Johnny Panic
and the Bible of Dreams
EVERY DAY FROM nine to five I sit at my desk facing
the door of the office and type up other people’s dreams. Not just dreams. That
wouldn’t be practical enough for my bosses. I type up also people’s daytime
complaints: trouble with mother, trouble with father, trouble with the bottle,
the bed, the headache that bangs home and blacks out the sweet world for no
known reason. Nobody comes to our office unless they have troubles. Troubles
that can’t be pinpointed by Wassermanns or Wechsler-Bellevues alone.
Maybe a mouse gets to thinking pretty
early on how the whole world is run by these enormous feet. Well, from where I
sit, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with
a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no
face at all—it’s the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.
When
people ask me where I work, I tell them I’m Assistant to the Secretary in one
of the Out-Patient Departments of the Clinics Building of the City Hospital.
This sounds so be-all end-all they seldom get around to asking me more than
what I do, and what I do is mainly type up records. On my own hook though, and
completely under cover, I am pursuing a vocation that would set these doctors
on their ears. In the privacy of my one-room apartment I call myself secretary
to none other than Johnny Panic himself.
Dream by
dream I am educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth,
than any member of the Psychoanalytic Institute, a dream connoisseur. Not a
dream stopper, a dream explainer, an exploiter of dreams for the crass
practical ends of health and happiness, but an unsordid collector of dreams for
themselves alone. A lover of dreams for Johnny Panic’s sake, the Maker of them
all.
There
isn’t a dream I’ve typed up in our record books that I don’t know by heart.
There isn’t a dream I haven’t copied out at home into Johnny Panic’s Bible of
Dreams.
This is
my real calling.
SOME NIGHTS I take the elevator up to the roof of my
apartment building. Some nights, about three A.M. Over the trees at the far
side of the park the United Fund torch flare flattens and recovers under some
witchy invisible push and here and there in the hunks of stone and brick I see
a light. Most of all, though, I feel the city sleeping. Sleeping from the river
on the west to the ocean on the east, like some rootless island rockabying
itself on nothing at all.
I can be
tight and nervy as the top string on a violin, and yet by the time the sky
begins to blue I’m ready for sleep. It’s the thought of all those dreamers and
what they’re dreaming wears me down till I sleep the sleep of fever. Monday to
Friday what do I do but type up those same dreams. Sure, I don’t touch a
fraction of them the city over, but page by page, dream by dream, my Intake
books fatten and weigh down the bookshelves of the cabinet in the narrow
passage running parallel to the main hall, off which passage the doors to all
the doctors’ little interviewing cubicles open.
I’ve got
a funny habit of identifying the people who come in by their dreams. As far as
I’m concerned, the dreams single them out more than any Christian name. This
one guy, for example, who works for a ball-bearing company in town, dreams
every night how he’s lying on his back with a grain of sand on his chest. Bit
by bit this grain of sand grows bigger and bigger till it’s big as a fair-sized
house and he can’t draw breath. Another fellow I know of has had a certain
dream ever since they gave him ether and cut out his tonsils and adenoids when
he was a kid. In this dream he’s caught in the rollers of a cotton mill,
fighting for his life. Oh he’s not alone, although he thinks he is. A lot of
people these days dream they’re being run over or eaten by machines. They’re the
cagey ones who won’t go on the subway or the elevators. Coming back from my
lunch hour in the hospital cafeteria I often pass them, puffing up the unswept
stone stairs to our office on the fourth floor. I wonder, now and then, what
dreams people had before ball bearings and cotton mills were invented.
I’ve a
dream of my own. My one dream. A dream of dreams.
In this
dream there’s a great half-transparent lake stretching away in every direction,
too big for me to see the shores of it, if there are any shores, and I’m
hanging over it, looking down from the glass belly of some helicopter. At the
bottom of the lake—so deep I can only guess at the dark masses moving and
heaving—are the real dragons. The ones that were around before men started living
in caves and cooking meat over fires and figuring out the wheel and the
alphabet. Enormous isn’t the word for them; they’ve got more wrinkles than
Johnny Panic himself. Dream about these long enough and your feet and hands
shrivel away when you look at them too closely. The sun shrinks to the size of
an orange, only chillier, and you’ve been living in Roxbury since the last ice
age. No place for you but a room padded soft as the first room you knew of,
where you can dream and float, float and dream, till at last you actually are
back among those great originals and there’s no point in any dreams at all.
It’s
into this lake people’s minds run at night, brooks and gutter trickles to one
borderless common reservoir. It bears no resemblance to those pure
sparkling-blue sources of drinking water the suburbs guard more jealously than
the Hope diamond in the middle of pine woods and barbed fences.
It’s the
sewage farm of the ages, transparence aside.
Now the
water in this lake naturally stinks and smokes from what dreams have been left
sogging around in it over the centuries. When you think how much room one night
of dream props would take up for one person in one city, and that city a mere
pinprick on a map of the world, and when you start multiplying this space by
the population of the world, and that space by the number of nights there have
been since the apes took to chipping axes out of stone and losing their hair,
you have some idea what I mean. I’m not the mathematical type: my head starts
splitting when I get only as far as the number of dreams going on during one
night in the State of Massachusetts.
By this
time, I already see the surface of the lake swarming with snakes, dead bodies
puffed as blowfish, human embryos bobbing around in laboratory bottles like so
many unfinished messages from the great I Am. I see whole storehouses of
hardware: knives, paper cutters, pistons and cogs and nutcrackers; the shiny
fronts of cars looming up, glass-eyed and evil-toothed. Then there’s the
spider-man and the webfooted man from Mars, and the simple, lugubrious vision
of a human face turning aside forever, in spite of rings and vows, to the last
lover of all.
One of
the most frequent shapes in this backwash is so commonplace it seems silly to
mention it. It’s a grain of dirt. The water is thick with these grains. They
seep in among everything else and revolve under some queer power of their own,
opaque, ubiquitous. Call the water what you will. Lake Nightmare, Bog of
Madness, it’s here the sleeping people lie and toss together among the props of
their worst dreams, one great brotherhood, though each of them, waking, thinks
himself singular, utterly apart.
This is
my dream. You won’t find it written up in any casebook. Now the routine in our
office is very different from the routine in Skin Clinic, for example, or in
Tumor. The other clinics have strong similarities to each other; none are like
ours. In our clinic, treatment doesn’t get prescribed. It is invisible. It goes
right on in those little cubicles, each with its desk, its two chairs, its
window arid its door with the opaque glass rectangle set in the wood. There is
a certain spiritual purity about this kind of doctoring. I can’t help feeling
the special privilege of my position as Assistant Secretary in the Adult
Psychiatric Clinic. My sense of pride is borne out by the rude invasions of
other clinics into our cubicles on certain days of the week for lack of space
elsewhere: our building is a very old one, and the facilities have not expanded
with the expanding needs of the time. On these days of overlap the contrast
between us and the other clinics is marked.
On
Tuesdays and Thursdays, for instance, we have lumbar punctures in one of our
offices in the morning. If the practical nurse chances to leave the door of the
cubicle open, as she usually does, I can glimpse the end of the white cot and
the dirty yellow-soled bare feet of the patient sticking out from under the
sheet. In spite of my distaste at this sight, I can’t keep my eyes away from
the bare feet, and I find myself glancing back from my typing every few minutes
to see if they are still there, if they have changed their position at all. You
can understand what a distraction this is in the middle of my work. I often
have to reread what I have typed several times, under the pretense of careful
proofreading, in order to memorize the dreams I have copied down from the
doctor’s voice over the audiograph.
Nerve
Clinic next door, which tends to the grosser, more unimaginative end of our
business, also disturbs us in the mornings. We use their offices for therapy in
the afternoon, as they are only a morning clinic, but to have their people
crying, or singing, or chattering loudly in Italian or Chinese, as they often
do, without break for four hours at a stretch every morning, is distracting to
say the least.
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
center, 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 in to 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 pieceworker 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
Greenleafs. 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 gray 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 algae 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 classroom, 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 humor 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 Real, 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
slaughterhouse 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, practiced and still practice 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 dumbbells. 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
doctors’ 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 shelf. 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 eclairs. I’ll bring hair
curlers and four changes of blouse to work in my biggest handbag on 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, 1931,
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 gray 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.”
The
blood in my not-there legs starts pinging under a million sewing-machine
needles and a vision of the Clinic Director acid-etches itself on my brain. I
don’t even need to look around: fat pot-belly buttoned into his gray pinstriped
waistcoat, woodchuck teeth yellow and buck, every-color eyes behind the
thick-lensed glasses quick as minnows.
I clutch
my notebook. The last floating timber of the Titanic.
What
does he know, what does he know?
Everything.
“I know
where there is a nice hot bowl of chicken noodle soup.” His voice rustles, dust
under the bed, mice in straw. His hand welds onto my left upper arm in fatherly
love. The record book of all the dreams going on in the city of my birth at my
first yawp in this world’s air he nudges under the bookcase with a polished
toe.
We meet
nobody in the dawn-dark hall. Nobody on the chill stone stair down to the
basement corridors where Billy the Record Room Boy cracked his head skipping
steps one night on a rush errand.
I begin
to double-quickstep so he won’t think it’s me he’s hustling. “You can’t fire
me,” I say calmly. “I quit.”
The
Clinic Director’s laugh wheezes up from his accordion-pleated bottom gut. “We
mustn’t lose you so soon.” His whisper snakes off down the whitewashed basement
passages, echoing among the elbow pipes, the wheelchairs and stretchers beached
for the night along the steam-stained walls. “Why, we need you more than you
know.”
We wind
and double and my legs keep time with his until we come, somewhere in those
barren rat tunnels, to an all-night elevator run by a one-armed Negro. We get
on, and the door grinds shut like the door on a cattle car, and we go up and
up. It is a freight elevator, crude and clanky, a far cry from the plush
passenger lifts I am used to in the Clinics Building.
We get
off at an indeterminate floor. The Clinic Director leads me down a bare
corridor lit at intervals by socketed bulbs in little wire cages on the
ceiling. Locked doors set with screened windows line the hall on either hand. I
plan to part company with the Clinic Director at the first red Exit sign, but
on our journey there are none. I am in alien territory, coat on the hanger in
the office, handbag and money in my top desk drawer, notebook in my hand, and
only Johnny Panic to warm me against the ice age outside.
Ahead a
light gathers, brightens. The Clinic Director, puffing slightly at the walk,
brisk and long, to which he is obviously unaccustomed, propels me around a bend
and into a square, brilliantly lit room.
“Here
she is.”
“The
little witch!”
Miss
Milleravage hoists her tonnage up from behind the steel desk facing the door.
The
walls and the ceiling of the room are riveted metal battleship plates. There
are no windows.
From
small, barred cells lining the sides and back of the room I see Johnny Panic’s
top priests staring out at me, arms swaddled behind their backs in the white
Ward nightshirts, eyes redder than coals and hungry-hot.
They
welcome me with queer croaks and grunts, as if their tongues were locked in
their jaws. They have no doubt heard of my work by way of Johnny Panic’s
grapevine and want to know how his apostles thrive in the world.
I lift
my hands to reassure them, holding up my notebook, my voice loud as Johnny
Panic’s organ with all stops out.
“Peace!
I bring to you . . .”
The
Book.
“None of
that old stuff, sweetie.” Miss Milleravage is dancing out at me from behind her
desk like a trick elephant.
The
Clinic Director closes the door to the room.
The
minute Miss Milleravage moves I notice what her hulk has been hiding from view
behind the desk—a white cot high as a man’s waist with a single sheet stretched
over the mattress, spotless and drumskin tight. At the head of the cot is a
table on which sits a metal box covered with dials and gauges.
The box
seems to be eyeing me, copperhead-ugly, from its coil of electric wires, the
latest model in Johnny-Panic-Killers.
I get
ready to dodge to one side. When Miss Milleravage grabs, her fat hand comes
away with a fist full of nothing. She starts for me again, her smile heavy as
dogdays in August.
“None of
that. None of that. I’ll have that little black book.”
Fast as
I run around the high white cot, Miss Milleravage is so fast you’d think she
wore rollerskates. She grabs and gets. Against her great bulk I beat my fists,
and against her whopping milkless breasts, until her hands on my wrists are
iron hoops and her breath hushabyes me with a love-stink fouler than
Undertaker’s Basement.
“My
baby, my own baby’s come back to me . . .”
“She,”
says the Clinic Director, sad and stern, “has been making time with Johnny
Panic again.”
“Naughty
naughty.”
THE WHITE COT is ready. With a terrible gentleness
Miss Milleravage takes the watch from my wrist, the rings from my fingers, the
hairpins from my hair. She begins to undress me. When I am bare, I am anointed
on the temples and robed in sheets virginal as the first snow.
Then,
from the four corners of the room and from the door behind me come five false
priests in white surgical gowns and masks whose one lifework is to unseat
Johnny Panic from his own throne. They extend me full-length on my back on the
cot. The crown of wire is placed on my head, the wafer of forgetfulness on my
tongue. The masked priests move to their posts and take hold: one of my left
leg, one of my right, one of my right arm, one of my left. One behind my head
at the metal box where I can’t see.
From
their cramped niches along the wall, the votaries raise their voices in
protest. They begin the devotional chant:
The only thing to love is Fear itself.
Love of Fear is the beginning of wisdom.
The only thing to love is Fear itself.
May Fear and Fear and Fear be everywhere.
There is
no time for Miss Milleravage or the Clinic Director or the priests to muzzle
them.
The
signal is given.
The
machine betrays them.
At the
moment when I think I am most lost the face of Johnny Panic appears in a nimbus
of arc lights on the ceiling overhead. I am shaken like a leaf in the teeth of
glory. His beard is lightning. Lightning is in his eye. His Word charges and
illumines the universe.
The air crackles with his blue-tongued
lightning-haloed angels.
His love
is the twenty-story leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart.
He
forgets not his own.
