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//-->Chapter 1I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstaticinstant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the morethan reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dreamwhich, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized.WILLIAM FAULKNER inAbsalom! Absalom!Half a deer walked up to my house and rattled at the door.WhenIdidn't answer, the deer went away andIwatchedhim turn into a whole deer. He walked awayinto trees where the wind was watery voices of peopleIdid not know.Strange watery voices were a$Icould hear.Icould not see becauseIwasmy eyes, my eyes were crying sohard becauseIwasso a%aid.Inthe voices they were talking about the deer.Iwentout of the house when the deer was gone. The lawnwasso'y long grass that layinthick strands like washed hair.Iwassurprised that the lake had climbed the hi$to the cabin. The water, rising up the hi$, was cloudy and bright ye$ow as if the sun were caught beneath it.AsIranged up and down the shores of the swo$en lakeIsaw a man's feet floating beneath the surface. Thebottoms of his feet were near the surface and sometimes sma$ waves broke over them. The rest of themandisappeared beneath the water.When I opened my eyes, doctors and nurses were moving around me talking in a strangelanguage. A white sheet was over me. Oh, Jesus Christ, I've been in a dream and suddenly I'm wakingup in a strange place. I don't know who I am or where I am or what is happening. What is thatlanguage?I closed my eyes but all there was to see was water so I opened them again. But I didn't seedifferently or know more. Sometime, a long time ago, something must have happened and I gotamnesia, and now I am waking up in this hospital-is it a mental hospital? There was a mentalhospital somewhere ....My arm began to hurt so I lay back on the table and tried to relax and remember as much as Icould:I was born in New York City on April 3, 1944. My mother and father, Ilse Ollendorff andWilhelm Reich, lived at 9906 Sixtyninth Avenue in Forest Hills. The telephone number wasBoulevard 8-5997. We lived there for a long time and then we moved to Maine. My father was apsychiatrist. When we moved to Maine he bought a big tract of land and called it Orgonon. Hediscovered Orgone Energy, which was Life Energy. He did a lot of experiments with it and lots ofother doctors and scientists came to help. The big thing was the accumulator. It was like a box andyou sat in it and it made you feel better. I was happy then. A lot of people said my father was aquack. A lot of bad things happened I can't remember ....The doctor came over and spoke to me in a funny language.He said something about gas. . . .Wait. My parents were separated. My father died. I went to a Quaker boarding school. Then Iwent to college in Maine and took my junior year abroad .... Yes, that was it, I was remembering. Iwas in France. Those people were speaking French.4I was in France, now, in 1963, and there had been an accident.I had gone to Geneva with a friend who had a motorcycle. We stayed overnight in a youth hosteland went to visit the United Nations palace the next day. Then we started back to Grenoble andcoming around a hairpin curve we went off the road. That was why my shoulder hurt: I haddislocated my shoulder.That was why there was pain and why I was in the hospital afraid to close my eyes because of thewater. There was a dream in the gas.The doctor came back again and smiled. He said they had not been able to get my shoulder backin its socket and would have to give me gas again. Again? Had I already been through some dream?The mask came over my face slowly and it was sickening and familiar. This has happened before andbefore. Thereisanother dream. There was an incredible dream I had that no one would ever believe.The gas was sweet as I tried to remember and already one had passed and two was coming because Iwas a soldier in a war long ago but no one would ever believe three or four and already it was racingdown a purple corridor with neon numbers clicking on and off in the trillions spinning all the waythrough the purple ribbon until out of it a thin black ribbon bent around the side of my head,encircled it, grew wider and wider and because no one would believe what happened was all black.So I finally made sergeant. It was 1954.Tightening the white plastic Sam Browne belt around my waist and over my chest, I adjusted theshiny new sergeant's badge over my heart and looked down the road. A car was coming so I blew thewhistle.On either side of me, a few yards down the road, privates swung their wrists, leaning two stopsigns out into the road. The car stopped.5I lifted my white sergeant's pole, swung it around in front of me and looked at the third-graderstanding next to me. "Okay," I said.We walked to the other side. I swung the pole around and let the third-grader walk up theasphalt pathway to Edward L. Wetmore School. Beyond the low school building, children wereplaying on a large dusty playfield.I walked back across the road and blew the whistle again. The two stop signs swung back and thecar drove past.As soon as he got his sign up, Rudy yelled at me. "Hey, stupid, you're not supposed to hold thewhite pole in front of you. It is supposed to be in the direction you're going!"Rudy was mad at me because I made sergeant before he did.But he didn't try as hard as I did. Ray Urbelejo made lieutenant. He's my friend."I'll do it any way I want to."Actually, I was a sergeant before, but nobody knew about that. Ray and Rudy wouldn'tunderstand. I'm a lieutenant too, in the cavalry, and my scout is named Toreano, but they wouldn'tunderstand that either. I'm a lieutenant when I wear the Stetson and a sergeant when I wear the pithhelmet. As soon as wegot to Tucson, Bill and I called Daddy, because he was still coming in his car with Eva. I askedhim if I could buy a real cowboy hat and he said okay. So we went to Jacome's and bought a realStetson for$12.It's a real cowboy hat. Then when Daddy arrived and our expedition began, hebought pith helmets forall of us and I got a red crayon and painted sergeant's stripeson it. Bill Moise, my brother-in-law, is a lieutenant and we're cosmic engineers. But Ray andRudy wouldn't understand."Hey, stupid, there's a car coming!" Rudy looked at me impatiently as I blew the whistle.As soon as we were relieved, I went back up to the locker room to hang up my belt and go out tolook for popsicle sticks before the bell rang. Ray had finished checking off the white6belts so we went outside together to look for popsicle sticks. We walked to the jungle jim wheremost of the kids ate their popsicles and started picking them up. Ray was asking me about Mainebecause I told him that was where I came from."Do you really get a lot of snow up there?""Yeah, once it was up to my waist. We used to have great snowball fights in school."I sat down and started to jam the first bunch of sticks into my engineer boots. Ray sat down nextto me."Gee, I've never seen snow. Can you eat it?"I shifted the popsicle sticks so they were all even, all the way around my leg. "Yeah, you canwhen you get thirsty, but actually, it just makes you more thirsty. It's not good to eat too muchof it.""Wow, someday I'd like to get up there and see it. My dad, uh, travels and maybe we could get upthere sometime." He jiggled his boot to let the popsicle sticks settle. He wore cowboy boots. Theywere higher and he could get more sticks in his.We got up and started looking around for more sticks. We walked over tQ the swings, wherekids dropped their feet into the dust on the downswing and made puffs of smoke. We picked uppopsicle sticks until our boots were stuffed up to the top and then we took out our yoyos. Ray didsome around-the-horns and I just let mine sleep for a while. We yoyoed for a while watching dustdevils sweep across the playground."Hey," said Ray, "I thought you had one of these glow-inthe-dark yoyos." He swung his red glow-in-the-darker around the world and dropped into a baby's cradle.My black diamond Duncan Hipped back into my hand after a double around-the-horn."Yeah, well, you see, my dad said I had to get rid of it on account of the glow-in-the-dark stuff.""Huh?""Well, you see, he works with some radioactive stuff and he7told me that the glow-in-the-dark on the yoyo and his radioactive stuff don't mix. It might makeme sick or something.""Wow, that sounds eerie. What kind of stuff does your dad do?" He dropped his yoyo into a longsleep. I swung my yoyo around the world and when it got back, walked the doggy."Well, actually, we're on an atmospheric research expedition." "An expedition? Wow!" HeHipped his yoyo back into his hand."Yeah, and you see we've got this machine called a cloudbuster-butit really isn't a machine-andwe use it to make rain.My dad, he decided to come down here and break the drought." Daddy always said not to brag,but I was just telling. A lump of popsicle sticks dropped around my ankles. I stopped to hike themup and Ray swung around the world."You mean you can really make it rain?""Sure. Last year when we were back East, in Maine, there was a drought, and all the blueberrieswere drying up. You know, that's where they grow blueberries.""Yeah?" He palmed his yoyo and listened."Yeah. So these blueberry growers heard about the cloudbuster and called my dad up. They saidthey'd give him ten thousand dollars to make it rain.""Wowee," said Ray, shaking his head. "Ten thousand bucks is a lot of money. Did you make itrain?"I swung around the horn. It wasn't bragging, it was just telling the truth. Besides, I'd never tellhim about the Hying saucers."Yup, twenty-four hours after we worked the cloudbuster,it started the rain. The weather bureau had said there wouldn't be any rain for a couple of daysand then, wham." The yoyo slapped back into my hand just as the bell rang and we started backtoward the school building."Well, gee, your dad must be pretty rich then, if he can go around making rain for money,especially out here." He grinned.8"Well, we're not really rich. You see, there's a problem with the government.""The government?""Yeah. They don't believe it works, so they're giving my dad a hard time about it ... it's kind ofcomplicated.""Wow. Well, do you think I could come over sometime and look at the cloudthing?""Yeah, I guess so."Swarms of kids walked past us as we went down the outside corridor that ran past theclassrooms. Little dunes of dust had gathered in front of the doors."What does your dad do?" I asked.Ray's face turned a little red. "Aaw, he just works on farms and stuff." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]