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“All right.”
I thought she was already under. I thought if Elgin asked her to bark like a dog she’d give it a try.
“Go inside and look around.”
“All right.”
“Go to the living room.”
“All right.”
“Not inside, just to the doorway.”
“Do you want me to tell you what it looks like in the living room? The furniture or what kind of wallpaper? Things like that?”
“No, I want you to kneel down and look for a crack in the floor. Right there in the living room doorway.”
“Will there be one?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Gibson. Althea. It’s your dream. If there’s a crack, put your fingers in it and lift up the living room floor.”
She gave him a dreamy smile. “I can’t lift up a floor, silly.”
“Maybe you won’t be able to but maybe you will. Things are possible in dreams that would otherwise not be.”
“Like flying.” The dreamy smile got bigger.
“Yes, like flying.” He sounded a little impatient with that idea, although to me the idea of flying in dreams seemed as logical as anything else about them. According to Jung, dreams of flying indicated the core psyche’s desire to break free of the expectations of others, or even more difficult, usually impossible, the expectations of the self.
“Lift up the floor. See what is beneath. If you remember when you wake up, write it down on the pad I’ve provided for you. I’ll ask you a few questions. If you can’t remember, that’s all right. We’ll be back soon, won’t we, Bill?”
We left the patient half of the former dining room and went into the other half. I took my seat in front of the oneway glass with my pad on my knee. Elgin sat at the desk and pushed one of his buttons. The record turned, the tonearm went down, and the music started to play. It was Debussy. Elgin pushed another button and the music in our half of the experimental station stopped but I could still hear it in Mrs. Gibson’s half. She was looking at the picture. She giggled and I wrote, not in Gregg but in plain, G laughs at 2:14 PM.
Time passed. Ten minutes by my watch. She studied the picture of the house with the close attention only those who are quite seriously stoned can attain. Little by little it began to sag in her hand. With the head of the couch facing us I could see the way her eyes slipped closed and then opened. Her lips, dressed in bright red, softened. Elgin was now standing next to me, bent forward with his hands on his knees. He looked like a bird colonel I knew over there in that other world watching through his binoculars as the F-100Ds of the 352nd came in low over Bien Hoa, pregnant with the firejelly they would drop in an orange curtain, burning a miscarriage in the belly of the green, turning part of the overstory to ash and skeleton palms. The men and women, too, them calling nahn tu, nahn tu to no one who could hear or care if they did.
The picture of the house settled to her belly. She was asleep. Elgin went back to the desk and turned off the music. He must also have turned up the sound in our part because I could hear her snoring, very lightly. He came back and resumed his former position. The Polaroids on timers flashed every thirty seconds or so, the one on our side and the one on the Gibson side. Each time they flashed a picture extruded with that catlike whirring sound they make and fell on the floor. I saw something three or four minutes after she fell asleep and leaned forward. I didn’t believe it, the way you don’t believe anything that runs contrary to the way things are supposed to be. But it was there. I rubbed a palm across my eyes and it was still there.
“Elgin. Her mouth.”
“I see it.”
Her lips were slipping apart and her teeth were rising between them. It was like watching something volcanic rising from the ocean, only there were no sharp points except I guess for the canines. Not fangs or animal teeth, they were her teeth, just longer and bigger. Her lips folded back revealing their pink lining. Her hands were jerking, flipping back and forth, fingers wiggling. The Polaroids flashed and whined. Two more times in there, two more in with us. The photos fell to the floor. Then the cameras were out of film. Her teeth began to retract. Her hands gave one more jerk, the fingers seeming to play an invisible piano. Then that stopped, too. Her lips closed but there was a faint red ghost on her philtrum where the upper one had pressed a lipstick tattoo.
I looked at Elgin. He looked serene and didn’t. I got a brief glimpse of what was underneath his serenity, the way a bank of clouds at the end of day may rift apart just enough and just long enough to see the bloodred glare of the setting sun. If I ever doubted the Gentleman Scientist was the Gentleman Mad Scientist, that was the end of that.
“Did you know what was going to happen?” I asked.
“No.”
Twenty minutes later, at 2:58 PM, Mrs. Gibson began to stir. We went in and Elgin shook her all the way awake. She came from sleep with no inbetween muzziness, just stretched with her arms spread wide as if to embrace the whole world.
G: That was wonderful. A wonderful nap.
E: Good. What did you dream? Do you remember?
G: Yes! I went inside. It was my grandfather’s house! The same Seth Thomas clock in the front hall, what my sister and I used to call Grampa’s tick-tock.
E: And the living room?
