Secret Dreams (10 page)

“Oh, you Hun! You Hun! You little Hun!”

Another memory came. He was six, a little older. His mother had made him an animal costume. She found an old fur stole in the attic, with the fox head still attached and a long furry tail. She peeled back the satin lining and hemmed it into earflaps. When she sewed on some shoelaces, he could tie the fox stole over his ears like a cap, the furred body trailing down behind.

What a little wild animal he looked, with nothing on but his fox cap and a dishrag for a loincloth! His black hair stuck out on all sides, and his mother gleefully patted his small behind, crying, “Run off now! Hide!”

Yes! Hide-and-seek! But where? The best part of it was how all the women, every one of them, came after him. At the start, his mother waited quietly in a corner of the living room, listening. And when she spied the tips of his fox ears moving behind the sofa, sounding the alarm:

“The sofa!”

First came big Henny, huffing and puffing and wheezing like a bellows — the fat old woman clung to every bit of furniture so she didn't slip on her bandy legs.

Then his sister, Dolphie. Dolphie, always so prim, but during the Fox Game going barefoot. Letting her hair down and fussing it into a mess, crouching on the floor like an animal herself. She came after him quick and hard, tearing over the hall rug, which slid on the polished floor.

They were
hunting
him. A thrill stabbed like fear and joy. They'd see! They'd see! He leaped over the couch like a real fox and plunged under the dining room table, hiding among its crossbars and legs. He tried to scamper out again, but his mother barred the way. Then Henny, down on all fours, thrust her head under the table, yowling fiercely. She snatched at him, but her heavy arms were too big and clumsy. “Aiii!” Dolphie shrieked. She seized his ankle, and they fought under the table. He kicked and broke free.

“On the stairs!” his mother called.

A flash of fox fur and a swish of tail, but when the women reached the banister, the stairs were empty. They clambered up, panting hard, the scent of him thick; they had his spoor.

His parents' room was quiet and shaded, the sun slanting in through the blinds, falling on the bright-red coverlet of the bed. He heard his own breathing and then the women's feet in the hall. A place to hide! Where to hide?

Under the bed? No, too tight.

The bathroom? No escape.

The closet door beckoned him. A trap with no exit, but there was a faint chance they'd miss him among the hanging clothes — and then he might break free. The women entered the room stealthily, spreading out….

“He's here,” Dolphie said in a hush. Her hair spread across her face like a web, her red-rimmed eyes roamed from the dresser to the chair, from the bathroom to the bed. His mother gazed warily up at the ceiling as though she would find him by searching her mind. She closed her eyes and concentrated. “Yes, he's very near.”

“I can smell him,” Henny whispered. She crept steadily toward the closet with a wicked smile on her face. Dolphie followed, her red lips drawn back, showing rows of pointy teeth. The women's skirts rustled about the door crack. His mother's legs paused outside the door. “Shhhhhhhh …,” his mother warned.

Far back in the musty closet, he wrapped himself in coats and dresses. If only he could crawl into a pocket and hide there like a mouse. His bowels yearned, and he wanted to go potty all at once. What a delicious full feeling, knowing how good it was, and how much better when he finally let go.

He wasn't a mouse — no pocket to hide! He'd break free now. Escape! He snarled like an angry fox, bursting from the closet. The women stumbled backward, tumbling over themselves. He was free! Free! Bounding across the room —

“Got him!” his father shouted, bolting from the bathroom. Half the man's beard was shaved away, soap clinging to one side of his naked face. The naked skin, white like a fish,- a pink scratch and blood where the razor cut too close. His father swept him in the air with hands so strong he thought they'd crush his potty-go right out of him. À terrified squeak flew to the ceiling, and his father grinned, the shaved side of his face looking vicious and abrupt.

Deep inside, the delicious fullness squirmed, and he felt it moving on himself, as if those iron hands had squeezed it out. The man put him down shakily. While the women, faces bloated with anger, shouted: “No! No! No!”

His mother prodded him into the bathroom, but not in anger.

When he sat on the potty, he saw his father had backed off into a corner of the room, glowering silently. “This is ridiculous,” he rumbled. “You act like a bunch of savages.”

“We didn't ask you to butt in,” Henny snapped back.

Then all the women came to the bathroom door, peering in as he sat on the potty seat. His mother felt his ribs, her touch gentler…. The soiled loincloth lay discarded on the bathroom floor. But his fox cap still clung to his head, the long red fox tail curled around his waist as he sat on the potty. He didn't feel like going anymore. When he looked at his loincloth, he saw most of his potty-go there.

His mother stared at his father in the most peculiar way. He had the strangest thought: that she hated the man….

“I don't like it,” his mother said. “Shave the rest and grow it all back.”

The reedy nurse wiped the soap from a straight razor. The white goat's beard from half his face lay in a thousand cut hairs down the front of his hospital gown. Some lay on the floor, the shorn hairs blending into the white tile invisibly. The old man knew they were shaving his face because they suspected a tumor in the cheek. My God, he felt it throbbing there himself: the warm bath and the shaving had brought sensation everywhere. If the X-rays confirmed what he already felt, they would bring him into surgery early in the after-noon without wasting time. He must remember to call home.

“We're ready,” the nurse said.

He caught the nurse's hand that held the razor. She didn't struggle in his grip but relaxed her arm as if to say, There's nothing I can do for you. Showing him how helpless he had really become. How impotent. Like an old gent walking around with his pants unzipped: open cage, dead bird. A terminal case, so why fuss?

“Please, Nurse.” He let go of her arm. “My father looked awful with half a beard. I can't look much better. Will you shave the other side?”

Her fingers touched his shaven cheek,- a tender gesture. She had cut it close, leaving the parched old skin waxy smooth. When she turned his face in her strong hand, a thrill went through him, like a far-off train whistle in the dead of night. He liked the feel of it. Her fingers on his jaw, her firm grip saying, You're not gone yet; I'll do what you wish…. He looked down the length of her, seeing how the starched skirt brought out the curve of her hips. He wished he could reach over and surround her bottom with his forearm. “You're a handsome man,” she said out of nowhere. It sounded like something she'd told herself the first moment she caught him tottering in the hall: Ah, now
there's
a handsome man! He felt himself stirring, warm and bloody and alive. He began to laugh. The first time in a year! Where the hell was his wife! The reedy nurse looked at him, a little worried. “Are you all right?”

He smiled up at her, he liked her hard-bitten face. She'd make some man a good woman before too long. She drew close enough for him to see the pockmarks from a bad case of acne years gone by. His arm wanted to go around her bottom. He let it go.

“Stay still,” she hissed with a naughty grin. “You're very bad.”

They put him under the X-ray projector, a huge metal locust of a machine, his shaved face going into shadow. The white-smocked technicians murmured at him to be still…. This was the end, then. The gnawing pain in his jaw had returned, as if some monstrous blacksmith with knotted hands was trying to hammer off the side of his head. Anything had to be better than this. He was flaccid again, his cold groin far away, like a valley covered in mist.

He had been taken in by strangers. Men in white coats, with lean, sallow faces, machinists of the corpus. Like some elaborate death ritual of ancient Egypt, preparing pharaoh's body for its journey over the river of death. But instead of building a tomb and gathering the relics of his worldly reign, instead of painting the tomb walls with the deeds of his life and a picture of his soul, instead of waiting till he was dead before they cut out his organs, preserving them in jars — instead of all that, the white strangers wrapped his living body in a cold sheet and sent him under a dark machine.

Later, there would be the inspection, the prodding and the poking — when they took out bits of him, pieces of his bone and shreds of his flesh, which they threw in a pail at their feet: flecks to be picked apart by more sallow strangers, to determine if those shreds were good or evil.

Better to be a king cut down in middle age. So it felt now. For he wished to take the slim nurse's bottom in his forearm once more. Or even find his wife. Take her away from whatever and do it to
her
. But this ugly machine hovered over him like a huge carrion fowl sucking at his guts. And him too feeble to push it away. Better to be cut down in middle age …

One of the technicians asked him not to mumble. Why shouldn't he mumble? He had a right. He was a king who had lived too long: survived his wars, seen his men fall one by one, survived his assassins and the princely ambitions of his sons — survived them all. Alone in the end and waiting, when his body came to claim him. The last assassin. A cunning, silent watcher, standing ever by your chamber door.

Now he knew for certain: better, much better, to be caught alone while hunting in the bright forest daylight. Better to be caught by ruthless brigands far away from his soldiers and the finery of the court, to be tracked down and hunted like an animal. For even as your steed leaped over a fallen tree and a spear stove in your back, in your mind — in your heart! — you knew you might escape. In fleeing there was hope.

In the desperate struggle there was hope. Dying with a bit of life in your blood. How much better so …

When there was hope.

THE PATIENT'S SYMPTOMS

Was he dead? Professor Praeger was supposed to be removing a tumor in his cheek. He remembered that much. No, a little more. A glimpse of the black X-ray machine as they slid his body out from under it. Then an even briefer glimpse of the reedy nurse's flat stomach as she took his pulse. Perhaps not even her. Then a long pause as he lay on the gurney in a bright room somewhere.

Presently a voice said to him, “We're going to put you to sleep now,” and he looked distractedly at the needle sliding into his arm. Then he floated over the operating table, looking down at the gowned assistants. He lay in white. A tube snaked into his nose and another dripped plasma into his thigh. What a grand ordeal they made of it! There were a few terribly vivid seconds when he saw Professor Praeger's narrow, delicate hands holding a scalpel and going in for the first cut. The dainty hands made a deliberate stroke, and the skin separated cooperatively as blood welled from the cheek. The flow came freely, while a nurse tried to keep pace with it, dabbing around the incision with one sponge after another, then dropping the soaked sponges in a waste pail under the operating table.

“Keep it clear,” Praeger snapped. “If you can't keep it clear, we'll send you home and get someone who can.”

He thought this remark terribly unfair — after all, everyone knows facial cuts bleed more than others. The assistant used more and more sponges, while Professor Praeger's spidery fingers probed deeper into his face. After a short while, the professor paused contentedly to gaze into the incision. At last he said,
“There
… you see?”

The narrow fingers held back the peeled skin, and all the assistants crowded round the table to look. Within the cavity of moist flesh and flowing blood sat a knot of bluish gristle, the tumor.

“You see?” Praeger sounded almost gratified with the chance to elaborate. “It goes back and back,- there's no end to it. The carcinoma has spread to the bone below the right eye. If we probed further we'd find the brain pan affected. Local inflammation of the cranial membrane. Higher fluid pressure within the cranial cavity. That is why the symptoms are something like spinal meningitis. Pain in the limbs, searing headaches, acute sensitivity to light. But unlike a viral infection his symptoms ebb and flow, when the body manages to absorb some of the excess fluid draining from the skull.” Then a long sigh. Td say the Subject has about a week to go … Let you be witness, ladies and gentlemen, to the long-term effects of a good cigar.”

The light in the operating room flickered as though the hospital were experiencing a power failure. He no longer cared about the body on the table. Then came a brief foggy period where he sat in the garden of his new English home in a lawn chair under the leaves of the almond tree. Lün sat in the garden doorway of his office, with her hindquarters up on a step and her front paws planted stoically in front like a stone lion. Why did dogs sit like that? With their bottoms an inch or so higher than their fronts? She looked comfortable and ridiculous at the same time. From out of the faint French doors people came into the garden and spoke to him…. He tried to answer. Friendly faces. He knew them, but the effort to recall their names had grown simply too great. He smiled and waved feebly as each new face swam into view. Some took his hand, some kissed him on the cheek. Then everyone went away and the sun streamed through the leaves of the almond tree.

His wife came out and sat beside him in a lawn chair. They held hands…. He tried to tell her about wanting to make love to her in the last few weeks, but he had lost the words. She pressed his hand in her own as if she understood, but how could she? They had not made love in such a long time. Out of the blue he noticed the same thrush sitting in a branch of the almond tree almost directly overhead. The tree was in bloom even down to the tiniest branches, covered in pink blossoms.