FLIPKA

Chapter Six

When the rain hit, I was in the middle of a nightmare. My very first one, and let me tell you, it was a whopper, transforming old “I never dream” Butters into a quivering, sweat-saturated, paranoid schizophrenic, certain the Devil lurked in her unconsciousness, panting with desire for her to sleep so that he could rip her soul from her body in the most grotesque and painful way possible. The monster under the bed, the ogre in the closet—the Nazguls from the land of Sauron—all had taken up residence in my mind.

And it was Karma; well-deserved payback. You see, for years I’d counseled people with sleep disorders, rambling off various theories on unresolved traumatic stress, even though I had not the vaguest clue of the depth of terror my patients felt. Not the foggiest, because I never dreamt, let alone nightmared. My peers will tell you it’s impossible not to dream. We all dream. We might not all remember our dreams, but we all dream. In graduate school my insistence that I was the lone exception to this rule earned me instant membership in the “Dream Clinic of the Month” club. I was always the first enlisted to test a new dream theorem, summoned to a clinic, strapped into the proper recording devices, put to sleep, woken up at various times during the night by caffeine-laden grad students, and questioned. Always with the same response: I remembered nothing. Several theories were proposed as to my abnormal psyche, one for each branch of psychotherapy. My favorite was that I was a psychopath with no conscience. Apparently demons never dream. I finally ended my participation in such nonsense when the cognitive neurologists wanted to put electrical probes in my brain. Now really, folks, who would trust a graduate student to insert something into their brain? 

However it didn’t seem fair that I’d gotten my comeuppance about as far from an ivy-school dream lab as can be, quivering like a child beneath an army blanket, as thunder rumbled over the desert. I fumbled for the lamp on the nightstand. It crashed to the floor. It was then that I heard the chanting:

Father come to us

Mother come to us

Brother come to us

Bring us back our bows

At first I thought I was still unconscious, that the nightmare still held tight to my poor brain. Pick an object to concentrate on, I told myself, turn away and then look back at it. Has it changed? If yes, dream. If no, awake. It was a trick I learned at one of my many sleep labs, a trick I’d never had to use until now. If you can’t decide whether you’re dreaming or awake, focus on an object, turn away and then glance back at the object. If the object has changed in any way, you’re still in the dream. If it is exactly the same, chances are you’re awake. The theory being that dreams are made up of image imprints that flash through our dream cycles, which is why you can be dreaming about your father when suddenly his face transforms into that of your husband. This does not mean that you have an oedipal attraction to your father, as the Freudians might deduce. It just means the guy running the slide project in your brain has a warped sense of humor.

I decided to focus on the painting of Jesus hung on the wall opposite my bed because highlighted by flashes of lightning he reminded me of Elvis. One of those Elvis-on-black-velvet paintings that you see sold on the streets. Lord all mighty, I feel my temperature rising. I stared at it a few moments, looked away quickly and then back. OK, he was holding the same pose. One hand upraised popelike. That was a good sign. I was awake, as were the little lovelies now chanting their pea-picking hearts out in the next room. I quickly threw on my bathrobe and slippers, and then, forgetting Winnie Peterson’s prime directive—“before you do anything in a suspicious situation, ring the guard”—unlocked the door. 

The next thing I remember was waking up back in bed, the light streaming through the aluminum blinds, my head pounding. Jesus, crooked on the wall, and a faint whiff of something sweetly foul in the air. 

Whatever they’d done all night, the little shits were now sleeping peacefully in their beds. But not for long.

“They broke out of the corral again last night,” I informed Winnie Peterson“In the middle of the rainstorm, so you can imagine the scene in their room. Right now, I’ve got the little lovelies on their hands and knees scrubbing the whole place down. I told them no breakfast until it was spotless.” 

She’d looked up from her paperwork with scorn. “They snuck out?”

“Yup.”

“How do you explain their escape this time, Dr. Butters – were you drinking?”

“No mystery there. I let them out. The question is, what the heck are they doing?”

“You let them out?”

“Not on purpose. I heard them chanting and, without thinking, unlocked the door to their room. After that I don’t know what happened; I woke up on top of my bed, frozen as a cherry popsicle with a headache the size of New Hampshire.” 

At this point, things got really squirrelly. Obviously, she snorted, I had been wrong. This was not simply the matter of a group of girls taking advantage of a drunken counselor. “If only I hadn’t been so hesitant,” she grumbled.

“To call a priest?” I joked. 

“Don’t be silly. That would be like reporting flying saucers over Enev.”

“Do you?”

“That’s not the point. I should have put them all in detention where they belong the minute this first began.”

“Except for Meredith Hyman, right? By the way, where did her mother get the notion that evil spirits had taken over Enev?”

“I don’t know. Certainly not from anyone at the school.”

“Are you sure? Maybe the missing counselor got in touch with her.” 

“I thought you were leaving, Dr. Butters.”

“’Cause, you know, whatever they’re up to, they’re all in it together. I read them the riot act and not one peep. Except Nancy Jean, who claimed that I’d come in to check on them, tripped, and knocked myself out. And then the little darlings put me back into bed out of the caring compassion of their souls. Ha! Don’t you love that one? I’m sure they didn’t honestly expect me to fall for it, but what the heck, they gave it a shot. That’s teens for you. Always taking the long shot.” 

But Winnie wasn’t listening to a word I said. In her book I was already gone. She picked up the walkie-talkie on her desk and ordered whoever was on the other side to retrieve Nancy Jean from Barracks Six and lock her in detention. According to her, Nancy Jean was the obvious mastermind; the girl who had whacked me over the head and was leading the other girls down the path to destruction. I listened as she went on and on, knowing that I was not hit over the head, but tranquilized. I also knew Nancy Jean might be the loudmouth, but she was not the leader.

I thought of telling her what I’d found after waking the sleeping beauties with an off-key rendition of “Wake Up Little Susie”, and sending them (accompanied by the guard) to the mess hall for extra mops and pails. What I’d found shoved between the mattresses of Meredith Hyman’s bed as I poked through their things. But I didn’t. I slipped into my professional voice and told her sternly: 

“Separating the girls is not going to solve the problem. It will only spread the contagion to the other barracks. Give me another night with them. I have a fairly good idea what possesses the Days of the Week.”

“What?”

“I’d rather not say right now. Just give me another day.”

Of course she wasn’t in favor of this plan. She demanded to know what my idea was, but I knew what her response would be, and so I kept my mouth shut. “If I’m right, I’ll tell you tomorrow morning,” I promised. Finally she agreed, but she assured me, if I did not produce a story worthy of Scheherazade, it would be curtains for Fi Butters.