The Anatomy of Dreams Page 7

  “You’re looking at human capacity,” he said, “and trying to see how far it can be stretched. But who benefits more: the individuals you’re studying, or science?”

  “Well, we hope to benefit both of them.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “It’s just that experimental research isn’t usually so charitable.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m all for asking questions, friendly debate, whatever you want to call it—but you really don’t know very much about us. We’ve been refining this procedure for years, trying to make sure it runs as smoothly and ethically as possible.”

  “But smoothly and ethically are two very different things,” Thom said. “And sometimes, I imagine, they’re completely at odds.”

  I must have bristled, because he seemed to realize he was crossing a line. He smiled, more warmly this time, his eyes wide with apology.

  “Listen, I didn’t mean any harm. I tend to ask a hell of a lot of questions. That’s one thing you’ll learn about me, if we get to know each other better. It’s a nervous mechanism, partly.” He rubbed his palms together. “Besides, I’m an academic. I like these sorts of exercises. To me, it’s a theoretical debate—it isn’t personal.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “You certainly have the right to ask questions.”

  “Thank you,” said Thom.

  I knew he was trying to pull me out of whatever cramped box I had gotten myself into. But what I needed was some way to trust him. This arch, impish Thom I didn’t trust; but I remembered the way he had recited the Keats poem at ­dinner—or started to, anyway—his voice a heavy, kicked-along stone.

  “What was the rest of the poem?” I asked. “The Keats poem, the one you mentioned at dinner?”

  In his face there was both pleasure and surprise; he looked like a boy who did not often know the answers in class but who, called upon this time, had only to open his mouth.

  “‘In spite of all,’” he said, “‘some shape of beauty moves the pall from our dark spirits.’”

  “I thought it would be more positive,” I said.

  “But it is,” said Thom.

  From downstairs there came sounds of laughter: Gabe’s raucous and guttural, Janna’s climbing higher octaves. When we walked down, Gabe’s head was hanging back, his shoulders shaking.

  “Janna was just telling me—she was telling me—” It was a kind of laughter I rarely saw in him: keeled over, full body. “It was a terrible joke . . .”

  They were sitting at the table, bowls of half-eaten blueberry soup in front of them. Janna crossed her hands in front of her, trying to quiet him. Then she turned to Thom and me.

  “Three children walk into the woods,” she said. “But only one child returns, carrying a bag of bones. The child’s mother says, ‘Whose bones are those, my darling?’ And the child looks at her and beams and says, ‘The ones who walked too slow.’”

  She grinned. The points of her canine teeth reminded me of a cat. Thom shook his head.

  “It’s awful,” said Gabe. But it took minutes for him to quiet down, and even when he did, little puffs of laughter escaped into the night.

  5

  BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, 1999

  In August of 1999, I arrived on the UC-Berkeley campus along with five thousand other freshmen. I carried with me my dad’s beat-up blue duffel bags and a leather backpack with a magnetic closure, which my mother bought to replace the corduroy JanSport I’d carried around at Mills. I can still picture the softened blue fabric, which had lost all sense of structure from years of carrying my color-coordinated binders and drawn-on, heavy books—none of which I’d brought to Berkeley, believing their lessons behind me.

  There was a tangible feeling of precipice that fall. By 1999, theories of climate change had made their way to Rutgers Newark, where my parents taught. Earlier that year, some of their colleagues had attended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and over the summer, the heat wave that swept the northeastern U.S. killed forty people in Philadelphia alone. Now they complained about the weather in Berkeley, saying it was too cold for summer in California, that fifty-nine degrees wasn’t natural, and even though I reminded them that the coldest winter Mark Twain ever saw was the summer he spent in San Francisco—and he had lived in the 1800s—they merely squinted at the campus, uncomforted.

  It was more than just the weather, of course. As we drew closer to the year 2000, even the most skeptical among us wondered what the millennium would bring. In my psychology course, we spent a unit on millennium predictions—the Tribulation, the second coming of Christ, the war of Armageddon. Some of the other students complained of nightmares. But I found myself magnetized by the predictions, the Rapture especially—all of the living and born-again dead rising into the sky like paper lanterns, their bodies lit from the inside and translucent as white sheets.

  Still, there were moments when all this was forgotten, when we gathered close to the radiator in somebody’s room and told stories from what felt like our past lives. My years at boarding school lent me a new exoticism. Even mundane details—the hall monitors, the curfews, the night privileges that came with senior year—took on a new, storied life when told to an audience who had only ever lived with their parents. My roommates—Donna, a pole-vaulter from Texas, and a Southern California transplant named Mallory—wanted to know how I’d ended up at boarding school in the first place. But when I told them that I went to Mills not because I showed exceptional promise, like the recruits, but because my father had gone there and received a hefty discount on my tuition, they seemed deflated.

  “Oh,” said Mallory from the bunk bed above Donna’s, turning again to her San Francisco magazine. She’d ordered it to be sent to her university mailbox despite the fact that we lived in Berkeley, an hour away by train. “So you were a legacy.”

  I’d heard the term before, but I’d never really thought it applied to me. I found little in myself of my father’s legacy. Thin and heavily bearded, he studied cuneiform script and made a hobby of erecting tiny wooden ships in glass bottles. When I was little, I thought it was a miracle, and he wouldn’t show me otherwise—he presented them to me when he was finished, gleaming with pride, and I gaped at the size of the ship inside and how it was so much larger than the neck of the bottle.

  Years later, on one of the shared computers at Mills, I used the Internet to look up how they were made. At home, we used a noisy dial-up modem that required use of the telephone line, so my brother and I were restricted to a half hour each night. Plus, it worked so slowly and theatrically that it was more of a family joke than anything else; Rodney and I had memorized the jerky song of its connection process and parroted it back and forth while setting the table or getting ready for bed. So when I got to Mills, where we could use the high-speed Internet in the library, I couldn’t believe what I’d been missing out on. It was so easy to find information, so easy to solve any problem, that I was almost afraid to trust it. The hierarchical structure of boarding school had taught me that information had to be vetted—by a textbook, by an instructor, by an administrative higher-up—before it was accepted as truth. But I was excited by the Internet, too, its free and unchecked passages. It meant that learning could also be passed from the ground up. It meant, in a small way, insurrection.

  When I returned home for Thanksgiving that year, I told my father I’d figured it out—that because the fully formed ship could never fit through the opening, the trick was to build it outside the bottle, with its sails and masts collapsed. Once you’d eased it inside, you pulled on a string that lifted the masts, and the whole ship unfolded and rose.

  I thought he would be impressed. But he looked surprised and mildly hurt, as if I’d broken an agreement we had settled on years ago. He couldn’t blame me, I thought—the inflation technique now seemed so obvious that I couldn’t believe I
hadn’t put it together before. But I was irritated about more than that. It felt unfair that our relationship rested on something as fragile and miniature as a handmade ship. And if it did, I didn’t think it was my fault.

  I’d grown up with the expectation that when high school came, I’d go where my father had gone. I knew my parents thought my education was the most important gift they could give me, but it had consequences, too. My bedroom had begun to feel more and more like a childhood relic, with its museum-like inventory of past interests and art projects. My parents tried to plan special activities when I was home, but this made me feel even more like a guest. Other people knew what their fathers ate for breakfast and how to fight with their little brothers. Rodney and I saw each other so infrequently that we hardly knew which buttons to press, which ones had been updated and no longer worked the same way. We lived together like bears raised in domesticity, their wildness latent and confused, bears afraid to swipe for fear that they would only scrape at air.

  • • •

  On New Year’s Eve, we gathered in the dorm common room with a bottle of Jack Daniels to watch the Times Square special. The dorm had been decorated with shiny, metallic streamers, as if matte colors had become outmoded along with grunge and floppy disks. We’d heard rumors of a problem known as Y2K, or the millennium bug—a technology crash that could paralyze everything from air traffic control to elevators, since computer systems had only been wired to support a two-digit year. On TV, the Times Square ball hung seventy-seven feet aboveground, and we wondered if this would fail, too, and stay suspended atop the flagpole when midnight turned.

  We passed around a crumpled article that someone had found online and pinned to the common room bulletin board. It was a piece from the December 1900 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, written by John Elfreth Watkins Jr. and called “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years.”

  “These prophecies will seem strange,” wrote Mr. Watkins, “almost impossible. Yet they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America.” And given the century’s lapse in time, we were all pretty impressed by what Mr. Watkins’s learned minds got right. Sure, strawberries weren’t as large as apples, as some had predicted they would be, and flies did, in fact, still exist. But it was true that automobiles had been substituted for horses, that weapons could destroy whole cities, that photographs could be taken at any distance and replicate all of nature’s colors. It was true, too, that there were airships to transport people and goods, but also to act as war vessels and to make observations at great heights above earth. Man had also seen around the world, via what would become the television: “The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus,” he wrote, “transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move.”

  Heard to boom when seen to blaze—these words looped through my head that night, their old rhythm and their poetry. There was something haunting about Watkins and the human capacity to predict the future, as much as it seemed to elude us. And the predictions that hadn’t yet been realized—were they still to come? That winter could be turned into summer and night into day? What of prediction number twenty-eight, his forecast for the animals?

  There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected.

  It disturbed me more than the others—the animals gutted, made impotent, stripped of their dignity and their defenses. When the countdown began, my breath caught in my throat. As much as I’d scoffed at rumors of the Tribulation, even of the technology crash, what would happen if I was wrong? If human beings vanished, and so did our consciousness of the world—our inventories of plants and insects and endangered birds, our ability to predict weather patterns and measure whole populations—would the planet still know itself? Or would it be better off without our predictions and the ways we made them come true?

  But at midnight, the ball slid easily to the ground at One Times Square. The dorm elevators rose and fell just as they had before. That night, before bed, I pressed my face to the sliver of window beside my bunk and watched as a plane flew by, blinking faintly in the darkness.

  • • •

  By sophomore year, my old interest in physics had flagged, and I’d decided to become a psychology major. Maybe Keller’s classes at Mills had ruined me, or perhaps I simply lost interest in the consistency of numbers. Either way, the laws of motion could no longer compete with the thrill of studying other people. The laws of human beings were counterintuitive and absurd, broken as often as they were followed.

  In the spring, my adviser suggested a class in the film department. Painting 201 conflicted with my abnormal psych requirement, and she’d heard good things about Intro to Videography.

  “At the very least, it’ll give you some good material,” she said, leaning forward. “It’s sanctioned people-watching. Legal voyeurism! A few of my kids got a lot out of it.”

  Her hair was brown except for an inch-wide silver chunk, as if she’d streaked it that way on purpose. She wore a shawl with various hanging bobbles that shook when she spoke emphatically. The walls in her office were hung with woven Peruvian tapestries and framed diplomas and grisly portraits of human beings in various states of psychic pain. Though she looked too old to have young children, she had recently adopted twin four-year-old boys from Indonesia. When I saw her around campus, she stared at me with her head cocked, as though wondering whether I was somebody else.

  She amazed me as much as she terrified me. The next day, I signed up for videography. I gave up painting with only a small pang—it had never stopped reminding me of Gabe. Film was a relief, for I didn’t have to create the material; I just had to capture it. That spring, I got a job as an audiovisual technician at the university, taping speech courses and oral presentations. Sometimes the professors greeted me, but often they continued talking as I set up at the back of the room, as if I required no more acknowledgment than the camera. I felt like a professional ghost. In my free time, I rented a camera from the media center and carted it as far as I could. I filmed the punk girls on Telegraph, the yolky desserts at the Russian bakery, the couples twined together in front of Sather Tower.

  In the August before my junior year, I moved into a one-bedroom with David, a graduate student I’d been dating since the previous semester. My parents weren’t entirely pleased, but I was dying to get out of the dorms, having spent four years in them during high school, and my AV job enabled me to pay my share of the rent. It was a stout, twelve-unit building with peeling beige paint and a purple burst of a garden; our galley kitchen was so narrow that I could only open the refrigerator door partway before it hit an opposing cabinet. Often we ordered in from the dim sum restaurant down the block, filling David’s Ikea plates with shrimp dumplings and steamed buns, lo mai gai wrapped in lotus leaves. I did homework for my psychology courses or edited videos, and I began to read fiction—something I had never enjoyed before but that now gave me a heady feeling of adventure.

  David worked on the font he’d created, the cornerstone of his dissertation in graphic design. I liked his even demeanor and his realism. Our similarities were comforting—or perhaps it comforted me to think we were similar. David didn’t ask about Mills. He seemed to assume that high school was as ancient a memory for me as it was for him. At night, we slept in his double bed, and he was always there in the morning, his hands crossed over his chest like a corpse.

  Every so often, I received an e-mail from Hannah, who was majoring in environmental science at C
olorado College (Happy N-Y! How was your x-mas? I sat on a mountaintop—drank champagne, made drunken angels in the snow. Heaven). We talked on the phone sporadically, but by senior year, we’d lost touch almost completely. She was happy to hear about David; once she said, “God, remember Gabe?” her tone conspiratorial and incredulous, as if he were a once-beloved leader or celebrity who had come to a disreputable end.

  I couldn’t tell her that I’d started dreaming of Gabe—his taut, springy legs, the way his eyebrows leapt when he laughed. Sometimes, the dreams followed a familiar story line, something that had happened at Mills—Gabe and I filching trays from the cafeteria, then sneaking out to Observatory Hill and sliding down on our backs—but there was something slightly off. Gabe’s head was shaved, while in real life he’d had thick brown hair that stopped at his chin, or the sky was a dull black, a chalkboard black, and I couldn’t see stars.

  It was the feeling of the dreams that I always remembered most. I was entirely at peace in a way I never was in waking life. But it was different from the sense of self-possession I had when operating a camera and different from the muted, colorless way that David slept. It was a deep-rooted kind of comfort, a feeling of utter appropriateness. This was where I belonged: on this hill, beneath this sky, devoid of stars as it was, and beside this boy—a boy who was, by then, a man, and who for all I knew could be anywhere.

  One warm night in May, I dreamed of him again, but this time, my eyes were open. I could see all the details of David’s room—his swan-necked adjustable lamp, his tidy bureau, his poster of a cartoon woman begging at her boss’s feet, her speech bubble reading, “Please, sir—don’t make me use Comic Sans!” And I could see, outside the window, a man who looked exactly like Gabe.

  I peeled my eyelids open farther, but the scene didn’t change. The man was standing at the foot of a lamppost at the end of the block, looking at a piece of paper. He glanced down the block in the other direction, and then he looked toward our apartment.