In a few moments, I am going to ask you to awaken feeling confident that whenever you wish to develop the hypnotic trance in the privacy of your own home, in the privacy of your bed, or out in the activity of the world, that you can do so easily, rapidly and confidently as I have taught you. Should you wish to enlarge your concentration you can do so by counting from one to three, as I have taught you. By counting to yourself, becoming fully awake, fully alert and more confident, feeling like the kind of person you really want to be. Now, when I say “now,” begin to count, one, two, three. Now.
Shindler waited until the door closed. He had moved as little as possible during the preceding hour, trying to avoid distracting Hollander’s subject, blending into the cool colors of the decor. Now he stretched, not saying anything until the doctor had completed his notes.
“This was fascinating for me,” Hollander said, looking up from a stenographer’s pad he kept on his desk. “Did you notice the headache and earache toward the end?”
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t want to talk about it, so the body creates pain that makes it impossible for her to think.”
“Then you think she knows something.”
“I am not positive. It was too soon to tell. But my instinct tells me that there is something there. When can you bring her in again?”
“Tomorrow.”
“No. Let’s make it next week. I want her to take some time to think.”
“Would it help if I drove her to the Fay home and the park?”
“It might.”
Shindler held out his hand.
“Thanks, Art. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the time you’re putting into this.”
Hollander laughed.
“I’m the one who should do the thanking. This is the most exciting experience I’ve had in all my years of practice. You can’t believe how pleasant and exhilarating a change this is from listening to the complaints of undersexed housewives.”
Shindler shook the doctor’s hand and closed the office door behind him. Esther Pegalosi was sitting in the waiting room. She looked up nervously as he approached.
5
The night lights of Portsmouth twinkled like grounded stars, then faded in brilliance as the red halo of the sunrise peeked above the horizon. Bobby Coolidge watched all this with dull, tired eyes from the couch in the darkened living room in Sarah Rhodes’s apartment. The red tip of a cigarette glowed at the end of loose fingers. His body slouched in the sofa and his legs rested on a glass-topped coffee table.
The process of turning night into day had taken some time, but Bobby’s conscious mind had missed most of it as it tried, with painstaking slowness, to piece together the remnants of a dream.
“Is anything wrong?” Sarah asked from the bedroom door.
“I couldn’t sleep. It’s nothing.”
Sarah watched his silhouette in the half light. They had been living together for the last month and she was still getting used to Bobby and his moods.
Bobby heard her bare feet pad across the hardwood floor and felt the cushions give way beside him.
“Is something bothering you, Bobby?” she asked softly. “This is the third night in a row that you haven’t slept.”
He turned to look at her. The weather was mild and she was sleeping in bikini panties and one of his tee shirts. The way she was leaning made the cotton fabric outline her nipples.
“It’s just the pressure of exams, that’s all,” he said, telling a half truth. He hoped she would accept his explanation and stop there, because he knew that he could not explain to her that the dreams had started again, creeping insidiously into his unconscious mind at night, when he had no defenses.
He thought that he had left them in Vietnam, but the pressure of finals had begun to build. Everything, his new life, his relationship with this girl, seemed to center on his staying in school. If he did not pass…If he failed…It was something he thought about all the time.
“Are you sure there’s nothing else?” she asked. He appreciated the sincerity of her concern. He had never had anyone care about him before. He felt her fingers run lightly through his hair and he leaned back and closed his eyes.
“It’s the tests. I think about them all the time. It’s just getting me down.”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Bobby. I know you. You’ll do fine.”
She stroked his hair and he shifted his head to her shoulder. He was tired. It was the same cycle again. Not enough sleep at night and too tired to work during the day. And behind it all were the dreams.
He felt Sarah’s lips brush his cheek and he opened his eyes. She was staring at him. He brushed her hair aside and stroked her cheek. They held each other.
The sun was up now, bathing the sleepy valley in morning light. He watched the mist floating across the rooftops like steam in a bowl. She felt so soft and yielding.
“I know how to help you sleep,” she said, her voice a husky whisper.
He smiled. She did, too. She got slowly to her feet and stripped away her clothing. He followed her slim, naked figure into the bedroom.
But the lovemaking did not help. Even while he was inside her, even when he came, he could not experience the full pleasure of the act. One part of him was watching, unbelieving. What was Bobby Coolidge doing in bed with this make-believe girl? What was he doing in college? He didn’t belong here. He could not believe that it was real and that it would not end.
Sarah could see that her efforts to relax him had failed. She could feel the tension in his body and she could see the sadness when he was through. Bobby was a strange boy. Not at all like the boys she had dated in high school. That was part of his attraction. His age, the maturity of his friends. Most of them were veterans or at least older than the boys most of the other freshman girls were dating. It made her feel older and more sophisticated to think that a boy who had been to war-a boy who had killed-found her attractive.
She rubbed her hand across his chest and kissed his cheek. How complicated he was. That was another facet of the attraction. The boys she had dated before were simple. Carbon copies. The idle rich. Sports cars. The same past, present and future. But Bobby could not be read. Not entirely. He had dark corners, secrets. Like the war, which he would not discuss, or his past, to which he alluded in only the vaguest of terms. He seemed so vulnerable at times like tonight. A combination of strength and weakness that she found fascinating.
“Bobby, there is something wrong and I want you to tell me.”
Bobby said nothing, staring into the silence and breathing deeply, like a laborer carrying a heavy load.
“Bobby?” she repeated.
“I get scared that I’ll fail and all this…You mean so much to me. I think about what I’ll do if I don’t make it and about my brother.”
“Poor baby,” she said, stroking his cheek and shifting her weight across his right side. Her smooth skin felt good beneath his hand. “Underneath that tough exterior you’re a rabbit. But I know you, rabbit, and I know that you are strong and smart and good. And I know that you will make a success of whatever you do.”
He smiled sadly and held her tight.
“You’re steel, Sarah. You are the best part of the good things that have been happening to me. But you don’t really know me. You know this Bobby Coolidge, but you don’t know who I was before the war.”
“People don’t change that much, Bobby. Deep down you are always the same person.”
“No, Sarah. I did things before that I could never do now. Bad things.”
“Oh, Bobby, you like to dramatize so. I know you couldn’t do ‘bad things.’ Not really bad.”
“But I did. There’s blood on my hands, Sarah, and I can’t shut it out of my dreams. Whenever the pressure builds up in me, like now, the dreams start again and I see what I’ve done.”