, measuring how much he would actually be inconvenienced by his assistant’s absence. ‘Monday morning? Early?’
McGrath said, ‘I’ll be there no later than eight o’clock. I’ll do the petit-points first.’
‘All right. And by the way, you sound awful. D’you know the worst part about being an Atheist?’
Lonny smiled. Tommy would feel it was a closed bargain if he could pass on one of his horrendous jokes. ‘No, what’s the worst part about being an Atheist?’
‘You’ve got no one to talk to when you’re fucking.’
Lonny roared, silently. There was no need to give him the satisfaction. But Tommy knew. He couldn’t see him, but Lonny knew he was grinning broadly at the other end of the line. ‘So long, Tommy. See you Monday.’
He racked the receiver in the phone booth and looked across Pico Boulevard at the office building. He had lived in Los Angeles for eleven years, since he and Victor and Sally had fled New York, and he still couldn’t get used to the golden patina that lay over the days here. Except when it rained, at which times the inclemency seemed so alien he had visions of giant mushrooms sprouting from the sidewalks. The office building was unimpressive, just three storeys high and brick; but a late afternoon shadow lay across its face, and it recalled for him the eighteen frontal views of the Rouen Cathedral that Monet had painted during the winter months of 1892 and 1893: the same façade, following the light from early morning till sunset. He had seen the Monet exhibition at MOMA. Then he remembered with whom he had taken in that exhibition, and he felt again the passage of chill leaving his body through that secret mouth. He stepped out of the booth and just wanted to go somewhere and cry. Stop it! he said inside. Knock it off. He swiped at the corner of his eye, and crossed the street. He passed through the shadow that cut the sidewalk.
Inside the tiny lobby he consulted the glass-paneled wall register. Mostly, the building housed dentists and philatelists, as best he could tell. But against the ribbed black panel he read the little white plastic letters that had been darted in to include THE REM GROUP 306. He walked up the stairs.
To find 306, he had to make a choice: go left or go right. There were no office location arrows on the wall. He went to the right, and was pleased. As the numbers went down, he began to hear someone speaking rather loudly. ‘Sleep is of several kinds. Dream sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep – what we call REM sleep, and thus the name of our group – is predominantly found in mammals who bring forth living young, rather than eggs. Some birds and reptiles, as well.’
McGrath stood outside the glass-paneled door to 306, and he listened. Viviparous mammals, he thought. He could now discern that the speaker was a woman; and her use of ‘living young, rather than eggs’ instead of viviparous convinced him she was addressing one or more laypersons. The echidna, he thought. A familiar viviparous mammal.
‘We now believe dreams originate in the brain’s neocortex. Dreams have been used to attempt to foretell the future. Freud used dreams to explore the unconscious mind. Jung thought dreams formed a bridge of communication between the conscious and the unconscious.’ It wasn’t a dream, McGrath thought. I was awake. I know the difference.
The woman was saying, ‘…those who try to make dreams work for them, to create poetry, to solve problems; and it’s generally thought that dreams aid in consolidating memories. How many of you believe that if you can only remember the dream when you waken, that you will understand something very important, or regain some special memory you’ve lost?’
How many of you. McGrath now understood that the dream therapy group was in session. Late on a Friday afternoon? It would have to be women in their thirties, forties.
He opened the door, to see if he was correct.
With their hands in the air, indicating they believed the capturing of a dream on awakening would bring back an old memory, all six of the women in the room, not one of them older than forty, turned to stare at McGrath as he entered. He closed the door behind him, and said, ‘I don’t agree. I think we dream to forget. And sometimes it doesn’t work.’
He was looking at the woman standing in front of the six hand-raised members of the group. She stared back at him for a long moment, and all six heads turned back to her. Their hands were frozen in the air. The woman who had been speaking settled back till she was perched on the edge of her desk.
‘Mr. McGrath?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry I’m late. It’s been a day.’
She smiled quickly, totally in command, putting him at ease. ‘I’m Anna Picket. Tricia said you’d probably be along today. Please grab a chair.’
McGrath nodded and took a folding chair from the three remaining against the wall. He unfolded it and set it at the far left of the semicircle. The six well-tended, expensively coifed heads remained turned toward him as, one by one, the hands came down.
He wasn’t at all sure letting his ex-wife call this Anna Picket, to get him into the group, had been such a good idea. They had remained friends after the divorce, and he trusted her judgment. Though he had never availed himself of her services after they’d separated and she had gone for her degree at UCLA, he’d been assured that Tricia was as good a family counseling therapist as one could find in Southern California. He had been shocked when she’d suggested a dream group. But he’d come: he had walked through the area most of the early part of the day, trying to decide if he wanted to do this, share what he’d experienced with total strangers; walked through the area stopping in at this shop and that boutique, having some gelato and shaking his head at how this neighborhood had been ‘gentrified,’ how it had changed so radically, how all the wonderful little tradesmen who had flourished here had been driven out by geysering rents; walked through the area growing more and more despondent at how nothing lasted, how joy was drained away shop by shop, neighborhood by neighborhood, person by…
Until one was left alone.
Standing on an empty plain. The dark wind blowing from the horizon. Cold, empty dark: with the knowledge that a pit of eternal loneliness lay just over that horizon, and that the frightening wind that blew up out of the pit would never cease. That one would stand there, all alone, on the empty plain, as one after another of the ones you loved were erased in a second.
Had walked through the area, all day, and finally had called Tommy, and finally had allowed Tricia’s wisdom to lead him, and here he sat, in a folding straight-back chair, asking a total stranger to repeat what she had just said.
‘I asked why you didn’t agree with the group, that remembering dreams is a good thing?’ She arched an eyebrow, and tilted her head.
McGrath felt uncomfortable for a moment. He blushed. It was something that had always caused him embarrassment. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘I don’t want to seem like a smart aleck, one of those people who reads some popularized bit of science and then comes on like an authority…’
She smiled at his consternation, the flush of his cheeks. ‘Please, Mr. McGrath, that’s quite all right. Where dreams are concerned, we’re all journeyists. What did you read?’
‘The Crick-Mitchison theory. The paper on “unlearning”. I don’t know, it just seemed, well, reasonable to me.’
One of the women asked what that was.
Anna Picket said, ‘Dr. Sir Francis Crick, you’ll know of him because he won the Nobel Prize for his work with DNA; and Graeme Mitchison, he’s a highly respected brain researcher at Cambridge. Their experiments in the early 1980s. They postulate tha
t we dream to forget, not to remember.’
‘The best way I understood it,’ McGrath said, ‘was using the analogy of cleaning out an office building at night, after all the workers are gone. Outdated reports are trashed, computer dump sheets are shredded, old memos tossed with the refuse. Every night our brains get cleaned during the one to two hours of REM sleep. The dreams pick up after us every day, sweep out the unnecessary, untrue, or just plain silly memories that could keep us from storing the important memories, or might keep us from rational thinking when we’re awake. Remembering the dreams would be counter-productive, since the brain is trying to unlearn all that crap so we function better.’
Anna Picket smiled. ‘You were sent from heaven, Mr. McGrath. I was going precisely to that theory when you came in. You’ve saved me a great deal of explanation.’
One of the six women said, ‘Then you don’t want us to write down our dreams and bring them in for discussion? I even put a tape recorder by the bed. For instance, I had a dream just last night in which my bicycle…’
He sat through the entire session, listening to things that infuriated him. They were so self-indulgent, making of the most minor inconveniences in their lives, mountains impossible to conquer. They were so different from the women he knew. They seemed to be antiquated creatures from some primitive time, confused by changing times and the demand on them to be utterly responsible for their existence. They seemed to want succor, to be told that there were greater forces at work in their world; powers and pressures and even conspiracies that existed solely to keep them nervous, uncomfortable, and helpless. Five of the six were divorcées, and only one of the five had a full-time job: selling real estate. The sixth was the daughter of an organized crime figure. McGrath felt no link with them. He didn’t need a group therapy session. His life was as full as he wanted it to be…except that he was now always scared, and lost, and constantly depressed. Perhaps Dr. Jess was dead on target. Perhaps he did need a shrink.
He was certain he did not need Anna Picket and her well-tailored ladies whose greatest real anguish was making sure they got home in time to turn on the sprinklers.
When the session ended, he started toward the door without saying anything to the Picket woman. She was surrounded by the six. But she gently edged them aside and called to him, ‘Mr. McGrath, would you wait a moment? I’d like to speak to you.’ He took his hand off the doorknob, and went back to his chair. He bit the soft flesh of his inner cheek, annoyed.
She blew them off like dandelion fluff, far more quickly than McGrath thought possible, and did it without their taking it as rejection. In less than five minutes he was alone in the office with the dream therapist.
She closed the door behind the Mafia Princess and locked it. For a deranged moment he thought…but it passed, and the look on her face was concern, not lust. He started to rise. She laid a palm against the air, stopping him. He sank back onto the folding chair.
Then Anna Picket came to him and said, ‘For McGrath hath murdered sleep.’ He stared up at her as she put her left hand behind his head, cupping the nape with fingers extending up under his hair along the curve of the skull. ‘Don’t be nervous, this’ll be all right,’ she said, laying her right hand with the palm against his left cheek, the spread thumb and index finger bracketing an eye he tried mightily not to blink. Her thumb lay alongside his nose, the tip curving onto the bridge. The forefinger lay across the bony eye-ridge.
She pursed her lips, then sighed deeply. In a moment her body twitched with an involuntary rictus, and she gasped, as if she had had the wind knocked out of her. McGrath couldn’t move. He could feel the strength of her hands cradling his head, and the tremors of – he wanted to say – passion slamming through her. Not the passion of strong amorous feeling, but passion in the sense of being acted upon by something external, something alien to one’s nature.
The trembling in her grew more pronounced, and McGrath had the sense that power was being drained out of him, pouring into her, that it had reached saturation level and was leaking back along the system into him, but changed, more dangerous. But why dangerous? She was spasming now, her eyes closed, her head thrown back and to the side, her thick mass of hair swaying and bobbing as she jerked, a human double-circuit high-voltage tower about to overload.
She moaned softly, in pain, without the slightest trace of subliminal pleasure, and he could see she was biting her lower lip so fiercely that blood was beginning to coat her mouth. When the pain he saw in her face became more than he could bear, he reached up quickly and took her hands away with difficulty; breaking the circuit.
Anna Picket’s legs went out and she keeled toward him. He tried to brace himself, but she hit him with full dead weight, and they went crashing to the floor entangled in the metal folding chair.
Frightened, thinking insanely what if someone comes in and sees us like this, they’d think I was molesting her, and in the next instant thinking with relief she locked the door, and in the next instant his fear was transmogrified into concern for her. He rolled out from under her trembling body, taking the chair with him, wrapped around one ankle. He shook off the chair, and got to his knees. Her eyes were half-closed, the lids flickering so rapidly she might have been in the line of strobe lights.
He hauled her around, settling her semi-upright with her head in his lap. He brushed the hair from her face, and shook her ever so lightly, because he had no water, and had no moist washcloth. Her breathing slowed, her chest heaved not quite so spastically, and her hand, flung away from her body, began to flex the fingers.
‘Ms. Picket,’ he whispered, ‘can you talk? Are you all right? Is there some medicine you need…in your desk?’
She opened her eyes, then, and looked up at him. She tasted the blood on her lips and continued breathing raggedly, as though she had run a great distance. And finally she said, ‘I could feel it in you when you walked in.’
He tried to ask what it was she had felt, what it was in him that had so unhinged her, but she reached in with the flexing hand and touched his forearm.
‘You’ll have to come with me.’
‘Where?’
‘To meet the real REM Group.’
And she began to cry. He knew immediately that she was weeping for him, and he murmured that he would come with her. She tried to smile reassurance, but there was still too much pain in her. They stayed that way for a time, and then they left the office building together.
They were impaired, every one of them in the sprawling ranch-style house in Hidden Hills. One was blind, another had only one hand. A third looked as if she had been in a terrible fire and had lost half her face, and another propelled herself through the house on a small wheeled platform with restraining bars to keep her from falling off.
They had taken the San Diego Freeway to the Ventura, and had driven west on 101 to the Calabasas exit. Climbing, then dropping behind the hills, they had turned up a side road that became a dirt road that became a horse path, Lonny driving Anna Picket’s ’85 Le Sabre.
The house lay within a bowl, completely concealed, even from the dirt road below. The horse trail passed behind low hills covered with mesquite and coast live oak, and abruptly became a perfectly surfaced blacktop. Like the roads Hearst had had cut in the hills leading up to San Simeon, concealing access to the Castle from the Coast Highway above Cambria, the blacktop had been poured on spiral rising cuts laid on a reverse bias.
Unless sought from the air, the enormous ranch house and its outbuildings and grounds would be unknown even to the most adventurous picnicker. ‘How much of this acreage do you own?’ McGrath asked, circling down the inside of the bowl.
‘All this,’ she said, waving an arm across the empty hills, ‘almost to the edge of Ventura County.’
She had recovered completely, but had said very little during the hour and a half trip, even during the heaviest weekend traffic on the 101 Freeway crawling like a million-wheeled worm through the San Fernando Valley out of Los Angeles. ‘Not a
lot of casual drop-ins I should imagine,’ he replied.
She looked at him across the front seat, fully for the first time since leaving Santa Monica. ‘I hope you’ll have faith in me, trust me just a while longer,’ she said.
He paid strict attention to the driving.
He had been cramped within the Buick by a kind of dull fear that strangely reminded him of how he had always felt on Christmas Eve, as a child, lying in bed, afraid of, yet anxious for, the sleep that permitted Santa Claus to come.
In that house below lay something that knew of secret mouths and ancient winds from within. Had he not trusted her, he would have slammed the brake pedal and leaped from the car and not stopped running till he had reached the freeway.
And once inside the house, seeing all of them, so ruined and tragic, he was helpless to do anything but allow her to lead him to a large sitting-room, where a circle of comfortable overstuffed chairs formed a pattern that made the fear more overwhelming.
They came, then, in twos and threes, the legless woman on the rolling cart propelling herself into the center of the ring. He sat there and watched them come, and his heart seemed to press against his chest. McGrath, as a young man, had gone to a Judy Garland film festival at the Thalia in New York. One of the revived movies had been A Child Is Waiting, a nonsinging role for Judy, a film about retarded children. Sally had had to help him out of the theater only halfway through. He could not see through his tears. His capacity for bearing the anguish of the crippled, particularly children, was less than that of most people. He brought himself up short: why had he thought of that afternoon at the Thalia now? These weren’t children. They were adults. All of them. Every woman in the house was at least as old as he, surely older. Why had he been thinking of them as children?
Anna Picket took the chair beside him, and looked around the circle. One chair was empty. ‘Catherine?’ she asked.
The blind woman said, ‘She died on Sunday.’
Anna closed her eyes and sank back into the chair. ‘God be with her, and her pain ended.’
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 155