Orbit 5 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Dr. Staunton didn’t mention that. He seems to think that all the people here are locals.”

  “I didn’t tell him,” I say. He nods and I know that he realizes that I have played the part of a local yokel with his superior. I ask, “Is this his research, or is it the thesis of one of the boys?”

  One of the others laughs. “It’s Roger’s original idea,” he says. “And mine.” I try to remember which one he is and I think he is Sid. Mediterranean type. I glance over the other faces, and none shows surprise. So Staunton has taken over openly, and they accept it as natural. It tells me more than they can know about Staunton.

  “You see, I had this idea that the whole pattern of dream content might switch depending on the location of the dreamer. In the city we know pretty much what each of us dreams, we’ve been subjects and experimenters all year now, and we decided to hunt up a place where there were none of the same things at all and then run a comparison.”

  “And you’ll check that against what you can find out from the people here, to see if there’s a correlation?”

  “We don’t expect one,” Sid said. “What we do expect is that our own dreams will change, but that the patterns of the dreams of the people already here will remain relatively stable.”

  “And what do you expect to prove?”

  “I don’t know that we’ll prove anything, but assuming that dreams reflect the emotional states of the person, by examining them in varying circumstances we might get a clue about how to help people relax more than they do, what kind of vacation to plan for, how long to stay, things like that. If my reasoning is right, then we’ll be able to predict from personality sketches whether a three-week vacation is desirable, or shorter periods more frequently. You see?”

  I nod and can find no fault with the experiment. It does seem a legitimate line of research, and a useful one, perhaps. “I suppose you will have a computer run the analysis of dream content?”

  Sid nods, and Roger says, “Would you like to see one of the cards we fill out? We’ve broken down dream content into categories. Like sexual with subheadings of hetero, homo, socially accepted, socially unaccepted, and so on, and a further breakdown of overt, covert; participatory, observed; satisfying, frustrating, and so on. I think we’ve hit everything.”

  “I would like to see one,” I say, and he nods.

  “I’ll bring one out to your place with us tomorrow. Have you seen any of the sleep lab equipment?”

  “Not in this context, not used in these experiments.”

  “Great. The first afternoon, after three or four, that you can get up here, I’ll show you around.”

  “Perhaps tomorrow?” I say. “Will Dr. Staunton object?”

  Roger and Sid exchange a hurried glance and Roger shrugs. “It’s my research,” he says.

  “Is he setting up equipment, testing it out now?”

  “No. In fact he came home with indigestion, I think, and conked out right away.”

  I can’t still the sudden laugh that I feel. I finish my coffee and stand up. “The storm is over, I think. At least it’s catching its breath now. I’m glad I was forced to stop,” I say, and hold out my hand to Roger and then Sid. “I must say, however, that I’m afraid Somerset isn’t quite what you expected. I hope you won’t be too disappointed in us.”

  “Will you help?” Roger asks.

  I hesitate and then nod. “I used to keep a record for my own psychology classes. I’ll start again.”

  “Thanks.”

  “If anyone in town asks my opinion,” I say, standing in the open doorway now, feeling the cool wind that the storm has brought in, “I’ll tell them that I’m cooperating, nothing more. They may or may not pay any attention to what I say.”

  “See you tomorrow afternoon,” Roger says and I leave them and walk home. It is very dark now, and the rain smells fresh, the air is cool and clean. I am thinking of the two halves that make up the whole me. In the city I am brisk and efficient. I know the nurses talk about me, wondering if I am a lesbian (I’m not), if I have any sex life at all (not now). They are afraid of me because I will not permit any sloppiness in surgery, and I am quick to report them. They don’t understand that my instruments are to me what the surgeon’s scalpel is to him, and they think I worship dials and stainless-steel gods. I once heard myself described as more machine-like than any of the exotic equipment that I have mastered. I know that the thought of those boys staring at the charts of their alpha and beta rhythms has brought this retrospective mood but I can’t break out of it. I continue to inspect my life as if from the outside. What no one understands is that it is not the machines that are deified, but the processes that the machines record, the fluctuations and the rhythms, the cyclic patterns that are beautiful when they are normal, and as hideous as a physical deformity when they are wrong. The covered mound on the hard table is meaningless when I observe it. Less than human, inert, it might be a corpse already, or a covered log, or a cache of potatoes. But the dials that I read tell me all I can know about it: male, steady heart, respiration normal ... Body processes that add up to life, or non-life. What more is there?

  My house is cool now, and rain has blown in the kitchen and dining-room windows. I mop it up and wipe the sills carefully, and inspect the rest of the house. I can’t see anything in the yard, but I stand on the back porch and feel the coolness and the mistiness of the air until I start to shiver.

  I have read that dreams follow a pattern of their own. The first dreams of the night are of events nearby in time and space, and as sleep progresses and the night goes by the dreams wander farther afield, into the past, or into future fantasy, and toward morning, they return to the here and now of the dreamer. During the night I wake up three times and jot down the dreams I can recall.

  Dream number one is a simple-minded wish fulfillment. I am at a party where I sparkle and dazzle everyone in the house. It is an unfamiliar house, not unlike the Sagamore House, except more elegant, simpler, with cool white marble statues replacing the clutter. I am the belle of the party and I dance with everyone there, and in the center of the room is a champagne glass that must hold gallons. Looking through the bubbling wine, I see the statues shimmer and appear to come alive, but I know that it is only because of the rising bubbles, that it is an illusion. I am swept back to the dance floor and I swirl around in a delirium of joy.

  Dream number two puzzles me. I am following Father, who is very small. It is not quite dark, but I don’t know where the light is coming from. It is like moonlight, but without the moon, which I suspect is behind me somewhere. I am very frightened. Father starts to climb the ash tree and I retreat and watch him, growing more and more afraid but not doing anything at all, simply standing and watching as he vanishes among the leaves. I wake up in a cold sweat.

  Dream number three takes place in my apartment. I am remodeling and doing the work myself. I am installing temporary wall boards, decorating them with childish pictures and pinups. I am weeping as I work. Suddenly there is a change and I am above Somerset, or in town, and I can’t be certain which it is. I am calm and happy, although I see no one and hear nothing. Somerset is bathed in moonlight that is too golden to be real and the town is as I remember it from my earliest days, with striped green-and-white umbrellas in yards, and silent children playing happily in Cobb’s Run.

  I wake up and don’t want to lose the feeling of peace and contentment. I smile as I write the dream down and when I read it over I don’t know quite why it should have filled me with happiness. As I think of it more, I am saddened by it, and finally I get up wishing I had let it escape altogether. It is very early, not seven yet, but I don’t want to return to bed. The morning is cool and refreshing. I decide to weed the patio out back and set up the grill before the sun heats up the valley again.

  The ash-tree is untouched. I work for an hour, go inside for breakfast, and return to the yard. I am thinking that if I do bring Father home, I will have to find someone who can help with the yard, and I
don’t know who it would be. Poor Haddie? He might, but he is so slow and unthinking. I could have a wheelchair for Father and bring him out to the patio every day and as he convalesces, we could take short trips in the car, go down to the lake maybe, or over to Hawley now and then. I am certain that he will be able to play chess by fall, and read aloud with me, as we used to do. A quiet happiness fills me as I plan and it is with surprise that I realize that I have decided about Father. I have been over the same reasoning with his doctor, and accepted his advice against this move, but here, working in the bright sunlight, the new decision seems to have been made effortlessly.

  I have weeded the patio, swept up the heaps of dandelions and buck weeds and crabgrass that have pushed through the cracks in the flagstones, and set up the barbecue grill. The picnic table is in pitiful condition, but it will have to do. There are some folding canvas chairs in the garage, but I will let the boys bring them out.

  It is one o’clock already. A whole morning gone so quickly. My muscles are throbbing and I am sunburned, but the feeling of peacefulness remains with me and I shower and change and then go to town to shop, have lunch with Dorothea and Annie, and then see the sleep lab equipment.

  I try to explain to Dorothea the difference between living in the city and living here in my own home, but she has her mouth set in a firm line and she is very disapproving of the whole idea.

  Timidly Annie says, “But, honey, there’s no one left your age. What will you do all the time?”

  “I’ll have plenty to do,” I tell her. “I want to study, rest, take care of Father, the house. There will be too much to do, probably.”

  “That’s not what she means,” Dorothea says sharply. “You should get married, not tie yourself down here where everything’s dying.” She eyes me appraisingly. “Don’t you have anyone in mind?”

  I shrug it off. A young doctor, perhaps? I try to think of myself with any of the young doctors I know, and the thought is ridiculous. There are some older doctors, thoroughly married, of course, that seem less absurd, but no one my age who is unattached. I think again of the Harvard doctor’s pink hands and pink cheeks, and I shudder. I say, “There’s time for that, Dorothea, but right now I feel it’s my duty to Father to bring him home where he will be happier.”

  After lunch I wander into the parlor and have Dorothea ring Roger’s room and tell him I’m waiting. She is still unhappy with me, and I know that she and Annie will discuss me the rest of the afternoon.

  The sleep lab is set up in the rear of the building on the second floor. There are three bedrooms in a row, the middle one the control room with the equipment in place, and the rooms on either side furnished with beds, telephones, wires with electrodes. I have seen pictures of these experiments and have read about them so that none of it comes as a surprise but I am mildly impressed that they were able to get together so much equipment that I know to be very expensive. Harvard is feeling flush these days, I decide, or else Staunton swings more weight than I have given him credit for.

  After I examine the EEGs from the night before and compare them with the reported dreams, I am introduced to the other three students that I missed before. I have already forgotten all of their names except Sid and Roger. We have a drink and I learn that so far they have received no cooperation from anyone in town, with the possible exception of myself. Staunton comes in looking angry and frustrated.

  “That hick doctor could do it, if he would,” he says before he sees me in the room. He reddens.

  “He won’t, though,” I say. “But I could.”

  “They’d tell you their dreams?”

  “Some of them would, probably enough for your purposes.” I stand up and start for the door. “I would have to promise not to give you their dreams, but to process them myself, however.”

  He starts to turn away, furious again, and I say, “I am qualified, you know.” I suspect that I have more degrees than he does and I reel them off rapidly. I walk to the door before he has a chance to respond. Before leaving I say, “Think about it. You can let me know tonight when you come to the house. I will have to be briefed on your methods, of course, and have a chance to examine your cards.”

  I don’t know why I’ve done it. I walk home and try to find a reason, but there is none. To puncture his smug shield? To deflate him in the presence of his students? To inflate my own importance, reassure myself that I am of both worlds? I can’t select a single reason, and I decide that perhaps all of them are part of it. I know that I dislike Staunton as much as anyone I have ever met, and perhaps I hope that he will fail completely in his research, except that it isn’t really his.

  I make potato salad, and bake pies, and prepare the steaks that Dorothea has ordered. It crosses my mind that Mr. Larson has virtually no meat except for the special order from Sagamore House, and that I’ll have to order everything in advance when I move back home for good, but I don’t linger over it. The evening passes quite pleasantly and even Staunton is on his good behavior. They accept my offer and Sid goes over the cards with me, explaining what they are doing, how they are analyzing the dreams and recording them. It seems simple enough.

  The days flow by now, with not quite enough time for all there is to do. The doctor in charge of the nursing home answers my letter brusquely, treating me like a child. I read it over twice before I put it on my desk to be taken care of later. I have been able to get six people to cooperate in the dream studies, and they keep me busy each day. People like to talk about their dreams, I find, and talking about them, they are able to bring back more and more details, so that each interview takes half an hour or an hour. And there are my own dreams that I am also recording.

  I found the reason for my own part in this when I first typed up my own dream to be analyzed. I found that I couldn’t give it to Staunton, and the students are like children, not to be trusted with anything so intimate as the private dreams of a grown woman. So each day I record my own dreams along with the other six, type them all up, fill out the cards, and turn the cards over to Roger. By then the dreams are depersonalized data.

  I finish typing the seven dreams and I am restless suddenly. There is something ... The house is more unquiet than usual, and I am accustomed to the rustlings and creakings. I wonder if another storm is going to hit the town, but I don’t think so.

  I wander outside where the night is very clear. The sky is brilliant and bottomless. The music of the night is all about me: the splashing water of the creek, crickets and tree frogs in arrhythmic choral chants and from a distance the deeper solo bass of a bullfrog. Probably I am bored. Other people’s dreams are very boring. I haven’t started to categorize this latest set, and I feel reluctant to begin. I purposely don’t put any names on any of the dreams I record, and I type each one on a separate card and then shuffle them about, so that by the time I have finished with them all, I have forgotten who told me which one.

  I stop walking suddenly. I have come halfway down the path toward the creek without thinking where I am going or why. Now I stop and the night noises press in on me. “They are alike,” I say, and I am startled by my voice. All other sounds stop with the words.

  I think of the stack of file cards, and those I added tonight, and I am amazed that I didn’t see it in the beginning. Roger is right: the townspeople are dreaming the same dreams. That isn’t really what he said. What he said was that the dreams of the people here would remain stable, unchanged by the experiment, while those of the students would change as they adapted to this life. I haven’t asked about that part of the research, but suddenly I am too curious about it to put it out of my mind.

  Are they changing, and how? I start back, but pause at the door to the house, and turn instead to the street and town. I slow down when I come in sight of Sagamore House. It is very late, almost two in the morning. The second-floor light is the only light I have seen since leaving my own house. I take another step toward Sagamore House, and another. What is the matter tonight? I look about. But there is noth
ing. No wind, no moon, nothing. But I hear ... life, stirrings, something. This is Somerset, I say to myself sharply, not quite aloud, but I hear the words anyway. I look quickly over my shoulder, but there is nothing. I see the apple trees, familiar yet strange, eerie shadows against the pale siding of the hotel. Across from Sagamore House on Wisteria there is the old boarded-up theater, and for a moment I think someone has opened it again. I press my hands over my ears and when I take them down the sound has stopped. I am shaking. I can’t help the sudden look that I give the corner where the drugstore burned down seven or eight years ago.

  We wait in the shadows of Sagamore House, under the apple trees for the movie to be over, and then Father and Mother, Susan’s parents, Peter’s, come out and take us along with them for an ice-cream soda in the drugstore. We know when the movie is ending because of the sounds that filter out when they open the inner doors. Faint music, laughter, a crash of cymbals, always different, but always a signal, and we come down from the trees, or from the porch and cross the street to wait for them to come out.

  I stare at the theater, back to the empty corner, and slowly turn and go home again. One of the boys was playing a radio, I tell myself, and even believe it for a moment. Or I imagined it, the past intruded for a moment, somehow. An audio hallucination. I stop at the gate to my yard and stare at the house, and I am desperately afraid. It is such an unfamiliar feeling, so unexpected and shattering, that I can’t move until it passes. It is as if I have become someone else for a moment, someone who fears rustling in the dark, who fears the night, being alone. Not my feelings at all. I have never been afraid, never, not of anything like this.