Spin Dry

by Greg Hollingshead

  Alex stopped filing. “Well, la-di-da. Why the hell not?”

  “First let me tell you who Leon thought he was, OK? It goes with the Wilkes/PAGO stuff.”

  Silver rolled his eyes. “OK OK. Tell me, tell me.”

  ——

  Over the next few weeks Leon, though he communicated little, was a new man. His food shopping became competent. Innovative meals were on the table when Rachel got home from work. His dope intake decreased to nil. PAGO, or at least the route to Hal it promised, had given him a new lease on life in the world.

  And then one night Rachel came downstairs to find him pacing the living room spinning the dark glasses he now wore. “Leon, what’s wrong?” she cried, falling onto the sofa. Still pacing, Leon explained.

  At the previous meeting Wilkes had refused to release the names of members of the subcommittee who had recommended that all meetings be held at his house, and so that night’s meeting had been boycotted by all members except Leon, who did not think about such things. Consequently he got a chanceto talk with Wilkes, face to face. “And boy was he nervous. Over and over he kept coming back to PAGO. That organization is a real crutch for him. But after about an hour, by asking questions, I steered him into a personal area. I didn’t find the connection exactly, but I found out something very, very interesting: Why Cam Wilkes is an agoraphobic.”

  “Oh really?” Rachel’s assumption that Cam Wilkes’ agoraphobia was a surface function of deeper craziness had prevented her from ever wondering this.

  Nevertheless, Leon told her Wilkes’ story.

  As a youth with a special talent for the trumpet, Cam Wilkes had once fallen deeply in love with a beautiful girl who happened to ride the same bus that he rode home from his music lessons. Every week for two years he rode that bus with this beautiful girl without being able to muster the courage to speak to her. One day his music teacher, looking a little wan, ended the lesson early. Reaching the bus stop earlier than usual, Wilkes mounted what he thought was his normal bus, but the beautiful girl was not on it. After a few blocks he realized what had happened. Unable to bear the prospect of not seeing her for another whole week, he got off at her stop to wait. As she stepped down from their usual bus, he put the trumpet to his lips and played a melody he had composed while waiting, entitled, Melody for the Girl on My Bus. The girl glanced briefly in Wilkes’ direction and hurried on. His music teacher sank into a coma that week, Wilkes took a different bus to other lessons, and he never saw the beautiful girl again. He confessed to Leonthat his withdrawal from the outside world had begun at that moment of rejection.

  “What a terribly sad story,” Rachel said. By now they were both slumped at the kitchen table.

  “I know. I really sympathize.”

  “He’s still in love with her?”

  Leon nodded. “And terrified.”

  “The poor guy.”

  “There’s something else.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “I got him to play The Melody for the Girl on My Bus.”

  “Oh no, Leon. It wasn’t the same one he played for us.”

  “Yup. I know that piece in my bones.”

  “Leon,” Rachel began carefully. “Are you really thinking there might be some connection between Hal and Cam Wilkes himself?”

  “Some connection, obviously. This has been established.”

  “But Leon! He’s not at all like the guy in your dreams!”

  “You know him that well, eh?”

  “Pardon?”

  In answer Leon got up and went back into the living room. There Rachel found him on the shag, staring at the ceiling.

  This was ridiculous. “Leon, what is going on in your mind? Cam Wilkes is hardly my type!”

  “And if he was your type—” Leon inflectionless.

  “Leon, what are you accusing me of? I didn’t think you’d be interested, that’s all! That’s why I didn’t tell you about him as soon as I got in!” This of course was not true, the way it came out.

  There was a long silence. “I said some connection,” Leon quietly. “Some connection.”

  “Leon, seriously. What’s the matter. Are you projecting?”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. It’s all my problem.”

  “Oh Leon—” Rachel said sadly. A few minutes of silence followed, and then she said, “Leon, I just want us to be happy.” She had meant to say moderate in all things, but that seemed a little pedantic.

  Leon rubbed his face with both hands. For another minute or so he returned to studying the ceiling. When his eyes shifted to meet Rachel’s there was hope in them. “You know what I’d like to do, Rachel? Something concrete to help the folks at PAGO.”

  “Such as?”

  “Particularly Cam Wilkes. I’d really like to do something to help Cam Wilkes.”

  Rachel nodded. After a few seconds she said, “Why him?”

  Leon closed his eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe because I like the guy. Maybe because he’s the one closest to the edge—”

  “But not because you think he’s Hal.”

  Leon took a minute to reply to this. “As I said. I’m not ruling out the relevance of Hal to all this, if that’s OK with you.”

  Rachel sighed. “So what will you do?”

  Leon hesitated, as if he did not want to say. And then to Rachel’s surprise he did say. “I think I’ll try to track down the Girl on His Bus for him. At this point it seems as good a place to begin as any.”

  “But Leon,” Rachel said. “Aside from how impossible that’ll be, what’s it got to do with Hal?”

  “Who can say? Hal’s the unknown, by definition. But the connection’s there. It’s got to be. And this at least is something concrete. I’ve spent too long on barren analysis and introspection. It’s time I got back into the world. That’s one thing writing down my dreams, and PAGO too, has taught me. There’s a little PAGO person in all of us—”

  “Yes, but—”

  “They’re my dreams, remember, Rachel. Mine. I’m the one who gets to decide how I work this through. Nobody else. This is my own business we’re talking about here.”

  ——

  From her bed at the Dream Centre Rachel said, “Alex?”

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “That’s when I broke it to Leon who I’d been thinking Hal was: his big hero back at Willmott High. A guy he always used to talk about.”

  Silver seemed nonplussed. He and Leon had gone to the same high school, back in the city. “I never knew Leon had a big hero at Willmott! Who was he? Maybe I’ll remem—”

  “You.”

  The skin around Alex Silver’s eyes walked back into his hairline and disappeared. “Me,” he said, like a man neatly punched in the stomach.

  “Alex,” Rachel said, watching him. “Does this surprise you?”

  “Surprise me? No, no—I mean. Yes. No. Kids have heroes, right? I didn’t expect Leon’s to be me, that’s all. I never really felt like a hero.” Silver laughed nervously. “Anybody’s hero.”

  “But you were friends?”

  “No. I didn’t even think he knew I existed. Leon was a pretty cool guy around Willmott High, you know—So. But. Anyways. What did Leon say? Denied it, I guess, eh?”

  Rachel nodded. “He said he never really knew you. You were a grade ahead. In high school, he said, that’s like a generation—”

  “Yeah—” Silver from the middle distance.

  “Later, back in the kitchen,” Rachel went on, “I asked him how he could be so sure you weren’t Hal, and he looked down at this design he’d been making with some crumbs—a heart I think it was—and with this crooked little smile he said, ‘Naw. But you know, he really was quite a guy, that Alex. How does Shakespeare put it? “Take him all in all, here was a man”—?’”

  Alex Silver squirmed, his face hot red.

  “He looked at me,” Rachel said, “and at that moment, Alex, I swear, he seemed so keen, so vulnerable, that I just had to go around the table and give him a big hug, but he must have
picked up a shift in my muscles or something, because his chair moved closer to the table and his back went into this even more exclusive curve, and I thought, Maybe I should go and lie down.

  “And then Leon was looking at me with a dreamy smile on. ‘Hey, Rachel?’ he said. ‘I wonder what’s become of old Alex, eh? I mean, I wonder what he’s doing right now!’”

  “Gee,” murmured Silver.

  Rachel’s head came around to scrutinize. “Alex, are you sure you’re disinterested enough for me to be telling you all this?”

  “Me? Oh sure.” Silver shifted in his chair. “Even if it turns out I am part of Leon’s problem, our concern here is yours. That’s got nothing to do with me. That you should choose to come to me because I’m the big expert around here does, but that’s something we can look at later. So. Anyways. You thought Hal was me. What about Leon? Did he think Hal was Cam Wilkes or not?”

  But Rachel had folded her arms. “No, Alex. I’m not saying another word until you tell me why I’m here. You gave me two hours to pack and get over here and you still haven’t told me a damn thing.”

  “You called me!”

  “I was desperate! My husband’s gone!”

  “Rachel, the thing is this. I want the events orderly and fresh in your mind before we start.”

  “Start what? That’s a legitimate question, Alex, and I’m walking out that door in two minutes if I don’t get an answer right now.”

  “But we haven’t got to the dream guy yet, or to why you’re the one looking for him now—We don’t even know who the Girl on Wilkes’ Bus was—”

  “And we won’t unless you tell me what you’ve got in mind.”

  “OK, OK.” Silver pushed his glasses up his nose and leaned forward on his seat, explanatory. “Here’s what this is about. You sleep here for seven nights or more while this baby—” he reached back to pat the Hewlett Packard—”deprives you of all your dreams. It does this by beeping you awake each time itnotices you’re sliding into REM sleep. You’ll get your sleep. You just won’t get your dreams. You know what REM is?”

  “I think so—”

  “Rapid Eye Movement. It’s not the only time you dream, but it’s the time that seems to matter for normal functioning. With most people it happens around five times a night, periodicity proportional to body weight. I’d say for you every seventy-four to-six minutes. More often, of course, if you haven’t been getting it—” Silver cleared his throat, blushed. “I mean REM. By the seventh day the beeper’ll be going every fifteen minutes. The first two or three days you won’t notice too much difference. A little irritability maybe. After that, you might want to take a few days off work.”

  “Why? What’s going to happen to me?”

  “Mild psychosis. People prevented from dreaming tend to dream out loud. Hallucinate, in other words. Same as narcotic and alcohol psychosis, which is simply the result of too little dreaming. That’s what the DT’s are all about.” Silver did a bogeyman. “Jimjams all dat stuff come back tuh haunt yuh!” He turned with satisfaction to the machine, his fingertips caressing the logo. “But anyways, this beauty does the same thing more healthfully and a heck of a lot more efficiently. No liver damage, for a start.”

  “But why?”

  “Why this treatment for you? Because I believe that what you need more than anything at this point, Rachel, is a chance to get into this thing with both feet. Otherwise you’re liable to be fiddling around with it all your life. Look at Cam Wilkes. Lookat your husband. It’s a whole lot easier to deal with material like this if you’re conscious when it is.”

  “But I’ll be crazy!”

  “Crazy is a relative term. My point is this. Analysis takes fifty years and then some. Who’s got time for that any more? This isn’t fin-de-siècle Vienna, it’s Village-on-the-Millpond. Listen to what I’m saying here. In ten days of dream deprivation you’ll go farther with this than you would in ten years of twice-a-week analysis. In three days I can break down your Censor. In a week you’ll be having coffee with the dream guy in person. Ten days and I guarantee a big dinner party, anywhere in the universe, with all your fears, all your desires—Just kidding—

  “A couple of routine side effects you might want to watch out for. Big increase in appetite. Eat, don’t worry. You’ll burn it off. Also, aggression tends to rise. You might want to keep that in mind. And, oh yeah. Sexual—the, um, sex drive tends to, increase. But you’re a big girl. Oh, two things that might encourage you to go ahead. One, you can quit any time. I mean, if it gets too weird. Two, there’ll be three of you in the study. All women. So you won’t be sleeping in here alone. And you can compare notes. Anyways, I’m in the next room. That’s where I’ll be sleeping. So what do you say?”

  Rachel requested a few minutes to think it over.

  “Sure. Take your time.” Silver stood up, stretched, and went away through the Keep Out door.

  Rachel’s decision-making process, once she was forced to come down to it, was fairly simple: This is more than Leon. This isthe dream guy, and I have to get to the bottom of the dream guy, not for Leon but for me, because if I don’t then nothing will change.

  “I can quit when I want to?” she asked when Silver came back sucking his hand. In the other he’d balanced two glasses of soda water, it looked like. He set them down on her bedside table and went over to his desk.

  “Sure. Just come back here and fall into bed. You’ll dream like hell and be fine.”

  “OK, I’ll do it. What have I got to lose?”

  “Your sanity. But only for a while.” Silver bustled back holding out a sheet of paper. “You don’t have to read all this. It just says you’re responsible.”

  “Is that responsible, or responsible?”

  “You know what you’re doing.”

  “Sure I do.” As she signed, Rachel said, “What happened to your hand?” Caught in a stapler? It seemed to be punctured.

  “Oh nothing—Join me?” offering one of the glasses.

  “Alex, no sedatives.”

  “Not a sedative—”

  “Let me taste it first—Yuck.”

  “Dexedrine sulphate. Routine in this sort of—Hey. A toast!”

  “A toast—?”

  “To the dream guy!”

  As their glasses touched, Rachel noticed that blood was flowing freely from Silver’s hand, down his wrist, and dripping off his Rolex to the floor.

  TWO

  He was real all right, but he was not here. His limit and ground was the pressure of his absence. Even when his methods were not generalizations, government, public opinion, your husband’s obsession, red tape, applause, guest lists, politics, editorials, pecking orders, hard sells—he was never far away. And long after the clamour there he would be, in the shadows at the square’s edge, the ghost in the ghost trench coat and ghost Wallabees, the trace and residue of everything those gathered voices had strained so hard to assume. Half an abstraction, objective as the clinically insane, grey as cement, he was the monkey wrench more crippling to her heart than anything Rachel had ever known, and for this reason, on a dark night towards the end of November, she allowed herself to be tucked in at the Silver Dream Research Centre with six electrodes glued to her head.

  No sign of the other two women in the study until what seemed like the instant Rachel had fallen asleep. Then they entered whispering and giggling, crashing into things. Silver had to come in shushing, reprimand them for fuzzying the first night’s results with alcohol, fight off having his pajamas removed, and wire their heads. A few more explosions of cackles and they were snoring like lumberjacks.

  Depressed by memories of summer camp, Rachel, now fully awake, lay for a long time and turned over in her mind the events leading to her own, desperate search for the dream guy at that time known to her as Hal.

  ——

  Two weeks after Leon had announced his intention of tracking down the Girl on Wilkes’ Bus, he walked into the kitchen of 201 Dell and announced that he had found her.

>   “But how?” marveled Rachel, who had been making them a couple of grilled cheeses.

  It hadn’t been easy. First Leon had cunningly extracted more details—date, which bus, stops involved—from a vague Wilkes. Then, working in secret from his basement study, he had phone-interviewed dozens of people. Gradually the pieces had fallen into place.

  “So who is it?” she asked.

  “You.” As soon as Leon said this, all details of Cam Wilkes’ behaviour crisped into focus for Rachel. The phrases madly in love and fool for love could be heard in her mind. Oddly, the fact that she had always felt her teenage prettiness to be singularly forgettable did not affect—except maybe inversely—her willingness to believe the contrary.

  “Aw, he wouldn’t remember me from way back then,” she said modestly.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He doesn’t realize it’s you.”

  “Then it wasn’t! For godsake, it was only a few years ago!”

  “Seventeen, to be exact.”

  “What bus?”

  “The Downtown 16 from Madison.”

  That shut her up.

  “So I’m sorry,” Leon said.

  Or was it the 19?

  “None of us,” Leon reassured her, “are what we were. Anyway my point is, he hasn’t made the connection. He can’t, and that indicates the real problem. He’s totally fixated on a dream. In the same proportion the guy is afraid. Rachel? It’s the least we can do.”

  “We? Do? What are you talking about?”

  “Come on.”

  “You come on.”

  Leon’s disappointed eyes followed her around the kitchen.

  “So what are you saying?” Rachel slamming down his grilled cheese. “I should give myself to him?”

  “You don’t get it yet, do you,” Leon said, still watching her face but his eyes less disappointed while he chose his words. “You, Rachel, are the key. Hal has come to me through you. Hal’s Theme is the same piece that Cam Wilkes played for you at that bus stop seventeen years ago.”

  “And allowing these assorted unlikely statements to be true?”