Secret Dreams (32 page)

Then a twinge of disappointment. Not the director himself writing. Jung — who was that? He skipped frantically to the end of the letter. Junior physician. Another twinge.
Junior
…

But after a moment he squared his shoulders and strode up to the consultation room. Hah! Congratulations, Fritzi! It had happened at last. Junior, senior, director —- who cared? He had slapped them in the face and they had woken up. It had become embarrassingly self-evident: the Institutional Method was a failure. They were desperate for help. Praying on their knees.

He laughed as he strode through the empty waiting room. The lonely umbrella stand, a clean ashtray, a couple of vacant chairs … He chuckled again as he threw the torn gray envelope onto the end table in the consultation room. A cramp seized his chest. The pressure sharpened for a moment, making him wince. He felt weak and shaky and groped for his chair. Don't die now. Before you even get a chance to write young Herr Whosis! Be a man, already.

Be a menschl

Is this what it meant to be a mensch? Waiting half a lifetime for bank-rapt methods to die so that bright young junior doctors would someday seek him out? While strange pains preyed upon your aging body?

He let the womb of his consultation room embrace him and massaged the red crab that sat upon his heart. Too many pictures on the walls, too many books crammed on the shelves. Over the couch hung a French artist's rendition of the colossal Egyptian god-kings guarding the temple of Abu-Simbel. The carved stone kings watched him mutely. This stricken man and those who came to lie upon his embroidered couch, their last human worshipers.

He gripped the armrests of his chair: carved sea serpents with scaly spines, bulbous eyes, and lolling tongues. Years of stroking, gripping, and mysterious chest pains had worn away some of the wood. “Help,” he whispered. “Help me….” He reached for Pan from his watchful tribe of gargoyles. The lecherous fellow grinned at him. More staggish than goatish. With sharp deer hooves and the stubs of antlers poking from behind his ears. The Romans actually had a staggish Pan, he now recalled. They called him Faunus. How easy to see him leaping off along the trampled deer runs to gambol with the herds. Foraging their berries, browsing their moss and leaves. Standing in the cold rain at night, drinking from the same streams, bedding down in the same matted grass …

And then, at the rutting time, bellowing with the long-antlered bucks, fighting them off and even taking a harem of hinds for himself. This little Faunus gave him the feeling that he would have found a doe's rear end just as attractive as a farm girls creamy behind. Taking one or the other, as chance allowed. Herr Professor had paid a hundred and fifty guilders for him in an overpriced shop. Ach! The crab of pain scuttled sideways in his chest. The indulgence! A week's fees!

But what a proud little bastard. Herr Professor could almost hear him whispering naughty suggestions: forget about your morning patients, say you're indisposed … just sit back and read young Who-sis's case. Tell Donna the maid to send everyone away What's wrong with you? Afraid someone will find out? Close the office for a day. Just for today. Go ahead….

He did nothing. He shifted in his chair, stroking the armrest. The crab scuttled quietly behind his lungs and mysteriously faded. A long morning's work lay before him like a dreary road. If only one of his patients would send word, cancel because of a head cold or a bout of rheumatism.

Wishful thinking.

No, only Herr Schuyt, his next patient, held claim to his attention. Not this scrap of paper from a stranger. And Herr Schuyt wouldn't vanish just to suit his mood. He heard Donna's footsteps in the hall. She poked her head in at the door. “Herr Schuyt is here, Herr Professor.” A reluctant shudder went through him. The Hat Fetish. The Drone. Pan appraised him coolly, with the hint of a sneer. Go on, cancel the hat man
—
or are you afraid your precious envelope will lead to nothing? Herr Professor frowned at the statue.

From her place at the door, Donna the maid politely cleared her throat. His eyes glided to the table by his elbow. He found himself staring longingly at the gray envelope.

“Herr Professor … ?” Donna tried again.

He hefted Pan into his lap and let him grin. “You win.” Then to Donna the maid: “Tell Herr Schuyt we must cancel. Beg a thousand pardons. As you can see, I'm not feeling myself today.”

In an hour or two of delicious stolen time he read it through and through. Even going back in some places to read it again. How had Herr Junior Physician addressed him? Erwürdigster Herr Professor Doktor Freud? Or Sehr geerter — straight and to the point?

Erwürdigster.
Mostvtmmhk
Professor. A supplicant. Even under all the dignified language you could feel the imploring, down-on-bended-knee supplication. Oh yes, they politely called it “consultation” — by all means try to call it something nice.

Not since he ended the friendship with Fliess had anyone implored him. With good old Wilhelm they had inaugurated the exclusive Vienna-Berlin Society of Mutual Masturbation. Membership requirement: total obscurity. Honorary founders: the rhinologist Fliess of Berlin and Herr Doktor Sex Quack of Vienna.

He had been waiting for his imperial appointment to professorship back then. And he might have gone on waiting forever if he hadn't luckily cured a woman with connections to the ministry. After interminable years and mysterious delays, she pressed his case down avenues of her own: the appointment came through in a month. Now hearing the title Professor always gave him a tinge of pleasure followed by a lick of hate.

God, how he and Fliess had stroked each other up and down, like a couple of lonely cats wrapping themselves around any available table leg for comfort. What a bleak, desolate time: when the Nose Doktor of Berlin had been the very first to hear every cracked theory, every half-baked notion. And Fliess responding with even wilder fantasies of his own. Theories about an immutable twenty-eight-day rhythm cycle in every condition or affliction — whether you were male or female or a dog or a duck. Ideas about how the human body's whole nervous structure was somehow guided through the nose — oh, God! While Herr Doktor Sex Quack — so insecure — tested every bit of gibberish. Forcing him to read all the available literature on cycles: immutable, pathological, seasonal —
and
nasal. Months during which his own work floated aimlessly in a sea of doubt. It embarrassed him now just to think of it.

Then once in a blue moon one of his holier-than-thou esteemed colleagues deigned to send him some scrap of human flesh for a second opinion. Invariably he found nothing to work on,- and so inevitably returned the human scrap to its point of origin with many thanks. Herr Professor had long ago given up on second opinions. And now this, the elegant Burghölzli envelope. A ray of hope, that maybe this time it would all be different…

For the gray envelope meant only one thing.

That Herr Doktor Whosis had consulted every jackass in his own hospital, sought out every second opinion, third, and fourth —- and still came away empty-handed. So he might as well give the Vienna Sex Quack Method a try. Well, well, well! Young man Jung. I like you already!

He scanned the pages for that nutty thing the girl had croaked. Ah, yes! “Queen of Sparta with a hot rear end.” Hah! And then what had she purred after they murdered the pillow? “Come to the Queen … She wants you….You can have her now. Come and take her.” First you kill a pillow, and then she begs you to take her on the floor. What's stopping you, Herr Whosis? Propriety? Let me tell you the story of the foxes.

The she-fox fleeing. And the he=fox chasing her. The scent of her body dragging him madly onward. He saw them dashing through a birch wood, in and out of snowy hillocks and white trunks, flashes of red fur across the snow. Their breath shooting steam, but still they kept on, panting, gasping, never resting — and still they ran. Their pawprints fleeing back behind them, over hill and dale across the cold white ground.

Why did he chase her? And why did she run?

The red-tailed he-fox had to be the perfect beast. To snarl off all the other males who wanted her. Then chase her down himself, right to ground. And then — and only then — have enough guts left over to take her in the snow.

But why did she run? So only the best one got her. Her match in strength, in drive, in will. And cunning. For even in the end she might squirm out from under him, biting and scratching, denying IT to the last.

“Find a little mouse for me,” she'd taunt, “and then I might consider.” So, tired, hungry, still aroused, he'd trot off looking for a mouse. Spend two days starving to catch one peeping out of the snow. Denying himself the pleasure of gobbling it there and then. Keeping it clamped between his teeth, still alive. Trotting back over the miles to where she waited for him — to set it at her feet.

For you. I caught it for you.

And for the little foxes to come.

While she, going hungry, and waiting in the birch saplings while her mate hunted for a mouse, wondering whether he would ever return to do the thing he was born to do. The deep animal satisfaction of being caught at last. And in the end, when he had brought the mouse and she had eaten a dainty bite of it, she would smile a gleaming, foxy smile at him. Turning her hindquarters for him at last, lifting her soft red tail, inviting him into the cloud of her hot scent once more. And him, to smile a foxy smile back. Frisk his tail. And take her in the snow.

That
was sex!

Call it what you wanted: it didn't change a thing. Say, Oh, we're human, we're different, we're above all that — you were wrong. The cunning primitive mind lurked in the overheated genitals. The he-fox chasing her up steep hills while he took shortcuts, forcing her to wade across the stream while he stepped over the stones, driving her through the brush while he dodged the roughs, cunningly saving his strength for the end. The mad drive to defeat her. The lust to mate. To seize her. The rage to kill anyone who stood in his way, between him and the scent coming from the crack between her legs — and the glorious moment when he plunged in his hot thing, her yelp of protest vanishing into the trees!

Herr Professor broke off his reverie.

The various truths concerning men, women, and foxes were not the issue here, but Herr Doktor Whosis and his Fräulein. Come to the Queen. Come and take her. You can have her now. How direct and to the point. How like a crazy person to say something frank and candid when you least expected. So unlike all the “normal” people he knew in everyday life, who always talked in euphemisms, in secret code. In his dream book, in the passage dealing with Flowery Language, he had analyzed a dream filled with hidden sexual ideas, in which one of his patients was climbing down from a great height carrying a BIG BRANCH in her hand, thickly studded with RED FLOWERS that looked like OPEN CAMELLIAS….To someone familiar with his method of interpreting dreams and their concealed thoughts, the sexual imagery was obvious. The camellia was a showy, hot-colored, open-petaled flower. Though perhaps a lily or a gladiola might have represented this woman's vagina better by virtue of having a deeper crevice, but then there would not have been even the shred of a disguise. And a good disguise on a thought let you bring it out into the open. With this girl's odd fantasy, however, there seemed little or none. No, that couldn't be right. There's
always
a disguise. Some secret hidden behind the clever tale. Fräulein S told this particular story in order to hide an even stranger one….

Years ago, when his publisher sent the five-hundred=odd copies of the dream book to the secondhand stalls, Herr Professor looked over the shoulder of his life and realized he had lived simply to discover the Method. Like a castaway coming upon a lost island in the ocean. And by combing the washed pebbles along a deserted beach, he had found the long-sought-for philosopher's stone, hidden among the worthless wrack and crushed shells. Holding up the long-sought-for rock, what had he seen? Hidden passions? Secret dreams? The glowing caverns of the heart?

Only chaos, lust, and terror. His own inadequacy staring him in the face at every turn. How many times a day did he say one thing when he really meant the opposite? How many times had he smiled when he really wanted to cry? And laughed when he wanted to murder? All in the name of getting along, making do, getting by.

Was forgetting someone's name really so innocent? Arriving late or early really so accidental? Wasn't there meaning in every little act? A convenient correctness in our errors, as when you missed a streetcar but suddenly recalled the burning gaslight in your empty office? A hidden achievement in your faults — avoiding a stop at the delicatessen but finding yourself at the jeweler's on your wedding anniversary.

How to explain to Herr Junior Physician of the Burghölzli that in the beginning, the very beginning, he spent his days dissecting layers of dead brain tissue in a bleak, cold laboratory, staring at the lifeless cells through a greasy microscope, inhaling the funeral-parlor smells of alcohol and formaldehyde. Before a Method existed at all.

And then the awkward, clumsy years of those first sessions, when early patients stumbled over some minutia or couldn't recall a simple fact from the day before. Driving him half insane with eagerness to know, to discover what or why or how — leaping from his chair to place his hands on their head and press their temples. Yes, actually
squeeze
their skull, pleading, imploring them to:

“Think! Think! You can remember. Just try. Try!”

Years it took to abandon the dissection of dead brain tissue, cold baths, hypnotizing, shouting, and squeezing heads in his hands. Years to discover the simple innocuous question:

“What does that remind you of?”

And then let the talk ramble out until all the evasions and lies, all the wishes and fears, had been exposed. Revealing a person's hidden rooms, seeing all the gross injustices of childhood papered over with pleasant recollections. Smiling strangers. Gruesome parents. A promised gift. A failed grade in school, a second helping of dessert, a good-night kiss, just one more chance …