Lincoln's Dreams

He scraped away at the caked dirt on the hoof, turning the knife blade on edge to get in close to the shoe. We weren’t getting anywhere with all this, but the barn was warm and smelled of dry hay, and Annie looked as if she was thinking about the mare’s sore foot and not about that other horse with its legs shot off. Dr. Barton dug in with the knife, and the mare began to shake her head as if telling him to stop. Annie stood up and went over to her, taking hold of the bridle just under the mare’s chin, and stroking her neck.

“Your father never talked about his dreams, not even in connection with Lincoln’s boat dream?”

“Not to me. He moved to Georgia last year when he started having heart problems. Did you know high blood pressure and heart disease were connected to acromegaly?”

“No, I didn’t.”

He stopped scraping and put the horse’s foot down. “Dad might have told my sister his dreams. She was always his favorite, and he used to talk to her more than to the rest of us. Would you like me to call her?”

“I’d appreciate it if you would,” I said, and wrote out our phone number at the inn. “Ask her if he had any dreams. They don’t have to be about boats.”

“Boats,” he said thoughtfully, folding up the piece of paper and sticking it in his pocket. The mare had tangled her mane in the bridle when she tossed her head. Annie pulled the forelock out from under it, smoothed it, and patted the mare’s forehead. “The Egyptians dreamed a lot about boats. Symbol of the passage to the world of the dead.”

We left the vet to the mystery of the sore foot and drove back to the inn. We had lunch at a McDonald’s on the way back into town, and when we got back to the inn, Annie took a nap.

I called the answering machine. There was a jumble of messages from people who hadn’t figured out Broun was gone yet, and Richard had left another message on the machine.

“I’ve been looking at the results of Annie’s blood tests, and I think I’ve found the key to what’s happening here,” he said in his Good Shrink voice. “Her L-tryptophan levels are indicative of cryptomnesia.” He waited long enough for me to ask what cryptomnesia was. “It occurs when the patient presents early memories as reality, something the patient saw or read in a book and the conscious mind has forgotten. The subconscious mind then reintegrates the material as reality. Bridey Murphy. Her memories of an earlier life in Ireland were stories her nurse had told her in a preverbal stage, and under hypnosis she presented them as a previous life.”

“Annie wasn’t hypnotized,” I said. “She was drugged.”

“She obviously had preverbal contact with someone who told her stories about the Civil War, or there’s a possibility of more recent reading of Civil War novels. Maybe she read one of Broun’s books. That would account for her immediate neurotic attachment to you. She’s experiencing schizophrenic dissociation, and you represent Broun.”

So now it was cryptomnesia, and I represented Broun. This morning it had been a revenge fantasy and Broun had represented Annie’s dreams. And before that it had been a psychotic break and a half-buried trauma and a murder in the orchard with a cap pistol, and who knew what it would be the next time Richard called, and never in all these calls a word about the Thorazine he had given her.

Did he honestly think he could talk me into bringing Annie back with all this psychiatric gibberish? Maybe he was the crazy one and all this talk about Annie’s repressed guilt and my obsession and Lincoln’s impending nervous breakdown was nothing but—what was the proper psychiatric term? —projection.

I called Broun at the number he had given me before he left for California. “How’s it going?” I asked. “Did you get in to see your prophetic-dreams expert?”

“This morning. He told me time and space aren’t real, that they only exist in the conscious part of our brain, and down in the subconscious there’s no such thing as a space-time continuum. He said everything that’s ever happened or is going to happen is already in our subconscious, and it comes out in dreams.” He talked the way he always had, as if we had never had that fight about California. “Then he says most people have to wait for dreams to tell them what’s going to happen, but he

can tell me my future right now just by putting me to sleep and watching my rapid eye movements.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said I’d already dreamed I didn’t give money to phony fortune-tellers, and since it had already happened there wasn’t any way I could change it.”

“And what did he say?”

“I didn’t wait to find out. I wish I could dream what was going to happen. Then I wouldn’t get stuck listening to cock-and-bull stories like that. Where are you, at home?”

“No,” I said. “I’m in Fredericksburg. The phone rang off the hook yesterday, and I decided I wasn’t going to get any work done, so I came down here. I think I might stay awhile. At least until McLaws and Herndon figure out where I am. There isn’t any snow here.”