Ursula Le Guin - The Lathe Of Heaven

Life is the most incredible mess, Heather thought. You never can guess what’s next. She took off her coat, while Orr got a cup from the cabinet shelf and canned milk from the cupboard. He brought her a cup of powerful coffee: 97 per cent caffeine, 3 per cent free.

“None for you?”

“I’ve drunk too much. Gives me heartburn.”

Her own heart went out to him entirely.

“What about brandy?”

He looked wistful.

“It won’t put you to sleep. Jazz you up a bit. I’ll go get it.”

He flashlighted her back to the car. The creek shouted, the trees hung silent, the moon glowered overhead, the Aliens’ moon.

Back in the cabin Orr poured out a modest shot of the brandy and tasted it He shuddered. “That’s good,” he said, and drank it off.

She watched him with approval. “I always carry a pint flask,” she said. “I stuck it in the glove compartment because if the fuzz stops me and I have to show my license it looks kind of funny in my handbag. But I mostly have it right on me. Funny how it comes in handy a couple of times every year.”

“That’s why you carry such a big handbag,” Orr said, brandy-voiced.

“Damn right! I guess I’ll put some in my coffee. It might weaken it.” She refilled his glass at the same time. “How have you managed to stay awake for sixty or seventy hours?”

“I haven’t entirely. I just didn’t lie down. You can get some sleep sitting up “but you can’t really dream. You have to be lying down to get into dreaming sleep, so your big muscles can relax. Read that in books. It works pretty well. I haven’t had a real dream yet. But not being able to relax wakes you up again. And then lately I get some sort of like hallucinations. Things wiggling on the wall.”

“You can’t keep that up!”

“No. I know. I just had to get away. From Haber.” A pause. He seemed to have gone into another streak of grogginess. He gave a rather foolish laugh. “The only solution I really can see,” he said, “is to kill myself. But I don’t want to. It just doesn’t seem right.”

“Of course it isn’t right!”

“But I have to stop it somehow. I have to be stopped.”

She could not follow him, and did not want to. “This is a nice place,” she said. “I haven’t smelled woodsmoke for twenty years.”

“Flutes the air,” he said, smiling feebly. He seemed to be quite gone; but she noticed he was holding himself in an erect sitting posture on the cot, not even leaning back against the wall. He blinked several times. “When you knocked,” he said, “I thought it was a dream. That’s why I mumble mumble coming.”

“You said you dreamed yourself this cabin. Pretty modest for a dream. Why didn’t you get yourself a beach chalet at Salishan, or a castle on Cape Perpetua?”

He shook his head frowning. “All I wanted.” After blinking some more he said, “What happened. What happened to you. Friday. In Haber’s office. The session.”

“That’s what I came to ask you!”

That woke him up. “You were aware—”

“I guess so. I mean, I know something happened. I sure have been trying to run on two tracks with one set of wheels ever since. I walked right into a wall Sunday in my own apartment! See?” She exhibited a bruise, blackish under brown skin, on her forehead. “The wall was there now but it wasn’t there now.... How do you live with this going on all the time? How do you know where anything is?”

“I don’t,” Orr said. “I get all mixed up. If it’s meant to happen at all it isn’t meant to happen so often. It’s too much. I can’t tell any more whether I’m insane or just can’t handle all the conflicting information. I ... It ... You mean you really believe me?”

“What else can I do? I saw what happened to the city! I was looking out the window! You needn’t think I want to believe it I don’t, I try not to. Christ, it’s terrible. But that Dr. Haber, he didn’t want me to believe it either, did he? He sure did some fast talking. But then, what you said when you woke up; and then running into walls, and going to the wrong office.... Then I keep wondering, has he dreamed anything else since Friday, things are all changed again, but I don’t know it became I wasn’t there, and I keep wondering what things are changed, and whether anything’s real at all. Oh shit, it’s awful.”

“That’s it. Listen, you know the war—the war in the Near East?”

“Sure I know it. My husband was killed in it.”

“Your husband?” He looked stricken. “When?”

“Just three days before they called it off. Two days before the Teheran Conference and the U.S.-China Pact. One day after the Aliens blew up the Moon base.”

He was looking at her as if appalled.

“What’s wrong? Oh, hell, it’s an old scar. Six years ago, nearly seven. And if he’d lived we’d have been divorced by now, it was a lousy marriage. Look, it wasn’t your fault!”

“I don’t know what is my fault any more.”

“Well, Jim sure wasn’t. He was just a big handsome black unhappy son of a gun, bigshot Air Force Captain at 26 and shot down at 27, you don’t think you invented that, do you, it’s been happening for thousands of years. And it happened just exactly the same in that other— way, before Friday, when the world was so crowded. Just exactly. Only it was early in the war... wasn’t it?” Her voice sank, softened. “My God. It was early in the war, instead of just before the cease-fire. That war went on and on. It was still going on right now. And there weren’t... there weren’t any Aliens—were there?”

Orr shook his head.

“Did you dream them up?”

“He made me dream about peace. Peace on earth, good will among men. So I made the Aliens. To give us something to fight.”

“You didn’t. That machine of his does it.”

“No. I can do fine without the machine, Miss Lelache. All it does is save him time, getting me to dream right away. Although he’s been working on it lately to improve it some way. He’s great on improving things.”

“Please call me Heather.”

“It’s a pretty name.”

“Your name’s George. He kept calling you George, in that session. Like you were a real clever poodle, or a rhesus monkey. Lie down, George. Dream this, George.”

He laughed. His teeth were white, and his laugh pleasant, breaking through dishevelment and confusion. “That’s not me. That’s my subconscious, see, he’s talking to. It is kind of like a dog or a monkey, for his purposes. It’s not rational, but it can be trained to perform.”

He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?

Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper’s wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.

“Now look. Tell me, I need to know this: was it after you went to Haber that you started having....”

“Effective dreams. No, before. It’s why I went. I was scared of the dreams, so I was getting sedatives illegally to suppress dreaming. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Why didn’t you take something these last two nights, then, instead of trying to keep awake?”