Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

I was babbling, spitting his words back at him less articulately than I’d been able to do in high school.

“It’s a start,” Keller said.

Through the open windows, I heard the crunch of shells that signaled Gabe’s arrival. The two orbs of his headlights grew brighter, spilling into the library, before the car came to a halt and the power was turned off.

“That’ll be Gabriel,” said Keller, cocking his head at the noise. He turned back to me and smiled, but I could see he was distracted; it was as if he’d just remembered his unpacked suitcases, dinner to be made, whatever ends had to be tidied up after the previous assistant’s departure.

“Mr. Keller?” I asked.

He raised his eyebrows.

“The letter,” I said. “Who were you writing to?”

If I had crossed some line, he didn’t blink.

“My thesis adviser,” he said. “Meredith.”

As I lay in bed that night, tossing in my UC-Berkeley boxers, his ideas seemed to me frightening and revolutionary. And they were, I discovered — though PNP was revolutionary less for its novelty than for its return to so-called archaic notions of the mind as murky, spiritual terrain, terrain whose geography was better understood by folklore and poetry than it was by pharmacology. In hindsight, I can see that Keller’s scholarly path was always one of upstream travel: the absorption of modern-day psychology into medicine and the hard sciences stranded him in murky terrain of his own, and though he had made use of his marginalization — there seemed to be a continual stream of people swimming to his rock, shaking the water off their backs, and clambering up to admire the view from the island — I know now that he worked always in fear of being delegitimized.

If I had known then what I do now, perhaps I would have been able to see Keller as he was: an aging, proud, and anxious man, unwavering in his convictions, persuasive in speech, but prone to paranoia and hermeticism. It should come as no surprise that someone so convinced of the mystery and idiosyncratic depth of the human mind should be self-isolating. But I could not help but see him, through the years, as a kind of martyr: brilliant, exiled, and lonely as a god.

As October gave way to the stark skies of November, its spindly, barren trees, I was surprised to find a cream envelope beneath the porch door of our house: perfectly square, licked shut, with a calligraphic scrawl— G + S —in black ink. I opened it in the kitchen while Gabe slept off the late study we’d monitored the night before.

Greetings, pals—

Janna and I’d be delighted if you’d treat us to your presence(s) on the eve of 25 November. We’ll give thanks, we’ll drink copious amounts of liquor, and, Janna willing, we’ll eat the appropriate troughs of food, American and otherwise. Come in your finest around the hour of five, post meridiem — and bring something to contribute, you lazy fucks.

Hugs—

T.

I read the letter twice in a row with a seeping feeling of delight. It had been years since I’d had a proper Thanksgiving meal — not since I lived with my family. Gabe and I had a halfhearted tradition of eating dinner at an ethnic restaurant, though I’d never really been sure whether we did it out of protest or laziness. Thom’s letter made me feel normal. We were the sort of young people who had neighbors, had friends; we would go to their house for Thanksgiving, and we would fall asleep, along with the bulk of the country, at the pathetic hour of seven thirty or eight, bloated and sewn-in as stuffed animals.

I decided to make a sweet potato dish, something roasted that I was sure I couldn’t mess up. After picking up the ingredients in town, I stopped at the Goodwill on State Street. Keller paid us fairly well — even better now that we worked for the university — but I was my mother’s daughter, and most of it went into savings. Usually, I was attracted to clothes in muted colors, though perhaps attracted is the wrong word; it was more that I knew these were the styles that suited me and I had resigned myself to our partnership. Today, though, I wanted something different. I brought home a suede skirt in a rich and dusty orange and paired it with a low-backed black top; as I closed the bedroom window, cool air brushed my spine. When I added the little gold hoops Gabe had given me for my twenty-third birthday and a pair of bronze heels, I felt almost unlike myself.

“You look great,” said Gabe, in a tone I tried not to take for surprise, as he came downstairs to meet me. He had dressed up, too: he wore a starched navy shirt and a skinny green tie with his Chucks.

“So do you,” I said. Had he gotten a haircut, or was the structure of his face always so clear — the sharp jaw, the deep-set and crinkled hazel eyes?

As we crossed the lawn to Thomas and Janna’s house — a bottle of wine in Gabe’s hand, the sweet potato dish in mine — we could have been any young couple. We rang the doorbell and waited on the porch, Gabe’s sneaker tapping the planks.

Janna opened it. Her hair was newly streaked with purple and pulled into a bun, so that the stripes collected in a clean knot at her crown. She wore an orange dress, too, but hers was the neon color of construction signs. It ended in a feathery skirt at her hips. Beneath it she wore sheer brown tights and no shoes.

“Oh, look!” she said, clapping. “You’re the same color as your potatoes!”

I looked down; it was true. She kissed Gabe twice, once on each cheek.

“Come in, come in,” she said. “I’ve got to attend to the table, but Thomas will get you a drink.”

With this she whirled out of the kitchen, and Thom sauntered in from the living room. The oven was releasing small curls of smoke. Thom paused in front of it and stared quizzically at its dials before turning to us.

“Hello, friends,” he said. “What can I get you? Wine? Martini? Gin and tonic?”

“Gin and tonic, please, sir,” said Gabe.

“Sylvie.” Thom grinned, putting a warm hand on my shoulder. “You match your potatoes.”

“I know,” I said. “Janna mentioned—”

“Extra,” said Janna, sweeping back into the kitchen, a butter knife in one hand. “Silly me — I set the table for five.”

She sniffed and turned, with razorlike precision, to the oven.

“The oven , Thomas,” she said. “The oven is smoking , darling.”

She turned off the heat at the same time as she opened the silverware drawer next to it. After dropping the extra knife, she slid her hand into a bright blue mitt and pulled out a tray of beautiful, scallop-edged orange cups with little mounds of sweet potato inside.

“Oh,” I said. “If I’d known you were making sweet potatoes, I wouldn’t have brought them. But yours are gorgeous. How did you make them?”

“Easy,” said Janna, licking a bit of potato off her ring finger. “You cut the oranges in half and scrape out the insides. Fill them with mashed potatoes, throw the pulp in the trash.”

She wiped her hands on a towel and looked at us brightly.

“Hungry?” she asked.

•••

I don’t remember much about dinner, only that we were woozy with drink by the end of it: first the gin and tonics, then two bottles of rich red wine, a post-dinner espresso splashed with bourbon. The moon rose baldly into the sky; Gabe took off one of his shoes and threw it behind his head, where it collided with an antique mirror that cracked into a delicate, spidery web and, Janna claimed, looked better now than it had before. At some point, we collapsed on the couch in their living room, a tangle of legs. I looked for the Keats book, the mossy old tome that Thom had shown me weeks before, but it was gone. Thom was singing something— Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine. You are lost and gone forever… Did I imagine that at some point, Janna’s head rested against my chest? I don’t know how or why it would have happened, but I remember the warm sun of her skull, the streaks of hair that spread across my shoulders like purple kelp, her spindly fingers picking at the fabric of the couch.