The Anatomy of Dreams: A Novel

by Chloe Benjamin

  “And you don’t think I did?”

  I was seething. But some part of me still wanted desperately to be convinced.

  “I know it feels that way,” said Gabe. “But we had other motivations for recruiting you. Everything I said to you, that day in the coffee shop—it was true. You were smart and resourceful, a psychology major. You knew Keller and me. And you’d understand our patients, however subconsciously. The fact that you were a sleepwalker—it was just an added bonus.”

  “An added bonus.” The words were dry in my mouth. “So what did I do?”

  I still imagine how it would be if I hadn’t asked. Would I think of myself differently? Or would I still have known, somewhere deep in the recesses of my consciousness, as Keller and Gabe believed I did?

  “In Fort Bragg,” Gabe said, “you did little things. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find you in the computer room, searching for something on Google, or sitting at the kitchen table doing your transcription work. Sometimes you even went up to the ground level, walked around in the grass. You never went very far. You just seemed to want a little air.”

  “And here?” I asked. “How far did I get here?”

  “Do you know?”

  Again, his face had the same odd expression—that mixture of shame and curiosity, of pain and hunger.

  “You tell me,” I said.

  Gabe inhaled, his breath uneven. He pushed himself to a standing position. The blood around his nose was still wet, and I could tell he was faint. But he walked slowly to the back door that led to the yard.

  “You went outside,” he said. “Through this door here. Took the stairs down to the yard. Come.”

  I followed him into the grass. Outside, it was dizzyingly bright, the sky the harsh gray-white specific to March. We stepped around the dogwood trees, which had managed to survive the winter; some had even sprouted fleshy little leaves, oily and lined like palms. Gabe led me to the back corner of the fence that separated our yard from Thom and Janna’s. Three planks had been removed, leaving a jagged hole through which an animal or a small person could pass. The hole was mostly hidden from view by a weedy bush. I didn’t remember seeing it before.

  “Did I make this?” I asked.

  “You or him,” said Gabe. “I wasn’t sure.”

  Thom. His calls in the night, the oddly familiar way he spoke to me after the bocce match.

  “You egged me on,” I said. I remembered the night of the match—how I had woken to find Gabe looking at me. “You asked me if I could see my hand—you said it made the dreams less real. You were trying to make me lucid.”

  “We’ve been trying for years. Keller thought it would be better if I worked with you—he obviously didn’t have access to you at night, and we didn’t want to make you suspicious. In Fort Bragg, I would talk to you in your sleep, but you didn’t make much progress until we came to Madison. These past few months, you got so close—I couldn’t help but nudge you when you were conscious. I felt like I was helping you do something extraordinary.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “Do you really think you would have stayed? We should have told you at the very beginning, back at Mills, but we didn’t. We couldn’t tell you now.” Gabe’s eyes were swollen, his nose already bruising blue. “I didn’t want to lose you, Sylve. I still don’t.”

  “But you were losing me. That’s exactly what you were doing—you sat there and watched me leave. It didn’t bother you? It didn’t hurt you, when you saw me go into his house?”

  “Of course it did. It was excruciating.” Gabe eyed the house next door and lowered his voice, though the rooms were dark and the shutters closed. “But we were doing something that had never been done before: we observed the subconscious mind in a totally uninhibited state over the course of almost seven years. You gave us the opportunity to watch a sleep disorder evolve in real time, to see how it was affected by lucidity. Keller was convinced you’d change the way parasomnias are understood. If it was the other way around—if it had been me—would you have been able to resist?”

  Gabe had gathered energy. He looked entreating and cautiously optimistic, as if convinced of a truth that I would come to see myself.

  “You’re sick,” I said. “You are verifiably fucking insane. This isn’t my achievement. You forced me into it—you took away any freedom of choice I had.”

  I was walking back to the house, stumbling over stepping stones and tangled plants, winding my way around the dogwood trees.

  “Do you really believe that?” asked Gabe from behind me. “You knew, I’m sure of it—at some level, even if it wasn’t conscious, you had to have known.”

  “Don’t tell me what I knew. I didn’t know a goddamn thing.”

  But I wondered if it was true. Had I wanted this? Had I been complicit? And, in some way, had I already figured it out myself?

  We walked into the kitchen again, and I pulled the glass door shut. All outside noises were sucked from the room. The hum of the refrigerator, now, the click of the clock. The slight buzz of the overhead lighting.

  Gabe held his hands up like a camper trying to calm a bear.

  “If that’s what you think, fine. But I think that, with time, you’ll come to see a picture that’s more complicated.”

  “Did you bug the phone, or was it Keller?”

  “We did it together.”

  “To listen to my conversations with Thom.”

  “Partly, yes. We had no way to know what was going on otherwise. We didn’t have anything set up at his place. And then there was the business with Anne.”

  “So Anne March is on trial.”

  “Of course she’s on trial.”

  “She killed her parents, and her sister, too.”

  “You know that, Sylvie.”

  He was looking at me quizzically, the space between his brows furrowed. I felt reality as a whole slipping away from me like an enormous tide. I had to reconstruct it by hand, to verify the simplest details.

  “It isn’t fair.” I felt frail and cold. “You saw sides of me I didn’t see myself.”

  “But isn’t that incredible?” His eyes were slick. “We know each other, Sylvie, in ways other couples can only dream of.”

  “People shouldn’t know each other this well. You watched me behave like an animal.”

  “No,” said Gabe more forcefully, shaking his head. “That’s not true. I saw you behave honestly. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “You know me, but I don’t know you.”

  “I know it seems that way. But you will, I promise you. Now that you know about all this—and believe me, my God, I’ve wanted you to know so badly—we don’t have to have any more secrets. We can be totally open.”

  “And what about Thom?”

  “I don’t care about Thom. It was all my fault.”

  “But what does he know?”

  “I have no idea. I haven’t spoken to him.”

  “No? You haven’t filled him in?”

  “I told you,” Gabe said. “We had no way to know what happened when you got there. We couldn’t figure out much with the phone bug; whenever you picked up, you seemed to want nothing to do with him. All I could do was take down the time when you got out of bed. Then watch as you walked through the fence.”

  “You were pretending to sleep.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t understand which side you were on.”

  “There aren’t sides,” said Gabe. “We’re all on the same side.”

  He caught hold of my forearm and tried to draw me to him. But I pulled away, twisting until his arm wrenched behind his back. He let go of me with a gritted noise of anguish. Panting, he dropped forward, his hands meeting his knees.

  “Jesus, Sylvie,” he said. “I just wanted to—
”

  But I barely heard him. I was running for the door, and then I was outside, lurching down the porch steps to the sidewalk. Across the street, a young couple walked two golden retrievers, wheat-gold and wily; the woman spoke sharply as they strained at their collars. Nausea came over me, sudden and boiling. I turned away and retched over a storm drain, vomit tumbling colorfully through the slats. One of the dogs barked, and the woman clicked her tongue, glancing at me with alarm as she ushered them forward. When they turned onto Atwood, the block was empty. I stumbled ahead.

  The wire fence that separated the train tracks from our house was overrun with ivy and backed by spindly trees. I stepped around it and began to walk down the length of the tracks, my feet inches from those gleaming steel bars. The air was cool and soft as a palm. I walked until I couldn’t see our house anymore; then I hooked my fingers in the open diamonds of the fence, leaned back, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again—how much later, I wasn’t sure—I heard a whinnying noise, grievous and faraway as a ghostly animal. The sound increased in urgency, accompanied by a bellowed horn and the ghastly screech of wheels on steel.

  Though I had heard plenty of trains in Madison, I rarely saw one; at home, the dark lacework of the trees blotted the tracks from view. Electricity whipped through the air. As the train came closer, my whole body shook, and I wound my hands deeper into the fence. I pictured the flash of a searchlight, a thunderous rush of air, my body whisked like a leaf. It would be so easy, so quick. The tracks were squealing, now, the ground rumbling with energy. Fear roared inside me, and I tried to yank my hands free. But my knuckles had swollen, and the sharp pull did nothing. The first car loomed into view, round nosed and gleaming, and I screamed.

  In one brutal movement, I ripped my hands from the fence and leapt to the other side of the tracks. The first car barreled past me, and the force of its trajectory knocked me to my knees. I crouched in the pebbled dirt—candy wrappers and soda cans, beer bottles rolling in the wind—as the other cars came into view.

  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 engine, 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, they 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 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 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 medication keeps 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 saw they were playing at catch-and-release: fishing for the sport of it, not the meat. There was thrill was in the capture, absolution in the letting go. They couldn’t have been older than fifteen—what had they ever killed? I stil
l 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 enemies. 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 ten 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.