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“Fair enough. When you say you’re the best at Temp-O—I’ve seen a couple of others from there, not just Diane Bissonette—how many words a minute are we talking about?”
I told him.
“I’m going to test you on that. I have to. If you’re the best, that’s what I need. Stenography will be the only record. Almost the only record. There will be no audio recordings of my experiments. No motion picture film. There will be Polaroid photographs, which I will keep if I publish and destroy if I don’t.”
He waited for me to be curious, and I was, but not enough to ask. He would either tell me or he wouldn’t. There was a stack of books on the coffee table. He picked up the top one and tested me from it. The book was Man and His Symbols. He spoke at a good pace, but not speeding along the way Mrs. Frobisher had. There was some technical jargon, like activation-synthesis, and some difficult names, like Aniela Jaffé and Brescia University, but I saw them correctly. That’s what it is, a kind of seeing. I put them down, even though he stumbled over the name of Jaffé, pronouncing it Jaff. I read everything back to him.
“You are wasted at Temp-O,” he said.
I had nothing to say to that.
“You would live here during the course of my experiments. In the guest house out back. Days off. Plenty of free time. Do you have any medical skills as a result of your service?”
“Some. I could set a bone and I could resuscitate someone. If they were fished out of the lake in time, that is. I don’t suppose you’d have any need for sulfa packs here.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“You look older.”
“Sure.”
“Were you by any chance at My Lai?”
“Before my time.”
He picked up one of the books in the stack: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. He picked up another called Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He hefted them. Seemed to weigh them in each hand, as if on a balance scale. “Do you know what these books have in common?”
“They’re both by Carl Jung.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You say his name correctly.”
Better than you say Aniela Jaffé, I thought but didn’t say.
“Don’t suppose you speak German?”
“Ein wenig,” I said, and held my thumb and forefinger apart.
He took up another volume from the stack. It was called Gegenwart und Zukunft. “This is my treasure. Rare, a first edition. Present and Future. I can’t read it, but I can look at the pictures, and I’ve studied the graphs. Mathematics is a universal language, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
I wasn’t because no language is universal. Numbers, like dogs, can be taught to do tricks. And the title of his first edition was actually Presence and Future. There is a world of difference between present and presence. A gulf. I didn’t care about that, but the book under Gegenwart und Zukunft interested me. It was the only one not by Jung. It was Beyond the Wall of Sleep, by H.P. Lovecraft. A man I knew in the ’docks, a doorgunner, had a paperback copy. It burned up and so did he.
There was more talk. The wages he proposed were high enough for me to wonder if his experiments were strictly legal. He left me several opportunities to ask about them but I didn’t. Finally he gave up teasing and asked me if I would like to hazard a guess about what his experiments would concern. I said dreams seemed likely.
“Yes, but I think I will keep the exact nature of my interest, the thrust, shall we say, to myself for the time being.”
I hadn’t asked about the thrust, another thing I didn’t bother to point out. He took a photo of my discharge papers with his Polaroid camera, then offered me the job. “Of course you could keep working at Temp-O, but here you would be aiding me as I explore realms no psychologist, not even Jung, has visited. Virgin territory.”
I said all right. He told me we would start in the middle of July and I said all right. He asked for my phone number and I gave it to him. I told him it was a roominghouse phone and down the hall. He asked if I had a girlfriend. I said no. He wore no wedding ring. I never saw any help. I cooked my own meals once I moved into the little guest house, or ate at one of the cafés in town. I don’t know who cooked his grub. There was something timeless about Elgin, as if he had no past and no future. He had a present but no particular presence. He smoked but I never saw him take a drink. All he had was his obsession about dreams.
On the way out I said, “You want to go over the wall of sleep, don’t you?”
He laughed at that. “No. I want to go under it.”
He called me on July 1st and told me to give my two weeks’ notice. I did. I didn’t think Mrs. Frobisher would tell me to never mind two weeks, just take a walk (or roll it small), and she didn’t. I was her best, and she wanted as much of me as she could get. He called me on July 8th and told me to move in when I finished work on the 14th. He said if I was living in a roominghouse I probably didn’t have much. He was right about that. He said he had a task for me right away, a small one.
My last interaction at Temp-O was with Pearson. I told him he was an asshole. He had no reply. Possibly he agreed with the assessment. Possibly he thought I might strike him. I don’t know. I drove around to the guest house and saw a keyring with two keys hanging down and a third stuck in the lock. Four rooms. Tidy. Warmer than the big house, probably because it was added later, after in-wall insulation became a thing. There was a fireplace in the living room and plenty of seasoned wood out back in a pile covered with a canvas tarp. I like a fireplace fire, always have. I didn’t go around to the big house. I figured Elgin would see my car and know I was in. There was an intercom in the little galley kitchen and a fax machine beside it. I had never seen a home fax machine before, but I knew what it was, having seen a few in Vietnam HQs. On the kitchen table was what looked like a scrapbook. A note taped to it said Familiarize yourself with these. You may want to take notes.
