The Anatomy of Dreams (15 page)

I made a pathetic gasping noise and ducked to the right; the apple sloped to the ground, hitting the floor of the hallway with a dull thud, and tumbled a few more feet before coming to a stop.

“What was that?” I asked, turning to look at the apple and then back at Keller, who was watching me with an utter lack of surprise.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I feel—what?” I sputtered. “I feel freaked.”

“Your heart rate is up?”

“Of course.”

“You're sweating?”

“A little.”

“And you're angry with me.”

“You almost hit me.”

“But I didn't,” said Keller pleasantly. “So why do you feel the way you do?”

I stared at him.

“Because you could have,” I said. “You could have hit me.”

“Ah. Precisely.”

He walked out of the room to retrieve the apple, then brought it back inside, rubbing it on his shirt. It had caved in on one side.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I knew you'd duck. I hoped you would, at least. But I was trying to make a point. When I threw this apple at you, I knew there were several likely outcomes. What were they?”

“You'd hit me,” I said. “Or I'd duck before you could. Or the apple would miss me entirely.”

“Good. The possibilities, of course, are infinite—I could have twisted my arm in swinging, sending the apple straight for one of these windows; Gabriel could have chosen to walk down the hall at that moment, in which case he would have been hit instead. But I chose to put my faith in probability. The apple would hit you, or it wouldn't. I'm pleased to say it didn't. But you're reacting as though it did. Not because it hit you—but because it
could
have.”

“Right,” I said. I was still wary, but my heart rate was beginning to steady.

“At the moment of decision,” said Keller, “at the moment of action, an infinite array of possibilities are conceived in the mind—alternate but parallel psychological universes, each
with its own set of outcomes and implications. Only one of these possibilities will be actualized. But what happens to the rest? If they folded neatly into submission, disappeared into the dust from whence they came, you would be, so to speak, single-minded. You would have felt no anxious residue, no fear or anger, when the apple was no longer a threat. And yet you
did
feel the threat of the outcomes that were not realized; indeed, you seemed to feel that threat more acutely than you did any sense of relief that the apple, as luck would have it, sailed right over your head.”

“And those are your simultaneous potentialities?”

A part of me thought it made perfect sense; the other part wondered, with a flailing sense of alarm, just what I'd gotten myself into.

“Correct,” said Keller. “I believe that these potential experiences are logged in the brain along with the actual one, that the mind processes potentialities and actualities simultaneously and that, therefore, an imagined nonevent—being hit by my apple, let's say—has as much cognitive power as the actual event.”

“But wouldn't that be too much for our brains to handle at once?” I asked. “The possibilities would be infinite. How could we process all of them?”

“You're quite right. Thankfully, the brain is selective. We know that certain actual memories are encoded and stored long-term while others are discarded. This is true, too, for potential memories.”

“But for memories to be stored, they have to be processed,” I said. “How can they be processed if they're never experienced?”

“Aren't they?”

“Subconsciously, maybe.” I shook my head. “But I thought you were working on sleep. What does all this have to do with dreams?”

“I hope it has a great deal to do with dreams,” said Keller with mock solemnity. “We'll be in a rather tight spot if it doesn't. We already know that sleep—REM sleep in particular—plays an important role in long-term memory formation and mental health. If simultaneous potentialities are sufficiently processed and resolved in REM sleep, we find ourselves better able to focus on the reality of waking life. But what happens to patients whose sleep isn't normative and whose emotional processes are, therefore, disrupted? Patients like the ones I see, who suffer from REM disorders?”

“They can't resolve them,” I guessed. “The simultaneous potentialities aren't processed. They keep looping, and the dreamers continue to act them out, these things they're afraid of—things that haven't happened yet, or things that happened a long time ago. Things that aren't real now—at least, not outside of their dreams.”

I was babbling, spitting his words back at him less articulately than I'd been able to do in high school.

“It's a start,” Keller said.

Through the open windows, I heard the crunch of shells that signaled Gabe's arrival. The two orbs of his headlights grew brighter, spilling into the library, before the car came to a halt and the power was turned off.

“That'll be Gabriel,” said Keller, cocking his head at the noise. He turned back to me and smiled, but I could see he was distracted; it was as if he'd just remembered his unpacked suitcases, dinner to be made, whatever ends had to be tidied up after the previous assistant's departure.

“Mr. Keller?” I asked.

He raised his eyebrows.

“The letter,” I said. “Who were you writing to?”

If I had crossed some line, he didn't blink.

“My thesis adviser,” he said. “Meredith.”

As I lay in bed that night, tossing in my UC-Berkeley
boxers, his ideas seemed to me frightening and revolutionary. And they were, I discovered—though PNP was revolutionary less for its novelty than for its return to so-called archaic notions of the mind as murky, spiritual terrain, terrain whose geography was better understood by folklore and poetry than it was by pharmacology. In hindsight, I can see that Keller's scholarly path was always one of upstream travel: the absorption of modern-day psychology into medicine and the hard sciences stranded him in murky terrain of his own, and though he had made use of his marginalization—there seemed to be a continual stream of people swimming to his rock, shaking the water off their backs, and clambering up to admire the view from the island—I know now that he worked always in fear of being delegitimized.

If I had known then what I do now, perhaps I would have been able to see Keller as he was: an aging, proud, and anxious man, unwavering in his convictions, persuasive in speech, but prone to paranoia and hermeticism. It should come as no surprise that someone so convinced of the mystery and idiosyncratic depth of the human mind should be self-isolating. But I could not help but see him, through the years, as a kind of martyr: brilliant, exiled, and lonely as a god.

10

MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2004

As October gave way to the stark skies of November, its spindly, barren trees, I was surprised to find a cream envelope beneath the porch door of our house: perfectly square, licked shut, with a calligraphic scrawl—
G + S
—in black ink. I opened it in the kitchen while Gabe slept off the late study we'd monitored the night before.

Greetings, pals—

Janna and I'd be delighted if you'd treat us to your presence(s) on the eve of 25 November. We'll give thanks, we'll drink copious amounts of liquor, and, Janna willing, we'll eat the appropriate troughs of food, American and otherwise. Come in your finest around the hour of five, post meridiem—and bring something to contribute, you lazy fucks.

Hugs—

T.

I read the letter twice in a row with a seeping feeling of delight. It had been years since I'd had a proper Thanksgiving meal—not since I lived with my family. Gabe and I had a
halfhearted tradition of eating dinner at an ethnic restaurant, though I'd never really been sure whether we did it out of protest or laziness. Thom's letter made me feel normal. We were the sort of young people who had neighbors, had friends; we would go to their house for Thanksgiving, and we would fall asleep, along with the bulk of the country, at the pathetic hour of seven thirty or eight, bloated and sewn-in as stuffed animals.

I decided to make a sweet potato dish, something roasted that I was sure I couldn't mess up. After picking up the ingredients in town, I stopped at the Goodwill on State Street. Keller paid us fairly well—even better now that we worked for the university—but I was my mother's daughter, and most of it went into savings. Usually, I was attracted to clothes in muted colors, though perhaps
attracted
is the wrong word; it was more that I knew these were the styles that suited me and I had resigned myself to our partnership. Today, though, I wanted something different. I brought home a suede skirt in a rich and dusty orange and paired it with a low-backed black top; as I closed the bedroom window, cool air brushed my spine. When I added the little gold hoops Gabe had given me for my twenty-third birthday and a pair of bronze heels, I felt almost unlike myself.

“You look great,” said Gabe, in a tone I tried not to take for surprise, as he came downstairs to meet me. He had dressed up, too: he wore a starched navy shirt and a skinny green tie with his Chucks.

“So do you,” I said. Had he gotten a haircut, or was the structure of his face always so clear—the sharp jaw, the deep-set and crinkled hazel eyes?

As we crossed the lawn to Thomas and Janna's house—a bottle of wine in Gabe's hand, the sweet potato dish in mine—we could have been any young couple. We rang the doorbell and waited on the porch, Gabe's sneaker tapping the planks.

Janna opened it. Her hair was newly streaked with purple and pulled into a bun, so that the stripes collected in a clean knot at her crown. She wore an orange dress, too, but hers was the neon color of construction signs. It ended in a feathery skirt at her hips. Beneath it she wore sheer brown tights and no shoes.

“Oh, look!” she said, clapping. “You're the same color as your potatoes!”

I looked down; it was true. She kissed Gabe twice, once on each cheek.

“Come in, come in,” she said. “I've got to attend to the table, but Thomas will get you a drink.”

With this she whirled out of the kitchen, and Thom sauntered in from the living room. The oven was releasing small curls of smoke. Thom paused in front of it and stared quizzically at its dials before turning to us.

“Hello, friends,” he said. “What can I get you? Wine? Martini? Gin and tonic?”

“Gin and tonic, please, sir,” said Gabe.

“Sylvie.” Thom grinned, putting a warm hand on my shoulder. “You match your potatoes.”

“I know,” I said. “Janna mentioned—”

“Extra,” said Janna, sweeping back into the kitchen, a butter knife in one hand. “Silly me—I set the table for five.”

She sniffed and turned, with razorlike precision, to the oven.

“The
oven
, Thomas,” she said. “The oven is
smoking
, darling.”

She turned off the heat at the same time as she opened the silverware drawer next to it. After dropping the extra knife, she slid her hand into a bright blue mitt and pulled out a tray of beautiful, scallop-edged orange cups with little mounds of sweet potato inside.

“Oh,” I said. “If I'd known you were making sweet pota
toes, I wouldn't have brought them. But yours are gorgeous. How did you make them?”

“Easy,” said Janna, licking a bit of potato off her ring finger. “You cut the oranges in half and scrape out the insides. Fill them with mashed potatoes, throw the pulp in the trash.”

She wiped her hands on a towel and looked at us brightly.

“Hungry?” she asked.

• • •

I don't remember much about dinner, only that we were woozy with drink by the end of it: first the gin and tonics, then two bottles of rich red wine, a post-dinner espresso splashed with bourbon. The moon rose baldly into the sky; Gabe took off one of his shoes and threw it behind his head, where it collided with an antique mirror that cracked into a delicate, spidery web and, Janna claimed, looked better now than it had before. At some point, we collapsed on the couch in their living room, a tangle of legs. I looked for the Keats book, the mossy old tome that Thom had shown me weeks before, but it was gone. Thom was singing something—
Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine. You are lost and gone forever . . .
Did I imagine that at some point, Janna's head rested against my chest? I don't know how or why it would have happened, but I remember the warm sun of her skull, the streaks of hair that spread across my shoulders like purple kelp, her spindly fingers picking at the fabric of the couch.

It must have been one or two in the morning when we stumbled out the back door to their yard. It was a gorgeous night, unexpectedly warm. I can still see Thom running back to us, gazelle-like, all legs—he'd gone somewhere and returned with boxes of bang snaps. We threw them at the ground and yelped when they exploded too close to our feet. Gabe and I kissed pressed against the fence, dense and urgent,
his hands beneath my shirt. How long had it been since we had kissed like that? And then he was gone, and I was sitting with Thom beneath the juniper tree in their backyard, a tree with a thick, warped trunk like a dish towel being wrung.

If my memories up until this point are imagistic and uncertain, here they sharpen. Here I remember not only sensory details—the leathery leaves and sharp little sticks beneath my legs; grass stains on the lap of my dress; Thom's sweet alcoholic scent—but whole stretches of conversation. Where were Gabe and Janna? I don't remember caring; I leaned against the juniper, its trunk kneading my back.

“. . . the first man I ever loved,” Thom said, his nose bulbous and jagged in the blue light. “Platonically, I mean—but I did love him. I admired him so much I felt my identity bleeding into his, little by little. Have you ever had a teacher like that?”

“No,” I said, whether or not it was true. An owl cooed in the distance.

“No? Ah,” said Thom. “Well, he was my first poetry professor. My first
real
professor. And Janna was his pet.”

“He liked her poetry?”

“He liked— Well.” He laughed, high and breathless. “You're a dear, Sylvie—you know that, don't you? You're a very sweet girl. But inside you there's a sour center. And that's why I like you.”

Why that flattered me I can't say now. It was the alcohol, I think—the scent of the muddied leaves, Thom's voice sure as an incantation.

“Not that I'm exempt,” he said. “I'm as dirty as they come. And I'm disgusted by it now. But, you know—I was so damn
idealistic
then. The art! That's what I thought was most important. He was the writer-in-residence at our college. I'd never met a man who was brilliant in the ways he was brilliant. And I thought I could
access
him, if I was with her.”

“You only started dating Janna to get close to—your professor?” It struck me as funny; I laughed, and soon Thom was wheezing with me, knocking his head against the fence. But like a summer storm, Thom's laughter passed as suddenly as it had arrived, and once more he was confidential, solemn.

“Yes,” he said. “I'll say it. I wanted to get to him. But when I stopped thinking that way—when I fell for
her
, and her only, nothing more—I experienced the most incredible purity. Do you believe in purity?”

I felt a tickle on my arm. Two ants were crawling toward the inside of my elbow. I brushed them to one side; they landed on Thom's pant leg, though he didn't notice.

“I'm a changed man, Sylvie.” He ran a hand through his messy reddish hair, swift and shaky. “I've repented, believe me. I've changed”—and we both took swigs of our drinks, the dark sky ringing with stars. The wineglasses had all been dirtied, and we were drinking out of jam jars. I had never been so drunk. My mind spun and spun, a top inside my skull. The next thing I remember, I was waking up in bed, still in my orange dress, Gabe's heavy thigh cast over mine; I was peeling back the curtains by our bed, a white November sun high in the sky.

The conversation was so peculiar I almost wondered if I had remembered it wrong. But from the window I could see the juniper tree, wrenched, and when I looked at the lap of my skirt, there were the grass stains, there were the little lines where twigs had scraped the fabric.

• • •

The next night, I dreamed I stood alone at an abandoned intersection in a small, plain town. To my left, wheat fields stretched fuzzy and golden; to the right was a boarded-up ice cream shop. The wind lifted my hair, blond and streaked with black. In one hand I held a whirligig that turned with
the wind, spinning light. The wind stilled as if in wait, and the whirligig stopped moving. Then a flush of blackbirds rose from the field, arcing through the sky with a thick flapping noise, like the pages of a thousand books being turned. When they cleared, I saw a hot air balloon.

It moved through the sky with a stately elegance, unhurried as a mayor at a small-town parade. Its progress was so slow that I didn't know it was manned until a figure no bigger than an insect clambered to the rim of the basket and tumbled, flailing, over one side.

It was the first dream I had fully remembered in years. I woke slick with sweat, gasping, and looked for Gabe. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head, arms two pointed wings. The clock on my bedside table shone 4:23, but I knew I wouldn't be able to fall back to sleep. So I stepped out into the hall, closing the bedroom door quietly behind me.

My mind was dizzy, caught in the groggy purgatory between sleep and wakefulness, and I was still half-drunk. But I climbed the stairs to the attic and dusted off a clean canvas. Then I carried my paint boxes to the rug in front of the window. Kneeling, I began to mix black and white until I found something that matched the tenor of that pale gray sky.

The dream began to sharpen as I painted it. In shaping the great rainbow bulb of the balloon and its brown thatched basket, I saw the way the figure inside had first leaned out of it, looking down, as if gauging where to land. Why? Because he was harnessed to a parachute, and I remembered it now: a pillowy lavender arc that looked quilted from below, floating toward the ground at the same leisurely pace as the balloon.

I wasn't paying attention to the way the painting looked. My goal was not the finished product but the accuracy of my recollection. I was painting what I remembered as I remembered it, and the only way to do that was to paint right on top of what I had done only moments before. And so, as the flyer
came nearer and nearer to the intersection where I waited with my whirligig, I painted him again and again—because now I was sure that it
was
a him, that the gangly legs hung from a pale torso brushed with hair as rough and golden as wheat; that up close, he smelled like alcohol and juniper, and if I were to pull up his shirtsleeve—which I would do as soon as he landed—I would find two ants crawling down one arm in slow procession.

I stepped away from the canvas and stared at it for the first time as a whole. It was cluttered, kaleidoscopic: the balloon traced over and over, the man's insect legs stretching toward the ground like an alien craft. My face was messily drawn and stretching apart, covered in whirligigs.

It was nothing I wanted to see again. I took a tube of black paint and squirted it across the canvas. With my widest brush, I swiped the paint from left to right, top to bottom. Light was beginning to inch up the sky, darkness drawing back like a tarp, but I was exhausted. When I returned to bed, Gabe was right where I had left him, as if no time had passed at all. I fell with surprising ease into a simple, passive sleep that must have lasted for hours. The next thing I remember was a soft rapping noise at the door, Gabe's broad nose poking through, the snuffling noise of his laughter.

“Sylvie,” he whispered. “Sylvie, my God, wake up. It's already one o'clock.”

• • •

I spent the next week in a haze. My sleep was fitful and uneven: too much, or not enough. During the day, it was all I could do to stay awake. I told Gabe and Keller I thought I was coming down with a cold. Keller had me cover shifts at the sleep clinic, where all I had to do was sit bleary eyed at the front desk. At night, I fell asleep immediately, and I woke blank as a baby.

I thought I was back to my old patterns until a cold Tuesday morning in the beginning of December. I dreamed of Thom; this time, there was no mistaking it. We were in an enclosed, dimly lit space with a desk and one chair, but we huddled on the floor as if in a bunker. Spread across the floor in front of us were old photographs that Thom showed me one by one. A dull, dusty-chained bulb provided a dim shaft of light. An orange cat slipped between us, purring.