The Horror of the War

The Dream-Sessions and the Snow House

My conviction that Private Haleman's grip on reality had waned drastically owing to his captivity seemed profoundly confirmed during the sessions in which we discussed his menacing dreams at the "hands" of the dire sculpture. I had suggested to him that it could have been leaking intoxicating oils, ones that, when he held it, were absorbed much like nicotine might be, prompting a deterioration of his psyche for that time being. The man had surprised me by accepting such a diagnosis. But he had given as his reason for this acceptance that "it sounds a hell of a lot more reassuring than what I actually believe."

"The first dream I had the second night after the rescued prostitute handed me her divine little piece of inheritance. It was the least terrifying, or the most---depends on how you look at it. I've looked at it both those ways. And in other ways, too."

He had been in an American warplane, adrift somewhere in the north, but over waters. A North Korean man huddled in a corner, bound, captured, abducted. He didn't seem to be from the communist military, not even in principle---one of his legs was severely mangled or deformed and he could only shamble. Not that he was right then shambling at all, no; he had been crouching, pitiably, as the plane had departed the sight of land and emerged amidst an intensifying storm, miles upon miles upon miles out into the cerulean dark.

Eventually the wailing and lamentation of the North Korean had prompted another American soldier or pilot on guard, here, to ask the man if the plane was in danger. The poor figure had alternatively mumbled and cried out loudly that yes, they were all in danger, and not just those on the plane, but those on the land, that they must not drop bombs on that island, no, especially not the weapons of amazing fire: surely not those! Surely not! No no no: doom alone would come of such blasphemies against creation. For the demons of anticreation dwelt near here, in a dead land beyond the houses of the spirits in nature. And a gate to this impure land could be opened on the island---was already open, in fact.

Amused, the Americans had continued to approach the now-visible island, becalmed despite the encircling storm. And without forewarning, the dream had shown to Haleman another storm, of napalm, descend upon the center of that island, igniting a tower of desolation that awed him with its apocalyptic portents.

Then what looked like immense blood wormed from the ruined heart, and Haleman saw that the mountain had been a spire of tissue and bone, now seething with incendiary torment, and a mammoth eye was melting through wherever the napalm still clung to that spire.

"I woke up when I locked eyes with that eye," the soldier finished this first dream-session. "This chill went through me. Like, you ever imagine what it'd be like to be swimming out in the ocean and look down and sea a huge jellyfish or octopus down there, coming up towards you, around you? Well, imagine how they feel when they look down and see things like this watching them. With something like hunger that even hunger is afraid of."

The next dreams paradoxically waxed and waned in hideousness of their own. In many he was an American imprisoned in one of those dark hamlets from the infested forest, but one who was treated far from as well as Haleman had found himself, despite even his witnessing the sundering of a child. Frequent tortures compassed repeated rubbing and even pricking by the teeth or petrified tentacles of the flea-anemones, psychiatric sessions of an inverted kind, elements in a brainwashing I tried to suspect had, indeed, been at some point practiced on Haleman himself. It had been too much for the young man to handle; his mind had been crippled by the pain, whatever its true cause; and this fragmented, unbelievable story of legendary grotesqueries was the phantasm of his attempts at emotional redemption. Perhaps he had even perceived authentic biological warfare by American forces, rogues or not. But the "bugs" were surely fantasies of some magnitude.