Every day from nine to five I sit at my desk facing the door of the
office and type up other people’s dreams. Not just dreams. That
wouldn’t be practical enough for my bosses. I type up also people’s
daytime complaints: trouble with mother, trouble with father,
trouble with the bottle, the bed, the headache that bangs home and
blacks out the sweet world for no known reason. Nobody comes to our
office unless they have troubles. Troubles that can’t be pinpointed
by Wassermanns or Wechsler-Bellevues alone.Maybe a mouse gets to
thinking pretty early on how the whole world is run by these
enormous feet. Well, from where I sit, I figure the world is run by
one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face,
devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no
face at all it’s the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.
When people ask me where
I work, I tell them I’m Assistant to the Secretary in one of the
Out-Patient Departments of the Clinics Building of the City
Hospital. This sounds so be-all end-all they seldom get around to
asking me more than what I do, and what I do is mainly type up
records. On my own hook though, and completely under cover, I am
pursuing a vocation that would set these doctors on their ears. In
the privacy of my one-room apartment I call myself secretary to
none other than Johnny Panic himself.
Dream by dream I am
educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth,
than any member of the Psychoanalytic Institute, a dream
connoisseur. Not a dream stopper, a dream explainer, an exploiter
of dreams for the crass practical ends of health and happiness, but
an unsordid collector of dreams for themselves alone. A lover of
dreams for Johnny Panic’s sake, the Maker of them all.
There isn’t a dream I’ve
typed up in our record books that I don’t know by heart. There
isn’t a dream I haven’t copied out at home into Johnny Panic’s
Bible of Dreams.
This is
my real calling.
Some nights I take the elevator up to the roof of my apartment
building. Some nights, about three A.M. Over the trees at the far
side of the park the United Fund torch flare flattens and recovers
under some witchy invisible push and here and there in the hunks of
stone and brick I see a light. Most of all, though, I feel the city
sleeping. Sleeping from the river on the west to the ocean on the
east, like some rootless island rockabying itself on nothing at
all.
I can be tight and
nervy as the top string on a violin, and yet by the time the sky
begins to blue I’m ready for sleep. It’s the thought of all those
dreamers and what they’re dreaming wears me down till I sleep the
sleep of fever. Monday to Friday what do I do but type up those
same dreams. Sure, I don’t touch a fraction of them the city over,
but page by page, dream by dream, my Intake books fatten and weigh
down the bookshelves of the cabinet in the narrow passage running
parallel to the main hall, off which passage the doors to all the
doctors’ little interviewing cubicles open.
I’ve got a funny habit
of identifying the people who come in by their dreams. As far as
I’m concerned, the dreams single them out more than any Christian
name. This one guy, for example, who works for a ball-bearing
company in town, dreams every night how he’s lying on his back with
a grain of sand on his chest. Bit by bit this grain of sand grows
bigger and bigger till it’s big as a fair-sized house and he can’t
draw breath. Another fellow I know of has had a certain dream ever
since they gave him ether and cut out his tonsils and adenoids when
he was a kid. In this dream he’s caught in the rollers of a cotton
mill, fighting for his life. Oh he’s not alone, although he thinks
he is. A lot of people these days dream they’re being run over or
eaten by machines. They’re the cagey ones who won’t go on the
subway or the elevators. Coming back from my lunch hour in the
hospital cafeteria I often pass them, puffing up the unswept stone
stairs to our office on the fourth floor. I wonder, now and then,
what dreams people had before ball bearings and cotton mills were
invented.
I’ve a dream
of my own. My one dream. A dream of dreams.
In this dream there’s a
great half-transparent lake stretching away in every direction, too
big for me to see the shores of it, if there are any shores, and
I’m hanging over it, looking down from the glass belly of some
helicopter. At the bottom of the lake so deep I can only guess at
the dark masses moving and heaving are the real dragons. The ones
that were around before men started living in caves and cooking
meat over fires and figuring out the wheel and the alphabet.
Enormous isn’t the word for them; they’ve got more wrinkles than
Johnny Panic himself. Dream about these long enough and your feet
and hands shrivel away when you look at them too closely. The sun
shrinks to the size of an orange, only chillier, and you’ve been
living in Roxbury since the last ice age. No place for you but a
room padded soft as the first room you knew of, where you can dream
and float, float and dream, till at last you actually are back
among those great originals and there’s no point in any dreams at
all.
It’s into this lake
people’s minds run at night, brooks and gutter trickles to one
borderless common reservoir. It bears no resemblance to those pure
sparkling-blue sources of drinking water the suburbs guard more
jealously than the Hope diamond in the middle of pine woods and
barbed fences.
It’s the
sewage farm of the ages, transparence aside.
Now the water in this
lake naturally stinks and smokes from what dreams have been left
sogging around in it over the centuries. When you think how much
room one night of dream props would take up for one person in one
city, and that city a mere pinprick on a map of the world, and when
you start multiplying this space by the population of the world,
and that space by the number of nights there have been since the
apes took to chipping axes out of stone and losing their hair, you
have some idea what I mean. I’m not the mathematical type: my head
starts splitting when I get only as far as the number of dreams
going on during one night in the State of Massachusetts.
By this time, I already
see the surface of the lake swarming with snakes, dead bodies
puffed as blowfish, human embryos bobbing around in laboratory
bottles like so many unfinished messages from the great I Am. I see
whole storehouses of hardware: knives, paper cutters, pistons and
cogs and nutcrackers; the shiny fronts of cars looming up,
glass-eyed and evil-toothed. Then there’s the spider-man and the
webfooted man from Mars, and the simple, lugubrious vision of a
human face turning aside forever, in spite of rings and vows, to
the last lover of all.
One of the most frequent
shapes in this backwash is so commonplace it seems silly to mention
it. It’s a grain of dirt. The water is thick with these grains.
They seep in among everything else and revolve under some queer
power of their own, opaque, ubiquitous. Call the water what you
will. Lake Nightmare, Bog of Madness, it’s here the sleeping people
lie and toss together among the props of their worst dreams, one
great brotherhood, though each of them, waking, thinks himself
singular, utterly apart.
This is my dream. You
won’t find it written up in any casebook. Now the routine in our
office is very different from the routine in Skin Clinic, for
example, or in Tumor. The other clinics have strong similarities to
each other; none are like ours. In our clinic, treatment doesn’t
get prescribed. It is invisible. It goes right on in those little
cubicles, each with its desk, its two chairs, its window arid its
door with the opaque glass rectangle set in the wood. There is a
certain spiritual purity about this kind of doctoring. I can’t help
feeling the special privilege of my position as Assistant Secretary
in the Adult Psychiatric Clinic. My sense of pride is borne out by
the rude invasions of other clinics into our cubicles on certain
days of the week for lack of space elsewhere: our building is a
very old one, and the facilities have not expanded with the
expanding needs of the time. On these days of overlap the contrast
between us and the other clinics is marked.
On Tuesdays and
Thursdays, for instance, we have lumbar punctures in one of our
offices in the morning. If the practical nurse chances to leave the
door of the cubicle open, as she usually does, I can glimpse the
end of the white cot and the dirty yellow-soled bare feet of the
patient sticking out from under the sheet. In spite of my distaste
at this sight, I can’t keep my eyes away from the bare feet, and I
find myself glancing back from my typing every few minutes to see
if they are still there, if they have changed their position at
all. You can understand what a distraction this is in the middle of
my work. I often have to reread what I have typed several times,
under the pretense of careful proofreading, in order to memorize
the dreams I have copied down from the doctor’s voice over the
audiograph.
Nerve Clinic
next door, which tends to the grosser, more unimaginative end of
our business, also disturbs us in the mornings. We use their
offices for therapy in the afternoon, as they are only a morning
clinic, but to have their people crying, or singing, or chattering
loudly in Italian or Chinese, as they often do, without break for
four hours at a stretch every morning, is distracting to say the
least.
In spite of such
interruptions by other clinics, my own work is advancing at a great
rate. By now I am far beyond copying only what comes after the
patient’s saying: “I have this dream, Doctor.” I am at the point of
recreating dreams that are not even written down at all. Dreams
that shadow themselves forth in the vaguest way, but are themselves
hid, like a statue under red velvet before the grand unveiling.
To illustrate. This
woman came in with her tongue swollen and stuck out so far she had
to leave a party she was giving for twenty friends of her
French-Canadian mother-in-law and be rushed to our Emergency Ward.
She thought she didn’t want her tongue to stick out and, to tell
the truth, it was an exceedingly embarrassing affair for her but
she hated that French-Canadian mother-in-law worse than pigs, and
her tongue was true to her opinion, even if the rest of her wasn’t.
Now she didn’t lay claim to any dreams. I have only the bare facts
above to begin with, yet behind them I detect the bulge and promise
of a dream.
So I set
myself to uprooting this dream from its comfortable purchase under
her tongue.
Whatever the
dream I unearth, by work, taxing work, and even by a kind of
prayer, I am sure to find a thumbprint in the corner, a malicious
detail to the right of center, a bodiless midair Cheshire cat grin,
which shows the whole work to be gotten up by the genius of Johnny
Panic, and him alone. He’s sly, he’s subtle, he’s sudden as
thunder, but he gives himself away only too often. He simply can’t
resist melodrama. Melodrama of the oldest, most obvious variety.
I remember one guy, a
stocky fellow in a nail-studded black leather jacket, running
straight in to us from a boxing match at Mechanics Hall, Johnny
Panic hot at his heels. This guy, good Catholic though he was,
young and upright and all, had one mean fear of death. He was
actually scared blue he’d go to hell. He was a pieceworker at a
fluorescent light plant. I remember this detail because I thought
it funny he should work there, him being so afraid of the dark as
it turned out. Johnny Panic injects a poetic element in this
business you don’t often find elsewhere. And for that he has my
eternal gratitude.
I
also remember quite clearly the scenario of the dream I had worked
out for this guy: a gothic interior in some monastery cellar, going
on and on as far as you could see, one of those endless
perspectives between two mirrors, and the pillars and walls were
made of nothing but human skulls and bones, and in every niche
there was a body laid out, and it was the Hall of Time, with the
bodies in the foreground still warm, discoloring and starting to
rot in the middle distance, and the bones emerging, clean as a
whistle, in a kind of white futuristic glow at the end of the line.
As I recall, I had the whole scene lighted, for the sake of
accuracy, not with candles, but with the ice-bright fluorescence
that makes skin look green and all the pink and red flushes dead
black-purple.
You ask,
how do I know this was the dream of the guy in the black leather
jacket. I don’t know. I only believe this was his dream, and I work
at belief with more energy and tears and entreaties than I work at
recreating the dream itself.
My office, of course,
has its limitations. The lady with her tongue stuck out, the guy
from Mechanics Hall these are our wildest ones. The people who have
really gone floating down toward the bottom of that boggy lake come
in only once, and are then referred to a place more permanent than
our office which receives the public from nine to five, five days a
week only. Even those people who are barely able to walk about the
streets and keep working, who aren’t yet halfway down in the lake,
get sent to the Out-Patient Department at another hospital
specializing in severer cases. Or they may stay a month or so in
our own Observation Ward in the central hospital which I’ve never
seen.
I’ve seen the
secretary of that ward, though. Something about her merely smoking
and drinking her coffee in the cafeteria at the ten o’clock break
put me off so I never went to sit next to her again. She has a
funny name I don’t ever quite remember correctly, something really
odd, like Miss Milleravage. One of those names that seem more like
a pun mixing up Milltown and Ravage than anything in the city phone
directory. But not so odd a name, after all, if you’ve ever read
through the phone directory, with its Hyman Diddlebockers and
Sasparilla Greenleafs. I read through the phone book once, never
mind when, and it satisfied a deep need in me to realize how many
people aren’t called Smith.
Anyhow, this Miss
Milleravage is a large woman, not fat, but all sturdy muscle and
tall on top of it. She wears a gray suit over her hard bulk that
reminds me vaguely of some kind of uniform, without the details of
cut having anything strikingly military about them. Her face, hefty
as a bullock’s, is covered with a remarkable number of tiny
maculae, as if she’d been lying under water for some time and
little algae had latched on to her skin, smutching it over with
tobacco-browns and greens. These moles are noticeable mainly
because the skin around them is so pallid. I sometimes wonder if
Miss Milleravage has ever seen the wholesome light of day. I
wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she’d been brought up from the
cradle with the sole benefit of artificial lighting.
Byrna, the secretary in
Alcoholic Clinic just across the hall from us, introduced me to
Miss Milleravage with the gambit that I’d “been in England too.”
Miss Milleravage, it
turned out, had spent the best years of her life in London
hospitals.
“Had a
friend,” she boomed in her queer, doggish basso, not favoring me
with a direct look, “a nurse at Bart’s. Tried to get in touch with
her after the war, but the head of the nurses had changed,
everybody’d changed, nobody’d heard of her. She must’ve gone down
with the old head nurse, rubbish and all, in the bombings.” She
followed this with a large grin.
Now I’ve seen medical
students cutting up cadavers, four stiffs to a classroom, about as
recognizably human as Moby Dick, and the students playing catch
with the dead men’s livers. I’ve heard guys joke about sewing a
woman up wrong after a delivery at the charity ward of the
Lying-In. But I wouldn’t want to see what Miss Milleravage would
write off as the biggest laugh of all time. No thanks and then
some. You could scratch her eyes with a pin and swear you’d struck
solid quartz.
My boss
has a sense of humor too, only it’s gentle. Generous as Santa on
Christmas Eve.
I work
for a middle-aged lady named Miss Taylor who is the Head Secretary
of the clinic and has been since the clinic started thirty-three
years ago the year of my birth, oddly enough. Miss Taylor knows
every doctor, every patient, every outmoded appointment slip,
referral slip and billing procedure the hospital has ever used or
thought of using. She plans to stick with the clinic until she’s
farmed out in the green pastures of Social Security checks. A woman
more dedicated to her work I never saw. She’s the same way about
statistics as I am about dreams: if the building caught fire she
would throw every last one of those books of statistics to the
firemen below at the serious risk of her own skin.
I get along extremely
well with Miss Taylor. The one thing I never let her catch me doing
is reading the old record books. I have actually very little time
for this. Our office is busier than the stock exchange with the
staff of twenty-five doctors in and out, medical students in
training, patients, patients’ relatives, and visiting officials
from other clinics referring patients to us, so even when I’m
covering the office alone, during Miss Taylor’s coffee break and
lunch hour, I seldom get to dash down more than a note or two.
This kind of
catch-as-catch-can is nerve-racking, to say the least. A lot of the
best dreamers are in the old books, the dreamers that come in to us
only once or twice for evaluation before they’re sent elsewhere.
For copying out these dreams I need time, a lot of time. My
circumstances are hardly ideal for the unhurried pursuit of my art.
There is, of course, a certain derring-do in working under such
hazards, but I long for the rich leisure of the true connoisseur
who indulges his nostrils above the brandy snifter for an hour
before his tongue reaches out for the first taste.
I find myself all too
often lately imagining what a relief it would be to bring a
briefcase into work, big enough to hold one of those thick, blue,
cloth-bound record books full of dreams. At Miss Taylor’s lunch
time, in the lull before the doctors and students crowd in to take
their afternoon patients, I could simply slip one of the books,
dated ten or fifteen years back, into my briefcase, and leave the
briefcase under my desk till five o’clock struck. Of course,
odd-looking bundles are inspected by the doorman of the Clinics
Building and the hospital has its own staff of police to check up
on the multiple varieties of thievery that go on, but for heaven’s
sake, I’m not thinking of making off with typewriters or heroin.
I’d only borrow the book overnight and slip it back on the shelf
first thing the next day before anybody else came in. Still, being
caught taking a book out of the hospital would probably mean losing
my job and all my source material with it.
This idea of mulling
over a record book in the privacy and comfort of my own apartment,
even if I have to stay up night after night for this purpose,
attracts me so much I become more and more impatient with my usual
method of snatching minutes to look up dreams in Miss Taylor’s
half-hours out of the office.
The trouble is, I can
never tell exactly when Miss Taylor will come back to the office.
She is so conscientious about her job she’d be likely to cut her
half hour at lunch short and her twenty minutes at coffee shorter,
if it weren’t for her lame left leg. The distinct sound of this
lame leg in the corridor warns me of her approach in time for me to
whip the record book I’m reading into my drawer out of sight and
pretend to be putting down the final flourishes on a phone message
or some such alibi. The only catch, as far as my nerves are
concerned, is that Amputee Clinic is around the corner from us in
the opposite direction from Nerve Clinic and I’ve gotten really
jumpy due to a lot of false alarms where I’ve mistaken some
pegleg’s hitching step for the step of Miss Taylor herself
returning early to the office.
On the blackest days, when I’ve scarcely time to squeeze one dream
out of the old books and my copywork is nothing but weepy college
sophomores who can’t get a lead in Camino Real, I feel Johnny Panic
turn his back, stony as Everest, higher than Orion, and the motto
of the great Bible of Dreams, “Perfect fear casteth out all else,”
is ash and lemon water on my lips. I’m a wormy hermit in a country
of prize pigs so corn-happy they can’t see the slaughterhouse at
the end of the track. I’m Jeremiah vision-bitten in the Land of
Cockaigne.
What’s worse:
day by day I see these psyche-doctors studying to win Johnny
Panic’s converts from him by hook, crook, and talk, talk, talk.
Those deep-eyed, bush-bearded dream collectors who preceded me in
history, and their contemporary inheritors with their white jackets
and knotty-pine-paneled offices and leather couches, practiced and
still practice their dream-gathering for worldly ends: health and
money, money and health. To be a true member of Johnny Panic’s
congregation one must forget the dreamer and remember the dream:
the dreamer is merely a flimsy vehicle for the great Dream Maker
himself. This they will not do. Johnny Panic is gold in the bowels,
and they try to root him out by spiritual stomach pumps.
Take what happened to
Harry Bilbo. Mr. Bilbo came into our office with the hand of Johnny
Panic heavy as a lead coffin on his shoulder. He had an interesting
notion about the filth in this world. I figured him for a prominent
part in Johnny Panic’s Bible of Dreams, Third Book of Fear, Chapter
Nine on Dirt, Disease and General Decay. A friend of Harry’s blew a
trumpet in the Boy Scout band when they were kids. Harry Bilbo’d
also blown on this friend’s trumpet. Years later the friend got
cancer and died. Then, one day not so long ago, a cancer doctor
came into Harry’s house, sat down in a chair, passed the top of the
morning with Harry’s mother and, on leaving, shook her hand and
opened the door for himself. Suddenly Harry Bilbo wouldn’t blow
trumpets or sit down on chairs or shake hands if all the cardinals
of Rome took to blessing him twenty-four hours around the clock for
fear of catching cancer. His mother had to go turning the TV knobs
and water faucets on and off and opening doors for him. Pretty soon
Harry stopped going to work because of the spit and dog turds in
the street. First that stuff gets on your shoes and then when you
take your shoes off it gets on your hands and then at dinner it’s a
quick trip into your mouth and not a hundred Hail Marys can keep
you from the chain reaction.
The last straw was,
Harry quit weight lifting at the public gym when he saw this
cripple exercising with the dumbbells. You can never tell what
germs cripples carry behind their ears and under their fingernails.
Day and night Harry Bilbo lived in holy worship of Johnny Panic,
devout as any priest among censers and sacraments. He had a beauty
all his own.
Well, these
white-coated tinkerers managed, the lot of them, to talk Harry into
turning on the TV himself, and the water faucets, and to opening
closet doors, front doors, bar doors. Before they were through with
him, he was sitting down on movie-house chairs, and benches all
over the Public Garden, and weight lifting every day of the week at
the gym in spite of the fact another cripple took to using the
rowing machine. At the end of his treatment he came in to shake
hands with the Clinic Director. In Harry Bilbo’s own words, he was
“a changed man.” The pure Panic-light had left his face. He went
out of the office doomed to the crass fate these doctors call
health and happiness.
About the time of Harry
Bilbo’s cure a new idea starts nudging at the bottom of my brain. I
find it hard to ignore as those bare feet sticking out of the
lumbar puncture room. If I don’t want to risk carrying a record
book out of the hospital in case I get discovered and fired and
have to end my research forever, I can really speed up work by
staying in the Clinics Building overnight. I am nowhere near
exhausting the clinic’s resources and the piddling amount of cases
I am able to read in Miss Taylor’s brief absences during the day
are nothing to what I could get through in a few nights of steady
copying. I need to accelerate my work if only to counteract those
doctors.
Before I know
it, I am putting on my coat at five and saying goodnight to Miss
Taylor, who usually stays a few minutes overtime to clear up the
day’s statistics, and sneaking around the corner into the ladies
room. It is empty. I slip into the patients’ john, lock the door
from the inside, and wait. For all I know, one of the clinic
cleaning ladies may try to knock the door down, thinking some
patient’s passed out on the seat. My fingers are crossed. About
twenty minutes later the door of the lavatory opens and someone
limps over the threshold like a chicken favoring a bad leg. It is
Miss Taylor, I can tell by the resigned sigh as she meets the
jaundiced eye of the lavatory mirror. I hear the click-cluck of
various touch-up equipment on the bowl, water sloshing, the scritch
of a comb in frizzed hair, and then the door is closing with a
slow-hinged wheeze behind her.
I am lucky. When I come
out of the ladies room at six o’clock the corridor lights are off
and the fourth-floor hall is as empty as church on Monday. I have
my own key to our office; I come in first every morning, so that’s
no trouble. The typewriters are folded back into the desks, the
locks are on the dial phones, all’s right with the world.
Outside the window the
last of the winter light is fading. Yet I do not forget myself and
turn on the overhead bulb. I don’t want to be spotted by any
hawk-eyed doctor or janitor in the hospital buildings across the
little courtyard. The cabinet with the record books is in the
windowless passage opening onto the doctors’ cubicles, which have
windows overlooking the courtyard. I make sure the doors to all the
cubicles are shut. Then I switch on the passage light, a sallow
twenty-five-watt affair blackening at the top. Better than an
altarful of candles to me at this point, though. I didn’t think to
bring a sandwich. There is an apple in my desk drawer left over
from lunch, so I reserve that for whatever pangs I may feel about
one o’clock in the morning, and get out my pocket notebook. At home
every evening it is my habit to tear out the notebook pages I’ve
written on at the office during the day and pile them up to be
copied in my manuscript. In this way I cover my tracks so no one
idly picking up my notebook at the office could ever guess the type
or scope of my work.
I
begin systematically by opening the oldest book on the bottom
shelf. The once-blue cover is no-color now, the pages are thumbed
and blurry carbons, but I’m humming from foot to topknot: this
dream book was spanking new the day I was born. When I really get
organized I’ll have hot soup in a thermos for the dead-of-winter
nights, turkey pies and chocolate eclairs. I’ll bring hair curlers
and four changes of blouse to work in my biggest handbag on Monday
mornings so no one will notice me going downhill in looks and start
suspecting unhappy love affairs or pink affiliations or my working
on dream books in the clinic four nights a week.
Eleven hours later. I am
down to apple core and seeds and in the month of May, 1931, with a
private nurse who has just opened a laundry bag in her patient’s
closet and found five severed heads in it, including her mother’s.
A chill air touches the
nape of my neck. From where I am sitting cross-legged on the floor
in front of the cabinet, the record book heavy on my lap, I notice
out of the corner of my eye that the door of the cubicle beside me
is letting in a little crack of blue light. Not only along the
floor, but up the side of the door too. This is odd since I made
sure from the first that all the doors were shut tight. The crack
of blue light is widening and my eyes are fastened to two
motionless shoes in the doorway, toes pointing toward me.
They are brown leather
shoes of a foreign make, with thick elevator soles. Above the shoes
are black silk socks through which shows a pallor of flesh. I get
as far as the gray pinstriped trouser cuffs.
“Tch, tch,” chides an
infinitely gentle voice from the cloudy regions above my head.
“Such an uncomfortable position! Your legs must be asleep by now.
Let me help you up. The sun will be rising shortly.”
Two hands slip under my
arms from behind and I am raised, wobbly as an unset custard, to my
feet, which I cannot feel because my legs are, in fact, asleep. The
record book slumps to the floor, pages splayed.
“Stand still a minute.”
The Clinic Director’s voice fans the lobe of my right ear. “Then
the circulation will revive.”
The blood in my
not-there legs starts pinging under a million sewing-machine
needles and a vision of the Clinic Director acid-etches itself on
my brain. I don’t even need to look around: fat pot-belly buttoned
into his gray pinstriped waistcoat, woodchuck teeth yellow and
buck, every-color eyes behind the thick-lensed glasses quick as
minnows.
I clutch my
notebook. The last floating timber of the Titanic.
What does he know, what
does he know?
Everything.
“I know where there is a
nice hot bowl of chicken noodle soup.” His voice rustles, dust
under the bed, mice in straw. His hand welds onto my left upper arm
in fatherly love. The record book of all the dreams going on in the
city of my birth at my first yawp in this world’s air he nudges
under the bookcase with a polished toe.
We meet nobody in the
dawn-dark hall. Nobody on the chill stone stair down to the
basement corridors where Billy the Record Room Boy cracked his head
skipping steps one night on a rush errand.
I begin to
double-quickstep so he won’t think it’s me he’s hustling. “You
can’t fire me,” I say calmly. “I quit.”
The Clinic Director’s
laugh wheezes up from his accordion-pleated bottom gut. “We mustn’t
lose you so soon.” His whisper snakes off down the whitewashed
basement passages, echoing among the elbow pipes, the wheelchairs
and stretchers beached for the night along the steam-stained walls.
“Why, we need you more than you know.”
We wind and double and
my legs keep time with his until we come, somewhere in those barren
rat tunnels, to an all-night elevator run by a one-armed Negro. We
get on, and the door grinds shut like the door on a cattle car, and
we go up and up. It is a freight elevator, crude and clanky, a far
cry from the plush passenger lifts I am used to in the Clinics
Building.
We get off at
an indeterminate floor. The Clinic Director leads me down a bare
corridor lit at intervals by socketed bulbs in little wire cages on
the ceiling. Locked doors set with screened windows line the hall
on either hand. I plan to part company with the Clinic Director at
the first red Exit sign, but on our journey there are none. I am in
alien territory, coat on the hanger in the office, handbag and
money in my top desk drawer, notebook in my hand, and only Johnny
Panic to warm me against the ice age outside.
Ahead a light gathers,
brightens. The Clinic Director, puffing slightly at the walk, brisk
and long, to which he is obviously unaccustomed, propels me around
a bend and into a square, brilliantly lit room.
“Here she is.”
“The little witch!”
Miss Milleravage hoists
her tonnage up from behind the steel desk facing the door.
The walls and the
ceiling of the room are riveted metal battleship plates. There are
no windows.
From small,
barred cells lining the sides and back of the room I see Johnny
Panic’s top priests staring out at me, arms swaddled behind their
backs in the white Ward nightshirts, eyes redder than coals and
hungry-hot.
They welcome
me with queer croaks and grunts, as if their tongues were locked in
their jaws. They have no doubt heard of my work by way of Johnny
Panic’s grapevine and want to know how his apostles thrive in the
world.
I lift my hands
to reassure them, holding up my notebook, my voice loud as Johnny
Panic’s organ with all stops out.
“Peace! I bring to you .
. .”
The Book.
“None of that old stuff,
sweetie.” Miss Milleravage is dancing out at me from behind her
desk like a trick elephant.
The Clinic Director
closes the door to the room.
The minute Miss
Milleravage moves I notice what her hulk has been hiding from view
behind the desk�a white cot high as a man’s waist with a single
sheet stretched over the mattress, spotless and drumskin tight. At
the head of the cot is a table on which sits a metal box covered
with dials and gauges.
The box seems to be
eyeing me, copperhead-ugly, from its coil of electric wires, the
latest model in Johnny-Panic-Killers.
I get ready to dodge to
one side. When Miss Milleravage grabs, her fat hand comes away with
a fist full of nothing. She starts for me again, her smile heavy as
dogdays in August.
“None
of that. None of that. I’ll have that little black book.”
Fast as I run around the
high white cot, Miss Milleravage is so fast you’d think she wore
rollerskates. She grabs and gets. Against her great bulk I beat my
fists, and against her whopping milkless breasts, until her hands
on my wrists are iron hoops and her breath hushabyes me with a
love-stink fouler than Undertaker’s Basement.
“My baby, my own baby’s
come back to me . . .”
“She,” says the Clinic
Director, sad and stern, “has been making time with Johnny Panic
again.”
“Naughty
naughty.”
The white cot is ready. With a terrible gentleness Miss Milleravage
takes the watch from my wrist, the rings from my fingers, the
hairpins from my hair. She begins to undress me. When I am bare, I
am anointed on the temples and robed in sheets virginal as the
first snow.
Then, from
the four corners of the room and from the door behind me come five
false priests in white surgical gowns and masks whose one lifework
is to unseat Johnny Panic from his own throne. They extend me
full-length on my back on the cot. The crown of wire is placed on
my head, the wafer of forgetfulness on my tongue. The masked
priests move to their posts and take hold: one of my left leg, one
of my right, one of my right arm, one of my left. One behind my
head at the metal box where I can’t see.
From their cramped
niches along the wall, the votaries raise their voices in protest.
They begin the devotional chant:
The only thing to love is Fear itself.
Love of Fear is the beginning of wisdom.
The only thing to love is Fear itself.
May Fear and Fear and Fear be everywhere.
There is no time for Miss
Milleravage or the Clinic Director or the priests to muzzle them.
The signal is given.
The machine betrays
them.
At the moment when
I think I am most lost the face of Johnny Panic appears in a nimbus
of arc lights on the ceiling overhead. I am shaken like a leaf in
the teeth of glory. His beard is lightning. Lightning is in his
eye. His Word charges and illumines the universe.
The air crackles with
his blue-tongued lightning-haloed angels.
His love is the
twenty-story leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart.
He forgets not his own.
~ Sylvia Plath Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
