Exiles in America(121)

Houses and schools and shopping malls. And people. It crushes them like

bugs. Leaving tiny spots of blood like when you slap a mosquito.”

“You’re no longer happy in the dream?”

“Oh no. I’m terrified. And confused. This is an angel of the Lord, and

these are His people. Why is He destroying them?”

It was Friday morning, two weeks into the new year, 2003, and Fay Daw-

son’s anxiety attacks were back. Her usual appointment was Monday after-

noon, but she’d needed to see Zack immediately. She connected the return of

her panic to a dream she’d had on Wednesday night.

“Then what happened?”

“I woke up. I was shaking. Like a leaf.” Her face turned chalky pale as she

remembered. “I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t catch my breath. But Yancy held

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me—he was very good to me this time—and I could breathe again. But I

couldn’t go back to sleep. I just lay there, terrified. And ashamed. I’ve been

anxious ever since.”

“Why were you ashamed?”

“For dreaming what I dreamed. For being afraid of God. For being angry

with God.”

Fay had never come to him with an overt dream about God or heaven or

even damnation. As if religion were all in her conscious, not her unconscious.

Or maybe she didn’t trust Zack enough to share her nakedly religious dreams.

“I’ve told you, Fay. You can’t feel guilty for your dreams. Your dreams are

outside your control.”

“That’s an easy thing to say. It’s not an easy thing to feel.”

“You said you were angry with God? Why?” He usually tried to avoid any-

thing theological, but this might lead into the personal.

“Oh, stuff. Don’t you know?” She had to take a deep breath before she

could say it. “They tell us God will protect us if we love Him. And we do love

Him, my whole family does. But He doesn’t protect us. He keeps letting ter-

rible things happen. Like Melissa almost dying. And now He’s filled the world

with terrorists who want to hurt us for no good reason. It isn’t fair. Reverend

Donald says it’s not for us to judge God, but one can’t help feeling—cheated.”

It was a war dream. Of course. Zack should’ve recognized sooner that

Fay’s angel was a bomber or a missile. “Have you been watching a lot of news

since Christmas?”

“Yes. Well, I don’t. Yancy does. He keeps cable on all evening, even while

we’re eating dinner. It’s awful what that Saddam can do to us.” She pro-

nounced his name “Sodom.” “He has all those terrible germs and chemicals

and things. Ugh. It’s too awful to think about.”

As soon as the holidays ended, the media had started talking up Iraq again.

The weapons inspectors were finding no weapons of mass destruction, which

the administration said only proved Saddam Hussein wasn’t cooperating and

the United States would have to invade. A few politically aware patients—all

leftists or liberals—began to come to Zack with war dreams, variations on the

old nuclear nightmares of the Reagan years: booms of blinding light, fiery

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conflagrations, black rain. Zack didn’t recognize the war dressed up in angels,

but the H-bomb dreams were religious, too, weren’t they? The end of the

world, the end of time.

Fay feared Iraq would do to us the very things that we would probably do

to them. After all, we were the ones with bombers like destroying angels. It

was a classic case of projection, but Zack couldn’t get into that without dis-

cussing world politics. No, he needed to bring this back into her life, her pri-

vate concerns.

“What’s happened since Monday? I remember we had a very good session

on Monday.”

Nothing had happened, everything was fine, Fay said. The kids were back

in school. And not a moment too soon, since Malvern was being a pig again.

He used to be such a lovable kid, but now he was mean and hateful. “Which

is an awful thing for a mother to say about her own flesh and blood.”

Zack heard the front door open and close. Daniel was teaching today, so it

must be a patient. Nobody was scheduled this morning except for Fay. Maybe

it was someone else with an emergency.

“In your dream,” said Zack, “where were you? Up in the air with the

angel? Or on the ground with the people being crushed?”

“Oh no. Not on the ground. I’m not afraid I’ll be crushed. I’m with the

angel, I think. Just watching.”

Like TV, thought Zack. Or maybe she identified with the angel. She