Freud and Jung had turned Missy’s cave dream into a professional disagreement before the tea had cooled.
Freud was particularly interested in the cave.
“A descent into what has been repressed,” he said.
Jung disagreed.
“The cave is older than repression. It is the interior world, the place where transformation begins.”
“And the talking basket?” Missy asked.
“A domestic symbol,” Freud replied.
“An archetypal container,” Jung corrected.
The Conductor looked up from his ledger.
“It was a basket,” he said. “I see no reason to encourage it.”
Bob had been listening from the windowsill, pretending not to.
The word descent disturbed something in him.
For several nights, his own dream had been returning in fragments. Water without a surface. Luminous towers beneath the sea. The voices of the Atlanteans calling themselves the story civilization had forgotten.
Sometimes he heard Rudolf Steiner warning that a world could become clever enough to lose its soul.
Bob had dismissed the first dream as metaphysical indigestion.
The second had led him to investigate emergency boats.
By the third, he had quietly acquired a copy of Beginner’s Swim Instruction.
Now, as Freud and Jung argued over Missy’s descent into the cave, Bob realized that his own descent had never properly ended.
Missy noticed that his tail had stopped moving.
“Are you all right?”
“Perfectly,” Bob said. “I have simply remembered that I may require professional mythological assistance.”
At the far end of the compartment, beside a stack of notebooks tied with string, Joseph Campbell looked up.
Bob narrowed his eyes.
He knew that silhouette.
Joseph Campbell.
The Myth Guy.
Campbell had appeared on the Train before, usually when a conversation had become too symbolic to proceed without professional supervision.
Bob jumped down from the windowsill and approached him.
“Perfect,” he said. “The Myth Guy himself.”
Campbell closed his notebook.
“Good morning, Bob.”
“That remains to be determined.”
Bob climbed onto the chair opposite Campbell.
“I need a consultation,” he said. “Privately.”
Campbell glanced at him.
“Dragons?”
“No. Not dragons this time. Urgent matters involving dreams, Atlantis, narcissism, and possible aquatic relocation.”
Missy followed him and stopped beside the table with her teacup. Campbell looked from her to Bob.
Bob flicked his tail.
“She does not count. This is Missy. She recently returned from a cave where a basket came alive, so confidentiality has become relative.”
Missy smiled.
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Professor Campbell. I am a great fan of your voice.”
“Then I hope it has helped you hear your own,” Campbell said.
“I’m beginning to,” Missy said. “Though mine seems to speak mostly through argumentative household objects.”
Campbell smiled.
“You are an interesting young lady,” he said.
Then he turned to Bob.
“Now, about your dream.”
Missy raised an eyebrow.
“Aquatic relocation?”
“Long story. The short version involves civilization repeating itself and me needing a boat.”
Campbell gestured toward the empty chair beside him.
“Please, sit.”
Missy sat. Bob jumped from his chair onto the table, where he felt consultations should properly take place.
For a moment, he looked at the vacant place where Ms. Understood would once have set down a porcelain tray and asked the question nobody else had thought to ask.
The absence disturbed him.
He rearranged his tail and pretended it had not.
Campbell poured tea into a second cup.
“Tell me about the dream.”
Bob sighed.
“I fell asleep over Huxley’s notes and woke underwater. There were ruins and glowing beings who claimed to be Atlantis. Not the people. The story itself.”
“In Elsewhere, stories often introduce themselves.”
“They said they were our forgotten ancestors. Then Steiner appeared.”
“Rudolf Steiner?”
“A dream echo of him. Classic Steiner. Very serious. Considerable guilt. He said Atlantis lost its soul to its tools and sank beneath the weight of its own cleverness.”
Campbell nodded as though this were standard consultation material.
“A descent, then. A classic katabasis. You went down into the depths of your own myth.”
“Depths, yes. Except no one told me how to breathe underwater.”
“That is not the problem.”
“It felt like the problem.”
“The problem,” Campbell said, “is remembering how to resurface.”
Bob tilted his head.
“You’re saying it was symbolic?”
“Everything is symbolic,” Campbell replied. “But that does not make it less real.”
Bob lowered his voice.
“So I am not insane?”
“Not at all, dear cat.”
Campbell untied the string around his notebooks and opened the first one to a blank page.
“You are simply mythically inconvenienced.”
Bob glanced toward Freud.
“I knew there would be a diagnosis eventually.”
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