The Triumph of Evil by Lawrence Block Page B

but have lost my grasp of the question.
    We tried words. Words are out-of-date. Dreary Drury gives us words, and we throw back bullets.
    It seems to me
    An hour later he went to the off-campus apartment house where Burton Weldon lived. He traded the typewriter for Weldon’s, which was open on the desk. He put a box of shells for the deer rifle on the closet shelf and covered it with a dirty shirt. He crumpled the unfinished letter and dropped it in a corner of the room where several crumpled sheets of paper already nestled.
    He left with Weldon’s typewriter in hand.
    The night before commencement exercises he had a dream in Serbo-Croat.
    For some time now English had been his language of thought as well as his language of speech. Certain idioms might occur, in thought as in speech, in any of several languages; there were certain concepts that did not translate. But it was English that he both thought and spoke.
    Dreams might come in any language. Lately they had been most often in English, but as recently as a year ago they had been primarily in German. He also dreamed occasionally in Serbo- Croat, and now and again in French.
    There was usually a connection between the language of the dream and its subject matter. Dreams of his youth, for example, were most likely to be in Serbo-Croat. Dreams of the present were often in English. But there was no hard and fast rule. Dreams, possessing their own system of logic, had their own scheme of comparative linguistics as well.
    This dream, set in the present time, was nevertheless in Serbo-Croat.
    In the dream he was in the chemistry laboratory. Its window high in the Science Building overlooked the quadrangle where commencement exercises were to be held. And he talked in the dream to Burton Weldon, who was dead in the dream, already shot down by guardsmen in retribution for a crime Miles Dorn had not yet got around to perpetrating. Though dead, Burton Weldon was able to hear and to speak; miraculously, he was able to understand and to speak Serbo-Croat.
    Furthermore, Weldon’s face wouldn’t behave. It kept turning into the face of Clyde Farrar, Jr.
    When the time came to shoot Drury, his dream finger froze on the dream trigger. He pulled with all his strength but was not strong enough to make his finger move.
    The speech went on and on and on, with Sen. J. Lowell Drury (Dem., N.H.) orating in flawless Serbo-Croat. And then the speech ended, and Drury left the podium, and still the finger had not moved the trigger.
    “You see?” Burton Weldon’s corpse shrilled at him. “You see? You could not do it!”
    He awoke drenched in sweat, fighting his way out of the dream, fighting Weldon’s voice (but it was not Weldon’s voice in the dream; it was someone else’s; whose?) and clawing at the bed-clothing with hands and feet. He went into the bathroom and stood for a long time under the shower, thinking about the dream.
    He knew enough of dream theory to recognize it as a classic impotence syndrome. Virility anxiety. The gun is a penis, and one cannot make it work. And yet it was so specific, and so much related to present circumstances, that he was not certain whether it was in fact a sexual dream or more an indication of unconscious fear that he would fail to kill Drury.
    Was it the same thing? Was the gun a penis in his life as well as in his dreams? He had thought of this before, of course. He was too insightful not have had the thought, too honest to dismiss it peremptorily, and yet too hardened to dwell on it.
    Later, after he had made the last of the arrangements, set up a meeting with Weldon, scattered more bits of damning evidence (but not too many, and never too obviously; let them work, those cops; they loved to find elusive clues)—after everything was set and checked out, he realized whose dream voice had spoken Serbo-Croat words through Burton Weldon’s dead lips.
    Jocelyn’s.
    This, more than anything else about the dream, gnawed at him.

SIX
    Jocelyn sat, legs