Dreamcatcher

flash silver in the dull day.

“… you dropped your keys.”

She doesn’t take them at first. She only gapes at him, as if he has performed an act of witchcraft (warlock-craft, in his case, maybe) before her eyes.

“Go on,” he says, smile fading a little. “Take them. It wasn’t anything too spooky, you know. Mostly just deduction. I’m good at stuff like that. Hey, you should have me in the car sometime when you’re lost. I’m great at getting unlost.”

She takes the keys, then. Quickly, being careful not to touch his fingers, and he knows right then that she isn’t going to meet him later. It doesn’t take any special gift to figure that; he only has to look in her eyes, which are more frightened than grateful.

“Thank… thank you,” she says. All at once she’s measuring the space between them, not wanting him to use too much of it up.

“Not a problem. Now don’t forget. The West Wharf, at five-thirty. Best fried clams in this part of the state.” Keeping up the fiction. You have to keep it up, sometimes, no matter how you feel. And although some of the joy has gone out of the afternoon, some is still there; he has seen the line, and that always makes him feel good. It’s a minor trick, but it’s nice to know it’s still there.

“Five-thirty,” she echoes, but as she opens her car door, the glance she throws back over her shoulder is the kind you’d give to a dog that might bite if it got off its leash. She is very glad she won’t be riding up to Fryeburg with him. Pete doesn’t need to be a mind-reader to know that, either.

He stands there in the rain, watching her back out of the slant parking space, and when she drives away he tosses her a cheerful car-salesman’s wave. She gives him a distracted little flip of the fingers in return, and of course when he shows up at The West Wharf (at five-fifteen, just to be Johnny on the spot, Just in case) she isn’t there and an hour later she’s still not there. He stays for quite awhile just the same, sitting at the bar and drinking beer, watching the traffic out on 302. He thinks he sees her go by without slowing at about five-forty, a green Taurus busting past in a rain which has now become heavy, a green Taurus that might or might not be pulling a light yellow nimbus behind it that fades at once in the graying air.

Same shit, different day, he thinks, but now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness that feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal. He lights a cigarette-in the old days, as a kid, he used to pretend to smoke but now he doesn’t have to pretend anymore-and orders another beer.

Milt brings it, but says, “You ought to lay some food on top of that, Peter.”

So Pete orders a plate of fried clams and even eats a few dipped in tartar sauce while he drinks another couple of beers, and at some point, before moving on up the line to some other joint where he isn’t so well-known, he tries to call Jonesy, down there in Massachusetts. But Jonesy and Carla are enjoying the rare night out, he only gets the baby-sitter, who asks him if he wants to leave a message.

Pete almost says no, then reconsiders. “Just tell him Pete called. Tell him Pete said SSDD.”

“S… S… D… D.” She is writing it down. “Will he know what-”

“Oh yeah,” Pete says, “he’ll know.”

By midnight he’s drunk in some New Hampshire dive, the Muddy Rudder or maybe it’s the Ruddy Mother, he’s trying to tell some chick who’s as drunk as he is that once he really believed he was going to be the first man to set foot on Mars, and although she’s nodding and saying yeah-yeah-yeah, he has an idea that all she understands is that she’d like to get outside of one more coffee brandy before closing. And that’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow he’ll wake up with a headache but he’ll go in to work just the same and maybe he’ll sell a car and maybe he won’t but either way things will go on. Maybe he’ll sell the burgundy Thunderbird, goodbye, sweetheart. Once things were different, but now they’re the same. He reckons he can live with that; for a guy like him, the rule of thumb is just SSDD, and so fucking what. You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER, sign on it.

In November he’ll go hunting with his friends, and that’s enough to took forward to… that, and maybe a big old sloppy-lipstick blowjob from this drunk chick out in his car. Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

Dreams are for kids.

1998: HENRY TREATS A COUCH MAN

The room is dim. Henry always keeps it that way when he’s seeing patients. It’s interesting to him how few seem to notice it. He thinks it’s because their states of mind are so often dim to start with. Mostly he sees neurotics (The wood’s are full of em, as he once told Jonesy while they were in, ha-ha, the woods) and it is his assessment-completely unscientific-that their problems act as a kind of polarizing shield between them and the rest of the world. As the neurosis deepens, so does the interior darkness. Mostly what he feels for his patients is a kind of distanced sympathy. Sometimes pity. A very few of them make him impatient. Barry Newman is one of those.

Patients who enter Henry’s office for the first time are presented with a choice they usually don’t register as a choice. When they come in they see a pleasant (if rather dim) room, with a fireplace to the left. It’s equipped with one of those everlasting logs, steel disguised as birch with four cunningly placed gas jets beneath. Beside the fireplace is a wing chair, where Henry always sits beneath an excellent reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Marigolds”. (Henry sometimes tells colleagues that every psychiatrist should have at least one Van Gogh in his or her consulting space.) Across the room is an easy chair and a couch. Henry is always interested to see which one a new patient will choose. Certainly he has been plying the trade long enough to know that what a patient chooses the first time is what he or she will choose almost every time. There is a paper in this. Henry knows there is, but he cannot isolate the thesis. And in any case, he finds he has less interest these days in such things as papers and journals and conventions and colloquia. They used to matter, but now things have changed. He is sleeping less, eating less, laughing less, too. A darkness has come into his own life that polarizing filter-and Henry finds he has no objection to this. Less glare.

Barry Newman was a couch man from the first, and Henry has never once made the mistake of believing this has anything to do with Barry’s mental condition. The couch is simply more comfortable for Barry, although Henry sometimes has to give him a hand to get Barry up from it when his fifty minutes have expired. Barry Newman stands five-seven and weighs four hundred and twenty pounds. This makes the couch his friend.

Barry Newman’s sessions tend to be long, droning accounts of each week’s adventures in gastronomy. Not that Barry is a discriminating eater, oh, no, Barry is the antithesis of that. Barry eats anything that happens to stray into his orbit. Barry is an eating machine. And his memory, on this subject, at least, is eidetic. He is to food what Henry’s old friend Pete is to directions and geography.

Henry has almost given up trying to drag Barry away from the trees and make him examine the forest. Partly this is because of Barry’s soft but implacable desire to discuss food in its specifics; partly it’s because Henry doesn’t like Barry and never has. Barry’s parents are dead. Dad went when Barry was sixteen, Morn when he was twenty-two. They left a very large estate, but it is in trust until Barry is thirty. He can get the principal then… if he continues in therapy. If not, the principal will remain in trust until he is fifty.

Henry doubts Barry Newman will make fifty.

Barry’s blood pressure (he has told Henry this with some pride) is one-ninety over one-forty.

Barry’s whole cholesterol number is two hundred and ninety; he is a lipid goldmine.

I’m a walking stroke, I’m a walking heart attack, he has told Henry, speaking with the gleeful solemnity of one who can state the hard, cold truth because he knows in his soul that such ends are not meant for him, not for him, no, not for him.

“I had two of those Burger King X-tras for lunch,” he is saying now. “I love those, because the cheese is actually hot.” His fleshy lips-oddly small lips for such a large man, the lips of a perch-tighten and tremble, as if tasting that exquisitely hot cheese. “I also had a shake, and on my way back home I had a couple of Mallomars. I took a nap, and when I got up I microwaved a whole package of those frozen waffles. “Leggo my Eggo!'” he cries, then laughs. It is the laugh of a man in the grip of fond recall-the sight of a sunset, the firm feel of a woman’s breast through a thin silk shirt (not that Barry has, in Henry’s estimation, ever felt such a thing), or the packed warmth of beach sand.

“Most people use the toaster oven for their Eggo waffles,” Barry continues, “but I find that makes them too crispy. The microwave just gets them hot and soft. Hot… and soft.” He smacks his little perch lips. “I had a certain amount of guilt about eating the whole package.” He throws this last in almost as an aside, as if remembering Henry has a job to do here. He throws out similar little treats four or five times in every session… and then it’s back to the food.

Barry has now reached Tuesday evening. Since this is Friday, there are plenty of meals and snacks still to go. Henry lets his mind drift. Barry is his last appointment of the day. When Barry has finished taking caloric inventory, Henry is going back to his apartment to pack. He’ll be up tomorrow at Six A.M… and sometime between seven and eight, Jonesy will pull into his driveway. They will pack their stuff into Henry’s old Scout, which he now keeps around solely for their autumn hunting trips, and by eight-thirty the two of them will be on their way north. Along the way they will pick up Pete in Bridgton, and then the Beav, who still lives close to Derry. By evening they will be at Hole in the Wall up in the Jefferson Tract, playing cards in the living room and listening to the wind hoot around the eaves. Their guns will be leaning in the corner of the kitchen, their hunting licenses hung over the hook on the back door.

He will be with his friends, and that always feels like coming home. For a week, that polarizing filter may lift a little bit. They will talk about old times, they will laugh at Beaver’s outrageous profanities, and if one or more of them actually shoots a deer, that will be an extra added attraction. Together they are still good. Together they still defeat time.

Far in the background, Barry Newman drones on and on. Pork chops and mashed potatoes and corn on the cob dripping with butter and Pepperidge Farm chocolate cake and a bowl of Pepsi Cola with four scoops of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream floating in it and eggs fried eggs boiled eggs poached…

Henry nods in all the right places and hears it all without really listening. This is an old psychiatric skill.

God knows Henry and his old friends have their problems. Beaver is terrible when it comes to relationships, Pete drinks too much (way too much is what Henry thinks), Jonesy and Carla have had a near-miss with divorce, and Henry is now struggling with a depression that seems to him every bit as seductive as it does unpleasant. So yes, they have their problems. But together they are still good, still able to light it up, and by tomorrow night they will be together. For eight days, this year. That’s good.

“I know I shouldn’t, but I just get this compulsion early in the morning. Maybe it’s low blood sugar, I think it might be that. Anyway, I ate the rest of the pound-cake that was in the fridge, then I got in the car and drove down to Dunkin” Donuts and I got a dozen of the Dutch Apple and four or-”

Henry, still thinking about the annual hunting trip that starts tomorrow, isn’t aware of what he is saying until it is out. “maybe this compulsive eating, Barry, maybe it has something to do with thinking you killed your mother. Do you think that’s possible?”

Barry’s words stop. Henry looks up and sees Barry Newman staring at him with eyes so wide they are actually visible. And although Henry knows he should stop-he has no business doing this at all, it has absolutely nothing to do with therapy-he doesn’t want to stop. Some of this may have to do with thinking about his old friends, but most of it is just seeing that shocked look on Barry’s face, and the pallor of his cheek. What really bugs Henry about Barry, he supposes, is Barry’s complacency. His inner assurance that there is no need to change his self-destructive behavior, let alone search for its roots.

“You do think you killed her, don’t you?” Henry asks. He speaks casually, almost lightly.

“I-I never-I resent-”

“She called and she called, said she was having chest-pains, but of course she said that often, didn’t she? Every other week. Every other day, it sometimes seemed. Calling downstairs to you. “Barry, phone Dr Withers. Barry, call an ambulance. Barry, dial 911.'”

They have never talked about Barry’s parents. In his soft, fat, implacable way, Barry will not allow it. He will begin to discuss them-or seem to-and then bingo, he’ll be