The Anatomy of Dreams (17 page)

The door of the stall she had used swung open with a slow, rusty whine. It was empty except for the purple snakeskin purse. Loud noises came from outside the bathroom, and I knew that others would soon come in search of the purse, that
I would be implicated as its new owner. I needed to move the purse, but first I had to see what was inside it. I went into the bathroom and pressed on the buckle. There was a click like the sound of a gun's safety being switched off. The lid of the purse opened automatically, willingly. And then I woke.

I told Gabe about the dream, late at night in the Bunk Room when we knew Keller had already gone to sleep. He listened with the knit-browed interest of a psychiatrist, and though there was no judgment on his face, he couldn't unlock the dream any better than I could. We still slept in our own beds—still barely touched, aside from the brief brush of arms as he sidled past me in the kitchen—but we had begun to talk late into the evening, Gabe leaning over the ledge of his top bunk and I looking up from below. Sometimes we talked about our dreams. Other times, we talked about Keller.

“I just don't believe that he's lived here, all these years, alone,” I said one warm, sticky night in July, my legs on top of the sheets. “He never had a family of his own?”

“He had a wife,” said Gabe.

I rolled to the side of the bed and craned my neck to look at him.

“You're kidding. He was married? When?”

“Years ago,” said Gabe. “Before he came to Mills.”

“What happened to her?”

Gabe glanced at the door. The floor was so old that if Keller was still padding around, we could generally hear him.

“She died,” he said in an undertone.

“How?”

“Beats me. That's all I know, and I'm not even sure how I know it. Keller never mentioned her to me, that's for sure. I think it was someone at Mills who told me—maybe Mr. Cooke.”

Gabe scrunched up his nose in the way he did when he was trying to recall some fact. Then he shook his head.

“Do you think that had something to do with it?” I asked. “With why he left USF, started teaching in a high school?”

“Who knows?” Gabe shrugged, the twin curves of his shadow shoulders rising against the opposite wall. “Anyway, there's a picture of her in Keller's bedroom. I stumbled in there one day, thinking it was one of the studies. It's on his bedside table. Have a look, if you want, but make sure you don't do it when he's around.”

It was my first glimpse of the old Gabe. And though I knew he couldn't see me, I was grinning in the dark.

I was eager to see the photo, if only to satisfy my curiosity about the kind of woman Keller would go for. For the next few days, I glanced in his room whenever I walked down the hall, hoping I wouldn't have to go inside to see the photo. But the door was only ever open a crack, if at all, and soon I realized I would have to be ballsier if I really wanted to go through with it.

Keller kept to a strict schedule: he went to the grocery in Edgartown on Tuesdays and Fridays, he ate dinner no later than six thirty
P
.
M
., and he took a walk to the water each day from four thirty to five fifteen. One Thursday afternoon in late July, Gabe was out, too—Keller had sent him to the Vineyard library to find a book on Jewish mysticism. At five
P
.
M
., seized with the fear that one of them would come home early, I opened Keller's bedroom door.

I scanned the room, which was small and spare. Most of it was taken up by a queen bed with one pillow, white sheets precisely flattened and tucked. A painting of a battered canoe hung above the bed. Beside it was a small wooden table upon which there was a pen, a few scattered sheets of paper, and a square photograph in a gold frame.

I stole closer, making sure not to disturb the books that had been set in stacks on the floor, and picked up the frame. The photo showed a woman from the waist up. She looked
to be at least in her forties, older than I expected. She had a small, fervent face, her features angular and catlike and held in place by a tight network of bones. There was something severe in her expression: the sharp little nose; the lifted chin; the pursed lips, less a smile than a contraction. But in her eyes I saw a swallowed depth and vulnerability that startled me. It's possible I'm remembering the photo incorrectly, that I've ascribed this vulnerability to her in hindsight. But I remember being struck by her unusual mix of challenge and urgent appeal. Her most striking feature was a helmet of bright strawberry-red hair, which had been cropped to her chin and smoothed into a bob.

At dinner that night, I realized I hadn't noticed the angle at which the photo had been placed before I picked it up. My body grew hot, and my heart began to pound. Gabe was telling some joke, his mouth full of pasta, Keller glancing at him with amusement. I could excuse myself from the table and go fix the photo, if I only knew how it had originally been positioned. No; it was useless. I could only pray he didn't look at it too closely.

Years later, I found myself in the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, and I decided to look through their archives of the
Chronicle
in the hopes of finding a particular article about Keller's Snake Hollow compound. After a few hours of searching, I found it in the style section of the Sunday paper on June 18, 2000—Father's Day of that year. “Space to Dream,” it was titled: “The Prodigal Father of Experimental Dream Psychology on His Vineyard Escape.” The text itself was not very interesting: cursory details about Keller's approach, some of which the author had gotten wrong (“Mr. Keller is most well-known for his polarizing theory of potential simultaneities”); he was clearly more interested in the Snake Hollow property, and most of the article's space was taken up by large, full-color photos of its interior.

June of 2000 was the summer after my freshman year of college, just before Gabe returned to work with Keller, but the house looked the way it did when we stayed there together. There was the library, vast and secretive; there was the kitchen, its white cabinets and fragile china. But something about the photo of Keller's bedroom gave me pause. The bed was the same—even the bedding had not changed—and the canoe painting still hung above it. His night table was cluttered with papers and pens that the photographer had not moved, preferring a naturalistic effect. But the picture of Keller's wife was gone.

There are explanations for this, of course. Perhaps Keller had moved the photo, not wanting such a personal item to be included in the article; perhaps he had simply put it on his night table sometime after the article was written. But for reasons I still can't fully articulate, the absence of the photo confirmed my suspicion that it had been placed there for my benefit, shortly before my arrival in June of 2002. I've never been able to prove that Keller wanted me to see it, and I doubt I ever will. But the question has stayed with me—pesky, cobwebbed—something I come back to on nights when I can't sleep or while on a drive that doesn't demand much of my attention. If there are no other cars, or if the road is long and flat, dotted black and white and brown by cows and dry grass—in moments like this, I let my mind float away from my body and return to the dusty attic space in me that Keller still occupies, a place with ashy shapes and sunken goods like the ruins of an old city, a place I have never really been able to leave behind.

12

MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2004

December crawled on, and I got my first taste of winter in Wisconsin, the snow and rain that alternated like dueling lawyers in a courtroom battle. First came the soft flakes, demure in their quietude, which settled gently on cars and trash bins so that they swelled like marshmallows; then the balls of hail as big as eyes, spraying branches until they were bony and shivering. On a particularly frigid day midmonth, Gabe and I inexpertly scraped the car of snow and drove to the Walmart in Waukesha County to buy the sleeping-bag coats everyone else owned. We invested, too, in real snow boots: fur-lined, insulated monster shoes that could protect the feet in temperatures as terrible as forty degrees below zero.

If we felt isolated in the summer, that humid haze was nothing when compared to the stark, icy quarantine of winter. I couldn't have stopped to say hello to a familiar face if I'd wanted to; I was focused only on survival, my face raw with cold, hands frozen in a rigor mortis grip around laundry bags or library books. When I stepped inside our house, gasping, I had to sit pressed up against the heating vents until my skin began to thaw. Once, Gabe and I saw a man waiting for the
bus in a bank robber's ski mask, with tiny holes for his eyes and nostrils, and though we laughed at the time, I can't say we weren't tempted to get our own.

We saw Thom and Janna less and less. Every so often, they invited us over for a game of Scrabble or Charades, and though Gabe showed interest, I was filled with an aversion that confused me. (“Go yourself, then,” I snapped during a hailstorm, pulling a blanket tighter around me.) Since Thanksgiving, I had dreamed of Thom: frenzied, consuming dreams that I found myself unable to shake the next day. I could never remember how they began. My consciousness picked up somewhere in the middle, in the underground room with the golden light. I realized it was Thom's basement. A clock hung on a cord on the wall behind Thom's head, and the hour was four, or two. Thom leaned against the wall, his legs spread in a wide V, a jam jar between them. In the jar was a honey-colored liquid without ice. He played with the glass, stirring the liquid with the tip of his ring fingernail.

Or we were sitting beneath the juniper tree of his backyard, Thom listening attentively—leaning in with his whole body, his chest curved toward me like a cave I could speak into. We sat on the ice, but neither one of us was cold.

“You're wet,” he said. “Your hands—they're wet”—and he nuzzled me, the soft fuzz of his chin on my cheek, his skin blessedly warm, as an orange cat purred its motorized hum and the moon shed light like a second skin.

I always woke from these dreams sweating, the blankets soaked and tangled, my muscles throbbing with strain. I had never remembered this much of my dreams. Now they were so vivid that I was terrified I'd spoken out loud, but whenever I looked over at Gabe, he was shut-eyed and still.

And so I left him. I climbed the stairs to the attic and turned on the lamp by the window. My canvases appeared suddenly, like a television turned on in a dark room. I painted
my dreams to get rid of them, to exorcise the shame and betrayal they brought up in me. I wanted to remember them and let them go, as if the act of memory would give me control. I had only brought five canvases to Madison, but I didn't buy more for fear that Gabe would wonder what I was doing. Instead, I painted over and over those same five canvases, sweeping each one black when I was done.

Sometimes, when Gabe and I returned home in the early morning after a session at the lab, we saw Thom striding to the garage in his corduroy pants and dress shoes, an arm held over his head to block the snow. In these moments, Gabe raised a hand in salute, but I ducked my head and climbed into the car. The dream Thom had become so vivid that the sight of the real one gave me a crawling feeling of guilt. When Gabe shut the car door and turned to me—“That was Thom; did you notice?”—I always feigned surprise, said I hadn't seen him through the snow.

Besides, we had bigger things to worry about that ­winter—and perhaps that's why my dream life took on its own menace. Five days before Christmas, Keller called and told us to meet him at the lab. A fuse had blown in the living room furnace, and we were cranky, sore with cold. Besides, it was Sunday, a day we were supposed to have off. But Keller spoke in the stiff tone that indicated he was not open to ­debate, so we grudgingly trudged outside to scrape the car in our new boots.

We never made it to the lab. A storm was dumping buckets of nasty slush on the roads, and the ground was so wet that we skidded twice before we pulled into somebody's driveway and called Keller to say we'd have to meet him somewhere else. We wound up at the Starbucks on State Street—the kind of place Keller abhorred, but it was the coffee shop closest to our car.

It was the last day of finals at the university, and it seemed
that every undergrad had fled their dorm for the heat and cloying music and sweet whipped drinks at Starbucks. The chairs were covered in down coats in shades of pink and red and blue; scattered across the floor were backpacks splayed like fallen soldiers, squashed Ugg boots, pom-pom hats, fat little gloves. Mariah Carey's Christmas album played over the speakers. We took the stairs to the second level, where there were more tables and leather armchairs (“Sorry,” said Gabe as he brushed past a girl who had fallen asleep with a chemistry book open on her lap, her mouth agape).

We found Keller standing in a back corner, hands linked behind his back as he scanned the room for us. He'd staked out a trio of tables, not because we needed to spread out but because we needed the privacy. He hadn't purchased anything, and a huddled group of underclassmen searching for a place to sit stared at his three empty tables with undisguised irritation.

“Have a seat,” he said, oblivious. Gabe and I sat down, each at our own table, and pulled off our hats. A flurry of snow settled on our eyelashes and hair; we brushed it off, staring at him. Keller reached into his briefcase—black leather, tattered now, the same one he'd carried around at Mills—and put a thick newspaper in front of us. It was a copy of the
San Francisco Chronicle
, dated that same day.

“I didn't know you still get the
Chronicle
,” said Gabe, his brows raised. “Homesick?”

“That's beside the point,” said Keller, jabbing a finger at the paper. He had opened it to the crime section of the “Bay Area and State” page. Below his finger was the mug shot of a woman with scraggly blond hair—yellowed at the ends, brown at the roots—and sallow, deep-set eyes. I immediately recognized her cleft chin and widow's peak, the pocked scars along her ­temples—remnants of a bad childhood bout with chicken pox, she'd told us, though we always suspected ­otherwise.

MURDER ARREST MADE IN OAKLAND CASE

(20-12) 06:51 PDT Rockridge—A suspect has been taken into custody in connection with the deaths of James, Leslie and Charlotte March, the Rockridge family found dead in September, authorities said Saturday.

Anne March, 26, of San Francisco, was arrested on suspicion of murder after an extensive statewide search. March, who worked as a pediatric nurse at Kaiser Permanente, was first reported missing in early October. The turning point came last Tuesday, when an anonymous tip directed city police to an abandoned house in San Francisco where Ms. March was found squatting.

“We have probable cause to believe Ms. March committed the murders of James, Leslie and Charlotte March,” said Sheriff's Sergeant Jose Mendoza. Mendoza declined further comment, saying a press conference was scheduled for Monday morning. Other members of the March family are expected to attend.

The suspect attended Oakland High School and college at California State–Long Beach. She has no prior criminal history, and public defender Linda Meyers has implied that the state might consider an insanity defense. Though prosecutor Kevin van Dyke called this “ludicrous,” citing Ms. March's passing scores on the psychological exams required of all licensed nurses, Meyers maintained that “mental health cannot be reduced to a numerical score, a true-or-false question, a pass or fail.” Meyers alluded to Ms. March's participation in a 2002 psychological research study as possible evidence of past instability, though she declined additional comment. Efforts by the
Chronicle t
o contact the study's director were unsuccessful.

March was transported to the Central California Women's Facility, where she faces a sentence of 50 years to life for
the murders of her parents, James and Leslie, both 52, and her younger sister Charlotte, age 11. The
San Francisco Chronicle
first reported on the March case on September 12, when James March's employer called city police to report his absence at work. The three victims were found in bed, dead due to fatal doses of morphine, administered intravenously. Their time of death was estimated to be ten days prior.

CCWF is the largest female correctional facility in the United States. It houses the state of California's death row for women.

“Jesus Christ,” said Gabe. He set the paper down and stared at it for a beat before looking up at Keller.

“I knew this would happen,” I said. “I knew it.”

We were quiet. Something seemed to rise and spread between us like toxic gas. In the hall behind us, a toilet flushed, and two girls came out of the bathroom, their arms linked. The taste of bile climbed my throat.

“Well, what do we do?” asked Gabe. “What the fuck do you suggest we do?”

It took a moment for me to realize he was talking to Keller. I'd known Gabe to quibble with Keller, tease him, even, but I'd never heard him use this kind of language. Keller looked at him evenly, his head slightly bowed.

“I suggest,” he said in a low tone, “that you don't pick up the phone unless you're sure the call is from one of us. Let everything else go to voice mail. If you're contacted by anyone you don't know—a reporter, a stranger, anyone—come to me immediately. I don't care how innocuous it seems.”

“Jesus
Christ
,” said Gabe. He ran his hands through his hair. “Okay, let's think about this. Maybe it's not so bad. It's possible she wasn't asleep, right? And even if she was, how could they possibly prove it?”

“She definitely wasn't asleep,” said Keller.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“She couldn't be. If you remember anything about Anne's case, you'll know that she was never a sleepwalker—her disorder most closely resembled RBD. She never left her bedroom. Her eyes were always closed. She was violent but clumsy. She had none of the fine motor skills required to operate a car or fill a vial of morphine.”

“That's a good thing, right?” asked Gabe. “That she wasn't sleeping? I mean, if she was awake when she committed those murders, how could our study have had anything to do with them?”

“It isn't a good thing,” I said. “My God—do you really think we had no part in this? We knew exactly how violent she was. We gave her knowledge of her deepest impulses, and then we left her. We trusted her to know what to do with it.”

“We aim to help patients resolve their sleep disorders. But we're not responsible for the knowledge they receive in lucidity training, nor the actions they take as a result of it,” said Keller tightly. “You know this as well as I do—it's in our release.”

“Legally, maybe, but what about morally?” I asked. “I mean, isn't that why we're sitting here, freaking out? That disclaimer's all well and good until somebody gets
killed
.”

“We were operating within the constraints of client-­patient confidentiality,” said Keller. “Besides, RBD is characterized by unconscious outbursts of violence and self-defense. Nearly every patient we see shows these symptoms.”

“Yeah, but Anne was different,” said Gabe. “She was cagier. Manipulative. We all knew it.”

“Exactly,” I said. “We should have told somebody. We should have turned her in.”

“And what should have happened then?” asked Keller. “Should she have been arrested for dreaming of murder?
Charged? Where would it stop? Imagine—people being rounded up and accused, not for what they've done, but what they
dreamed
of doing. It's thoughtcrime, and we would have been the policemen.”

“Fine—but that still doesn't mean we aren't culpable. We held a mirror up to her mind and showed her what was inside it.” I felt nauseous, my head thick. “We gave her the idea.”

“That's impossible to prove,” Keller said.

“But are you denying it?” asked Gabe.

A strange, new dynamic uncoiled itself between us: Keller leaning slightly back, Gabe and I staring at him hungrily. Hungry for what? For him to admit some wrongdoing? For him to crack?

Keller was silent, staring at a spot behind our heads, either lost in thought or ignoring us completely. For a moment, I thought he wasn't going to reply; then he opened his mouth and exhaled, a rattle of a sound.

“I don't know,” he said, articulating each word carefully, and somehow this was worse, more humiliating, than a denial.

I thought of Jamie: his tufted hair, his limbs straining against our straps, his shoes blinking red as he walked away from us. And I remembered something else: a warm night in September, a locket hanging from an index finger. My first conversation with Thom.

Couldn't what begins as an exercise in self-knowledge actually reveal our darkest impulses?
he'd asked.
Once we
experience
our dreams—not via recollection, but right there in the moment—how long is it before we start to believe that this is who we really are, what we really want, how we really feel? When does one's dream consciousness become their consciousness, I mean? Maybe the dreams themselves aren't dangerous. Maybe what's dangerous is putting people in contact with them.