Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

He was looking at me quizzically, the space between his brows furrowed. I felt reality as a whole slipping away from me like an enormous tide. I had to reconstruct it by hand, to verify the simplest details.

“It isn’t fair.” I felt frail and cold. “You saw sides of me I didn’t see myself.”

“But isn’t that incredible?” His eyes were slick. “We know each other, Sylvie, in ways other couples can only dream of.”

“People shouldn’t know each other this well. You watched me behave like an animal.”

“No,” said Gabe more forcefully, shaking his head. “That’s not true. I saw you behave honestly. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You know me, but I don’t know you.”

“I know it seems that way. But you will, I promise you. Now that you know about all this — and believe me, my God, I’ve wanted you to know so badly — we don’t have to have any more secrets. We can be totally open.”

“And what about Thom?”

“I don’t care about Thom. It was all my fault.”

“But what does he know?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t spoken to him.”

“No? You haven’t filled him in?”

“I told you,” Gabe said. “We had no way to know what happened when you got there. We couldn’t figure out much with the phone bug; whenever you picked up, you seemed to want nothing to do with him. All I could do was take down the time when you got out of bed. Then watch as you walked through the fence.”

“You were pretending to sleep.”

He nodded.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t understand which side you were on.”

“There aren’t sides,” said Gabe. “We’re all on the same side.”

He caught hold of my forearm and tried to draw me to him. But I pulled away, twisting until his arm wrenched behind his back. He let go of me with a gritted noise of anguish. Panting, he dropped forward, his hands meeting his knees.

“Jesus, Sylvie,” he said. “I just wanted to—”

But I barely heard him. I was running for the door, and then I was outside, lurching down the porch steps to the sidewalk. Across the street, a young couple walked two golden retrievers, wheat-gold and wily; the woman spoke sharply as they strained at their collars. Nausea came over me, sudden and boiling. I turned away and retched over a storm drain, vomit tumbling colorfully through the slats. One of the dogs barked, and the woman clicked her tongue, glancing at me with alarm as she ushered them forward. When they turned onto Atwood, the block was empty. I stumbled ahead.

The wire fence that separated the train tracks from our house was overrun with ivy and backed by spindly trees. I stepped around it and began to walk down the length of the tracks, my feet inches from those gleaming steel bars. The air was cool and soft as a palm. I walked until I couldn’t see our house anymore; then I hooked my fingers in the open diamonds of the fence, leaned back, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again — how much later, I wasn’t sure — I heard a whinnying noise, grievous and faraway as a ghostly animal. The sound increased in urgency, accompanied by a bellowed horn and the ghastly screech of wheels on steel.

Though I had heard plenty of trains in Madison, I rarely saw one; at home, the dark lacework of the trees blotted the tracks from view. Electricity whipped through the air. As the train came closer, my whole body shook, and I wound my hands deeper into the fence. I pictured the flash of a searchlight, a thunderous rush of air, my body whisked like a leaf. It would be so easy, so quick. The tracks were squealing, now, the ground rumbling with energy. Fear roared inside me, and I tried to yank my hands free. But my knuckles had swollen, and the sharp pull did nothing. The first car loomed into view, round nosed and gleaming, and I screamed.

In one brutal movement, I ripped my hands from the fence and leapt to the other side of the tracks. The first car barreled past me, and the force of its trajectory knocked me to my knees. I crouched in the pebbled dirt — candy wrappers and soda cans, beer bottles rolling in the wind — as the other cars came into view.

I had pictured the majestic ferocity of old freight trains, the coal-black engine and husk of white steam. But this train was ramshackle and tired, with a child’s crude design: blunt wheels, wagons in sallow shades of orange and yellow and brown. The sides were sprayed with graffiti. The train itself seemed to howl in protest, condemned to carry these stories, for how to clean a train — a pressure washer, a sandblaster? — and what would be the point, if the next night someone new came, spray paint in hand, to find the train’s canvas cleaned and ready?

I coughed dust as the last car passed. This was no brick-red caboose: those had been phased out in the 1980s and ’90s to cut costs, Gabe once told me — one of the random bits of knowledge I was no longer surprised he had. The manned caboose and its crew were deemed unnecessary, he said, the rails safe enough. The caboose conductor was replaced by an end-of-train device: a small electronic unit with a flashing red taillight.

But someone stood on the back of this engine, his feet on the small aluminum platform, hands gripping the railing. He wore layers of dark clothes and studded boots, a knit cap pulled low; a heavy beard hung down to his shoulders. A train hopper. I had heard they rode in open boxcars or in the wells behind cargo containers. With night falling, the man blended into the charcoal-colored car and the dusky sky. Perhaps this had emboldened him, or maybe he just wanted air. Every few seconds, the flashing red light illuminated his swan-shaped cheekbones and the tube clutched in one hand — a map? A newspaper? I couldn’t tell.

As the engine pulled away, our eyes met, and sparks ran down my spine. He raised a hand in salute, and I did the same. Then the train sank into the darkness, swallowed like a stone in water, and just as unexpectedly as he had appeared, the man was gone.

The Vineyard feels much more benign than it used to. It’s sunnier than it was in the summer of 2002, the product of a world hell-bent on heat. This year, seventy-degree days have been replaced by scorching stretches of drought, and the fertile plains of the Midwest are unable to bear food. The fog is a relief. Was it ever as foreboding, as secretive, as I once made it out to be? I’m eight years older now than I was that summer — in August, I’ll turn thirty — and my anxiety about the fog, its powers of concealment, has slipped away from me. It’s better that way, though I suppose the world has lost some of its glitter. It’s as though I’ve peeled away some holographic veneer, and the world is stark, actual. Night fits obediently into its little box. And I, perhaps, fit obediently into mine.

It’s been years since I dreamed the way I did in Madison. I don’t walk in my sleep anymore — two nightly medications and four years of careful calibration have seen to that. It’s strange; actually, they make my dreams easier to remember. I set up a video camera at the foot of the bed — an extreme measure, I know, which made me feel both protected and marginally insane — and each morning, I reeled through the previous night’s videotape. Aside from the occasional twitch, I was slack as a a sack of flour. This calmed me, and soon I came to enjoy my dreams. Other people dropped into a state as blank and idle as a sleeping computer. But every night, I got to go to the movies — my one concession to the way I used to be.

Or maybe that’s just what I tell myself. There’s a crack in that floor, and I stay as far away from it as possible. The truth is there will always be a fault line in me, and fault lines are never a single, clean fracture; when the surface of your world is displaced, the plates shuffled and broken like china, you can never step as carelessly as you used to. The medication keeps me asleep, and trying to find some pleasure in my dreams keeps me from hating them — or the place in me they come from. How can I explain how it feels to be constantly on guard, afraid not of what someone else could do to you but of what you might do to yourself? It’s like owning a rottweiler: no matter how sweet she is at home, she’ll speak for herself once she’s off-leash in the dog park, and there’s not a thing you can do to control the way she tears through the grass, the way she howls like sin; you can only smile with embarrassed apology at the other owners and mutter thinly, “She thinks she’s a wolf.”