The Night Companion
by Jeffrey Greene
Chapter 4: Write Down Your Dreams
part 2
Part 1 appears in this issue.
The question seemed to agitate him. He rolled out of the chair and darted across the room as lightly as a spider and put the ferret back in its cage. “That’s none of your...” He paused, shook his head. “No, I never go out there.”
“Any idea what it’s used for?”
He looked sharply at me. “Nosy, aren’t you?”
“Just curious.”
“My father grows his mushrooms down there. At least, he used to. Specimens he brought back from Brazil.”
“That makes sense.” Changing the subject, I said: “Your mother doesn’t know that I know about your brother’s... suicide. Should I tell her?”
“Why ask me? She’s your friend.”
“You won’t advise me?”
“She should’ve told you: I don’t take sides in this family.”
“She did. Told me something else, too: that your ferrets were some kind of defense against your father.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” he said, his eyes veiled and alert.
“What? That she’d tell me?”
“That once she started talking, she wouldn’t stop. Mother’s alone too much. Since my brother killed himself, she’s been like a prisoner here.” He’d been staring at a pen-and-ink drawing of a demonic face as vast as the sun, peering over a desert horizon, its ravenous glare fixed on a tiny sleeping town. He turned and met my eyes warily. “That’s why it’s good you’re here.”
“I don’t mean to pry—”
He giggled. “Of course you do. Just say what you want.”
“All right. Are you afraid of your father?”
“No. Next question.”
“Why is everyone else so scared of him?”
“Why do you care?”
“Like I said, I’m curious.”
“How curious?”
“Well—”
“Curious enough to find out?”
“I think so.”
“Okay, here’s whatcha do: go downstairs to the spare room and take a nap.”
“You’re serious?”
“Seriouser and seriouser. Then write down the dreams you remember as soon as you wake up. That’s important: write them down immediately, then come back and read them to me.”
I recalled the dream on Friday. “I don’t think your mother wants me sleeping on her time.”
“That’s your problem. You wanted to know.” He sat down and flicked on the TV. “It’s time for my program. Come back tomorrow night, okay? Same time.”
“All right. Goodnight, then.” Without taking his eyes off the TV, Roland raised his hand in a backward wave. I closed the door and stood in the hallway. He was serious, I was sure of that. But if his reclusion was the complex result of a dreadful childhood, the still-fresh scars of which manifested as nightmares, why would he think that his father’s purely historical menace would affect my dreams? Was that not evidence of delusion?
The problem was how well it fit with everything else Carla had told me, and my own limited experience: her insistence on being awake when her husband was asleep, the expression of alarm on Catherine’s face when I woke up, and my bizarre dream in which the professor, whom I’d barely glimpsed, figured prominently. I wanted to try the experiment, if only to prove Roland wrong, but at the moment I couldn’t think of how to get away from Carla for ten minutes, much less an hour or two. What if I just asked her permission? She’d been hinting around the subject since the beginning, as if uncertain of my reaction, but clearly feeling me out.
When I came in, she was sitting at her desk staring intently at a pad of yellow legal paper, a pen in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and as I approached she snorted with disgust, crossed out a line and threw down her pen. I started to pour myself a cup of coffee, then changed my mind and poured some water instead. “What are you writing?” I asked.
She shifted in her chair, eyes hidden by the hand holding the cigarette, and shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Every now and then I get the old feeling again, of wanting to start something new. So I try and it’s just awful. I can’t... I don’t breathe that air anymore. Of childhood, I mean. It’s all gone. There are probably more washed-up writers of children’s books than any other genre.”
“You’ve told me very little about your writing career,” I said.
“Not much to tell. During my thirties, I published five skinny books for children, and only one of them did any good. I’m still getting modest royalties from it, twenty years later..”
“Why not write your memoirs? That would make harrowing reading.”
She shook her head. “I can’t write about real things. I’ve tried, and it’s like sticking pins in my navel. I’d start drinking again, I know I would. But writing children’s stories, even when I was drinking a fifth of vodka a day, was like that... what was that lovely title by Robert Heinlein? The Door into Summer. If I could just get back to that place for three hours a day, I wouldn’t need you.”
“Thanks.”
“Tom, you know I was joking,” she said contritely, but smiling as she said it. “Forgive me, please. You know how glad I am that you answered the ad. Don’t you?”
“Sure,” I said. “But what if a sixty-year old nurse had answered it instead?”
“A sixty-year old nurse did answer it. I chose you.”
“I’m flattered. But to be honest, I think you hired me for something other than my bad chess.”
She reddened, looked at her hands. “Maybe I like you.”
“Maybe I like you, too. But I still think there’s another reason you hired me.”
“And what might that be?” She asked the question smilingly, but her drumming fingers betrayed her unease.
I leaned forward. “You want an ally. To help you fight your war.” She exhaled disgustedly and shook her head. “Sure you do. Or maybe a mercenary, since you’re paying me. What do you want me to do? Threaten him? Lean on him a little bit?”
“I want you stay away from him.”
“You’re sure you don’t want me to kill him?”
“My God, you’re worse than Roland. No subtle tints to his imagination, only lurid extremes. Television has done that to your whole generation.”
“Let’s stay on the subject. So you don’t want me to kill him?”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Allies have to share military secrets. If you want me to help, you’ll have to be more trusting. I need to know what you’re afraid of.”
She shrugged indifferently. “The usual things: old age, sickness, death. What are you afraid of?”
“That you’ll fire me if I push too hard. Which would be a shame, because there’s something going on here I’d like to understand.”
“I’m not going to fire you. But there’s nothing you need to understand, because you were lucky enough to be born outside this family. All you need to know is that I value your friendship, and your welfare, more than I can tell. So please don’t press me. It has to be this way, believe me.”
“All right.” So I’d have to go behind her back; so be it. “I’m hungry all of a sudden. Are you?”
“No, but if you’d like to make a sandwich...?”
“Sounds great,” I said, heading for the door. “You stay here and try to write something. I won’t be long.”
It had been a brutally hot day, denied the absolution of a thunderstorm, and the night was suffocating. Sliding open the glass door, I noted that all lights other than Carla’s and Roland’s were off. I turned on the light in the kitchen, poured myself a glass of milk and drank it down. I found a pad of paper and a pen by the telephone, left the light on and went back to the walkway.
Easing open the living room door, I closed it carefully behind me, groped my way to the couch and sat there for a minute or two, trying to calm my heartbeat, then took off my shoes and belt and lay down. It was warm and close in the room; I got up and opened the door, lay back down. The velour cushion had a musty smell, and I heard the dry skitter of roach legs on paper somewhere behind me.
I’m traveling on a dirt road at night, my body floating as if underwater, pulling myself over the ground with my hands, which are covered by torn garbage bags like makeshift gloves. Crowds of desperately poor Black men line the road, occasionally grabbing at the bags on my hands, which are worth at least something...
I have arrived at a 16th-century Spanish fort converted into a hotel, overlooking a black river lined with alligators. On the grounds, three men are walking back and forth over a patch of barren earth on which a house has stood, holding cigarette lighters and looking for loose wires, which they light like fuses and burn back to the source.
Now I’m walking through cavernous rooms and avoiding those guarded by huge alligators, their threat augmented by their stillness. Upstairs, I am looking over a doctor’s shoulder at Larry Craven, a ward clerk I’ve known from my hospital days, who has been surgically transformed into a monster. He is sitting up in bed, ailing and miserable, his hollow, seven-inch tusks hanging down past his chin. His shoulders seem enlarged and his hair is like a cloth headdress.
The doctor reaches out and pulls off the teeth with no apparent effort, revealing pulpy, rotten gums, and then unbuttons the patient’s shirt, which has hidden the scaly torso of a lizard man. “This is only the first stage,” says the doctor and, though he is looking at Larry, I know the words are addressed to me. The white-coated back is hunched at the shoulders, the gray hair curling over his collar.
The doctor’s head begins to turn toward me, and then I’m flying rapidly backwards through the door and out of the house. I am floating a few feet over a grassy prairie, curled into a tight ball and tumbling end over end in slow motion, the empty plains stretching away in all directions...
I opened my eyes and lay still, trying to fix in my memory as many images from the dream as possible before they slipped away, noting that the effort itself seemed to hurry the process of erasure. Groping for the pad and pen, I wrote quickly in the dark, then folded the page and stuffed it in my pocket, put on my shoes and belt, combed my hair and stepped outside.
I looked at my watch: twenty-five minutes had passed. I went back to the kitchen, put the pad and pen where I’d found them, then unfolded the paper and read the last sentence: “Doctor says, ‘This is only the first stage.’ He was Professor Morhan.”
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
