The Dream Master (12 page)

“That,” he announced, “is about all for this time.”

“But there is more, so much more,” she said. “You carry menus about in your head. Don’t you remember more of this thing? I remember something about the band-necked partridges roosting in a ring with their heads out, and the yellow-crowned heron feeding upon crabs at the edge of the marsh at night, and the katydid on a walnut tree above a well, and…”

“It is rich, it is very rich,” said Render. “Too rich, perhaps.”

They passed through groves of lemons and oranges, under fir trees, and the places where the heron fed, and the katydid sang on the walnut tree above the well, and the partridges slept in a ring on the ground, heads out.

“Next time, will you name me all the animals?” she asked. “Yes.”

She turned up a little path to a farmhouse, opened the front door, and entered. Render followed her, smiling. Blackness.

Solid, total—black as only the black of absolute emptiness can be.

There was nothing at all inside the farmhouse. “What is the matter?” she asked him, from somewhere. “Unauthorized excursion into the scenery,” said Render. “I was about to ring down the curtain and you decided the show should continue. Therefore, I kept myself from providing you with any additional props this time.”

“I can’t always control it,” she said. “I’m sorry. Let us go back now. I’ve mastered the impulse.”

“No, let’s go ahead,” said Render. “Lights!”

They stood on a high hilltop, and the bats that flitted past the partial moon were metallic. The evening was chill and a harsh croaking sound arose from a junkpile. The trees were metal posts with the limbs riveted into place. The grass was green plastic underfoot. A gigantic, empty highway swept past the foot of the hill.

“Where—are we?” she asked.

“You’ve had your Song
of Myself,”
he said, “with all the extra narcissism you could stuff in. Nothing wrong with that in this place—up to a point. But you’ve pushed it a little too far. Now I feel a certain balancing has become necessary. I can’t afford to play games each session.”

“What are you going to do?”

“The Song of
‘Not Me’
?” he stated, clapping his hands. “Let us walk.”

…
Where the Dust Bowl cries for water
, said a voice, somewhere—and they walked, coughing…
Where the waste-polluted river knows no living thing
, said the voice,
and the scum is the color of rust.

They walked beside the stinking river, and she held her nose but it did not stop the smelling.

…
Where the forest is laid to waste and the landscape is Limbo.

They walked among the stumps, stepping on shredded branches; and the dry leaves crackled underfoot. Overhead, the face of the leering moon was scarred, and it hung by a thin strand from the black ceiling.

They walked like giants among wooden plateaus. The earth was cracked beneath the leaves.

…
Where the curreted land bleeds into the emptied gouge of the strip-mine.

Abandoned machinery lay about them. Mounds of earth and rocks lay bald beneath the night. The great gaps in the ground were filled with a blood-like excrescence.

… Sing,
Aluminum Muse, who in the beginning taught that shepherd how the museum and the process rose out of Chaos, or if death delight thee more, behold the greatest Graveyard!

They were back atop the hill overlooking the junkheap. It was filled with tractors and bulldozers and steamshovels, with cranes and diggers and trucks. It was piled high with twisted metal, rusted metal, broken metal. Frames and plates and springs and beams lay about, and the blades and shovels and drills were all smashed. It was the Boot Hill of the tool, the Potter’s Field of the machine.

“What…?” she said.

“Scrap,” said he. “This is the part Walt didn’t sing about—the things that step on his blades of grass, the things that tear them up by the roots.”

They made their way through the place of dead machinery.

“Haunted, too,” he added, “in a way.

“This machine bulldozed an Indian burial mound, and this one cut down the oldest tree on the continent. This one dug a channel which diverted a river which turned a green valley into a wasteland. This one broke in the walls of our ancestors’ homes, and this one hoisted the beams up the monstrous towers which replaced them—”

“You’re being very unfair,” she said.

“Of course,” said Render. “You should always try for a large point if you want to make a small one. Remember, I took you where the panther walks to and fro on the limb overhead, and where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, and where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou. Do you recall what I said when you asked, ‘Why
these
things?’”

“You said, ‘More than the idyllic must you know.’”

“Right, and since you were once again so eager to take over, I decided that a little more pain and a little less pleasure might strengthen my position. You’ve already got whatever goes wrong. I catch it.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know. But this picture of mechanism paving the road to hell… Black or white, really? Which is it?”

“Gray,” he told her. “Come a little further.”

They rounded a heap of cans and bottles and bedsprings. He stooped beneath a jutting piece of metal and pulled open a hatch.

“Behold hidden in the belly of this great tank truck against the ages of ages!”

Its fantastic glow filled the dark cavity with a soft green light, spreading from where it blazed within a tool box he had flung open.

“Oh…”

“The Holy Grail,” he announced. “It is enantiadromia, my dear. The circle runs back upon itself. When it passes its beginning, the spiral commences. How can I judge? The Grail may be hidden within a machine. I don’t know. Things twist as time goes on. Friends become enemies, evils become benefits. But I’ll hold back time long enough to tell you a quick tale, since you regaled me with that of the Greek, Daedalus. It was told me by a patient named Roth-man, a student of the Cabala. This Grail you see before you, symbol of light and purity and holiness and heavenly majesty—what is its origin?”

“None is given,” she said.

“Ah, but there is a tradition, a legend that Rothman knew: The Grail was handed down by Melchisadek, High Priest of Israel, and destined to reach the hands of the Messiah. But where did Melchisadek get it? He carved it from a gigantic emerald he had found in the wilderness, an emerald which had fallen from the crown of Shmael, Angel of Darkness, as he was cast down from On High. There is your Grail, from light to darkness to light to darkness to who knows? What is the point of it all? Enantiadromia, my dear.—Good-bye, Grail.”

He closed the lid and all was darkness.

Then, as he walked on through Winchester Cathedral, flat ceilings everywhere, a statue beheaded (said the guide) by Cromwell, off to his right, he recalled the following session. He remembered his almost-unwilling Adam-attitude as he had named all the animals passing before them, led, of course, by the
one
she had wanted to see, colored fearsome by his own unease. He had felt pleasantly bucolic after boning up on an old Botany text and then proceeding to Shape and name the flowers of the fields.

So far they had stayed out of the cities, far away from the machines. Her emotions were still too powerful at the sight of the simple, carefully introduced objects to risk plunging her into so complicated and chaotic a wilderness yet; he would build her city slowly.

Something passed rapidly, high above the cathedral, uttering a sonic boom. Render took Jill’s hand in his for a moment and smiled as she looked up at him. Knowing she verged upon beauty, Jill normally took great pains to achieve it. But today her hair was simply drawn back and knotted behind her head, and her lips and her eyes were pale; and her exposed ears were tiny and white and somewhat pointed.

“Observe the scalloped capitals,” he whispered. “In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif.”

“Faugh!” said she.

“Shh!” said a sunburnt little woman nearby, whose face seemed to crack and fall back together again as she pursed and unpursed her lips.

Later, as they strolled back toward their hotel, Render said, “Okay on Winchester?”

“Okay on Winchester.”

“Happy?”

“Happy.”

“Good; then we can leave this afternoon.”

“All right.”

“For Switzerland…”

She stopped and toyed with a button on his coat.

“Couldn’t we just spend a day or two looking at some old chateaux first? After all, they’re just across the Channel, and you could be sampling all the local wines while I looked…”

“Okay,” he said.

She looked up—a trifle surprised.

“What? No argument?” She smiled. “Where is your fighting spirit?—to let me push you around like this?”

She took his arm then and they walked on as he said, “Yesterday, while we were galloping about in the innards of that old castle, I heard a weak moan, and then a voice cried out, ‘For the love of God, Montresor!’ I think it was my fighting spirit, because I’m certain it was my voice. I’ve given up der geist der stets verneint. Pax vobiscum! Let us be gone to France. Alors!”

“Dear Rendy, it’ll only be another day or two…”

“Amen,” he said, “though my skis that were waxed are already waning.”

So they did that, and on the morn of the third day, when she spoke to him of castles in Spain, he reflected aloud that while psychologists drink and only grow angry, psychiatrists have been known to drink, grow angry, and break things. Construing this as a veiled threat aimed at the Wedgewoods she had collected, she acquiesced to his desire to skiing.

Free! Render almost screamed it.

His heart was pounding inside his head. He leaned hard. He cut to the left. The wind strapped at his face; a shower of ice crystals, like bullets of emery, fired by him, scraped against his cheek.

He was moving. Aye—the world had ended at Weissflujoch, and Dorftäli led down and away from this portal.

His feet were two gleaming rivers which raced across the stark, curving plains; they could not be frozen in their course. Downward. He flowed. Away from all the rooms of the world. Away from the stifling lack of intensity, from the day’s hundred spoon-fed welfares, from the killing pace of the forced amusements that hacked at the Hydra, leisure; away.

And as he fled down the run he felt a strong desire to look back over his shoulder, as though to see whether the world he had left behind and above had set one fearsome embodiment of itself, like a shadow, to trail along after him, hunt him down, and to drag him back to a warm and well-lit coffin in the sky, there to be laid to rest with a spike of aluminum driven through his will and a garland of alternating currents smothering his spirit.

“I hate you,” he breathed between clenched teeth, and the wind carried the words back; and he laughed then, for he always analyzed his emotions, as a matter of reflex; and he added. “Exit Orestes, mad, pursued by the Furies…”

After a time the slope leveled out and he reached the bottom of the run and had to stop.

He smoked one cigarette then and rode back up to the top so that he could come down it again for non-therapeutic reasons.

That night he sat before a fire in the big lodge, feeling its warmth soaking into his tired muscles. Jill massaged his shoulders as he played Rorschach with the flames, and he came upon a blazing goblet which was snatched away from him in the same instant by the sound of his name being spoken somewhere across the Hall of the Nine Hearths.

“Charles Render!” said the voice (only it sounded more like “Sharlz Runder”), and his head instantly jerked in that direction but his eyes danced with too many afterimages for him to isolate the source of the calling.

“Maurice?” he queried after a moment, “Bartelmetz?”

“Aye,” came the reply, and then Render saw the familiar grizzled visage, set neckless and balding above the red and blue shag sweater that was stretched mercilessly about the wine-keg rotundity of the man who now picked his way in their direction, deftly avoiding the strewn crutches and the stacked skis and the people who, like Jill and Render, disdain sitting in chairs.

“You’ve put on more weight,” Render observed. “That’s unhealthy.”

“Nonsense, it’s all muscle. How have you been, and what are you up to these days?” He looked down at Jill and she smiled back at him.

“This is Miss DeVille,” said Render.

“Jill,” she acknowledged.

He bowed slightly, finally releasing Render’s aching hand.

“… And this is Professor Maurice Bartelmetz of Vienna,” finished Render, “a benighted disciple of all forms of dialectical pessimism, and a very distinguished pioneer in neuroparticipation—although you’d never guess it to look at him. I had the good fortune to be his pupil for over a year.”

Bartelmetz nodded and agreed with him, taking in the Schnapsflasche Render brought forth from a small plastic bag, and accepting the collapsible cup which he filled to the brim.

“Ah, you are a good doctor still,” he sighed. “You have diagnosed the case in an instant and you make the proper prescription. Nozdrovia!”

“Seven years in a gulp,” Render acknowledged, refilling their glasses.

“Then we shall make time more malleable by sipping it.”

They seated themselves on the floor, and the fire roared up through the great brick chimney as the logs burnt themselves back to branches, to twigs, to thin sticks, ring by yearly ring.

Render replenished the fire.

“I read your last book,” said Bartelmetz finally, casually, “about four years ago.”

Render reckoned that to be correct.

“Are you doing any research work these days?”

Render poked lazily at the fire.

“Yes,” he answered, “sort of.”

He glanced at Jill, who was dozing with her cheek against the arm of the huge leather chair that held his emergency bag, the planes of her face all crimson and flickering shadow.

“I’ve hit upon a rather unusual subject and started with a piece of jobbery I eventually intend to write about.”

“Unusual? In what way?”