Overheard in a Dream

James listened carefully to the noise. It had a distinctive mechanical sound, like a car ignition turning over on a cold morning. Turning, turning, turning but never catching.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh. Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh, ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

Conor had the stuffed cat clutched tightly against his chest. Slowly he lifted it up until it was pressed under his chin, then higher still until the head of the cat lay against his lips. He stopped the ignition sound. Taking one hand off the cat, he flapped it frantically. “Meow?” he said.

Was he making the noise on behalf of the toy? James wondered. Was he trying to make it ask something that Conor dared not voice himself? Or was it the other way around? Was the cat putting its words in Conor’s mouth?

“Meow?”

“When you’re ready, Conor, you can come all the way into the room and we’ll shut the door,” James said. “But if you wish to stand there, that’s all right too. In here you can choose what you want to do.”

The boy remained immobile in the doorway, the toy cat pressed against the lower half of his face. His eyes flickered here and there but never to meet James’s gaze.

An expectancy seemed to form around them and James didn’t want this. He didn’t want Conor to feel there were any expectations of what he should or shouldn’t be doing, so James attempted to diffuse it by lifting up his spiral notebook. “This is where I take my notes. I am going to write in it while I sit here. I will write notes of what we are doing together so that I don’t forget.” He picked up his pen.

For a full five or six minutes Conor stood without moving, then very cautiously he began to inch inward. As with the first session, he stayed near to the perimeter of the room and kept well away from James, sitting at the small table. Once, twice, Conor circumnavigated the room and pressed the cat’s nose lightly against things as he went.

He was saying something under his breath. James couldn’t hear at first, but as Conor passed the third time, he could make out words. House. Car. Doll. Conor was naming the items he saw, as he passed them. This was a good sign, James thought. He understood the meaning of words. He knew things had names. He had at least some contact with reality.

So it was when Conor came again on Thursday. And again the next week. Fifty minutes were spent quietly circling the room, touching things lightly with the nose of the stuffed cat, naming them. James didn’t intrude on this activity. He wanted the boy to set his own pace, to construct his own sense of security within the room, to understand that James had meant what he’d said: that Conor alone would decide what he wanted to do in here. That was how trust was built, James believed. That was how you made a child feel safe enough to reveal all that was hidden. Not by schedules. Not by reward and punishment. But by giving time. There were no shortcuts. Even when it meant session after session of naming.

Three weeks passed. During the sixth session Conor circled the room upon entering and again touched everything he could easily reach with the toy cat’s nose, still murmured the names, but this time it was different. He elaborated. Red house, he whispered. Brown chair. Blue pony.

For the first time, James answered Conor’s murmuring.

“Yes,” James said, “that’s a blue pony.”

Conor’s head jerked up abruptly. “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.” He stared straight ahead. The hand not holding the cat came up and fluttered frantically in front of his eyes. “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

James sat very still.

Moments passed.

Slowly Conor exhaled. Extending the cat away from his body, he touched its nose to the edge of the shelf. “Wood,” he murmured very softly.

“Yes, that’s made of wood,” James said.

The cat was retracted instantly.

James watched the boy, who kept his head averted to avoid eye contact.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.” There was a long pause, then Conor whispered, “Brown wood.”

“Yes, the wood is brown.”

Conor turned his head. Not to look at James. His eyes never left the far distant point they were fixed on, but his head inclined a little in James’s direction. That was all that happened.

“Bob and I were thinking of going over to the Big Horns to squeeze in a couple of days of elk hunting,” Lars said and sank down in the beige-cushioned softness of James’s office. “You want to come?”

“That’s a very kind invitation, Lars, but I don’t know one end of a rifle from the other.”

“You can borrow one of Davy’s guns,” Lars replied. “Davy killed his first buck when he was just twelve. Did I tell you about it? A six-pointer.”

“Yes, you mentioned it.”

“So come with us. Time you got blooded, Jim. How else we gonna make a South Dakota man out of you?” Lars laughed heartily. “It’ll just be Bob and me. We’ll take some beers and some grub and have a great time.”

“When?”

“Next weekend.”

Relief flooded through James. “Well, damn! Wouldn’t you know it? I’ve got the kids coming out next weekend. Remember? Because I’m taking Monday and Tuesday off the following week.”

“Oh Jesus, yeah.”

“Darn. I’m sorry to miss it. Maybe next time.”

Stretching his arms up behind his head, Lars settled back into the chair. “So how’s it been going between you and Sandy? Is she getting any more reasonable about the kids?”

“Not really. They can come out at Easter but she says no way over Christmas,” James replied, but he couldn’t quite keep the disappointment from his voice.

“Why not? I thought you got to alternate Christmases,” Lars said.

“The court says yes. But Sandy keeps on about how disruptive it is for them at their ages.”

“Yeah, but they’re your kids too. You’ve got the right to spend time with them.”

“I know, but all this fighting over them isn’t good for them either. I don’t want them to grow up seeing Sandy and me at each other’s throats the whole time. And she’s probably got a point. It is disruptive for them at Christmastime. Sandy always goes to her folks in Connecticut. They have one of those big old Cape Cod houses and do Christmas with this enormous ten-foot tree and all the trimmings. The kids have their grandparents there, their cousins, their aunts and uncles, their friends. Christmas is supposed to be a happy time. Desperately as I want Mikey and Becky with me, I want what’s best for them more.”

“You’re a pushover, Jim,” Lars said, shaking his head. “You need to learn how to stand up to her. To say: ‘This is important to me and I’m going to fight for it.’”

“I already have, Lars. That’s how I’ve ended up here.”

“Well, once in a lifetime isn’t enough. You need to keep at it.”

James nodded morosely. “Yes, I know.”

The day was one of those in autumn of pure lapis lazuli sky and crystal air. From the large playroom window, James could see out over the city to the open plains beyond. Below in the street the dappled tints of gold and orange flickered restlessly in the sunlight, but the sky stretched ever onward, a clear, almost luminescent blue.

Gentle joy always filled James when he stood at this window. Clichéd as the vision was, he knew there was a metaphorical eagle somewhere inside him that would one day spread its wings and soar in response to this infinite landscape. His heart still felt depressingly sparrow-sized most of the time, but seeing such immensity always gave him hope of greater things.

Not that his sparrow’s heart hadn’t had its own share of struggling to get free. The most horrible moment had come two years ago when, after ten years of training, James suddenly realized that he couldn’t bear the thought of spending another day in the sheltered prison of psychoanalytic theory. That moment still relived itself with soul-shattering clarity. He’d been fighting his way through heavy traffic on FDR Drive in Upper Manhattan when the insight mushroomed up with all the subtlety of an H-bomb going off. His hands went rigid on the steering wheel; sweat ran down the sides of his face and his heartbeat roared up so loudly into his ears that it drowned out whatever the hell was playing on that jazz station he always listened to but didn’t really like. He realized then that things had to change. He had to get out of the life he was living …

God, what that moment of insight did to Sandy. She’d been beyond furious when he told her. The rows they had. And some of her anger was justified. She’d supported him all those years. She’d put her own career on hold while he’d finished medical school, then the training, the internship, the residency and his own analysis to emerge as a fully qualified psychiatrist. Sandy had stuck through it all for the chance of a brownstone on the Upper West Side and private school for the kids. Those were her goals in life and she’d worked just as hard to achieve them as he’d worked for his.

“Theory?” she’d screamed when he’d tried to give voice to his confusion. “What the hell’s this sudden thing with theory? How can you wreck our entire lives over something like that? It isn’t even real. So what if you don’t believe it? You’re not a priest, for fuck’s sake. Believe in something else.”

How did he explain it, his inarticulate longing for something beyond the narrow corridors of analysis, the domineering views of his colleagues and the shadowy brick-and-mortar ravines of Manhattan? A panic attack in the middle of rush-hour traffic hadn’t been very subtle, but it got the message over.