Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

While at USF, Keller founded an interdisciplinary philosophy-neuroscience-psychology program, commonly known as PNP. But in 1995, he left to become the headmaster at our small, private boarding school, hidden in the fog and black walnut trees and upside-down rivers of Humboldt County, California. While at Mills, I’d known that Keller was a psychologist with some degree of prestige, but I hadn’t cared to learn more than that. Gabe shared the rest of this with me in the weeks before we left Berkeley. When David wasn’t home, he helped me pack and mail boxes. During work breaks, we spread out on the empty floor and ate pizza out of the delivery box as he told me about Keller. Gabe soon gave up trying to teach me about simultaneous potentialities, but it wasn’t only the theory that confused me.

“So Keller was fully set up at USF,” I said. “A tenured professor, the founder of this groundbreaking lucidity program, and he left to head up a high school? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like he was regressing.”

By now, we were on the plane from SFO, sitting in the seats Keller had purchased for us. These were the days when planes still served meals — something we dreaded at the time but later came to regard as a bygone luxury. We prodded the lemon chicken breast, set deep in a gelatinous yellow glaze. We unwrapped our twin bread rolls from aluminum foil and were surprised to find them still warm.

“It’s strange, I know,” said Gabe. He speared a piece of chicken with his plastic spork and swallowed it, making a face. “Almost like he needed a vacation. All I know is that he came to Mills in ’95, just like us, and stayed for five years. Then he moved to Fort Bragg to do his own research.”

“And you don’t know why?”

Gabe shrugged. “There are some things I can ask him and some things I can’t. My guess is that he started off within the university system because he had to, and over time he wanted more freedom. I know he’s still connected to the university in a tangential way — he’s sort of a grandfather to the PNP program — but other than that, they seem to leave him alone.”

Keller spent each summer on Martha’s Vineyard. The house was an inheritance, though Gabe didn’t know from whom. All he knew about Keller’s family was that his mother was a German immigrant while his father, a New York Jew with Eastern European roots, sold hats. Neither one seemed to have been particularly well-off, so I couldn’t shake the sense that the house had been given to Keller by a third party.

We took a cab from the airport in Vineyard Haven, and as Gabe paid the driver — a tall, sweating boy in a limp polo shirt who couldn’t have been any older than us — I stared at the wide expanse of the compound. It looked like three original houses, descending in size, had been pressed up against each other and were now linked. Gabe told me they were constructed in the late 1870s. Like many of the homes in Vineyard Haven, which had been built in the same neocolonial, Cape Cod style, Keller’s compound had a symmetry and stately sense of proportion that seemed to me impenetrably masculine. Each house was sided with unpainted cedar shingles, which had originally been a rosy tan; over time, they took on the silver-gray sheen of moth wings. In front of the houses curved a crushed-shell driveway, long enough to hold three or four cars, though only one was parked there.

The entire compound was surrounded by dense, shade-giving trees, which keeled toward the house as if obligated to protect what was inside it. The landscape was new to me — the vicious storms of greenflies; the tall grasses that swayed with the airy fullness, the intention, of ghostly bodies — and I rarely ventured off alone. Fog curtained the beginning and end of each day like an ongoing play, and I feared that I would get lost inside it — that I would disappear into the gauze like the beetlebung trees and the vast, pale ocean. It didn’t help that I couldn’t find the house on any Vineyard Haven map. It lay at the end of an unpaved, dead-end road called Snake Hollow. Whenever Gabe and I talked about it afterward, we referred to the houses not as “Keller’s compound” or “the place on Martha’s Vineyard” but as Snake Hollow itself.

The day of our arrival was muggy and overcast. Every so often, the sun broke through, brief and dazzling. As our cab driver backed out of the narrow road — off to pick up another batch of tourists, no doubt — a young woman came out of the house and walked toward the car parked in the driveway. She wore a cut-off pair of jean shorts with Birkenstocks and a baggy, short-sleeved T-shirt. When she came closer, I saw that she was pretty: African-American, with round, long-lashed eyes and hair that coiled up and out. She carried a bundle of clothing and a worn denim backpack over one shoulder, both of which she chucked in the open trunk of the car.

“What’s up?” she called to Gabe as we walked toward the front door. Gabe carried his bags easily, but I had fallen behind, dragging my wheeled suitcase choppily over the shells. “This the new one?”

Gabe nodded.“This is Cassidy,” he said as I caught up. “Cass, meet Sylvie — your replacement.”

“You’re such a dick,” said the girl. But she was laughing, shaking her head. She leaned on the open car door, one knee bent. “Take care, okay?”

“I will,” said Gabe. He hugged her briefly and slapped the roof of the car. “You say hi to San Francisco for me.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Cass, slinging her body into the driver’s seat. “Your old stomping grounds.”

She flashed another smile, small white squares of teeth like Chiclets, and pulled out of the driveway.

“Who was that?” I asked as Gabe took out a ring full of keys and wedged one of them in the lock of the front door.

“Summer assistant — one of the kids in the PNP program. They come here on fellowships, stay for a few weeks, a month.” The lock gave, and he pushed the door open with his shoulder. “You’re taking her place. Come on in.”

The house was filled with pastel light, as it often was that summer: the sun slanting through the kitchen blinds in lemony streaks or filling the library, while setting, with the orange sherbet of evening. Keller’s old lamps emitted a warm glow, more heat than color. At night, they lent the house a dreamy haze, a sense that things were not quite what they seemed. Although the house was Keller’s, it seemed to both obey and resist his mastery. Like a double agent, it dropped clues: an open window; thin walls that allowed sound to pass; a piece of softened yellow paper with blue handwriting, fluttering out of an opened book like a leaf from a late fall tree.

“Make yourself at home,” said Gabe, leading me into a small, white kitchen from which the Atlantic Ocean could be seen. “Keller gets back on Monday.”

“He isn’t here?”

“He decided to go to a conference in Boston — sort of a last-minute thing. So I told him you’d spend the weekend getting acquainted with the place. And you can start your reading.”

Gabe took two glasses from the cabinet above the sink, filled both with water, and brought one to me. The water was milky with bubbles. I swallowed.

“Hey,” Gabe said, more gently. “Let’s put your things away in the bedroom.”

He must have detected my disorientation. I nodded and followed him down the hall, which gave off the sweet, musty odor of old wood. I knew, of course, that there would be long days of study here. But my memories of life in Berkeley were still so fresh that I wondered whether I’d made the right choice. My withdrawal from the university had been unsettlingly easy: I only had to go to the registrar’s office and request a cancellation form. I’d imagined there would be someone who’d try to convince me to stay — a final test to be passed, like the spry, hopping creature at the final level of a video game. But the registrar was an ancient-looking woman who barely looked up before sliding a white form across the desk.