Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

I followed Janna to the door and out onto the porch. She began to lean toward me, as if to lay her head on my shoulder. Her cheek brushed mine. I don’t know why I didn’t pull away.

“If I see you come into my house again,” she said, “I’ll call the police.”

Without meeting my eyes, she turned toward the screen door. There was a quick flutter of air as it opened and closed, and then she was gone.

•••

At that time, I could count on one hand the people whose phone numbers I knew and whom I spoke to with any intimacy. I had long since lost touch with any of my college friends. I called my mother.

I still marvel at the speed and efficiency with which she extricated me from life in Madison. I didn’t tell her about my participation in Keller’s experiments, and whatever her suspicions, she took me at my word: it was only a bad breakup. Like most young people, I’d convinced myself that her romantic life had begun and would end with my father. But as we flew from Madison to Cleveland, then from Cleveland to Newark, she resurrected an animated lineup of past boyfriends. During the layover, my mother — my frugal mother, wearing the same faded jeans and clogs she’d had since I was born, with the original suede skinned off the toe — treated me to an epic airport feast: steak frites from the flashiest, most overpriced grill in Cleveland international, topped off with a brownie sundae that was probably illegal in some states. She stopped short of carrying my luggage; I asked at the baggage claim, whiny with exhaustion, and she gave me a look equivalent to a sharp kick. At home, she babied me for a few weeks — doing the laundry, making my favorite minestrone soup — before telling me it was time that I decided what to do next, and I better not think about living alone.

“What other choice do I have?” I asked. “I don’t know anyone.”

I was sitting on the couch in my dad’s old sweatpants, eating Funyuns out of the bag, and I couldn’t decide whether I was pleased or disgusted with myself.

“Find a roommate on Craigslist,” she said. “People do it every day. Or call Hannah, from high school.”

“How?” I asked. “We didn’t have cell phones back then — I wouldn’t even know how to reach her.”

My mother sighed and walked out of the room. When I heard the quick patter of her footsteps on the stairs, I figured she was giving up on me. But less than a minute later, she reappeared in the living room doorway and tossed a heavy, spiral-bound book at me. It landed at my feet with a self-satisfied smack.

I picked it up: the old Mills directory, an impressive inch and a half thick, which included a dense section on the school’s rules and history before getting to the good stuff. Having everyone’s home address and phone number felt deliciously valuable then, as benign as it seems in today’s obsessively public, networked world: I remember crowding over a San Francisco map with Hannah to look up her crush’s address and repeating Gabe’s home phone number in my head until I had it down by heart. But the directory was almost a decade old now. The phone number listed for Hannah rang so long that I was about to hang up, convinced that her parents had sold the farm, when there was a plastic clatter and her mother’s melodious hello. I could still picture her soft pale braid, her browned and callused palms, the way she bent over the rosemary bushes in the garden as if checking on sleeping infants.

Hannah wasn’t there; she was in Berkeley, her mother said, with more than a touch of pride, after finishing culinary school in New York. She’d spent a year working on an organic farm in Canada, and now she was an assistant chef at a vegetarian restaurant. Ingrid asked how I was (“Er, fine”) and gave me Hannah’s cell phone number. I was worried we wouldn’t know what to say to each other, but Hannah was so enthusiastic, Stevie Wonder playing in the background, that my nerves dissolved (“Hang on a sec, let me turn that down — I’ve got my pump-up music on, you know I can’t wake up otherwise — Sylvie! Jesus Christ, girl, it’s been ages!”).

She was living in a squat, sixties apartment building in the Gourmet Ghetto (“Hideous — we’re talking wood-paneled walls and orange shag carpeting, but what can you do?”) with her ex-boyfriend, a chef at the same restaurant (“Don’t ask — it’s about as terrible as it sounds, but it’s only for another nine weeks, not that I’m counting, and on the upside, he’s obsessively tidy and does all of my dishes”). Their lease was up at the end of July, and she needed a new roommate.

“I’d love to have you, obviously,” she said. It was nine in the morning in California, and I could hear her bustling around the kitchen: the clink of a knife, plates rattling, the swift wheeze of a window being pushed up. “But what would you do here?”

“I’ve been thinking about going back to school, actually,” I said. It was true — I still had that damn application for readmission, and it was becoming clear that this was my best option. I knew that if I lived with my parents for much longer I’d become self-pityingly depressed, and I needed a college degree. “I could come out in August, get a job waiting tables while I work on my application. Maybe I could start up in the spring semester.”

And that was what happened. I spent the early summer tying up loose ends in Newark, not that I had many: I packed my bags, trashed my mementos of Snake Hollow and my photos of Gabe. I ate more consecutive dinners with my parents than I ever had as a kid. In June, Rodney came home from college, where he was studying creative writing; in the evening, we kicked a Hacky Sack around as the sun’s golden yolk smeared the backyard. After weeks of apartment hunting, Hannah found a turrety little Victorian just blocks from her restaurant. She sent me photos via e-mail: two bedrooms, a turquoise-tiled bathroom, space for a garden.

I could put Gabe out of my mind during the day, but at night, memories of him throbbed beneath my skin. I dreamed of his off-kilter smile, the particular tenor of his voice, and woke sweaty and gasping. I didn’t pick up his phone calls, though each one was a fresh puncture, followed by a dull ache that lasted for days. If he asked me to come back, if he told me again that he loved me, I didn’t trust myself to move to California. It would be so easy to slip back into our life together before I even knew I was doing it — to edge quietly through the door like a teenager returning after a long night out, to climb the stairs and take my old, soft place beside him in bed. He would wake up to find me there, fold his body around mine in habit before the surprise of it registered. But I would have to return to Keller, too — to the bare halls of the lab, the perpetual exhaustion, and the stagnant, indoor air. I felt as if I’d spent years within the glass segments and cyclical view of a revolving door. Outside, I was so dizzy that I could probably have fainted on command, but at least there was wind.

Gabe wasn’t the only one who called me. My cell phone rang constantly, the area codes ranging from Madison to Massachusetts, and the voice mails were all from Keller. In the beginning, they were curt— Sylvia, it’s Adrian; I need you to call me —but as the days passed, his voice became strained, an undercurrent of panic impossible to cover up. He called from the private number at the lab, his Boston-based cell phone, and eventually, from pay phones. Ignoring him made me feel sickened and blasphemous, but I never picked up.

Instead, I wrote a letter. The silver lining of Anne March’s trial was that it gave me a prepackaged excuse. I can still recall, with mild embarrassment, the convolution of the first paragraph: Though the past three years of my life have been dedicated to my work with you, and I have believed in that work as ardently as my conscience has allowed, certain events of late have forced me to see our research, and its terrible complications, in a new light. It is with great sadness that I recuse myself from an effort in which I have been so profoundly invested, but I can no longer ignore the evidence that suggests our work has been of primarily negative consequence to the lives of our participants and their loved ones.