Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 87
ice cream and coffee. Armed with these indisputable details, he
seemed to scourge the farmhouse memory as one opens doors and
windows to get the smoke out of a room. He was successful at
establishing the reality of the office and while he was not truly
uneasy about the experience, it had very definitely raised a
question for which he had no information at all.
With the exception of organized religion and triumphant fucking,
Farragut considered transcendent experience to be perilous
rubbish. One saved one’s ardor for people and objects that could
be used. The flora and fauna of the rain forest were
incomprehensible, but one could comprehend the path that led to
one’s destination. However, at Falconer the walls and the bars had
sometimes seemed to threaten to vanish, leaving him with a
nothingness that would be worse. He was, for example, waked
early one morning by the noise of the toilet and found himself
among the receding fragments of some dream. He was not sure of
the depth of the dream—of its profundity—but he had never (nor
had his psychiatrists) been able to clearly define the moraines of
consciousness that compose the shores of waking. In the dream he
saw the face of a beautiful woman he enjoyed but had never much
loved. He also saw or felt the presence of one of the great beaches
on a sea island. A nursery rhyme or jingle was being sung. He
pursued these receding fragments as if his life, his self-esteem,
depended upon his bringing them together into a coherent and
useful memory. They fled, they fled purposefully like the carrier in
a football game, and one by one he saw the woman and the
presence of the sea disappear and heard the music of the jingle
fade away. He checked his watch. It was three-ten. The
commotion in the toilet subsided. He fell asleep.
Days, weeks, months or whatever later, he waked from the same
dream of the woman, the beach and the song, pursued them with
the same intensity that he had in the beginning, and one by one
lost them while the music faded. Imperfectly remembered dreams
—if they were pursued—were a commonplace, but the dispersal