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MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2005
Like all good liars, I took pride in my ability to deceive and thought it seamless. I painted my canvases black with a zealous attention to detail, allowing no trace of the original painting to shine through. Those covered-up paintings were works in themselves, as layered and intentional as what was underneath. There was only one painting I’d forgotten to black out: the one I had been working on when Thom called, on Christmas night. I’d shoved it behind the other four dark canvases and left it there.
One afternoon in January, I came inside after scraping ice off the porch, an old shovel in hand, when I noticed that Gabe wasn’t in the kitchen where I’d left him. With the specialized intuition of the paranoid, which told me that the only possible outcome was the one I most feared, I knew he was in the attic.
I pounded up the stairs and pushed open the door. He stood at the window, light striking his cheekbones. The four black paintings were scattered on the ground like fallen soldiers. In Gabe’s hands was the painting of Thom.
“You didn’t tell me you were doing this,” he said without looking up at me.
“It’s a new project.”
“I see.”
He held the painting up to the light. My stomach tumbled, for I knew what it showed: Thom and me on the floor of the attic, our bodies making angles as we rocked together. But I had painted it the way I always did my dreams—narrative on top of narrative, the same scene sketched over as more of it came back to me—and now the lines were dizzying, almost indecipherable. Gabe squinted at it, straining to tease out the piece’s meaning. A test: how well had I hidden it away?
“What is it?” he asked, finally.
“I don’t know. I was just messing around. Playing with color and lines.”
But maybe I had wanted him to find the painting; maybe it was I who was testing him. How much do you know about me, Gabe? How far will you go to know it? He hadn’t put the painting down; he was staring at the lower left corner, where I had painted Thom’s cast-off glasses. The glinting little lenses, the black temples folded shut.
“Those glasses look familiar,” he said.
“Really?” I blinked. “Huh.”
He put the painting down on the ground and brushed his hands on his pants. When he looked up again, his face was fixed.
“They’re Thom’s,” he said. “Funny, isn’t it?”
I thought I had won, but now I saw I was wrong. Gabe was feigning disinterest, something he only bothered to do when he was supremely, painfully interested. He wouldn’t give up without a fight.
“Why funny?”
Gabe ignored this. I crouched and began to clean up the foam peanuts that had fallen out of a large, tipped-over box. He was silent, watching me.
“Is Thom really that interesting to you?”
“That’s a ridiculous question. First of all, Thom doesn’t have a monopoly on black-rimmed glasses. And secondly, they’re only a small part of the painting.”
“Right. I forgot to mention the crazy lines zigzagging all over the place. And the two naked bodies.” He laughed hollowly. “I’m not blind.”
“Gabe.” I released a long breath. “It was a dream, okay? I had this weird dream about Thom, and it freaked me out. I came up here to process it.”
“A dream. So you’re still remembering them.”
“I guess so. Parts of them, anyway.” I crossed my arms. “I thought you’d be happy I’m painting again.”
“You’re changing the subject. And you’re defensive.”
“Of course I’m defensive. You’re acting like I’ve done something wrong, like I’ve betrayed you, but I can’t help what I dream. And don’t I have the right to—to artistic freedom?”
I was bluffing; in truth, I felt just as guilty as Gabe thought I was. But he believed me, or he wanted to—I could see it in his face. His jaw softened, and he exhaled.
“I’m sorry.” He shook his head, ran a hand through his thick brown hair. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I know you can’t help it.”
He walked out of the attic; his shoulder brushed mine as he passed me, and then I heard his heavy, quick footsteps on the stairs. A moment later, the screen door gasped open, rattled shut. He had left.
In my first year at Berkeley, I took a psychology course that focused on love. Most interesting to me was the section on communication between couples. I learned that even the slightest change of facial expression in one partner, a raised eyebrow or a curled lip, can be enough to trigger an increase in the heart rate and adrenaline of the other. Even more striking was the fact that couples begin to look alike as they age: their faces are quite literally shaped by shared experience. It was clear that couples speak with their bodies, not just their voices; that the body is confused in its allegiances; and that, sometimes, the body betrays the mind of its owner in order to communicate something to the partner—an insurgent rushing across party lines with a letter in hand.
I should have been relieved when the conversation was over, but I wasn’t. Gabe’s unease had amplified my own alarm, for I could no longer deny that my dreams were beginning to bulge into my days. Time was no longer fastened to my life; it had become unsewn, a hanging hem, a sibling whose days had once been braided with mine but had since moved on. I tumbled into morning feeling disoriented and incongruous, like a nocturnal creature blinking in the harsh, wrong light of dawn. Sometimes my muscles were sore, my breath short, as if I’d clenched them through the night. At other times, a faint, ebbing pleasure washed through my body.
My dreams of Thom had grown richer and more detailed, and they had a sensory, physical weight that stayed with me when I woke up: Thom’s scissored legs around me, warm and long, sparsely patched with hair; the knobs and hollows of his face pressed against mine, soft eye sockets, ridge of nose, as he whispered something to me—a song—For there’s a change in the weather, a change in the sea. My walk will be diff’rent, my talk and my name . . . It was an old big-band song from the 1940s, a Benny Goodman song, and where had I heard it before? For it to occur in my dream, I knew, I had to have heard it somewhere. But when I played the song online, in the office with the door shut, it reminded me of Thom, only Thom, nothing more.
Until now, I had felt helpless, resigned to the dreams as they came. Years ago, I had given up on the lucidity exercises Keller taught us in Snake Hollow. But what if I tried again? If I could train myself to be lucid—if I could watch the old machinery of my subconscious creak to life while standing apart from it—perhaps the dreams would lose their power. If I could name them, I might be able to disarm them. Maybe I could even control them.
That night, lying in bed, I took inventory of the things around me: the bedroom door, slightly ajar; outside my window, a yawn of moon; hanging from my nightstand, the cotton skirt from which I’d scrubbed a stain the night before. When I see my hand in my dream, I will know I am dreaming, I thought as Gabe snored lightly next to me. I reminded myself of the dream signs: broken electronics, impossible feats of physics, the dead. And when I emerged in a dream, minutes or hours later, I looked for them.
I was never aware of how the dreams began. Instead, I became conscious partway through, and it was almost like waking—slowly my eyes would seem to open and that musty, subterranean world materialized again, always the basement, its cracked floorboards and dusty bulb. Lights didn’t turn on in dreams, and so it was light I would start with. But when I reached for the bulb’s dangling chain one night, Thom stopped me.
“Are you crazy?” He batted my hand down like a fly. “Gabe might see.”
The threat was enough to freeze me in place. I was distracted, too, for Keller’s wife had appeared. She never spoke, but she watched us. She wore a red suit jacket and skirt, her expression impassively appraising: she was either fascinated by us or very, very bored. Sometimes, she sat in a chair across from me and tri
mmed her hair, staring into my face as if it were a mirror. Other times, she ignored us entirely: she inspected the room or leaned against the wall, humming like a teenager waiting for a train to arrive. Another time, Keller’s orange cat wound between us before settling on her lap.
Thom followed my gaze.
“What are you looking at?” he asked, his voice low.
The woman caught my eye, one brow raised in an elegant, sideways S.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
“Sure you do,” said Thom, wheedling me.
Thinking felt like swimming through sludge. I had mastered one task, at least: I knew I was dreaming. But what was I supposed to do now?
“Don’t know how to,” I said. “How to wake myself up.”
“Then don’t bother.”
“You’re no help.”
“You don’t need my help.” Thom scooted over toward me and laid his head on my lap, crossing one leg over the other. His feet were long and wide, the bones raying out like fans. “You’ll wake up in the morning.”
“But what do I do until then?”
The cat slinked by, and Thom grabbed it. He held her above his head, his large palm beneath her stomach. The cat bristled, her back arching, before relaxing in his grip. Her legs, dangling toward the ground, twitched and went limp.
“A thousand things,” he said. “We could have a staring contest. A wrestling match. Play blackjack. Run away. Though there are plenty of fun things we can do right here.”
He wiggled his eyebrows.
“Don’t be disgusting,” I said, but as if watching a film I couldn’t stop, I kissed him. He tasted muddy and sweet, and I did it again.
“Stay awhile,” murmured Thom.
With his hand behind my neck, he held me close. Why did it feel so good to kiss him? He had none of Gabe’s forceful need, his blunt charisma; Thom was coy and languid, drawing me to him before pulling back again. His body lacked the tight density of Gabe’s—the hard chest or thickly muscled arms. When I pressed my fingers into Thom’s skin, it was responsive, but through it I could feel bone.
He lit a candle. It made his face glow gold, then red. Light played other tricks on me, too. Sometimes, I climbed the stairs to look out of a small window set in the basement door. The sky was an inky black, unnaturally matte, like dried paint. I could see nothing else—no shapes, no garden, no stars.
“Why can’t I see stars?” I once asked Thom. I shook him by the shoulders, and his head bobbled, moving from shoulder to shoulder like a scarecrow’s.
And then I was in bed with Gabe, and it was his shoulders I was shaking, though his head remained fixed in place, his sturdy rottweiler’s neck unmoving. His eyes were wide and focused.
“Because we live in a city,” he said. “There are streetlamps. Light pollution. We aren’t in the middle of nowhere anymore.”
Could it be possible that something about the winter—the light pollution, the atmospheric density—had blotted out the stars? One night, I stayed up to see. I sat on the side of our bed with a glass of water. We had returned at three P.M. after a long session at the lab, and now it was evening. I was exhausted, and the urge to sleep tugged at me like a riptide—the strongest urge we have, I’ve often thought, greater than hunger or sex. But I waited as the digital clock beside the bed shone six thirty, then seven, then eight.
It was eight thirty when they began to appear. Like guests at a lavish party, some were early, others fashionably late, but one by one they filled the sky. Hyades, Cygnus, Pleiades. The Seven Sisters with their assigned seats at the table. Assured that I had indeed been dreaming, I fell asleep as if taking my rightful place below them—Gabe and I clustered in bed, assigned to our roles: in the mind as on earth, on earth as in the heavens.
• • •
A door had sealed off between Gabe and me, and we squinted at each other through the peephole. I couldn’t tell him that I was afraid of the dreams that still took me at night, or how much Anne’s reentrance into our lives had disturbed me. It was difficult to tell where his loyalties lay, and we were spending less time alone. Keller, so rarely a presence in our house, had begun to stop by unannounced; or at least it seemed unannounced to me, as I was never there when he arrived. I pushed through the door with grocery bags or library books, my face flushed and muscles rigid from the cold, and there he was—sitting with Gabe at our kitchen table or washing a glass at the sink.
“Sylvie,” Keller would say, nodding, and Gabe would jump in: “Adrian was in the neighborhood.” Or, gesturing to the newspaper spread out on the counter: “Another article about Anne’s case. Have a look. Where’ve you been, by the way?”
Keller didn’t live nearby, and he had no reason to be there unless he was coming to see us. I suspected he wanted to make us feel he was there during an obviously disturbing time—though I wasn’t sure whether he meant to comfort us or keep tabs on us.
Gabe thought he was lonely.
“You know what Anne meant to him,” he said after Keller had stayed over for dinner and two drinks before finally shuffling out the door around eleven.
I eyed him from the sink, drying my hands on a dish towel.
“To his work, you mean,” I said.
“You know Adrian. For him, there’s not much difference between the two.” Gabe sighed and leaned back in his chair, wincing, until his back cracked. “He’s never claimed to be perfect, Sylvie. He’s dealing with a lot, and the least we can do is be there for him.”
“Why are you going so easy on him?” I remembered Gabe’s anger that day at Starbucks—how good it felt to be on the same side. “He screwed up, remember?”
“Maybe.” Gabe sighed. “Maybe not. It’s a shitty situation all around, but I think we might have jumped the gun in blaming him. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s Anne’s.”
His defection made me feel bewildered and abandoned. And it brought me back to a hazy night in October of 2002, shortly after we moved to Fort Bragg. Gabe and I were cleaning the kitchen after a roast chicken dinner, raising the windows to let the smoke out, when I brought up the fact that Anne took direction only from Keller. That morning, we had finished another frustrating session in which she refused to let Gabe or me prepare her; it was Keller she trusted, and Keller was the only person she allowed near.
“He’s reinforcing her bad behavior,” I said. “He’s coddling her. If she’s going to be a part of our research, she’s got to accept the fact that she also has to deal with the underlings.”
“It’s still early.” Gabe wiped the plate I’d just washed with a dish towel and slung the towel back over his shoulder. “She’s clearly pretty damaged. And that’s just how Keller is.”
“An enabler?” I asked. I was braver then; it still wasn’t too late for me to reenroll at Berkeley for the spring semester.
“If you want to put it that way.” Gabe shrugged. “But there’s no reason to villainize him. Keller’s always wanted to help the people who need him most. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”
“Maybe he’s the one who should be in therapy.”
“He has been.”
I laughed in surprise.
“How do you know?”
“He’s mentioned it,” said Gabe. “I don’t know what about—maybe Meredith.”
“Meredith?”
“His wife. She died, for Chrissake, and young—how are you supposed to get over that?”
That night, I lay awake for hours in the bed that Gabe and I had shyly begun to share. Meredith: the name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Gabe was snoring beside me, a peaceful mound. I climbed out of bed and started up the computer, waiting as it sputtered and groaned. I pulled up Google and searched for some combination of Meredith and Keller. Why I felt the need to do so privately I wasn’t sure; I only knew that I was betraying Keller, and somehow, Gabe, too.
RENOWNED SCIENTIST AND PROFESSOR MEREDITH KELLER DEAD AT 43
A graveside service at Crossways Cemetery will be held on Saturday, December 4, to honor the life of Meredith Keller, née Meredith White. Born in 1950 to Mary and Lewis White in Oak Bluffs, Meredith received her MA in psychology at the University of Tennessee and her PhD in neurobiology at Yale School of Medicine. Shortly after graduating, Meredith became a teacher in the US military school system, educating children in Vietnam, Germany and Japan before accepting an assistant professorship at the University of San Francisco in 1979. It was there that she met her husband, researcher Adrian Keller, a PhD student who later joined Meredith on the faculty. They were married in 1985.
Meredith took her own life on November 26, 1993. She is survived by her widower, Adrian Keller, and her mother, Mary White. She had no children.
Donations in her memory may be made to the Meredith Keller Foundation for Interactive Lucid Dreaming through the philosophy-neuroscience-psychology program at the University of San Francisco.
“You don’t find that a little unethical?” I demanded of Gabe the next morning. As surreptitiously as I had found the information, I couldn’t keep quiet now that I had it. “I mean, Jesus—Keller’s wife commits suicide, and he funnels all of her donations into his own research?”
“The research was both of theirs,” said Gabe. His face was rigid with a defensiveness that surprised me. “They were partners.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know anything about her,” I said. “Nothing but the fact that she died.”
“I knew they were colleagues.”
“Hardly,” I said. “He was her student.”
The Anatomy of Dreams Page 20