Connie Willis - Lincoln’s Dreams

We went on reading galleys in the coffee shop the next day as if nothing had happened and we would do this every morning for the rest of our lives. During the night the snow had turned to a cold rain.

“We should be able to finish them off this afternoon,” I said, “and then tomorrow we can run them up to New York and hand them to the publishers. What’s the weather like?” I asked our waitress.

“It’s raining hard north of here. Some truckers in here were talking about flooding.”

Annie yawned. She looked beautiful, rested, her cheeks as pink as that first night when she had come to me for help. I took hold of her hand.

“Why don’t you go back to bed?” I said. “You’ve got a lot of catching up on sleep to do. I’ll call McLaws and Herndon.” The waitress frowned. “And the highway patrol.”

We went back up to the room. I called the answering machine to make sure Broun hadn’t decided to come home. Broun had left a message. “Pay dirt,” he said, sounding excited. “I knew I was on the right track. The sleep clinic has some TB patients they’ve been studying because the fever makes them have more REM sleep. All of them dream about being buried alive. They say they can feel the cold wet dirt being shoveled in on them. The doctors say it’s the night sweats, but I talked to them and some of them started having these dreams before they had any other symptoms.

“Not only that, but as the disease progresses the dreams get clearer and less symbolic and they dream their own symptoms, fevers and coughing and blood, and sometimes they dream about dying, being at their own funeral, being in the coffin. That’s why Lincoln dreamed the coffin dream that last week. His acromegaly was getting worse.

“But here’s the best part. One of the patients is this kid who was reading Treasure Island. I asked him about it and he said Robert Louis Stevenson was his hero because he had TB as a kid, too. He said Stevenson had dreamed about being buried alive, too. Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the same dream over a hundred years ago!”

He didn’t say where he was. He had an autograph party in L.A. on Saturday and an appointment with a neurologist on Monday. He would be home sometime Tuesday if he finished with the prodromic-dreams thing.

Broun’s agent had left another message. “I told McLaws and Herndon the galleys would in Monday at the latest. If you can’t reach Broun, they’ll have to go in as is.”

Before she had even stopped talking, Richard said, “You have to call me immediately.”

“The hell I do,” I said, and hung up. I took the galleys and went back into Annie’s room. Annie was asleep, on top of the covers, her legs pulled up against her body. She was cradling her left arm in her right, as if it hurt. I took the folded-up blanket at the foot of the bed and put it over her.

There were only a few pages of The Duty Bound left to go. Mrs. Macklin had broken Nelly’s wrist trying to get her away from her dead private. The alcoholic surgeon had had to take time off from sawing at arms to set hers and put it in a sling. Mrs. Macklin wanted her to go home. “You can’t do any good here,” she said.

“You told me that once before,” Nelly said. “You have your duty. I have mine,” and kept working as long as they had a hospital, which wasn’t long. The armies swarmed around and past Winchester, and the hospital had to be moved and men dismantled and the soldiers too hurt to walk taken off in wagons. When Ben’s unit marched past on its way to Fredericksburg, Ben went with them.

“No,” Nelly said when he told her he was going.

Annie sat up in the bed and screamed. I jerked as if I’d been shot. I dropped the galleys and stood up. My foot was asleep and I half-fell onto the bed. She screamed again and put up her hands to ward me off. I grabbed her wrists. “Wake up, Annie. You’re having a bad dream. Wake up!”

I could feel her heartbeat through her wrists, fast and light. “No!” she said, and her voice was full of desperation. She tried to pull away from my grip.

“Annie, wake up! It’s just a dream.”

“I’m so cold,” she said, and I thought for a minute she was awake. “It got so cold. In the church.” She was shivering and her breath was coming in gasps, as if she had been running. “The meeting took so long.”

What meeting? Not the meeting with Longstreet at Gettysburg. That was in a school, not a church. Dunker Church? Surely she wasn’t going to dream Antietam, not now, when the dreams were supposed to be over.

“They couldn’t decide… I finally said… so cold!” Her teeth were chattering. I let go of her wrists and wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. I pulled the sides of the coverlet up and over her legs.

“What were they meeting about?”

She tried to say something through her chattering teeth, closed her eyes, and turned on her side. She gasped and shifted, as if her arm hurt. She put her hand up to cradle her elbow and murmured something I could not make out. Then she turned again, still holding her arm, and said clearly, “Tell Hill to come up.”

And now I knew what church she’d dreamed about. I shut my eyes.

She slept for another hour. I sat with her awhile and then went into the other room, hobbling on my still half-asleep foot, stripped the bed, and piled the blankets over her.

The phone rang. It was the vet’s wife with a message. Dr. Barton had called home from the horse-disease conference. He had two things he wanted to tell me. One was that he had gotten to talking about me with some of the other veterinarians at the convention, and one of them mentioned that he had just read an article about acromegaly in one of the science magazines. He thought I might be interested. She didn’t know which magazine, she was just relaying the message.

The second thing was that he had finally gotten in touch with his sister. She didn’t remember Dr. Barton—she meant Dr. Barton’s father—ever saying anything about dreaming about coffins or boats, and she thought he would have mentioned it. He was very interested in dreams because of his study of the Egyptians. He had had a recurring dream for months before he died that he was convinced was warning him of his death. He had dreamed he was lying dead out under the apple tree in his backyard.

“What did he die of?” I asked. “The acromegaly?”

“No,” the vet’s wife said. “He died of a heart attack.”

“What symptoms did he have? Before the heart attack?”

“Gosh, I don’t know. He was living with Hank’s sister, and we didn’t see much of him. He complained of his arm hurting a lot, I know, because Hank’s sister thought it was arthritis, but afterwards the doctor told her it was probably angina, and I remember he rubbed his wrist all the time.”

I thanked her for giving me the message and hung up the phone. Then I went and stood by the window, looking out at the Rappahannock. My precious Annie.

When Annie woke up, I said, as casually as I could, “The weather’s supposed to get worse tonight. Maybe we should go on up this afternoon.”

“I thought you said tomorrow,” she said.

“I did, but I don’t want to get caught in a blizzard the way I did on my way back from West Virginia.”

She stood up, still cradling the arm. “What about the galleys?”

“We can stop somewhere for lunch along the way and finish them off. There are only a few pages left.”

She was looking at the tangled heap of blankets. “What happened?” she said. “Did I have another dream?” She turned to me, her face innocent and trusting, as if this dream were like all the others and I would say it was Antietam or The Further Adventures of little Hen. There was nothing in her face to show she had realized there was something terribly wrong, that with the surrender the dreams were supposed to be over. Over.