“Every night.”
“And it is always without variation yet? Perhaps you will tell me the dream again.”
“Oh, God,” said Hackett. “It’s the same dream, all right? I get a phone call, I have to go to Cleveland, I drive there, I drive back. End of dream. What’s the point of going through it every time we have a session? Unless you just can’t remember the dream from one week to the next.”
“That is interesting,” Loebner said. “Why do you suppose I would forget your dream?”
Hackett groaned. You couldn’t beat the bastards. If you landed a telling shot, they simply asked you what you meant by it. It was probably the first thing they taught them in shrink school, and possibly the only thing.
“Of course I remember your dream,” Loebner went on smoothly. “But what is important is not my recollection of it but what it means to you, and if you recount it once more, in the fullest detail, perhaps you will find something new in it.”
What was to be found in it? It was the ultimate boring dream, and it had been boring months ago when he dreamed it the first time. Nightly repetition had done nothing to enliven it. Still, it might give him the illusion that he was getting something out of the session. If he just sprawled on the couch for what was left of his fifty minutes, he ran the risk of falling asleep.
Perchance to dream.
“It’s always the same dream,” he said, “and it always starts the same way. I’m in bed and the phone rings. I answer it. A voice tells me I have to go to Cleveland right away.”
“You recognize this voice?”
“I recognize it from other dreams. It’s always the same voice. But it’s not the voice of anyone I know, if that’s what you mean.”
“Interesting,” Loebner said.
To you perhaps, thought Hackett. “I get up,” he said. “I throw on some clothes. I don’t bother to shave, I’m in too much of a hurry. It’s very urgent that I go to Cleveland right away. I go down to the garage and unlock my car, and there’s a briefcase on the front passenger seat. I have to deliver it to somebody in Cleveland.
“I get in the car and start driving. I take I-71 all the way. That’s the best route, but even so it’s just about two hundred fifty miles door to door. I push it a little and there’s no traffic to speak of at that hour, but it’s still close to four hours to get there.”
“The voice on the phone has given you an address?”
“No, I just somehow know where I’m supposed to take the briefcase. Hell, I ought to know, I’ve been there every night for months. Maybe the first time I was given an address, it’s hard to remember, but by now I know the route and I know the destination. I park in the driveway, I ring the bell, the door opens, a woman accepts the briefcase and thanks me—”
“A woman takes the briefcase from you?” Loebner said.
“Yes.”
“What does this woman look like?”
“That’s sort of vague. She just reaches out and takes the briefcase and thanks me. I’m not positive it’s the same woman each time.”
“But it is always a woman?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you suppose that is?”
“I don’t know. Maybe her husband’s out, maybe he works nights.”
“She is married, this woman?”
“I don’t know,” said Hackett. “I don’t know anything about her. She opens the door, she takes the briefcase, she thanks me, and I get back in my car.”
“You never enter the house? She does not offer you a cup of coffee?”
“I’m in too much of a hurry,” Hackett said. “I have to get home. I get in the car, I backed out of the driveway, and I’m gone. It’s another two hundred fifty miles to get home, and I’m dog-tired. I’ve already been driving four hours, but I push it, and I get home and go to bed.”
“And then?”
“And then I barely get to sleep when the alarm rings and it’s time to get up. I never get a decent night’s sleep. I’m exhausted all the time, and my work’s falling off and I’m losing weight, and sometimes I’m just about hallucinating at my desk, and I can’t stand it, I just can’t stand it.”
“Yes,” Loebner said. “Well, I see our hour is up.”
“Now let us talk about this briefcase,” Loebner said at their next meeting. “Have you ever tried to open it?”
“It’s locked.”
“Ah. And you do not have the key?”
“It has one of those three-number combination locks.”
“And you do not know the combination?”
“Of course not. Anyway, I’m not supposed to open the briefcase. I’m just supposed to deliver it.”
“What do you suppose is in the briefcase?”
“I don’t know.”
“But what do you suppose might be in it?”
“Beats me.”
“State secrets, perhaps? Drugs? Cash?”
“For all I know it’s dirty laundry,” Hackett said. “I just have to deliver it to Cleveland.”
“You always follow the same route?” Loebner said at their next session.
“Naturally,” Hackett said. “There’s really only one way to get to Cleveland. You take I-71 all the way.”
“You are never tempted to vary the route?”
“I did once,” Hackett remembered.
“Oh?”
“I took I-75 to Dayton, I-70 east to Columbus, and then I picked up I-71 and rode it the rest of the way. I wanted to do something different, but it was the same boring ride on the same boring kind of road, and what did I accomplish? It’s thirty-five miles longer that way, so all I really did was add half an hour to the trip, and my head barely hit the pillow before it was time to get up for work.”
“I see.”
“So that was the end of that experiment,” Hackett said. “Believe me, it’s simpler if I just stick with I-71. I could drive that highway in my sleep.”
Loebner was dead.
The call, from the psychiatrist’s receptionist, shocked Hackett. For months he’d been seeing Loebner once a week, recounting his dream, waiting for some breakthrough that would relieve him of it. While he had just about given up anticipating that breakthrough, neither had he anticipated that Loebner would take himself abruptly out of the game.
He had to call back to ask how Loebner had died. “Oh, it was a heart attack,” the woman told him. “He just passed away in his sleep. He went to sleep and never woke up.”
Later, Hackett found himself entertaining a fantasy. Loebner, sleeping the big sleep, would take over the chore of dreaming Hackett’s dream. The little psychiatrist could rise every night to convey the dreaded briefcase to Cleveland while Hackett slept dreamlessly.
It was such a seductive notion that he went to bed expecting it to happen. No sooner had he dozed off, though, than he was in the dream again, with the phone ringing and the voice at the other end telling him what he had to do.
“I wasn’t going to continue with another psychiatrist,” Hackett explained, “because I don’t really think I was getting anywhere with Dr. Loebner. But I’m not getting anywhere on my own, either. Every night I dream this goddamned dream and it’s ruining my health. I’m here because I don’t know what else to do.”
“Figures,” said the new psychiatrist, whose name was Krull. “That’s the only reason anybody goes to a shrink.”
“I suppose you want to hear the dream.”
“Not particularly,” said Krull.
“You don’t?”
“In my experience,” Krull said, “there’s nothing duller than somebody else’s dream. But it’s probably a good place to get started, so let’s hear it.”