The Sleepless Read online

  Dr Rice had been trying to unravel all of Michael’s traumas for over a year now, but it wasn’t easy. As soon as he managed to untangle one nightmare, another would snaggle itself up. But Dr Rice was not only skilled but infinitely patient, and he reckoned that four or five years’ more therapy would eventually bring Michael back to the same state of mental equilibrium in which he had been when he first landed by helicopter at Rocky Woods, eager and ambitious and unprepared for one of the messiest civil aviation disasters in recent history.

  There was a difference between reliving his nightmares and dealing with them. At the moment, Michael was simply reliving them, again and again, and making very little emotional headway.

  ‘The falling nightmare,’ Michael explained. ‘The girl’s body. That nightmare.’

  Dr Rice hesitated over his solitaire board. Then he picked up the last pin that he could take out of it, and said, ‘Three left. Why do I never manage fewer than three?’

  ‘I don’t think I’m making any kind of recovery,’ said Michael. ‘It’s the same nightmare, just as clear. Just as frightening. I try to handle it, but my mind doesn’t want to handle it. It’s almost like I’m trying to punish myself.’

  ‘That’s not uncommon,’ Dr Rice explained. ‘We’ve talked about this before, haven’t we? Part of your problem is survivor syndrome. “Grace of God” syndrome, Dr Leavis used to call it. “There, but for the grace of God, go I” – and don’t I feel guilty about it!’

  ‘I wasn’t even a passenger on that plane,’ Michael pointed out.

  Dr Rice shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. You saw people killed; you saw innocent women and children smashed to pieces. You walked amongst them and you were still alive.’

  Michael eased himself out of the awkward chrome-and-canvas chair. Dr Rice began systematically to put back all the pins in his solitaire board, and didn’t even watch him as he crossed the office and peered out through the vertical slatted blinds at the street outside. All Michael could see was the rear end of a yellow van with Aal’s Transmissions stencilled in scarlet on the side, and the corner of the Contented Cod Restaurant, with red chintzy curtains and a white mock-Colonial porch. He could also see a gingery dog sleeping in the sun, and a tricycle with a red pennant and a basket filled with groceries, bread, lettuce. It was an odd, empty scene. No automobiles passed, no pedestrians walked by. It reminded him of a painting by Edward Hopper.

  Dr Rice waited for him patiently. He could afford to be patient. Michael’s therapy was being paid for by Plymouth Insurance, as part of his severance arrangements, and it was up to Dr Rice himself to decide when Michael was emotionally readjusted. Dr Rice was a great believer in the effectiveness of hypnotherapy, but he was also a great believer in cashflow. ‘Small and steady is better than sporadic and spectacular,’ he had told his broker on the fifth green at Dunfey’s Hyannis Resort. But he wasn’t a hypocrite: he genuinely believed that Michael could only be cured through a very gradual and well-structured acceptance of what he had experienced.

  One day Michael had to accept that witnessing a tragedy wasn’t the same as causing it. People had rained from the sky, yes. Children had died. All of the private and precious detritus of hundreds of human lives had been scattered across the countryside. But it hadn’t been Michael’s fault. Once Michael understood that, once he had really come to terms with his innocence, then his healing process could begin. Up until then, there was nothing that Dr Rice could do but hold up a guiding light as he struggled through the thorns and briars of his nightmares, hoping against hope that he was travelling in the right direction.

  ‘Do you think that anything might have triggered this nightmare off?’ asked Dr Rice. ‘Anything you read, anything you saw on television? Or was it simply spontaneous?’

  Michael said, ‘They want me to go back. They want me to do it again.’

  ‘Who does? What do you mean?’

  ‘Joe Garboden, from Plymouth Insurance. He came around yesterday. Unannounced, unexpected. He said they need help with this helicopter crash ... you know, the crash that killed John O’Brien and his family?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dr Rice, ‘of course I do. But why do they want you?’

  Michael shrugged. ‘They seem to think I have special talents.’

  ‘But ... come on now, they know that you’re still undergoing therapy.’

  ‘I don’t think they care very much about that. All they care about is the fact that they might have to cough up a great many millions of dollars.’

  ‘They must have plenty of qualified investigators who could do the job just as well as you.’

  Michael took a long last look out of the window. ‘They don’t seem to think so.’

  Dr Rice stood up. He was very tall, at least six-feet-three, and so thin that he looked as if he were racked by some life-threatening disease, although (apart from a liver weakened in his twenties by alcohol and drugs) he was in excellent health. His dyed-black mane was combed back from a bony, horselike forehead. His eyes were so pale that they were almost colourless, like the sea washing over a stone, but they were full of expression. Fire, verve, intellect, warmth. His cheekbones were sharply sculptured and his nose was narrow and complicated and bony.

  He was a survivor from the 1960s. After he had graduated in psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Columbia Point, he had headed west and lived at Sandstone and Carmel and Haight-Ashbury. He had spent long, lunatic, spaced-out nights with Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and a Yaqui mystic who had shown him the skull that lies beneath every human face. At one point, he had nearly understood God. But one morning in spring, 1974, he had woken up in Balboa Park, in San Diego, ragingly thirsty and ravenously hungry and realized that the days of revelation were over. It was time to go home to Cape Cod, time to take care of his mother, time to set up in respectable practice and trade his flower-decorated VW Camper for a new gold-metallic Mercedes-Benz. Now, twenty years later, he had a fashionable and highly profitable partnership in Hyannis, helping to treat the psychological complexes of the rich, the influential, the self-absorbed and the just-plain-bored.

  He draped his long fingers over Michael’s shoulder. ‘They can’t force you to go back, can they?’ he said, his voice very gentle.

  Michael made a face. ‘No. But poverty can.’

  ‘How much are they offering?’

  ‘Thirty thousand, plus expenses.’

  ‘I think your psychological well-being is worth more than thirty thousand plus expenses, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, I guess. But I also have this feeling that I need to go back – that I won’t ever be readjusted until I face up to it.’

  Dr Rice raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think you really understand the risks. You could end up psychologically damaged beyond repair. A fully paid-up, card-carrying basket-case.’

  Michael said nothing. He felt like a basket-case already. Ever since Joe Garboden had said Remember Rocky Woods his mind had been gradually collapsing under its own terrible weight.

  ‘Do you want to go under?’ asked Dr Rice.

  ‘Do you think it’ll solve anything?’

  ‘It might help you to evaluate the risks. You might find out why you feel a need to go back. But you ought to bear in mind that the whole purpose of this therapy has been to help you get over what you experienced, to put it into proportion. Believe me, it’s a fallacy that reliving a trauma can help you to deal with it. That’s strictly for the movies. The best way of dealing with a trauma is to locate the damaged area of your psyche and see what you can do to repair it.’

  Michael thought for a while. Across the street, a pretty young girl in red-and-white striped shorts mounted the abandoned tricycle, and slowly pedalled away. She looked as if she were singing, but he couldn’t hear her. The sleeping dog didn’t stir.

  ‘Okay,’ said Michael. ‘I’ll go under.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Sure I’m sure.’

  He sat back in the canvas-and-chrome ar
mchair. On the wall beside him, half-obscured by the light reflected on its frame, was a lavishly illuminated certificate from Die Akademie der Hypnotismus und Mesmerismus, Wien, 1981, testifying that David Walden Rice had graduated in advanced hypnotherapy. Underneath it hung a vaguely disturbing reproduction of Charles Sheeler’s painting of the upper deck of an ocean liner – empty, like the street outside, with meticulously rendered railings and ventilators and cables. A deserted scenario waiting for something to happen.

  Dr Rice tugged the chain that closed the vertical blinds, drowning his office in warm, brown shadow. ‘Are you comfortable?’ he asked Michael; although he had asked this question so many times before that Michael didn’t feel the need to reply. ‘Place your feet a little wider apart, please. That’s right. Now lay your left hand on top of your left knee, palm upwards, and lay your right hand on top of your left hand, also palm upwards.’

  Michael had already done what Dr Rice was asking him to do. Dr Rice came closer and Michael could smell cigarette tobacco on his clothes and that clove-scented aftershave he always wore. Dr Rice touched Michael’s forehead with his fingertips and said, ‘You’re tenser than usual. Relax. Keep your elbows close to your sides, but not too close. Rotate your head around, let those neck muscles go.’

  After a while, he reached into the pocket of his green checkered shirt and produced a small metal disc only a little larger than a quarter. He laid it carefully and almost reverentially onto Michael’s open palm, as if it were a communion wafer. The disc was made of dull grey zinc, with a centre stud of polished copper. Dr Rice said, ‘Fix your eyes on the middle of the disc ... on the copper spot ... keep your eyes fixed on it and don’t let them waver.’

  Every time that Dr Rice began to take him under, Michael was convinced that this time he wouldn’t go. He wasn’t at all tired; and today he felt that his resistance was stronger than ever. How could Dr Rice put him to sleep simply by making him stare at a zinc-and-copper disc? Yet he knew the disc had worked before. The disc had guided him hundreds of times into his dreams; and into the darkness beneath his dreams; and deeper still; into that Marianas Trench of the human subconscious, where forms and feelings swam in almost total darkness – forms and feelings that could never be exposed to the naked light of wakefulness.

  Because of this, the disc was invested in Michael’s mind with an almost holy quality – a talisman, a magical artefact. He didn’t believe in it, not really. But on the other hand he cherished and respected it. It had some mystical aura, although he couldn’t understand what. It was like the lucky glass marble he had played with at school, a sea-green sailor. He hadn’t really believed that it was lucky; but he had always used it when a game was crucially close; and he had been inconsolable when he lost it.

  ‘You feel inclined to sleep,’ said Dr Rice, in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Do not resist that feeling. Allow it to make itself manifest as quickly as it likes. When I tell you to close your eyes, close them.’

  Dr Rice then started to make downward passes in front of Michael’s face with the palms of his outstretched hands, again and again. Each time his hands came closer and closer, until they were almost touching Michael’s eyelashes.

  ‘You are beginning to feel sleepy,’ he said, in the calm, monotonous voice he always used when he was taking Michael under. ‘You are beginning to feel sleepy. Your eyes are tired. You are losing feeling in your legs and your arms. Your body begins to rest. You are going to sleep. In a minute, you will be sleeping.’

  Now he touched Michael’s eyelids and gently closed them. ‘Your eyes are closing,’ he murmured. ‘You find it impossible to keep them open. You are going to sleep, fast asleep. You are sleeping now. You cannot open your eyes. They are stuck fast.’

  Michael felt the room darkening. He was determined this time that he was going to stay awake. But the darkness was so warm and welcoming; and after all, he had the disc to guide him – and what would it matter if he slept for just a few moments? Dr Rice would never know. He could sleep quickly, to refresh himself, and then open his eyes again, and what difference would it make? He had never really believed in hypnotism anyway. Almost every time Dr Rice had taken him under, he had felt better afterwards, but not that much better. And he had never remembered anything he had dreamed or fantasized about.

  He struggled to open his eyes, just to show Dr Rice that he was still awake, but he found that he couldn’t. His brain couldn’t seem to find the switch to lift his eyelids. He could still hear Dr Rice intoning, ‘Now your eyes are well-closed; you are going to sleep, fast asleep.’ But no matter how much he grimaced, his eyes simply refused to open. God, he thought. Blinded. Helpless. He wanted to speak out. He wanted to tell Dr Rice to stop, but somehow his mouth wouldn’t work either. His larynx simply refused to form words.

  Even though his eyes were closed, and he couldn’t open them, he saw the faintest flicker of pinkish light. He saw it every time that Dr Rice took him under, but he still didn’t understand what it was. For a moment it flared like the aurora borealis, almost dazzling him, but then it died away again as it always did.

  After that, after that brilliant flare of light, he felt himself sinking downward. He sank gradually at first, like a man whose lungs are slowly filling with ink. But then he began to slide faster and faster into the endless dark of his subconscious – into that world where his own terror could talk to him, and his worst fears took on flesh.

  He heard Dr Rice saying, ‘Deeper – and deeper – and deeper asleep.’ He sounded like a man talking down a hundred-foot well.

  Michael knew where he was: sitting in Dr Rice’s office in Dr Rice’s canvas-and-chrome chair. Yet he was also back at home, standing in the kitchen drinking Folger’s Dark Roast coffee out of his Ross Perot For President mug, with the morning sun slanting across the table. Outside the window, red-and-white kites whirled in a tethered frenzy over New Seabury beach, and the window sash rattled – hesitated – rattled in the breeze. Jason was bent over his cereal bowl, his tousled hair shining, while Patsy was standing at the sink in her pink cotton robe, the one with the torn lace collar.

  ‘Have you thought about it any more?’ Patsy was asking him, in a blurry voice. It meaning death. It meaning John O’Brien’s body. It meaning more people falling like heavy rainfall out of the sky, and a burned-out helicopter. Patsy turned around, and for some reason he couldn’t focus on her face, although he knew for sure that it was her.

  He nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all night.’

  Jason looked up, and Michael found it impossible to focus on his face, too. ‘Dad ... when you come back from Hyannis, can you fix my back brake? It keeps rubbing against the wheel.’ Then he lifted his head again and said, ‘ – rubbing against the wheel.’ Then he lifted his head yet again and said, ‘ – rubbing against the wheel.’

  Michael thought yes, I ought to keep Jason’s bicycle in good working order. But before he could answer, Patsy said, ‘Have you thought about it any more?’ and he began to feel that he was trapped in a loop of memory that was playing and replaying with no way out.

  He was just about to say something to Patsy about Joe Garboden when he found that he wasn’t in the kitchen at all, but travelling to Hyannis along the Popponosset Beach road. He didn’t know why he was going this way. He should have driven directly to South Mashpee and onto Route 28. Going through Popponosset involved an unnecessary dogleg. All the same, he had a vague feeling that he was supposed to meet somebody at Popponosset, although he didn’t know who it could be.

  The odd thing was that he was standing up as he drove, as if he were still standing in the kitchen. The sunlit coastline of Popponosset Bay unravelled past him bright and two-dimensional, in bleached-out colours, like the special effects in a cheap 1960s movie.

  On the car radio, a faint, dry voice was saying, ‘ ... be meeting you later, yes. That’s quite correct. He said nothing else.’

  He drove past the Popponosset Inn, with its tiled beach house and its verandah and its s
triped umbrellas nodding in the breeze. He thought he could see a tall man in a grey suit standing by the railings watching him, but when he turned his head around to look again, the man had vanished; and the only people on the verandah were a young couple in white polo shirts.

  But something had changed. Something was making him feel uneasy. Although he couldn’t understand how he had become aware of it, he knew for certain that the man in the grey suit had seen him, and was intent on pursuing him. He kept turning around and around, but he couldn’t see the man anywhere. All the same, the man was after him, and intended to do him serious harm.

  He began to feel alarmed. The sky over Popponosset Bay began to grow rapidly darker, and the white of the breakers began to shine in the gloom like the teeth of fierce, hungry dogs. The wind sprang up and he could actually feel it on his face, salty and warm and abrasive with flying sand.

  The man was waiting for him on the beach. Strangely, it didn’t look like Popponosset Beach any more, but somewhere else – somewhere that Michael was sure that he had seen before, but which he couldn’t quite place. There was a scrubby headland in the distance, and a row of green-painted saltbox houses, and a curve of rocks that reminded him very strongly of Popponosset. But there was a squat, whitewashed lighthouse here; and there was no such lighthouse at Popponosset, never had been.

  His car seemed to have melted away. He found himself walking across the dry, blowing sand in his Adidas training shoes. He could hear the sound of the surf quite distinctly, and the high-pitched whistling of a man calling his dog. ‘Be meeting you later,’ said a voice, very close to his ear; and he was too frightened to turn his head to see who it was. ‘Be meeting you later – rubbing against the wheel.’

  Off to his right, the Atlantic sky was evilly black, and the wind was so strong now that the sand was whipping against his ankles like snakes. He could hear his heart beating, and his lungs rising and falling, and he could even hear the faint crackling of electricity in his nerve-endings. The tall grey man was still waiting for him at the end of the beach, and Michael was beginning to feel seriously frightened. This was only hypnotism, after all; this was only suggestive therapy. He knew it was only hypnotism, even though he was experiencing the seashore so vividly. He knew he was still sitting in Dr Rice’s office.