“When I was in the hospital—” remembering, I smiled—“I used to have a friend who’d say: ‘When you’re paranoid, everything makes sense.’ But that’s not quite it. It’s that all sorts of things you know don’t relate suddenly have the air of things that do. Everything you look at seems just an inch away from its place in a perfectly clear pattern.” Once more I looked at her leg. “Only you never know which inch to move…” I felt my face wrinkling over my skull with concentration.
She said: “Your dream. Can you think why you particularly wanted to tell me about it?”
I looked at my lap; “I don’t know. I’ve just had it on my mind a long time.”
“You mean it isn’t a recent dream?”
“Oh, no. I had it…I don’t remember when; while I was still staying in the…park?”
“And it isn’t a recurrent dream?”
“No. I only had it once. But it…I just keep thinking about it.”
One hand at her necklace, she fingered a lens. “I asked you this before, but I want to check: In the dream, you made love, had an orgasm, and then went to the cave. It wasn’t just a heavy necking session?”
“No. She came first. I remember it surprised me, because I was just about ready myself. I finished up about thirty seconds after she did—which is unusual with me. Usually it takes me a couple of minutes longer. When I shot my load, leaves blew against my side. And I opened my eyes and we talked for a while.”
Madame Brown mulled, a glass bead pressed to her chin. “I was on a research team that did a study some years ago—dirty old lady that I am—about sex dreams. We had, admittedly, a small sampling—two hundred and thirty-nine; they’d all checked yes to the question: whether they felt they had satisfactory sexual outlets. We had men, women, a few late adolescents; some homosexuals, of both sexes. One overwhelmingly consistent pattern was that when sex, in a dream, led to actual orgasm, either the dream ended or the subject awoke. Of course there was nothing conclusive about the study, and I can make a list of biasing factors an ell long. But yours is the first dream I’ve ever encountered, during or since the study, where orgasm was achieved and the dream continued.” She looked at me like she was waiting for a confession.
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Anything that comes to mind.”
“You think I didn’t have the dream? You think I’m lying, or that maybe the dream was…” I hunched my shoulders and felt silly. “I don’t know…”
“You want me to suggest it wasn’t a dream? That it was real?” She gave a sudden, small frown. “Yes, you do, don’t you? Well, I can understand that—if it seemed real to you.” Underlying her frown was a slight and slightly sad smile. “But it was a dream, Kid. Because…” She paused; and I wondered what moons and suns returned to devil her memory. “Well, let’s assume it wasn’t. Would you like to discuss it further? What’s the first thing that comes to mind?”
“I’m frightened, all of a sudden,” I said. “Again.”
“Of what?”
“Of you.” I tried a smile and felt it abort deep in the muscles of my face.
“What about me frightens you?”
I looked at her scarred leg. I looked at the bead she rubbed against her chin. (I remembered what she had said, when I first met her, about them; I remembered what Nightmare had said. What Nightmare had said made more sense. But I want to believe her. Doesn’t that count for something?) “I don’t…I can’t…” I began to cry again. And I couldn’t stop this time. At all. “It’s got to be a dream! It’s got to…” Could she hear it for my sobbing? “If it isn’t a dream, then I…I’m crazy!” And I cried about all the things people can not understand when other people say them. I cried over the miracle that they could understand anything at all. I cried for all the things I had said to other people that had been misunderstood because I, not knowing, had said them wrong. I cried with joy about those times when someone and I had nodded together, grinning over an understanding, real or wished for. A couple of times I managed to choke out; “I’m so frightened…I’m so frightened! I’m so alone!” I pushed my fingers into my mouth to stop the sound, rocking forward and back, bit on them, and couldn’t stop.
Madame Brown brought me Kleenex. I blubbered, “Thank you,” too inarticulate to be understood, and cried in despair that I could not even make that clear. I wandered back far enough in the cave to think, “This has got to be good for something,” but climbed up the rocks where she told me to go, in the orange flicker, and didn’t find anything there, so got scared again and cried and rocked in my seat, the pits above my kneecaps hurting, which is the place that hurts when I want to fuck bad, and kept crying and biting the sides of my hands for what seemed hours but was probably only fifteen, twenty minutes.
Denny’s circumcised; I’m not. After we all made it this afternoon, he sat wedged in the loft corner and kept asking Lanya which kind of dick she liked more: “…one that’s still got curtains or one that’s been cut?”
“It doesn’t make any difference to me.” She sat cross-legged with my feet in her lap, playing with my toes.
“But which do you think is sexier?”
“I don’t think it matters. They both feel the same.”
“But don’t you think one looks better?”
“No. I don’t.”
“But they are different; so you have to feel different about them. Which one…?” and on and on till I got bored lying there listening.
To stop it, I asked him: “Look, which one do you like more?”
“Oh. Well, I guess…” He leaned forward, hunching his shoulders. “The one that’s still got it all there…like yours, is better.”
“Oh,” Lanya said, with a puzzled look as though she’d suddenly understood something. About him.
“Yeah.” Denny grinned, came out of his corner, and lay down with his head on my lap.
Lanya nodded, swung out from under my legs, and lay down with her head on Denny’s lap. I put my feet in hers.
And it lessened; I felt weaker, better, and when I quieted, Madame Brown said: “You know, you asked me what I think of you? On the strength of the amnesia, the anxiety attacks, yes, that alone would make me suggest, if we were someplace else, that you go into a hospital. But as you say, there aren’t any mental hospitals in Bellona any-more. And, frankly, I don’t know quite what they’d do for you if you went. It might take some of the pressure off you of being ‘the Kid.’ Perhaps that would allow some things to heal that are wounded, some things to settle in place that are swollen.”
I nodded as though I was considering what she said—which wasn’t what I was doing at all. “Do you…” I asked. “Do you believe…in my dream?”
“Pardon me?”
“Do you believe I had that dream?”
She looked confused. “I’m not sure what you mean. But…don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Oh, Jesus Christ I do! I…I believe it was a…I had that dream.” And realized there was a whole well of anguish from which only a single cup had been dipped. She hadn’t understood. But that was all right.
Over her face was a mask of compassion: “Kid, there was nothing in the study to say that it couldn’t happen the way you said. You remember it very clearly, and told all the details. Yes, I believe it was a dream. I don’t know whether or not you do, but it’s probably not a bad idea for you to keep trying.”
Over mine was a mask of relief: “Madame Brown,” I said, “I am not going back into a mental hospital. The place I was in, for a leprosarium, was pretty nice. But I think I’d have to be crazy to go into one again. And you can read that any way you want!”