But of course that made perfect sense. This was, after all, a dream—in which, I reminded myself, everything was choreographed
to some specific and intended point. The only question, I thought to myself as I continued dreaming, was: What point?
The strangest thing of all was that I recognized her, though I didn’t know why or from where. But I knew at once and with
absolute certainty that I had to get out of the cab, catch up with her, and speak to her.
I pushed a five-dollar bill into the driver’s hand and told him to drop me right there. Then I got out of the cab and started
after the woman along the busy sidewalk. Strangely, although I was hurrying as fast as I could, even breaking into a run at
times, I seemed unable to catch up with her. She strolled on at her leisurely, untroubled pace, forever the same frustrating
distance ahead of me.
“It’s all right,” I told myself, “it’s just a dream, that’s why you can’t catch her. The dream is trying to tell you something.
You’ll catch her if you’re supposed to.”
Suddenly, as though that thought had been the key to closing the gap between us, I found myself right behind her, close enough
to touch. I reached out for her shoulder, afraid she would get away again before she’d seen me.
She turned. Her face, beautiful in its surprise at first, took on an expression of horror as she recognized me. She threw
up her hands and gave a piercing scream.
I awoke with a gasp, bathed in perspiration as though I really had been running along that warm Manhattan sidewalk. I looked
at the digital clock beside my bed.
The time was 4:44.
T
he opening party at the gallery was a great success, with an even larger turnout than usual of media celebrities, well-heeled
collectors, and members of lofty museum boards. Personally I found the work on show to be trash, but you can’t say that without
having a degree in fine arts, preferably a doctorate, and the ability to write the kind of impenetrably meaningless prose
in which art critics specialize. I smiled my way around the room, conversing on autopilot. But I was happy for Sara, who looked
particularly beautiful that night and was clearly basking in her triumph.
We didn’t get home till after two in the morning. I climbed into bed and gave Sara a big hug of congratulation—the first time
I’d had the chance all evening. She fell asleep in my arms. I would normally have said she fell asleep “happily” in my arms,
but I knew now that she had not found happiness with me. That knowledge hurt. Badly. After a while I gently disengaged myself
and lay staring at the darkened ceiling.
It was no good. I couldn’t sleep, and if I couldn’t sleep I was going to scream. I slipped quietly out of bed and went to
my study. I sat in the dark looking out at the lights of Manhattan for almost an hour. Suddenly I became aware of Sara watching
me from the door. She was genuinely concerned and made a real effort to encourage me to talk about whatever was worrying me.
I managed to reassure her and sent her back to bed; the fact that she was exhausted helped a great deal. I promised I would
come to bed just as soon as I’d finished working through some ideas for my book—the usual old reliable standby of an excuse.
After that I went to the guest room as on the previous night and took a pill. Once again I fell asleep relatively quickly.
Almost at once I found myself in the back of the same cab with the same driver. His fare meter and the clock on his dash both
showed 4:44. He gave the same reply—“That’s how it works”—to my question about his dash clock being wrong. I saw the woman
on the sidewalk, exactly as before. I stopped the cab and followed her, unable to catch up at first, then, finding myself
right behind her, I reached out to touch her and she turned. As before, her look of surprise turned to horror. She threw up
her hands and gave a piercing scream.
The time on my bedside clock when I awoke with a gasp and bathed in perspiration was again 4:44.
There was no way I was going to get back to sleep, and eventually I gave up trying. I decided to pull on a tracksuit and go
for a jog—not in the park, but there were plenty of broad well-lit sidewalks where people ran throughout the night without
much risk of being mugged or bothered in any way. I had already noticed in my dressing room that there were a couple of jackets,
some shirts, and sweaters that I didn’t recognize and that must have been Larry’s purchases. Among them was a sleek gray-and-black
tracksuit that I had no recollection of seeing before and that I thought I’d try on. Naturally enough it fitted me perfectly.
I found some running shoes, also new, and pulled them on. As I knelt to tie them, I felt something in the tracksuit pocket
dig into my hip. I reached in and pulled out a plastic card. It was black, about the size of a credit card, and without marking
of any kind on either side.
For some moments I just held it in the palm of my hand and looked at it. My mind raced with possibilities. The most likely
thing was that it was some kind of key, to a hotel room, a security door, a locker of some kind. But why wasn’t it marked?
That suggested it was not meant to be identified if it fell into the wrong hands. Its function was to be known only to its
rightful owner.
What, I wondered, was Larry’s secret? And how could I go about finding it out?
I waited till Joe came on duty downstairs and asked him about the firm that had installed the security system in our building
and the friend he’d claimed to have who worked there. He gave me his friend’s name without hesitation and called him to say
that I would be stopping by.
Just after ten I was in the shop, which was Midtown off Broadway, asking what they could tell me about the black card. The
answer was depressingly little. A quick test established that it was indeed a magnetic key as I had suspected, but beyond
that there was nothing to suggest the location of the lock it might fit.
“It could be a security door, a private safe, or safe deposit box of some kind,” said Leroy, Joe’s amiable friend with an
unruly mop of dreadlocks that covered half his face, “even a luggage locker. I can have somebody go over it and tell you how
good it is and therefore the kind of place that it might belong, but probably no more than that.”
“Try anyway,” I said, and left it with him. He said he’d get back to me by the next morning at the latest.
“For all his fascination with ghost stories, Charles Dickens liked to think of himself as free from all forms of superstition,”
writes Brian Inglis in his book about coincidence, then recounts the following story in Dickens’s own words. It obviously
refers to the public readings he used to give of his works to enthralled audiences in England and America:
I dreamt that I saw a lady in a red shawl with her back towards me (whom I supposed to be E). On her turning round, I found
that I didn’t know her and she said, “I am Miss Napier.”
All the time I was dressing next morning I thought—what a preposterous thing to have so very distinct a dream about nothing;
and why Miss Napier? For I had never heard of any Miss Napier. That same Friday night, I read. After the reading, came into
my retiring room Mary Boyle and her brother and the lady in the red shawl, whom they presented as “Miss Napier!”
I was spending the afternoon searching through my collection of books on dreams—from Freud to the occult—trying to get some
handle on the symbolism of my own.
To hard-line rationalists like Francis Crick, dreams are without meaning or significance of any kind, just the nocturnal rumblings
of our mental digestive systems. But that only makes dreams that appear to predict the future all the more remarkable. For
example:
British Rail had a call from a woman who claimed to have had a vision of a fatal crash in which a freight train had been involved.
So clear had it been, she said, that she not merely saw the blue diesel engine, but could read the number: 47216. Two years
later, an accident of the kind she predicted occurred, all the details matching—except one: the engine’s number was 47299.
That would have been that, but a train spotter happened to have noticed that 47299 was not the engine’s original number. It
had been renumbered a couple of years before from 47216. Diesels, the train spotter knew, were ordinarily renumbered only
after major modifications, which this one had not undergone. When curiosity prompted him to ask why, he was told about the
prediction. Apparently British Rail officials had been sufficiently impressed (they had checked with the local police and
found that the woman had previously given them useful information from her visions) to try to ward off Fate by changing the
number.
The sense of déjà vu is attributed by some people, those who are prepared to believe in such things, to a forgotten precognitive
dream that stirs in the subconscious memory when the event predicted eventually happens. Rationalists, on the other hand,
explain it by a process called “priming,” which is a demonstrable capacity of the brain to absorb information subliminally
into the unconscious. In other words, you know something without knowing that you know it. Later, when the conscious brain
sees something that reflects this unconscious knowledge, it experiences a sense of déjà vu.
I suppose that Occam’s razor—the rule that says we should always accept the explanation that requires the fewest assumptions—would
back the second view.
Doesn’t guarantee it’s right though.
O
ur nights were becoming a ritual by now. Yet again I went to bed with Sara, around midnight this time, and lay there until
she was asleep. Then I slipped from between the covers and went to my study, where I tried to read. But concentration was
impossible. After barely half an hour I abandoned the struggle and went to the guest room. Again I took a sleeping pill, but
this time it did not have the same immediate effect.
I surfed through the late shows and then the late-late shows, and then I must have finally drifted into sleep, because I became
aware that I was dreaming again. Once again I was in the back of the same cab with its clock and meter both reading 4:44,
the same driver making the same remark, the same spectacularly attractive and dramatically attired woman on the sidewalk,
the same chase, the same scream of terror when she turned and saw me.
But this time I didn’t wake up. I was aware of a certain excitement as I felt the dream moving into unknown territory. A second
later I realized that the woman’s scream was not directed at me at all. I wasn’t even sure she’d seen me, though the only
reason she had turned was the pressure of my hand on her shoulder. But she was looking past me, somewhere beyond, from where
I now heard a screech of brakes and a sickening thud. I spun around—and saw that a car had knocked down a pedestrian, a man
who lay sprawled at an unnatural angle in the road.
“Call 911,” the woman said.
I turned back to look at her.
“Call 911,” she repeated urgently, and pushed past me to where people were now crowding around the injured man.
Once again I awoke with a start and found myself breathless and perspiring. Once again I found myself looking at the bedside
clock.
Once again it read 4:44.
But this time the lights were on, and so was the television. I was slumped awkwardly across my pillow where I’d fallen asleep.
And there was something on the screen that almost made my heart stop. It was the woman from my dream, dressed in that same
encoiling black-and-white theatrical creation with the dramatic wide-brimmed hat. But this time she was against a totally
white background, which threw into sharper focus those magnificent long black-stockinged legs.
“She walks in beauty,” crooned a deep male voice on the sound track. And up came the logo for a brand of pantyhose.
It was the brand that I knew had been used to strangle Nadia Shelley.
Next morning Joe’s friend Leroy from the security company phoned shortly after ten to tell me what he’d found out about the
key card I’d left with him. In fact he’d found out very little except that it carried quite a sophisticated code, which suggested
it was more than just a hotel or locker room key. Also, he said, it probably opened more than one lock, for example an outer
security door and then a safe deposit box. Beyond that he couldn’t help. I asked him to messenger the card back to me. It
arrived just as I was leaving to have lunch with my agent, Lou Bennett. I slipped it into my pocket and headed for the subway,
which, I could see from the traffic, was going to be faster than taking a cab.
I had called Lou because, despite his age and his fondness for long three-Martini (and then some) lunches, he was one of the
smartest and most perceptive people I’d ever met. I knew he’d had lunch with Larry a couple of times and they’d talked on
the phone now and again, and I wanted to find out if he’d noticed anything different about “me” on those occasions. I wasn’t
going to tell him why I wanted to know, just ask the question. One of the things I liked about Lou was that you didn’t have
to explain yourself to him. He knew that life in general and people in particular were too complex to be easily understood,
and he rarely even tried; he just observed.
It seemed that everybody and his cousin was heading downtown that morning. The subway car I got into was packed to the doors
even though it was well past the rush hour. I couldn’t help giving a slightly sour smile of amusement as I thought about the
consolations offered by Dave’s philosophy of life to this and other discomforts. That wasn’t really someone’s elbow in my
back, and that fat man breathing in my face didn’t really stink of half-chewed sugared peanuts, nor was the music leakage
from the Walkman worn by some kid jammed against my right shoulder really setting my teeth on edge: It was all just information
fed into a quantum computer, as was I myself, and any resemblance to painful physical reality was purely coincidental. The
world was, as any Eastern mystic could have told me with or without Dave’s scientific mumbo-jumbo, an illusion.