Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  Trexler knew he must hurry. He had already used up pretty nearly four seconds since the question had been put. But it was an impossible situation – just one more lousy, impossible situation such as he was always getting himself into. When, he asked himself, are you going to quit maneuvering yourself into a pocket? He made one more effort. This time he stopped at the asylum, only the bars were lucite – fluted, retractable. Not here, he said. Not this one.

  He looked straight ahead at the doctor. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I never have any bizarre thoughts.’

  The doctor sucked in on his pipe, blew a plume of smoke toward the rows of medical books. Trexler’s gaze followed the smoke. He managed to make out one of the titles, ‘The Genito-Urinary System.’ A bright wave of fear swept cleanly over him, and he winced under the first pain of kidney stones. He remembered when he was a child, the first time he ever entered a doctor’s office, sneaking a look at the titles of the books – and the flush of fear, the shirt wet under the arms, the book on t.b., the sudden knowledge that he was in the advanced stages of consumption, the quick vision of hemorrhage. Trexler sighed wearily. Forty years, he thought, and I still get thrown by the title of a medical book. Forty years and I still can’t stay on life’s little bucky horse. No wonder I’m sitting here in this dreary joint at the end of this woebegone afternoon, lying about my bizarre thoughts to a doctor who looked, come to think of it, rather tired.

  The session dragged on. After about twenty minutes, the doctor rose and knocked his pipe out. Texler got up, knocked the ashes out of his brain, and waited. The doctor smiled warmly and stuck out his hands. ‘There’s nothing the matter with you – you’re just scared. Want to know how I know you’re scared?’

  ‘How?’ asked Trexler.

  ‘Look at the chair you’ve been sitting in! See how it has moved back away from my desk. You kept inching away from me while I asked you questions. That means you’re scared.’

  ‘Does it?’ said Trexler, faking a grin. ‘Yeah, I suppose it does.’

  They finished shaking hands. Trexler turned and walked out uncertainly along the passage, then into the waiting room and out past the next patient, a ruddy pin-striped man who was seated on the sofa twirling his hat nervously and staring straight ahead at the files. Poor, frightened guy, thought Trexler, he’s probably read in the Times that one American male out of every two is going to die of heart disease by twelve o’clock next Thursday. It says that in the paper almost every morning. And he’s also probably thinking about that day on the Madison Avenue bus.

  A week later, Trexler was back in the patient’s chair. And for several weeks thereafter he continued to visit the doctor, always toward the end of the afternoon, when the vapors hung thick above the pool of the mind and darkened the whole region of the East Seventies. He felt no better as time went on, and he found it impossible to work. He discovered that the visits were becoming routine and that although the routine was one to which he certainly did not look forward, at least he could accept it with cool resignation, as once, years ago, he had accepted a long spell with a dentist who had settled down to a steady footing with a couple of dead teeth. The visits, moreover, were now assuming a pattern recognizable to the patient.

  Each session would begin with a résumé of symptoms – dizziness in the streets, the constricting pain in the back of the neck, the apprehensions, the tightness of the scalp, the inability to concentrate, the despondency and the melancholy times, the feeling of pressure and tension, the anger at not being able to work, the anxiety over work not done, the gas on the stomach. Dullest set of neurotic symptoms in the world, Trexler would think, as he obediently trudged back over them for the doctor’s benefit. And then, having listened attentively to the recital, the doctor would spring his question: ‘Have you ever found anything that gives you relief?’ And Trexler would answer, ‘Yes. A drink.’ And the doctor would nod his head knowingly.

  As he became familiar with the pattern Trexler found that he increasingly tended to identify himself with the doctor, transferring himself into the doctor’s seat – probably (he thought) some rather slick form of escapism. At any rate, it was nothing new for Trexler to identify himself with other people. Whenever he got into a cab, he instantly became the driver, saw everything from the hackman’s angle (and the reaching over with the right hand, the nudging of the flag, the pushing it down, all the way down along the side of the meter), saw everything – traffic, fare, everything – through the eyes of Anthony Rocco, or Isidore Freedman, or Matthew Scott. In a barbershop, Trexler was the barber, his fingers curled around the comb, his hand on the tonic. Perfectly natural, then, that Trexler should soon be occupying the doctor’s chair, asking the questions, waiting for the answers. He got quite interested in the doctor, in this way. He liked him, and he found him a not too difficult patient.

  It was on his fifth visit, about halfway through, that the doctor turned to Trexler and said, suddenly, ‘What do you want?’ He gave the word ‘want’ special emphasis.

  ‘I d’know,’ replied Trexler uneasily. ‘I guess nobody knows the answer to that one.’

  ‘Sure they do,’ replied the doctor.

  ‘Do you know what you want?’ asked Trexler narrowly.

  ‘Certainly,’ said the doctor. Trexler noticed that at this point the doctor’s chair slid slightly backward, away from him. Trexler stifled a small, internal smile. Scared as a rabbit, he said to himself. Look at him scoot!

  ‘What do you want?’ continued Trexler, pressing his advantage, pressing it hard.

  The doctor glided back another inch away from his inquisitor. ‘I want a wing on the small house I own in Westport. I want more money, and more leisure to do the things I want to do.’

  Trexler was just about to say, ‘And what are those things you want to do, Doctor?’ when he caught himself. Better not go too far, he mused. Better not lose possession of the ball. And besides, he thought, what the hell goes on here, anyway – me paying fifteen bucks a throw for these séances and then doing the work myself, asking the questions, weighing the answers. So he wants a new wing! There’s a fine piece of theatrical gauze for you! A new wing.

  Trexler settled down again and resumed the role of patient for the rest of the visit. It ended on a kindly, friendly note. The doctor reassured him that his fears were the cause of his sickness, and that his fears were unsubstantial. They shook hands, smiling.

  Trexler walked dizzily through the empty waiting room and the doctor followed along to let him out. It was late; the secretary had shut up shop and gone home. Another day over the dam. ‘Good-bye,’ said Trexler. He stepped into the street, turned west toward Madison, and thought of the doctor all alone there, after hours, in that desolate hole – a man who worked longer hours than his secretary. Poor, scared, overworked bastard, thought Trexler. And that new wing!

  It was an evening of clearing weather, the Park showing green and desirable in the distance, the last daylight applying a high lacquer to the brick and brownstone walls and giving the street scene a luminous and intoxicating splendor. Trexler meditated, as he walked, on what he wanted. ‘What do you want?’ he heard again. Trexler knew what he wanted, and what, in general all men wanted; and he was glad, in a way, that it was both inexpressible and unattainable, and that it wasn’t a wing. He was satisfied to remember that it was deep, formless, enduring, and impossible of fulfillment, and that it made men sick, and that when you sauntered along Third Avenue and looked through the doorways into the dim saloons, you could sometimes pick out from the unregenerate the ranks who had not forgotten, gazing steadily into the bottoms of the glasses on the long chance that they could get another little peek at it. Trexler found himself renewed by the remembrance that what he wanted was at once great and microscopic, and that although it borrowed from the nature of large deeds and of youthful love and of old songs and early intimations, it was not any one of these things, and that it had not been isolated or pinned down, and that a man who attempted to define it in the privacy of a do
ctor’s office would fall flat on his face.

  Trexler felt invigorated. Suddenly his sickness seemed health, his dizziness stability. A small tree, rising between him and the light, stood there saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy. Trexler’s spine registered an ever so slight tremor as it picked up this natural disturbance in the lovely scene. ‘I want the second tree from the corner, just as it stands,’ he said, answering an imaginary question from an imaginary physician. And he felt a slow pride in realizing that what he wanted none could bestow, and that what he had none could take away. He felt content to be sick, unembarrassed at being afraid; and in the jungle of his fear he glimpsed (as he had so often glimpsed them before) the flashy tail feathers of the bird courage.

  Then he thought once again of the doctor, and of his being left there all alone, tired, frightened. (The poor, scared guy, thought Trexler.) Trexler began humming. ‘Moonshine Lullaby’, his spirit reacting instantly to the hypodermic of Merman’s healthy voice. He crossed Madison, boarded a downtown bus, and rode all the way to Fifty-second Street before he had a thought that could rightly have been called bizarre.

  (1948)

  ★

  Is it coincidence that White’s story mentions ‘Moonshine Lullaby’, which also features earlier in this collection?

  Everyone has been surprised by unbelievable coincidences in daily life, ones that defy explanation. I don’t believe in luck (you make that stuff) – but I respect that others, who swerve towards spirituality, like to interpret deeper, hidden truths of inner-connectivity. Symbiosis, synchronicity and serendipity . . . rather than mere circumstance.

  Dreams too are ripe for extrapolations and interpretations. Freud, for one, championed such an attitude towards them.

  Read into them – dreams, coincidences – what you will, I say.

  By Chance

  by Wendy Cope

  About fifteen years ago while I was teaching a summer course at the Skyros Centre in Greece I picked up a discarded paperback copy of An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan. It’s his account of his four and a half years as a hostage in Beirut and his friendship with fellow hostage John McCarthy. I might not have thought of buying it because I thought I knew enough about this episode from newspapers, radio and television. And I had no reason to think that Keenan was an especially good writer – I must have missed the reviews. By the time I’d read twenty or thirty pages I was glad to have come across it by chance. It’s a powerful and moving book, very well written. In 1991 it won the Irish Times Literature Prize for non-fiction. By the time I finished it I felt warm admiration for the author.

  A few months later, having parked my car in a London street, I came back to find a motorcycle parked so close to it that there was no way I was going to get out of the space. As I stood there wondering what to do, a man came out of a nearby theatre and saw the problem. He picked up the motorbike and moved it several yards down the street. I thanked him. He nodded, smiled and went on his way. I recognised the man from his photographs. It was Brian Keenan.

  (2014)

  ★

  Extract from An Evil Cradling

  by Brian Keenan

  I knew they had a motor-generator to light the prison at night whilst bringing in new prisoners. On one occasion the generator was running, though there was no light, and the ventilation pipe was blowing in dusty hot air as usual. I could not see the dust falling. I wasn’t bothered by it. But I remember listening to the noise of the machine and the air as it passed through this long vent of piping. My mind seemed to be pulled into the noise until the noise became music. And I listened entranced in the dark to the music that was coming from this pipe. I knew that there was no music and yet I heard it. And flowing out melodiously was all the music that I had ever loved or half remembered. All at once, all simultaneously playing especially for me. It seemed I sat alone in a great concert hall in which this music was being played for me alone. I heard the ethnic chant music of Africa. The rhythmic music of bone and skin. I heard the swirl and squeal of bagpipes. I heard voices chanting in a tribal chant; great orchestras of violins; and flutes filling the air like bird flight, while quiet voices sang some Gregorian chant. All the music of the world was there, playing incessantly into my cell. I lay at first smiling and listening and enjoying this aural feast. I kept telling myself ‘There is no music, Brian, it’s in your head.’ But still I heard it and the music played on and on ever-changing, ever-colourful. I heard the uilleann pipes’ lilting drone. I heard fingers strum and pluck a classical flamenco. I heard ancient musics of ancient civilisations coming all at once to fill my cell and from simply smiling and laughing I fell into a musical delirium and began to tap and dance and beat softly upon the walls the different rhythms offered to me.

  For how long I did this, I cannot tell, but then suddenly I was fearful. This music that was not there but that I heard had taken hold of me and would not let me go. I could not silence it. It was carrying me away. I called for it to stop. I pressed my hands over my ears foolishly trying to block out a music that was already thumping in my head and it would not go away. I could not end this or silence it. The more I tried the louder it swirled about me, the more it filled the room. And in its loudness I was gripped with a fear that was new to me. I did not know how to contain myself or how to end this thing. My fight against it was defeating me. It was crushing out every part of me and filling me with fear itself. I could not bear it.

  I fumbled under my mattress to find the stubs of candles that I had squirrelled away. I took out one candle and lit it in the hope that light would dispel the music that filled the room, but it did not. With my mind only half conscious, I lit another and another candle until I had filled the cell with candlelight, bright, dazzling, soft, alluring light. But still the music played around me. Everywhere the bright burning of the small candles and me waiting and hoping that this imagined music would stop. And then I remembered again you do not overcome by fighting, you only concede the victory to the madness within. You overcome by going beyond it.

  Like a somnambulist, I got up from my mattress and in that tiny cell, naked and wet with sweat, I began to dance. Slowly, slowly at first then going with the music, faster I danced and faster until I went beyond, and beyond the music’s hold on me. I danced every dance I knew and dances unknown to me. I danced and danced until the music had to keep up with me, I was a dancing dervish. I was the master of this music and I danced and danced. The sweat rolled off me and I bathed myself in the luxury of it. I felt myself alive and unfearful. I was the pied piper who was calling this tune. A tiny cell, a dozen candle stubs and a madman dancing naked. I was laughing. The laughter was part of the music around me. Not the laugh of hysteria, but the laugh of self-possession, the laugh that comes with the moment of victory. Every part of me, every limb, every muscle energized in this dance. For how long I danced or how long I laughed I cannot tell. But it seemed that I would be dancing forever.

  (1992)

  ★

  A Barred Owl

  by Richard Wilbur

  The warping night air having brought the boom

  Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,

  We tell the wakened child that all she heard

  Was an odd question from a forest bird,

  Asking of us, if rightly listened to,

  ‘Who cooks for you?’ and then ‘Who cooks for you?’

  Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,

  Can also thus domesticate a fear,

  And send a small child back to sleep at night

  Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight

  Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw

  Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

  (2000)

  ★

  The Haunted Mind

  by Nathaniel Hawthorne

  What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to recollect yourself, after starting from midnight slumber! B
y unclosing your eyes so suddenly, you seem to have surprised the personages of your dream in full convocation round your bed, and catch one broad glance at them before they can flit into obscurity. Or, to vary the metaphor, you find yourself, for a single instant, wide awake in that realm of illusions, whither sleep has been the passport, and behold its ghostly inhabitants and wondrous scenery, with a perception of their strangeness, such as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed. The distant sound of a church clock is borne faintly on the wind. You question with yourself, half seriously, whether it has stolen to your waking ear from some gray tower, that stood within the precincts of your dream. While yet in suspense, another clock flings its heavy clang over the slumbering town, with so full and distinct a sound, and such a long murmur in the neighboring air, that you are certain it must proceed from the steeple at the nearest corner. You count the strokes – one – two – and there they cease, with a booming sound, like the gathering of a third stroke within the bell.

  If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night, it would be this. Since your sober bedtime, at eleven, you have had rest enough to take off the pressure of yesterday’s fatigue; while before you, till the sun comes from ‘far Cathay’ to brighten your window, there is almost the space of a summer night; one hour to be spent in thought, with the mind’s eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams, and two in that strangest of enjoyments, the forgetfulness alike of joy and woe. The moment of rising belongs to another period of time, and appears so distant, that the plunge out of a warm bed into the frosty air cannot yet be anticipated with dismay. Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space, where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks nobody is watching him, sits down by the way side to take breath. Oh, that he would fall asleep, and let mortals live on without growing older!