The Sleepwalkers Page 13

She smiles, for the first time. “Of course,” she says.

  As Ron walks out to his car he has a strange feeling, like just after an argument when you remember everything you should’ve said. Only there’s no argument, no “should’ve said,” and no reason to have a strange feeling.

  Please, Lord, don’t let me get

  any stranger in my old age.

  Ron digs out his keys and drives away, without any idea of the terrible danger Caleb is in.

  Chapter Nine

  TRANSCRIPT—Patient #62, SESSION #85

  (In this session, the doctor introduces “The Dream Viewer Machine.”)

  DIRECTOR: Well, Patient Sixty-two, you’ve been making excellent progress, don’t you agree?

  (The patient nods.)

  DIRECTOR: Have you been enjoying the radio we put in your room for you?

  (The patient nods.)

  DIRECTOR: Good. Let’s get started then. We’re beginning a new mode of therapy today. Put on the helmet.

  PATIENT #62: I don’t want to.

  DIRECTOR: And lie on the table.

  PATIENT #62: It’s cold . . . Something’s poking me inside the helmet.

  DIRECTOR: Those are cathodes. With this machine I will be able to watch your dreams, just like a film or television show. That’s pretty exciting, isn’t it?

  PATIENT #62: It looks like a metal dish attached to an old TV by some wires.

  DIRECTOR: You don’t think it will work?

  (The patient doesn’t answer.)

  DIRECTOR: Well?

  PATIENT #62: I’m afraid to say.

  DIRECTOR: Then lie down on the table and we’ll find out. Now relax.

  (The director plays the relaxation tape and begins talking the patient down into hypnosis.)

  PATIENT #62: Director, I have to ask you a question.

  DIRECTOR: You’re supposed to be embracing the hypnosis.

  PATIENT #62: Please?

  DIRECTOR: Yes, Patient Sixty-two, quickly.

  PATIENT #62: Are you a real doctor?

  DIRECTOR: Why yes, of course. I studied at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, among other places. Why do you ask—because my methods seem unconventional?

  PATIENT #62: No.

  DIRECTOR: Why then?

  PATIENT #62: Because somebody told me you’re not really a doctor at all.

  DIRECTOR: And who was that, one of the other patients?

  PATIENT #62: No.

  DIRECTOR: Who then?

  PATIENT #62: I’m afraid to say.

  DIRECTOR: Why would you be afraid to tell me something? Have I ever hurt you?

  PATIENT #62: Not yet, but . . .

  DIRECTOR: But what?

  PATIENT #62: But you will.

  DIRECTOR: I thought we had dispelled all those silly fears. What did we decide together? About the hole in your head? About the dreams?

  PATIENT #62: There is no hole in my head and there are no dreams. Having no dreams is just part of the healing process. But I did have a dream the other night.

  DIRECTOR: And what did you dream?

  PATIENT #62: That I was sleepwalking.

  DIRECTOR: And what else?

  PATIENT #62: Nothing else. That’s all I remember.

  DIRECTOR: You’re an interesting case, Patient Sixty-two. Let’s try the Dream Viewer, shall we? Please close your eyes.

  (The director urges the patient into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep. He then observes the screen and speaks into his tape recorder.)

  DIRECTOR: It’s difficult to make out what I’m seeing here. Okay, this is better. It’s a girl, a younger version of the patient, I imagine. She’s running through a labyrinth made of shrubbery. She’s come upon a lake. She knows there’s something in the water, alligators is the feeling, and now she’s sliding, like a waterslide, however she’s passed the surface of the water and is still going down. And the patient has landed in a pile of clothes. Clearly, we’re picking up the smell of laundry detergent, and the clothes are warm, fresh out of the dryer, I gather. And she’s poking her head out of the pile. She must be very small. The sun is very bright through the window. There’s the silhouette of a woman laughing, and there’s a girl in the basket next to her, also very small, I’m sure representing the twin sister. The sister whispers in her ear. I’m having trouble making out the whisper, but it sounds like bees buzzing, not words—like a big hive of angry hornets, kind of frightening, maybe causing some of the distress we’re seeing. Okay, now it’s changed. She’s in a hallway; it’s dark. There’s a door with a light shining out of it. And she opens the door slowly, and sees—what am I seeing here? It’s washed out from going from the dark hall then into the bright light. Okay, here we go. We have a girl lying on a ceramic table, very pale, dead maybe, something on her head. She’s turning now, looking, sees a man sitting in front of a TV. It’s me, or somebody very closely resembling me. How interesting. Okay, now she walks around the chair, looking over my shoulder. She looks at the TV—

  (Patient #62 then begins screaming. After some effort, the director is finally able to wake her.)

  DIRECTOR: Patient Sixty-two. Patient Sixty-two! Calm down now. Stop crying, or you’ll be confined to your room for a week. There, that’s better. Now tell me, what was it that made you so frightened?

  PATIENT #62: I’m afraid to say.

  DIRECTOR: You must say. If you ever want to make progress and live a normal life, you must cooperate with your therapy. What upset you?

  PATIENT #62: I was dreaming. And I saw you and me, in this room, just like we are now. And you were looking at the TV, to see what I was dreaming. And . . .

  DIRECTOR: And what?

  PATIENT #62: And I saw the TV screen and . . .

  DIRECTOR: And?

  PATIENT #62: And . . . there was nothing there. It was blank.

  (The Director smiles.)

  DIRECTOR: And if the TV is blank, how was I able to see your dreams, do you think? That would be impossible.

  (The patient begins crying.)

  DIRECTOR: What? Why are you crying?

  PATIENT #62: Look. The TV. It’s not even plugged in.

  DIRECTOR: Of course the machine works. If it didn’t work, how would I know that you dreamt of playing in a basket of clothes with your twin sister when you were just a child?

  (The patient becomes distraught, crying, shaking her head.)

  DIRECTOR: How would I know that, Patient Sixty-two?

  PATIENT #62: She says . . . she says the drowned ones tell you.

  DIRECTOR: Who says that? I promise if you tell me, I won’t get angry. Who’s talking to you?

  PATIENT #62: My sister.

  DIRECTOR: And where is your sister? I’d very much like to meet her.

  PATIENT #62: You can’t.

  DIRECTOR: Why.

  PATIENT #62: Because she’s dead. Stop, stop smiling at me! I want to go home now. Billy was supposed to take me home. I can’t take this. I can’t take this. The devil is coming, and you know it, and you know it, and you know it! I hear you, you sing his song at night, you—

  DIRECTOR: I think we’ve accomplished enough for this session. Patient Sixty-two appears to have gotten a pen somewhere, and attacks the director with it, stabbing it into his forearm. The director strikes her, knocking her unconscious, then directs the orderlies to undress the patient and remove her into the basement. End of session.

  DESPITE HIS DISCOMFORT, by the time the doctor walks in, Caleb is fast asleep.

  The doctor clears his throat. “Young man?”

  Caleb starts and sits up fast, gripping the crunchy exam-table paper hard with his unbroken hand.

  The doctor backs up a step, blinking fast.

  “You scared me,” Caleb murmurs.

  The doctor, “Doctor Rodgers,” according to the embroidery on his white coat, smiles warmly, and Caleb likes him instantly. He has salt-and-pepper hair, overgrown eyebrows, and must be sixty years old or so. He’s short of stature, round of body, and red of face.

  �
��Well, don’t worry about a thing,” he says. “Nothing to be scared of here. We’ll fix you right up. Now, I heard something about an arm.”

  Caleb presents the arm.

  “Oh, ouch. That doesn’t look too healthy, now does it? Okay, I’m going to touch you now, it might hurt a little. Tell me what hurts, okay. Does that hurt?”

  Caleb nods.

  “Okay, how ’bout now? Not really? Okay, what about this? Ouch, okay, sorry. That’s it, then. Let me just feel around here for a minute. Okay. Well, we’re going to have to X-ray it first, and then I’m going to set it, which is going to hurt a little bit, but we have to do it to make sure you heal right, okay? I’ll just order the X-ray and my nurse will be in soon to take care of that for you.”

  Doctor Rodgers sits on the stool with wheels, puts on his glasses, and writes something in a file.

  “I imagine that hurts a good deal, doesn’t it? I’m going to order you something for pain as well. That might make setting the bone a little easier to take if the painkillers have set in.”

  Caleb hears all this from inside a black hole. He doesn’t care if his arm is amputated. He doesn’t care if his arm never heals again. The problem isn’t that his arm is broken, it’s that the world is broken.

  For the first time, he notices that one of Dr. Rodgers’s eyelids is violently twitching. Blink-blink-blink-blink-blink.

  It’s disconcerting. He wonders how Mrs. Rodgers, if there is a Mrs. Rodgers, can stand it.

  “ . . . Are there any medications you’re allergic to?”

  Caleb shakes his head.

  “Are there any medical conditions we need to be aware of?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever experienced shortness of breath? Loss of vision? Dementia? Anmesia? Chest pains? Leg pains? Chronic headaches? Chronic joint pain? Nightmares? Back pain?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Well, nightmares, yes, I guess, sometimes. All the rest, no.”

  “Alrighty!” Dr. Rodgers says, his left eye snapping open and closed like the wings of a dragonfly. He claps the folder shut and stands. “The nurse’ll be right in.”

  The door closes behind the doctor and the room is silent.

  Caleb marinates in his own confusion, disbelief, grief, even restless apathy. It’s disbelief that wins out, though. He just can’t believe in his own experiences. Reality seems as fragile as a spiderweb.

  The nurse comes in. She doesn’t say anything, just half smiles and sets something down on the counter, rolls up Caleb’s sleeve and begins making a small, circular scrubbing motion with an alcohol swab on his shoulder.

  “Dang, you’re filthy,” she says. “What you been doing, campin’?”

  “Yeah,” Caleb says absently.

  “Uck. Look,” she says, showing him the blackened alcohol swab. “You might shoulda jumped in the river for a swim,” she says and tosses the swab into the wastebasket.

  She gets out a syringe and a tiny bottle. Caleb watches her hold the bottle upside down, draw the clear medicine out from it, then pull the long needle free again.

  “You from around here?” Caleb asks.

  “Born and raised,” she says.

  “You ever know a pair of twin girls, Christine and Anna?”

  “I did at one time,” she says, flicking the syringe. “But one’s dead or something and the other one’s over at the Dream Center getting her head shrunk. That’s who you meant, right?”

  “Yeah,” Caleb says.

  “Well, maybe you’ll see her there. Little prick now, honey.” She sticks the needle in his arm, pushes hard, empties the syringe and pulls the needle out again fast, replacing it with a cotton ball.

  “Hold that there,” she says, turning away to dispose of the syringe. “Now,” she says, “a handsome boy like you ain’t from around here, I know. You got a girlfriend back home?”

  One time, Bean had dared Caleb to ride a wildly spinning fair ride, the Gravitron, ten times in a row. Now Caleb feels just like he did getting off from that tenth ride.

  “What did you give me?” he asks.

  She raises her eyebrows sensually. “Sup’m that’ll knock the pain right out of you, and then some.”

  Red panic is leaking into Caleb’s brain. He can’t feel his feet.

  “What did you say a minute ago, about seeing Christine?”

  “Well, I don’t know as you’ll see her, but you’ll sure be neighbors.”

  “I’ve gotta go,” Caleb says. He tries to get up, but his legs give out from under him. The nurse’s quick hands are the only thing that saves his face from smashing on the tile floor.

  “Hold on now,” she says, “before you hurt yourself again. There’s worse things than going to the Dream Center . . . like going there a virgin.”

  She smiles her sexiest smile, the one she practices in front of the mirror sometimes, but it’s too late. The guy is already passed out on the floor, drooling.

  No real point in getting his number anyway. Even though the Dream Center is supposed to be a great place and all, she hasn’t seen it cure anyone of bad dreams yet. Come to think of it, she hasn’t heard of anyone being let out at all, cured or not.

  Creedence Clearwater Revival. Let people call rock and roll the music of the devil all they want; some of it, not all but some, is divine. Like blades of sunlight cutting through treetops is divine, like ice cream is divine, like Keisha was—is, is—divine. Rock and roll. Beautiful.

  Who knows how people miss the implicit meaning behind all these little miracles, but they do. And Ron knows he’s no exception. He’s lived in the dark for years, wandering the catacombs of disillusionment, looking for the stairway back up to faith. And today, for some reason, as he beats out the rhythm to the song with his “hook” on the steering wheel, he feels a little closer.

  Bitter clouds litter the sky, fluffy white on top and heavy gray on the bottom, portending rain, but the sun is still out, the sky is still mostly blue, and Ron feels better than he has in a long time. More awake. More real. He continues tapping “the hook” on the steering wheel, and with his good hands hoists the last bite of a Whopper into his mouth, then takes a sip of iced tea. Hudsonville’s only fast food restaurant, an outdated Burger King, is dead now, at eleven AM. Ron looks next door, through the drive-through, at the sign of the doctor’s office next door. “Dr. Rodgers” is all it says. He eats some fries. The back lot where he sits is empty, save for a few stray burger wrappers skittered across by the wind. Some seagulls pick at stray fries by the Dumpster.

  Ron tries to think of the next step, the road ahead.

  Probably, he’ll go back to Panama City. The next check from good old Uncle Sam should be arriving any time, and the wallet’s getting a little thin.

  Still, there’s something here. Something going on, something happening. For the first time in years, the dismal still life of his world is churned up, like a shaken snow globe.

  And Keisha might yet be near, yes she might.

  But where to turn? Not to the sheriff. He’s tried the police for years and all they seem good for is putting paper into files, drinking coffee, nodding, and looking at their watches. But where then? Maybe the FBI should step in. After all, they’re the big dogs, the Saint Bernards of law enforcement. And maybe they could crack the whip on these lamebrained, limp-dick, small-town, Barney Fife pigs.

  He takes a deep breath to calm himself. No use getting his piss boiling again. That wouldn’t lead to anything but indigestion.

  No, the FBI isn’t the answer. He’s tried them. He’s written letters to the DA, to the governor (that worthless jackass), he’s seen the FBI agents—Marley and Grovner were their names—take down his statements and stash them away in a nice, neat manila folder, never to be seen again. Never a call returned. Never a letter acknowledged.

  Piss in the wind, Dirty Dan would’ve said.

  Still, there’s something going on here, all around him; he can feel it in the air, in the ground. Like getting near
a big machine— even with the earplugs in, you feel the vibration. (Ron Bent knows about machines. He ran a printing press for almost three months in Dothan. Wasn’t much good at that, though.)

  The truth is all around him, and it’s big, big as the miracle of life, big as God, and just as hard to see, praise him.

  And that kid. If somebody took his friend, then at least there’s an ally. Somebody on the same road, somebody else who maybe knows a piece of the truth.

  Ron shovels a handful of fries into his mouth, and for the first time in years, maybe in his life, he wallows in the possibility that he’s lonely. Really, desperately lonely. Because right now, the thought of a brother-in-arms is as tempting as a beer is to a drunk. And Ron Bent knows something about that. He was always a pretty good drunk.

  There’s only one problem, and that’s the fact that the kid didn’t seem too eager for a friend or too interested in the handicapped old bastard who had given him a ride to the doctor’s. The kid had hardly uttered a word. And why should he? Why would somebody want to take up with a bitter, crotchety old screwup like Ron anyway?

  Lord,

  Grant me the humility to face myself

  And the strength to walk my road alone,

  Because that’s the path you’ve laid out for me,

  Hard as it may be,

  And—

  Ron freezes in the midst of his sip of iced tea.

  He almost laughs—it’s that strange a sight he sees through his windshield.

  The pretty young nurse and a small, timid-looking doctor appear at the back door of the office, looking over their shoulders like a couple of spies in a pulp magazine, hauling a limp, heavy object to the waiting door of a silver Lincoln Town Car. And that object is a body. And that body—Ron knows without knowing, since it’s too far to see for sure—is the kid he dropped off half an hour ago.

  Ron is very still, staring. He breathes in slow, and as he does his mouthful of sweetened tea jets down the wrong pipe. By the time he stops choking, the town car is already pulling onto the street. But no amount of coughing or blurred, teary-eyed vision will stop Ron Bent, not now, and he slaps his car into gear and lurches forward, spilling some tea on his lap, not caring. As he pulls onto the road with a bottom-thunking “whack” and punches the throttle, he can almost hear little Keisha laughing, and sweet damn does it sound good.