Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

He kept his eyes on the road, but I stared at him as he talked. The feeling of his body so close to mine was so uncanny I couldn’t help it.

“Anyway, I was always looking for ways to make a little extra money. I loved Mills; I considered it my home. My tuition was covered, but I imagined I’d repay the school eventually — I’d make a big donation, cover the tuition of another student, maybe fund a new computer lab. You know how it was with the computers in the library — there was always a line out the door.

“So I started taking these odd jobs. I’d do whatever anybody wanted. For a while I gave haircuts in the Moberly Common Room. They didn’t mind so long as I cleaned up afterward. I started a group that played poker on Sunday afternoons, but I got too worried we’d be found out. And I worked night shifts in the dining hall.”

“I know.”

“Please be patient with me,” he said. “I know nothing makes sense yet.”

There was genuine appeal in his face. I kept us going straight, rather than turning off one of the side paths that would take us farther into the web of buildings.

“In our junior year, Mr. Keller approached me. I’d been a smart-ass that day in psych, and he asked me to stay after class. I thought I was going to get in trouble. But he sat me down on the other side of his desk, and he told me my problem was that I had too much energy.”

“I remember that.” I stopped. “We’d been studying — early childhood development, was it? We all figured you were going to get in trouble. I stopped on the hill as we were walking back to the dorms. I tried to look in the window.”

“I saw you,” said Gabe. “And I thought, That’s Sylvie, she would do such a thing . You were always loyal, even before we were together.”

He started walking again, and I followed him.

“You told us you were fired, that you’d lost your job at the dining hall.”

“I was. But that wasn’t the full story. Keller gave me this whole spiel — said I reminded him of himself at my age, that I needed something to pour myself into. I tuned out a bit until he mentioned the pay. Twenty dollars an hour for such menial work: data entry, mailings, things I could do in my sleep. I thought he was joking until he had me sign a confidentiality agreement.”

“So it was true,” I said. “Keller’s research assistants.”

Gabe nodded. “He said he chose one or two students each semester, students who showed promise and seemed trustworthy, but he didn’t want the word getting around. That was fine with me — I already tried to keep my scholarship as quiet as possible, and I would’ve been an obvious target if anyone had known about this.”

“Was Will Washburn his assistant?” I asked. I remembered the time that Keller had come upon us standing on the library stairs, when Will had been excluded from the larger group.

“The year before me.” Gabe tore a twig from the dangling branch of a nearby tree and chucked it in front of us. “So I went to talk to him before I gave Keller an answer. Asked him what it was like, how much money he made, whether he was skeeved out by the confidentiality agreement. Honestly, I was kind of offended to think that Keller had put me in the same camp as Will Washburn — you know how Will was, always throwing some fit — but what I noticed that day was that he’d really calmed down. A thoroughly useful experience —that was how Will described it. He said he’d made tons of money and Keller had already written a personal recommendation on his behalf to someone on Princeton’s admissions committee.”

“Will did wind up going to Princeton.”

“Exactly. I figured Keller would do the same for me. There wasn’t any good reason not to take the job — so I started in January. The January of our junior year.”

“That was the month of the eclipse.”

“That’s right.”

Gabe looked at me appreciatively, as though he’d presented me with a riddle and I had solved it. We were in the grass below Sather Tower, where I often set up my camera. I sat down, and he joined me. The entire situation felt surreal — the haziness of the sky, the relative absence of other students, and Gabe, sturdy and tangible before me.

“What did you mean by showing me that flower? The flower with two discs?”

“The infinity flower.” Gabe smiled. “I didn’t know what it was at the time, though I found out later I was right — it was an experiment, some sort of play with garden genetics. But by then I had seen Stu Cappleman at Keller’s house, and I had a whole new set of suspicions.”

“Stu Cappleman? The guy who worked in the dining hall?”

He was a gangly boy from one of the surrounding towns who went to public high school and worked nights in our dining hall. His dad did the plumbing in the dorms, which was how Stu must have been hired. He was something of a character at Mills, with his cystic acne and loose, inventive slang. Sometimes, he played basketball on campus with a few of our students, Gabe included. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to be there when he wasn’t working, but none of the teachers ever asked him to leave.

“That’s the one,” said Gabe. “This was one night in April — our junior year. I was supposed to have printed out a bunch of reports and put them underneath the door to Keller’s office in Sellery Hall. But I’d been scrambling to get a history paper done, and I didn’t finish until after midnight. Sellery was closed, so I figured I would go to his house and slip it under the door. I thought I could tell him I’d forgotten he wanted me to put it in Sellery, and he’d never know the difference. I didn’t want him to dock my pay.”

He plucked a blade of grass and played with it: rolled it into a spiral, slivered it at the center.

“When I got to the door, I realized there was light coming out from underneath it. That’s when I heard these — noises. High-pitched whines, like a little girl’s voice, and then a lot of muttering I couldn’t understand. But finally I realized someone was talking about his hands. ‘I see my hands,’ the person would say—‘Here they are, my hands,’ all in the same weird voice. Keller would offer some encouragement—‘That’s right,’ or ‘Very good, Stuart,’ or ‘You certainly do’—but Stu didn’t seem to notice him at all. He never responded when Keller spoke, and sometimes he talked right over him.”

“Are you sure it was Stu Cappleman?”

Gabe nodded. “Positive. The blinds were down, but there was a sliver of space on each side. At one point, Stu came close to the window and I saw him.”

A part of me was skeptical; the story was too fantastic. But another part of me believed Gabe as I believed in dreams, while they were happening: with absurd and unconscious trust.

“And that didn’t bother you?” I asked. “It didn’t seem to be ethically questionable, Keller keeping a school employee locked up in his house past midnight?”

“Of course it bothered me. It took me a few days, but I finally worked up the courage to ask him about it. Keller listened very quietly, not at all ruffled. You would’ve thought I was asking him about the weather. Then he looked at me in this calm sort of way and said that Stu had volunteered to be a part of his research, the same research I was helping with — as if I’d known about it all along.”

“Had you?”

“Not a thing,” said Gabe. “Believe me, Sylvie. All I was doing was entering data I didn’t understand, long strings of letters and numbers. He’d kept me in the dark, and for good reason. Now that I knew, it was like I had this special power. And I was afraid. I didn’t know what I’d gotten myself into. So I went to Keller and asked him to tell me what his research was about.”