Secret Dreams (40 page)

She hissed him to silence. More word babies came up her throat, one after another. But they were all the Nekken's sort of words, deformed and useless.

“Degenerate,” she snarled.

“Brain damage” came right after.

She knelt by the trunk, touching its sides, then wrapped her thin arms around it. It was hers. She possessed it.

“No Gurgler,” she spat down the hallway.

Yes, drag it into her room,- the trunk belonged there. She gripped the latch and pulled. Nothing happened. Not even the littlest budge … She strained, squinting at the dirty white electric bulb suspended from the ceiling. For a second it seemed as if the Nekken's yellow face sneered down at her. She turned her eyes away and pulled harder. The trunk gave an inch. The muscles in her shoulders screamed…. She gripped the huge trunk and stared defiantly into the electric globe suspended from the ceiling. No Nekken. No taunting, sallow face. Just a dingy glass globe hanging from a metal rod. Out of the corner of her eyes she saw the Zeik orderly coming toward her. The air streamed from between her teeth:

“I'm not a bee anymore!” she spat. “Not an egg!”

The Zeik orderly froze. She readied herself for one more try, one more pull. Her bare feet slipped again and again on the cold marble floor. The strings in her fingers sobbed.

One more tug. One more pull. The trunk had wedged into the doorway, she cut her toe on the jamb, yanking the thing free. She threw her feet against the wall and coiled like a spring. One more pull.

The trunk slid with a slow groan that sounded like
damn them!
into the center of the room. Almost filling the whole space. She closed the door and sat on her bed.

She began to weep.

She wept because the trunk brought all the way from home had finally come into her private room, with fresh clothes inside. She wept because now she knew about being crazy. Away from home.
Alone
… And as she wept she thought in normal sentences, the way people were supposed to think. Wondering, Where am I? Then answering, In Zurich, Switzerland. In the Burghölzli Hospital for the Mentally Insane. Such a clear, nice, concise thought. If only she could leave all her regular thinking right there and not push on any further. But then she thought, I was supposed to go to medical school. Medical school? She had never wanted that. She must have been misunderstood, Or gotten herself mixed up with someone else.

Because I'm
crazy
, she thought. Yes, I'm crazy, and my doctor's name is Jung.

She found the book called
Newrongedly
on her bed. No,
Neurology
. She clutched it like a prayer book, like a family Bible, like scrolls of the Torah. She would take it to his office, right now, this very second. To show him what she knew. The great difference between
Neurology
and the other. God! she prayed. Don't let me forget those simple things. Those simple little things. That I'm crazy. That I'm far away from home. That I
wasn't always
crazy. And that my doctor's name is Jung.

“Yes, sir, that's just what I saw, Herr Doktor, sir.” Orderly Zeik wrung his hands and shifted from foot to foot. "I'll wager that Nekken must have been spying on her pretty regular, sir. Maybe creeping past my chair while I was dozing. But then, sir, you should have seen her drag that trunk inside. Scarred the floor, it did. Grooves cut right into the marble.”

“Krantz in Accounting will have something to say about that. Probably tack the cost of repair onto her bill,” Herr Doktor remarked dryly.

“But she's rich enough, I've heard.” The orderly winked.

“You have been misinformed,” Herr Doktor replied gravely. The payments from the parents had all but ceased. He had adjusted to the prospect of securing the girl's credit indefinitely. “And it seems Nekken wasn't the only poltergeist to pass you on the nod.”

Zeik hung his head. “It's been a busy night, sir, I'll admit. First that old jackal lurking about. She drags in the trunk. Bang! down to your office. Zip! back to her room. Then you show up. Is that her book?”

The neurology text. He had found the passages on dementia she had read to death. The words “dementia” and “incurable” had been rubbed off the paper,- no longer readable. Where they once appeared, now tiny holes showed, revealing the next page.

By pure chance, two new words peeked through. Where “dementia” used to be, now the syllable
proto
, as in “protozoan,” appeared. And in place of the word “incurable,” part of the word “cryptogenic” showed — with only the
genie
visible. The girl had rubbed out the words that condemned her forever, “incurable dementia,” and in their place created another message altogether;
protogenic
.

Proto as in prototype. Genie as in Genesis.

Proto … genie.

The First Birth.

In her anger Fräulein had obliterated the words of her incurable madness and discovered, beneath them, a first birth. A new chance, Hope. Protogenesis commuting the life sentence of insanity. And so, sitting in his office in the middle of the night, he finally understood….

She was right. He didn't know anything. Dumb as the big trunk sitting outside her door. For by pulling in the trunk she had finally taken charge of the well-made clothes of her former self —old friends long forgotten, whom she wished to see once more after strange travels in a dark country far away.

During the first chill weeks of March, Fräulein opened the steamer trunk and handled some of the things that had once been hers. Freeing the latches with clumsy, awkward fingers, glancing suspiciously over her shoulder, then going back to the trunk again. Yet it seemed repellent. Her face paled as though she were about to retch. Clutching the trunk, letting her fingers explore inside, hesitantly, as if trying to decide by touch alone … a blouse, a skirt … ?

Suddenly to grab a fistful. And sink her face into a knot of folded underthings. A ragged sigh.

Oh, to touch the silks of long ago …

Over the course of that week she eventually found a pale-blue cotton blouse with a high collar and frilly lace around the cuffs. She misbuttoned most of the buttons but got the garment on all the same, tearing a bit of lace that hung from her left wrist. The lace fascinated her, she gently traced its complicated weave. She wrapped her bottom half in dirty sheets from the bed. Misbuttoned blouse and sheets around her legs. Ridiculous — and yet…

Regal

In the days that followed, a regression occurred. One moment she might be talking to him, really talking, and the next all her lucidness cracked like a glass ball. Enraged. Barbaric. Shouting another scrap of nonsense like “the Queen of Sparta.”

Only this time it was …

“I can't stand it when the horse laughs!”

She twiddled when she said it, sawing her thigh,- sometimes sawing the trunk, then back to her thigh. Once, she accidentally exposed her leg nearly to the hip. Her flank glowed whitely, coarse from being long abed. And red weals had risen from the twiddling, for she always twiddled when she touched some piece of clothing loaded with hidden powers…. Her voice rasping, “Can't stand the laughing horse! Can't stand it! Can't —-”

Were the things from her trunk a catalyst? A blue blouse with fine lace. A cashmere sweater, A set of mother-of-pearl combs for her hair. A silver hand mirror and matching hairbrush, with long, thick handles. All too loaded with memories, too precious, too painful to bear?

A line from the Vienna letter came to him. He had not glanced at the thing for a long time. Odd, considering how impatiently he had waited for it and how hard it had been to write Vienna in the first place …

They sat together in her room once more. She had chosen to wear the pale-blue blouse again. Now buttoned more properly.

“What did you see before you came here?” “Nothing. Blackness. I lived in the trunk.”

One finger twitched on her thigh, threatening to break into a fullblown twiddle. “Coming here,” she said vaguely, “sometimes I was taken out of the trunk. We were on a journey. By carriage.”

Then, more firmly, “We were going to the Rostov station. We had tickets. First-class tickets for the Zurich train —” She halted as if unsure. Beyond the window, the trees shook fitfully.

“A horse and carriage …”

She struggled on. “Riding on a long street in the wholesale meat district. Red-brick buildings with butchers' signs. One sign read:
Fleischerei Hans Schändung.”

Herr Doktor winced at the use of the words in the wholesaler's name. Schändung — meaning dishonor, rape, violation. Hans the Rapist Butcher, Hans the Filthy Fleshman. Amazing how Schand also formed the first syllable of Fräuleins family name. How cleverly she brought it into her tale. Schanderein, a name that combined disgrace with the common word “pure.” Disgraceful Purity, Pure Shame.

Fräulein worked her mouth. “My f-f-f… Mym-m-m … Yes, they were in the carriage too. We rode in the open.” She touched her forehead, troubled by some detail. “They're sitting across from me.” She ground her jaws. “My f-f-flatter in his blue suit and my m-m-matter in her traveling cloak. But no faces. Like shopping-store mannikins … human heads but” — she searched for the words — “with no expression.”

Oh, what wonderful words she used! Mannikins. Shopping store. Human heads. Describing things, how they looked, how they felt. Who cared if it wasn't perfect.

“I can see so clearly. From above, like an angel over the carriage. Glad to be coming. Coming here to … to …” She seemed to lose her way, then abruptly jumped ahead. “Thats when the horse lifted its tail. His whole rear quarters jammed between Flatter and Matter's blank shopping-store faces. Its whole insides coming out right between their blank empty heads. Without even breaking stride, expelling … pumping … a huge round … and I saw the ring, the inner lining of the animal's —”

Ja, ja, ja. Herr Doktor knew what it looked like. He once saw an elephant go in the midst of a circus performance. The audience gasped. Then roared bravo as clowns with brooms bumbled in to clean up.

“Right between their blank empty heads!” Fräulein said loudly through her teeth. Then, with disgust, “They were laughing! Laughing as the horse shit between their faces!”

Her parents' blank dummy heads — just open mouths and painted lips, jeering laughter from empty noggins. He exulted; who cared how revolting her story was. That she
told
him. After all these months, letting it out for him to see. Telling him because she wanted to! He was winning!

A hard object struck him on the cheek, clattering to the floor. The girl had flung a mother-of-pearl hair comb at him, and now she flung another, screaming, “They were laughing! Laughing! And shit between their faces!”

His absurd exultation vanished. The second comb hit him square on the forehead, and he saw a bright flash. “Get down,” she raged at him. “On your knees. Down for the Queen!”

She flung a book, which found its mark, and then another, and a black marble paperweight in the shape of an egg, which glanced off his forearm and thudded against the wall, cracking the plaster. He covered his ringing head, warding off the blows as they came. He had forgotten how strong insane people could be. Beaten down as the air in the room went gray. He faintly heard her shouting, “On your knees! Your knees!”

“I am!” he wailed.

“Lower,” she ordered.

“I am.” Pleading now.

“Lower!”

“Please,” he begged. He feared she'd throw something heavy or sharp. He had a brief vision of a broken skull. The brains leaking out. What idiocy to have been so hopeful. He waited for the final blow to come. He had almost given up caring if he died.

“That's better,” she said at last. “Get up.”

Warily he peered at her. She sat on the bed, cold and cruel, a thin smile across her startling red lips. She had bitten them in her tantrum, and they stood out, moist and swollen. She held the silver hairbrush limply in her hand. Presenting the long handle for him.

“Come here,” she said darkly. “Come sit by me. Come brush my hair.” Clumsily he sat beside her, taking the long-handled brush. Her hair had grown out, thicker — a few knotted tufts but beginning to flow down her neck. He started to brush her hair from the top, getting caught in the tangles and pulling sharply.

“Ow! Not like that,” she scolded. “From the bottom, and separate as you go. You'll just make a mess if you try to mash the tangles.”

He tried it the way she told him. She had talked to him again, yes, just like a person. But he felt flat inside. Slowly one or two of the knots loosened. She posed demurely like a schoolgirl, swinging her legs.

“That's enough now,” she said. “You can't untangle them all at once.” For a second he thought she said, You can't untangle
my bead
all at once, but he knew he'd got it wrong. She took the pretty brush from him, gently slapping her palm with the broad silver back. Being on the bed made him feel so tired and sleepy. He almost lay back against the wall Would she let him close his eyes for a moment? He wished he had never heard of the carriage and the horse. He leaned back against the wall, and they sat side by side in silence for a while. She let him close his eyes.

“Is there more?” he asked her.

Her hand twiddled, sawing mechanically across her thigh. She chirped gaily:

“Of course there's more. Presently we arrived at the railway station. All aboard the Zurich Express! Where is our private compartment? We booked a private compartment. No, not second class. Too many second-class people in there already. Commonest riffraff of the lowest sort.”