“Then the dream could have—”
“And the memory,” Leider continued, “which is in itself a sort of dream, since you tell me it never really happened, substantiates the dream material by utilizing different sexual symbolism to restate essentially the same thing. Freud used as symbols of sexual intercourse such rhythmical activities as dancing, riding and climbing. In the false memory, the gang leader is first depicted as dancing with his girl friend, isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And you said the girl is carried later to a weed-covered lot...”
“Yes...”
“Well, in dreams of both sexes, pubic hair is represented as woods or bushes, so I guess by extension we can include weeds. In the dream, as I recall, the weeds have become a green carpet. The father figure bleeds to death on a green carpet, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Again we can refer back to the broken Christmas tree ornaments. A vase, or a flowerpot, or any such vessel — which a round Christmas tree ornament somewhat resembles — is a symbol for the female genitals, and the breaking might symbolize virginity and the bleeding normally associated with first intercourse. Was the girl a virgin, would you know?”
“I don’t know. I would doubt it,” Carella said.
“Mm,” Leider said, and took off his glasses and wiped at the lenses. His eyes were a pale blue behind them; he looked suddenly weary, and much, much older. He put the glasses on again. His magnified eyes leaped into the room. “And of course we’ve got the violence — violent experiences in dreams can usually be interpreted as representations of sexual intercourse.”
“But I thought dreams were designed to mask something,” Carella said. “To disguise it.”
“To hide it from the censor of the conscious mind, yes,” Leider said. “If your outlook is strictly Freudian, you’re bound to believe, quote, that what instigates dreams are actively evil and extravagantly sexual wishes, which have made the censorship and distortion of dreams necessary, unquote.”
“Mm,” Carella said.
“Mm,” Leider said. “But of course, that’s very early Freud, and we’ve come a long way in the interpretation of dreams since then. In this case, where the patient was having recurring nightmares, I would guess he was trying to master the original trauma... to desensitize it, if you will, by exploring it again and again. That’s what the dream-work would seem to indicate to me.”
“What trauma?” Carella asked.
“I don’t know what trauma,” Leider said. “You know his history, you tell me.”
“He was blinded in the war,” Carella said. “I guess that could...”
“That would most certainly be traumatic,” Leider said.
“But... no,” Carella said, “because... Now, wait a minute. When Jimmy was telling Lemarre about the rape, he said God had punished him instead of the other boys. He told Lemarre the rape had everything to do with his getting blinded.”
“But there was no rape,” Leider said. “There was the trauma instead.”
“Right, and the trauma couldn't have been him getting blinded, because he later blamed the blindness on whatever it was happened.”
“So what was it that happened?” Leider asked.
“I don’t know,” Carella said.
“When was he wounded?”
“December the fourteenth.”
“Had he been in any action before then?”
“Yes, they’d been fighting since the beginning of the month...”
You'd been fighting with another gang all that month—
Heavy fighting, man.
And now you were resting.
Yeah, and Lloyd told us to go on up.
“What is it?” Leider asked.
“Is it possible that...?”
“Is what possible?”
“I don’t know,” Carella said. “Let me... let me just put this together, okay?”
“Take your time.”
His mouth was suddenly dry. He wet his lips with his tongue, and nodded, and tried to remember everything he’d read in Lemarre’s report up there at the hospital while he himself was repressing all sorts of sexual desire for Janet, tried to remember the report in detail, and tried to remember everything Danny Cortez had told him on the phone yesterday.
We'd all been through heavy fighting that whole month. Alpha was down where the lieutenant had set up a command post near some bamboo at the bottom of the hill... Bravo was going up the hill where the enemy was dug in. The lieutenant went back down to see where the hell Alpha was... That's when the mortar attack started. Bastards had zeroed in on the bamboo and were pounding the shit out of it.
That was Danny Cortez talking about the third day of December, ten years ago, when Lieutenant Roger Blake was killed by a mortar fragment.
It was a terrible thing. Alpha took cover when the attack started, and then they couldn't get to the lieutenant in time... In the war over there, you had to pick up your own dead and wounded because if you didn't they dragged them off and hacked them to pieces. The enemy, you understand me?... Alpha told us later they couldn't go after him because of the mortars. All they could do was watch while he was dragged in the jungle. They found him later in an open pit — cut to ribbons. The bastards used to cut the bodies up and leave them in open pits... With bayonets, they did it.
That was still Danny Cortez, elaborating on the theme of jungle warfare. This now was Jimmy Harris talking about a rape that had never taken place.
Lloyd told us to go on up... Upstairs... The boys told Lloyd to shove it up his ass. Then they all grabbed him, you know, pulled him away from Roxanne where they were standin there in the middle of the floor. Record still goin, drums loud as anything. Guy banging the drums there.
(All we heard was the noise, Cortez said. You ever been in a mortar attack? It makes a lot of noise, even from a distance.)
There's this post in the middle of the room, you know? Like, you know, a steel post holdin up the ceiling beams. They push him up against the post. I got no idea what they fixin to do with him, he the president, they askin for trouble there. I tell them Hey, cool it, this man here's the president. But they... they... they don't listen to me, man. They just... they keep holdin him up against the tree, and Roxannes cryin now, she's crying, man... The post, I mean. Roxanne's cryin. They grab her. She fightin them now, she don't want this to happen, but they do it anyway, they stick it in her, one after the other, all of them... They carried her outside afterward, they picked her up and took her out... Cause she bleeding. Cause they hurt her when they were doin it.
(All they could do was watch while he was dragged in the jungle, Cortez said. They found him later in an open pit — cut to ribbons. The bastards used to cut the bodies up and leave them in open pits. With bayonets, they did it.)
“What is it, Mr. Carella?” Leider asked again. “Have you hit upon something?”
The dog was in a small office on the ground floor of the police garage, where a uniformed cop had promised to watch him while Carella was upstairs. The cop wanted to know what was wrong with the dog; he’d tried feeding him and the dog wouldn’t take nothing. Carella said he was a seeing-eye dog. The cop looked at the dog and said, “So what does that explain?”
“He’s trained to accept food only from his master.”
“So where’s his master?” the cop asked.
“Dead,” Carella said.
“Then the dog’s gonna starve,” the cop said philosophically, and picked up the magazine he’d been reading, dismissing with that single gesture the vast and complicated world of canine problems.