Lathe of Heaven, The (13 page)

Oh for Christsake she was as big as he was almost, and in lots better shape. Coward coward. "Are you high?"

"No, I ..."

"You what? What's wrong with you?"

"I can't sleep,"

The tiny cabin smelt wonderfully of woodsmoke and fresh wood. Its furniture was the Franklin stove with a two-plate cooker top, a box full of alder branches, a cabinet, a table, a chair, an army cot. "Sit down," Heather said. "You look terrible. Do you need a drink, or a doctor? I have some brandy in the car. You'd better come with me and we'll find a doctor in Lincoln City."

"I'm all right. It's just mumble mumble get sleepy."

"You said you couldn't sleep."

He looked at her with red, bleary eyes. "Can't let myself. Afraid to."

"Oh Christ. How long has this been going on?"

"Mumble mumble Sunday."

"You haven't slept since Sunday?"

"Saturday?" he said enquiringly.

"Did you take anything? Pep pills?"

He shook his head. "I did fall asleep, some," he said quite clearly, and then seemed for a moment to fall asleep, as if he were ninety. But even as she watched, incredulous, he woke up again and said with lucidity, "Did you come here after me?"

"Who else? To cut Christmas trees, for Christsake? You stood me up for lunch yesterday."

"Oh." He stared, evidently trying to see her. "I'm sorry," he said, "I haven't been in my right mind."

Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible.

"It's all right. I don't care! But you're skipping therapy--aren't you?"

He nodded. "Would you like some coffee?" he asked. It was more than dignity.

Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved.

The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.

Briefly she saw him thus, and what struck her most, of that insight, was his strength. He was the strongest person she had ever known, because he could not be moved away from the center. And that was why she liked him. She was drawn to strength, came to it as a moth to light. She had had a good deal of love as a kid but no strength around her, nobody to lean on ever: people had leaned on her. Thirty years she had longed to meet somebody who didn't lean on her, who wouldn't ever, who couldn't....

Here, short, bloodshot, psychotic, and in hiding, here he was, her tower of strength.

Life is the most incredible mess, Heather thought. You never can guess what's next. She took off her coat, while Orr got a cup from the cabinet shelf and canned milk from the cupboard. He brought her a cup of powerful coffee: 97 per cent caffeine, 3 per cent free.

"None for you?"

"I've drunk too much. Gives me heartburn."

Her own heart went out to him entirely.

"What about brandy?"

He looked wistful.

"It won't put you to sleep. Jazz you up a bit. I'll go get it."

He flashlighted her back to the car. The creek shouted, the trees hung silent, the moon glowered overhead, the Aliens' moon.

Back in the cabin Orr poured out a modest shot of the brandy and tasted it He shuddered.

"That's good," he said, and drank it off.

She watched him with approval. "I always carry a pint flask," she said. "I stuck it in the glove compartment because if the fuzz stops me and I have to show my license it looks kind of funny in my handbag. But I mostly have it right on me. Funny how it comes in handy a couple of times every year."

"That's why you carry such a big handbag," Orr said, brandy-voiced.

"Damn right! I guess I'll put some in my coffee. It might weaken it." She refilled his glass at the same time. "How have you managed to stay awake for sixty or seventy hours?"

"I haven't entirely. I just didn't lie down. You can get some sleep sitting up "but you can't really dream. You have to be lying down to get into dreaming sleep, so your big muscles can relax. Read that in books. It works pretty well. I haven't had a real dream yet. But not being able to relax wakes you up again. And then lately I get some sort of like hallucinations. Things wiggling on the wall."

"You can't keep that up!"

"No. I know. I just had to get away. From Haber." A pause. He seemed to have gone into another streak of grogginess. He gave a rather foolish laugh. "The only solution I really can see," he said, "is to kill myself. But I don't want to. It just doesn't seem right."

"Of course it isn't right!"

"But I have to stop it somehow. I have to be stopped."

She could not follow him, and did not want to. "This is a nice place," she said. "I haven't smelled woodsmoke for twenty years."

"Flutes the air," he said, smiling feebly. He seemed to be quite gone; but she noticed he was holding himself in an erect sitting posture on the cot, not even leaning back against the wall. He blinked several times. "When you knocked," he said, "I thought it was a dream. That's why I mumble mumble coming."

"You said you dreamed yourself this cabin. Pretty modest for a dream. Why didn't you get yourself a beach chalet at Salishan, or a castle on Cape Perpetua?"

He shook his head frowning. "All I wanted." After blinking some more he said, "What happened. What happened to you. Friday. In Haber's office. The session."

"That's what I came to ask you!"

That woke him up. "You were aware--"

"I guess so. I mean, I know something happened. I sure have been trying to run on two tracks with one set of wheels ever since. I walked right into a wall Sunday in my own apartment! See?" She exhibited a bruise, blackish under brown skin, on her forehead.

"The wall was there now but it wasn't there now. . . . How do you live with this going on all the time? How do you know where anything is?"

"I don't," Orr said. "I get all mixed up. If it's meant to happen at all it isn't meant to happen so often. It's too much. I can't tell any more whether I'm insane or just can't handle all the conflicting information. I ... It ... You mean you really believe me?"

"What else can I do? I saw what happened to the city! I was looking out the window!

You needn't think I want to believe it I don't, I try not to. Christ, it's terrible. But that Dr.

Haber, he didn't want me to believe it either, did he? He sure did some fast talking. But then, what you said when you woke up; and then running into walls, and going to the wrong office. . . . Then I keep wondering, has he dreamed anything else since Friday, things are all changed again, but I don't know it became I wasn't there, and I keep wondering what things are changed, and whether anything's real at all. Oh shit, it's awful."

"That's it. Listen, you know the war--the war in the Near East?"

"Sure I know it. My husband was killed in it."

"Your husband?" He looked stricken. "When?"

"Just three days before they called it off. Two days before the Teheran Conference and the U.S.-China Pact. One day after the Aliens blew up the Moon base."

He was looking at her as if appalled.

"What's wrong? Oh, hell, it's an old scar. Six years ago, nearly seven. And if he'd lived we'd have been divorced by now, it was a lousy marriage. Look, it wasn't your fault!"

"I don't know what is my fault any more."

"Well, Jim sure wasn't. He was just a big handsome black unhappy son of a gun, bigshot Air Force Captain at 26 and shot down at 27, you don't think you invented that, do you, it's been happening for thousands of years. And it happened just exactly the same in that other-- way, before Friday, when the world was so crowded. Just exactly. Only it was early in the war . . . wasn't it?" Her voice sank, softened. "My God. It was early in the war, instead of just before the cease-fire. That war went on and on. It was still going on right now. And there weren't . . . there weren't any Aliens--were there?"

Orr shook his head.

"Did you dream them up?"

"He made me dream about peace. Peace on earth, good will among men. So I made the Aliens. To give us something to fight."

"You didn't. That machine of his does it."

"No. I can do fine without the machine, Miss Lelache. All it does is save him time, getting me to dream right away. Although he's been working on it lately to improve it some way. He's great on improving things."

"Please call me Heather."

"It's a pretty name."

"Your name's George. He kept calling you George, in that session. Like you were a real clever poodle, or a rhesus monkey. Lie down, George. Dream this, George."

He laughed. His teeth were white, and his laugh pleasant, breaking through dishevelment and confusion. "That's not me. That's my subconscious, see, he's talking to. It is kind of like a dog or a monkey, for his purposes. It's not rational, but it can be trained to perform."

He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?

Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.

"Now look. Tell me, I need to know this: was it after you went to Haber that you started having. . . ."

"Effective dreams. No, before. It's why I went. I was scared of the dreams, so I was getting sedatives illegally to suppress dreaming. I didn't know what to do."

"Why didn't you take something these last two nights, then, instead of trying to keep awake?"

"I used up all I had Friday night. I can't fill the prescription here. But I had to get away. I wanted to get clear away from Dr. Haber. Things are more complicated than he's willing to realize. He thinks you can make things come out right. And he tries to use me to make things come out right, but he won't admit it; he lies because he won't look straight, he's not interested in what's true, in what is, he can't see anything except his mind--his ideas of what ought to be."

"Well. I can't do anything for you, as a lawyer," Heather said, not following this very well; she sipped her coffee and brandy, which would have grown hair on a Chihuahua.

"There wasn't anything fishy in his hypnotic directions, that I could see; he just told you not to worry about overpopulation and stuff. And if he's determined to hide the fact that he's using your dreams for peculiar purposes, he can; using hypnosis he could just make sure you didn't have an effective dream while anybody else was watching. I wonder why he let me witness one? Are you sure he believes in them himself? I don't understand him.

But anyway, it's hard for a lawyer to interfere between a psychiatrist and his patient, especially when the shrink is a big shot and the patient is a nut who thinks his dreams come true--no, I don't want this in court! But look. Isn't there any way you could keep yourself from dreaming for him? Tranquilizers, maybe?"

"I haven't got a Pharm Card while I'm on VTT. He'd have to prescribe them. Anyway, his Augmentor could get me dreaming."

"It is invasion of privacy; but it won't make a case. . . . Listen. What if you had a dream where you changed him?"

Orr stared at her through a fog of sleep and brandy.

"Made him more benevolent--well, you say he is benevolent, that he means well. But he's power-hungry. He's found a great way to run the world without taking any responsibility for it. Well. Make him less power-hungry. Dream that he's a really good man. Dream that he's trying to cure you, not use you!"

"But I can't choose my dreams. Nobody can."

She sagged. "I forgot. As soon as I accept this thing as real, I keep thinking it's something you can control. But you can't. You just do it."

"I don't do anything," Orr said morosely. "I never have done anything. I just dream. And then it is."

"I'll hypnotize you," Heather said suddenly.

To have accepted an incredible fact as true gave her a rather heady feeling: if Orr's dreams worked, what else mightn't work? Also she had eaten nothing since noon, and the coffee and brandy were hitting hard.

He stared some more.

"I've done it. Took psych courses in college, in pre-law. We all worked out both as hypnotizers and subjects, in one course. I was a fair subject, but real good at putting the others under. I'll put you under, and suggest a dream to you. About Dr. Haber--making him harmless. I'll tell you just to dream that, nothing more. See? Wouldn't that be safe--

as safe as anything we could try, at this point?"

"But I'm hypnosis-resistant. I didn't use to be, but he says I am now."

"Is that why he uses vagus-carotid induction? I hate to watch that, it looks like a murder.

I couldn't do that, I'm not a doctor, anyway."

"My dentist used to just use a Hypnotape. It worked fine. At least I think it did." He was absolutely talking in his sleep and might have maundered on indefinitely.

She said gently, "It sounds like you're resisting the hypnotist, not the hypnosis. . . . We could try it, anyhow. And if it worked, I could give you posthypnotic suggestion to dream one small what d'you call it, effective, dream about Haber. So he'll come clean with you, and try to help you. Do you think that might work? Would you trust it?"

"I could get some sleep, anyway," he said. "I ... will have to sleep sometime. I don't think I can go through tonight. If you think you could do the hypnosis . . ."

"I think I can. But listen, have you got anything to eat here?"

"Yes," he said drowsily. After some while he came to. "Oh yes. I'm sorry. You didn't eat.

Getting here. There's a loaf of bread. . . ." He rooted in the cupboard, brought out bread, margarine, five hard-boiled eggs, a can of tuna, and some shopworn lettuce. She found two tin pie plates, three various forks, and a paring knife. "Have you eaten?" she demanded. He was not sure. They made a meal together, she sitting in the chair at the table, he standing. Standing up seemed to revive him, and he proved a hungry eater.