Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

Later, I would marvel at the change in Janna. Alone, she hadn’t seemed to worry about small talk and propriety, but with Thomas she acted like a moral handler. As time went on, I began to notice that he did the same to her, however subtly. They seemed to exist in this constant state of checks and balances, one catching the other whenever they swung too far.

But I didn’t have time to sort through this then; I was too busy feeling embarrassed about the state of our walls, for the truth was we had nothing in boxes. Gabe had wanted to hang some of my paintings, but I didn’t want to look at them every day. Each piece felt like a minor exorcism, a dredging up of all the silt and sludge that collected around my consciousness. When I finished one, I felt accomplished, but I never thought they were beautiful.

As we sat down at the table, a train approached. We paused to listen to it whistle, then howl.

“It’s a lovely noise,” said Janna, her back erect. “I always like it when I hear one go by.”

I found it intoxicating, too, like a missive from another world. The trains came through erratically that year; we never knew what they were carrying or when the next one would come. But if it was at night, and we were asleep, I always woke up.

I’d put the chicken back in the oven to keep it hot, and it had dried, but Janna professed to love it. I felt too jittery to eat much, so I asked questions: How long had they lived here? What did Thomas do? He was a graduate student in the English department, he told us, studying Romantic poets of the nineteenth century

“My third year here,” he said. “But we try to get out in the summers. This year we went to South Carolina to see my mother — didn’t get back until August.”

“Thomas was studying for his preliminary exam,” said Janna. “He read two hundred books, and then he wrote eight essays in eight hours. Doesn’t it sound awful?”

“I was supposed to read two hundred books,” said Thomas, with a bite of chicken. “I read one fifty. No — make that one forty. I shouldn’t lie to myself, I skimmed at least ten. How can you skim Lord Byron? The point is, you can’t.”

“Sounds like a huge task,” said Gabe, leaning forward. “And what about you, Janna? Are you involved in the university?”

“Nope,” said Janna. She swallowed a sip of wine. “I garden.”

“She used to study botany,” said Thomas. “Before that it was biology. She likes the way all the little parts of a thing fit together.”

“No, if I’d liked it I would have stayed,” said Janna, with a sharp look at Thom. “I dropped out our senior year of college. I’d rather be touching things, you know, than reading about them. But let’s talk about the two of you — where did you meet?”

Though she’d been effusive about the chicken, she hadn’t eaten much of it. Now she picked the chunks off the skewer with her fingers and grouped them on one side of her plate. Gabe and I looked at each other.

“It was in high school,” I said.

“High school!” said Thomas. “Fantastic!”

“Thomas goes wild for a good love story,” said Janna. “Were you sweethearts back then?”

“We for dated a while,” said Gabe. “But then we went in separate directions. We got in touch again partway through college, before Sylvie’s senior year.”

He grinned at me and put a hand on mine on top of the table. I was soothed by its warmth, but I wished he had taken my left hand — the one beneath the table, closest to him.

“Those are the best kind of relationships,” said Janna. “Ones with a long history. Thomas and I are the same way. We met in our first year of college, in the only poetry class I ever took — Keats.”

“‘In spite of all,’” said Thomas, “‘some shape of beauty—’”

His voice changed as he recited the poem, steadying and becoming lower in pitch. There was something commanding about his presence now. But Janna waved a hand, cutting in.

“Oh, stop, they don’t want to hear it. I certainly don’t. It’s been a summer of hearing him go on about Keats, and Blake, and Coleridge — don’t look at me that way, sweet, you know it’s true — and Wordsworth, and Goethe , and who’s that annoyingly emotional man who’s always going on about social ills?”

“Shelley,” said Thomas, and cackled. “‘Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’”

“Besides, we haven’t even asked what you do,” said Janna. “Do you see what I mean? We get talking about poetry and then real life goes out of the conversation entirely. Gabe — you tell us.”

I wondered if she remembered my own evasiveness at her house several days before and thought she might get a more direct reply out of Gabe. Either way, I was happy to let him give our answer. He was better at it than I was — I got tripped up trying to tell the truth.

“It’s not very exciting,” said Gabe. “We’re sleep researchers in the Center for Neuroscience. Mainly, we’re studying consciousness and REM cycles. We look at the point when dreaming begins and the extent to which the dreamer is conscious of that shift.”

“How can you tell?” asked Janna.

“Well, there are different ways. We use a polysomnogram to measure the stages of sleep through brain activity, muscle tone, eye movements, and so on — this tells us when the subject is in REM sleep. That’s when dreaming occurs. Our next job is to figure out whether or not they’re aware of it.”

Thomas leaned back in his chair, dropping his fork onto the plate with a clatter.

“You don’t ask them, I presume? ‘Sorry, don’t mean to bother you, but are you dreaming yet? No? Whoops, carry on then, just pretend I’m not here.’”

“No, we use a mask,” I said, smiling. “It’s equipped with two LEDs — light-emitting diodes — which we flash a certain number of times once the subject’s in REM. They’re supposed to respond to the flashes by making an eye-movement signal: two pairs of horizontal eye movements, left-right, left-right, if they’re asleep and conscious of it. If no signals are made, we can assume they aren’t conscious.”

“Like we said,” Gabe said, shrugging, “it’s not very interesting.”

“It’s hardly uninteresting,” said Janna. “I’d like to try it sometime. You don’t need a new subject, do you? Hook me up to the machine — I’ll tell you if I’m awake.”

She was leaning in, her tattooed arm cast across the table. I was transfixed by her combination of toughness and delicacy, her body pale as a mirage.

Thomas laughed, staring at Janna with his eyebrows raised, and Gabe followed him.

“I’ll put you on our list,” Gabe said. “Lots of people trying to get in for this kind of research, you know.”

“Vying for their chance to be shot through with light and made conscious,” said Thomas. “Oh, to be new-born!”

Gabe rubbed my hand. I was relieved that we’d squeezed through without too much probing. This was the explanation we gave to our oldest friends, the nurses at the sleep clinic, even our parents. It wasn’t untrue, exactly — our studies started by measuring consciousness this way — but it was only a small slice of what we did. Gabe was in favor of saying we studied sleep medication, but lying so blatantly made me uneasy. And more than that, I wanted to be known, wanted desperately, even then, to be found out.

We cleared the table with Thomas and Janna’s help. When Thomas excused himself to use the bathroom, Gabe began to do dishes, and Janna offered to dry them. By the time they had almost finished, Thomas still hadn’t returned.

I went upstairs to look for him. The bathroom was empty, its door creaking open. But the light in our bedroom was on, and when I ducked my head inside the door frame, I found him sitting on our bed.