Overheard in a Dream. Torey Hayden

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ what I hate. She acts like in coming out here, I’ve run away when in fact, I’ve done just the opposite. I’ve faced up to myself, to where I went wrong. I made some bad choices and took some wrong turnings but when I realized that, I took action to create a better life. It just wasn’t the one she thought she was signing up for.”

      Very slowly, Conor began to talk more. It was difficult to tell if it was meaningful speech or simply echolalia because it was made up largely of phrases James himself had used first, but it became increasingly clear that Conor wanted to interact.

      One morning when he arrived, Conor said, “In here, you decide,” at the doorway of the playroom, almost as if it were a greeting.

      “Good morning, Conor. Won’t you come in?” James replied.

      “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

      For a long moment Conor remained in the doorway. He pressed the cat against his face, over his eyes, then lowered it and pointed it around the room.

      “In here, you decide,” he said again. “In here, you go around the room.” He began his usual counter-clockwise perambulation. Once, twice, three times he went around the room.

      “Where’s the boy’s auroch?” he said suddenly. “In here, you decide.”

      “Yes,” James said. “In this room you can decide for yourself if you want to play with the toy animals.”

      “Where’s the boy’s auroch? You decide.”

      “Would you like me to help you find the basket?” James asked.

      “Find the basket with the animals,” Conor replied, although James couldn’t discern if it was a genuine response or simply an incomplete echo.

      Rising from his chair, James crossed over to the shelves. “Here are the animals,” he said, and lifted the red wire basket out. “Shall I take it to the table for you?”

      “In here, you decide.”

      “That’s right. You decide if you want me to take it to the table.”

      “Take it to the table.”

      Conor followed. Lifting the cat up, he scanned the basket, then reached in and lifted an animal out. “Here is a dog,” he said and set it on the table. This seemed to please him. There was almost the hint of a smile on his lips. “Here is a duck.” He set that up too.

      James watched him as he progressed through the basket of animals. While the boy’s actions were slow and obsessive, they were not quite the same as the rote repetitions of an autistic child. They were nuanced in a way that made James quite certain they had meaning, although he couldn’t even speculate at this point what it might be.

      “Here is the boy’s auroch,” Conor said with emphasis. “The auroch will stand with the others.” He surveyed them. “There are many animals. How many? How many is many?” Then he started to count them. This was new. James hadn’t heard him count before. “Forty-six. Forty-six is many. Forty-six in all,” Conor said.

      “You like seeing many animals,” James said. “I hear a pleased voice counting.”

      “There is no cat.”

      “No, there’s no cat among them.”

      “Many animals. Forty-six animals. But no cat,” Conor said.

      “No. All of those animals, but none of them is a cat,” James reflected back to indicate he was listening carefully.

      “Now they will die,” Conor said matter-of-factly. “The dog will die.” He pushed the dog on its side. “The duck will die. The elephant will die.” One by one he went through the plastic animals, pushing them over on to their sides. There was no distress in his voice. The animals all died with the same equanimity as they had lined up.

      “Died. Many animals have died,” Conor said. “No more in-and-out. No more steam.” He pulled his toy cat out from under his arm where it had been stashed. He scanned it over the fallen animals, pushing the cat’s nose up against each individually. “The cat knows.”

      The cat knows? James thought. The cat knows what? Or perhaps he had been misunderstanding all this time. Perhaps it was “the cat nose”. Perhaps Conor believed the cat was capable of scenting something.

      “Where’s the rug?” Conor said suddenly and looked at James.

      James looked up blankly.

      Conor turned his head and glanced around the room. Abruptly his face lit up and he crossed over behind James to get the box of tissues.

      Coming back to the table, Conor pulled tissues out of the box and laid them one by one over the plastic animals. This took up most of the space on the table. And most of the tissues too.

      When he was finished, Conor surveyed his work. “Where is the dog?” he asked. Then he lifted one tissue. “The dog is here. Where is the duck? The duck is here.” Repetitively he went through all the animals, asking where an animal was and then lifting the tissue to say that here it was. There was a repetitive, sing-song quality to his questions and answers. This reminded James of a baby’s game of peek-a-boo. However, there was also a stuck-record quality to it, as though once started he couldn’t stop himself.

      “You are concerned that the dog won’t be there, that the dog might not be under the tissue, if you can’t see him,” James ventured to interpret. “You want to look again and again to make sure.”

      For a brief moment, Conor looked up, looked directly at James, his eyes a cloudy, indistinct blue. He had registered James’s comment and by his reaction James guessed his interpretation must have been correct.

      “You are worried about what you will find under the tissue, so you must look,” James reiterated.

      “The dog is dead,” Conor replied.

      “You think the dog is dead and so that’s why you’ve put a tissue over it.”

      “A rug.”

      “So you’ve put a rug over it.”

      “The cat knows.”

      “The cat knows the dog is dead?” James asked.

      “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

      “You are making your worried sound,” James said.

      “The dog is dead,” Conor said very softly. “The duck is dead. The auroch is dead.” He looked down at the toy cat in his hands. “Someday the cat will die too.” And as he stood, a single tear fell, wending a wet path down over his cheek.

       Chapter Eight

      “So what exactly happened to you that night you first saw Torgon?” James asked, once Laura was settled for her next session. “When you experienced this intense imaginative episode?”

      Laura sat in silence for a few minutes. “Well, СКАЧАТЬ