The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison

  She began to cry.

  He could feel his throat closing. He knew. The turning to tell your best friend something you’d just seen together, to get the reinforcement, the input, the expression on his face. And there was no face. There was emptiness in that place. He knew. He’d turned to Victor three dozen times in the past two days. Turned, to confront emptiness. Oh, he knew, all right.

  “Sally,” he murmured. “Sally, I know; I know.”

  She pulled herself together, snuffled herself unclogged and cleared her throat. “It’s okay. I’m fine. It was just a second there…”

  “Try to get some sleep. We have to do stuff tomorrow.”

  “Of course,” she said, sounding really quite all right. “I’ll go back to bed. I’m sorry.” He told her to shut up, if you couldn’t call a friend at that hour to talk about the echidna, who the hell could you call?

  “Jerry Falwell,” she said. “If I have to annoy someone at three in the morning, better it should be a shit like him.” They laughed quickly and emptily, she said good night and told him he had been much loved by both of them, he said I know that, and they hung up.

  Lonny McGrath lay there, the paperback still tented at his side, the Tensor still warming his flesh, the sheets still soggy from the humidity, and he stared at the far wall of the bedroom on whose surface, like the surface of his skin, there lay no evidence whatever of secret mouths filled with teeth.

  “I can’t get it out of my mind.”

  Dr. Jess ran her fingers down his side, looked closer. “Well, it is red; but that’s more chafing than anything out of Stephen King.”

  “It’s red because I keep rubbing it. I’m getting obsessive about it. And don’t make fun, Jess. I can’t get it out of my mind.”

  She sighed and raked a hand back through her thick auburn hair. “Sorry.” She got up and walked to the window in the examination room. Then, as an afterthought, she said, “You can get dressed.” She stared out the window as McGrath hopped off the physical therapy table, nearly catching his heel on the retractable step. He partially folded the stiff paper gown that had covered his lap, and laid it on the padded seat. As he pulled up his undershorts, Dr. Jess turned and stared at him. He thought for the hundredth time that his initial fears, years before, at being examined by a female physician, had been foolish. His friend looked at him with concern, but without the look that passed between men and women. “How long has it been since Victor died?”

  “Three months, almost.”

  “And Emily?”

  “Six months.”

  “And Steve and Melanie’s son?”

  “Oh, Christ, Jess!”

  She pursed her lips. “Look, Lonny, I’m not a psychotherapist, but even I can see that the death of all these friends is getting to you. Maybe you don’t even see it, but you used the right word: obsessive. Nobody can sustain so much pain, over so brief a period, the loss of so many loved ones, without going into a spiral.”

  “What did the X-rays show?”

  “I told you.”

  “But there might’ve been something. Some lesion, or inflammation; an irregularity in the dermis…something!”

  “Lonny. Come on. I’ve never lied to you. You looked at them with me, did you see anything?” He sighed deeply, shook his head. She spread her hands as if to say, well, there you are, I can’t make something sick where nothing sick exists. “I can work on your soft prostate, and I can give you a shot of cortisone in the ball joint where that cop worked you over; but I can’t treat something out of a penny dreadful novel that doesn’t leave any trace.”

  “You think I need a shrink?”

  She turned back to the window. “This is your third visit, Lonny. You’re my pal, kiddo, but I think you need to get counseling of a different sort.”

  McGrath knotted his tie and drew it up, spreading the wings of his shirt collar with his little fingers. She didn’t turn around. “I’m worried about you, Lonny. You ought to be married.”

  “I was married. You’re not talking wife, anyway. You’re talking keeper.” She didn’t turn. He pulled on his jacket, and waited. Finally, with his hand on the doorknob, he said, “Maybe you’re right. I’ve never been a melancholy sort, but all this…so many, in so short a time…maybe you’re right.”

  He opened the door. She looked out the window. “We’ll talk.” He started out, and without turning, she said, “There won’t be a charge for this visit.”

  He smiled thinly, not at all happily. But she didn’t see it. There is always a charge, of one kind or another.

  • • •

  He called Tommy and begged off from work. Tommy went into a snit. “I’m up to my ass, Lonny,” he said, affecting his Dowager Empress tone. “This is Black goddam Friday! The Eroica! That Fahrenheit woman, Farrenstock, whatever the hell it is…”

  “Fahnestock,” Lonny said, smiling for the first time in days. “I thought we’d seen the last of her when you suggested she look into the possibility of a leper sitting on her face.”

  Tommy sighed. “The grotesque bitch is simply a glutton. I swear to God she must be into bondage; the worse I treat her, the more often she comes in.”

  “What’d she bring this time?”

  “Another half dozen of those tacky petit-point things. I can barely bring myself to look at them. Bleeding martyrs and scenes of culturally depressed areas in, I suppose, Iowa or Indiana. Illinois, Idaho, I don’t know: one of those places that begins with an I, teeming with people who bowl.”

  Lonny always wound up framing Mrs. Fahnestock’s gaucheries. Tommy always took one look, then went upstairs in back of the framing shop to lie down for a while. McGrath had asked the matron once, what she did with all of them. She replied that she gave them as gifts. Tommy, when he heard, fell to his knees and prayed to a God in which he did not believe that the woman would never hold him in enough esteem to feel he deserved such a gift. But she spent, oh my, how she spent.

  “Let me guess,” McGrath said. “She wants them blocked so tightly you could bounce a dime off them, with a fabric liner, a basic pearl matte, and the black lacquer frame from Chapin Molding. Right?”

  “Yes, of course, right. Which is another reason your slacker behavior is particularly distressing. The truck from Chapin just dropped off a hundred feet of the oval top walnut molding. It’s got to be unpacked, the footage measured, and put away. You can’t take the day off.”

  “Tommy, don’t whip the guilt on me. I’m a goy, remember?”

  “If it weren’t for guilt, the goyim would have wiped us out three thousand years ago. It’s more effective than a Star Wars defense system.” He puffed air through his lips for a moment, measuring how much he would actually be inconvenienced by his assistant’s absence. “Monday morning? Early?”

  McGrath said, “I’ll be there no later than eight o’clock. I’ll do the petit-points first.”

  “All right. And by the way, you sound awful. D’you know the worst part about being an Atheist?”

  Lonny smiled. Tommy would feel it was a closed bargain if he could pass on one of his horrendous jokes. “No, what’s the worst part about being an Atheist?”

  “You’ve got no one to talk to when you’re fucking.”

  Lonny roared, silently. There was no need to give him the satisfaction. But Tommy knew. He couldn’t see him, but Lonny knew he was grinning broadly at the other end of the line. “So long, Tommy. See you Monday.”

  He racked the receiver in the phone booth and looked across Pico Boulevard at the office building. He had lived in Los Angeles for eleven years, since he and Victor and Sally had fled New York, and he still couldn’t get used to the golden patina that lay over the days here. Except when it rained, at which times the inclemency seemed so alien he had visions of giant mushrooms sprouting from the sidewalks. The office building was unimpressive, just three storeys high and brick; but a late afternoon shadow lay across its face, and it recalled for him the eighteen frontal views of the Rouen Cathedral that Monet had pai
nted during the winter months of 1892 and 1893: the same façade, following the light from early morning till sunset. He had seen the Monet exhibition at MOMA. Then he remembered with whom he had taken in that exhibition, and he felt again the passage of chill leaving his body through that secret mouth. He stepped out of the booth and just wanted to go somewhere and cry. Stop it! he said inside. Knock it off. He swiped at the corner of his eye, and crossed the street. He passed through the shadow that cut the sidewalk.

  Inside the tiny lobby he consulted the glass-paneled wall register. Mostly, the building housed dentists and philatelists, as best he could tell. But against the ribbed black panel he read the little white plastic letters that had been darted in to include THE REM GROUP 306. He walked up the stairs.

  To find 306, he had to make a choice: go left or go right. There were no office location arrows on the wall. He went to the right, and was pleased. As the numbers went down, he began to hear someone speaking rather loudly. “Sleep is of several kinds. Dream sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep—what we call REM sleep, and thus the name of our group—is predominantly found in mammals who bring forth living young, rather than eggs. Some birds and reptiles, as well.”

  McGrath stood outside the glass-paneled door to 306, and he listened. Viviparous mammals, he thought. He could now discern that the speaker was a woman; and her use of “living young, rather than eggs” instead of viviparous convinced him she was addressing one or more laypersons. The echidna, he thought. A familiar viviparous mammal.

  “We now believe dreams originate in the brain’s neocortex. Dreams have been used to attempt to foretell the future. Freud used dreams to explore the unconscious mind. Jung thought dreams formed a bridge of communication between the conscious and the unconscious.” It wasn’t a dream, McGrath thought. I was awake. I know the difference.

  The woman was saying, “…those who try to make dreams work for them, to create poetry, to solve problems; and it’s generally thought that dreams aid in consolidating memories. How many of you believe that if you can only remember the dream when you waken, that you will understand something very important, or regain some special memory you’ve lost?”

  How many of you. McGrath now understood that the dream therapy group was in session. Late on a Friday afternoon? It would have to be women in their thirties, forties.

  He opened the door, to see if he was correct.

  With their hands in the air, indicating they believed the capturing of a dream on awakening would bring back an old memory, all six of the women in the room, not one of them older than forty, turned to stare at McGrath as he entered. He closed the door behind him, and said, “I don’t agree. I think we dream to forget. And sometimes it doesn’t work.”

  He was looking at the woman standing in front of the six hand-raised members of the group. She stared back at him for a long moment, and all six heads turned back to her. Their hands were frozen in the air. The woman who had been speaking settled back till she was perched on the edge of her desk.

  “Mr. McGrath?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry I’m late. It’s been a day.”

  She smiled quickly, totally in command, putting him at ease. “I’m Anna Picket. Tricia said you’d probably be along today. Please grab a chair.”

  McGrath nodded and took a folding chair from the three remaining against the wall. He unfolded it and set it at the far left of the semicircle. The six well-tended, expensively-coifed heads remained turned toward him as, one by one, the hands came down.

  He wasn’t at all sure letting his ex-wife call this Anna Picket, to get him into the group, had been such a good idea. They had remained friends after the divorce, and he trusted her judgment. Though he had never availed himself of her services after they’d separated and she had gone for her degree at UCLA, he’d been assured that Tricia was as good a family counseling therapist as one could find in Southern California. He had been shocked when she’d suggested a dream group. But he’d come: he had walked through the area most of the early part of the day, trying to decide if he wanted to do this, share what he’d experienced with total strangers; walked through the area stopping in at this shop and that boutique, having some gelato and shaking his head at how this neighborhood had been “gentrified,” how it had changed so radically, how all the wonderful little tradesmen who had flourished here had been driven out by geysering rents; walked through the area growing more and more despondent at how nothing lasted, how joy was drained away shop by shop, neighborhood by neighborhood, person by…

  Until one was left alone.

  Standing on an empty plain. The dark wind blowing from the horizon. Cold, empty dark: with the knowledge that a pit of eternal loneliness lay just over that horizon, and that the frightening wind that blew up out of the pit would never cease. That one would stand there, all alone, on the empty plain, as one after another of the ones you loved were erased in a second.

  Had walked through the area, all day, and finally had called Tommy, and finally had allowed Tricia’s wisdom to lead him, and here he sat, in a folding straight-back chair, asking a total stranger to repeat what she had just said.

  “I asked why you didn’t agree with the group, that remembering dreams is a good thing?” She arched an eyebrow, and tilted her head.

  McGrath felt uncomfortable for a moment. He blushed. It was something that had always caused him embarrassment. “Well,” he said slowly, “I don’t want to seem like a smart aleck, one of those people who reads some popularized bit of science and then comes on like an authority…”

  She smiled at his consternation, the flush of his cheeks. “Please, Mr. McGrath, that’s quite all right. Where dreams are concerned, we’re all journeyists. What did you read?”

  “The Crick-Mitchison theory. The paper on ‘unlearning.’ I don’t know, it just seemed, well, reasonable to me.”

  One of the women asked what that was.

  Anna Picket said, “Dr. Sir Francis Crick, you’ll know of him because he won the Nobel Prize for his work with DNA; and Graeme Mitchison, he’s a highly respected brain researcher at Cambridge. Their experiments in the early 1980s. They postulate that we dream to forget, not to remember.”

  “The best way I understood it,” McGrath said, “was using the analogy of cleaning out an office building at night, after all the workers are gone. Outdated reports are trashed, computer dump sheets are shredded, old memos tossed with the refuse. Every night our brains get cleaned during the one to two hours of REM sleep. The dreams pick up after us every day, sweep out the unnecessary, untrue, or just plain silly memories that could keep us from storing the important memories, or might keep us from rational thinking when we’re awake. Remembering the dreams would be counter-productive, since the brain is trying to unlearn all that crap so we function better.”

  Anna Picket smiled. “You were sent from heaven, Mr. McGrath. I was going precisely to that theory when you came in. You’ve saved me a great deal of explanation.”

  One of the six women said, “Then you don’t want us to write down our dreams and bring them in for discussion? I even put a tape recorder by the bed. For instance, I had a dream just last night in which my bicycle…”

  He sat through the entire session, listening to things that infuriated him. They were so self-indulgent, making of the most minor inconveniences in their lives, mountains impossible to conquer. They were so different from the women he knew. They seemed to be antiquated creatures from some primitive time, confused by changing times and the demand on them to be utterly responsible for their existence. They seemed to want succor, to be told that there were greater forces at work in their world; powers and pressures and even conspiracies that existed solely to keep them nervous, uncomfortable, and helpless. Five of the six were divorcées, and only one of the five had a full-time job: selling real estate. The sixth was the daughter of an organized crime figure. McGrath felt no link with them. He didn’t need a group therapy session. His life was as full as he wanted it to be…except that he was now alwa
ys scared, and lost, and constantly depressed. Perhaps Dr. Jess was dead on target. Perhaps he did need a shrink.

  He was certain he did not need Anna Picket and her well-tailored ladies whose greatest real anguish was making sure they got home in time to turn on the sprinklers.

  When the session ended, he started toward the door without saying anything to the Picket woman. She was surrounded by the six. But she gently edged them aside and called to him, “Mr. McGrath, would you wait a moment? I’d like to speak to you.” He took his hand off the doorknob, and went back to his chair. He bit the soft flesh of his inner cheek, annoyed.

  She blew them off like dandelion fluff, far more quickly than McGrath thought possible, and did it without their taking it as rejection. In less than five minutes he was alone in the office with the dream therapist.

  She closed the door behind the Mafia Princess and locked it. For a deranged moment he thought…but it passed, and the look on her face was concern, not lust. He started to rise. She laid a palm against the air, stopping him. He sank back onto the folding chair.

  Then Anna Picket came to him and said, “For McGrath hath murdered sleep.” He stared up at her as she put her left hand behind his head, cupping the nape with fingers extending up under his hair along the curve of the skull. “Don’t be nervous, this’ll be all right,” she said, laying her right hand with the palm against his left cheek, the spread thumb and index finger bracketing an eye he tried mightily not to blink. Her thumb lay alongside his nose, the tip curving onto the bridge. The forefinger lay across the bony eye-ridge.

  She pursed her lips, then sighed deeply. In a moment her body twitched with an involuntary rictus, and she gasped, as if she had had the wind knocked out of her. McGrath couldn’t move. He could feel the strength of her hands cradling his head, and the tremors of—he wanted to say—passion slamming through her. Not the passion of strong amorous feeling, but passion in the sense of being acted upon by something external, something alien to one’s nature.