The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  Chapter 6

  Nicole had been scheduled for a series of follow-up visits at weekly intervals after her discharge from the Institute. In my growing obsession with Olympia I had almost forgotten about Nicole, but that Wednesday afternoon I was delighted to notice her name in my appointment calendar.

  “Dr. Hoffmann?” She slipped into my office, a little embarrassed to be there, which I took as a good sign. By her own account she was adjusting well, taking her medications, and planning to continue in graduate school. A few panic attacks, occasional disorientation, but no new psychotic episodes. She’d gotten over the breakup with the boyfriend and had no interest in dwelling on it. Her main preoccupation was with her frustrating search for a dissertation topic. “That’s not something I can help you with,” I said without thinking.

  Her eyes darted away. “Maybe you can. Maybe you’re part of it somehow.”

  We sat in silence for a few seconds.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?” I finally asked.

  “Yes. It’s about Hunter’s piano playing. I found out what it was.”

  “What it was?”

  She was looking right at me now. “You know, what music he was playing. Don’t you think that’s important?”

  “Sure. It could be very important. Although—”

  “He’s been playing a piece by Robert Schumann. Just as I thought. I got a CD from the library and the piece is on it. It’s called Kreisleriana.”

  “Kreisleriana,” I repeated, stalling for time. “That’s a strange name.”

  “There’s an even stranger story behind it.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Kreisleriana is named after a fictional character called Johannes Kreisler, who’s an eccentric musician in some stories by Hoffmann.”

  I was startled to hear my own name. “Hoffmann?”

  “Not you,” she laughed. “E.T.A. Hoffmann. German Romantic writer from the first part of the nineteenth century.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Most people haven’t. But when Schumann was a young man—which was a few years after Hoffmann’s death—Hoffmann was what today we’d call a cult figure.”

  “A Hoffmann cult?” The idea made me smile.

  “He was an incredibly influential writer. He influenced Poe, Dumas, Dostoevsky. Offenbach even composed an opera about him—The Tales of Hoffmann—which I’m not familiar with. Do you know it?”

  “I’ve been hearing about it all my life,” I frowned. That opera, or at least its name—which was all I knew about it—was a sore point with me. Every teacher I’d ever had had taunted me with it at one time or another. “Because of my name. And maybe for that reason I’ve studiously avoided knowing anything about it. To be quite honest, I have no use for opera as an art form. It’s totally stupid as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I know what you mean. Well, anyway, Hoffmann was a peculiar blend of Prussian bureaucrat and bohemian artistic genius. He made his living as a judge, and on his nights off he sat in the local tavern drinking wine and writing these crazy, fantastical stories that became enormously popular after his death.”

  I thought it was time to bring this digression back around to its starting point. “What does all this have to do with Hunter Morgan?”

  “I’m getting to that,” she said. “Hoffmann believed, quite literally, that there’s a ‘spirit world’ that parallels this one, populated by demons and sprites who represent pure spirit uncontaminated by the corruption of the material world.”

  “But wasn’t that just a metaphor for something?”

  “No, that’s what’s so hard for us to grasp. To Hoffmann the spirit world wasn’t just a metaphor—it was the real thing, more real than anything else we ordinarily experience—and he believed that the creative artist had to do everything possible to go there. Through music, dreams, alcohol, drugs—and if all else failed, madness.”

  I was beginning to see the connection. “He sounds like a character out of the 1960s.”

  She nodded. “Hoffmann was Jack Kerouac and Timothy Leary and Jim Morrison all rolled into one. But at heart he was a bourgeois functionary. He was never able to rise above the commonplace and make the leap into the spirit world.”

  This was starting to make me uncomfortable. “Now bring me back to earth. Why are we talking about this?”

  “Because Hunter’s been playing this music by Schumann that was inspired by Hoffmann’s stories, remember?”

  “Right.”

  “Schumann accepted the artistic ideology that Hoffmann had never been able to put into practice. And he worked at it so hard that he actually became what Hoffmann only wrote about.”

  “Didn’t you say he went mad?”

  “Absolutely stark raving mad. Institutionalized—in a much worse place than this—for the last two years of his life.”

  “Are you suggesting—”

  “As a follower of Hoffmann, Schumann concluded that in order to be an artistic genius you have to enter the spirit world and stay there. You can’t leave to go to law school or medical school or take a government job. You have to get crazy and stay crazy. And that’s exactly what Schumann did.”

  I stood up and looked at my watch. “This is all very interesting,” I said curtly, “but it will have to wait until next time. I have another appointment.”

  “But what are you going to do in the meantime? Obviously Hunter’s trying to tell you something.”

  “As you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ll have to discuss that next time. Are you planning to come next week?”

  She stood up, glaring. “But this isn’t about me!” she protested. “I told you all this because it’s about Hunter.”

  “Of course it’s about Hunter.”

  “You’re just humoring me, aren’t you? You think I just made all this up.”

  “No, absolutely not. I just don’t know what to make of it. We can talk about it again next week.”

  After Nicole went home—I didn’t really have another appointment—I sat at my desk in the gathering darkness, mulling over the bizarre tale she had just told me. Was this a story about Hunter, as she claimed—or was it really about Nicole herself? In either case, the fact that it involved a writer named “Hoffmann” could not be a mere coincidence. And clearly it was no accident that this “Hoffmann” was described as a “bourgeois functionary” who could never rise above the commonplace. Assuming the story was really about Hunter, what was Hunter trying to tell me with his piano playing? That he inhabited a spirit world apart from the one most of us regard as reality? That much was obvious. But surely it went farther than that. Wasn’t he saying that I—after all, I was the “Hoffmann” of the piece—was somehow responsible for his insanity? That like Schumann he had taken on the madness I projected and made it real? Or was Nicole saying this about my relationship to her? Merely to ask such questions was to demonstrate their absurdity. It was clear that Nicole’s “research” had little or nothing to do with Hunter but was an elaborate fantasy of her own.

  I suspected a disguised form of transference. Transference is a phenomenon in which the patient transfers a repressed emotional conflict—often of a sexual nature—onto the therapist. In this case Nicole made it appear that she was focused on Hunter, but her emphasis on “Hoffmann” and his almost supernatural power to influence events pointed in another direction. It pointed at me.

  * * *

  Dubin rose early on Thursday and worked out at the gym between six and seven. Over breakfast he avoided reading the USA Today some misguided soul had started leaving on his doorstep—as a recovering news junkie, he never allowed himself to be exposed to the news media before five in the afternoon—and when he climbed into the BMW to begin his day’s work he deftly manipulated the radio buttons with the same end in mind. Thursday was collection day, the most satisfying day of the week, when his clients paid for their misdeeds. He insisted on personal delivery, usually in cash, in suburban ven
ues of his own choosing: convenience stores, gas stations, even banks—in fact he preferred banks, where armed guards and surveillance cameras were assigned to protect him from any recurrence of antisocial behavior. The clients were sullen, bitter, contemptuous, the meetings hurried and impersonal with a dash of weary familiarity, like illicit sex or banking itself. On days like this, when he sensed that he was being watched, he conducted business with a Zen-like simplicity. Nothing was said that could be transmitted through a wire.

  Having completed his collections, he decided to take a quick drive into the city, as if such a thing were possible—in fact the traffic beyond the Lincoln Tunnel was worse than usual, an impenetrable Middle Eastern bazaar of taxicabs and desperate throngs, locked in deadly combat for every square inch between Eleventh Avenue and Grand Central Station. Angry, agonized faces on cab drivers and pedestrians alike. He crawled uptown, then over to Madison, and at last his luck turned. He found what he was looking for, even found a parking garage with an hourly rate that was less than a lawyer’s.

  It was upstairs in a posh building that housed an art gallery on the ground floor. Stephen Witz & Son, Inc. Rare books and manuscripts. The man who grudgingly unlocked the door—after checking Dubin’s skin color to make sure he wasn’t there to rob him—was fortyish, tidy-looking and smug. Undoubtedly Witz fils, if a Witz at all.

  “Can I help you?”

  Dubin decided not to waste his time with pointless preliminaries. He reached in his pocket and pulled out the wrinkled page from the dealer’s catalog he’d photocopied at the library and stuck it under Witz’s skeptical nose.

  “Is this still available?”

  “The Offenbach letter? Heavens, no! That was sold months ago.”

  “Did you get your price for it?”

  The son of Witz chuckled shrewdly. “We always get our price. In this case, we could have asked a lot more. There was someone who really wanted it.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a photocopy, would you?”

  “A photocopy of the letter? I couldn’t show it to you, even if I had one. There is such a thing as ethics, you know.”

  “What’s ethics got to do with it?”

  The dealer’s patience for Dubin’s gaucherie was wearing thin. “When people buy a manuscript,” he sniffed, “part of what they’re buying—sometimes most of what they’re buying—is exclusivity. You wouldn’t pay these prices in order to have photocopies floating all over the place, would you?”

  “What if I told you I know where the manuscript is and could get it for you?”

  “What manuscript?”

  “The manuscript score of The Tales of Hoffmann that Offenbach is referring to in the letter.”

  Witz pretended to laugh as he watched Dubin carefully. “You mean the one he claims to be hiding from his wife, who he thinks is trying to kill him? I mean, really, wasn’t that all a paranoid delusion?”

  “I don’t know. Was it?”

  “Do you have the manuscript?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You know where it is?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “In that case, I’d say I’m interested.”

  Dubin folded his photocopy slowly and put it back in his pocket. “You have a buyer?”

  “I might have one.”

  “Probably the same one who bought the letter. But this deal would have to be handled very discreetly. Not through a catalog.”

  The dealer nodded in acquiescence. “No, very discreetly. That will suit my client fine.”

  Dubin picked up one of the dealer’s business cards from the counter and stuck it in his pocket, as if he was impatient to leave. “We’re talking a lot of money. Well into six figures.”

  “I realize that.”

  “My commission is fifteen percent.”

  Witz winced. “That’s a bit rich.”

  “That’s exactly what I intend to be when I’ve sold it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A bit rich.” Dubin turned around and headed for the door.

  “Did I get your name?” the dealer called after him.

  “I’ll give you a call.”

  * * *

  Day and night, at the library, on the internet, commuting in and out of the city to the university, Nicole devoted herself to her researches into every nook and cranny of nineteenth century literature, with an emphasis on fantasy and the supernatural: Mary Shelley, Monk Lewis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe. She was under enormous pressure to select a thesis topic, but she was convinced that if she could understand Hunter Morgan’s playing of Kreisleriana and what it signified, her own problems would fall into place. She spent as much time with Hunter and Antonia as possible and kept them abreast of her findings, though neither was capable of adding any useful insights or even of showing any understanding of what she was trying to do. Nicole listened to all of Schumann’s piano music, read most of Hoffmann’s tales, and after two weeks, on the eve of a desperate meeting with her thesis advisor at which she was expecting to be asked to leave the program, she hit pay dirt.

  Miss Whipple had recommended a battered old book from the Classics section, the sole volume remaining from a complete set of the writings of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo. This volume contained a short novel entitled La Femme au Colliers de Velour—“The Woman With the Velvet Necklace”—and its protagonist was none other than E.T.A. Hoffmann. Nicole read the novel twice in growing astonishment. The Hoffmann in this story is an aspiring artist who leaves his fiancée—a musician’s daughter named Antonia—and journeys to Paris during the darkest days of the Reign of Terror. There he falls in love with a ballerina who is really an automaton under the control of a mysterious doctor. One night he finds the ballerina in a daze beneath the guillotine and brings her to his hotel where she seems to revive. They dance wildly, but he is haunted by the fear that she is not really alive—and in the morning, when the doctor removes her velvet necklace, her head rolls off onto the floor.

  All the characteristic themes and elements of Hoffmann’s tales were there—a sinister doctor, an eccentric musician with a daughter named Antonia, a ballerina who may or may not be an automaton. Madness, hypnosis, love at first sight. Unexplainable synchronicities. Drunkenness, madness, and the suggestion (after the doctor rescues Hoffmann from the guillotine) that much of the preceding narrative was the raving of a madman.

  “It’s as if Hoffmann has come full circle,” Nicole thought, “to become a character in his own nightmare world.”

  Dubin had been sitting in his car outside Nicole’s apartment house since his return from the city. He knew she was there because he’d watched her jog around the corner in her running clothes and let herself in through the side door that led up to her garret. Dusk had fallen but no lights had come on in the apartment. Had she gone straight to bed? Dubin slipped out of his car and strolled around the building, peering upward as if to glimpse the rising moon. He could see the bluish glow of a computer screen in one of the windows. Pushing the side door open, he crept up the dark staircase to her door. He knew exactly what he was going to do. When he knocked, he could hear the floor creaking inside as she edged warily toward the door. Then suddenly the door flew open and she stood facing him in wide-eyed amazement.

  From that moment nothing happened the way he had planned or expected.

  “Edgar Allan Poe!” she exclaimed. “I knew it was only a matter of time before you’d come knocking on my door!”

  Chapter 7

  “Edgar Allan Poe?”

  Dubin stood frozen in the doorway staring back at Nicole as if she’d caught him in the middle of some unspeakable crime.

  “Just joking,” Nicole smiled, her emerald eyes twinkling in the dim light. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that you look like Edgar Allan Poe?”

  “Yes, actually, someone has,” he stammered, trying to smile. “But why did you expect Poe to show up at your door?”

  “It’s a long story,” she l
aughed. “I’m sorry. What can I do for you?”

  “My name is Dubin and I—”

  “Dubin!” She said the name as if it were French, with the accent on the second syllable. “That’s perfect! Are you a detective?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am.”

  “And tell me, are you working with the préfecture du police?”

  “The police? No, I despise the police.”

  “Ah! You despise the police! Just as I’d expect!”

  Dubin grimaced. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “I’m sorry! You poor man! Please come in.”

  Nicole led him through the dimly-lit apartment to the cluttered kitchen table, where she offered him a seat. “Don’t mind me at all. I’ve been going stir crazy up here trying to think of a topic for my dissertation and I have Edgar Allan Poe and Alexandre Dumas and E.T.A. Hoffmann on the brain. Can I get you some tea?”

  He smiled and hesitantly sat down while she poured two mugs of tea from a ceramic tea pot. “You arrived at a perfect time,” she said, perching on the chair across from him. “I just had a brilliant inspiration for my thesis topic. I even have a title: Authors as Characters, Characters as Authors: The Semiotics of Authorship in Literary Romance. Isn’t that fantastic?”

  “Yes,” he said. “That sounds fantastic.”

  “It’s about writers appearing as characters in other writers’ fictional works, where they meet characters from their own stories who were based on people they knew in real life, only now they’re characters in somebody’s else’s story, not their own, and—well, you can see how convoluted it gets and why I could imagine that you were Edgar Allan Poe knocking on my door and why sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  “Sure.”

  “And you probably know,” she added, “that I actually am a little crazy, don’t you? Or used to be. You must work for the Institute.”

  “The Palmer Institute? No, I have no connection with the Institute.”

  “Oh. Then why have you been following me around?”

  Dubin shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “You’ve noticed, then?”