by Max Ehrlich
“I don’t know. There’s no answer to that question. Maybe there was a big game and your number came up. I’ll answer your question with a question. Of all the people in the world almost two thousand years ago, why a simple carpenter from Nazareth?”
They said nothing for a long time. Travelers came in and out of the cocktail lounge. Muted chatter rose and fell. There was an occasional laugh. The voice over the airport public address system intruded insistently. Flights were arriving, flights were leaving, last call for Flight So-and-So, and would Mister So-and-So please report to the information desk.
Finally, Bentley stirred and started to rise. “I guess we’d better pick up your luggage. Then I’ll get the car and …”
“Hall, wait a minute. Sit down.” Bentley sat down, staring at Peter. “There’s something we haven’t discussed.”
“Yes?”
“If all this really does come about—what becomes of me? What happens to my personal life?”
“I’m sure you can guess.”
“I can. But I’d like to hear what you think.”
Bentley smiled weakly. “I was afraid we’d get into this sooner or later.”
“Let’s get into it now.”
“All right. I suppose we can make some reasonable speculations. First, as soon as all this is announced, you’d become an instant world celebrity, a controversial figure. You’d put Bridey Murphy in the deep shade. To some, you’d become the Man of the Century, or any other century. The man who brought this world a new revelation, who solved the mystery of death. To some, you’d be kind of a new Messiah.
“Does all this sound pretty high-flown? Maybe it does. But it’s impossible to exaggerate it. In a sense, to some you’d be the founder, or at least the prophet, of a whole new religion. To others, you’d be a liar and a fraud. To yet others, some kind of Satan, bent on destroying the whole idea of Heaven after death, and other concepts the Christian church holds dear. You’d be both one hell of a hero and one hell of a villain.”
Peter felt faint. His head whirled.
“Hall, I still can’t absorb all of this. All I have is a gut reaction.”
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid of it. I don’t want any part of it. My instinct is to pass. Forget it. Not get involved at all.”
“You don’t have any choice.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t belong to yourself anymore,” said Bentley. “You’re in too deep, and you’ve gone too far. You’re committed. I appreciate how you feel, Pete. But look, your personal life isn’t important anymore. It’s what you know, and what you have to tell.”
They paid their bill and walked out of the lounge. As they did, Hall Bentley looked at Peter. There was a small smile around his mouth, but his eyes were serious.
“Remind me to drive carefully. Very carefully.”
As they drove away from the airport the traffic was bumper to bumper. It reminded Peter of the last time he had been here. Then, hundreds of kids with painted faces and wearing saffron robes had tied up the traffic. They were beating drums, clanking finger cymbals and chanting the Hare Krishna. They had come to meet their guru, the Supreme Person, Lord of all Lords, the Cause of all Causes, the Ultimate Truth of all Truths, the Perfection of all Endeavors of Perfection.
He knew they were part of the whole growing occult scene. Most of them had already tried all the psychedelic drugs. They knew all about mind expansion, and they were interested in anything that promised a fourth dimension. It wasn’t much of a step to go from acid travel to soul travel. And it wasn’t only the kids who were part of this renaissance of mysticism. It was the older people, too. Everybody wanted answers. People everywhere, he reflected, were suffering from the same frustrations. We could fly men to the moon, but it took years to get our men out of Vietnam. We knew how to blow all mankind to hell, but we couldn’t get rid of the rats in the slums. We could climb the highest mountain, but we couldn’t keep muggers away from a few square miles of city parks and streets.
This didn’t make sense to the cultists. To them, what made sense were ideas or movements based on faith or emotion. Brother, we’ve all been locked in the jail of technology. We’ve had our minds computerized. And what has it done for us? Nothing. It’s turned out to be a desert. Now, we’re looking for answers way out there, because there’s nowhere else to look.
At the time, the Krishna kids had amused him by the way they had honored their prophet. The Great Guru, the Supreme Person, the Ultimate Truth of all Truths.
Then he shivered a little. My God, that could be me.
Chapter 20
When Bentley dropped him at the Summit Plaza, he still felt a little lightheaded.
When he walked into the lobby Edna was at the switchboard. He found the familiar sight reassuring. He’d been doing too much heavy thinking, been involved for too long in the unreal, the bizarre. He needed to divorce himself from all this for a while. He had a hunger now for the ordinary, the inconsequential.
“Well! Welcome back!”
“Thank you, Edna. Glad to be home.”
“We’ve missed you around here. Did you have a nice trip?”
“Very nice.”
“Lots of phone calls for you,”
She reached into his message box and gave him a sheaf of pink slips. He saw that her astrology book was open in front of her.
“What’s my horoscope for today, love?”
“Let’s see. You’re a Libra, right?”
“Right.”
“I love Libras,” she said. “Libras are usually very interesting people. Very sensitive. You should know some of the other signs we get around here.” She ruffled the pages of the book and found the reference she wanted. She took a moment to read, and then: “Oh, my. You’re going to find this interesting.”
“I can’t wait,” he said.
“Mars and Neptune are approaching your fifth solar house. Neptune is in the third house, and squaring Mars. This is a good time to study your various financial interests and enlarge your sphere of action. Analyze current insurance policies, contracts, and other legal documents to be sure they are to your satisfaction. Follow up any opportunity there may be to do public speaking …”
“Nothing very earth-shaking about that.”
“Oh,” she said, “I haven’t finished. Here’s the interesting part. Your life is about to change radically. Soon you will meet a new lover. The experience will be deep and profound. Look for a whole new future.”
“Well, Edna,” he said, “that’s more like it.”
He grinned at her and walked toward the elevator. His horoscope for today wasn’t bad, except it was screwed up in one detail: He was looking for an old lover.
The apartment had a faint musty smell. He opened the curtains and threw the windows wide open. Down below, he could see three or four girls lolling in beach chairs and mats on the pool patio. Now, he thought, they’re tanned and languid young naiads baking themselves in the California sun. But who were they once? Handmaidens to Cleopatra? Camp followers to the armies of Napoleon? Ladies-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth? Queens or slave girls?
He swore softly at himself. It was getting so that he couldn’t look at people without speculating on their past lives. He’d have to cut it out.
He dialed Nora’s number, but there was no answer. He felt very tired. The plane trip, the talk with Bentley at the airport, everything.
He stretched out on the couch without unpacking. He dozed awhile, then fell asleep. He had two dreams, the House Dream and the Tennis Dream. When he awoke it was getting dark. He went to the telephone and dialed Nora’s number again. This time she was in.
“Nora, Pete.”
“Oh. You’re back.” She sounded cool, distant. “I hope you had a nice trip.”
“Listen, I found it. The town …”
“Congratulations.”
“It’s a place called Riverside. In Massachusetts.”
“How nice.”
He was silent for a
moment. “You still don’t believe me.”
“Why, of course I do, darling.”
“Nora, let’s have dinner tonight.”
“I’m sorry. I have a date.”
“Tomorrow night, then?”
“No,” she said. “I can’t make it then, either.”
“I see. You’re pretty busy.”
“Very busy.”
“We’ll make it some other time, then. I’ll phone you.”
“You do that, Pete. Some other time.”
He hung up and thought, that’s that. Curiously, he felt no sense of loss. He grinned.
Soon I’m going to meet a new lover. I’ve got it straight from Edna.
The next day he saw the head of his department and got permission to stay for only the first four weeks in the quarter and have his teaching assistant handle the rest of the course. He gave as his excuse some urgent research he had to do on some of the tribes in the East. The department head was unhappy about the request but finally agreed, reluctantly, provided he was back in time for the exam period.
The time dragged. He taught his classes, got through his conferences, worked on his book. It was hard for him to maintain any level of interest. Los Angeles was where his body was, but the rest of him, the most important part of him, was three thousand miles away. At times he was on the verge of quitting ahead of time and taking the next plane for Riverside, even if it meant placing his whole career in jeopardy. But he resisted the urge.
Meanwhile, the hallucinations continued. The Lake Dream was, as always, the most frequent and the most intense. But five of the dreams were missing, seemingly banished to some permanent limbo. The City Dream, the Tower Dream, the Tree Dream, the Cotton Mather Dream, and, curiously enough, the Prison Dream.
He talked to Hall Bentley about it. And the parapsychologist said, “I’m not sure what’s happening. It seems to be some kind of expiation process—release through some kind of reenactment or contact, no matter how vague. You’ve seen the streets of the city. You’ve been at the site of the tower. You saw the Puritan effigy. Once you come in real contact with the subject of your dream, the hallucination itself disappears.”
“But how do you account for the Prison Dream? That’s gone too.”
“Go over it again for me.”
“I’m in a prison, and I’m counting money.”
“Maybe you saw it and didn’t recognize it.”
“No. I never even saw any prison in Riverside.”
“Funny about that. It’s the only hallucination that isn’t realistic. I mean, you don’t normally count money in a jail cell.”
Something else puzzled him. He had seen the lake. But the Lake Dream still continued.
Suddenly he remembered Ed Donan’s dissertation subject. The Relations. The Iroquois divinity of-dreams, their therapeutic strategy of catharsis. You have a dream; you live it again, act it out. The Seneca dreams he buys a dog in Quebec, the next day he travels to Quebec to buy a dog. The Huron dreams he is tortured by an enemy, the next day he gets his friends to torture him. If you fail to do this, the sickness comes.
Ondinnonk.
Chapter 21
He flew to Bradley Field, rented a car, and then drove to Riverside. It was early evening when he checked in at the same hotel as before.
He felt the key to X’s identity lay in the House Dream. His best chance of finding out who he had been was in finding that house. If he could locate the house, he could find out the name of the person who had lived there. If.
He remembered it clearly, every detail of it. He knew he would recognize it immediately if he saw it. It was a two-family house, the upper part brown shingles, the lower white stucco, with a big three-arched front porch. It was the third house from the corner.
He would start looking for it the next day, He decided to go to bed right after dinner so that he could get an early start in the morning, There were hundreds of streets in Riverside, and it might be weeks—even months—before he found it. But he had to find it—it was his only chance.
The next morning, he bought a detailed street map of the city at a bookshop. Then, with a red pencil, he systematically marked off specific sections. His idea was to cover a section a day by driving up one street and down another till he had covered the entire area.
Suddenly he had a chilling thought. Suppose they had torn it down long ago? They’d torn down half the town already. Maybe there wasn’t any house left. Maybe they had put some goddamn gas station or apartment house in its place….
He did have a few things going for him. In the Window Dream, he had been able to see the big sign on the roof of the Puritan Bank before the blizzard obscured it. There had been no river in between. This indicated that the house had been located somewhere in Riverside proper, not across the river in West Riverside. From the distance and the perspective in which he had viewed the sign, he was quite sure the house wasn’t located in the central or business part of the city but in one of the many residential areas. And, finally, he was under the impression, from the House Dream, that the location was on a side street, not a main avenue with traffic lights and stores.
Not much. But it was a beginning.
He began to cruise the streets. He had to drive slowly, for fear he would miss the house. If it still existed. Up one street, and down another.
After a few days it became a nightmare. His eyes ached from watching not only both sides of each street, but the traffic ahead. He put innumerable miles on the car. And one by one he crossed off the sections he had covered. The North End. The Eastwood Section. Hungry Hill. Riverside Heights. The Pilgrim Square Section. Winchester. Manor Park. The South End.
Some of the streets were solid with apartments, and he drove through them swiftly. Others were obviously new developments. Still others were hodgepodges, a mixture of the old and the new. He saw a number of two-family houses, but none that remotely resembled the house of his dream.
The Belmont Boulevard Section. The Oak Avenue Neighborhood. The Central Avenue Area.
By the third day, he realized the futility of what he was doing. More and more he was convinced that the house no longer existed. But grimly he hung on. He had to remind himself that this was his last chance. He had no other options, no way to back check any of the other dreams.
On the sixth day, he stopped the car on a street in the Armory section. He sat there for a long time, resting his head on the wheel. He was bone weary, and in the middle of a black depression. He told himself that perhaps he was better off not finding that damned house. After all, he had been messing around in something he didn’t really understand. And even if he found the house and, through it, his identity, there was no guarantee he would like it. It could be hideous. It was possible that if he took the cover off this particular Pandora’s box, he might start screaming.
He made up his mind then to go back to his hotel and take the first plane to Los Angeles. Goodbye, J. C., whoever you were. Enough was enough. Hall Bentley would be disappointed, of course. Well, that was just too damned bad. As for himself, he’d just have to stay curious for the rest of his life. Now he felt relieved. He wouldn’t have to play the horrendous role Bentley had pictured. Let someone else bring messages to the world. It occurred to him now, that deep in his unconscious he had really wanted to fail all along.
He felt better now. He started the car.
He was on the opposite side of town from where his hotel was located. Checking his map, he found a shorter way to get back. Instead of going down Highland Avenue, with all its lights and traffic, he could cut through Albemarle Street and hit a main artery called Bridge Avenue. This would lead him directly to the downtown section and his hotel.
At the junction of Albemarle and Bridge he found himself in a Negro section. A solid ghetto of blacks. He had gone only a few blocks down Bridge when, suddenly, he stopped the car. His skin began to prickle. He knew he had been there before. He recognized the red brick school building down the street. The big gas station on the co
rner. And opposite the gas station, a small shopping area that looked familiar. Very familiar. There was a supermarket there now, and a pizza parlor, and a bar called Hi-de-Ho. But he seemed to remember, through the gauze of some veil, a candy store, a shoe repair shop, a bakery. The signpost said: Almont Street.
This was my old neighborhood. This was where I lived. This was my street.
He had no doubt about it. He simply knew it. It had never occurred to him to look in this area. He had overlooked the fact that white neighborhoods often changed radically during the years, some of them becoming all black. And he knew that old houses in slum neighborhoods often were the last to be torn down. They simply deteriorated until even the ghetto tenants abandoned them.
Dimly he heard the raucous blast of automobile horns behind him. Angry voices shouted at him. He became aware that he had stopped the car in the middle of the street. He drove to the next street, went back, and like a homing pigeon headed down Almont.
Then he saw it. The third house from the corner, on the left-hand side.
No. 28 Almont Street. It had aged tremendously. The white stucco was stained and cracked. Someone had painted the rotting shingles white, but the paint was peeling, exposing the brown underneath. The wooden frames around the windows were warped and weather-beaten. The neat lawn he remembered was now a tangle of weeds and crabgrass. The whole place was shabby, neglected.
He stopped the car at the curb directly in front of the house and sat there, staring at the house. He hardly noticed the three black men sitting on the upper step of the rotting porch. They were watching him intently, their faces hostile. Finally one of them got to his feet and walked slowly down the broken sidewalk toward him. He was a huge, hulking black with great, hairy arms. He stuck his head through the open window of the car.
“Whut you want, man?”
“Nothing.”
“Whut you stopping here for, then?”
“Just looking.”
“Lookin’ for whut?”
“That your house?”
“Yeah.”
“How long have you been living there?”
