Dreamcatcher

  In November he'll go hunting with his friends, and that's enough to look 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 woods 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, Mom 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 Mal-lomars. 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 of--"

  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 talking about roast lamb again, or roast chicken, or roast duck with orange sauce. Back to the inventory. Hence Henry knows nothing about Barry's parents, certainly not about the day Barry's mother died, falling out of bed and pissing on the carpet, still calling and calling, three hundred pounds and so disgustingly fat, calling and calling. He can know nothing about that because he hasn't been told, but he does know. And Barry was thinner then. A relatively svelte one-ninety.

  This is Henry's version of the line. Seeing the line. Henry hasn't seen it for maybe five years now (unless he sometimes sees it in dreams), thought all that was over, and now here it is again.

  "You sat there in front of the TV, listening to her yell," he says. "You sat there watching Ricki Lake and eating--what?--a Sara Lee cheesecake? A bowl of ice cream? I don't know. But you let her yell."

  "Stop it!"

  "You let her yell, and really, why not? She'd been crying wolf her whole life. You are not a stupid man and you know that's true. This sort of thing happens. I think you know that, too. You've cast yourself in your own little Tennessee Williams play simply because you like to eat. But guess what, Barry? It's really going to kill you. In your secret heart you don't believe that, but it's true. Your heart's already pounding like a premature burial victim beating his fists on the lid of a coffin. What's it going to be like eighty or a hundred pounds from now?"

  "Shut--"

  "When you fall, Barry, it's going to be like the fall of Babel in the desert. The people who see you go down will talk about it for years. Man, you'll shake the dishes right off the shelves--"

  "Stop it!" Barry is sitting up now, he hasn't needed Henry to give him a hand this time, and he is deadly pale except for little wild roses, one growing in each cheek.

  "--you'll splash the coffee right out of the cups, and you'll piss yourself just like she did--"

  "STOP IT!" Barry Newman shrieks. "STOP IT, YOU MONSTER!"

  But Henry can't. Henry can't. He sees the line and when you see it, you can't unsee it.

  "--unless you wake up from this poisoned dream you're having. You see, Barry--"

  But Barry doesn't want to see, absolutely will not see. Out the door he runs, vast buttocks jiggling, and he is gone.

  At first Henry sits where he is, not moving, listening to the departing thunder of the one-man buffalo herd that is Barry Newman. The outer room is empty; he has no receptionist, and with Barry gone, the week is over. Just as well. That was a mess. He goes to the couch and lies down on it.

  "Doctor," he says, "I just fucked up.

  "How did you do that, Henry?

  "I told a patient the truth.

  "If we know the truth, Henry, does it not set us free?

  "No," he replies to himself, looking up at the ceiling. "Not in the slightest.

  "Close your eyes, Henry.

  "All right, doctor."

  He closes his eyes. The room is replaced by darkness, and that is good. Darkness has become his friend. Tomorrow he will see his other friends (three of them, anyway), and the light will once more seem good. But now . . . now . . .

  "Doctor?

  "Yes, Henry.

  "This is a bona fide case of same shit, different day. Do you know that?

  "What does that mean, Henry? What does that mean to you?

  "Everything," he says, eyes closed, and then adds: "Nothing." But that's a lie. Not the first one that was ever told in here.

  He lies on the couch, eyes closed and hands folded on his chest, and after a little while he sleeps.

  The next day the four of them drive up to Hole in the Wall, and it is a great eight days. The great hunting trips are coming to an end, only a few left, although they of course do not know this. The real darkness is still a few years away, but it is coming.

  The darkness is coming.

  2001: Jonesy's Student-Teacher Conference

  We don't know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well. On the day that will change his, Jonesy is in his third-floor John Jay College office, looking out at his little slice of Boston and thinking how wrong T. S. Eliot had been to call April the cruelest month just because an itinerant carpenter from Nazareth supposedly got himself crucified then for fomenting rebellion. Anyone who lives in Boston knows that it's March that's the cruelest, holding out a few days of false hope and then gleefully hitting you with the shit. Today is one of the untrustworthy ones when it looks as if spring might really be coming, and he's thinking about taking a walk when the bit of impending nastiness just ahead is over. Of course at this point, Jonesy has no idea how nasty a day can get; no idea that he is going to finish this one in a hospital room, smashed up and fighting for his goddam life.

  Same shit, different day, he thinks, but this will be different shit indeed.

  That's when the phone rings, and he grabs it at once, filled with a hopeful premonition: it'll be the Defuniak kid, calling to cancel his eleven-o'clock. He's gotten a whiff of what's in the wind, Jonesy thinks, and that is very possible. Usually it's the students who make appointments to see the teacher. When a kid gets a message saying that one of his teachers wants to see him . . . well, you don't have to be a rocket-scientist, as the saying goes.

  "Hello, it's Jones," he says.

  "Hey, Jonesy, how's life treating you?"

  He'd know that voice anywhere. "Henry! Hey! Good, life's good!"

  Life does not, in fact, seem all that great, not with Defuniak due in a quarter of an hour, but it's all relative, isn't it? Compared to where he's going to be twelve hours from now, hooked up to all those beeping machines, one operation behind him and three more ahead of him, Jonesy is, as they say, farting through silk.

  "Glad to hear it."

  Jonesy might have heard the heaviness in Henry's voice, but more likely it's a thing he senses.

  "Henry? What's wrong?"

  Silence. Jonesy is about to ask again when Henry answers.

  "A patient of mine died yesterday. I happened to see the obit in the paper. Barry Newman, his name was." Henry pauses. "He was a couch man."

  Jonesy doesn't know what that means, but his old friend is hurting. He knows that.

  "Suicide?"

  "Heart attack. At the age of twenty-nine. Dug his grave with his own fork and spoon."

  "I'm sorry."

  "He hasn't been my patient for almost three years. I scared him away. I had . . . one of those things. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

  Jonesy thinks he does. "Was it the line?"

  Henry sighs. It doesn't sound like regret to Jonesy. It sounds like relief. "Yeah. I kind of socked it to him. He took off like his ass was on fire."

  "That doesn't make you responsible for his coronary."

  "Maybe you're right. But that's not the way it feels." A pause. And then, with a shade of amusement: "Isn't that a line from a Jim Croce song? Are you all right, Jonesy?"

  "Me? Yeah. Why do you ask?"

  "I don't know," Henry says. "Only . . . I've been thinking about you ever since I opened the paper and saw Barry's picture on the obituary page. I want you to be careful."

  Around his bones (many of which will soon be broken), Jonesy feels a slight coldness. "What exactly are you talking about?"

  "I don't know," Henry says. "Maybe nothing. But . . ."

  "Is it the line now?" Jonesy is alarmed. He swings around in his chair and looks out the window at the ch
ancy spring sunlight. It crosses his mind that maybe the Defuniak kid is disturbed, maybe he's carrying a gun (packing heat, as they say in the mystery and suspense novels Jonesy likes to read in his spare time) and Henry has somehow picked this up.

  "I don't know. The most likely thing is that I'm just having a displaced reaction from seeing Barry's picture on the all-done page. But watch yourself the next little while, would you?"

  "Well . . . yeah. I can do that."

  "Good."

  "And you're okay?"

  "I'm fine."

  But Jonesy doesn't think Henry is fine at all. He's about to say something else when someone clears his throat behind him and he realizes that Defuniak has probably arrived.

  "Well, that's good," he says, and swivels around in his chair. Yep, there's his eleven-o'clock in the doorway, not looking dangerous at all: just a kid bundled into a big old duffel coat that's too heavy for the day, looking thin and underfed, wearing one earring and a punky haircut that spikes over his worried eyes. "Henry, I've got an appointment. I'll call you back--"

  "No, that's not necessary. Really."

  "You're sure?"

  "I am. But there's one other thing. Got thirty more seconds?"

  "Sure, you bet." He holds up a finger to Defuniak and Defuniak nods. But he just goes on standing there until Jonesy points to the one chair in the little office besides his own that isn't stacked with books. Defuniak goes to it reluctantly. Into the phone, Jonesy says, "Shoot."

  "I think we ought to go back to Derry. Just a quick trip, just you and me. See our old friend."

  "You mean--?" But he doesn't want to say that name, that baby-sounding name, with a stranger in the room.

  He doesn't have to; Henry says it for him. Once they were a quartet, then for a little while they were five, and then they were four again. But the fifth one has never exactly left them. Henry says that name, the name of a boy who is magically still a boy. About him, Henry's worries are more clear, more easily expressed. It isn't anything he knows, he tells Jonesy, just a feeling that their old pal might need a visit.