“I don’t know. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I walk around at night. I can’t even concentrate on a movie or anything. I just keep thinking about those nights, you know, when she was so sick. She didn’t want anybody else to touch her. I told you that. I had to take her to the bathroom. And she—” Harold covered his face with his hands.
“What was the dream?” Jason asked again.
There was another letter sitting with today’s mail on the table in the hall. Emma was out having lunch with someone, and hadn’t seen it yet. Jason felt a deep pang of jealousy over the lunch. He never had lunch. Now she was always out at lunch, had lunch every day and was never hungry for dinner. He looked at the bull clock on the shelf. Definitely still at lunch.
“I was with a prostitute. We were having drinks. We were negotiating her price. Marilyn came in. She was very angry. Then she went into the kitchen and started washing dishes. I think we were on an ocean liner. But it had no captain. It was sort of drifting, wallowing in the water. I took the prostitute out on deck. It was, like, all foam rubber. We started, uh, doing it on the foam rubber deck. She was very skinny and small. She felt like a little girl. My dick was tiny, about as thin as a pencil. It was … horrible. It didn’t feel like my own.”
Jason sighed and shook his head.
“I mean really
He couldn’t understand why Emma wasn’t alarmed by the intrusion of the letters into her life. It didn’t take years of training to see they came from a disturbed mind. Jason didn’t like the idea of a disturbed mind fixated on Emma.
“What do you make of it?” Harold demanded.
The postmarks were all impossible to read. You couldn’t see where they came from, or even the date. That didn’t worry her either. Maybe it was the military upbringing. You just didn’t withdraw from danger in the military.
“Dr. Frank, why are you looking at me like that?”
Jason focused. Harold’s face was red. His lips were caught between his teeth, and he was breathing loudly through his nose. He was being frowned at by his doctor. He didn’t like that.
“Am I going crazy? Is that it?” he demanded wildly.
“No,” Jason said, alarmed that once again he had slipped away in the middle of a session. “You’re not going crazy.”
“Then why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m just concentrating,” Jason said. “I wasn’t looking in any particular way. Tell me about the dream.”
“I just did, didn’t you hear me?” Harold gnawed his lips again.
Shit. Jason bit the inside of his own lip with fury at himself. He was having trouble concentrating. It was his fault, not Harold’s. There was steam coming out of Harold’s every orifice. Jason could see it. Harold was an important man. Very few people dared to thwart him in any way. That was one of the reasons Marilyn’s death hit him so hard. Death hadn’t spared him, and he couldn’t take it.
“Can you remember anything else about the dream? Any other details?” Jason asked. He hadn’t been listening to the whole thing and couldn’t begin to comment on it. Shit and shit again.
“What does it mean? You really think I’m in trouble, don’t you?” Tears filled Harold’s eyes.
Jason shook his head with horror. He was making his patients cry. One after another. They were having dreams about ships without captains and rudders, about trains off the rails. Pilotless airplanes. Wallowing in quicksand. Jesus.
Jason had been thinking about the letters in his appointment book, and the unopened letter on the mail table. Harold had lost his wife. She died after a long and terrible decline. Harold was trying to get over it. But he, Jason, was the one in trouble.
“I did go to a prostitute.” Harold wept. “First time in my life.” He blew his nose. “And I couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel a thing. You think I’m disgusting, don’t you?”
“No,” Jason said empathically. Normal, all normal. “We’ll have to talk a lot about this.”
There was a click on the phone, the answering machine kicking in. He wondered if it was Emma, calling to say she was back from another glamorous lunch. His eyes moved to the carriage clock on his desk. He had fifteen minutes to get Harold’s ship back on course. He got the ship back on course and ushered Harold out, then punched the button on his answering machine.
14
It was a hot, clear, California day with a deep blue sky and no sign of smog north of Pacific Beach when Troland took the second of his many steps to make things Right. He headed up the Five to sell his bike. Looking back, he saw a gray haze over the city.
He wore sunglasses but no helmet. He liked the feeling of the wind whipping at his face. He didn’t want to go all the way to Santa Monica or Malibu, so he got off the highway at Torrey Pines. He rode around Del Mar and Miramar for a while, then headed to the better bike shop. It was on a different planet from Stephen’s Motorcycle Salvage where he and Willy used to go. This was the kind of place with ads that said you meet the nicest people on a Honda.
There wasn’t another Harley like his either on the street or in the window of the shop. The only bikes he saw here were Hondas, Kawasakis—Yuppie Jap bikes with the guts all covered up. Riding a bike like that was like fucking a girl with all her clothes on.
He parked in front of the diner across the street. One of his voices told him he was hungry, so he went inside. Bikers were scattered around at a few tables drinking beer. Troland sat at a table in the front by the window, where he could see his bike prominently parked by the door.
A short, tired-looking blonde in a white bikini top and denim shorts came over with an order pad.
“Hi, I’m Jean. What can I get for you?” she said pleasantly.
“I’ll have a pitcher of draft, double cheeseburger, and fries.”
“Sure thing.”
He looked at her retreating back. The round ass, jiggling under the short shorts, held no interest for him. He couldn’t concentrate on wanting to hurt her. It made him feel cursed. He couldn’t even think about taking her out on the desert where no one could see or hear anything and sticking her dry little cunt. He didn’t think of this one screaming, trying to kick him with sandy bare feet, and missing. Breaking her arm. It usually made him feel good to think about it.
The little blonde put the foaming beer down. “Anything else I can get you?”
“No,” he said flatly. He had been sitting very still, staring straight ahead since he came in.
She hesitated for a second, “You okay?” she asked.
“You got a problem?”
“No.” She turned away quickly.
He didn’t turn to look after her this time. He knew he’d been brought real low if he had no interest in sex. It was like they all got together and did something to his balls so his dick wouldn’t work anymore.
The girl returned with the plate and put it down gently in front of him. She moved the ketchup bottle closer and took off without a word. Troland looked down at the plate, then drank some beer.
A kid with a cross dangling from one earlobe, stringy hair, and bare feet in holey sneakers approached the table cautiously.
“Nice scooter, man. Looks low.”
Troland nodded without looking at him. “It’s been stretched and lowered.”
“No shit.”
Troland picked up the cheeseburger and took a huge bite. He chewed and swallowed before answering.
“It’s for sale,” he said flatly. “Wanna buy it?”
“You’re kidding.”
