In One Person

steeply, the bookworm lost his grip. He came skipping over the toilet seats—his ass made a slapping sound—until he collided with my father at the opposite end of the row of toilets.
    “Sorry—I just had to keep reading!” he said. Then the ship rolled in the other direction, and the soldier sallied forth, skipping over the seats again. When he’d slid all the way to the last toilet, he either lost control of the book or he let it go, gripping the toilet seat with both hands. The book floated away in the seawater.
    “What were you reading?” the code-boy called.
    “
Madame Bovary
!” the soldier shouted in the storm.
    “I can tell you what happens,” the sergeant said.
    “Please don’t!” the bookworm answered. “I want to read it for myself!”
    In the dream, or in the story someone (who was
not
Richard Abbott) was telling me, my father never saw this soldier for the rest of the voyage. “Past a barely visible Gibraltar,” I remember the dream (or someone) saying, “the convoy slipped into the Mediterranean.”
    One night, off the coast of Sicily, the soldiers belowdecks were awakened by crashing noises and the sounds of cannon fire; the convoy was under aerial attack by the
Luftwaffe
. Subsequently, my dad heard that an adjacent Liberty ship had been hit and sunk with all hands. As for the soldier who’d been reading
Madame Bovary
in the storm, he failed to introduce himself to my dad before the convoy made landfall at Taranto. The code-boy’s war story would continue and conclude without my disappearing dad ever encountering the toilet-traveling man.
    “Years later,” said the dream (or the storyteller), my father was “finishing up” at Harvard. He was riding on the Boston subway, the MTA; he’d got on at the Charles Street station, and was on his way back to Harvard Square.
    A man who got on at Kendall Square began to stare at him. The sergeant was “discomfited” by the strange man’s interest in him; “it felt like an
unnatural
interest—a foreboding of something violent, or at least unpleasant.” (It was the language of the story that made this recurrent dream seem more real to me than other dreams. It was a dream with a first-person narrator—a dream with a
voice.)
    The man on the subway started changing seats; he kept moving closer to my dad. When they were almost in physical contact with each other, and the subway was slowing down for the next stop, the stranger turned to my father and said, “Hi. I’m Bovary. Remember me?” Then the subway stopped at Central Square, where the bookworm got off, and the sergeant was once more on his way to Harvard Square.
    I WAS TOLD THAT the fever part of scarlet fever abates within a week—usually within three to five days. I’m pretty sure that I was over the fever part when I asked Richard Abbott if he’d ever told me this story—perhaps at the onset of the rash, or during the sore-throat part, which began a couple of days before the rash. My tongue had been the color of a strawberry, but when I first spoke to Richard about this most vivid and recurrent dream, my tongue was a beefy dark red—more of a raspberry color—and the rash was starting to go away.
    “I don’t know this story, Bill,” Richard told me. “This is the first time I’ve heard it.”
    “Oh.”
    “It sounds like a Grandpa Harry story to me,” Richard said.
    But when I asked my grandfather if he’d told me the
Madame Bovary
story, Grandpa Harry started his “Ah, well” routine, hemming and hawing his way in circles around the question. No, he “
definitely
didn’t” tell me the story, my grandfather said. Yes, Harry had
heard
the story—“a secondhand version, if I recall correctly”—but he conveniently couldn’t remember who’d told him. “It was Uncle Bob, maybe—perhaps it was Bob who told you, Bill.” Then my grandfather felt my forehead, and mumbled words to the effect that my fever seemed to be gone. When he peered into my mouth, he announced: “That’s still a pretty ugly-lookin’ tongue, though I would say the rash is disappearin’ a bit.”
    “It was too real to be a dream—at least, to begin with,” I told Grandpa Harry.
    “Ah, well—if you’re good at
imaginin
’ things, which I believe you
are
pretty good at, Bill, I would say that some dreams can seem very real,” my grandfather hemmed and hawed.
    “I’ll ask Uncle Bob,” I said.
    Bob was always putting squash balls in my pockets, or in my shoes—or under my