Three years had passed since I’d seen Arlen. Then one night, I got a call from her telling me Harry was in the intensive care unit at Kaiser in critical condition. I sped over to the hospital, where she drew me into a foyer to tell me what had happened.

Harry hadn’t gotten the teaching position in New Zealand, and she’d realized only a few months before that he’d been secretly drinking at night, claiming that she hadn’t known—that until then she’d never smelled alcohol on his breath or seen him intoxicated. She told me he’d turned nasty that last month, remarking to her once, “I went out and found the one woman who could destroy me…and then I married her.” When she gave him an ultimatum to stop drinking or leave, he tried to go cold turkey but went into convulsions in the middle of the night. Now the doctors were telling her that if he survived, his liver was so damaged he could never take another drink or it would kill him.

In my journal I wrote:

     “Harry is naked except for a sheet pulled over his groin, up to the great yellow swelling of his belly, fine networks of red veins traced over the yellow of his face. He makes strangled sounds, as though he is suffocating under the transparent blue muzzle of an oxygen mask. A tube, clotted with blood, sticks from one nostril, twisting it grotesquely to one side. I stroke his cheek with the backs of my fingers, wanting to comfort him…then, fearful of disturbing his sleep, I simply rest my hand there.

     “Harry…reclusive, erudite, witty, kind. Arlen tells me he holed up in his room drunk the last month. It wasn’t until he slipped out briefly that she pushed her way in and found layers of empty bottles, dirty plates, and newspapers piled in the corners, the strata of his despair. She poured a half a gallon of vodka down the bathtub drain. When he came back and saw what she had done, he cried.

     “The laying on of hands—I’m wondering what is possible. Being happy in my life now, I find myself ardently wishing when I touch Harry that I could somehow communicate to him my own hope, give him whatever he needs of my own life force.”

     That night I went home and prayed to whatever powers might be that Harry would recover.

One night I had a dream unlike any I’d ever had before. In it, I felt a strange, acute mental anguish that was entirely different from any conscious feeling I’d ever experienced. In the dream, I went to my grandmother, who was deceased, and asked, “Someone else in the family has died, haven’t they? Is it Uncle Rob?” She shook her head. “Is it Uncle Bill?” She nodded.

When I woke up in the morning and remembered the dream, I was nonplussed and a little alarmed. I was confident at the time that dreams were always and only reflections of one’s personal unconscious, and, given that I was enjoying my life, I was troubled to think that undiscovered traumatic memories might be lurking beneath my awareness.

Two days later I got a call from my mother. My uncle Bill, who wore a brace because of the polio he’d contracted as a young man, had had a catastrophic fall in the bathtub and had spent the night in the intensive care unit of a hospital, fighting for his life. His accident happened the night of my dream—and though he survived, the experience was a revelation to me. My father had always regarded ESP as preposterous, and I’d never questioned his certitude. But now I had what surely was incontrovertible proof that he was wrong. Somehow, that night I’d tuned in to some of my uncle’s anguish. How could anyone possibly argue that my dream and my uncle’s fall were coincidental? The odds were vanishingly small.

Though I knew my experience would never convince my father, it changed my conception of reality.

The next morning Roberta came round to enlist volunteers for a Dada art performance. Seely had buried her head in her requisition book and frowned with feigned concentration, trying to appear too busy to be conscripted. But when she saw Stuart dragging a splintered chair and a power saw into the slide library, she scuttled after him. Roberta was instructing a unit of only three. So Seely fetched a Ph.D. robe from the back room, arranged the satin hood over her head, and made it a foursome.

Once Roberta was inside the lecture room, they took turns pressing their ears to the door, and, when her talk was about five minutes underway, they burst in. Nan had her boom box turned up to full volume. Seely pirouetted in front of her, clicking two giant staplers over her head like castanets and singing, “La Cucaracha.” Dizzily, she glimpsed Nan throwing confetti she’d cut from the morning’s newspaper and her assistant, Ellie, fencing at the air with a broken umbrella—handle and spokes only. Stuart, in a gas mask and goggles, was sawing the chair to splinters with a deafening roar. Roberta scolded and railed at them with almost believable outrage. Then, just before they exited, Nan snatched a pile of books from the lectern and dropped one—as per instructions. Roberta retrieved it and held it up for the class to see—”ART” was printed on the cover. “They have no respect!”she cried.  On the pile of wood that had been a chair, Stuart left a sign, “DADA LIVES!”