16

Witt had a new tennis court. One day Armande challenged Hugh to a set.

Ever since childhood and its nocturnal fears, sleep had been our Person's habitual problem. The problem was twofold. He was obliged, sometimes for hours, to woo the black automaton with an automatic repetition of some active image – that was one trouble. The other referred to the quasi-insane state into which sleep put him, once it did come. He could not believe that decent people had the sort of obscene and absurd nightmares which shattered his night and continued to tingle throughout the day. Neither the incidental accounts of bad dreams reported by friends nor the case histories in Freudian dream books, with their hilarious elucidations, presented anything like the complicated vileness of his almost nightly experience.

In his adolescence he attempted to solve the first part of the problem by an ingenious method which worked better than pills (these if too mild induced too little sleep, and if strong enhanced the vividness of monstrous visions). The method he hit upon was repeating in mind with metronomic precision the successive strokes of an outdoor game. The only game he had ever played in his youth and could still play at forty was tennis. Not only did he play tolerably well, with a certain easy stylishness (caught years ago from a dashing cousin who coached the boys at the New England school of which his father had been headmaster), but he had invented a shot which neither Guy, nor Guy's brother-in-law, an even finer professional, could either make or take. It had an element of art-for-art's sake about it, since it could not deal with low, awkward balls, required an ideally balanced stance (not easy to assume in a hurry) and, by itself, never won him a match. The Person Stroke was executed with a rigid arm and blended a vigorous drive with a clinging cut that followed the ball from the moment of impact to the end of the stroke. The impact (and this was the nicest part) had to occur at the far end of the racket's netting, with the performer standing well away from the bounce of the ball and as it were reaching out for it. The bounce had to be fairly high for the head of the racket to adhere properly, without a shadow of "twist," and then to propel the "glued" ball in a stiff trajectory. If the "cling" was not enduring enough or if it started too proximally, in the middle of the racket, the result was a very ordinary, floppy, slow-curving "galosh," quite easy, of course, to return; but when controlled accurately, the stroke reverberated with a harsh crack throughout one's forearm and whizzed off in a strongly controlled, very straight skim to a point near the baseline. On hitting the ground it clung to it in a way felt to be of the same order as the adherence of the ball to the strings during the actual stroke. While retaining its direct velocity, the ball hardly rose from the ground; in fact, Person believed that, with tremendous, all-consuming practice, the shot could be made nor to bounce at all but roll with lightning speed along the surface of the court. Nobody could return an unbouncing ball, and no doubt in the near future such shots would be ruled out as illegal spoilsports. But even in its inventor's rough version it could be delightfully satisfying. The return was invariably botched in a most ludicrous fashion, because of the low-darting ball refusing to be scooped up, let alone properly hit. Guy and the other Guy were intrigued and annoyed whenever Hugh managed to bring off his "cling drive" – which unfortunately for him was not often. He recouped himself by not telling the puzzled professionals, who tried to imitate the stroke (and achieved merely a feeble spin), that the trick lay not in the cut but in the cling, and not only in the cling itself but in the place where it occurred at the head of the strings as well as in the rigidity of the reaching-out movement of the arm. Hugh treasured his stroke mentally for years, long after the chances to use it dwindled to one or two shots in a desultory game. (In fact, the last time he executed it was that day at Witt with Armande, whereupon she walked off the court and could not be coaxed back.) Its chief use had been a means of putting himself to sleep. In those predormitory exercises he greatly perfected his stroke, such as quickening its preparation (when tackling a fast serve) and learning to reproduce its mirror image backhandedly (instead of running around the ball like a fool). No sooner had he found a comfortable place for his cheek on a cool soft pillow than the familiar firm thrill would start running through his arm, and he would be slamming his way through one game after another. There were additional trimmings: explaining to a sleepy reporter, "Cut it hard and yet keep it intact"; or winning in a mist of well-being the Davis Cup brimming with the poppy.

Why did he give up that specific remedy for insomnia when he married Armande? Surely not because she criticized his pet stroke as an insult and a bore? Was it the novelty of the shared bed, and the presence of another brain humming near his, that disturbed the privacy of the somnorific – and rather sophomoric – routine? Perhaps. Anyhow he gave up trying, persuaded himself that one or two entirely sleepless nights per week constituted for him a harmless norm, and on other nights contented himself with reviewing the events of the day (an automaton in its own right), the cares and misИres of routine life with now and then the peacock spot that prison psychiatrists called "having sex."

He had said that on top of the trouble in going to sleep, he experienced dream anguish?

Dream anguish was right! He might vie with the best lunatics in regard to the recurrence of certain nightmare themes. In some cases he could establish a first rough draft, with versions following in well-spaced succession, changing in minute detail, polishing the plot, introducing some new repulsive situation, yet every time rewriting a version of the same, otherwise inexisting, story. Let's hear the repulsive part. Well, one erotic dream in particular had kept recurring with cretinous urgency over a period of several years, before and after Armande's death. In that dream which the psychiatrist (a weirdie, son of an unknown soldier and a Gypsy mother) dismissed as "much too direct," he was offered a sleeping beauty on a great platter garnished with flowers, and a choice of tools on a cushion. These differed in length and breadth, and their number and assortment varied from dream to dream. They lay in a row, neatly aligned: a yard-long one of vulcanized rubber with a violet head, then a thick short burnished bar, then again a thinnish skewerlike affair, with rings of raw meat and translucent lard alternating, and so on – these are random samples. There was not much sense in selecting one rather than another – the coral or the bronze, or the terrible rubber – since whatever he took changed in shape and size, and could not be properly fitted to his own anatomical system, breaking off at the burning point or snapping in two between the legs or bones of the more or less disarticulated lady. He desired to stress the following point with the fullest, fiercest, anti-Freudian force. Those oneiric torments had nothing to do, either directly or in a "symbolic" sense, with anything he had experienced in conscious life. The erotic theme was just one theme among others, as A Boy for Pleasure remained just an extrinsic whimsy in relation to the whole fiction of the serious, too serious writer who had been satirized in a recent novel.

In another no less ominous nocturnal experience, he would find himself trying to stop or divert a trickle of grain or fine gravel from a rift in the texture of space and being hampered in every conceivable respect by cobwebby, splintery, filamentary elements, confused heaps and hollows, brittle debris, collapsing colossuses. He was finally blocked by masses of rubbish, and that was death. Less frightening but perhaps imperiling a person's brain to an even greater extent were the "avalanche" nightmares at the rush of awakening when their imagery turned into the movement of verbal colluvia in the valleys of Toss and Thurn, whose gray rounded rocks. Roches ЙtonnЙes, are so termed because of their puzzled and grinning surface, marked by dark "goggles" (ecarquillages). Dream-man is an idiot not wholly devoid of animal cunning; the fatal flaw in his mind corresponds to the splutter produced by tongue twisters: "the risks scoundrels take."