Orbit 5 - [Anthology] Read online

  Sid is on my right and Roger on my left. I see that Dr. Staunton is in the wagon. He looks pale and worried.

  I remember the basket of flowers that I never did put on the grave and I look back once more to see it standing by the tree. Sid’s hand tightens on my arm, but I don’t try to pull away. Inside the wagon I say, “Will one of you tell me what that was all about?”

  “Janet, do you know how long you’ve been there at the cemetery?”

  “Half an hour, an hour.”

  “It’s almost six now. I ... we got to your house at three and waited awhile for you, and then went back to the hotel. An old man with a white goatee said he saw you before noon heading this way with flowers. So we came after you.” Sid is sitting beside me in the back seat of the wagon, and I stare at him in disbelief. I look at my watch, and it is five minutes to six. I shake it and listen to it.

  “I must have been sound asleep.”

  “Sitting straight up, with your legs stretched out in front of you?”

  We drive to my house and I go upstairs to wash my face and comb my hair. I study my face carefully, looking for something, anything, but it is the same. I hear voices from below; the sound diminishes and I know they are playing the tapes, so I hurry down.

  I see that Sid has found my dream cards, the typed reports, and I am angry with him for prying. He says, “I had to know. I found them earlier while we were waiting for you.”

  Roger has the tape ready, so I sit down and we listen for the next two hours. Staunton is making notes, scowling hard at the pad on his knee. I feel myself growing tenser, and when the first tape comes to an end, I go to make coffee. We all sip it through the playing of the second tape.

  The dreaming students’ voices sound disjointed, hesitant, unguarded, and the dreams they relate are all alike. I feel cold in the hot room, and I dread hearing my own voice, my own dreams played by the machine.

  All the early dreams are of attempts to leave Somerset. They speak of trying to fly out, to climb out, to swim out, to drive out, and only one is successful. As the night progresses, the dreams change, some faster than others. Slowly a pattern of acceptance enters the dreams, and quite often the acceptance is followed swiftly by a nightmarelike desire to run.

  One of the dreamers, Victor, I think it is, has a brief anxiety dream, an incomplete dream, and then nothing but the wish-fulfillment acceptance dreams, not even changing again when morning has him in a lighter stage of sleep.

  Sid motions for Roger to stop the tape and says, “That was three days ago. Since then Victor has been visiting people here, talking with them, fishing, hiking. He has been looking over some of the abandoned houses in town, with the idea of coming here to do a book.”

  “Has he ...” I am amazed at how dry my mouth has become and I have to sip cold coffee before I can ask the question. “Has he recorded dreams since then?”

  “No. Before this, he was having dreams of his parents, caring for them, watching over them.” Sid looks at me and says deliberately, “Just like your dreams.”

  I shake my head and turn from him to look at Roger. He starts the machine again. There are hours and hours of the tapes to hear, and after another fifteen minutes of them I am ravenous. It is almost nine. I signal Roger to stop, and suggest that we all have scrambled eggs here, but Staunton vetoes this,

  “I promised Miss Dorothea that we would return to the hotel. I warned her that it might be late. She said that was all right.”

  So we go back to Sagamore House and wait for the special of the day. On Sunday night there is no menu. I find myself shying away from the implications of the dream analysis again and again, and try to concentrate instead on my schedule for the next several months. I know that I have agreed to work with Dr. Waldbaum on at least six operations, and probably there are others that I agreed to and have forgotten. He is a thoracic surgeon and his operations take from four to eight or even ten hours, and for that long I control death, keep life in abeyance. I pay no attention to the talk that is going on between Roger and Sid, and I wonder about getting an ambulance driver to bring Father in during the winter. If only our weather were more predictable; there might be snowdrifts six feet high on the road, or it might be balmy.

  “I said, why do you think you should bring your father home, here to Somerset?” I find that my eyes are on Staunton, and obviously he thinks I have been listening to him, but the question takes me by surprise.

  “He’s my father. He needs me.”

  Sid asks, “Has anyone in town encouraged you in this idea?”

  Somehow, although I have tried to withdraw from them, I am again the center of their attention, and I feel uncomfortable and annoyed. “Of course not. This is my decision alone. Dr. Warren tried to discourage it, in fact, as Dorothea did, and Mr. Larson.”

  “Same thing,” Sid says to Roger, who nods. Staunton looks at them and turns to me.

  “Miss Matthews, do you mean to say that everyone you’ve talked to about this has really tried to discourage it? These people are your father’s friends. Why would they do that?”

  My face feels stiff and I am thinking that this is too much, but I say, “They all seem to think he’s better off in the nursing home.”

  “And isn’t he?”

  “In certain respects, yes. But I am qualified to handle him, you know. No one here seems to realize just how well qualified I really am. They think of me as the girl they used to know playing jump rope in the back yard.”

  Dorothea brings icy cucumber soup and we are silent until she leaves again. The grandfather clock chimes ten, and I am amazed at how swiftly the day has gone. By now most of the townspeople are either in bed, or getting ready. Sunday is a hard day, with the trip to church, visits, activities that they don’t have often enough to become accustomed to. They will sleep well tonight, I think. I look at Sid and think that he should sleep well too tonight. His eyes are sunken-looking, and I suppose he has lost weight; he looks older, more mature than he did the first time I met him.

  “Are you going to set up your equipment tonight?” I ask. “Any of the other boys volunteer?”

  “No,” Roger says shortly. He looks at Sid and says, “As a matter of fact, we decided today not to put any of them in it again here.”

  “You’re leaving then?”

  “Sending all the kids back, but Sid and I’ll be staying for a while. And Dr. Staunton.”

  I put down my spoon and lean back, waiting for something that is implicit in the way Roger stops and Sid looks murderously at him. I watch Sid now.

  “We think you should leave, too,” he says.

  I look to Roger, who nods, and then at Staunton. He is so petulant-looking, even pursing his lips. He fidgets and says, “Miss Matthews, may I suggest something? You won’t take it amiss?” I simply wait. He goes on, “I think you should return to the city and make an appointment with the psychiatrist at Columbia.”

  “And the others you are sending out? Should they also see doctors?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do think so.”

  Sid is examining his bowl of soup with great care, and Roger is having trouble with his cigarette lighter. “But not them?” I ask Staunton, pointing at Roger and Sid.

  “Them too,” he says reluctantly. Sid looks amused now and Roger manages to light his cigarette.

  “Is this your opinion too?” I ask Sid. “That I should see Dr. Calridge?”

  “No. Just go away from here, and stay away.”

  Dorothea is bringing in a cart now and I wonder how much she has heard. I see her lined face and the pain in her eyes and I know that she has heard a lot of it, if not all. She catches my gaze and nods firmly. Then she serves us: sizzling ham steaks, french fried fruits, pineapple, apple rings, bananas, sweet potato soufflé.

  It is after eleven when we are finished with dinner, and by now Sid is almost asleep. He says, “I’ve got to go. Will you set things up, Rog?”

  “Sure. Damn shame that Doug pooped out on us. We need all the data we
can get now.”

  “I can do the recording,” I say.

  At almost the same instant Staunton says, “I thought I was going to record both of you tonight.”

  Roger and Sid look embarrassed, and Sid says after a pause, “Dr. Staunton, if it’s all the same with you, we’ll let Janet do it.”

  “You really think I’m that biased? That I can’t get objective data?”

  Sid stands up and steadies himself with one hand on the table. “I’m too tired to be polite,” he says, “and too tired to argue. So, yes, I think you’re too biased to record the dreams. Roger, will you show Janet what we’re doing?”

  Roger stays with me until the eye-movement trace shows that Sid is having his first dream, and he watches as I call Sid on the phone and turn on the recorder, and then switch it off again. Then Roger goes to bed in the second room and I see that his electrodes are all working, and I am alone watching the two sets of moving lines. The mountains and valleys of life, I think, watching them peak and level out, and peak again.

  There is no mistaking the start of REM sleep; the rapid eye movements cause a sharp change in the pattern of the peaks and valleys that is more nearly like a waking EEG than that of a sleeping person. I call Sid again, and listen to him describe climbing a mountain, only to slip back down again and again. Roger is on a raft that keeps getting caught up on a tide and brought back to a shore that he is desperately trying to escape.

  The same dream, different only in details. Like the dreams I heard earlier on the tape recorder. Like my own.

  At three in the morning Staunton joins me. I can tell that he hasn’t been asleep, but I wish he had kept his insomnia to himself. He says, “You might need help, I won’t bother you. I’ll just sit over here and read.” He looks haggard, and like Sid, he seems to have aged since coming to Somerset. I turn my attention to the EEGs again. Roger is dreaming.

  “Peaceful now, watching a ball game from a great distance, very silent everywhere.” I bite my lips as I listen to this strange voice that seems to have a different accent, a different intonation; flatter and slower, of course, but apart from that, it is a changed voice. It is the dream of contentment, wanting nothing, needing nothing. This is the dream that my six people keep reporting to me, modified from person to person, but the same. Suddenly Roger’s voice sharpens as he recalls the rest of the dream, and now there is a sense of urgency in his reporting. “And I had to get out of it, but couldn’t move. I was frozen there, watching the game, afraid of something I couldn’t see, but knew was right behind me. Couldn’t move.”

  I glance at Staunton and he is staring at the moving pens. Roger has become silent once more, so I turn off the tape recorder and look also at the continuing record. Typical nightmare pattern.

  Staunton yawns and I turn to him and say, “Why don’t you try to get some sleep? Really, I’m fine. I slept almost all day, remember?”

  He yawns again, then says, “If ... if I seem to be dreaming, will you waken me?” I nod and he stretches out on the couch and is asleep almost instantly.

  There is a coffee maker with strong coffee hot in it, and I pour myself a cup, and try to read the book that Roger provided, a spy thriller. I can’t keep my mind on it. The hotel is no more noisy at night than my own house, but the noises are not the same, and I find myself listening to them, rustlings in the halls, distant doors opening and closing, the occasional squeak of the porch swing. I sit up straighter. A woman’s laugh? Not at three fifteen in the morning, surely. I have more coffee and wander to the window. A light on in the Sayer house? I blink and when I look again, I know that it was my imagination. I remember how their baby used to keep night hours, and smile. The baby would be fifteen or sixteen now, at least. I used to baby-sit for them now and then, and the child never slept.

  I return to my chair by the electroencephalograph and see that Sid has started a new dream. I reach for the phone, waiting for the peak to level off again, and slowly withdraw my hand. He is dreaming a long one this time. After five minutes I begin to feel uneasy, but still I wait. Roger has said to rouse the sleeper after ten minutes of dreaming, if he hasn’t shown any sign of being through by then. I wait, and suddenly jerk awake and stab my finger at the phone button. He doesn’t answer.

  I forget to turn on the recorder, but rush into the next room to bring him out of this dream turned into nightmare, and when I touch his shoulder, I am in it too.

  Somerset is gay and alive with playing children, and sun umbrellas everywhere. There are tables on the lawn of Sagamore House, and ladies in long white skirts moving among them, laughing happily. The Governor is due and Dorothea and Annie are bustling about, ordering the girls in black aprons this way and that, and everywhere there is laughter. A small boy approaches the punch bowl with a wriggling frog held tightly in one hand, and he is caught and his knickers are pulled down summarily and the sounds of hand on bottom are plainly heard, followed by wails. I am so busy, and someone keeps trying to pull me away and talk to me. I shake him off and run to the table where Father and Mother are sitting, and see to it that they have punch, and then swirl back to the kitchen where Dorothea is waiting for me to help her with the ice sculpture that is the centerpiece. It is a tall boy with curly hair rising up from a block of ice, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I want to weep for him because in a few hours he will be gone. I slip on a piece of ice and fall, fall ... fall ...

  I catch the wires attached to Sid and pull them loose, half pull him from the bed, and we end up in a heap. He holds me tightly for a long time, until we are both breathing normally again, and my shaking has stopped, and his too.

  There is pale dawn light in the room. Enough to see that his dark hair is damp with sweat, and curly on his forehead. He pushes it back and very gently moves me aside and disentangles himself from the wires.

  “We have to get out of here,” he says.

  Staunton is sound asleep on the couch, breathing deeply but normally, and Roger is also sleeping. His graph shows that he has had nightmares several times.

  We take our coffee into the room where Sid slept, and sit at the window drinking it, watching morning come to Somerset. I say, “They don’t know, do they?”

  “Of course not.”

  Poor Haddie appears at the far end of the street, walking toward Mr. Larson’s store. He shuffles his feet as he moves, never lifting them more than an inch. I shudder and turn away.

  “Isn’t there something that we should do? Report this, or something?”

  “Who would believe it? Staunton doesn’t, and he has seen it over and over this week.”

  A door closes below us and I know Dorothea is up now, in the kitchen starting coffee. “I was in her dream, I think,” I say.

  I look down into my cup and think of the retirement villages all over the south, and again I shiver. “They seem so accepting, so at peace with themselves, just waiting for the end.” I shake the last half inch of coffee back and forth. I ask, “Is that what happened with me? Did I not want to wake up?”

  Sid nods. “I was taking the electrodes off your eyes when you snapped out of it, but yours wasn’t a nightmare. It just wouldn’t end. That’s what frightened me, that it wasn’t a nightmare. You didn’t seem to be struggling against it at all. I wonder what brought you out of it this time.”

  I remember the gleaming ice sculpture, the boy with curly hair who will be gone so soon, and I know why I fought to get away. Someday I think probably I’ll tell him, but not now, not so soon. The sun is high and the streets are bright now. I stand up. “I’m sorry that I forgot to turn on the tape recorder and ask you right away what the dream was. Do you remember it now?”

  He hesitates only a moment and then shakes his head. Maybe someday he’ll tell me, but not now, not so soon.

  I leave him and find Dorothea waiting for me in the parlor. She draws me inside and shuts the door and takes a deep breath. “Janet, I am telling you that you must not bring your father back here to stay. It would be the worst po
ssible thing for you to do.”

  I can’t speak for a moment, but I hug her, and try not to see her etched face and the white hair, but to see her as she was when she was still in long skirts, with pretty pink cheeks and sparkling eyes. I can’t manage it. “I know,” I say finally. “I know.”

  Walking home again, hot in the sunlight, listening to the rustlings of Somerset, imagining the unseen life that flits here and there out of my line of vision, I wonder if memories can become tangible, live a life of their own. I will pack, I think, and later in the day drive back up the mountain, back to the city, but not back to my job. Not back to administering death, even temporary death. Perhaps I shall go into psychiatry, or research psychology. As I begin to pack, my house stirs with movement.

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