Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

This summer, I’ve had plenty of time to think about my years with Keller and what they meant to me. I could have taken a plane to the Vineyard, but Hannah insisted I drive. See the country, take my time. I’ve saved up a bit of money — enough for a motel room in Cheyenne and another outside Iowa City. The first thing I do, when I get to a new room, is stand in front of the air-conditioning with my arms spread out like plane wings. It’s been a hot summer, and I’ve pitied the animals I’ve seen on the way: the thick-skinned sheep, horses swishing their tails like fans.

It isn’t so awful, being alone, not when you get used to it. Every decision’s my own. Whenever I like, I can stop at a gas station for cheap coffee or Slim Jims. If there’s a fruit stand, I’ll pull to the side of the highway — I keep the bags in the passenger seat, knotted to keep out flies — and sometimes I get out for a roadside attraction: the Angel Museum in Beloit, Wisconsin, or Amarillo’s Cadillac Ranch. Mostly, though, I try to make good time. That way, when I touch down for the night, it feels deserved.

At each motel, after I stand in front of the air-conditioning — or, for the cheaper ones, the fan — I pull on my old Speedo one-piece and go out to the pool. Even the motels without air-conditioning have pools. The color is always the same: a too-bright, mouthwash aqua. Smallish and rectangular, lined by a curved ledge of concrete and rows of beach chairs in various stages of decline, the pools shine like beacons amid the surrounding mediocrity. I ease myself into the deep end — too tall to dive like the children holding life preservers, or too old.

It feels good to be surrounded by families, even if they aren’t my own: the children chicken-fighting with a viciousness reserved for siblings while their wide-set mothers yell for leniency. After I swim, I set up on one of the folding chairs with a hotel towel and chip away at the twenty-seven books I loaded onto my e-reader before the trip. When I was studying for my preliminary exams, it was more — a hundred and sixty, give or take — but I’m now halfway through my dissertation, and my reading has become more focused.

How different it would have been if e-readers had been around when I worked with Keller! None of the fragrant, heavy books, their pages wilted as old dollar bills. The Kindle was too practical to resist — that sleek little machine, light as a paperback — but I miss the days when books were weighty and tangible. If all goes as planned, I’ll graduate in a year, apply for jobs this fall. I’d hoped this trip would give me time to read the rest of my texts, and I think I’m on track. If I’m honest, it helps to have a distraction — to believe that my mission this summer is to finish my reading, and not something else.

I’ve been on the Vineyard for two days now. I’m staying in a little motel by the water — the most expensive one I’ve visited, but I’ve been frugal enough in the past six years to manage it. It’s located across the island from our old haunts. I wanted to keep my distance, at least until I was ready. In the morning, I have breakfast on the deck: a piece of fruit and one of the boxes of cereal I filched from the continental breakfast in Iowa City. When it gets hot, I read inside my room — I can see the ocean through the window.

I don’t know exactly what I’m waiting for. I guess I’m expecting to drop into a different state, one in which I feel meditative and unflappable. I get frustrated when I snag on things. The silvery color of the motel siding, for example, the same siding as all of the houses on the Vineyard. The fog and its familiar descent.

I planned my route so that I had to drive through Madison; I wanted to prove to myself I could do it. I hit the Wisconsin state line on the afternoon of July 4. I had planned to drive through the capital without stopping, but by evening, the holiday traffic had become unbearable. My muscles were rigid, and the air-conditioning in the car was less effective as the temperature rose outside. At nine o’clock, I pulled into a cul-de-sac on Rutledge and parked. I was ten minutes on foot from the old apartment in Atwood, two minutes by car. Through the window, I heard the high shrieks of the children who had gathered, with their parents, to watch the fireworks.

I unlocked the car door. I only meant to stretch my legs, but I found myself wandering down the stairs between two waterfront houses, which led to a grassy patch of land at the edge of the lake. Families sat on the grass and on the benches by the stairs, waiting.

We were bound by a congenial feeling of mutual anticipation. One of the children began to climb the fence; his father pulled him down, but not before the child pointed over the fence and hollered notice of the first explosion. It was a green shower of lights, shooting up in stalks to our right. The next one — red sparks, flaring and dissolving — came from the opposite direction. The land was so flat that we could see the fireworks of a succession of different towns. They burst one after another in all parts of the sky. The biggest explosions must have come from the closer towns, like Sun Prairie. The smaller ones followed like echoes.

We waited until the last town had sent up its final spark; the coda was a happy face, accidentally upside down. Watching the layered lights of these Wisconsin towns, many of which I’d driven through before, left me with a sore, vacant feeling. As parents collected their children and couples ambled back to the road, I found myself waiting by the fence, as if another show was soon to start or someone was coming to meet me. I could have been any other thirty-year-old woman — a well-lit apartment down the block, a partner at the stove. I look much the same as I did when I lived in Madison: the same slim, compact frame, skin beige and dotted with freckles in summertime. Two years ago, I changed my haircut, adding bangs — the feathery whim of a Berkeley hairdresser. I had hoped to be transformed, but when he spun me around to face the mirrors, it took only seconds for me to register myself. Like a child waking to a bedroom at first fuzzy and strange, the details soon sharpened into familiarity: the mole beneath my left eye, light eyebrows peeking out from behind a fuzzy shelf of hair.

When I’d spent several minutes alone and it was clear that the fireworks were over, I climbed the stairs and walked back to the car. I was already turning my mind to logistics. Accustomed as I was to working through the night, I started driving again. By the time dawn was peeling night from the landscape, returning color to the pastures and wetlands, I was in Ohio.

In March, Madison shook off its crust of snow. Tree branches and glass blades shivered baldly in the early spring air; the most adventurous undergrads began to wear shorts, their legs defiantly exposed and covered in goose bumps. I lived in a vigilant state of alert. After seeing the bug on our phone line and finding Meredith’s file, I was determined to find out more. And if Gabe wouldn’t help me, I’d do it alone.

I was distant from him, as if preparing myself, as if I already knew how our story would end. He was in charge of recruiting new participants, driving through the state to post flyers at satellite campuses of the university, and I continued the file reorganization project. We needed a success, and soon: our funding for the following year was not guaranteed. But we had no more than two new participants that spring, and I think a part of us had given up. Every morning, we read the San Francisco Chronicle online on separate computers, and at night we fell asleep in our clothes.