The Anatomy of Dreams Read online

  “You guys hang out all the time. I just don’t get what you’re doing,” said Hannah. Blotchy, blackberry-colored hickeys had started to appear on her body in surprising places (collarbone, inner elbow, and once, she showed me, smiling wickedly, her inner thigh); she was baffled by our restraint, not that it was intentional.

  “We’re talking,” I said helplessly, and it was true: we’d become expert in the kind of simpatico conversation that usually only fell into place after years of friendship. Tucked between the redwood trees in the forest behind school, we traded stories: our secret plans (“To be a physicist,” I whispered, hot-cheeked), our childhood fears (“Pill bugs,” said Gabe), our families. What I’d heard of Gabe’s was partially true: he lived with his mother in Tracy, California, a humid town in the San Joaquin Valley—“best known,” said Gabe, “as the place where people stop to pee on the way to Tahoe.” His mother worked from home for a telecommunications company and was heavily medicated for a chronic pain condition that made her yell, he said, or sleep. His dad wasn’t dead, but he “wasn’t in the picture”—a phrase Gabe said with such swift automatism that it sounded like something he’d been trained to say.

  I didn’t push him. Instead, I told him about my family. We were closer, maybe, but not cuddly. My parents prized their intellects and encouraged the same in my brother, Rodney, and me. Rodney was five years younger, thirteen during my senior year, and he was the softest one of all of us: a boy unusually gentle for thirteen, who kept a pet newt and wrote short stories on my father’s hand-me-down laptop. They lived in New Jersey, ten states and six hours away, and most of the time I kept them tucked in one compartment in my mind—a compartment I opened up when I went home but otherwise kept firmly lidded.

  A narrow channel had opened between Gabe and me, and we wriggled through. What we had was a likeness, an understanding of the way that solitary people could and had to drift together. Though Gabe was often surrounded by a troop of boys, he was more reclusive than most people knew. He took long, tangled walks alone on weekends, returning to the dorms with dirty fingernails and forearms scratched by brambles. He did his homework in the attic of the library, a tower that one of the headmasters in the 1960s had dubbed a place for silent thought—Gabe claimed he couldn’t think if anyone else was around. Having spent most of the past three years at Mills (“It’s like this weird alternate universe,” he said, “where everyone is sixteen”), we were both independent by design, expert in adopting friends and in letting them go. As solid as Mills felt while we were there, we knew we would have to relinquish it at the end of senior year, just as we had our real families. Against our better judgment, in defiance of our transience and the rush of time, we built a raft and clung to it.

  When I was with him, I longed to kiss him, but I was starting to despair. (“We couldn’t do it now,” I said to Hannah, rolling around in my bunk. “We’re already friends. It’d be too weird.”) On Halloween, Hannah—sick of my whining and already to third base with David Horikawa—came into our room armed with a trough of makeup and a minidress purchased at the thrift store in Eureka.

  “Tonight is the night,” she said. “Women’s intuition.”

  She was right. In the middle of the annual Halloween party—a teacher-patrolled affair in the multipurpose room, with an epic snack table to offset the booze we seniors snuck into the punch—Gabe pulled me into the boys’ bathroom and took my face in his hands. He was a hamburger with pool-noodle fries, I a Roy Lichtenstein comic girl. We kissed pressed against the stalls until one of the resident advisers came in to pee, his eyes bulging; then we ran, hysterical with adrenaline, our hands clasped tight as sailor’s knots. We took the fire escape to the first floor and burst outside. It was raining faintly; above us, the windows of the multipurpose room had been pushed open to release the collective heat and Cheez-It breath of two hundred teenage bodies. Their voices floated out to us, free and high-pitched as loose balloons.

  “So,” said Gabe.

  “So.”

  I could barely get the word out. I felt like I’d swallowed my tongue.

  Something—not love but its precursor, a love embryo—loomed between us. I moved toward him again, and this time our kiss was tentative, investigative. We covered more ground, moving from mouth to ear to edge of cheek as if to memorize the topography of each other’s faces. That night, we fell asleep outside, and though we got in trouble for it later—Sandy glowering as he lumbered toward us through the trees, his red ponytail slapping his back—I still remember the first few moments of that morning: the sun blushing over the hills as the sparrows trilled the day’s first song, their notes soaring through the air like streamers.

  I couldn’t believe we’d done it—that one of the most beloved boys in our class had kissed my cheeks and chin and eyelashes until the red dots that Hannah had so painstakingly applied (bent over our art history textbook, lip liner in hand) smeared my whole face blurry. If Gabe was a pit bull, I had the pert, close features of a dachshund: quick brown eyes, small pursed mouth. A snub of nose, a dash of freckles. It was a utilitarian face: focused, unobtrusive, fine to look at but nothing that would make most people look twice. I was as lean and agile as Rodney, even at sixteen; I kept my chestnut hair in a taut little ponytail, my widow’s peak a dark point. Sometimes I envied girls with voluptuous features—plump lips, lush movie-star hair—but just as often I was grateful for my inconspicuousness. There’s nothing more dangerous than a teenager who looks like a librarian, because we can get away with anything. On the day of the Halloween party, a group of us snuck out to the closest corner store that sold alcohol, and I was the one who purchased it. I was never ID’d; I looked so plain, so earnest, that the paunched owner gave me the benefit of the doubt. That Gabe wanted me was just as thrilling as buying a bottle of whiskey at the age of eighteen: both meant, somehow, that I had passed.

  Gabe and I began to sit together in class, scribbling notes on old homework assignments whenever the teacher turned to the board. He saved a chair for me at lunch, his beaten-­down black JanSport marking my spot. I still remember how it felt to walk into the dining hall and see it there. My stomach rose, as if pulled by strings; I moved not by foot but by hovercraft. Most surprising was how little I resisted. Some of my friends had boyfriends, and I’d always scoffed at how distracted they became, how easily they relinquished their former selves—and here I was, vaulting away, leaving behind the tidy rows of my independence.

  It took us weeks to figure out how to sneak into each other’s rooms at night without the resident advisers catching on. The trick was to go between hall checks, walking nonchalantly past the monitor’s station as though you were just going to pee, then taking the fire escape to ground level. The boys’ dorm was separated from the girls’ by a thin path, but if you snuck around the back of the buildings, James Bond style, you could avoid the Cyclops gaze of the security camera. Those first few nights were deliciously illicit; we clung to each other even more fiercely for having made the trip successfully. But one morning, I woke to find that Gabe was gone. That time, I chalked it up to the discomfort of fitting two people in one pancake-mattressed twin bunk. But when it happened a second time, and then a third, I was hurt.

  “Different people like it different ways,” said Hannah, who was not bothered by Gabe’s presence at night. She slept so deeply that our friends had started to call her Hannah Van Winkle; the only thing that woke her up was our CD alarm clock, blasting Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” at full volume. “Could be he’s trying to send you a subliminal message, say he doesn’t really want to have sleepovers after all.”

  Hannah was the baby in a bright lineup of sisters—sisters who knew how to braid hair, who flattened cardboard boxes and slid down the hills that surrounded their father’s farm, and who handed down to Hannah a complicated mythology about boys in addition to old sweaters and winter jackets and bicycles. But Gabe didn’t seem the type for subliminal messag
es. His face was open and readable as a dog’s. When we talked, I could tell if I’d offended or pleased him just by the tightness of his mouth.

  One Tuesday in November, I saw him leaving Mr. Keller’s garden. I had woken up at four thirty and hadn’t been able to fall back asleep, so I pulled my pillow over to the window that overlooked the grounds and began to read with a flashlight. Soon I caught some motion in the corner of my eye, and when I looked outside, I saw it was Gabe. My dorm faced the front of Keller’s house, but Gabe appeared to be coming from the back, where the garden was.

  My first thought was that he was still stuck on Mr. Keller’s flowers, and a wad of dread gathered in my chest. Neither one of us had mentioned the doubled flower since the night of the eclipse. I was embarrassed for him—his interest in it, his suspicions about the school as a whole, made him seem paranoid. So when I saw him in the dining hall that morning, I meant to bring it up. But his skin was pale and his eyes were sunken, the lower lids rimmed by sallow half-moons. It frightened me—I wondered if something much worse was going on. I made him a plate of food, and we ate together by the windows that overlooked Observatory Hill, where we had watched the eclipse almost one year before. By the end of the meal he seemed to perk up, the color of his cheeks becoming more beige than white, and for the moment, that satisfied me.

  2

  MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2004

  Six years later, as Gabe and I drove a U-Haul from Fort Bragg, California, to Madison, Wisconsin, I found myself sorting obsessively through my memories of Mills and the years after I left. There was plenty of time on our drive, and more space: first the California redwoods, then the sliced-open rock of the Sierra Nevada and Utah’s red hills. In Colorado we saw rivers so glassy and clear they mirrored the land above them, so that the river ceased to be a river at all and instead became a double of the sky.

  We looked at all this without talking; we felt as though it belonged not to us but to the natives and travelers who hiked those canyons by day and slept with the sun. We had forfeited our right to day by accepting a different offer. And though I had accepted it, I had always been the harder sell, and there were still moments when insurgencies would spark unexpectedly inside me. It was as though there were thousands of little soldiers in my gut, most of whom were aligned with the cause but some who wrestled free and fired at it. It was one thing to say we would participate in Keller’s work; it was another to make it our lives. Or perhaps I clung to that skepticism because it suggested that choice had not been lost—or at least, irreversibly muddied—at the very start.

  Our new house in Madison was a rental on East Main Street, in a neighborhood called Atwood. It was a historically blue-collar district that had undergone a sort of half gentrification: the old porn house had been converted into a theater that showed art films, and there was a little chocolatier between Trinity Lutheran Church and St. Bernard Catholic Church. But there were also wide lots penned in by wire and filled with low warehouses, or nothing at all. Madison is known for the two lakes that bracket its isthmus, and Atwood felt like an island, hemmed in by bodies of water.

  The house was square, painted a faded, wheaty yellow, with a steeply triangular roof; the previous tenants had left a couch on the front porch. The house’s combination of shabbiness and sweetness was typical of Madison. Unless you went to the west side, where the university professors lived, or to Maple Bluff, the governor’s neighborhood, most of the apartments looked a little cobwebby. Inside our place, the wooden floors were faded and the kitchen drawers jammed. The refrigerator door routinely got suctioned stuck, opening only when I braced one foot against the freezer and yanked with all of my strength. The brass doorknocker had rusted to the color of tea, and the light fixtures—beautiful fixtures, made of decorative metal and glass—swung precariously on their cords.

  In Fort Bragg, we had lived in a garden apartment—half underground, that is—that Keller paid for, subtracting it out of what he owed us for our work. Our place in Madison was huge in comparison. Upstairs was the bedroom, the bathroom, and, above that, an attic. On the bottom level were the living room, the kitchen, and the office. Gabe preferred to work on campus, so the office became mine: a room with large windows and a domed ceiling. I loved the clarity of its shape, the sense of being tucked away in an egg, and when I left it in the evenings, dazed from work, I felt like a hatchling, vulnerable and disoriented.

  There was one other house on our block, separated by our two driveways and patchy lawns. Structurally, it was almost identical to ours, but it had been painted violet with pink trim. The porch was strung with multicolored lights and hung with wind chimes I could hear from the office. And for most of August, that noise, along with the two recliners on the porch, was the only evidence that people actually lived there. Most of the bright, floral drapes were drawn, but the curtains on the upstairs window had fluttered open, and I could see the edge of a bedside table, a salmon-colored pillow.

  I was eager for the sight of other people because our house was so secluded. It sat in the center of a nearly barren block: to the right was the neighbor’s house, and to the left were freight-train tracks, which were clearly the reason for our affordable rent. We were separated from the tracks by a chain-link fence, four feet high and overrun with wild greenery: messy, verdant trees keeled over them from each side. The trains came most often after dark, making low bellowing noises that kept us awake. It was almost a blessing that so much of our work with Keller took place at night.

  Usually, we went to the lab around seven, a couple of hours before the participant went to sleep. It was our job to explain the procedure, soothe them—you’d be amazed how many seemed to treat the experiments like therapy—bring them water, if they asked for it, but no food. Often, the anxious ones asked for Gabe instead of me. I was more businesslike, explaining the procedure matter-of-factly, but Gabe didn’t talk about the study. Instead, he got the participants to talk about their children, their partners, their ailing parents. Once they fell asleep, I monitored the polysomnogram in an adjoining room while Gabe stayed next to the bed, watching closely for signs of movement or speech and intervening as necessary.

  On days when we didn’t have a procedure scheduled, we worked at the university sleep clinic with Keller, where our tasks were more routine. Some of the higher-ups at the clinic knew about our project, which had been commissioned by the Center for Neuroscience, but most of them didn’t. They didn’t seem to find our caginess odd—it wasn’t uncommon for researchers to keep their work close to their chests—but I can see now that it prevented us from feeling at home in the university community. The department’s interest in Keller’s work had been a surprise: his research was so experimental that getting mainstream validation was always an uphill battle, and we felt like we were working on borrowed time.

  We worked in the lab about four nights a week, and on those days we slept from the time we got home until early afternoon. We had brought our eclipse curtains with us from Fort Bragg, made of a tightly woven fabric that blocked light completely. It was part of our work to be interested in dreams, and we always listened intently to each other’s stories—not that I had many. I was rarely able to remember them; no matter how vivid my dreams felt at the time, they slipped through my hands in the morning. All I had was a faint sense of space and emotional residue that lingered, like a bad taste in the mouth. Gabe dreamed, most often, of transportation: helicopters and planes, commuter trains, and ships that crossed vast bodies of water with impossible speed.

  When he told me about them, he looked not at me but at the ceiling, or out the window to the neighbor’s house, an arm bent behind his neck. He was my height, five feet seven, and by then he was stocky and muscular, with a head that almost looked to be too large for his body. With me, his face softened: his mouth untensing, the wide-set brown eyes, which narrowed when we worked, becoming gentler and more open. Other women seemed to find him attractive, though I suspected that had less to do with
the way he looked than with his confidence. He was decisive and convincing in speech, but he could also drop into a low tone of intimacy that was, for Keller’s participants especially, profoundly comforting.

  We worked in the old neuroscience building, a mile away from the quad of undergraduate classrooms and dorms near State Street. It was a flat, drab structure the color of brown eggs. Most neuroscience operations had transferred to a newly constructed, multistory building closer to the heart of campus, but this one still housed experiments, and Keller had a five-room complex in its north wing. Only one of the rooms had windows, so the wing felt like a collection of cells.

  A petite, red-haired woman and an older Hungarian man conducted experiments in other parts of the building. I never knew exactly what they did, but I always stopped and made small talk when I saw them. In fact, I was rarely the one to end a conversation with anybody; I became so friendly with two of the checkout men at our local grocery co-op that Gabe accused me of flirting. I denied it at the time, but perhaps I was—flirting not with them, but with the idea of another life. We kept such irregular hours that neither of us had much opportunity to develop outside friendships.

  This was the way our lives went for that first month of August—muggy, static days filled with fatigue and the little caffeine pills Gabe bought online—so I would probably have been grateful for any shift in our routine. It just happened that the shift came in the form of Thomas and Janna.

  I remember the evening they arrived because there was a terrible thunderstorm, the kind I learned was common during Midwest summers. The rain was warm and steady, but the sounds were violent: great, piercing cracks, the taut sky shot open. Thunder like this used to terrify Bo, my family’s dog; I had always talked in my sleep, and my brother told me I often comforted Bo in that state. I was packing dinner for the lab with Gabe, thinking about Bo cowering in the closet, when we heard the garage door open next door.