“But it wasn’t you.”
I said nothing for a moment, impaled by guilt. Was it possible that I could have killed him and blocked out the episode?. “I don’t think it was me,” I said.
“You’re not sure?”
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “I haven’t seen Henry in over five years.”
“You’ve certainly never mentioned his name here before. Why were you so hesitant in claiming your innocence?”
I shrugged, abashed.
“Melvin,” he said, “we’ve talked about this again and again. You have to distinguish the real from the imaginary. Your free-floating guilt is caused by a confusion of the two. You had nothing to do with Henry’s murder.”
“That’s not what the police think,” I said
“Neither of us know what the police think.”
“Then why did they come to my house?” I asked.
“Why? They might have gone through all the names in Henry’s address book. I have no idea. In any event, you and I know they had it wrong. Don’t we?”
I felt slightly better after this session but the feeling only lasted until I got home and had a chance to brood again. A few nights later I had a dream about being in a police lineup where all the potential suspects looked something like me. I wondered how the old woman making the identification could tell the difference among us.
“Which one of these reprobates was it?” the policeman holding the pointer asked. “Candidate number one, candidate, number two, candidate, number three, candidate number four or candidate number five?”
She rested her chin on her hand, didn’t seem to be looking at any of us. I was in the third and most conspicuous position.
“He might have been wearing some kind of mask,” she said.
Masks were brought out and we were all fitted with masks that covered our eyes.
“No,” she said. “No masks.”
The masks were removed. The room looked lighter than it had before.
“It’s either one or five,” she said, after a moment, “though it could be three.”
“It could be three, couldn’t it?” the policeman said.
The woman looked confused. “It could be three,” she repeated reluctantly.
What about one or five I wanted to say, they were her first choices, but the policeman had settled on me. I was still protesting in my dreams when I woke.
I kept waiting to be called to the police station for a lineup, but it didn’t happen, at least it hadn’t happened. I tried not to think about it, to think about anything else, but it was the only thing on my mind.
I had another dream in which I was the only one in a lineup for identification. The others hadn’t shown up, had been delayed. It didn’t seem any less fair than anything else. Oddly, the woman making the identification, a different old woman, said it wasn’t me, which made the policeman angry. He refused to accept her non-identification. “Who else could it be?” he asked.
And then there was the third version of the dream in which two of the candidates were very short, virtual midgets, and two exceptionally tall, leaving me in the middle, a stand-out at medium height. Who else could it be? I thought. The room was silent for the longest time.
I woke from these dreams outraged at the manipulative nature of the police, who for no reason I understood had it in for me. What I had ever done to them?
“Do you believe that dreams are prescient?” I asked Eva, on one of our walks.
“I used not to,” she said.
“What changed your mind?”
She squeezed my arm. “The bitter lessons of experience,” she said.
I asked her to be more explicit. “What experiences are you referring to?”
She seemed to be thinking about my question. “I can’t be more explicit than that. You’ll just have to accept my word for it. Or not.”
“My dreams are prescient,” I said. “At least some of them are.” I didn’t say that sometimes I can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s dreams. Or where one begins and the other ends.
“Some people think that’s crazy,” I said, laughing at the severity of my comment.
She glanced behind her briefly. “You can’t help what people think,” she said.
“That’s a good way to look at it,” I said. At that moment I realized there was something a little off about her, not quite crazy, but not far from crazy either. Were we kindred spirits? Perhaps that was just another way of looking at our odd relationship.
Three weeks had passed since the detectives’ visit and they had not returned, but I expected them daily, waited for them, had two extra cups of coffee brewed in my pot in case they showed up. I also read the paper every day for news of the murder case. For a while there had been a suspect and a reported arrest, but there had been no follow up. I still imagined some version of the police lineup that had been nagging at my dreams awaited me.
“In my opinion,” Klotzman said, when the topic came up in one of our sessions, “you’re not likely to hear from them again.”
The ‘not likely’ disturbed me. “You’re saying it’s not absolutely certain,” I said, “which plays into my fantasies.”
“I’m fairly certain,” he said. “If they were interested in you, they wouldn’t have waited this long.”
“What if they’re just trying to catch me off my guard,” I said.
“So you’re staying on your guard just in case,” he said. “And what good does that do you?”
“This way they can’t take me by surprise,” I said.
“And what would happen if these machievellians took you by surprise?” he asked.
He always had a comeback, always had the last word. Later, at home, I was full of answers, most of them built on the case that I had something to hide.
I had a dream in which the police lineup was made up of five men who looked like Dr. Klotzman. I woke relieved, thinking maybe Klotzman was on to something, but with the equivalent of a smile on my face, even though I almost never smiled.
My mother called and hectored me about getting out more. How could she know how little I got out unless she had spies or long distance binoculars. I assured her I was taking lots of walks with my neighbor, Eva, exaggerating the amount, but she went right on as if I hadn’t said a thing. This went on for about an hour. There were other complaints about my not eating well, about which she had even less information. She threatened to come over and cook for me but I managed to talk her out of that one. “And how are you?” I asked her. “Lonely,” she said. There was probably more going on in my life than in hers.
When alone I was concerned what to do with myself, was considering setting up another regular appointment with Klotzman or having an affair with Eva, Eva willing, both ideas rejected almost out of hand. Spending more time in bed seemed a possible solution, but only if I could sleep. Lying sleepless barely passed the time. Maybe I should give up on the novel I was having so much trouble writing and start another one. I made a note to myself to consider the prospect.
Much of what I do has to do with planning what to do next so I never find myself with nothing to do while in fact I never have anything to do.
I mentioned this excessive planning to Klotzman. “I like to know what’s coming up,” I said.
“You want to avoid surprise,” he said. “You mentioned that before in conjunction with the detectives.”
“Yes. At the same time when I know what’s coming up, I lose interest in it. Still, that’s better than being taking by surprise or having nothing ahead of me.”
“I’m not sure, Mel, I know what you mean by nothing,” he said.
I wasn’t sure either. “Nothing to do,” I said. “No activity. Sometimes I write in my note book: ‘watch TV tonight at nine.’”