For some time now English had been his language of thought as well as his language of speech. Certain idioms might occur, in thought as in speech, in any of several languages; there were certain concepts that did not translate. But it was English that he both thought and spoke.
Dreams might come in any language. Lately they had been most often in English, but as recently as a year ago they had been primarily in German. He also dreamed occasionally in Serbo- Croat, and now and again in French.
There was usually a connection between the language of the dream and its subject matter. Dreams of his youth, for example, were most likely to be in Serbo-Croat. Dreams of the present were often in English. But there was no hard and fast rule. Dreams, possessing their own system of logic, had their own scheme of comparative linguistics as well.
This dream, set in the present time, was nevertheless in Serbo-Croat.
In the dream he was in the chemistry laboratory. Its window high in the Science Building overlooked the quadrangle where commencement exercises were to be held. And he talked in the dream to Burton Weldon, who was dead in the dream, already shot down by guardsmen in retribution for a crime Miles Dorn had not yet got around to perpetrating. Though dead, Burton Weldon was able to hear and to speak; miraculously, he was able to understand and to speak Serbo-Croat.
Furthermore, Weldon’s face wouldn’t behave. It kept turning into the face of Clyde Farrar, Jr.
When the time came to shoot Drury, his dream finger froze on the dream trigger. He pulled with all his strength but was not strong enough to make his finger move.
The speech went on and on and on, with Sen. J. Lowell Drury (Dem., N.H.) orating in flawless Serbo-Croat. And then the speech ended, and Drury left the podium, and still the finger had not moved the trigger.
“You see?” Burton Weldon’s corpse shrilled at him. “You see? You could not do it!”
He awoke drenched in sweat, fighting his way out of the dream, fighting Weldon’s voice (but it was not Weldon’s voice in the dream; it was someone else’s; whose?) and clawing at the bed-clothing with hands and feet. He went into the bathroom and stood for a long time under the shower, thinking about the dream.
He knew enough of dream theory to recognize it as a classic impotence syndrome. Virility anxiety. The gun is a penis, and one cannot make it work. And yet it was so specific, and so much related to present circumstances, that he was not certain whether it was in fact a sexual dream or more an indication of unconscious fear that he would fail to kill Drury.
Was it the same thing? Was the gun a penis in his life as well as in his dreams? He had thought of this before, of course. He was too insightful not have had the thought, too honest to dismiss it peremptorily, and yet too hardened to dwell on it.
Later, after he had made the last of the arrangements, set up a meeting with Weldon, scattered more bits of damning evidence (but not too many, and never too obviously; let them work, those cops; they loved to find elusive clues) — after everything was set and checked out, he realized whose dream voice had spoken Serbo-Croat words through Burton Weldon’s dead lips.
Jocelyn’s.
This, more than anything else about the dream, gnawed at him.
Six
Jocelyn sat, legs crossed, a hand at her chin. “You know,” she said, “when I heard about it I thought of you right away. Some of the things we were talking about before you left. And I wasn’t surprised when it happened, that’s another thing. That’s the thing, nobody was surprised. Somebody was listening to a radio and came down the hall passing the word, and hardly anybody was surprised. As if we all knew they would get him sooner or later. They get everybody.”
“But the boy was a leftist, wasn’t he?”
“If he did it.”
“I didn’t follow the reports too closely,” Dorn admitted. “But I understood it was open and-shut.”
“It always is, isn’t it? Who always gets shot? Kennedy. King. Bobby. Malcolm. Drury. They’re always leftists, and they always get shot by leftists.”
“Not King.”
“No, but it might have looked that way if they hadn’t caught that guy. And even so they want you to believe that there wasn’t a conspiracy, that this Ray broke out of prison and did it all by himself. Nobody believes that. Nobody believes the Warren Commission. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who believes the Warren Commission. And when Bobby Kennedy was killed, well, they caught him right there, he did it, but somebody must have put the idea in his head. I mean, he was this mixed-up little Arab; somebody must have put the idea in his head.”
“I see what you mean. And Weldon?”
“I guess he flipped out. The letter he started to write, and he evidently made some strange telephone calls. And he was supposed to be in an accident in a stolen car, and then he used a dead boy’s driver’s license to buy a gun in Vermont. Or else he had someone buy it for him. But other people said he was on campus in Caldwell when the accident took place.”
“Perhaps he had an accomplice.”
“Maybe.” She looked doubtful. “I guess he was very militant. So many kids, though. They talk more than they act. That’s part of the game, putting the Establishment uptight. Of course if he flipped out, and then they say he called somebody and said he realized Drury was his father. You know, if he was in that whole Oedipus bag—”
Was there anyone so easily manipulated as the amateur at revolution? They were suspicious, cautious, their caution occasionally verging on paranoia. They accepted it as highly likely that any adult was a policeman. But they did not honestly believe that anything could happen to them. They were young, and that damned them because the young always assume themselves to be immortal and immune. They may state flatly that they expect to die, that they do not expect the planet itself to survive another ten years. But the idea of personal death, of sudden pointless personal death, is never real to them.
And so they are oddly careless. It was easy to arrange a secret meeting with Burton Weldon, easy to mention a few of the correct names and phrases, easy to win not his trust but his physical presence.
“You may be a cop, man. Let’s say that I take it for granted you’re a cop.”
But, taking it for granted, he still told no one where he was going or whom he was meeting, he still met with Dorn and went into the Science Building with him, mounted the flights of stairs, entered the chemistry lab.
“The funeral was on television yesterday,” she said. “A lot of kids watched it. Even some of the ones who had gone around saying that Drury was just a knee-jerk liberal. They changed their attitudes completely the minute his body was cold. I didn’t watch the funeral.”
“A show,” Dorn said. “Entertainment for the public.”
“That’s all it is. And I was thinking. There was no big televised funeral for the fourteen kids who died in Washington. Someone was saying that they ought to put Burt Weldon’s funeral on television. You know, under the equal-time code.”
“There’s a bitter thought.”
“If Weldon even did it. But I guess there’s no doubt, is there? I mean, he was right there with the gun in his hands.”
“I was told to contact you,” he said, “because of your feelings toward Drury.”
“My feelings? The whole point of it is that I haven’t got any feelings about him. He doesn’t exist. He’s not relevant.”
“Some people feel he ties marginal revolutionaries to the Establishment.”
“No question. So?”