Three Thursdays since, when last you Wrote you, the Minstrel Show was on the verge, which in the event turned all our screws. In the Progress and Advice Room, just before it, you Observed to the Doctor that you’d Experienced no Recurrence of Reparalysis since April 2, Casanova’s birthday; nor had you on the other hand Achieved Suicide. You Remarked Further that your Scriptotherapy could not claim the credit, inasmuch as Joe Morgan’s reappearance had inspired both your Immediate Resumption of that therapy and your Later Relapse into the condition it was meant to treat. It Was your Guess that Morgan’s Wiedertraum, despite the Doctor’s misgivings and your own, was the mobilizing factor, if only because it occasioned the reinstitution of these weekly P & A’s.
Et cetera. You Nattered On to fill the time; your mind was Nervously Elsewhere. The Doctor’s too, you Would Have Thought — though he mouthed his dead cigar and regarded you as entomologically as ever. It was his afternoon to fish, but the day, indeed the approaching weekend, looked to be another stormy one, and he was chagrined. Presently he said, as confidently and acidly as ever in 1953: “Merde Homer. Blank attracts blank. You are In Love with Pocahontas. You would be Better Off Paralyzed.”
You were Entirely Startled. Indeed, you Blushed. But you Could Not Deny what till then you’d Not Acknowledged even to yourself: that Ambrose Mensch’s ex, the blonde Medusa who froze even limber Tombo, somehow moved your Heart — if not to Love, at least to a Surprising Sympathy. It Seemed Likely to you, however, that this unlikelihood was in some measure another aspect of Der Wiedertraum: Marsha Blank’s miscasting (as the high school teacher you’d Bedded Cavalierly in Wicomico in 1953) had occasioned your Reviewing both herself and “Peggy Rankin” in a new, more compassionate light. Sixteen years after the fact, you Wished you Had Been Less Cynical with Ms. Rankin; and you Dared Say Pocahontas had her reasons for being bitchy.
Genug, the Doctor ordered: your Balls, such as they were, were your Own, to Lose as you Would, but kindly Spare him the smarmy sympathetics. He did not regard you as Prepared for a Genuine Emotional Engagement — you Recalled perhaps that he’d advised against it in 1953 as well, vis-à-vis the late Rennie Morgan? — but neither did he regard you as Capable of one. If your Feeling for Marsha Blank helped keep you Alive and Mobile, the rest was your Funeral.
Der Wiedertraum itself he still considered dangerous, both to the mobility of its principals and to the security of the Farm, which he did not want jeopardized so near to his retirement. What was more, he didn’t understand the timetable. The novelized version of the original trauma corroborated his own recollection: that Mrs. Morgan’s abortion and death had occurred in late October 1953. Wherefore then “Saint Joe’s” ultimatum that she be redreamed, reborn, by Labor Day, which would fall this year on the 1st of September? More important, whatever Morgan’s dramaturgical calendar, how could the reenactment imaginably have a positive outcome? It was a time bomb, and unless (what the Doctor could not conceive) you Had Some Possible Strategy for defusing it, he was resolved to move it off the premises before it blew.
What Struck you as Odd about this colloquy was that for all his customary hauteur the Doctor appeared, for the first time in your connection, to be consulting you. He was asking your Advice! Moreover, he seemed now not only superannuated but impotent, at least far from omnipotent. It Occurred To you, irrelevantly, that by the rules of B-movie dramaturgy he was as of that moment a dead man. You Were Not Surprised when thunderstorms crashed as if on cue immediately thereafter, and a tornado watch curtailed the evening’s show. That the twisters spun off Lake Erie, not into Ontario, but into New York State across the way (and wrecked specifically the Chautauqua Lake locations that Prinz and Mensch had just done filming) underscored the portent. And if you Did Not Quite Assume — when after the abbreviated entertainment the Doctor declared an end to Der Wiedertraum, gave two weeks’ notice to Casteene, Morgan, and the draft evaders to begone from the Farm or be removed therefrom by the provincial police, and forbade the film company ever to return (Bea Golden excepted, whose family’s patronage was still prized) — that it was his own termination notice the Doctor thus pronounced, it is because you Doubted Fate was such an artless hack.
