Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other Prose Writings Read online

  In spite of such interruptions by other Clinics, my own work is advancing at a great rate. By now I am far beyond copying only what comes after the patient’s saying: ‘I have this dream, doctor.’ I am at the point of recreating dreams that are not even written down at all. Dreams that shadow themselves forth in the vaguest way, but are themselves hid, like a statue under red velvet before the grand unveiling.

  To illustrate. This woman came in with her tongue swollen and stuck out so far she had to leave a party she was giving for twenty friends of her French-Canadian mother-in-law and be rushed to our Emergency Ward. She thought she didn’t want her tongue to stick out and, to tell the truth, it was an exceedingly embarrassing affair for her, but she hated that French-Canadian mother-in-law worse than pigs, and her tongue was true to her opinion, even if the rest of her wasn’t. Now she didn’t lay claim to any dreams. I have only the bare facts above to begin with, yet behind them I detect the bulge and promise of a dream.

  So I set myself to uprooting this dream from its comfortable purchase under her tongue.

  Whatever the dream I unearth, by work, taxing work, and even by a kind of prayer, I am sure to find a thumbprint in the corner, a malicious detail to the right of centre, a bodiless midair Cheshire cat grin, which shows the whole work to be gotten up by the genius of Johnny Panic, and him alone. He’s sly, he’s subtle, he’s sudden as thunder, but he gives himself away only too often. He simply can’t resist melodrama. Melodrama of the oldest, most obvious variety.

  I remember one guy, a stocky fellow in a nail-studded black leather jacket, running straight into us from a boxing match at Mechanics Hall, Johnny Panic hot at his heels. This guy, good Catholic though he was, young and upright and all, had one mean fear of death. He was actually scared blue he’d go to hell. He was a piece-worker at a fluorescent light plant. I remember this detail because I thought it funny he should work there, him being so afraid of the dark as it turned out. Johnny Panic injects a poetic element in this business you don’t often find elsewhere. And for that he has my eternal gratitude.

  I also remember quite clearly the scenario of the dream I had worked out for this guy: a gothic interior in some monastery cellar, going on and on as far as you could see, one of those endless perspectives between two mirrors, and the pillars and walls were made of nothing but human skulls and bones, and in every niche there was a body laid out, and it was the Hall of Time, with the bodies in the foreground still warm, discoloring and starting to rot in the middle distance, and the bones emerging, clean as a whistle, in a kind of white futuristic glow at the end of the line. As I recall, I had the whole scene lighted, for the sake of accuracy, not with candles, but with the ice-bright fluorescence that makes skin look green and all the pink and red flushes dead black-purple.

  You ask, how do I know this was the dream of the guy in the black leather jacket. I don’t know. I only believe this was his dream, and I work at belief with more energy and tears and entreaties than I work at recreating the dream itself.

  My office, of course, has its limitations. The lady with her tongue stuck out, the guy from Mechanics Hall—these are our wildest ones. The people who have really gone floating down toward the bottom of that boggy lake come in only once, and are then referred to a place more permanent than our office which receives the public from nine to five, five days a week only. Even those people who are barely able to walk about the streets and keep working, who aren’t yet halfway down in the lake, get sent to the Out-Patient Department at another hospital specializing in severer cases. Or they may stay a month or so in our own Observation Ward in the central hospital which I’ve never seen.

  I’ve seen the secretary of that Ward, though. Something about her merely smoking and drinking her coffee in the cafeteria at the ten o’clock break put me off so I never went to sit next to her again. She has a funny name I don’t ever quite remember correctly, something really odd, like Miss Milleravage. One of those names that seem more like a pun mixing up Milltown and Ravage than anything in the city phone directory. But not so odd a name, after all, if you’ve ever read through the phone directory, with its Hyman Diddlebockers and Sasparilla Green-leafs. I read through the phone book once, never mind when, and it satisfied a deep need in me to realize how many people aren’t called Smith.

  Anyhow, this Miss Milleravage is a large woman, not fat, but all sturdy muscle and tall on top of it. She wears a grey suit over her hard bulk that reminds me vaguely of some kind of uniform, without the details of cut having anything strikingly military about them. Her face, hefty as a bullock’s, is covered with a remarkable number of tiny maculae, as if she’d been lying under water for some time and little algæ had latched on to her skin, smutching it over with tobacco-browns and greens. These moles are noticeable mainly because the skin around them is so pallid. I sometimes wonder if Miss Milleravage has ever seen the wholesome light of day. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she’d been brought up from the cradle with the sole benefit of artificial lighting.

  Byrna, the secretary in Alcoholic Clinic just across the hall from us, introduced me to Miss Milleravage with the gambit that I’d ‘been in England too’.

  Miss Milleravage, it turned out, had spent the best years of her life in London hospitals.

  ‘Had a friend,’ she boomed in her queer, doggish basso, not favoring me with a direct look, ‘a nurse at Bart’s. Tried to get in touch with her after the war, but the head of the nurses had changed, everybody’d changed, nobody’d heard of her. She must’ve gone down with the old head nurse, rubbish and all, in the bombings.’ She followed this with a large grin.

  Now I’ve seen medical students cutting up cadavers, four stiffs to a class-room, about as recognizably human as Moby Dick, and the students playing catch with the dead men’s livers. I’ve heard guys joke about sewing a woman up wrong after a delivery at the charity ward of the Lying-in. But I wouldn’t want to see what Miss Milleravage would write off as the biggest laugh of all time. No thanks and then some. You could scratch her eyes with a pin and swear you’d struck solid quartz.

  My boss has a sense of humour too, only it’s gentle. Generous as Santa on Christmas Eve.

  I work for a middle-aged lady named Miss Taylor who is the Head Secretary of the Clinic and has been since the Clinic started thirty-three years ago—the year of my birth, oddly enough. Miss Taylor knows every doctor, every patient, every outmoded appointment slip, referral slip and billing procedure the hospital has ever used or thought of using. She plans to stick with the Clinic until she’s farmed out in the green pastures of Social Security checks. A woman more dedicated to her work I never saw. She’s the same way about statistics as I am about dreams: if the building caught fire she would throw every last one of those books of statistics to the firemen below at the serious risk of her own skin.

  I get along extremely well with Miss Taylor. The one thing I never let her catch me doing is reading the old record books. I have actually very little time for this. Our office is busier than the stock exchange with the staff of twenty-five doctors in and out, medical students in training, patients, patients’ relatives, and visiting officials from other Clinics referring patients to us, so even when I’m covering the office alone, during Miss Taylor’s coffee break and lunch hour, I seldom get to dash down more than a note or two.

  This kind of catch-as-catch-can is nerve-racking, to say the least. A lot of the best dreamers are in the old books, the dreamers that come in to us only once or twice for evaluation before they’re sent elsewhere. For copying out these dreams I need time, a lot of time. My circumstances are hardly ideal for the unhurried pursuit of my art. There is, of course, a certain derring-do in working under such hazards, but I long for the rich leisure of the true connoisseur who indulges his nostrils above the brandy snifter for an hour before his tongue reaches out for the first taste.

  I find myself all too often lately imagining what a relief it would be to bring a briefcase into work, big enough to hold one of those thick, blue
, cloth-bound record books full of dreams. At Miss Taylor’s lunch time, in the lull before the doctors and students crowd in to take their afternoon patients, I could simply slip one of the books, dated ten or fifteen years back, into my briefcase, and leave the briefcase under my desk till five o’clock struck. Of course, odd-looking bundles are inspected by the doorman of the Clinics, Building and the hospital has its own staff of police to check up on the multiple varieties of thievery that go on, but for heaven’s sake, I’m not thinking of making off with typewriters or heroin. I’d only borrow the book overnight and slip it back on the shelf first thing the next day before anybody else came in. Still, being caught taking a book out of the hospital would probably mean losing my job and all my source material with it.

  This idea of mulling over a record book in the privacy and comfort of my own apartment, even if I have to stay up night after night for this purpose, attracts me so much I become more and more impatient with my usual method of snatching minutes to look up dreams in Miss Taylor’s half-hours out of the office.

  The trouble is, I can never tell exactly when Miss Taylor will come back to the office. She is so conscientious about her job she’d be likely to cut her half hour at lunch short and her twenty minutes at coffee shorter, if it weren’t for her lame left leg. The distinct sound of this lame leg in the corridor warns me of her approach in time for me to whip the record book I’m reading into my drawer out of sight and pretend to be putting down the final flourishes on a phone message or some such alibi. The only catch, as far as my nerves are concerned, is that Amputee Clinic is around the corner from us in the opposite direction from Nerve Clinic and I’ve gotten really jumpy due to a lot of false alarms where I’ve mistaken some pegleg’s hitching-step for the step of Miss Taylor herself returning early to the office.

  *

  On the blackest days, when I’ve scarcely time to squeeze one dream out of the old books and my copywork is nothing but weepy college sophomores who can’t get a lead in ‘Camino Rear’, I feel Johnny Panic turn his back, stony as Everest, higher than Orion, and the motto of the great Bible of Dreams, ‘Perfect fear casteth out all else’ is ash and lemon water on my lips. I’m a wormy hermit in a country of prize pigs so corn-happy they can’t see the slaughter house at the end of the track. I’m Jeremiah vision-bitten in the Land of Cockaigne.

  What’s worse: day by day I see these psyche-doctors studying to win Johnny Panic’s converts from him by hook, crook, and talk, talk, talk. Those deep-eyed, bush-bearded dream-collectors who preceded me in history, and their contemporary inheritors with their white jackets and knotty-pine-paneled offices and leather couches, practised and still practise their dream-gathering for worldly ends: health and money, money and health. To be a true member of Johnny Panic’s congregation one must forget the dreamer and remember the dream: the dreamer is merely a flimsy vehicle for the great Dream-Maker himself. This they will not do. Johnny Panic is gold in the bowels, and they try to root him out by spiritual stomach pumps.

  Take what happened to Harry Bilbo. Mr Bilbo came into our office with the hand of Johnny Panic heavy as a lead coffin on his shoulder. He had an interesting notion about the filth in this world. I figured him for a prominent part in Johnny Panic’s Bible of Dreams, Third Book of Fear, Chapter Nine on Dirt, Disease and General Decay. A friend of Harry’s blew a trumpet in the Boy Scout band when they were kids. Harry Bilbo’d also blown on this friend’s trumpet. Years later the friend got cancer and died. Then, one day not so long ago, a cancer doctor came into Harry’s house, sat down in a chair, passed the top of the morning with Harry’s mother and, on leaving, shook her hand and opened the door for himself. Suddenly Harry Bilbo wouldn’t blow trumpets or sit down on chairs or shake hands if all the cardinals of Rome took to blessing him twenty-four hours around the clock for fear of catching cancer. His mother had to go turning the TV knobs and water faucets on and off and opening doors for him. Pretty soon Harry stopped going to work because of the spit and dog turds in the street. First that stuff gets on your shoes and then when you take your shoes off it gets on your hands and then at dinner it’s a quick trip into your mouth and not a hundred Hail Marys can keep you from the chain reaction.

  The last straw was, Harry quit weight lifting at the public gym when he saw this cripple exercising with the dumbells. You can never tell what germs cripples carry behind their ears and under their fingernails. Day and night Harry Bilbo lived in holy worship of Johnny Panic, devout as any priest among censers and sacraments. He had a beauty all his own.

  Well, these white-coated tinkerers managed, the lot of them, to talk Harry into turning on the TV himself, and the water faucets, and to opening closet doors, front doors, bar doors. Before they were through with him, he was sitting down on movie-house chairs, and benches all over the Public Garden, and weight lifting every day of the week at the gym in spite of the fact another cripple took to using the rowing machine. At the end of his treatment he came in to shake hands with the Clinic Director. In Harry Bilbo’s own words, he was ‘a changed man’. The pure Panic-light had left his face. He went out of the office doomed to the crass fate these doctors call health and happiness.

  About the time of Harry Bilbo’s cure a new idea starts nudging at the bottom of my brain. I find it hard to ignore as those bare feet sticking out of the lumbar puncture room. If I don’t want to risk carrying a record book out of the hospital in case I get discovered and fired and have to end my research forever, I can really speed up work by staying in the Clinics’ Building overnight. I am nowhere near exhausting the Clinic’s resources and the piddling amount of cases I am able to read in Miss Taylor’s brief absences during the day are nothing to what I could get through in a few nights of steady copying. I need to accelerate my work if only to counteract those doctors.

  Before I know it, I am putting on my coat at five and saying goodnight to Miss Taylor who usually stays a few minutes’ overtime to clear up the day’s statistics and sneaking around the corner into the Ladies’ Room. It is empty. I slip into the patients’ john, lock the door from the inside, and wait. For all I know, one of the Clinic cleaning ladies may try to knock the door down, thinking some patient’s passed out on the seat. My fingers are crossed. About twenty minutes later the door of the lavatory opens and someone limps over the threshold like a chicken favoring a bad leg. It is Miss Taylor, I can tell by the resigned sigh as she meets the jaundiced eye of the lavatory mirror. I hear the click-cluck of various touch-up equipment on the bowl, water sloshing, the scritch of a comb in frizzed hair, and then the door is closing with a slow-hinged wheeze behind her.

  I am lucky. When I come out of the Ladies’ Room at six o’clock the corridor lights are off and the fourth floor hall is as empty as church on Monday. I have my own key to our office; I come in first every morning, so that’s no trouble. The typewriters are folded back into the desks, the locks are on the dial phones, all’s right with the world.

  Outside the window the last of the winter light is fading. Yet I do not forget myself and turn on the overhead bulb. I don’t want to be spotted by any hawk-eyed doctor or janitor in the hospital buildings across the little courtyard. The cabinet with the record books is in the windowless passage opening onto the doctor’s cubicles which have windows overlooking the courtyard. I make sure the doors to all the cubicles are shut. Then I switch on the passage light, a sallow twenty-five watt affair blackening at the top. Better than an altarful of candles to me at this point, though. I didn’t think to bring a sandwich. There is an apple in my desk drawer left over from lunch, so I reserve that for whatever pangs I may feel about one o’clock in the morning, and get out my pocket notebook. At home every evening it is my habit to tear out the notebook pages I’ve written on at the office during the day and pile them up to be copied in my manuscript. In this way I cover my tracks so no one idly picking up my notebook at the office could ever guess the type or scope of my work.

  I begin systematically by opening the oldest book on the bottom sh
elf. The once-blue cover is no-color now, the pages are thumbed and blurry carbons, but I’m humming from foot to topknot: this dream book was spanking new the day I was born. When I really get organized I’ll have hot soup in a thermos for the dead-of-winter nights, turkey pies and chocolate éclairs. I’ll bring hair-curlers and four changes of blouse to work in my biggest handbag. Monday mornings so no one will notice me going downhill in looks and start suspecting unhappy love affairs or pink affiliations or my working on dream books in the Clinic four nights a week.

  Eleven hours later. I am down to apple core and seeds and in the month of May, nineteen thirty-one, with a private nurse who has just opened a laundry bag in her patient’s closet and found five severed heads in it, including her mother’s.

  A chill air touches the nape of my neck. From where I am sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the cabinet, the record book heavy on my lap, I notice out of the corner of my eye that the door of the cubicle beside me is letting in a little crack of blue light. Not only along the floor, but up the side of the door too. This is odd since I made sure from the first that all the doors were shut tight. The crack of blue light is widening and my eyes are fastened to two motionless shoes in the doorway, toes pointing toward me.

  They are brown leather shoes of a foreign make, with thick elevator soles. Above the shoes are black silk socks through which shows a pallor of flesh. I get as far as the grey pinstriped trouser cuffs.

  ‘Tch, tch,’ chides an infinitely gentle voice from the cloudy regions above my head. ‘Such an uncomfortable position! Your legs must be asleep by now. Let me help you up. The sun will be rising shortly.’

  Two hands slip under my arms from behind and I am raised, wobbly as an unset custard, to my feet, which I cannot feel because my legs are, in fact, asleep. The record book slumps to the floor, pages splayed.

  ‘Stand still a minute.’ The Clinic Director’s voice fans the lobe of my right ear. ‘Then the circulation will revive.’