Lincoln's Dreams

by Connie Willis

  “You know, I don’t know anything about you. Your family, where you come from, what you were doing before you started having Lee’s dreams. Where do you live?”

  She straightened up, her smile gone. She looked the way she had that night when Richard had been ranting about Lincoln’s psychological problems. “A little town. About the size of Fredericksburg.”

  “Broun has a cat,” I said hastily. “It’s a selfish brute. Like this one here.” I chucked the cat under its black chin and walked on up the stairs to open the door for Annie, hating Richard at that moment more than I had ever hated anyone.

  I didn’t know anything at all about Annie. Correction: I knew she had a father who was allergic to cats, and that she came from a little town, and from the look on her face that was all she was going to tell me. I didn’t blame her. Richard knew all about her. If it wasn’t on the forms she had filled out at the Institute or the records her doctor had sent, Richard had found it out in his therapy sessions, and whatever he knew he had used: “I see your father died last year. Did you feel responsible for his death? What did he look like? Did he have a white beard? Like Robert E. Lee’s? Isn’t that what your dream is really all about?”

  And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he had probably spent the morning calling those numbers on the forms. Next of Kin Not Living at Above Address, and demanding to know where she was. No wonder she didn’t want to tell me anything. I might turn out to be another Richard, and when she ran from me, she would want to make sure I couldn’t follow.

  “Broun’s really going to be mad when he gets back,” I said, opening the door to my room and smiling reassuringly. “I gave his cat the leftover shrimp doodads.”

  She followed me into the room. “What did they taste like?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want Broun to find out, but I think they’re awful. I was afraid that night of the reception he was actually going to force us to eat some of them. Now you go ahead and take a nap if you’re tired. Is there anything I can get you?”

  She rubbed her hand across her forehead. “Jeff, I think I could use some aspirin after all.”

  “I’ll see if I’ve got any,” I said, knowing full well I hadn’t packed any in the mad dash down here, and went into my room. I had almost offered to go get some for her, but there was something I had to do first. I shut the door and called Broun’s answering machine.

  Broun’s California-fog message repeated itself, and Richard had called.

  “I’m calling to tell you that I’m not angry about your getting me hauled in for questioning by the police this morning,” the Good Shrink said. “I know you felt threatened, and I know Annie feels threatened, but I want to reassure you that my only concern is my patient and her welfare.”

  The psychiatrist must convince the patient he has her own best interests at heart.

  “Running away isn’t the answer, Jeff. You have to bring Annie back so she can get the proper treatment. I know you choose not to believe me, but this neurotic fantasy of hers is dangerous. She’s completely dissociated herself from her dreams. She told me they’re Robert E. Lee’s dreamy. She’s on the edge of a complete psychotic break, and taking her to California is only going to precipitate it.”

  Good. He thought we were in California. That meant he wasn’t going to show up here while I was gone. I didn’t want to leave Annie alone, but I had to find out about the Thorazine Richard had given her. I hung up and went back into Annie’s room. She was standing by the window, looking out at the trees that lined the river.

  “I didn’t bring any aspirin. I’ll run get you some. I saw a drugstore on the way back here.”

  “You don’t have to…”

  “I’ve got to go anyway. I forgot to pack my razor, too, and, unlike Broun, I have no desire to grow a beard. Is there anything else I can get you?”

  “No.” She managed a fair smile. She was looking flushed again.

  “You’re sure you’ll be okay here? I’ll just be a few minutes.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. She tried for a better smile. A truck rumbled past the front of the inn, and Annie raised her head and gazed out over the trees as if what she had heard was the low thunder of artillery fire.

  I took the car, bought the razor and some aspirin at a convenience store, and then drove downtown to the library. I’d seen it on our way back to the inn, a three-story brick building that looked like it had been a school.

  The reference books were in a drab basement room lit by fluorescent lights. The only drug compendium they had was badly out-of-date, and it didn’t say anything about how to get Thorazine out of a person’s system, but it said abrupt withdrawal from a high dosage could cause nausea and dizziness.

  It didn’t say what a high dosage was, and it didn’t particularly matter anyway since I didn’t have any idea how much Richard had given her, but how could he have given her any at all? The compendium described it as being just as dangerous as I thought it was.

  Dozens of contraindications and warnings were listed, drowsiness and jaundice and fainting spells, and there was a note set off in double borders that read, “Sudden death, apparently due to cardiac arrest, has been reported, but there is not sufficient evidence to establish a relationship between such deaths and the administration of the drug.” I wondered if in the ten years since the book had been published they had managed to establish a relationship, and if Richard cared.

  He had to have known exactly what Thorazine could do to Annie, and yet he had given it to her anyway. Why? It wasn’t used to cure mental patients. It was used to keep them under control.

  I couldn’t find anything about headaches or fever in the list of side effects, although it said infections could result after the fourth week. All of the side effects and warnings seemed to be related to long-term use of the drug, and the last page reassured me. In spite of all the warnings, it was recommended in the treatment of everything from hiccups to lockjaw.

  I went back to the inn and found Annie sitting on the outside steps, playing with the black cat. “My headache’s gone,” she said when I handed her the aspirin. “I feel much better.”

  We ate dinner at the coffee shop where we’d had breakfast. “How are you feeling now?” I asked her when the waitress brought our check. “Have you been dizzy at all today?”

  “No.”

  “Nauseated?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You still may have some Thorazine in your system.”

  “I don’t see how,” she said. “Between you and the waitress I’ve drunk enough coffee today to get anything out of my system. You don’t have to worry about the Thorazine.”

  “Okay,” I said, picking up the check. “Then I won’t.”

  She stood up and looked across at the inn as if she were afraid of it. “Now all we have to worry about is the dreams.”

  I went back to the table to leave the tip. Her paper napkin was lying on the seat of the booth. She had shredded it into tiny pieces.

  When we got back to the room, I said, “I thought I’d read galleys in here for a while.” I pulled a green chair over near the foot of the bed, and went to my room to get the galleys, taking a while to gather up Broun’s copyedited manuscript and a couple of blue pencils so Annie could get ready for bed, and whistling the whole time so she’d know I was there.

  When I came back in, she was already in bed, in a long-sleeved white nightgown, sitting up against the pillows, her hands clenched together.

  “Is that Broun’s book about Antietam?” Annie asked.

  “More or less,” I said. “He keeps making changes. That’s why I need to get these done before he comes back from California, so he’ll quit fooling with it.”

  “What do you have to do with them?”

  “Read them over. Look for mistakes, typos, missing lines, punctuation, that kind of thing.” I moved the chair closer to the bed so I could prop my feet on the end of it.

  “Can I help?” She said it calmly enough, but the knuckles of her clench
ed hands were white. “Please. I don’t want to just sit here and wait to go to sleep.”

  I put the galleys down. “Look, I don’t have to work on these right now. We could watch some TV or something.”

  “Really, I’d like to help with the galleys. I think reading would take my mind off the dreams. Do we take different parts or do we read it out loud to each other?”

  “Annie, I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Because it’s about Antietam?”

  Because it’s about Lee’s bandaged hands and a horse with its legs shot off and dead soldiers everywhere. “Yes.”

  “You read those out loud, don’t you?” she said. “That’s exactly the reason I should help you. I can see if Broun made any mistakes. After all, I was there.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. I handed her the galleys and a blue proofreader’s pencil. “I’ll read from the copyedited manuscript and you follow along to make sure everything’s there and they haven’t left out a line. You can check for typos, too. Just mark an X in the margin, and I’ll go back and put in the proofreader’s marks.” I handed her a pencil and put my feet up on the footboard and began to read:

  “What time is it, do you reckon?” Ben said. They were crouched in a cornfield a little behind the sunken road where all the fighting was. They had fired over the heads of the men in the road until they ran out of cartridges and then had begun working their way backwards between the rows of shredded corn, taking rifles away from dead and wounded men and firing them. It seemed like they had been doing it for hours, but there was so much smoke Ben couldn’t even see the sun. He wondered if maybe they had been here all day and the sun had gone down.

  “It ain’t noon yet,” Malachi said. He had his hand under a soldier whose left shoulder had been shot off and who was lying face down in the broken corn stalks. He had yellow hair. His arm was lying on the ground beside him, still holding on to his Springfield. There was a scrap of cloth pinned to his sleeve with a stick. Ben put down his rifle and unpinned the cloth. It was a handkerchief.

  Malachi turned him over and rummaged in his pockets. It was Toby.

  “Come on,” Malachi said. “Looks like he ran out of minnies, too before they got him.” He thrust Ben’s rifle at him and yanked him backwards. “Listen. They’re bringing the guns up,” Malachi said, and Ben could feel the rough dirt shake under his feet.

  “I have to …” Ben said and started forward again.

  Malachi stood up and grabbed him by the back of his shirt. “What in tarnation do you think you’re doin’?”

  He showed the handkerchief to Malachi. “I gotta pin this back on Toby, How will they know who he is? How will his kin know what happened to him?”

  “They’ll have a right good idea, but they won’t find out from that,” he said, and jerked his finger at the handkerchief Ben looked at it. It was covered with soot from the powder so badly he couldn’t even make the letters out, “Now come on! What the hell you doin now?”

  “I know him,” Ben said, scrabbling in his pockets. “I know where he’s from. Do you got some paper?”

  A bullet kit Toby’s arm and gouged out another red hole, “Come on,” Malachi shouted, “or that gal back home’s gonna be findin’ out about you.” He took hold of Ben’s coat and yanked him back through the corn till they couldn’t see Toby anymore.

  After a while the shooting let up a little and Malachi said, “Me, I stick my pertinents in my boots.”

  “They can shoot you in the foot, too,” Ben said.

  “They can,” Malachi said, “but most likely you won’t get kilt straight off and you kin tell ’em who you are before you die.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We had no business reading that.”

  She was asleep. I took the galleys back from her and put in the proofreader’s marks till I began to feel sleepy myself, and then went and looked out the window a while at the Rappahannock. Union troops had camped on the far side of the river, no more than half a mile from here, their campfires hidden by the fog along the river, waiting for the battle to start. Everyone who had written about the Civil War, generals, platoon historians, journalists, said the waiting was the worst part. Once you were in the battle, they said, it wasn’t so bad. You did what you had to do without even thinking about it, but beforehand, waiting for the fog to lift and the signal to be given, was almost unbearable.

  “It’s so cold,” Annie said. She sat up and tugged at the blankets with both hands, trying to pull them free of the foot of the bed.

  “I’ll get a blanket,” I said, and then realized she was still asleep. She yanked hard on the coverlet and it came free.

  “Get Hill up here,” she said, wrapping the flounced muslin around her shoulders and holding it together with one hand at her neck, as if it were a cape. “I want him to see this.” Her cheeks were flushed almost red. I wondered if she would be feverish if I touched her.

  She let go of the coverlet and leaned forward as if looking at something. The coverlet slipped off her shoulders. “Bring me a lantern,” she said, and fumbled with the satin edge of the blanket.

  I wondered if I should try to wake her up. She was breathing fast and shallowly, and her cheeks were as red as fire. She clutched the edge of the blanket in a desperate pantomime of something.

  I moved forward to take the blanket away from her before she tore it, and as I did she looked directly at me with the unseeing gaze of the sleeping, and let go of it.

  “Annie?” I said softly, and she sighed and lay down. The coverlet was bunched behind her neck, and her head was at an awkward angle, and I gently eased the coverlet out from under and pulled the blanket up over her shoulders.

  “I had a dream,” Annie said. She was looking at me and this time she saw me. Her cheeks were still flushed, though not as red as they had been.

  “I know,’ I said. I hung the coverlet over the end of the bed and sat down beside her. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  She sat up, tucking the pillow up against the headboard and pulling the muslin coverlet up over her bent knees. “I was standing on the porch of my house at night, looking down at the lawn. It was winter, I think, because it was cold, but there wasn’t any snow, and the house was different. It was on a steep hill, and the lawn was a long way below me, at the bottom of the hill. I was looking down at the lawn, but I couldn’t see it because it was too dark, but I could hear the sound of someone crying. It was a long way off, so I couldn’t really be sure what I heard, and I kept squinting down at the lawn, trying to make out what was down there.

  “I turned on the porch light, and that just made it worse. I couldn’t see anything. So I turned it off again and stood there in the dark and just then somebody crashed into me and it was a Union soldier. He had a message for me, and I knew it would be good news, but I was afraid if I turned on the porch light to read it by, I wouldn’t be able to see what was on the lawn.

  “Then I saw a light in the sky, a long way off, and I thought. Oh, good, somebody on their side has turned a porch light on, but it wasn’t like that, it bobbed and danced, and I thought, Somebody is bringing me a lantern to read the message by, and then the whole sky lit up with red and green, and I could see the bodies on the lawn.”

  “Were they Union soldiers?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “only they weren’t wearing blue uniforms. Some of them were wearing long underwear, red and white, and some of them were naked, and I thought how cold they must be lying there without any clothes on. Do you know where we are?”

  Oh, yes, I thought, I know where we are. I hadn’t taken her anywhere near the battlefield all day, but she had been there anyway. And why had I thought the battles Lee had won would haunt him any less than the ones he had lost?

  “They weren’t wearing uniforms because the Confederates came down from Marye’s Heights in the middle of the night and stole them off the dead bodies. After the battle of Fredericksburg.”

  She leaned back against the pi
llows as if I had said something comforting. “Tell me about the battle.”

  “After Antietam, Lee retreated back into Virginia. It took forever for the Union army to make up its mind to follow him, and when they did it was at the worst possible place. In December, the Union army crossed the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg and tried to march across the plain southwest of town, but the Confederate army held Marye’s Heights above the plain. They proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can’t attack a defended ridge from an open plain.”

  “And after the battle the wounded soldiers lay there crying for help on the plain?”

  “Yes. It froze that night.”

  “And the Confederate soldiers stole their clothes,” she said softly. “What about the message?”

  “A Union courier got lost in the dark the night before the battle and wandered up to a Confederate picket line. He was captured and the orders he was carrying were taken to Lee. That same night the aurora borealis shone, lighting up the whole sky with red and green. Both sides took it as a good omen.”

  She sat a long time huddled under the coverlet. “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Eleven forty-five.”

  She lay down. “If this time is anything like the others, I shouldn’t have any more dreams tonight. I usually don’t have them after midnight.”

  “Was this dream like the others, Annie?” I asked, thinking of the “storm of dreams” Dr. Stone had said followed abrupt discontinuation of a sedative.

  “No,” she said. She had propped herself up on one elbow, and she was smiling. “It was easier. Because you were here to tell me what it meant.” She yawned. “Can I sleep late tomorrow?”

  “Of course. The morning after a battle the soldiers always get to sleep late,” I said, which was a lie. The morning after the battle the soldiers were marched off to the next battle, and the next, till they came to the one that killed them.

  I sat down in the green chair and picked up the galleys.

  “You don’t have to stay up, Jeff,” she said. “I won’t have any more dreams. You can go to bed.”