17. Waking up into a Bad Dream and then a Beautiful Reality
Nothingness is almost impossible to describe or imagine. The interval you can't experience consciously, between dropping off to deep sleep and before dreaming and awakening is such a nothingness. It is, Eddie guesses, like the nothingness after one’s dying.
Eddie comes out of sleep into a dream. He is on a train, on its Pullman sofa. It makes a brief stop and he jumps up, wraps a thin blanket around his nakedness and goes out of the train onto the station platform to get fresh air. But, just as he fills his lungs with it, the doors of the train slide shut and off goes the train and there he is - in the dream - wrapped only in a blanket on a platform and he dreads having to go into the station for help.
Eddie opens eyes, awakening from the dream. Quickly he scribbles its details into his notebook on sofa table. Since Dr. Stan's seminar on dreaming, Eddie is writing down his dreams on awaking. And he is getting good at interpreting them. In this one he recognizes a repetition of his phobia of being exposed without clothes. Also he sees in the location of the dream, sleeping on sofa in a train - an imprecise copy of the sleeper's actual condition; here, sleeping on the living-room sofa in Pris's flat. This sameness of locations in dreams with the sleeper's location convinces Eddie that dreams occur at the interface between sleep and wake and that elements of dreams are simply the faintly conscious impressions of the sleeper as he wakes.
A knocking takes his attention. A sharp Knock! Knock! Knock! Followed by a hissing. Having been brought up in a Bronx flat, he recognizes the steam heat radiator starting sound. Must be 6 AM, he thinks, as that is the time the super's Black Joe helper starts the basement furnace firing with coal.
It is almost jet black in Pris's living room and still icy cold late December. He gets up from the sofa, lights the room, folds the comforter cover neatly as Pris likes and, pulling a white-towel bathrobe about his body, goes to kitchen and turns on light. Spotless as usual, he thinks. She is Miss Spic & Span. He shivers even as the kitchen heats up, happily heating water for tea.
It is months now after that first date and Eddie is living at Pris's place. She invited him to stay, next day after that Sunday, and he said Yes. His situation is that he is an on-assignment soldier, which means outside of the usual lines of army command, because of his specially valued computer work at the 42nd Street Army Recruiting Center. He has bunk space in a barracks at the Army camp on Governors Island just off the tip of Manhattan Island and he can sleep around as he pleases as long as he reports for duty at 42nd Street Mondays to Fridays, 9 AM.
His folks still live nearby and his mother keeps his room and he occasionally sleeps there to make her happy but most nights, weekends and holidays he spends at Pris's Place. And not always with her. They have developed what she calls a free relationship. He sleeps on the sofa and eats at the small round glass-top table with his chair by window that gives a sixth-floor view of the Parkway and building-tops and streets and the El subway train on stilts over Jerome Ave. On Sunday or Saturday afternoon or a holiday he might either go some place with her or stay behind doing his own study, reading, thinking and enjoying at the flat.
They started having sex at her initiation with his enthusiastic assent. She uses a contraceptive diaphragm putting it in nights before lying down. She does not approve of what he calls spontaneous sex and Eddie, being so thankful for this wonderful person who came into his life decides he better not allow his male urge during daytime ruin his newly found paradise.
Back to Eddie in kitchen.
Carrying a tray with cup of steaming tea and a few small mints, he returns to a now steam-heated living room and sits by the window. "I got steam heat!" he sings, thinking, Nothing like steam heat - the moist warm feeling so good for the skin and making one feel so sure all is right with one's self.
He looks out window down on the now winter sun’s lightening early morning. Sipping hot tea with mint on tongue, he contemplates the opportunities he has fallen into. Meeting Miss Ali and Professor Edwardes and attending the seminars had given him unusual insight of potential futures. And for so young a fellow the varied sexual experiences - Ali's initiating him into masturbation and then the friendly rape, the homosexual experience, and now with this with Pris. These are all working to make him a youth who can see his future potentials as though he were looking back at the end of a long life. And he sees himself now at Pris's Place in what he would call a magic moment,, a time when a whole series of systems are working to produce a Utopian period of learning, a time of happiness that will be like reaching the peak at Darien.
How long this magic moment? Not long, he guesses; it is abnormal for a young man to get stuck in paradise. He wants to stay long enough to acquire the skills but not so long he can't escape.
"Hello, young lover!" her voice interrupts. She is standing at the French door to the living room in a wrap with flower design on white, and carrying her cup. She comes to his table and sits facing him. "That book you got me - Physician's Notebooks. Incredible knowledge! No wonder all these good things are happening to you."
"You," he replies, causing her to color.
She asks, "Is Physician's Notebooks commercial? I mean, can people buy it? It looks like it was typed by scribes."
"Monkeys at typewriters is more likely,"he jokes, recalling the writing seminar. "No. Dr Edwardes got it from another professor. It gets circulated to university professors and they give it to special students they want to help succeed."
"Well, now I am one of the students and I succeeded. I got you, Mr. Soldier." She gets up. "I shall shower, have a breakfast, and today - Sunday - I am going to Dr Davidoff's office and type his manuscript. She goes to the kitchen.
He thinks I enjoy so much living with Pris. She asks nothing of me, she gives what she likes to give and it is good, and she accepts what I give happily. There is no tension between us. I am free to be me.
He goes to the bookshelf and pulls Fundamentals of Neuroscience and starts his reading session on the cerebellum - the mysterious 2nd brain behind and under the first. He gets 20 almonds to slowly eat as he reads, an almond deliciously chewed for each page read. The slow eating of healthy food snacks to reinforce reading memory is another suggestion from Physician's Notebooks. He is on the cerebellum's role in memory. It is the memory bank for physical action memory - not the kind of memory children use in school to recite poems by heart but the memory of doing an action physically with perfect coordination without thinking it ahead. Like stick-shift driving a car - one just does it automatically without thinking. But the automatic part has been acquired and housed in cerebellar memory. Whenever Eddy enters the lobby downstairs to Pris's flat he now automatically presses the sequence 8361 to open-sesame the door. He does not need to recall the numbers; it is only his fingers that remember; and he thinks triumphantly, Cerebellar memory!
He reads the important chapter twice. In the reading he hopes to learn how the cerebellum functions in consciousness, which traditionally has been associated only with the cerebral cortex - the main brain. And he guesses, it is somewhat like his new computer.
He is humming I got steam heat. The room has become nicely warm and he takes off his bathrobe and puts on shorts with no shirt.
After 15 minutes consuming the deliciously chewed almonds, he goes for a different read, - Einstein's Relativity - now on general relativity that explains gravity like billiard balls going into holes. He will do that with a cup of Pris's strawberry jello.
To continue next, click 14.18 Brenda Gets Pregnant With a Little Help
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