by Jesse Ball
The examiner left the room. Her footsteps crossed the hall, paused at the door, and sounded on the porch.
ON THE FIFTEENTH DAY, she sat at the writing desk, making her report. The noise of the claimant’s breathing could be heard through the open door. A window was before her, and through it she could see clouds and a sky surrounding them, and beyond it, a moon that was hardly a sliver. Maybe there wasn’t even a moon there to be seen.
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The claimant’s memories intrude at an alarming rate. The cause is clearly his dream recollection. I have chosen a course of reintegration, to begin tomorrow. He has completely regained his written language, and writes with great composure.
A sample of his dream records:
_ _
I see the face of a woman as she lies in a bed. I am sometimes near enough that her face is all I can see, as though she were leaning over me. But it is I that am leaning over her. At other times, I feel I am far away and I can see the bed, the room, and her—all of them as small as objects on a table, and as still. I am sure that she is dead.
When I see her, I feel that she is surrounded by images, and although I can see her, I cannot see the images that blur her face. Somehow I feel that they are images of our happiness—that we were happy and knew one another. I feel that these things are hidden from me, and that she has carried them into death and I can never know them again.
And then I am flying through a long tunnel in the darkness and there are stars all about me, and finally I realize that I am just water—I am just the surface of a pond. I ripple and when I ripple, I sail through darkness until the ripples settle and I can see again. And when I see, what I see is the sky above and it is full of pinpricks of light.
When I woke up this morning, I had just been sitting in a station where there were huge machines to carry people. I was waiting for someone, and I was holding a paper bag full of presents. I wore a long coat—it was cold—and a hat and gloves. A child was crying or blowing its nose on the bench beside me. I felt someone was coming to meet me. And always someone comes up from behind and calls to me, a man. I see him, but I don’t recognize him, and he goes away, not as in life, but back the way he came, backward, fluttering backward, and all the trains leave the station the same way, and even the child is gone, there’s just a bench and a handkerchief, and I am the one crying.
_ _
Troubling, to say the least.
The course of his recovery is peculiar. We are already on difficult ground. He has begun to insist that he remembers this woman, and he asks me incessantly to explain details of his dreams—which would lend him a larger view onto the life he led. All the same, I favor transparency, where it is possible. Perhaps it is not possible here.
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THE EXAMINER sat the claimant down at the dining room table one afternoon.
—Do you remember, she said, how I told you last week that there was a thing called writing, how I explained it to you, and showed you about it, how we practiced thinking about it, and imagining doing it, and how it could be used to record dreams?
The claimant looked at her with a bit of confusion.
—You remember how I told you several of my dreams? How I wrote them down and showed them to you? And I told you, if you wanted to, you could try to dream them yourself? And you have been trying, all this last week?
She set on the table several sheets of paper—in her handwriting, the dreams she had written out for him.
—I suppose, said the claimant, I suppose I do. It is hard to remember. I feel like I have been dreaming.
—You have been dreaming, said the examiner, you have been, and, Anders, you have been dreaming the dreams that I told you to! You have been so very successful. Now it is time, for the very first time, for you to write yourself.
She brought out a pencil and a leather notebook and set them before him.
—Please write down in this the dreams I have been sharing with you—the ones you managed to also have. And write down any you have that branch off of those—those are important, too.
The claimant held the pen and looked down at the notebook. He looked up at her and down again.
—Do you need some help? she asked.
—I just, he said, I am having trouble remembering about…
—About…
—About what is what.
—Well, the first dream we worked on for you, the first of my dreams that you were to have—and this was only because you were having such trouble remembering your dreams at all—the first dream was of a thing called a train station.
—A train station?
—A place with large machinery that runs on wheels. Large boats with wheels that travel along metal rails. They carry people in and out.
—I remember, he said. I remember it.
—You see, she said, you were successful—you had the dream when we decided you should.
—I was sitting on a bench, he said. I was waiting for someone.
—The dream, she said, is one that I often had as a child. You see, I was in boarding school some of the time, and so I would wait for my parents at the large station. It felt like it was always winter, and I was always in a coat, I was always sneezing. I had a cold, I believe.
—Yes, he said, in the dream, I also had a cold!
—Sometimes it was me, and sometimes it was a child who sat next to me.
—Do you remember the other dreams that we worked on?
—No, said the claimant. I can’t seem to remember.
—There was one, a dark and difficult dream. It is of my mother. I told you about her. She died of a fever when I was seventeen. She was still very young then. That dream is just a single image, just her in a bed, lying with her eyes closed. But all around her there flutters the life of my family, and the world that we lost when she died. Don’t you remember, said the examiner crossly. Don’t you remember at all? This was the first success that we had—on Tuesday. You managed to have this dream exactly—only for you it was a young woman, not a mother, and you managed to invent a feeling of longing and sadness.
They sat quietly in the room.
The claimant looked as though he might cry.
—I can’t remember it properly, he said to himself.
—That feeling of longing and sadness, continued the examiner, is important. It is part of life’s balance, to give things their proper worth. If a person was loved, and a person has died, we want to bring them with us while we still live, but we cannot allow their memory to ruin all new things. So, we must accord them a space of solemnity and reverence, and spontaneous joy in recollection. That is the exercise that we are trying to do with this dream. We are making a case for you to put your effort into. I want you to invent some memories that you might have had with this young woman and be lighthearted about it. She is, after all, not real. Since she is not real, you can play a bit. You can imagine that there were wonderful times, and that she has died, and that it was a tragedy the likes of which you could scarcely bear, but then—because it wasn’t real, you can use it as a test case. You can be strong, and delight in all the fine things that you invent—all the fine things you did together. And you can imagine how a person might use this process to get over a difficult grief, and live a happy life.
—I remember, he said. I remember now that we talked about this. I think I do. I can remember thinking about her a lot, and I remember also, I remember…
—For now, said the examiner, let us think about another of the dreams I had that I gave to you. Do you remember the one where you worked in an antiques store—and you were always forgetting to lock the door. You were always leaving without locking the door?
—Yes, I remember that one.
—Well, do you remember that I did work in an antiques store, that I did forget to lock the door? And do you remember what happened?
—You were fired? You lost your position?
—No, nothing of the sort. I just went back in the middle of the night and locked the door. N
o one ever found out—not until I told you about it.
The claimant leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath.
—You want me to try to write this down?
—I know you can, said the examiner. Even if you haven’t written before, or if you wrote once long ago, but have forgotten how. I’m sure you can do it.
The claimant leaned over the paper and began to write.
He wrote:
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I am in a train station. I am wearing a coat because it is winter. There are birds everywhere, and I am crying.
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—Very good, said the examiner. Very good! You see, you can write! And your handwriting is very clean and even. I am going to go out onto the porch so you can write in peace. Come out when you are ready.
The claimant sat and wrote, and it felt very good to him to write. He felt he could see them so clearly, the things he had dreamed, and that writing made them firm. The examiner was so kind to him. He tried to imagine her face as the face of the young woman. He tried to imagine her face looking out of a train window. He wrote and wrote, and when he went out on the porch and showed her, the examiner smiled and touched him on the arm and he sat beside her. In the night there had been a storm and part of the fence was down. He said, the fence has fallen down, and she said, if part of it has fallen down, it isn’t a fence any longer. Then she said she was sorry, that that was a joke. And he thought about it as a joke, and soon they were sitting in the dusk.
—WHAT IS IT LIKE to be an examiner?
—It is difficult at first. One has to be so careful, always afraid of saying the wrong thing. It begins that you work with people who were not sick, who are not recovering. Everything else is the same, but the people you are working with are actors.
—Actors?
—People who are playing a part, who are pretending to be something they are not. And still others are watching the whole thing and keeping track. They grade you on your performance, and if you do well enough, you may be offered a position as an examiner. Of course, one is only an examiner D at that point.
—D?
—There are several ranks—D, C, B, A, and G. They have different levels of responsibility and autonomy.
—Teresa, what are you now?
—Examiners are not supposed to talk about this sort of thing.
—Oh, please!
—Examiner A.
—That is so wonderful!
He shook her arm with both his hands.
—I am so happy for you, he said. What a great thing to have done.
The examiner was taken aback. A pleased smile flashed on her features and was dispelled.
—Oh, it was nothing, she said. I just do my work and try as hard as I can.
—But still, he said. But still. Just imagine—me, getting an examiner A to help me! What a great thing.
—Anders, she said. A person always gets an examiner A at first—that’s what they are for.
—But still, he said. I am sure that you are different from the other examiners. Don’t you think you are? Don’t you do things a bit differently? Are all examiners women?
—Yes, she said. They are all women.
—And are all gardeners men?
She laughed.
—Not at all. They can be either. And there are many men who work with examiners. It is only that—it has been found that women are better at this task.
—Could I become an examiner?
—You, an examiner? There are things like examiners—you could take a position like that, within this system. Indeed, many who come to us as claimants end up working in our ranks once they have recovered completely. It is a matter of how well your recovery proceeds. There are many things we do not know, many questions unanswered. We shall see what you are best suited for.
—I think that I might like it, he said. Sometimes I feel that we are a bit alike.
—It is good to feel that, she said. That is the feeling we talked about—empathy. It is what humans can feel for other humans. It is very natural.
—But I think we are alike, he said.
—We may be, she said. But feeling that we might be—that is what is most important.
THEY WERE STANDING before the pictures again. One was a painting of a farm scene. Another was a photograph of a hill with a hole in it.
—How many times, said the examiner, we have stood looking at these pictures.
—There is someone in the cave, I think.
—Why do you think that, Anders?
—Because there is a line here, and here and here. I believe that someone must have walked there, up the hill, again and again and again until a path was worn down. If that is true, then maybe the person is inside of the hill, in the cave, in this photograph. I have often thought this when we have stood here, but I wasn’t ready to speak about it until now.
—Do you put someone there?
—What do you mean?
—Anders, do you put someone there, in the cave? Is there someone you imagine to be there, when you imagine a person in there?
He shifted his weight and the floor creaked slightly.
—I put you in there. It’s you that is in there.
—That’s all right. That’s okay.
She patted him reassuringly.
—I am the only person you know. Of course, you would put me in there. Who else would you put?
—It isn’t for good, he said. I pictured you coming out, also.
She narrowed her eyes.
—Did you really?
—No. But, I can.
—Anders, she said. Just so you know, you can’t say that something is inside the hill. A hill is a solid object. If a tunnel is bored through it, or a cave is there, the cave replaces the inside of the hill. Then, a person who is in a cave is in a cave that goes into a hill. They are not in a hill. In the same way, a tunnel that goes through a hill has no part that is in the hill, unless, of course, the tunnel collapses. Then, the person that was in the tunnel when it collapsed could be said to be inside the hill.
—I like this one less and less, said the claimant, pointing to the painting.
—Why is that?
—I think that it doesn’t reflect how things are very well. I am concerned about it never having happened.
—So you prefer real things?
—I think so, I think. No, that’s not it.
—There are many imagined things that are good, said the examiner, and many that I know you like.
—I think maybe it is false. There isn’t any hope in it.
—It looks cheerful enough to me, said the examiner quietly.
—But, ah, mmm…
—You are right, you know, said the examiner. It is a bad piece of art, and that is because it is an imposture. The artist was elsewhere when it was made. It would be good to take it down or to throw it away, but I think,
She tilted her head.
—I think it will be good for it to stay as a reminder to you of this moment. Good work.
ONE DAY, SHE SAT DOWN with him on the porch steps outside the house. It was a very gray day. The clouds were low over their heads, and there was hardly any sun. In fact, the town looked different beneath this sky. The claimant said this to the examiner,
—How different the weather makes things. You almost wouldn’t know the street to look at it.
—That reminds me, she said, of an exercise. It might be hard for you, on a day like today, to think of the way things usually are, and remember them, but I want you to. I want you to close your eyes, and give me an account of what you see as you leave the house and go down into the town.
—THE FIRST THING, the claimant said, is that I shut the gate. As soon as I’ve done that, I’m standing in the road. The road goes in two directions. I always go to the left. There is a house opposite, and it is the same as our house. There is a house to the left of that, and opposite it, a house to the right of our house. There are, on our street, nineteen houses on each side, as we go do
wn into the town. At the base of the hill, there is a depression where water sometimes gathers. That’s on the right side of the street. There is a shop with a chessboard set up in the window. The pieces are not set up properly. The board has been turned ninety degrees. The queens are not on their color. As you…
—That is enough for now, said the examiner quietly. You are doing so well. You see so much, I would never have guessed.
—The next thing, said the claimant, is a shop with a sewing machine. The same dress is always in the machine, as if it is about to mended, but it never is. It is always waiting to be mended.
ANOTHER DAY, and they went down the road in the other direction. For the first time, they turned right. They walked for a good long while. For this good while there were houses on both sides, and then there were just houses on one side, and then none—just fields and woods. They had a picnic with them, and when they came upon a large rock that was pleasantly placed beneath the shade of a tree, they decided to sit and eat.
—Do you remember what I said to you last night? That I said, today we will practice how it would be to meet a person? Are you ready to try?
—A real person?
The claimant looked about him to see if there was someone approaching, or any sign of anyone nearby, but there was none. It was just a beautiful autumn afternoon, with leaves falling, and birds passing now and then through the air and through the trees.
