Sleeping in Flame

by Jonathan Carroll

  "What does that mean?"

  "Do you know what a sonogram is? It's like the sonar they use on ships to detect submarines or mines beneath the surface of the water. We send sound waves down through the body in a completely harmless, 'noninvasive' way, which then lets us see what's going on inside the person without having to expose them to an X-ray.

  "If Ms. York is pregnant, it will show up there. I would think with everything I've seen so far, what we've got is a classical threatened abortion."

  "Abortion? She didn't –"

  He held up his hand to silence me. "Mr. Easterling, the word abortion in medical terms means any kind of termination of pregnancy. Laymen misuse the word all the time, so it has come to have a terrible connotation. In Ms. York's case, 'threatened abortion' only means that her body itself is threatening the abortion. She has had nothing to do with it. However, as far as I can see, although there was a large loss of blood, this has not happened yet."

  "You mean she might be miscarrying?"

  "A threatened miscarriage. There are two other possibilities that we are going to check out. One of them is called a 'placenta previa' and the other is called 'abruptio placentae.' Both of them mean her body may naturally be saying something is wrong with this fetus, so it refuses to carry it. Do you understand me?"

  "I'm getting confused."

  "The body keeps constant check on itself. When a woman gets pregnant and then suddenly, naturally aborts, it usually means the fetus was in one way or another defective. This isn't always the case and sometimes, in something like 37 percent of all miscarriages, the woman loses the child for unknown reasons."

  "But what if she isn't pregnant? Why would she be bleeding like that? There was a hell of a lot of blood."

  "I'm not sure yet, but I still think she is, from the brief examination I just gave her. There's a medical saying: 'Rare things occur rarely.' Unless she has some kind of serious condition that's been unknown till now, like a tumor or some other kind of cancer, from her condition I would say she has all the symptoms of what I described to you before."

  "Isn't all that blood she lost before dangerous?"

  "You'd be surprised how much a body can lose before it gets into real trouble. She's a strong woman. Her body could probably lose almost two liters and still she'd be all right."

  "Two liters?"

  "Yes. The thing we worry about most with loss of blood is that the patient will then go into shock. This didn't happen here. Ms. York was disoriented and her color was bad when she came in, but we caught it in time. Now let's see what the gynecologist says."

  He took out a pack of unfiltered cigarettes and, lighting up, took a deep, happy drag. I smiled and he smiled back. "Don't say anything. I have to live with a wife who's a jogger. I compromise by taking a five-mile walk every day." He paused. "Every day that the weather is nice."

  They wouldn't let me see her that night, although they assured me she was better and it would be all right if I went home. I assured them I was quite comfortable in my awful chair in the waiting room. But after two hours of hospital walls and silence, I fell into a deep sleep.

  It took days for the train to cross Europe, but I was in no hurry. There was an exhaustion so deep in my bones that all I seemed to do the whole trip was sleep, wake for a few minutes, then fall asleep again. Once, I slept right through a fistfight that happened two feet away from me when a German soldier from Konstanz tried to steal a pack of American cigarettes from my friend Gьnter.

  The only interesting part of the train ride was when we crossed into Switzerland. The rest of the European countryside looked like any place that's gone through years of war, but not Switzerland. Crossing the border was like entering a fairyland, or at least the land you dreamed of returning home to after living in a trench and dirty underpants for three years. It was so clean! Nothing was ruined, nothing destroyed or broken. The cows were brown and wore gold bells in green meadows of grass. There was perfectly white snow on the mountains, white sails on the boats in the lakes. How could anything stay white while a war was going on? In the Zurich station, where we had to lay over while other, 'more important,' trains passed ours, vendors sold chocolate wrapped in silver paper, cigarettes in yellow and red boxes, apples and tomatoes as big as your hand.

  The Swiss are horrible people, but they're smart. They take no sides and have no friends, but what do they care? They make it through wars untouched, with their banks full of money and their fat stomachs full. In France we heard they turned away Jews from their borders even when they knew what would happen by sending them back. Sometimes I thought about the French Jews we'd put on trucks. Sometimes, no, a lot of the time I thought about those French children who . . . flew out of that schoolhouse.

  They wouldn't let us off the train in Zurich but that didn't matter. All we wanted from them was their food, and between us we had just enough money to buy it. When I ate a chocolate bar for the first time there, I almost got sick to my stomach from the pure beautiful sweetness of it. They had coffee with real milk and sandwiches on dark bread so fresh and warm it kissed the inside of your mouth. There's a funny contradiction here: You dream about food like that when you can't have it, especially when you can't have it for years, but at the same time you completely forget what it tastes like until you put it in your mouth and bite down after a thousand days. When I told Gьnter that, he said, "Yeah, just like pussy." When I saw the glint in his eye, good man that he is, I felt sorry for the first woman he slept with when he got home to Bregenz.

  Naturally that made me think of Elisabeth. Would she be at the station to meet me? I'd written from France, but who knew what happened to letters sent from another country during a war? I kept thinking the post office there took prisoners' letters and threw them away first chance they got. But every once in a while I'd heard from her or my father. His letters were always the same: boring – how great things were going to be when I got back, the newest deal he'd pulled off and how much profit he'd made . . . But her letters were killers. They never talked about the weather or how hard the war was on them in Vienna. They talked only about sex. They talked about what kind of dreams she was having, what she thought about when she masturbated, what sort of things she wanted to do when we could sleep together again. After one of those letters arrived it always kept me hard for a week. I never knew whether I was glad or not to get them. Stupid as it sounds, they also made me nervous and uncomfortable. I'd play with myself so many times I'd get dizzy. When I wrote her that, she wrote back and set a date way in the future when, at exactly the same time, we should both jerk off and think of the other doing it. She was good in bed, but these letters told me things about her I'd never known when we'd slept together before the war. I wondered if that's all they were – dreams on paper. When we finally got to touch again, would she go back to being cozy sweet Elisabeth who sometimes purred like a cat when she was really hot, and most nights fell asleep with one leg over mine?

  Gьnter got off at Bregenz. As we hugged good-bye, both of us started crying like fools. We were home, for better or worse, and we were glad of it. The last I saw of him, he was standing on the platform with a scared look in his eye. There were people swarming all around, but none of them went up to him. I knew exactly how he felt, so I pushed the window down and yelled at him, "Come to Vienna if it's bad here. You know where I am. Kochgasse!"

  He waved at me. "Okay, but I'll be all right. You take care, pal."

  It was another two days before I got home. Across the whole country, foreign troops were everywhere. English, Russians, Americans in Jeeps and tanks, walking by the side of the road . . . A group of them even waved to the train as we went past. A year before we would have been shooting at each other.

  From what we heard, Austria had been divided up among different countries. Each Bundesland was controlled by someone else. In the train we learned Vienna itself was split up like that, and wondered who would be in charge of the different districts, and what changes would have taken place. More ba
d things to think about.

  The last stop we made before we got there was Linz, which, from the look of things, had been hit hard. What I remember most, though, were two freight cars off on a siding with large Jewish stars painted sloppily on their sides. Below the stars was the word "Mauthausen." In France, I didn't believe the stories until that day I saw the kids fly, the day our lieutenant told us to round them up and put them in the trucks. After that I believed every story I heard about the death camps. But what was I supposed to do? What could anyone do when one word against it would have meant the firing squad, or worse. The lieutenant had been right that day – our job was to get our asses home in one piece, no matter what the orders were.

  That was one of the few things I wanted to talk to my father about. He was a survivor. If you were his size, you had to find a way to survive in this world. I wanted to hear what he had to say about what the Nazis had done and why. Much of my life he'd been able to make sense of things that had only confused me. Maybe there was a good reason for killing all those Jews but I just didn't know it.

  When the train pulled into Vienna it took only a few minutes for me to make out both of them waiting side by side on the platform. When they saw me Elisabeth started to run, but my father grabbed her arm and held her there. Then he started alone toward me in that funny side-to-side walk he had when he was in a big hurry.

  When we reached each other he pulled me down and kissed my cheeks. "My boy! Moritz! You're home. You're here."

  He used the Papa language, the secret words he'd taught me when I was a boy but which I'd always disliked.

  "Hello, Papa. Talk to me in German. I want to hear my own language now." I was crying again. I picked him up and hugged him, but over his shoulder I was looking at Elisabeth, so far down the way. Papa was Papa, but Elisabeth was home.

  "Dave? Walker Easterling."

  "Hey! What time is it? Christ, what's so important at eight in the morning that it can't wait?"

  "Dave, I want you to do some more research for me."

  "Right now? Can I brush my teeth first? What happened, did you find another skeleton in your family closet?"

  "No, this time it's something more in your direction. I want you to find out all you can about the history of the fairy tale 'Rumpelstiltskin.' I know it comes from the Brothers Grimm, but I want you to really dig into this and find out everything you can."

  After checking with the doctor on duty and hearing that Maris was still sleeping, I went home for a shower and a change of clothes. Orlando was indignant that I'd left him alone for the whole night, so I first had to play with him for some minutes before he walked away with his tail in the air, satisfied for the time being.

  I was tired and stiff and worried about Maris, but once I was back in my apartment, the other phone call from the night before came back and hit me full force. Everything that had happened since then had clouded over some of what he had said, but enough of it returned and gave me a full dose of the creeps. Not to mention the dream I'd had in the hospital waiting room which, along with the other dreams I'd had over the last weeks, was beginning to make some sense.

  After I showered, changed, and put the coffee on, I went to my desk and looked for a pencil and paper. While searching around, I happened to notice the computer in the corner and thought that would work just as well. Turning it on, I put in and pulled out the various disks, commands, blah-blah that needs to be done before you can have your conversation with the television screen. While it was thinking, I fiddled with the mouse and thought about the names Kaspar, Balthazar, and Melchior. When the word-processing program came up, I created a new file and typed those names at the top. Remembering that somewhere in Maris's load of books was a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, I got up to look for it. Unbelievably, it was the second book I pulled out of a big box. "Rumpelstiltskin," page 209.

  Although it's a famous story, I didn't realize how short it was. Before reading, I did a quick line count and saw it was no more than 1500 words. Her copy was in English and I knew I'd have to get hold of the German original too, but for the moment this would be enough.

  Whether we have better memories, or simply a better capacity for wonder as children, what struck me was how well I remembered the story, although it had been more than twenty years since I'd last read it: The poor miller's daughter who can supposedly spin straw into gold (according to her father), the king's interest, her desperation when it comes times to actually do it.

  When she began to weep, the door suddenly opened, and a little man entered.

  Not a midget or a dwarf, "a little man."

  What I had forgotten was that he first takes a necklace and a ring from the girl before he does any spinning for her. That made no sense, even in the land of fairy tales. If she was so poor, where did she get all the jewelry? I decided to hold off on the cynicism until I'd read the whole story.

  Just after that comes the first intriguing part of the story. When the girl has nothing left to give but still must spin gold for the king, the little man demands her first child when she becomes queen. She agrees! Until that point we're obviously supposed to not only be on her side, but feel great pity for both her poverty and helplessness. But if she is so virtuous, why would she accede so quickly to such a terrible and inhuman demand? All that is said to justify her decision is, Who knows whether it will ever come to that? thought the miller's daughter. And since she knew of no other way out of her predicament, she promised the little man what he demanded.

  Lured to the kitchen by the strong perfume of fresh coffee, I got up feeling like a graduate student at work on his thesis: "A Critical Examination of the Role of Early Germanic Sexism in 'Rumpelstiltskin,' by Walker J. Easterling." There's probably some weenie out there actually writing something like that.

  Warming my hands around the coffee cup, I looked down into the courtyard, but today there was no Rumpelstiltskin bicycle leaning up against the wall. I remembered the scene in The Bicycle Thief where the little boy watches his father steal a bicycle and then get chased by the mob. My father? The only father I'd ever known was Jack Easterling of Atlanta, Georgia. A tall, quiet man who sold ad space in the Atlanta Constitution and liked nothing more than to have a catch in the backyard with his son Walker, who was never a very good baseball player.

  Walker, Moritz, Alexander (Rednaxela), Walter.

  Easterling, Benedikt, Kroll . . .

  What was the last name of the boy in my Rumpelstiltskin dream? My coffee break was over. Before sitting down again with the book, I typed those names into the computer, too.

  The king comes in the next morning, and seeing his third haul of new gold, decides to marry the girl. Nothing more is heard of their relationship until a year later when the queen delivers her first child.

  The little man had disappeared (?!) from her mind, but now he suddenly appeared in her room and said, 'Now give me what you promised.'

  Wait a minute. I knew it was a story, but how in the world could he have 'disappeared' from her mind when from the beginning he'd been the reason for her success? I was chewing on that when a few lines later I found the key to the story.

  The queen was horrified and offered the little man all the treasures of the kingdom if he would let her keep the child, but the little man replied, "No, something living is more important to me than all the treasures of the world."

  Why would he say that? If he was magical enough to spin straw into gold, couldn't he just as well have conjured up a real child of his own? Something in what he said the night before slid into my mind. Something about how the girl promised to love him even if he couldn't do it. What was it, sex? An intriguing notion, and it made sense. I read the line again. . . . something living is more important to me than all the treasures of the world.

  I put on my screenwriter's hat and started thinking about motivation. The little man falls in love with the girl and does her spinning. He thinks she'll love him for it, even though he's not a "real" man because he's incapable of taking her to bed.
But that makes him fight all the harder for her because he hopes that by doing all these magical things, she'll love him anyway.

  I sat back in the chair and snorted. What would Freud or Bruno Bettelheim say? This had to go into the computer too. I went over and started typing, not watching what was happening on the screen. When I did have a few words written, I looked up to check.

  On the monitor was a picture of a room. It was clear and in color and looked like a movie. A television flickered in a corner of the room and I realized one of my old films was showing there: the film I had made with Nicholas when Victoria and I first came to Vienna. I even knew the scene. It had been so difficult to shoot that we'd had to do it over and over until Nicholas blew his top at me and said, "Start acting like a human being, will you?"

  Someone in the room laughed.

  The picture bled away and was replaced by one of Victoria and a man in bed, fucking: the actor I'd introduced her to who owned all of the nice Hoffmann furniture. They were moving around like mad dogs, howling and biting, eating each other alive. Despite the passage of time and my great love for Maris, what I saw punched me in the stomach. While my friend humped my wife, she began hitting him on the back with her small fist. She cried out "I hate you! I hate you, Walker!" The man laughed and put his hand over her mouth. She bit it and made him yelp. My memories of sleeping with Victoria were quiet and comfortable. She used to tickle my back with her long fingernails, and laugh when I tried to roll her around or do something different.

  The television picture bled away until the screen was empty. Just the room was there now. I heard footsteps somewhere off-camera and then the madman on the bicycle walked into the scene. He had a large bowl of popcorn in one hand and was humming. Sitting down in the room's only chair, he picked up a remote control box from the floor and changed the channel. Another of my old films came on.