Free Early Warning by Jane Smiley Page A

as far as she knew, didn’t have any dreams. But Dr. Katz seemed to like the dream stories she told him, and to find them revealing.
    She went on, “I’ve been married twice already. So maybe I’m not fifteen. But it seems like both those things are true. The main thing is the feel of the grass on the hillside—rough and full of burrs.”
    “Hmm,” said Dr. Katz.
    “Then a man comes up to me, and I know that this is my new husband, and I really like him best.” She paused, then said, “He smiles more than the others did. He’s not Frank. Anyway, we walk along the hillside, which is steep, and then, all of a sudden, he has a bow in his hand, and he’s shooting arrows at some people. And his bowstring breaks, and he asks me for some of my hair. I say no.”
    “Explain, please,” said Dr. Katz.
    “I can’t explain. I just say no. So he stands there with the broken bowstring, and then he is shot through the neck, and I woke up. I guess I looked over at Frank, and he was lying on his back, but he was fine. So I lay there for a few minutes, and then went back to sleep.” In fact, Frank was not next to her. But, then, she hadn’t had the dream, either.
    Dr. Katz said, “Do you feel that you withheld something from your husband, and it killed him?”
    “Well,” said Andy, “he was outnumbered.”
    “Is that what you feel, that he was outnumbered?”
    “Why would he think that he could use hair as a bowstring? It makes no sense.”
    “Did you feel that in the dream, that his idea was a foolish one?”
    “I felt nothing. I just said no.”
    “Did you feel in mortal danger?”
    “No.”
    Andy was beginning to regret that she had told this story. Finally, she said, “People die in my dreams all the time.” From, she thought, fallout. Dr. Katz said, “Yes, they do,” which surprised her. She said, “But it seems like, in the dream, I always know that it’s a dream, and that the person is not really dying, or that the person is not really a person. One or the other.”
    “You do not grieve for them.”
    Andy said, “No.” A question offered itself: was she a heartless person? When Lillian told her over the phone the night before that the son of a friend of hers, nine years old, also named Michael, had been hit by a car crossing the road by the house, killed instantly, Lillian wept in sympathy, but Andy felt cold, stared at the ash of her cigarette, had nothing to say. Was she the most heartless client hehad? But you weren’t supposed to ask questions, you were supposed to arrive at answers.
    There was an extra-long silence. Andy thought of being honest and telling him that she had related a story, not a dream. But then he would ask her what the difference was, and she would have to say that she didn’t know.

1957

    W HEN DID LILLIAN HAVE TIME to read the papers, or to watch the news on TV? And yet things filtered through—Hungary in November, the Suez crisis at the same time, both of them crushing. Even so, though Arthur came home a little late, he did come home in the usual way, full of fun and with a big appetite, two helpings of everything, though you couldn’t tell that to look at him. He didn’t lose his sex drive until February, which Lillian thought, secretly, was a bit of a relief. Then, one night, she got up to go to the bathroom, and when she got back to bed, in the moonlight the tears were glistening on his cheeks and his eyes were wide open, even though he was lying still and not saying a word. It was like getting in bed with a stranger. She said, “Arthur?”
    He rolled onto his side, his back to her, and she slipped under the covers. She put her hand on his head and scratched, just very lightly, and it put her right to sleep. Sometime after that, he slipped his arms around her sleeping body and woke her up, sobbing on her shoulder. He hadn’t been like this for years, not since Timmy was born alive and healthy. Even when his father died, his eyes had remained dry and his back