I approach the cold chateau from the side, moving as if by perfect instinct not to the main gate but to another and smaller entrance in the thick side wall. I know where I am going, I am in possession of myself, and yet I know too that I have no history, no recollection of the past, so that my life, which is specific, depends only on the field, the ditch, the night, and what I am about to experience within the chateau. I know the way. There is nothing else.
The chateau is empty. I enter as if by plan, and I find that the great stone hall consists only of a single vast room that is empty, dusty, cold, from floor to roof windowless and desolate except for one small structure standing altarlike and frightening in the center of the stone floor. I approach, I am breathing deeply. Erect and with hands at my sides I face the sacred structure which is twice my height and circular at the base and pointed on top — like some prehistoric tribal tent — and covered entirely with dry and hairless animal skins.
The skins are hard, scaly, wrinkled, and completely without hair. The light in the vast stone room is gray, the air is cold, the construction of dead skins is familiar and unfamiliar as well. Slowly and conscious only of myself as neutral and of the action as charged, slowly I descend to my knees, insert my fingers in the scam where two large bottom skins are joined, and slowly pull them apart until the darkness will accommodate my entry on all fours. So I, a man fully grown and yet also reduced to my simple and now curiously unemotional intention, on all fours work my way head and shoulders and hips and heavy legs inside the second structure where in a meaningless crouch I survey the desolation of my own beginning. The circular and conical space inside the dead skins contains nothing at all except a dusty floor and a small iron hearth partially heaped with ashes which are both dry and moist. The fire is gone, the ashes have stood so long that here and there they have become crystalline, I see a few bones and feathers embedded like Norse relics in the dead ashes. Now I realize that I had hoped for more, had expected more, and yet in the midst of such silence and immobility I also realize that my disappointment is nothing compared with the journey I have just taken and the barren actuality I have at last discovered.
When I reported this dream in meticulous detail to Ursula, insisting that it was central to my life, since few men are privileged and courageous enough to undertake this journey, her only reply was that it was obviously someone else’s womb, not hers, that had become so inhospitable to my regressive drives. Her own womb, she answered me, was warm and receptive always, as I surely knew.
“But I disagree with your cesspool metaphor,” I said, waiting for her to face me in the leather chair. “It’s simply that I am in love with Psyche. I have always been in love with Psyche. And I happen to know that whenever I express the need I can trust my Psyche to send me up a fresh bucket of slime. Unlike you,” I said, studying the level of water in my clear glass, “I am not afraid of Psyche’s slime. I do not find it distasteful. As a matter of fact, without my periodic buckets, I could not survive. Now tell me,” I said, feeling the cigar swimming toward my fingers through the semidarkness, “isn’t my metaphor preferable to yours? It is truer, Ursula, more just, more compassionate.”
“Allert,” she said, “have you ever realized that you have the face of a fetus? The eyes, the jowls, the florid complexion are all deceiving. If you look closely enough you’ll see, as I have just seen, that actually you have the face of a fetus. Perhaps that is why you dream rather than live your life.”
In my dream it is nighttime on the grounds of Peter’s hospital. My impression is that I have never seen this place before yet I know it well. Acres Wild, as it is called, extends without limit through the night, but also is carefully tended by capped and muffled gardeners and, sooner or later, stops at the perimeter of the high serpentine brick wall. All this I know somehow and even without letting the words come silently to mind. But now through the tall trees the rain is falling, in each of the small white cabins a single naked bulb is burning. And I am mobilized, I am worried, I have an urgent task requiring Peter’s help.
“Peter,” I say in the dream, “I must talk with you.”
We are in the main building and Peter, wearing his white coat, is surrounded by a group of young men and women. My face and clothes are wet, he does not wish to give me his attention. The young men and women are too attractive, too interested in what he is telling them in his musical and confidential tones.
“Peter,” I say, and at last he stares at me over the shoulder of a slender blonde young woman. “Why is she here? She has no business here. She is different from all the rest, she is quite special. If you don’t help me, Peter, who knows what harm they may do her under the mistaken thought that she too is one of your patients?”
It is raining, my white shirt smells as if it has been sprinkled with the juice of clams, my feet are bare. And I am agitated over the problem of Ursula’s welfare. But Peter removes a thick black professional fountain pen from the pocket of his long white coat and on a spongy paper napkin writes what I presume are instructions to those invisible attendants who will either set Ursula free or do her harm.
I accept the instructions, I express my thanks, I see that Peter is returning the fat pen to the breast pocket of his long white coat. He appears quite unconcerned about Ursula or my own atypical need for haste. The voices of the young men and women are wet with admiration as if Peter is their celebrity as well as doctor. Instructions in hand I hurry again into the rain which has become a combination of white mist and dripping leaves.
The light in Ursula’s cabin smells of tallow. The bulb is naked and yet casts an orange light over all the damp interior of that small screened-in white cabin into which Ursula is settling, making herself comfortable, as if the cabin were facing an empty beach instead of standing in the center of the grounds of Peter’s hospital. Inside the cabin there is no one but Ursula, who is spreading a sheet, removing the contents of her valise, only unwary Ursula and no one to whom I might show Peter’s lengthy handwritten instructions to send Ursula back to her home, her garden, her magazines, her husband. But even so, when I glance at the instructions I see that the paper napkin has absorbed the rain and that the ink has become hopelessly blurred.
“Don’t you see where you are?” I say. “Don’t you understand?”
But she only smiles and smoothes the sheet, while I in anxiety and frustration take full note of the fact that the cabin is half garage, half cabin, so that the ambulance may enter the cabin itself and deposit the unruly patient directly into the waiting bed. And I also take full note of the thickly padded straps attached to the bed, the enamel pan beneath a cheap table, the smell of some terrible drug that lingers on the damp air.
The orange light, the smell of a burning candle, the smell of the drug, the padding on the bedstraps as thick as my arm, it is a stage setting with which I am familiar and unfamiliar both, and in which I am more afraid than ever.
“We must go,” I whisper, “we must leave at once.”
But Ursula only smiles, leaning over the bed, and draws up the sleeve of her simple yellow dress that has fallen away to expose some of the fullness of her perfect shoulder, and speaks. As long as Peter is there, she tells me, we have nothing to fear.
When I told this dream to Ursula she remarked that the drug in my dream was in all likelihood paraldehyde, which she remembered hearing about somewhere in the past. Then she walked across the room and stood looking down at me where I sat in the leather chair and said that never, never, would I be able to wrap her in the rubber sheet, as she expressed it, of my destructive unconscious and, further, that I should take this dream as a warning, not about the state of her psychic life but mine.