Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

David was only ten or twenty feet away when he paused and punched the water’s surface. I didn’t know why until I saw a fleet of sailboats making their way toward him — college students, probably, who could rent boats after taking a quick licensing course. The boats were set to cut right between David and the other man, who was swimming closer to the horizon with increasing speed. David tried to speed up, too — I had zoomed in with my camera and could see the water flurrying behind him — but it was no use; he had to tread water to let the line of boats pass, and when they had, the other man was gone.

Not gone , of course. No longer visible. He couldn’t have disappeared, because this time, I wasn’t the only one who’d seen him. David had, too, and this was so validating that by the time he returned, his chest heaving, I almost felt calm.

By October, the air had cooled in Madison, and the trees made quilts of red and brown and gold. On a Saturday afternoon, returning home from a trip to the market, I saw Gabe and Janna kneeling in a patch of dirt in our backyard. They were scooping earth into a large clay pot and packing it down, Gabe gathering large fistfuls, Janna pressing down with precise and expert speed.

I stepped onto the back porch and set my bags down. The milk, sweating, leaned against my leg.

“’Lo,” said Janna. “I’m teaching your husband how to grow a dogwood tree.”

She smiled in her brief, catlike way before returning to the mound — a flash of a smile, fool’s gold in a pan.

“Boyfriend,” said Gabe. He looked up at me and grinned.

“That’s right.” Janna slapped at a mosquito that had landed quietly on her arm. “I forget.”

“I thought it would be nice for us to have a little flora around here,” said Gabe, still squatting. “A little fauna. What say you”—he raised himself, propping his elbows on his knees—“about that?”

“ Fauna means ‘animals,’” I said.

“Right,” said Gabe. “But with flora comes fauna. Spiders and dragonflies and ladybugs.”

“You don’t like spiders,” I said. “And have you ever seen a swarm of ladybugs?”

“It’s grotesque,” said Janna cheerfully.

“Anyway,” I said, “isn’t it a bit late to be planting trees? Doesn’t that happen in summer?”

“That’s what I thought. But it turns out,” said Gabe, “that autumn is the perfect time for planting.”

“It isn’t the only time, but it’s really ideal,” Janna said. “After a few frosts, you’ve still got soils that are warm enough through the winter to allow for root growth. Then, when spring comes, the roots are dying for water, and they’re much easier to transplant.”

Janna stood and wiped her hands on her jean shorts, which sagged around her waist. She’d rolled the legs up to the top of her thighs.

“So they can keep growing,” she said.

I thought of the bags at my feet — the twelve eggs, the avocados Gabe liked to eat plain with a spoon. He scarfed them with such boyish enthusiasm that finding the best ones was a secret pleasure of mine. I could spend ten minutes in the produce section, gently prodding their leathery skins.

“I have to put these away,” I said.

“But it’s so glorious out.” Janna stretched her arms, slender but packed with stringy little muscles. “You don’t want to join us?”

“Maybe afterward.”

“Suit yourself,” said Gabe.

I was irritated by the Labrador look of his face, his smile hanging open.

“You’ll be ready to leave in a half hour?” I asked.

“Course,” he said. “I’m never late.”

It was true: Gabe was a stickler when it came to timing. That night, he was in the car fifteen minutes early, his bag packed with lab work and the dinner he carried in separate Tupperware containers — one for cooked pasta, one for cold sauce, one for salad leaves, one for dressing. His packing process was by now so rote, so obsessively standardized, that it almost seemed like an act of resistance rather than submission.

The sky became dusky as we drove to the lab. We were quiet on these rides: while Gabe stared at the road, I read through the notes Keller had sent about tonight’s participant.

“Who do we have tonight?” asked Gabe, parking.

We stepped out of the car and walked down the sidewalk beneath a line of trees. Their leaves were dark cutouts in the royal-blue sky.

“The kid,” I said.

Gabe’s jaw set the way it always did when he was thinking more than he wanted to say. We both felt conflicted about Keller’s use of children. Still, Gabe was near-paranoid about criticizing Keller; he certainly wouldn’t do it when we were within spitting distance. Gabe and I had worked with patients as young as fifteen, but we knew that children had been part of Keller’s early tests in Fort Bragg. Tonight’s participant was seven.

At the heavy metal doors, we fell into a single-file line and took out our ID cards. Gabe held his to the square reader next to the doors, which emitted a short, high-pitched beep. The doors opened automatically to allow him inside before closing again. When they shut behind me, clapping together with a rubbery noise of suction, we started down the left corridor.

“Evening,” said Gabe to the Hungarian researcher, who was pushing a young man in a wheelchair across the hallway.

“And to you,” said the researcher. He paused and nodded at us; the man in the wheelchair stirred, his head rolling from one shoulder to the other.

We took the staircase to the basement level of the building and passed three of Keller’s rooms, the doors locked, before we came to his office. It was a windowless bunker at the end of the hall. Inside, there were meticulously organized metal cabinets, a closed door that led to a small closet, and a bulletin board with pinned notes and schedules. Keller sat at a large metal desk, facing away from us.

“Just a moment,” he said.

He was hunched over, taking longhand notes on a yellow pad of paper — he preferred this to the laptops Gabe and I used, claiming it helped him to write more intuitively. He held the cap of his pen in his teeth.

We waited. After a moment, he capped the pen and turned to face us. His eyes went immediately to Gabe’s shirt.

“You’re dirty.”

Gabe set down the cooler with his dinner and leaned against the door frame.

“I was planting a tree.”

“Planting a tree,” said Keller, glancing at me.

I shook my head. “This was his venture.”

“Our neighbor’s a gardener,” said Gabe.

“Well, you can tell him,” said Keller, mildly, “that if Rosemarie Sillman complains that my assistants look like they’ve just buried someone, I’ll be holding him accountable.”

“Her,” said Gabe. “The neighbor’s a woman. You do know it’s the twenty-first century, don’t you? Next thing you know, you’ll be assuming all scientists are men, and Sylvie will have to put you in line.”

Gabe was able to rib this way with Keller; in their relationship, there was always a line being narrowly walked. Over the years, it had become almost familial — something that made me vaguely jealous, even though I knew Gabe had always needed a father more than I did.

“Noted,” said Keller shortly, though he was smiling. “Go on and set up. Room seventy-six.”

It was seven o’clock now; we had half an hour until Jamie arrived. We walked to Room 76—the only one with a window, though it was a small square close to the ceiling and barred. Gabe rolled the bed to the center of the room. It was similar to a hospital bed, with white sheets and a remote that allowed us to raise or lower it. Gabe left the room for the closet in Keller’s office, then returned with straps that he affixed to hooks down the length of each side of the bed. I walked into Room 74, raised the blinds on the large window that allowed me to see through to Room 76, and powered on the polysomnograph machine and telemetry equipment. I made sure that the amplifiers and the CPAP machines were working properly. I set up the montage, the configuration of all the channels we’d be using, and I did the amplifier calibrations.