Gateway

Chapter 13

“Good morning, Rob,” says Sigfrid, and I stop in the door of the room, suddenly and subliminally worried.

“What’s the matter?”

“There’s nothing the matter, Rob. Come in.”

“You’ve changed things around,” I say accusingly.

“That’s right, Robbie. Do you like the way the room looks?”

I study it. The throw pillows are gone from the floor. The nonobjective paintings are off the wall. Now he’s got a series of holopictures of space scenes, and mountains and seas. The funniest thing of all is Sigfrid himself: he is speaking to me out of a dummy that’s sitting back in a corner of the room, holding a pencil in its hands, looking up at me from behind dark glasses.

“You’ve turned out very camp,” I say. “What’s the reason for all this?”

His voice sounds as though he were smiling benevolently, although there is no change in the expression on the face of the dummy. “I just thought you’d enjoy a change, Rob.”

I take a few steps into the room and stop again. “You took the mat away!”

“Don’t need it, Rob. As you see, there’s a new couch. That’s very traditional, isn’t it?”

He coaxes, “Why don’t you just lie down on it? See how it feels.”

“Um.” But I stretch out on it cautiously. How it feels is strange; and I don’t like it, probably because this particular room represents something serious to me and changing it around makes me nervous. “The mat had straps,” I complain.

“So does the couch, Rob. You can pull them out of the sides. Just feel around… there. Isn’t that better?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I think,” he says softly, “that you should let me decide whether for therapeutic reasons some sort of change is in order, Bob.”

I sit up. “And that’s another thing, Sigfrid! Make up your flicking mind what you’re going to call me. My name isn’t Rob, or Robbie, or Bob. It’s Robinette.”

“I know that, Robbie—”

“You’re doing it again!”

A pause, then, silkily, “I think you should allow me the choice of the form of address I prefer, Robbie.”

“Um.” I have an endless supply of tbose noncommittal nonwords. In would like to conduct the whole session without revealing any more than that. What I want is for Sigfrid to reveal. I want to know why he calls me by different names at different times. I want to know what he finds significant in what I say. I want to know what he really thinks of me… if a clanking piece of tin and plastic can think, I me

Of course, what I know and Sigfrid doesn’t is that my good friend S. Ya. has piece of tin and plastic can think, I mean. practically promised to let me play a little joke on him. I am looking to that a lot.

“Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Rob?” piece of tin and plastic can thinko, I mean.

“No.” piee of tin and plastic can think,

He waits. I am feeling somewhat hostile and noncommunicative. I think part of it is because I am so much looking forward to the time when I can play a litk on Sigfrid, but the other part is because he has changed around piece of tin and plastic can think, I mean. the auditing room. That’s the kind of thing they used to do to me when I had my psychotic episode in Wyoming. Sometimes i’d come in for a session and piece of tin and plastic can think, I mean. they’d have a hologram of my mother, for Christ’s sake. It looked exactly like her, but it didn’t smell like her or feel like her; in fact, you couldn’t feel it at all, it was only light. Sometimes they’d have me come in there in the dark and something warm and cuddly would take me in its arms and whisper to me. I didn’t like that. I was crazy, but I wasn’t that crazy.

Sigfrid is still waiting, but I know that he won’t wait forever. Pretty soon he’s going to start asking me questions, probably about my dreams.

“Have you had any dreams since I last saw you, Rob?”

I yawn. The whole subject is very boring. “I don’t think so. Nothing important, I’m sure.”

“I’d like to hear what they were. Even a fragment.”

“You’re a pest, Sigfrid, do you know that?”

“I’m sorry you feel I’m a pest, Rob.”

“Well… I don’t think I can remember even a fragment.”

“Try, please.”

“Oh, cripes. Well.” I get comfortable on the couch. The only dream I can think of is absolutely trivial, and I know there’s nothing in it that relates to anything traumatic or pivotal, but if I told him that he would get angry. So I say obediently, “I was in a car of a long railroad train. There were a number of cars hooked up together, and you could go from one to the other. They were full of people I knew. There was a woman, a sort of motherly type who coughed a lot, and another woman who — well, she looked rather strange. At first I thought she was a man. She was dressed in a sort of utility coverall, so you couldn’t tell from that whether she was male or female, and she had very masculine, bushy eyebrows. But I was sure she was a woman.”

“Did you talk to either of these women, Rob?”

“Please don’t interrupt, Sigfrid, you make me lose my train of thought.”

“I’m sorry, Rob.”

I go on with the dream: “I left them — no, I didn’t talk to them. I went back into the next car. That was the last one on the train. It was coupled to the rest of the train with a sort of — let’s see, I don’t know how to describe it. It was like one of those expanding gatefold things, made out of metal, you know? And it stretched.”

I stop for a moment, mostly out of boredom. I feel like apologizing for having such a dumb, irrelevant dream. “You say the metal connector stretched, Rob?” Sigfrid prompts me.

“That’s right, it stretched. So of course the car I was in kept dropping back, farther and farther behind the others. All I could see was the taillight, which was sort of in the shape of her face, looking at me. She—” I lose the thread of what I am saying. I try to get back on the track: “I guess I felt as though it was going to be difficult to get back to her, as if she- I’m sorry, Sigfrid, I don’t remember clearly what happened around there. Then I woke up. And,” I finish virtuously, “I wrote it all down as soon as I could, just the way you tell me to.”

“I appreciate that, Rob,” Sigfrid says gravely. He waits for me to go on.

I shift restlessly. “This couch isn’t nearly as comfortable as the mat,” I complain.

“I’m sorry about that, Rob. You said you recognized them?”

“Who?”

“The two women on the train, that you were getting farther and farther away from.”

“Oh. No, I see what you mean. I recognized them in the dream. Really I have no idea who they were.”

“Did they look like anyone you knew?”

“Not a bit. I wondered about that myself.”

Sigfrid says, after a moment, which I happen to know is his way of giving me a chance to change my mind about an answer he doesn’t like, “You mentioned one of the women was a motherly type who coughed—”

“Yes. But I didn’t recognize her. I think in a way she did look familiar, but, you know, the way people in a dream do.”

He says patiently, “Can you think of any woman you’ve ever known who was motherly and coughed a lot?”

I laugh out loud at that. “Dear friend Sigfrid! I assure you the women I know are not at all the motherly type! And they are all on at least Major Medical. They’re not likely to cough.”

“I see. Are you sure, Robbie?”

“Don’t be a pain in the ass, Sigfrid,” I say, angry because the crappy couch is hard to get comfortable on, and also because I need to go to the bathroom, and this situation looks to be prolonging itself indefinitely.

“I see.” And after a moment he picks up on something else, as I know he is going to: he’s a pigeon, Sigfrid is, pecking at everything I throw out before him, one piece at a time. “How about the other woman, the one with the bushy eyebrows?”

“What about her?”

“Did you ever know any girl who had bushy eyesbrows?”

“Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, I’ve gone to bed with five hundred girls! Some of them had every kind of eyebrows you ever heard of.”

“No particular one?”

“Not that I can think of offhand.”

“Not offhand, Rob. Please make an effort to remember.”

It is easier to do what he wants than to argue with him about it, so I make the effort. “All right, let’s see. Ida Mae? No. Sue-Ann? No. S. Ya.? No. Gretchen? No — well, to tell you the truth, Sigfrid, Gretchen was so blond I couldn’t really tell you if she had eyebrows at all.”

“Those are girls you’ve known recently, aren’t they, Rob? Perhaps someone longer ago?”

“You mean way back?” I reflect deeply as far back as I can go, all the way to the food mines and Sylvia. I laugh out loud. “You know something, Sigfrid? It’s funny, but I can hardly remember what Sylvia looked like — oh, wait a minute. No. Now I remember. She used to pluck her eyebrows almost altogether away, and then pencil them in. The reason I know is one time when we were in bed together we drew pictures on each other with her eyebrow pencil.”

I can almost hear him sigh. “The cars,” he says, pecking at another bright bit. “How would you describe them?”

“Like any railroad train. Long. Narrow. Moving pretty fast through the tunnel.”

“Long and narrow, moving through a tunnel, Rob?”

I lose my patience at that. He is so fucking transparent! “Come on, Sigfrid! You don’t get away with any corny penis symbols with me.”

“I’m not trying to get away with anything, Rob.”

“Well, you’re being an asshole about this whole dream, I swear you are. There’s nothing in it. The train was just a train. I don’t know who the women were. And listen, while we’re on the subject, I really hate this goddamned couch. For the kind of money my insurance is paying you, you can do a lot better than this!”

He has really got me angry now. He keeps trying to get back to the dream, but I am determined to get a fair shake from him for the insurance company’s money, and by the time I leave he has promised to redecorate before my next visit.

As I go out that day I feel pretty pleased with myself. He is really doing me a lot of good. I suppose it is because I am getting the courage to stand up to him, and perhaps all this nonsense has been helpful to me in that way, or in some way, even if it is true that some of his ideas are pretty crazy.