Bear and His Daughter by Robert Stone Page A

paralysis. He ate his candy bar without tasting it. He knew that the craving for sweets was itself a bad sign.
    Blankenship had misappropriated someone else’s dream and made it his own. It made no difference whether you had been there, after all. The dreams had crossed the ocean. They were in the air.
    He took his glasses off and put them on his desk and sat with his arms folded, looking into the well of light from his desk lamp. There seemed to be nothing but whirl inside him. Unwelcome things came and went in his mind’s eye. His heart beat faster. He could not control the headlong promiscuity of his thoughts.
    It was possible to imagine larval dreams traveling in suspended animation undetectable in a host brain. They could be divided and regenerate like flatworms, hide in seams and bedding, in war stories, laughter snapshots. They could rot your socks and turn your memory into a black and green blister. Green for the hills, black for the sky above. At daybreak they hung themselves up in rows like bats. At dusk they went out to look for dreamers.
    Elliot put his jacket on and went into the outer office, where the secretary sat frowning into the measured sound and light of her machine. She must enjoy its sleekness and order he thought. She was divorced. Four red-headed kids between ten and seventeen lived with her in an unpainted house across from Stop & Shop. Elliot liked her and had come to find her attractive. He managed a smile for her.
    “Ethel, I think I’m going to pack it in,” he declared. It seemed awkward to be leaving early without a reason.
    “Jack wants to talk to you before you go, Chas.”
    Elliot looked at her blankly.
    Then his colleague, Jack Sprague, having heard his voice, called from the adjoining cubicle. “Chas, what about Sunday’s games? Shall I call you with the spread?”
    “I don’t know,” Elliot said. “I’ll phone you tomorrow.”
    “This is a big decision for him,” Jack Sprague told the secretary. “He might lose twenty-five bucks.”
    At present, Elliot drew a slightly higher salary than Jack Sprague, although Jack had a Ph.D. and Elliot was only an M.S.W. Different branches of the state government employed them.
    “Twenty-five bucks,” said the woman. “If you guys have no better use for twenty-five bucks, give it to me.”
    “Where are you off to, by the way?” Sprague asked.
    Elliot began to answer but for a moment no reply occurred to him. He shrugged. “I have to get back,” he finally stammered. “I promised Grace.”
    “Was that Blankenship I saw leaving?”
    Elliot nodded.
    “It’s February,” Jack said. “How come he’s not in Florida?”
    “I don’t know,” Elliot said. He put on his coat and walked to the door. “I’ll see you.”
    “Have a nice weekend,” the secretary said. She and Sprague looked after him indulgently as he walked toward the main corridor.
    “Are Chas and Grace going out on the town?” she said to Sprague. “What do you think?”
    “That would be the day,” Sprague said. “Tomorrow he’ll come back over here and read all day. He spends every weekend holed up in this goddamn office while she does something or other at the church.” He shook his head. “Every night he’s at A.A. and she’s home alone.”
    Ethel savored her overbite. “Jack,” she said teasingly, “are you thinking what I think you’re thinking? Shame on you.”
    “I’m thinking I’m glad I’m not him, that’s what I’m thinking. That’s as much as I’ll say.”
    “Yeah, well, 1 don’t care,” Ethel said. “Two salaries and no kids, that’s the way to go, boy.”

    Elliot went out through the automatic doors of the emergency bay and the cold closed over him. He walked across the hospital parking lot with his eyes on the pavement, his hands thrust deep in his overcoat pockets, skirting patches of shattered ice. There was no wind, but the motionless air stung; the metal frames of his glasses burned his skin. Curlicues of mud-brown ice