Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

It must have been one or two in the morning when we stumbled out the back door to their yard. It was a gorgeous night, unexpectedly warm. I can still see Thom running back to us, gazelle-like, all legs — he’d gone somewhere and returned with boxes of bang snaps. We threw them at the ground and yelped when they exploded too close to our feet. Gabe and I kissed pressed against the fence, dense and urgent, his hands beneath my shirt. How long had it been since we had kissed like that? And then he was gone, and I was sitting with Thom beneath the juniper tree in their backyard, a tree with a thick, warped trunk like a dish towel being wrung.

If my memories up until this point are imagistic and uncertain, here they sharpen. Here I remember not only sensory details — the leathery leaves and sharp little sticks beneath my legs; grass stains on the lap of my dress; Thom’s sweet alcoholic scent — but whole stretches of conversation. Where were Gabe and Janna? I don’t remember caring; I leaned against the juniper, its trunk kneading my back.

“… the first man I ever loved,” Thom said, his nose bulbous and jagged in the blue light. “Platonically, I mean — but I did love him. I admired him so much I felt my identity bleeding into his, little by little. Have you ever had a teacher like that?”

“No,” I said, whether or not it was true. An owl cooed in the distance.

“No? Ah,” said Thom. “Well, he was my first poetry professor. My first real professor. And Janna was his pet.”

“He liked her poetry?”

“He liked — well.” He laughed, high and breathless. “You’re a dear, Sylvie — you know that, don’t you? You’re a very sweet girl. But inside you there’s a sour center. And that’s why I like you.”

Why that flattered me I can’t say now. It was the alcohol, I think — the scent of the muddied leaves, Thom’s voice sure as an incantation.

“Not that I’m exempt,” he said. “I’m as dirty as they come. And I’m disgusted by it now. But, you know — I was so damn idealistic then. The art! That’s what I thought was most important. He was the writer-in-residence at our college. I’d never met a man who was brilliant in the ways he was brilliant. And I thought I could access him, if I was with her.”

“You only started dating Janna to get close to — your professor?” It struck me as funny; I laughed, and soon Thom was wheezing with me, knocking his head against the fence. But like a summer storm, Thom’s laughter passed as suddenly as it had arrived, and once more he was confidential, solemn.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll say it. I wanted to get to him. But when I stopped thinking that way — when I fell for her , and her only, nothing more — I experienced the most incredible purity. Do you believe in purity?”

I felt a tickle on my arm. Two ants were crawling toward the inside of my elbow. I brushed them to one side; they landed on Thom’s pant leg, though he didn’t notice.

“I’m a changed man, Sylvie.” He ran a hand through his messy reddish hair, swift and shaky. “I’ve repented, believe me. I’ve changed”—and we both took swigs of our drinks as the sky began to turn pink. The wineglasses had all been dirtied, and we were drinking out of jam jars. I had never been so drunk. My mind spun and spun, a top inside my skull. The next thing I remember, I was waking up in bed, still in my orange dress, Gabe’s heavy thigh cast over mine; I was peeling back the curtains by our bed, a white November sun high in the sky.

The conversation was so peculiar I almost wondered if I had remembered it wrong. But from the window I could see the juniper tree, wrenched, and when I looked at the lap of my skirt, there were the grass stains, there were the little tears where twigs had snagged the fabric.

•••

The next night, I dreamed I stood alone at an abandoned intersection in a small, plain town. To my left, wheat fields stretched fuzzy and golden; to the right was a boarded-up ice cream shop. The wind lifted my hair, blond and streaked with black. In one hand I held a whirligig that turned with the wind, spinning light. The wind stilled as if in wait, and the whirligig stopped moving. Then a flush of blackbirds rose from the field, arcing through the sky with a thick flapping noise, like the pages of a thousand books being turned. When they cleared, I saw a hot air balloon.

It moved through the sky with a stately elegance, unhurried as a mayor at a small-town parade. Its progress was so slow that I didn’t know it was manned until a figure no bigger than an insect clambered to the rim of the basket and tumbled, flailing, over one side.

It was the first dream I had fully remembered in years. I woke slick with sweat, gasping, and looked for Gabe. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head, arms two pointed wings. The clock on my bedside table shone 4:23, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep. So I stepped out into the hall, closing the bedroom door quietly behind me.

My mind was dizzy, caught in the groggy purgatory between sleep and wakefulness, and I was still half-drunk. But I climbed the stairs to the attic and dusted off a clean canvas. Then I carried my paint boxes to the rug in front of the window. Kneeling, I began to mix black and white until I found something that matched the tenor of that pale gray sky.

The dream began to sharpen as I painted it. In shaping the great rainbow bulb of the balloon and its brown thatched basket, I saw the way the figure inside had first leaned out of it, looking down, as if gauging where to land. Why? Because he was harnessed to a parachute, and I remembered it now: a pillowy lavender arc that looked quilted from below, floating toward the ground at the same leisurely pace as the balloon.

I wasn’t paying attention to the way the painting looked. My goal was not the finished product but the accuracy of my recollection. I was painting what I remembered as I remembered it, and the only way to do that was to paint right on top of what I had done only moments before. And so, as the flyer came nearer and nearer to the intersection where I waited with my whirligig, I painted him again and again — because now I was sure that it was a him, that the gangly legs hung from a pale torso brushed with hair as rough and golden as wheat; that up close, he smelled like alcohol and juniper, and if I were to pull up his shirtsleeve — which I would do as soon as he landed — I would find two ants crawling down one arm in slow procession.

I stepped away from the canvas and started at it for the first time as a whole. It was cluttered, kaleidoscopic: the balloon traced over and over, the man’s insect legs stretching toward the ground like an alien craft. My face was messily drawn and stretching apart, covered in whirligigs.

It was nothing I wanted to see again. I took a tube of black paint and squirted it across the canvas. With my widest brush, I swiped the paint from left to right, top to bottom. Light was beginning to inch up the sky, darkness drawing back like a tarp, but I was exhausted. When I returned to bed, Gabe was right where I had left him, as if no time had passed at all. I fell with surprising ease into a simple, passive sleep that must have lasted for hours. The next thing I remember was a soft rapping noise at the door, Gabe’s broad nose poking through, the snuffling noise of his laughter.

“Sylvie,” he whispered. “Sylvie, my God, wake up. It’s already one o’clock.”

•••

I spent the next week in a haze. My sleep was fitful and uneven: too much, or not enough. During the day, it was all I could do to stay awake. I told Gabe and Keller I thought I was coming down with a cold. Keller had me cover shifts at the sleep clinic, where all I had to do was sit bleary eyed at the front desk. At night, I fell asleep immediately, and I woke blank as a baby.