Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

Once I got to the Vineyard, I couldn’t resist the urge to drive past the Snake Hollow compound, even though — or perhaps because — I knew it would look nothing like it used to. In the fall of 2008, a developer bought the compound, gutted the insides of the buildings, and began work on a two-year project that turned each one into a cluster of vacation condominiums. He kept the name — Snake Hollow, sure to attract couples in search of a storied, moody island escape — but to me it felt terribly wrong. I pulled smoothly into the driveway, which had been dug out and paved, and there they were: the three original structures, shingles painted the impeccable white of veneers.

Each building was roughly the same shape and size, but there were new appendages here and there: another porch, an extra wing. Each condominium had its own entrance, so that walkways jutted out of the building in various directions, crawling with guests. A family of five emerged from what was once the bunk room, clutching noodles and boogie boards and a giant yellow float in the shape of a slug; a child stood inside one of the windows of the old library, testing the air with her foot before being sucked into the room by an invisible parent. In front of the driveway, on a newly planted stretch of bright green grass, a young couple sat knock-kneed in sunglasses, sharing a peach. They looked at me with casual interest as I reversed out of the driveway.

On the side of the road, stalks of dune grass waved in salute or farewell. Twenty yards away was the beach, where a group of teenage boys stood with fishing poles. I slowed to watch them: their slender, eager bodies, the round whip of the lines. Every so often, a lone holler signaled a tug from the water. I saw they were playing at catch-and-release: fishing for the sport of it, not the meat. There was thrill was in the capture, absolution in the letting go. They couldn’t have been older than fifteen — what had they ever killed? I still remember the night Keller returned to the compound from one of his afternoon walks with the gasping, sparkling body of a striped bass. Its jaw gaped, lips wide enough to hold a grapefruit. It wasn’t even bloody. Silver-green, round-bellied and pulsing, the fish was so robustly itself that it was hard to believe it would soon be split, skin slipped off like a dress, and reincarnated on Keller’s floral china plates, the meat buttered and fried to a crisp.

The sunset that night was startlingly neon — searing orange and highlighter pink as Keller paused in front of the French doors and the fish stilled. I wondered why it didn’t resist him. I’d heard about the power of striped bass. They weighed as much as sixty pounds; mature, they had few enemies. But the one in Keller’s hands was docile, resigned. Its eyes — even larger than a human’s, the black irises pits in pools of yellow — stared out at the room with what seemed like attention, as if Keller were offering not death but a privilege. Here, he seemed to say, was life on land.

My mind wanted to forgive Gabe. But my body couldn’t. I kept expecting to return to bed with him, but as the days passed, the charge around that room only gathered strength. I went upstairs to grab clothes or a book when he was out, and when I returned downstairs, I felt contaminated. Only one thing made me feel better: that Gabe didn’t know — or wasn’t sure about — what had happened at Thom’s. At the time, it was my only, meager stitch of power. That knowledge, knowledge of how far I had gone, was what Keller and Gabe most desperately wanted. It was what they had spent ten years fishing for, what they were betting their careers on. And in the terrible weeks that followed, weeks I spent in a hazy state of limbo, I guarded it with everything I had left.

I slept on the couch and adopted Meredith Keller’s method of RBD intervention, waking myself with a cell phone alarm before I could sink into REM sleep. It had never been so difficult to deny myself that most basic instinct. I was pulled toward sleep’s depth and what awaited me there. Was Thom expecting me? Twice, the phone rang — once while Gabe was at the lab, and another time when he was home, though it stopped after the first ring — but I never picked up.

My memories of those final weeks are few, but static images, like postcards, surface now and then. Lying on the couch before dawn, half-asleep and wrapped in my coat. Standing before the bathroom mirror in the darkness of very early morning, turning the fluorescent lights on and off so that the bright shock kept me awake. Sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal and Gabe in the chair across, his eyes bleary but focused on me.

“Say something, Sylvie. Anything.”

I didn’t answer. Mostly, he knew enough to let me alone. I made the living room into a haven, for I was afraid to venture very far outside; the thought of seeing Thom was even worse than seeing Gabe. But it was not long before the outside came to me.

It was the beginning of April, one week after I found my file at the lab, and I had spent it indoors. I’d sent Keller a brief e-mail saying that I had come down with the flu to buy time while I thought through what to do — whether and how to confront him, whether and how to leave. But my brain was foggy, and I was spending less and less time conscious. While Gabe was at the lab, I dozed in my coat on the living room couch. My sleep was never deep enough to be satisfying, which made it easy to fall in and out of it. So when I heard a sharp rapping at the door, I rose.

I expected to see Keller, but it was Janna. She stood barefoot on the porch in a pink silk pajama top and what looked like Thom’s jeans. They sank into folds around her knees and ankles. She had dyed her hair an unnatural, all-over red. And she was staring at me expectantly, as if it was I who was on her porch and not the other way around.

“May I come in?” she asked finally.

I nodded. She stepped lightly through the door. I became conscious of the living room and its air of agoraphobia: the windows covered with black sheets, coats crumpled on the couch and floor. In the air was the damp, close smell of bodies. She looked at the video camera I’d set up at the foot of the couch and averted her eyes.

“Can I get you something to drink?” I asked.

“Anything with alcohol.”

Her tone was almost flirtatious. But beneath it was a stale tone of affect, of attempt.

“All right,” I said. I walked to the refrigerator and opened it: eggs, a scattering of leftovers, old cold cuts for lab lunches. Nestled in the back was a half-full bottle of old white wine. I sniffed it and poured a glass.

“Actually,” said Janna, “don’t bother.”

She had seated herself at the kitchen table. Her silk top, oversized, pooled on the chair.

Not knowing what else to do with it, I kept the glass for myself. I sat down across from her. She was silent. Months earlier, I would have tried to make conversation, but now I was exhausted. I stared at my wineglass, fingered the thin flute. Slowly, my nervous system was waking up, pawing its way through the grogginess of afternoon. It was minutes before I noticed Janna staring at me.

“You don’t look well,” she said.

It would have been less painful if I had detected a tone of of insult. But her voice was bare of its playful filigree, its musical lilt. Even the nasal clip of her Finnish accent had softened.

I’m not sure how long we sat like that together. It felt to me like hours, but in reality it must have been no more than five minutes.

Abruptly, Janna stood. “It smells in here.”

When I call up that memory now, I see her in the loose pajama top, her nostrils flared and her stomach already pushing against the waistband of Thom’s jeans. But I think I’ve added that detail in hindsight; at the time, I later learned, she was no more than four months along.