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bourbon, then took the cup and drank it down.
"Better?" Farley asked. She nodded. "Sit down. I'll get a blanket to
put around you." Wordlessly she sat down by the fire. Sam was making coffee.
No one spoke until they all had coffee. Then Farley took Victoria's
hand. "We have to finish it," he said.
She nodded without looking at him. "I'm crazy," she said. "I would have
killed myself that night if that cowboy hadn't been there to save my life."
"You saved yourself," Farley said. "You panicked and you ran. You knew
there was no forest, no river, no mist, but they were there. You invented
Reuben, you projected him, because you couldn't resist the evidence of your
senses. You had to have help and no one was there to help you, so you helped
yourself, through Reuben."
"I'm going to bed," Victoria said dully. She made no motion to get up.
Farley was not certain if she could accept anything he was saying. He
could not tell if she heard him. "You acted out of self-preservation," he
said.
"It was all just a dream or a series of hallucinations," Sam said. His
voice was hard, grating. His angular face looked aged; his full beard made him
look Biblical, like an old bitter prophet.
"You can't regard it all as one thing," Farley said. "That's the
mistake you made before, the same mistake the psychiatrist made, that if part
of it was false, it all was. Obviously the cowboy figure is right out of
romantic fiction, but that doesn't make the rest of it false. I wondered if
Victoria rejected the truth because she was convinced the truth was
impossible, and accepted instead the illusions that could have been possible."
He paused, then added, "Both in what she saw in the valley, and again in the
cowboy."
Victoria stirred and shook her head. "I don't understand anything," she
said, but with more animation now, as if she were awakening.
"I don't either," Farley said. "But you did see something, and you
smelled and heard Ghost River. I bet not more than a dozen people today know
it was ever called that, but you renamed it. That's what I keep coming back
to."
"That's crap!" Sam shouted. "She saw something and ran. Probably she
stumbled and knocked herself out. You know you can't run over that country,
not even in daylight. She dreamed all the rest of it." He had risen to stand
over Victoria. "The only important thing is, what did you see in the valley?"
"Not what you want me to say!" Victoria cried. "It wasn't a god figure.
Not a burning bush or a pillar of flame. Not good or evil. Nothing we can
know."
Farley reached out to touch her and she jerked away. "You said we have
to finish it. We do! I do! Sam, you wanted to know my nightmare. Let me tell
you. I'm wearing tights, covered with sequins, circus makeup, my hair in a
long glittering braid. Spotlights are on me. I'm climbing the ladder to the
tightrope and there's a drum roll, the whole thing. I know I can do this, the
way you know you can ride a bike, or swim, or just walk. I smile at the crowd
and start out on the rope and suddenly there is absolute silence. I look down
and realize the crowd is all on one side of the rope, to my left; no one is on
the right side. The audience is waiting for me to fall. Nothing else. They
know I'll fall and they are waiting. They aren't impatient, or eager; they
have no feelings at all. They don't care. That's when I panic, when I realize
they don't care. And I know I must not fall on their side. I try to scream for
someone to open the safety net, for someone to take my hand, for anything.
Then I am falling and I don't know which side I'm on. I won't know until I
hit. That is what terrifies me, that I don't know which side I'll die on." Her
voice had become almost a monotone as she told the dream. Abruptly she rose to
her feet. "I'd like some more bourbon, please."
Farley poured it and she sat down once more and drank before she spoke
again.
"I came back here to see which side of the rope I'll land on. The next
time I'll finish the dream and find out."
Sam reached for the bottle and poured bourbon into his cup. "A lousy
dream," he muttered.
"Indifference, that's what made it a nightmare. Their indifference,"
Victoria said quietly. She sipped at her drink and went on. "It's the same way
we might break up an anthill and watch the ants scurry. Or how we tear a
spiderweb and maybe see the spider dart away, or not. We don't care. We watch
or not, it doesn't matter. Like the bank camera that photographs me when I go
to the window. Me, a bank robber, someone asking for information, it doesn't
matter, the camera clicks its picture." She was starting to slur her words
slightly. Her voice was low, almost inaudible part of the time. "It ... they
watched me like that. They didn't care if I went over the cliff or not."
Farley felt the hair rise on the back of his neck and wondered if she
realized what she was saying. She wasn't talking about the dream any longer.
"They didn't care if I went over the cliff. They didn't care if I
stopped, or ran, what I did." She drained her cup, then set it down on the
ground with elaborate care. "That's inhuman," she said. "Not like a god, the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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