The Anatomy of Dreams (25 page)

I had pictured the majestic ferocity of old freight trains, the coal-black engine and husk of white steam. But this train was ramshackle and tired, with a child's crude design: blunt wheels, wagons in sallow shades of orange and yellow and brown. The sides were sprayed with graffiti. The train itself seemed to howl in protest, condemned to carry these stories, for how to clean a train—a pressure washer, a sandblaster?—and what would be the point, if the next night someone new came, spray paint in hand, to find the train's canvas cleaned and ready?

I coughed dust as the last car passed. This was no brick-red caboose: those had been phased out in the 1980s and '90s to cut costs, Gabe once told me—one of the random bits of knowledge I was no longer surprised he had. The manned caboose and its crew were deemed unnecessary, he said, the rails safe enough. The caboose conductor was replaced by an end-of-train device: a small electronic unit with a flashing red taillight.

But someone stood on the back of this car, his feet on the small aluminum platform, hands gripping the railing.
He wore layers of dark clothes and studded boots, a knit cap pulled low; a heavy beard hung down to his shoulders. A train hopper. I had heard they rode in open boxcars or in the wells behind cargo containers. With night falling, the man blended into the charcoal-colored car and the dusky sky. Perhaps this had emboldened him, or maybe he just wanted air. Every few seconds, the flashing red light illuminated his swan-shaped cheekbones and the tube clutched in one hand—a map? A newspaper? I couldn't tell.

As the engine pulled away, our eyes met, and sparks ran down my spine. He raised a hand in salute, and I did the same. Then the train sank into the darkness, swallowed like a stone in water, and just as unexpectedly as he had appeared, the man was gone.

18

MARTHA'S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS, 2010

The Vineyard feels much more benign than it used to. It's sunnier than it was in the summer of 2002, the product of a world hell-bent on heat. This year, seventy-degree days have been replaced by scorching stretches of drought, and the fertile plains of the Midwest are unable to bear food. The fog is a relief. Was it ever as foreboding, as secretive, as I once made it out to be? I'm eight years older now than I was that summer—in August, I'll turn thirty—and my anxiety about the fog, its powers of concealment, has slipped away from me. It's better that way, though I suppose the world has lost some of its glitter. It's as though I've peeled away some holographic veneer, and the world is stark, actual. Night fits obediently into its little box. And I, perhaps, fit obediently into mine.

It's been years since I dreamed the way I did in Madison. I don't walk in my sleep anymore—two nightly medications and four years of careful calibration have seen to that. It's strange; actually, the medications make my dreams easier to remember. I set up a video camera at the foot of the bed—an extreme measure, I know, which made me feel both protected and marginally insane—and each morning, I reeled through
the previous night's videotape. Aside from the occasional twitch, I was slack as a sack of flour. This calmed me, and soon I came to enjoy my dreams. Other people dropped into a state as blank and idle as a sleeping computer. But every night, I got to go to the movies—my one concession to the way I used to be.

Or maybe that's just what I tell myself. There's a crack in that floor, and I stay as far away from it as possible. The truth is that there will always be a fault line in me, and fault lines are never a single, clean fracture; when the surface of your world is displaced, the plates shuffled and broken like china, you can never step as carelessly as you used to. The medications keep me asleep, and trying to find some pleasure in my dreams keeps me from hating them—or the place in me they come from. How can I explain how it feels to be constantly on guard, afraid not of what someone else could do to you but of what you might do to yourself? It's like owning a rottweiler: no matter how sweet she is at home, she'll speak for herself once she's off-leash in the dog park, and there's not a thing you can do to control the way she tears through the grass, the way she howls like sin; you can only smile with embarrassed apology at the other owners and mutter thinly, “She thinks she's a wolf.”

Once I got to the Vineyard, I couldn't resist the urge to drive past the Snake Hollow compound, even though—or perhaps because—I knew it would look nothing like it used to. In the fall of 2008, a developer bought the compound, gutted the insides of the buildings, and began work on a two-year project that turned each one into a cluster of vacation condominiums. He kept the name—Snake Hollow, sure to attract couples in search of a storied, moody island escape—but to me it felt terribly wrong. I pulled smoothly into the driveway, which had been dug out and paved, and there they
were: the three original structures, shingles painted the impeccable white of veneers.

Each building was roughly the same shape and size, but there were new appendages here and there: another porch, an extra wing. Each condominium had its own entrance, so that walkways jutted out of the building in various directions, crawling with guests. A family of five emerged from what was once the bunk room, clutching noodles and boogie boards and a giant yellow float in the shape of a slug; a child stood inside one of the windows of the old library, testing the air with her foot before being sucked into the room by an invisible parent. In front of the driveway, on a newly planted stretch of bright green grass, a young couple sat knock-kneed in sunglasses, sharing a peach. They looked at me with casual interest as I reversed out of the driveway.

On the side of the road, stalks of dune grass waved in salute or farewell. Twenty yards away was the beach, where a group of teenage boys stood with fishing poles. I slowed to watch them: their slender, eager bodies, the round whip of the lines. Every so often, a lone holler signaled a tug from the water. I still remember the night Keller returned to the compound from one of his afternoon walks with the gasping, sparkling body of a striped bass. Its jaw gaped, lips wide enough to hold a grapefruit. It wasn't even bloody. Silver-green, round-bellied and pulsing, the fish was so robustly itself that it was hard to believe it would soon be split, skin slipped off like a dress, and reincarnated on Keller's floral china plates, the meat buttered and fried to a crisp.

The sunset that night was startlingly neon—searing orange and highlighter pink as Keller paused in front of the French doors and the fish stilled. I wondered why it didn't resist him. I'd heard about the power of striped bass. They weighed as much as sixty pounds; mature, they had few en
emies. But the one in Keller's hands was docile, resigned. Its eyes—even larger than a human's, the black irises pits in pools of yellow—stared out at the room with what seemed like attention, as if Keller were offering not death but a privilege. Here, he seemed to say, was life on land.

19

MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2005

My mind wanted to forgive Gabe. But my body couldn't. I kept expecting to return to bed with him, but as the days passed, the charge around that room only gathered strength. I went upstairs to grab clothes or a book when he was out, and when I returned downstairs, I felt contaminated. Only one thing made me feel better: that Gabe didn't know—or wasn't sure about—what had happened at Thom's. At the time, it was my only, meager stitch of power. That knowledge, knowledge of how far I had gone, was what Keller and Gabe most desperately wanted. It was what they had spent years fishing for, what they were betting their careers on. And in the terrible weeks that followed, weeks I spent in a hazy state of limbo, I guarded it with everything I had left.

I slept on the couch and adopted Meredith Keller's method of RBD intervention, waking myself with a cell phone alarm before I could sink into REM sleep. It had never been so difficult to deny myself that most basic instinct. I was pulled toward sleep's depth and what awaited me there. Was Thom expecting me? Twice, the phone rang—once while Gabe was at the lab, and another time when he was home, though it stopped after the first ring—but I never picked up.

My memories of those final weeks are few, but static images, like postcards, surface now and then. Lying on the couch before dawn, half-asleep and wrapped in my coat. Standing before the bathroom mirror in the darkness of very early morning, turning the fluorescent lights on and off so that the bright shock kept me awake. Sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal and Gabe in the chair across, his eyes bleary but focused on me.

“Say something, Sylvie. Anything.”

I didn't answer. Mostly, he knew enough to let me alone. I made the living room into a haven, for I was afraid to venture very far outside; the thought of seeing Thom was even worse than seeing Gabe. But it was not long before the outside came to me.

It was the beginning of April, one week after I found my file at the lab, and I had spent it indoors. I'd sent Keller a brief e-mail saying that I had come down with the flu to buy time while I thought through what to do—whether and how to confront him, whether and how to leave. But my brain was foggy, and I was spending less and less time conscious. While Gabe was at the lab, I dozed in my coat on the living room couch. My sleep was never deep enough to be satisfying, which made it easy to fall in and out of it. So when I heard a sharp rapping at the door, I rose.

I expected to see Keller, but it was Janna. She stood barefoot on the porch in a pink silk pajama top and what looked like Thom's jeans. They sank into folds around her knees and ankles. She had dyed her hair an unnatural, all-over red. And she was staring at me expectantly, as if it was I who was on her porch and not the other way around.

“May I come in?” she asked finally.

I nodded. She stepped lightly through the door. I became conscious of the living room and its air of agoraphobia: the windows covered with black sheets, coats crumpled on the
couch and floor. In the air was the damp, close smell of bodies. She looked at the video camera I'd set up at the foot of the couch and averted her eyes.

“Can I get you something to drink?” I asked.

“Anything with alcohol.”

Her tone was almost flirtatious. But beneath it was a stale tone of affect, of attempt.

“All right,” I said. I walked to the refrigerator and opened it: eggs, a scattering of leftovers, old cold cuts for lab lunches. Nestled in the back was a half-full bottle of old white wine. I sniffed it and poured a glass.

“Actually,” said Janna, “don't bother.”

She had seated herself at the kitchen table. Her silk top, oversized, pooled on the chair.

Not knowing what else to do with it, I kept the glass for myself. I sat down across from her. She was silent. Months earlier, I would have tried to make conversation, but now I was exhausted. I stared at my wineglass, fingered the thin flute. Slowly, my nervous system was waking up, pawing its way through the grogginess of afternoon. It was minutes before I noticed Janna staring at me.

“You don't look well,” she said.

It would have been less painful if I had detected a tone of insult. But her voice was bare of its playful filigree, its musical lilt. Even the nasal clip of her Finnish accent had softened.

I'm not sure how long we sat like that together. It felt to me like hours, but in reality it must have been no more than a few minutes.

Abruptly, Janna stood. “It smells in here.”

When I call up that memory now, I see her in the loose pajama top, her nostrils flared and her stomach already pushing against the waistband of Thom's jeans. But I think I've added that detail in hindsight; at the time, I later learned, she was no more than four months along.

I followed Janna to the door and out onto the porch. She began to lean toward me, as if to lay her head on my shoulder. Her cheek brushed mine. I don't know why I didn't pull away.

“If you come into my house again,” she hissed, “I'll call the police.”

Without meeting my eyes, she turned toward the screen door. There was a quick flutter of air as it opened and closed, and then she was gone.

• • •

At that time, I could count on one hand the people whose phone numbers I knew and whom I spoke to with any intimacy. I had long since lost touch with any of my college friends. I called my mother.

I still marvel at the speed and efficiency with which she extricated me from life in Madison. I didn't tell her about my participation in Keller's experiments, and whatever her suspicions, she took me at my word: it was only a bad breakup. Like most young people, I'd convinced myself that her romantic life had begun and would end with my father. But as we flew from Madison to Cleveland, then from Cleveland to Newark, she resurrected an animated lineup of past boyfriends. During the layover, my mother—my frugal mother, wearing the same faded jeans and clogs she'd had since I was born, with the original suede skinned off the toe—treated me to an epic airport feast: steak frites from the flashiest, most overpriced grill in Cleveland international, topped off with a brownie sundae that was probably illegal in some states. She stopped short of carrying my luggage; I asked at baggage claim, whiny with exhaustion, and she gave me a look equivalent to a sharp kick. At home, she babied me for a few weeks—doing the laundry, making my favorite minestrone soup—before telling me it was time that I decided what to do next, and I better not think about living alone.

“What other choice do I have?” I asked. “I don't know anyone.”

I was sitting on the couch in my dad's old sweatpants, eating Funyuns out of the bag, and I couldn't decide whether I was pleased or disgusted with myself.

“Find a roommate on Craigslist,” she said. “People do it every day. Or call Hannah, from high school.”

“How?” I asked. “We didn't have cell phones back then—I wouldn't even know how to reach her.”

My mother sighed and walked out of the room. When I heard the quick patter of her footsteps on the stairs, I figured she was giving up on me. But less than a minute later, she reappeared in the living room doorway and tossed a heavy, spiral-bound book at me. It landed at my feet with a self-­satisfied smack.

I picked it up: the old Mills directory, an impressive inch and a half thick, which included a dense section on the school's rules and history before getting to the good stuff. Having everyone's home address and phone number felt deliciously valuable then, as benign as it seems in today's obsessively public, networked world: I remember crowding over a San Francisco map with Hannah to look up her crush's address and repeating Gabe's home phone number in my head until I had it down by heart. But the directory was almost a decade old now. The phone number listed for Hannah rang so long that I was about to hang up, convinced that her parents had sold the farm, when there was a plastic clatter and her mother's melodious hello. I could still picture her soft pale braid, her browned and callused palms, the way she bent over the rosemary bushes in the garden as if checking on sleeping infants.

Hannah wasn't there; she was in Berkeley, her mother said, with more than a touch of pride, after finishing culinary school in New York. She'd spent a year working on an organic
farm in Canada, and now she was an assistant chef at a vegetarian restaurant. Ingrid asked how I was (“Er, fine”) and gave me Hannah's cell phone number. I was worried we wouldn't know what to say to each other, but Hannah was so enthusiastic, Stevie Wonder playing in the background, that my nerves dissolved (“Hang on a sec, let me turn that down—I've got my pump-up music on, you know I can't wake up otherwise— Sylvie! Jesus Christ, girl, it's been ages!”).

She was living in a squat, sixties apartment building in the Gourmet Ghetto (“Hideous—we're talking wood-paneled walls and orange shag carpeting, but what can you do?”) with her ex-boyfriend, a chef at the same restaurant (“Don't ask—it's about as terrible as it sounds, but it's only for another nine weeks, not that I'm counting, and on the upside, he's obsessively tidy and does all of my dishes”). Their lease was up at the end of July, and she needed a new roommate.

“I'd love to have you, obviously,” she said. It was nine in the morning in California, and I could hear her bustling around the kitchen: the clink of a knife, plates rattling, the swift wheeze of a window being pushed up. “But what would you do here?”

“I've been thinking about going back to school, actually,” I said. It was true—I still had that damn application for readmission, and it was becoming clear that this was my best option. I knew that if I lived with my parents for much longer I'd become self-pityingly depressed, and I needed a college degree. “I could come out in August, get a job waiting tables while I work on my application. Maybe I could start up in the spring semester.”

And that was what happened. I spent the early summer tying up loose ends in Newark, not that I had many: I packed my bags, trashed my mementos of Snake Hollow and my photos of Gabe. I ate more consecutive dinners with my parents than I ever had as a kid. In June, Rodney came home
from college, where he was studying creative writing; in the evening, we kicked a Hacky Sack around as the sun's golden yolk smeared the backyard. After weeks of apartment hunting, Hannah found a turrety little Victorian just blocks from her restaurant. She sent me photos via e-mail: two bedrooms, a turquoise-tiled bathroom, space for a garden.

I could put Gabe out of my mind during the day, but at night, memories of him throbbed beneath my skin. I dreamed of his off-kilter smile, the particular tenor of his voice, and woke sweaty and gasping. I didn't pick up his phone calls, though each one was a fresh puncture, followed by a dull ache that lasted for days. If he asked me to come back, if he told me again that he loved me, I didn't trust myself to move to California. It would be so easy to slip back into our life together before I even knew I was doing it—to edge quietly through the door like a teenager returning after a long night out, to climb the stairs and take my old, soft place beside him in bed. He would wake up to find me there, fold his body around mine in habit before the surprise of it registered. But I would have to return to Keller, too—to the bare halls of the lab, the perpetual exhaustion, and the stagnant, indoor air. I felt as if I'd spent years within the glass segments and cyclical view of a revolving door. Outside, I was so dizzy that I could probably have fainted on command, but at least there was wind.

Gabe wasn't the only one who called me. My cell phone rang constantly, the area codes ranging from Madison to Massachusetts, and the voice mails were all from Keller. In the beginning, they were curt—
Sylvia, it's Adrian; I need you to call me
—but as the days passed, his voice became strained, an undercurrent of panic impossible to cover up. He called from the private number at the lab, his Boston-based cell phone, and eventually, from pay phones. Ignoring him made me feel sickened and blasphemous, but I never picked up.

Instead, I wrote a letter. The silver lining of Anne March's
trial was that it gave me a prepackaged excuse. I can still recall, with mild embarrassment, the convolution of the first paragraph:
Though the past three years of my life have been dedicated to my work with you, and I have believed in that work as ardently as my conscience has allowed, certain events of late have forced me to see our research, and its terrible complications, in a new light. It is with great sadness that I recuse myself from an effort in which I have been so profoundly invested, but I can no longer ignore the evidence that suggests our work has been of primarily negative consequence to the lives of our participants and their loved ones.

I wrote that I wouldn't share the details of our work with the media or the police, and I've kept that promise, though I've never been able to figure out whether it was for their sake or my own. In return, I asked Gabe not to tell Keller what I'd learned. I've no idea whether he honored his part of the pact; in any event, when the case against Anne came to a sudden close later that summer—Anne changed her plea to guilty and was sentenced, without a trial, to twenty-six years in a federal prison for women—Keller's calls dwindled to a stop.

Maybe even he knew by then that an era was coming to a close. While in Berkeley, I followed him and Gabe from afar. They continued on for another two years, traveling like vagabonds from one college town to the next. They spent the fall after I left in Ann Arbor, the spring in Bloomington. From there, the universities became more and more obscure. After the 2005-2006 academic year, which they spent in a small New York college so far upstate that it bordered Canada, their work was no longer tied to any school at all.

I've often wondered how they felt in those final months, when the East Coast was just beginning to wake after a winter in hibernation. Were they filled with despair, so incongruous when the outside world was in bloom? Or did they surrender quietly? They must have known that their time had come and
gone. As the twenty-first century continued, nobody wanted to learn how to live in their dreams—they just wanted to stay asleep. Out was the touchy-feely naval-gazing of the eighties and nineties; when gas prices were soaring, ice caps were melting, and resources were becoming thin, insurance was the best thing money could buy.
You'll Sleep Like a Baby
, one mattress ad promised—and what was more attractive, more elusive, than that sort of ignorance, harder-won in adulthood but no less blessed?