Lincoln's Dreams

“I don’t know. It’s … I can’t explain it. They’re getting clearer.” And more frightening, I thought, watching her face. Whatever it is that she thinks she’s starting to understand is terrifying her.

The waitress brought our breakfast and more coffee. I waited till Annie was done with her eggs and then asked her, “When do you usually have the dreams? You said last night you usually don’t have them after midnight.”

“Between nine and midnight. That was why Richard was so worried that night at the reception, because it was after nine. I think he thought I might fall asleep on the loveseat or something, but I don’t have narcolepsy. I just have bad dreams.”

“You said the Thorazine kept you from dreaming that afternoon after I took you home from Arlington. Do you have the dreams during the day, too?”

“When the dreams first got bad I thought maybe if I could stay awake past midnight, the dreams would leave me alone, and it worked for a while, but then I started dreaming as soon as I went to sleep, so then I tried staying up all night and sleeping during the day, but that didn’t work either.”

“And that was two weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

“And you were on the Elavil then?”

“Yes. I’d been on it for a month and a half.”

“Did Richard think that was odd, that you were dreaming? Antidepressants are supposed to repress the dream cycle. Did Richard say anything about that?”

“He was a little worried at first, but he said it took the Elavil a while to work and my sleep record was better. I wasn’t waking up so often, and I was getting a lot more rest.”

“What about when the dreams got worse… clearer?”

“He said that was a good sign, that whatever was causing the dreams was trying to break through, that my subconscious was determined to make itself heard.”

I had assumed that he had taken her off the Elavil because it wasn’t working or was even making the dreams worse. If that wasn’t the reason, what was? According to Annie, he hadn’t even been worried about the dreams, but something had happened to frighten him so badly that he had given her Thorazine to try to stop them.

The waitress made a frontal assault on our coffee cups again, and Annie and I both tried unsuccessfully to hold her off. “Maybe we’d better retreat before she drowns us in this stuff.” I looked at my watch. “It’s ten-fifteen. Why don’t we go ahead and see if we can find this Dr. Barton?”

“All right,” Annie said. She folded her napkin and laid it on the table.

“Were you on anything before you came to the Institute? You said your doctor sent you to the Institute. Did he have you on any sedatives or anything?”

We stood up. “Phénobarbital,” she said, reaching for her coat.

“Did Richard know that?”

“Yes, he was upset about it. He said that nobody used barbiturates anymore, certainly not in cases of pleisomnia, that my treatment had been all wrong.”

“You didn’t keep taking the phenobarbital, did you?”

“No.”

I handed Annie the map and got the directions the vet’s wife had given me out of my wallet. South of town, she had said, past Hazel Run on the Massaponax road. A house with a porch.

All the houses had porches, and we meandered along at least three roads marked Massaponax before we found it. Dr. Barton was back from rounds but just barely and he still had a few animals to look at, his wife told us. She was much younger than she had sounded on the phone, not much older than Annie. She told us we were welcome to go around back to the stable and talk to him there.

The vet was young, too, with a thin, boyish mustache, and he obviously had never had acromegaly. He was only about five foot eight. He was wearing a pocketed blue shirt, jeans, and a pair of high boots that made him look like a Union army officer.

“What can I do for you?” he said, looking at a sorrel mare with a bad foot.

“I doubt if you can do anything for me,” I said. “I’ve made a mistake. I was looking for a Dr. Barton who has acromegaly.”

“That was my father,” he said, picking up the mare’s left hind foot. “I told Mary I bet that was who you wanted to see when she told me you’d mentioned Dr. Stone’s name.” He put the foot down. “Dad died of a heart attack this fall. What did you want to talk to him about?”

“I work for Thomas Broun.” The vet nodded as if he’d heard of him. “He’s doing a book on Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had acromegaly.”

“I know,” he said. “Dad was always interested in other people who’d had acromegaly, especially famous people. Edward the First, the pharaoh Akhenaten, but especially Lincoln. I think because late years he got to look like Lincoln. That happens, you know, with the acromegaly. They all get the big ears and nose and the splayed hands.”

He picked up each of the mare’s feet one by one, laid his hand flat against the sole of it, and then set the foot back down so the mare would put her weight on it. When he got to the right forefoot, the mare held the foot above the ground for a minute and then set it down carefully. Annie sat down on a bale of hay and watched him.