Machine Dreams

between us—I’d slept with two of the three and it wasn’t clear who I was with. It wasn’t clear to Riley either. I looked up from my third or fourth drink to see him standing near me.
    “Danner? Could I talk to you for a minute?”
    I’d known he was back in school at Lynchburg, that his wife worked in a bank there, but I was so surprised at seeing him, at the look on his face, that I said nothing.
    “Who’s he?” someone said.
    “He’s an old friend,” I answered. I stood and realized I was dizzy.
    Riley and I went out to the parking lot. It was cold and we got into his car. Finally I said, “How long have you been back?”
    “Not long.” He turned to me in the dark of the car. His hairwas close-cropped and he seemed even thinner, more angular. He had a mustache. “You don’t look too good, Danner.”
    “No?”
    “I don’t mean your looks, I mean the way you act.” He glanced out the windshield nervously. Snow was beginning to pelt the glass. “It’s no good for Jean and Mitch if you rack yourself up in a car with three drunk vets.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    Riley put one hand on the dash. His wedding ring was a plain gold band, unmarked and narrow. “Hell,” he said slowly, “I’m sorry about Billy. I’m sorry.”
    “I know. Your mom came over to the house.”
    “Have you heard anything?”
    “No. I mean we hear, but it’s always nothing.” I kept watching Riley’s face, his eyes. He was really here. Someone real had come back. “I haven’t seen you since way before Billy left.”
    “Danner, I want you to let me drive you back to the University. You stay here, all right? Don’t get out of the car. I’ll just go back inside and tell your friends we’re leaving.”
    “Yes,” I said, “okay.” My own voice sounded distant to me. Riley sounded so familiar, when the world was full of strangers.
    He came back and I heard him slam the door of the car; he said I should lie down and rest while he drove. I lay down across the seat with my head on his thigh. We didn’t talk and I fell asleep. I hadn’t slept so easily and quickly since it happened. Sometimes in my sleep I felt the turning of the car in the dark, the winding of the slick road as my body shifted, Riley’s hand steadying my shoulder.
    I wakened as he pulled up behind a University bus at a red light. I gave him directions to my apartment and asked him in, but he said he had to get home. Before the roads got any worse. “Take better care,” he said, holding my face in his two hands. “Will you?”
    After that I stopped sleeping with anyone. I stopped going to classes much. One of my honors professors told me I should see a psychiatrist and gave me a name. I started talking to a shrink at Student Health Services. On the eighth visit, the shrink said I had a lot of blocks against talking to him or talkingto myself; he suggested I try to talk to Billy. Write him a letter. If I could say things Billy would hear, what would I say? I was to work on the letter a while every day, and I was given a week to complete it.
    I wrote the letter. It contained no greeting and was unsigned. The words came into my mind as though carved in stone, and I don’t think they will alter. This is the letter in its entirety:
They’ll never convince me I won’t see you again—I just don’t feel alone.
    The psychiatrist wasn’t pleased. “That’s the whole letter?”
    “Yes.”
    A silence. Then he said, from his chair five feet away, “Who’s trying to convince you, Danner?”
    “Everyone.”
    “Who, exactly?”
    “The world, the war still going on and on, people I know, guys, time—all the time going on, piling up like evidence against him, that he’s just—”
    “Just what, Danner?”
    “
Dead
over there,” I shouted, “you
fucker
, you made me say it—” And I leaped toward him, into him, striking out with my fists. How many times I hit him is a blur. I remember he got me back into my chair. The matronly receptionist was in the room, very nervous, and the shrink was bending down to pick his glasses up off the carpet. He signaled the receptionist to go. She did, but left the office door ajar.
    “Well,” he said, putting his glasses back on and sitting down, “I think we got somewhere today.”
    I was sobbing. He tried to hand me a box of Kleenex.
    “I’m not coming back here again,” I said.
    He looked at me resignedly. “I think it’s advisable you come twice a week for a while. You have a great deal of