The Anatomy of Dreams: A Novel

by Chloe Benjamin

  “I found this today,” I said, handing it to him. “It was in the filing cabinet, wedged beneath the others.”

  Gabe opened it gingerly and sifted through the papers inside.

  “Look.” I leaned toward him, pointing. “It’s Keller’s wife, her intake form. She had some sort of RBD—sexsomnia, it sounds like, if that even exists. She was tracking herself, keeping a kind of diary. Look at the handwriting. You recognize it, don’t you?”

  Gabe was silent. His body was perfectly still, but his eyes shifted across each page with incredible speed.

  “I don’t trust him,” I said. “He’s never told us about this, never even alluded to it.”

  “But why should he have told us? It was personal.”

  “That’s my point,” I said. “Science is supposed to be impartial. It’s supposed to be objective. And I’m starting to feel like Keller’s mission isn’t professional—it’s personal. It’s like he has a vendetta, Gabe—like he’s trying to avenge her by curing other people of the same sickness.”

  “And what’s so wrong with that?”

  I remembered something he’d said months ago, last fall—both of us standing in the kitchen at dusk as the hazy golden light of evening slanted through the window. But what’s more ethical than helping the people you know? Why should the process be so quarantined, so sterilized? Science should be applicable to real life—so why should we divorce it from love?

  Outside the window, a crow paused on the fence. It trained on us one dark, beady eye before sweeping away.

  “How much do you know about this?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” said Gabe. “Nothing.”

  “Then why are you protecting him?”

  “I’m trying to see the good.”

  “But what if you’re wrong?”

  My faith in Keller had begun to erode years earlier, I think. But my faith in Gabe was, until that moment, mostly intact. Who else did I have but him?

  We looked at each other carefully. Then he sat next to me on the bed, kissed the line of my jaw.

  “Everything I do,” he said, “I do for you. For us. You know that, don’t you?”

  Was that romance? I had known no love but his. Rolling through the grass like wolves, limb for limb, scavenging for attention—the brute hunger, the desperate force—and then, days when we hunted alone, nosing our way through the brush and picking at stones, days when our tracks were parallel but far apart. That Christmas, my mother had called, her voice crackling with static, and asked if I thought I would marry him. I looked over at Gabe, who was making oatmeal at the stove, holding a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle in his non-stirring hand. What could I tell her—that we were caught in the purgatory of Anne’s trial, a trial that would name her fate but seemed just as likely to direct our own?

  I knew Gabe well enough to know when he was lying. Even so, the truth seemed elusive, as faint and faraway as half-hidden stars. I was afraid to look up. Why, I should have asked myself, did Gabe not suggest we dismantle the bug? As he walked to the bathroom to shower, I crouched on the floor and unclipped its teeth.

  •••

  Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs lists physiological needs—for breathing and food, for sex and sleep—as the most basic of all drives. Next comes the need for safety, followed by the need for belonging. But what about the need to forgive? There is no belonging without it, no safety, no love. And so I found myself climbing into bed with Gabe that night. I started to read my novel, but Gabe was fidgety: he rustled through the Isthmus, discarded it, futzed with his radio alarm clock. Music crackled to life: Jay Z, a classical crescendo, a mariachi band.

  “Can you turn that off?” I put my book down. “I’m trying to read.”

  “Hold on.”

  He fiddled with the dials, and Diana Ross’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do” came through, rich and jazzy and clear. Gabe began to groove in his seat. A pillow bounced and fell off the bed. He got to his feet, still on the mattress, and extended his hand.

  “Dance with me?” he asked.

  “Gabe—”

  “Come on, Sylve. We need a little music.”

  Diana’s voice faded, and the Jackson 5 took her place. I want you back, they crooned, and what could I do but take his hand? We jived down the mattress, jumped and rebounded; we spun and dipped and clung. Gabe knelt, playing air guitar, shaking his head until his eyes were masked by hair. For seconds, it was possible to forget everything we had ever done to each other. Hysterical with need, we yanked the curtains shut. As the furnace exhaled heat, we stripped off our clothes and climbed back onto the bed.

  But something wasn’t right, something had been lost, and we scrambled for it with increasing panic. We searched coolly at first—an arm adjusted, a shift in the hips—and then hastily, furious in our bafflement and so thorough that any desire turned to exhaustion, though we couldn’t stop. We wouldn’t. We tried positioning Gabe behind me and above me, my ankles on his shoulders or cast to the left. I lay on my back, on my stomach, on my side; I crouched on my knees with my elbows pointing into a pillow and my forehead bumping the bed frame. We sat up, my legs pretzeled around Gabe’s waist, and rocked. The radio music faded; a commercial came on. Gabe braced himself against our comforter, his fists sinking into the down, and thrust with as much determination as I’d ever seen in him. It was no use: he was softening, his face twisted with humiliation. Years ago, something had burned between us, solitary as a candle on a dining room table. But it had been snuffed out while we were elsewhere—while we took out the trash, while we made dinner, while we worked and slept in other rooms—and now, we could only try to catch the smoke.

  “I’m sorry,” said Gabe.

  He lay back heavily, and our bodies came apart.

  “It’s okay,” I said, disentangling my legs from around his waist. My knees popped, the skin rubbed pink.

  It must have taken minutes for us to notice that the doorbell was ringing. By the time we scrambled into our clothes and turned off the radio, someone was rapping on the door. Who could it be but Keller? We slipped down the stairs in our sweatpants and socks. Neither of us bothered to look through the peephole before Gabe unlocked the door.

  Two police officers stood on the porch. One was a stocky younger man with ruddy skin and a brown mustache, precisely clipped; the other was a tall, lean woman with deep-set eyes and a tight bun, which tugged at her forehead.

  “Dane County Police,” said the man.

  Both cops pulled out their ID badges and flipped open the leather card cases before putting them away again. The woman took a small notebook from her belt and flicked up the cover.

  “Am I looking at Gabe and Sylvie Lennox?”

  “I’m Patterson,” I said. “Sylvie Patterson.”

  “Gabe Lennox and Syl-vie Patterson.” The woman squinted at her notebook, writing quickly. “Lived here long?”

  “Since August,” said Gabe. “What is this about?”

  The woman looked up at us. “Is that your car in the driveway?”

  “We don’t have to answer these questions,” said Gabe.

  I squeezed Gabe’s arm. “It’s our car,” I said.

  “Anyone else in the house?”

  Gabe and I didn’t flinch, but a current passed between us.

  “Is this about Anne?” I asked before I had the sense to stop myself.

  “Anne?” asked the man, taking a step forward. He was broad across the chest, and he strained in his belted jacket. He and his colleague exchanged looks, and she scribbled again on the small pad. “Is Anne in the house?”

  “No one is in the house,” said Gabe. “No one else is in the house.”

  “Mind if we confirm that?”

  It was the woman this time, her eyebrows cocked.

  “Yeah, I do mind if you confirm that.” Gabe’s face
was fixed with tension. “I know my rights. Tell me what this is about and we’ll go from there.”

  The two cops exchanged another glance. Then the man sighed, and the woman flipped her notebook closed.

  “Listen.” The man inclined his head confidentially. “You want to tell us what you were thinking making all that noise at twelve thirty on a Tuesday night?”

  “That’s all this is?” spluttered Gabe. “A—a noise complaint?”

  “Hey, buddy, hey.” The cop put his hands up. “We take noise complaints very seriously in this town.”

  “I bet you do. And I bet you think you’re really fucking funny.” Gabe’s voice was rising, his neck veined. “Bet you thought it was hilarious, scaring us like that. You know what I think is fucking funny? Cops not doing their jobs. Cops coming to my front door, hassling me about a fucking noise complaint, when people are killing each other out there—”

  “Not helping your case, my man,” said the cop, taking another step forward.

  “Stop it, Gabe.” I took his wrists in mine, digging my nails into the thin underskin. “Let it go.”

  Gabe had stopped shouting, but his face shook. A drop of sweat quivered at the tip of his nose.

  “We’ll stop, I promise,” I said, keeping hold of him. “We’ve already turned the music off. We were having fun, that’s all. It was stupid.”

  The man crossed his arms. His partner stared at us over the bridge of her nose.

  “Understand, you are this close”—she squinted—“from a misdemeanor. We get another call, things get more serious.”

  I nodded. Gabe wriggled out of my grasp and watched from the porch as the cops walked back to their car.

  “Hey,” he shouted, just before they opened the doors. “Who reported us?”

  The man opened the driver’s door and got inside without answering. The woman covered her eyes with one hand, as if trying to see us through the glare of the streetlights.

  We didn’t notice that the light in Thom and Janna’s bedroom was also on until it abruptly went out, throwing the policewoman’s face into shadow. She nodded slightly. Then she climbed into the car and yanked the door shut. The car began to move, blinking in the night.

  I locked the door. Gabe turned away from me and headed for the stairs. But before he got there, he turned abruptly and slammed the heel of his palm into the living room wall.

  “Gabe,” I gasped.

  “What kind of fucking business did they have reporting us?”

  “Maybe we really were being loud.”

  “Bullshit. They were our friends.”

  His forehead was dented with anger, the folds around his eyes so deep a penny could have balanced inside them. He glared at me, waiting for a response. But I wanted to be back in our room, jumping on the bed with the radio on and my stomach in my throat. I wanted to see Gabe playing air guitar with as much vigor as any other twenty-four-year-old, his hair streaking the air. I wanted him to be blurry again.

  PART THREE

  MORNING

  16

  MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS, 2010

  This summer, I’ve had plenty of time to think about my years with Keller and what they meant to me. I could have taken a plane to the Vineyard, but Hannah insisted I drive. See the country, take my time. I’ve saved up a bit of money—enough for a motel room in Cheyenne and another outside Iowa City. The first thing I do, when I get to a new room, is stand in front of the air-conditioning with my arms spread out like plane wings. It’s been a hot summer, and I’ve pitied the animals I’ve seen on the way: the thick-skinned sheep, horses swishing their tails like fans.

  It isn’t so awful, being alone, not when you get used to it. Every decision’s my own. Whenever I like, I can stop at a gas station for cheap coffee or Slim Jims. If there’s a fruit stand, I’ll pull to the side of the highway—I keep the bags in the passenger seat, knotted to keep out flies—and sometimes I get out for a roadside attraction: the Angel Museum in Beloit, Wisconsin, or Amarillo’s Cadillac Ranch. Mostly, though, I try to make good time. That way, when I touch down for the night, it feels deserved.

  At each motel, after I stand in front of the air-conditioning—or, for the cheaper ones, the fan—I pull on my old Speedo one-piece and go out to the pool. Even the motels without air-conditioning have pools. The color is always the same: a too-bright, mouthwash aqua. Smallish and rectangular, lined by a curved ledge of concrete and rows of beach chairs in various stages of decline, the pools shine like beacons amid the surrounding mediocrity. I ease myself into the deep end—too tall to dive like the children holding life preservers, or too old.

  It feels good to be surrounded by families, even if they aren’t my own: the children chicken-fighting with a viciousness reserved for siblings while their wide-set mothers yell for leniency. After I swim, I set up on one of the folding chairs with a hotel towel and chip away at the twenty-seven books I loaded onto my e-reader before the trip. When I was studying for my preliminary exams, it was more—a hundred and sixty, give or take—but I’m now halfway through my dissertation, and my reading has become more focused.

  How different it would have been if e-readers had been around when I worked with Keller! None of the fragrant, heavy books, their pages wilted as old dollar bills. The Kindle was too practical to resist—that sleek little machine, light as a paperback—but I miss the days when books were weighty and tangible. If all goes as planned, I’ll graduate in a year, apply for jobs this fall. I’d hoped this trip would give me time to read the rest of my texts, and I think I’m on track. If I’m honest, it helps to have a distraction—to believe that my mission this summer is to finish my reading, and not something else.

  I’ve been on the Vineyard for two days now. I’m staying in a little motel by the water—the most expensive one I’ve visited, but I’ve been frugal enough in the past six years to manage it. It’s located across the island from our old haunts. I wanted to keep my distance, at least until I was ready. In the morning, I have breakfast on the deck: a piece of fruit and one of the boxes of cereal I filched from the continental breakfast in Iowa City. When it gets hot, I read inside my room—I can see the ocean through the window.

  I don’t know exactly what I’m waiting for. I guess I’m expecting to drop into a different state, one in which I feel meditative and unflappable. I get frustrated when I snag on things. The silvery color of the motel siding, for example, the same siding as all of the houses on the Vineyard. The fog and its familiar descent.

  I planned my route so that I had to drive through Madison; I wanted to prove to myself I could do it. I hit the Wisconsin state line on the afternoon of July 4. I had planned to drive through the capital without stopping, but by evening, the holiday traffic had become unbearable. My muscles were rigid, and the air-conditioning in the car was less effective as the temperature rose outside. At nine o’clock, I pulled into a cul-de-sac on Rutledge and parked. I was ten minutes on foot from the old apartment in Atwood, two minutes by car. Through the window, I heard the high shrieks of the children who had gathered, with their parents, to watch the fireworks.

  I unlocked the car door. I only meant to stretch my legs, but I found myself wandering down the stairs between two waterfront houses, which led to a grassy patch of land at the edge of the lake. Families sat on the grass and on the benches by the stairs, waiting.

  We were bound by a congenial feeling of mutual anticipation. One of the children began to climb the fence; his father pulled him down, but not before the child pointed over the fence and hollered notice of the first explosion. It was a green shower of lights, shooting up in stalks to our right. The next one—red sparks, flaring and dissolving—came from the opposite direction. The land was so flat that we could see the fireworks of a succession of different towns. They burst one after another in all parts of the sky. The biggest explosions must have come from the closer towns, like Sun Prairie. The s
maller ones followed like echoes.

  We waited until the last town had sent up its final spark; the coda was a happy face, accidentally upside down. Watching the layered lights of these Wisconsin towns, many of which I’d driven through before, left me with a sore, vacant feeling. As parents collected their children and couples ambled back to the road, I found myself waiting by the fence, as if another show was soon to start or someone was coming to meet me. I could have been any other thirty-year-old woman—a well-lit apartment down the block, a partner at the stove. I look much the same as I did when I lived in Madison: the same slim, compact frame, skin beige and dotted with freckles in summertime. Two years ago, I changed my haircut, adding bangs—the feathery whim of a Berkeley hairdresser. I had hoped to be transformed, but when he spun me around to face the mirrors, it took only seconds for me to register myself. Like a child waking to a bedroom at first fuzzy and strange, the details soon sharpened into familiarity: the mole beneath my left eye, light eyebrows peeking out from behind a fuzzy shelf of hair.

  When I’d spent several minutes alone and it was clear that the fireworks were over, I climbed the stairs and walked back to the car. I was already turning my mind to logistics. Accustomed as I was to working through the night, I started driving again. By the time dawn was peeling night from the landscape, returning color to the pastures and wetlands, I was in Ohio.

  17

  MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2005

  In March, Madison shook off its crust of snow. Tree branches and glass blades shivered baldly in the early spring air; the most adventurous undergrads began to wear shorts, their legs defiantly exposed and covered in goose bumps. I lived in a vigilant state of alert. After seeing the bug on our phone line and finding Meredith’s file, I was determined to find out more. And if Gabe wouldn’t help me, I’d do it alone.

  I was distant from him, as if preparing myself, as if I already knew how our story would end. He was in charge of recruiting new participants, driving through the state to post flyers at satellite campuses of the university, and I continued the file reorganization project. We needed a success, and soon: our funding for the following year was not guaranteed. But we had no more than two new participants that spring, and I think a part of us had given up. Every morning, we read the San Francisco Chronicle online on separate computers, and at night we fell asleep in our clothes.