Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

“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.