Trapped, I told him the dream.
“I dream I have a red, white, and blue pinwheel. Since there is no wind to move it, I must turn it with my finger. After I touch the pinwheel it disintegrates into spinning black and white polka dots. The polka dots stop moving and are replaced by purple. Then the purple dissolves into red and the red fills up the dream.”
Dr. God put his pipe down because he had no verdict to tap out on the dream. He looked baffled. I rejoiced. He stood up and began to pace behind his desk. For five beautiful minutes I reveled in his bewilderment.
“I admit the dream puzzles me, but I do see one clue. Since the pinwheel is a child’s toy, I assume the dream relates to an incident in your childhood.”
“Bravo, Dr. God. You’ve hit on the old psychological standby childhood. I was wondering when you’d get to that.”
He ignored my jibe and sat down. He led me into a game. Free association, he called it. I had to sit like an obedient child and tell him all the words that came to my mind when I thought of a pinwheel.
“Flag,” I told him because of the pinwheel’s red, white, and blue colors. Windmill, bicycle wheel, I told him — spinning wheel, roulette wheel, wagon wheel.
He eyed me like a teacher about to fail a student. “Think harder,” he urged, “harder! What else is round like a pinwheel and needs an outside force to move it?”
I glanced around the room. Nothing came to my mind until I looked at the phone on his desk. “A telephone dial,” I said softly.
“Eureka!” he shouted. “As a child, the pinwheel reminded you of a telephone dial, something else that you had to turn with your finger. And the black and white polka dots spinning in your dream are the letters and numbers on a black instrument. When you were a child, telephones were only black with white letters and numbers. We are decoding the dream, Lorna,” he said.
I ignored his use of the word “we.” I was decoding the dream. I began to cry. He came to me and patted me on the shoulder, a gesture that made me cry-harder. It reminded me of the day the policeman patted eight-year-old Lorna on the shoulder as she sat on the front steps watching the three stretchers being lifted into ambulances.
“One of the stretchers,” I heard myself telling him, “held my mother, the other, her lover, and the other, my father. My father came home from work and found my mother upstairs with another man. My father shot both of them, and then himself.”
He handed me his handkerchief. “And all that happened on a day when you were playing happily with a pinwheel. Then you heard shots, ran into the house, and dialed the police. They probably told you to wait outside, but you went upstairs — were you wearing a purple dress? — and saw all the redness from the blood of the three bodies.
“Now we understand the meanings of the pinwheel, the polka dots, the purple, and the red. And now we understand why you made those calls to damn your co-workers. You wanted to punish them. You transferred your rage at being deceived by your mother to your co-workers who, in your mind, were deceiving others.”
“Yes, Dr. God,” I admitted. I said yes to his interpretation so I could leave. I had to think. I had to plan.
“May I use your phone, Doctor, my car is in the shop. I must call a cab.”
“Of course.”
He watched me dial the phone. I put through my request for a cab in a shaky voice. Then I hung up.
“Do you always do that?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Hang up the phone by tapping the listening end of the receiver on the table before putting the receiver back in its cradle.”
“I guess so. Why?”
“Because tapping the phone on the table reminds me of a judge tapping his gavel at a trial.”
“Then we have something in common, Doctor,” I said casually. “You tap your pipe when you deliver a verdict. I tap the phone.”
His face became dead-pan again. “Now that you understand your dream you’ve probably delivered your last verdict via the telephone.”
“But you have more verdicts to tap out, don’t you, Dr. God?”
“If you say so,” he responded.
He was wrong about my delivering my last verdict on the phone. I had another one to deliver. He was correct about some of my dream, but not all of it. In his egotism he missed the more complex points. I had to see to it that he never discovered the truth when he had a chance to think it over.
The truth was mine alone. The dream did unravel its meaning to me in Dr. God’s office. On that summer day when I was eight years old, I walked two blocks to wait for the bus that was to take me on a day trip with my Brownie troop. My mother waved to me from the door. She seemed happy that I would be gone all day.
But the bus didn’t come. It had broken down. Our Scout Leader knew we were disappointed so she gave us each a pinwheel to take home. The pinwheel didn’t move because there was no wind. I took it in the house so that the fan in the living room would make it spin. I heard them, my mother and him, laughing upstairs. I turned the pinwheel round and round with my finger.
The spinning pinwheel made me think of the telephone dial. I called my father at work and told him about my mother and the man upstairs. As I waited for him to come home, I colored a picture of a queen in my fairy-tale coloring book. I used purple for her dress. My father had told me that purple was a royal color, the color of kings and queens. I felt like a queen sitting there. I felt powerful. I felt royal. I felt purple. And purple was exciting. I always felt purple when I made the calls about my co-workers.
Dr. God was right about the red in the dream. It was blood, the blood all over my mother and that man. I didn’t look at my father. Red is a good color too. It’s the color of satisfaction, of a verdict delivered, of sentencing received. Harry — his gambler’s face was red from embarrassment when he asked to have his paycheck mailed home. Ellen’s eyes were red after a night’s crying. Paul’s wrists were red after he slashed them.
And Dr. God’s pipe will glow red when he puffs and puffs on it as he desperately tries to extricate himself from the situation I am planning for him. I feel no pity for him. He too was feeling purple in that office when he thought he had interpreted my dream. I can’t have that — purple belongs to me. And so does red.
I looked at my mussed hair and my scratched face and my ripped dress in the mirror of my apartment. I had had time to do those things to myself in the ladies room before the cab came. The cab driver noticed and asked if I was all right. I acted too distraught to answer him. I smiled at my cleverness. My car isn’t in the shop. I just needed a witness to my disheveled state. And luckily Dr. God’s wife hadn’t come to work today.
I dialed my beige phone, regretting that it wasn’t an old black one. When a voice said, “Jones. Twenty-second Precinct,” I began to sob. I was quite good at it. “Dr. Adams of the Baker Building tried to attack me in his office this afternoon. Please come, please!”
It was the best acting job of my life. It’s hard to feign tears when one is feeling so purple. The police promised to come at once. Before I hung up the phone, I carefully tapped the listening part of the receiver on the table.
Donald E. Westlake
This Is Death
It’s hard not to believe in ghosts when you are one. I hanged myself in a fit of truculence — stronger than pique, but not so dignified as despair — and regretted it before the thing was well begun. The instant I kicked the chair away I wanted it back, but gravity was turning my former wish to its present command; the chair would not right itself from where it lay on the floor, and my 193 pounds would not cease to urge downward from the rope thick around my neck.