Lincoln's Dreams

by Connie Willis

  I handed them to Annie. “We’re in the South now. We’re lucky they’ve got any books on him at all.”

  She took the books back to the table, and I got down on all fours to see what they had on Lee. It might have been the South, but I didn’t do much better. I went out to the desk, asked where the history section was, and got directed to a little alcove located a half-flight up from the reference section where I had found the drug compendium.

  Since I was already there and I knew where Annie was, I took the opportunity to look up phenobarbital in the dated drug compendium. It said about what I expected it to, that it was a tranquilizer and worked by suppressing REM sleep. Barbiturates were addictive, especially when used over a long period of time, and maybe that was why Richard had been so upset about Annie’s family doctor prescribing it, but phenobarbital was comparatively mild, and it didn’t have nearly the number of contraindications and warnings that Elavil had had, let alone Thorazine.

  I went up into the alcove. It was labeled “Virginiana,” and was about as sparse as the biographies lad been, which didn’t make any sense. Fredericksburg was a major battle, and we were within shooting distance of Spotsylvania, Chancellorsville, and the Wilderness. This should be a main source library for those battles, at least, and, since researchers would inevitably come here, for the rest of the Civil War as well.

  I gathered up what I could find on the three battles Annie had dreamed so far and took them back up to the biography room. The librarian, a sharpish-looking woman who would have been at home teaching school there in the old ruler-rapping days, gave me a suspicious glance but made no attempt to stop me.

  Annie had the books open and had torn some pages out of my notebook to take notes on. She looked up and smiled when I came in and then bent back over the book, her light hair swinging forward across her cheeks. I sat down opposite her and tried to find out Lee’s sleeping habits.

  Lee’s “precious hours” of sleep between nine and midnight couldn’t account for the dreams Annie had had late at night or during the day, but she had said that she’d started having those only after she began staying awake to avoid the dreams. And maybe Lee had tried to grab a few hours here and there to compensate for his sleepless nights.

  Lee had “slept little” the night before Antietam, and, according to General Walker, who had seen him sitting on Traveller in midstream when he took his division across, Lee had been there all night, supervising the retreat across the Potomac.

  On the night before Fredericksburg, that same night that the aurora borealis lit up the sky and the Union messenger stumbled into Confederate lines, Lee had kept his staff up working all night. At dawn he had ridden out to inspect the pits dug by the work parties overnight. None of the books mentioned whether Lee had gotten some rest after the battle was over, though it was obvious from these accounts that he must have been ready to collapse with fatigue.

  Dr. Stone had said that when the body was deprived of REM sleep, it made it up with a vengeance. Was that what the dreams were? Had Lee, worn out from the strain of battle and a lack of sleep, experienced a storm of dreams?

  I couldn’t find the same clear-cut pattern with Chancellorsville. Jackson had been wounded on May second, and as soon as Lee found out about it, he wrote him, “I would I were wounded in your stead.” The message of the amputation of his arm arrived on the night of the fourth. There was no mention of Lee’s having insomnia that night, though it was hard to imagine him getting a good night’s sleep after news like that. On the fifth, word came that Jackson was recovering, and he definitely slept well that night, under a fly-tent at Fairview.

  On the morning of the seventh, Jackson began to get worse, and by afternoon he was lost in delirious dreams, calling out for A. P. Hill and telling the infantry to move up. “Do your duty,” he told the doctor who was dosing him with mercury and opium. “Prepare for action.” On Sunday he said clearly, out of the final dream of some battle. “Let us cross over the river and rest under the trees,” and died.

  Annie closed both the Lincoln books. “Would they have anything else on Lincoln?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They might have something in the reference section. It’s downstairs.”

  She nodded and left, taking her notes with her.

  I started through the biographies of Lee, wishing I had brought Freeman with me. The first book was arranged so hopelessly I never even found Chancellorsville, let alone any references to Lee’s insomnia, but the second one, so old the pages were edged in gilt, and written in indecipherably flowery language, said, “When Lee received the dreadful news that the doctors’ ministrations were to no avail and that Jackson was sinking fast, he turned to that last, best source of hope in times of trouble. All night he prayed fervently on his knees for Jackson’s recovery.”

  He had been up all one night praying and probably had slept badly three or four nights before that because of worrying about Jackson. There was definitely a pattern. During each of the events Annie had dreamed about, Lee had gone without sleep for several days in a row. Maybe when he did finally sleep, he experienced the storm of dreams that Dr. Stone had described. Dr. Stone had called them powerful, frightening dreams. Could they have been powerful enough to have blasted their way across a hundred years to Annie? And if they had, why was she having them one right after the other? Jackson had died five months after the battle of Fredericksburg.

  I looked at my watch. It was four-thirty. I piled the books up and took them back downstairs. Annie was in the reference section with a large book spread open in front of her. They must have had something alter all. I went up into the alcove and put the books back on the shelves where they belonged so they would be there if I needed them again and not on a cart guarded by that fierce-looking librarian, and found a book on Gettysburg.

  It weighed a ton. I didn’t try to carry it back up to the biographies room or even get it up onto a table. I just laid it open on the floor and bent over it, trying to see if the same pattern of lack of sleep persisted with Gettysburg. Gettysburg was the next Dig battle after Chancellorsville, but Annie wasn’t dreaming all the battles. I needed to see if the same conditions for dreaming had occurred during that battle.

  There was a full page of references to Lee in the index. I tried looking them up, keeping one hand in the index page and going down the two-column pages with a finger of my other hand, hoping Lee’s name or the word sleep would jump out at me. At five-fifteen I gave up. It was in there, every word ever written about Gettysburg had to be in there, which was the whole problem. There was too much stuff to sort through, the way the vet’s bay had had too many symptoms. Lee’s insomnia was lost in the sheer volume of facts. I hefted the book back onto its shelf and went to look for Annie.

  She wasn’t in the magazine section. I looked along the stacks and found her finally back in the biographies room. She had let up one of the shades and was looking out the window in the direction of the Rappahannock.

  “I think I’ve figured out what’s causing the dreams,” I said.

  She turned around. She looked tired, as if she had been up all night instead of a few hours.

  “I think you were right when you said you were helping Lee sleep,” I said. “I think that may be exactly what you’re doing.”

  We went out the arched green doors and down the cement steps. It must have rained while we were inside because the library’s asphalt parking lot was covered with puddles, but the sky was as clear as when we went inside, paling to lavender with the evening. The air smelled like apple blossoms.

  “You said he couldn’t sleep,” I said. “You were right. He apparently suffered from insomnia through the whole war, and during the battles he didn’t sleep at all.” I explained my theory to her as we walked back to the inn, telling her about Dr. Stone’s storm of dreams and the pattern I’d discovered in her dreams.

  “I still think the drugs you took are somehow connected to all this, but I haven’t figured out how yet,” I said. �
�You said your family doctor put you on phenobarbital. Did you notice any change in the dreams while you were on it?”

  “No,” Annie said, looking in the direction of the inn two blocks away. The black cat was coming out to meet us, highstepping its way along the wet sidewalk.

  “How long were you on the phenobarbital?” I asked.

  The cat meowed a greeting that sounded like a complaint. Annie knelt to pick it up. “Did you know that when Willie Lincoln had pneumonia he kept calling for the boy across the street?” she said. “His name was Bud Taft. He came and held Willie’s hand and sat with him the whole time, did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “One night while Bud was with Willie, Lincoln came in and said, ‘Better go to bed. Bud,’ and Bud said, ‘If I go, he will call for me.’”

  The cat struggled to be let down. Annie put it back on the sidewalk, and it stalked off, offended. Half a block away, it sat down on the sidewalk and began to lick its white paws.

  “You didn’t happen to find out where Willie Lincoln was buried, did you?” I said.

  “I thought he was buried at Arlington.”

  “Nope. And I don’t know where he was buried.”

  Annie looked at the cat. “Maybe nobody knows,” she said.

  When we came up even with the cat, it stood up and walked alongside us all the way back to the inn.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Lee’s affection for Traveller was obvious. “If I were an artist like you,” he wrote his cousin Markie Williams, “I would draw a true picture of Traveller…. Such a picture would inspire a poet, whose genius could then depict his worth and describe his endurance of toil, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and the dangers and sufferings through which he has passed. He could dilate on his sagacity and affection, and his invariable response to every wish of his rider. He might even imagine his thoughts through the long night marches and days of battle through which he has passed. But I am no artist.”

  When Michael Miley took Lee’s photograph, Lee insisted that he be mounted on Traveller, “just as we went through the four years of war together.”

  We went back to the inn after dinner and waited for Lee’s aides to deliver some last message so that he could take off his boots and settle onto his camp cot and go to sleep.

  Annie rechecked the galleys that I had read the night before, and I got out my trusty Freeman and started in on Gettysburg. It was impossible for me to believe that Lee wouldn’t dream about this, the worst battle of the war, the end of the war really for the Confederacy, though Broun would fight me on that.

  He claimed that Antietam was the decisive battle, that with the failure of Lee’s push into Maryland the war was effectively over for the Confederacy, even though there were three more years of killing left and Lee knew it.

  Whether it was or not, and, more important, whether Lee was aware of it, he certainly knew it at Gettysburg a year later, and if anything would have given him bad dreams, it was that misbegotten battle. The high-water mark of the Confederacy. Lee made it all the way into Pennsylvania before the Union army stopped him, and then for three days he unleashed one assault after another that made it look like he could win after all.

  On the morning of the third day, Lee met with Longstreet outside a schoolhouse. Longstreet didn’t like Lee’s plan of attack. Later Longstreet claimed he had said, “It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position,” and had considered the matter settled. Lee never blamed anybody but himself for the failure of Pickett’s Charge, but when his aide Colonel Venable said bitterly that he’d distinctly heard Lee direct Longstreet to send up Hood’s division in support, Lee had said, “I know! I know!”

  Lee’s plan was to send Pickett’s men directly on a frontal assault at the Union center, and it almost worked. Pickett’s men made it up to the famous bloody angle of a stone wall and held it for almost twenty minutes, without any support at all, in spite of the fact that this time it was Fredericksburg in reverse, Lee’s men in an open field marching toward a defended ridge. But Longstreet didn’t send up the supporting divisions, and they couldn’t hold the wall. When the soldiers began to fall back, Lee rode down to meet them and send them back to Seminary Ridge, speaking encouragingly to nearly every man who passed.

  “Try to reform your division in the rear of this hill,” he had told Pickett, and Pickett had said, “General Lee, I have no division.”

  Annie went to sleep around ten, the covers pulled up over her shoulders as if she were cold. I called the answering machine, and Richard gave me his new theory, this one about sexual guilt and repressed Oedipal attachments.

  I had felt all along that these calls, these theories, were leading somewhere, that they were all part of a pitch to persuade me to bring Annie back, but now I was not so sure. The theories didn’t fit together. Sometimes they even contradicted each other, and he jumped from one to another with the same quiet urgency of a man recounting a dream. He still used his Good Shrink voice, but, listening to him, I had the feeling that it was not me he was trying to convince, but himself.

  “I talked to a Jungian psychiatrist today,” Broun said after Richard ran down. He pronounced Jung to rhyme with “hung.”

  “He’s got a theory that our subconscious is really a storage bin for everything that’s ever happened in the past. Jung’s collective unconscious, only he says it’s not just common racial memories, it’s everything.”

  He sounded excited, agitated. Maybe he was getting obsessed with Lincoln’s dreams. “Dates, people, places. It’s all down there, but people only dream bits and pieces of it, and even then something has to trigger the memories. That’s where Lincoln’s acromegaly comes in. He says a hormonal imbalance can unlock the collective unconscious. I know, I know, this sounds like the fortune-teller, but I think he’s on to something.”

  I erased the messages, thinking about what he’d said. If a hormonal imbalance could unlock the collective unconscious, maybe a chemical imbalance could, too, and that was where the drugs came in. It would explain why the dreams had suddenly gotten clearer when Annie was on the Elavil. Maybe the phenobarbital had started to let down some kind of guard in the subconscious, and then the Elavil had completed the process, so that Lee’s dreams came through loud and clear.

  If that was the case, then the dreams would gradually lose their power and clarity now that Annie was off the drugs, and the best thing to do was to wait them out till the chemical balance in her brain was restored and the dreams faded away.

  I shut off the lights and went back into Annie’s room to wait it out with her, and was asleep in the chair within minutes. When I woke up it was three-thirty by the lighted dial of my watch. Annie was still sleeping peacefully, though she had flung most of the covers off. I thought, with the confused logic of the half-awake, that I must somehow have slept through her dream, but her breathing wasn’t the heavy, almost drugged-sounding breathing she had after the dreams, and my next thought, even more confused, was that I had stopped the dreams simply by telling her what caused them, and went back to sleep.

  I must have heard the door slam because when I woke up again I was already halfway to it, only barely glancing at the bed because I knew she wasn’t there. I had it open and was out in the hall in time to hear the outside door close. The outside door that opened on the fire escape.

  I ran to the end of the hall and pushed down on the metal bar. The bar gave, but the door wouldn’t open. Annie must be pushing on it from the outside. Or be lying crumpled against it. “Annie!” I shouted through the door, and then stopped. You weren’t supposed to startle a sleepwalker. If they were somewhere dangerous, on a cliff or something, they might fall. I tore back down the hall, down the front stairs, and through the empty lobby to the front door. It was locked, but from the inside. I got it open and raced around to the side of the building.

  Annie was standing at the top of the stairs in her white nightgown, looking like a ghost in the gray, indistinc
t light of dawn. The cat was sitting on the top step, watching her.

  “Annie,” I said quietly from the bottom of the stairs, “you’re having another dream.”

  She was looking toward the Rappahannock. Fog lay along the line of trees like a gray blanket. “Goodbye, Katie,” she said with a catch in her voice. “Promise you’ll come back.”

  “Stay there,” I said, “I’m coming.” I started up the stairs, one hand on the railing and the other held out to catch her if she fell. “What are you dreaming, Annie?”

  She half-raised her hand in its full white sleeve as if to wave. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” she said, and then buried her face in her hand and began to cry. The cat watched her incuriously.

  I stepped onto the landing and put my hand gently on her shoulder. “Annie, can you wake up? You’re having a bad dream.”

  She took her hand away from her face and turned to me, her face alight. “No tears at Arlington!” she said brightly, “no tears,” and flung her arms around my neck and sobbed.

  “Annie, don’t cry!” I put my arms around her. Sobs shuddered through her. “Honey, oh, don’t cry!”

  She clung tighter to me, shivering in the thin nightgown. I patted her back and reached behind me for the door with one hand. I was afraid it would be locked from the outside, and how would I ever get her down these narrow stairs and back inside the inn? The metal bar gave under the pressure of my hand and opened. “Let’s go inside, Annie,” I said. “It’s cold out here, honey. Let’s go back to the room.”

  She tightened her arms around me and pressed her face against my neck. “I don’t want you to leave,” she said, and lifted her tear-stained face up to mine, her face full of love and sorrow. Her eyes were wide open, but she wasn’t looking at me. Whoever she was clinging to, begging them not to go, it wasn’t me.

  Her nightgown had come unbuttoned at the neck and was pulled away from the long curve of her throat. I could feel the uneven catch of her sobs through the thin cotton of the nightgown. “Annie,” I said, and the pain in my voice brought her awake.