Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

Until now, I had felt helpless, resigned to the dreams as they came. Years ago, I had given up on the lucidity exercises Keller taught us in Snake Hollow. But what if I tried again? If I could train myself to be lucid — if I could watch the old machinery of my subconscious creak to life while standing apart from it — perhaps the dreams would lose their power. If I could name them, I might be able to disarm them. Maybe I could even control them.

That night, lying in bed, I took inventory of the things around me: the bedroom door, slightly ajar; outside my window, a yawn of moon; hanging from my nightstand, the cotton skirt from which I’d scrubbed a stain the night before. When I see my hand in my dream, I will know I am dreaming , I thought as Gabe snored lightly next to me. I reminded myself of the dream signs: broken electronics, impossible feats of physics, the dead. And when I emerged in a dream, minutes or hours later, I looked for them.

I was never aware of how the dreams began. Instead, I became conscious partway through, and it was almost like waking — slowly my eyes would seem to open and that musty, subterranean world would materialize again, always the basement, its cracked floorboards and dusty bulb. Lights didn’t turn on in dreams, and so it was light I would start with. But when I reached for the bulb’s dangling chain one night, Thom stopped me.

“Are you crazy?” He batted my hand down like a fly. “Gabe might see.”

The threat was enough to freeze me in place. Now, I don’t know whether I was afraid of Janna or of what I’d find when I pulled that string — but I was distracted, for Keller’s wife had reappeared. She never spoke, but she watched us. She wore a red suit jacket and skirt, her expression impassively appraising: she was either fascinated by us or very, very bored. Sometimes, she sat in a chair across from me and trimmed her hair, staring into my face as if it were a mirror. Other times, she ignored us entirely: she inspected the room or leaned against the wall, humming like a teenager waiting for a train to arrive. Another time, Keller’s orange cat wound between us before settling on her lap.

Thom followed my gaze.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, his voice low.

The woman caught my eye, one brow raised in an elegant, sideways S.

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“Sure you do,” said Thom, wheedling me.

Thinking felt like swimming through sludge. I had mastered one task, at least: I knew I was dreaming. But what was I supposed to do now?

“Don’t know how to,” I said. “How to wake myself up.”

“Then don’t bother.”

“You’re no help.”

“You don’t need my help.” Thom scooted over toward me and laid his head on my lap, crossing one leg over the other. His feet were long and wide, the bones raying out like fans. “You’ll wake up in the morning.”

“But what do I do until then?”

The cat slinked by, and Thom grabbed it. He held her above his head, his large palm beneath her stomach. The cat bristled, her back arching, before relaxing in his grip. Her legs, dangling toward the ground, twitched and went limp.

“A thousand things,” he said. “We could have a staring contest. A wrestling match. Play blackjack. Run away. Though there are plenty of fun things we can do right here.”

He wiggled his eyebrows.

“Don’t be disgusting,” I said, but as if watching a film I couldn’t stop, I kissed him. He tasted muddy and sweet, and I did it again.

“Stay awhile,” murmured Thom.

With his hand behind my neck, he held me close. Why did it feel so good to kiss him? He had none of Gabe’s forceful need, his blunt charisma; Thom was coy and languid, drawing me to him before pulling back again. His body lacked the tight density of Gabe’s — the hard chest or thickly muscled arms. When I pressed my fingers into Thom’s skin, it was responsive, but through it I could feel bone.

He lit a candle. It made his face glow gold, then red. Light played other tricks on me, too. Sometimes, I climbed the stairs to look out of a small window set in the basement door. The sky was an inky black, unnaturally matte, like dried paint. I could see nothing else — no shapes, no garden, no stars.

“Why can’t I see stars?” I once asked Thom. I shook him by the shoulders, and his head bobbled, moving from shoulder to shoulder like a scarecrow’s.

And then I was in bed with Gabe, and it was his shoulders I was shaking, though his head remained fixed in place, his sturdy rottweiler’s neck unmoving. His eyes were wide and focused.

“Because we live in a city,” he said. “There are streetlamps. Light pollution. We aren’t in the middle of nowhere anymore.”

Could it be possible that something about the winter — the light pollution, the atmospheric density — had blotted out the stars? One night, I stayed up to see. I sat on the side of our bed with a glass of water. We had returned at three P.M. after a long session at the lab, and now it was evening. I was exhausted, and the urge to sleep tugged at me like a riptide — the strongest urge we have, I’ve often thought, greater than hunger or sex. But I waited as the digital clock beside the bed shone six thirty, then seven, then eight.

It was eight thirty when they began to appear. Like guests at a lavish party, some were early, others fashionably late, but one by one they filled the sky. Hyades, Cygnus, Pleiades. The Seven Sisters with their assigned seats at the table. Assured that I had indeed been dreaming, I fell asleep as if taking my rightful place below them — Gabe and I clustered in bed, assigned to our roles: in the mind as on earth, on earth as in the heavens.

•••

A door had sealed off between Gabe and me, and we squinted at each other through the peephole. I couldn’t tell him that I was afraid of the dreams that still took me at night, or how much Anne’s reentrance into our lives had disturbed me. It was difficult to tell where his loyalties lay, and we were spending less time alone. Keller, so rarely a presence in our house, had begun to stop by unannounced; or at least it seemed unannounced to me, as I was never there when he arrived. I pushed through the door with grocery bags or library books, my face flushed and muscles rigid from the cold, and there he was — sitting with Gabe at our kitchen table or washing a glass at the sink.

“Sylvie,” Keller would say, nodding, and Gabe would jump in: “Adrian was in the neighborhood.” Or, gesturing to the newspaper spread out on the counter: “Another article about Anne’s case. Have a look. Where’ve you been, by the way?”

Keller didn’t live nearby, and he had no reason to be there unless he was coming to see us. I suspected he wanted to make us feel he was there during an obviously disturbing time — though I wasn’t sure whether he meant to comfort us zor keep tabs on us.

Gabe thought he was lonely.

“You know what Anne meant to him,” he said after Keller had stayed over for dinner and two drinks before finally shuffling out the door around eleven.

I eyed him from the sink, drying my hands on a dish towel.

“To his work, you mean,” I said.

“You know Adrian. For him, there’s not much difference between the two.” Gabe sighed and leaned back in his chair, wincing, until his back cracked. “He’s never claimed to be perfect, Sylvie. He’s dealing with a lot, and the least we can do is be there for him.”

“Why are you going so easy on him?” I remembered Gabe’s anger that day at Starbucks — how good it felt to be on the same side. “He screwed up, remember?”

“Maybe.” Gabe sighed. “Maybe not. It’s a shitty situation all around, but I think we might have jumped the gun in blaming him. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s Anne’s.”