“Well, what do you want to do now?” Hackett asked when he’d finished. “Should I try to figure out what the dream means or do you want to suggest what the dream might mean or what?”

  “Who cares?”

  Hackett stared at him.

  “Really,” Krull said, “do you honestly give a damn what your dream means?”

  “Well, I—”

  “I mean,” said Krull, “what’s the problem here? The problem’s not that you’re in love with your raincoat, the problem’s not that they potty-trained you too early, the problem’s not that you’re repressing your secret desire to watch My Little Margie reruns. The problem is you’re not getting any rest. Right?”

  “Well, yes,” Hackett said. “Right.”

  “You have this ditsy dream every night, huh?”

  “Every night. Unless I take a sleeping pill, which I’ve done half a dozen times, but that’s even worse in the long run. I don’t really feel rested—I have a sort of hangover all day from the pill, and I find drugs a little worrisome, anyway.”

  “Mmmm,” Krull said, clasping his hands behind his head and leaning back in his chair. “Let’s see now. Is the dream scary? Filled with terror?”

  “No.”

  “Painful? Harrowing?”

  “No.”

  “So the only problem is exhaustion,” Krull said.

  “Yes.”

  “Exhaustion that’s perfectly natural, because a man who drives five hundred miles every night when he’s supposed to be resting is going to be beat to hell the next day. Does that pretty much say it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure it does. You can’t drive five hundred miles every night and feel good. But”—he leaned forward—“I’ll bet you could drive half that distance, couldn’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean,” said Krull, “is there’s a simple way to solve your problem.” He scribbled on a memo pad, tore off the top sheet, handed it to Hackett. “My home phone number,” he said. “When the guy calls and tells you to go to Cleveland, what I want you to do is call me.”

  “Wait a minute,” Hackett said. “I’m asleep while this is happening. How the hell can I call you?”

  “In the dream you call me. I’ll come over to your place, I’ll get in the car with you, and we’ll drive to Cleveland together. After you deliver the briefcase, you can just curl up in the backseat and I’ll drive back. You ought to be able to get four hours’ sleep on the way home, or close to it.”

  Hackett straightened up in his chair. “Let me see if I understand this,” he said. “I get the call, and I turn around and call you, and the two of us drive to Cleveland together. I drive there, and you drive back, and I get to nap on the drive home.”

  “Right.”

  “You think that would work?”

  “Why not?”

  “It sounds crazy,” Hackett said, “but I’ll try it.”

  The following morning he called Krull. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.

  “It worked?”

  “Like a charm. I got the call, I called you, you came over, and off we went to Cleveland together. I drove there, you drove back, I got a solid three and a half hours in the backseat, and I feel like a new man. It’s the craziest thing I ever heard of, but it worked.”

  “I thought it would,” Krull said. “Just keep doing it every time you have the dream. Call me the end of the week and let me know if it’s still working.”

  At the week’s end, Hackett made the phone call. “It works better than ever,” he said. “It’s gotten so I’m not dreading that phone call either, because I know we’ll have a good time on the road. The drive to Cleveland is a pleasure now that I’ve got you in the car to talk to, and the nap I get on the way home makes all the difference in the world. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “That’s terrific,” Krull told him. “I wish all my patients were as easily satisfied.”

  And that was that. Every night Hackett had the dream, and every night he drove to Cleveland and let the psychiatrist take the wheel on the way home. They talked about all sorts of things on the way to Cleveland—girls, baseball, Kant’s categorical imperative, and how to know when it was time to discard a disposable razor. Sometimes they talked about Hackett’s personal life, and he felt he was getting a lot of insight from their conversations. He wondered if he ought to send Krull a check for services rendered and asked Krull the following night in the dream. The dream-Krull told him not to worry about it: “After all,” he said, “you’re paying for the gas.”

  Hackett’s health improved. He was able to concentrate better, and the improvement showed in his work. His love life improved as well, after having virtually ceased to exist. He felt reborn, and he was beginning to love his life.

  Then he ran into Feverell.

  “My God,” he said. “Mike Feverell.”

  “Hello, George.”

  “How’ve you been, Mike? Lord, it’s been years, hasn’t it? You look—”

  “I look like hell,” Feverell said. “Don’t I?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “You weren’t? I don’t know why not, because it’s the truth. I look terrible and I know it.”

  “How’s your health, Mike?”

  “My health? That’s what’s ridiculous. My health is fine, perfectly fine. I don’t know how much longer I can go on before I just plain drop dead, but in the meantime my health is a hundred percent.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, it’s too stupid to talk about.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s this recurring dream,” Feverell said. “I have the same dream every goddamned night, and it’s driving me nuts.”

  The room seemed to fill up with light. Hackett took his friend’s arm. “Let’s get a couple of beers,” he said, “and you can tell me all about your dream.”

  “It’s stupid,” Feverell said. “It’s an adolescent sex fantasy. I’m almost ashamed to talk about it, but the thing is I can’t seem to do anything about it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, it’s the same every night,” Feverell said. “I go to sleep and the doorbell rings. I get up, put on a robe, answer the door, and there are three beautiful women there. They want to come in, and they want to have a party.”

  “A party?”

  “What they want,” said Feverell, “is for me to make love to them.”

  “And?”

  “And I do.”

  “It sounds,” said Hackett, “like a wonderful dream. It sounds like a dream people would pay money to have.”

  “You’d think that, wouldn’t you?”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “The problem,” said Feverell, “is that it’s too much. I make love to all three of them and I’m exhausted, drained, an empty shell, and no sooner do I drift off to sleep than the alarm clock’s ringing and it’s time to get up. I’m too old for three women in one night, and these aren’t hasty encounters. It takes the whole night to satisfy them all, and I’ve got no strength left for the rest of my life.”

  “Interesting,” said Hackett, in a manner not altogether unlike the late Dr. Loebner’s. “Tell me, are they always the same women?”

  Feverell shook his head. “If they were,” he said, “it’d be a cinch, because I wouldn’t keep getting turned on. But every night it’s three brand-new ladies, and the only common denominator is that they’re all gorgeous. Tall ones, short ones, light ones, dark ones. Blondes, brunettes, redheads. Even a bald one the other night.”

  “That must have been interesting.”

  “It was damned interesting,” Feverell said, “but who needs it? Too much is still too much. I can’t resist them, I can’t turn them down, but I’ll tell you, I shudder when the doorbell rings.” He sighed. “I suppose it relates to being divorced a little over a year and some kind of performance anxiety, something like that. Or do you suppose there’s a deeper cause?”

  “Who cares?”

  Feverell stared at him.

  “Really,” said Hackett. “What’s the difference why you’re having the dream? The dream is the problem, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so. But—”

  “As a matter of fact,” Hackett went on, “the dream isn’t the problem either. The problem is that there are too many women in it.”

  “Well—”

  “If there were just one woman,” Hackett said, “you’d do just fine, wouldn’t you?”

  “I suppose so—but there’s always three, and no matter how much I want to I can’t seem to tell two of them to go away. I don’t want to hurt their feelings, see, and it’d be impossible to choose among them anyway—”

  “Suppose you only had to make love to one of them,” Hackett said. “Could you handle that?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “And then you could get plenty of sleep after she left.”

  “I guess so, but—”

  “And you’d be rested in the morning. In fact, after a dream like that you’d probably feel like a million dollars, wouldn’t you?”

  “What are you getting at, George?”

  “Simple,” said Hackett. “Simplest thing in the world.”

  He got out a business card and scribbled on the back. “My home phone number,” he said, thrusting the card at Feverell. “Go ahead, take it.”

  “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Memorize it,” Hackett said, “and when the doorbell rings tonight, call me.”

  “What do you mean, call you? I’m supposed to get up out of a sound sleep and call you? And then what happens? Is it like AA or something—you come over and we have coffee and you talk me out of dreaming?”

  Hackett shook his head. “You don’t get up,” he said. “In the dream you call me. You call me, and then you go open the door and let the girls in.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “The point is that I’ve got a friend, a psychiatrist as it happens, a very nice clean-cut type of guy. You’ll call me, and I’ll call him, and the two of us’ll come over to your place.”

  “You’re going to schlepp some shrink to my house in the middle of the night?”

  “This is in the dream,” Hackett told him. “We’ll come over, and you’ll make love to one of the girls, whichever one you choose, and I’ll take one, and my friend’ll take one. And after you’re done with your girl you can go to sleep, and you’ll be perfectly well rested in the morning. And we can do this every night you have the dream. All you have to do is call me and we’ll show up and help you out.”

  Feverell stared at him. “If only it would work.”

  “It will.”

  “There was a Chinese girl the other night who was just plain out of this world,” Feverell said. “But I couldn’t really relax and enjoy her, because the Jamaican and the Norwegian girls were in the other room and, well—”

  Hackett clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Call me,” he said. “Your troubles are over.”

  The following morning, on his way to work, Hackett gave himself up to a feeling of supreme well being. He had repaid Krull’s kindness to him in the best way possible, by passing on the favor to another. At his desk that morning, he waited for the phone to ring with a report from Feverell.

  But Feverell didn’t call. Not that morning, not the next morning, not all week. And something kept Hackett from calling Feverell.

  Until finally he ran into him on the street during the noon hour—and Feverell looked terrible! Bags under his eyes, deeper than ever. Sallow skin, trembling hands. “Mike!” he said. “Mike, are you all right?”

  “Do I look all right?”

  “No, you don’t,” Hackett said honestly. “You look awful.”

  “Well, I feel awful,” Feverell said savagely. “And I don’t feel a whole lot better for being told how terrible I look, but thanks all the same.”

  “Mike, what’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong? You know damned well what’s wrong. It’s this dream I’ve been having. I told you the whole story. Or did it slip your mind?”

  Hackett sighed. “You’re still having the dream?”

  “Of course I’m still having the dream.”

  “Mike,” Hackett said, “when the doorbell rings, before you do anything else, you were going to call me, remember?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “So?”

  “So I’ve called you. Every night I call you, for all the good it does.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course I do, every goddamned night.”

  “And then I come over? And I bring my friend?”

  “Oh, right,” said Feverell. “Your famous friend, the clean-cut psychiatrist. Whom I’ve yet to meet, because he doesn’t come over and neither do you. Every night I call you, and every night you hang up on me.”

  “I hang up on you?” Hackett stared. “Why would I do a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Feverell. “I don’t have the slightest idea. But every night I call you and you don’t even let me get a word in edgewise. ‘I’m sorry,’ you say, ‘but I can’t talk to you now, I’m on my way to Cleveland.’ Cleveland yet! And you hang up on me!”

  DEATH WISH

  The cop saw the car stop on the bridge but didn’t pay any particular attention to it. People were apt to pull over to the side in the middle of the span, especially late at night when the traffic was thin and they could stop for a moment without somebody’s horn stabbing them in the back. The bridge was a graceful steel parabola over the deep channel of river that cut the city neatly in two, and the center of the bridge provided the best view of the city, with the old downtown buildings clustered together on the right, the flour mills downriver on the left, the gentle skyline, the gulls maneuvering over the river. The bridge was the best place to see it all. It wasn’t private enough for the teenagers, who were given to long-term parking and preferred drive-in movie theaters or stretches of road along the north bank of the river, but sightseers stopped often, took in the view for a few moments, and then continued across.

  Suicides liked the bridge, too. The cop didn’t think of that at first, not until he saw the man emerge from the car, and walk slowly to the footpath at the edge, and place a hand tentatively upon the rail. There was something in his stance, something in the pose of the solitary figure upon the empty bridge in the after-midnight gloom, something about the grayness of the night, the way the fog was coming off the river. The cop looked at him and cursed and wondered if he could get to him in time.

  He walked toward the man, headed over the bridge on the footpath. He didn’t want to shout or blow his whistle at him because he knew what shock or surprise could do to a potential jumper. Once he saw the man’s hands tense on the rail, his feet lifting up on the toes. At that moment he almost cried out, almost broke into a run, but then the man’s feet came back into position, his hands loosened their grip, and he took out a cigarette and lit it. Then the cop knew he had time. They always smoked that last cigarette all the way down before they went over the edge.

  When the cop was within ten yards of him the man turned, started slightly, then nodded in resignation. He appeared to be somewhere in his middle thirties, tall, with a long narrow face and deep-set eyes topped with thick black eyebrows.

  “Nice night,” the cop said.

  “Yes.”

  “Having a look at the sights?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Saw you out here, thought I’d come out and have a talk with you. It can get lonely this hour at night.” The cop patted his pockets, passed over his cigarettes. “Say, you don’t happen to have a spare cigarette on you, do you? I must have run out.”

  The man gave him a cigarette. It was a filter, and the cop normally smoked nothing but regulars, but he wasn’t about to complain. He thanked the man, accepted a light, thanked him again, and stood beside him, hands on the rail, leaning out over the water and looking at the city and the river.

  “Looks pretty from here,” he said.

  “Does it?”

  “Sure, I’d say so. Makes a man feel at peace with himself.”

  “It hasn’t had that effect on me,” the man said. “I was thinking about, oh, the ways a man could find peace for himself.”

  “I guess the best way is just to go on plugging away at life,” the cop said. “Things generally have a way of straightening themselves out, sooner or later. Some of the time they take awhile, and I guess they don’t look too good, but they work out.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Sure.”

  “With the things you see in your job?”

  “Even with all of it,” the cop said. “It’s a tough world, but that’s nothing new. It’s the best we’ve got, the way I figure it. You’re sure not going to find a better one at the bottom of a river.”

  The man said nothing for a long time, then he pitched his cigarette over the rail. He and the cop stood watching it as it shed sparks on the way down, then heard the tiny hiss as it met the water.

  “It didn’t make much of a splash,” the man said.

  “No.”

  “Few of us do,” the man said. He paused for a moment, then turned to face the cop. “My name’s Edward Wright,” he added. The cop gave his own name. “I don’t think I would have done it,” the man went on. “Not tonight.”

  “No sense taking chances, is there?”

  “I guess not.”

  “You’re taking a chance yourself, aren’t you? Coming out here, standing at the edge, thinking it over. Anyone who does that long enough, sooner or later gets a little too nervous and goes over the edge. He doesn’t really want to and he’s sorry long before he hits the water, but it’s too late; he took too many chances and it’s over for him. Tempt fate too much and fate gets you.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Something in particular bothering you?”

  “Not … anything special, no.”

  “Have you been seeing a doctor?”

  “Off and on.”

  “That can help, you know.”

  “So they say.”

  “Want to go grab a cup of coffee?”