Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

I wrote that I wouldn’t share the details of our work with the media or the police, and I’ve kept that promise, though I’ve never been able to figure out whether it was for their sake or my own. In return, I asked Gabe not to tell Keller what I’d learned. I’ve no idea whether he honored his part of the pact; in any event, when the case against Anne came to a sudden close later that summer — Anne changed her plea to guilty and was sentenced, without a trial, to twenty-six years in a federal prison for women — Keller’s calls dwindled to a stop.

Maybe even he knew by then that an era was coming to a close. While in Berkeley, I followed him and Gabe from afar. They continued on for another two years, traveling like vagabonds from one college town to the next. They spent the fall after I left in Ann Arbor, the spring in Bloomington. From there, the universities became more and more obscure. After the 2005–2006 academic year, which they spent in a small New York college so far upstate that it bordered Canada, their work was no longer tied to any school at all.

I’ve often wondered how they felt in those final months, when the East Coast was just beginning to wake after a winter in hibernation. Were they filled with despair, so incongruous when the outside world was in bloom? Or did they surrender quietly? They must have known that their time had come and gone. As the twenty-first century continued, nobody wanted to learn how to live in their dreams — they just wanted to stay asleep. Out was the touchy-feely naval-gazing of the eighties and nineties; when gas prices were soaring, ice caps were melting, and resources were becoming thin, insurance was the best thing money could buy. You’ll Sleep Like a Baby , one mattress ad promised — and what was more attractive, more elusive, than that sort of ignorance, harder-won in adulthood but no less blessed?

I should have felt a sense of redemption when Interactive Lucid Dreaming finally dissolved, but all I felt was mourning. Until that moment, the research itself had stood as witness to my life, both personal and professional. When Keller dropped out of the academic landscape, his work as brief and brilliant as a species gone extinct, it was as if none of it had ever happened at all.

Five months after I left Madison, in October of 2005, my mother called on the half-broken Nokia I’d brought to Berkeley. A letter had come to my parents’ house, addressed to me. At least, it appeared to be a letter: it was a thick, large envelope, taped shut over the tack. Three stamps were pressed in the upper left corner. The return address was Gabe’s. She had mailed it to me.

“Don’t read it,” said Hannah. “It’ll only torture you. Who cares what he has to say?”

Hannah was, and still is, the only person who knows the story in all its humiliating detail. I had already told her about how I’d reconnected with Gabe and had left school to join him, but she knew nothing of my work with Keller until our first night in California. We were sitting on the living room couch, eating takeout from the vegan place down the block whose utter lack of cheese and meat made it clear I was no longer in Wisconsin. The room was hedged with boxes, and I barely recognized Hannah: the slight, wiry girl I’d known at Mills had became tall and womanly, butter skinned, her curly hair piled in a bun and held with chopsticks. She had gained weight, but it suited her: with her sturdy, round thighs and flushed cheeks, she looked as if she had grown into the body she was always meant to have. I couldn’t help it. I began to cry.

“What is it?” she asked, setting her seitan on the ground.

Before I could stop myself, I was telling her everything. She listened to me with quiet focus, her blue eyes wide and barely blinking. The gentle attention of an old friend, of someone who wanted nothing from me, was enough to make me cry harder. I blew my nose so loudly that Hannah leaned away, laughing until she snorted.

“She’s still got it,” she said.

When Gabe’s letter came, she stood between me and the counter where it sat like a parent separating two warring children. For the first few days, the curiosity gnawed at me so badly that we stuffed the envelope in a shoe box in her closet. Soon, though, I realized I had more power if I didn’t know what was inside it. What if Gabe revealed something new? What if he asked me to come back or let go of me completely? I wanted none and all of these things to be true. And for the first time in my life, I learned the value of ignorance. We drove to the beach boardwalk in Santa Cruz and drank cheap, warm beer, sitting on the dock with our feet in the surf, screaming as the Giant Dipper dropped. We huddled in dive bars with her coworkers deep into the morning; hours later, I hiked across campus to gather signatures for my readmission forms and course preferences, as sleep deprived and coffee-high as any other undergrad.

I was twenty-five and a college senior, but I didn’t feel like either one of them. I’d been so serious about college the first time around — even my relationship with David had felt like a kind of work-study. Now, if only to take my mind off Gabe, I was determined to have fun. On weekends, Hannah and I took BART into San Francisco and went dancing downtown. I had never been so close to that many bodies at once, writhing and shouting en masse; with the music pounding and dizzyingly sweet drinks coursing through my blood, I could almost forget myself. It was a tradition of ours: even years later, when I finished my undergraduate degree and began the PhD, we made a monthly pilgrimage to our favorite spot. On one of these nights, Hannah spotted a curly-haired man with a suit jacket thrown over his shoulder, standing at the bar and eyeing us with amusement. “Go on,” she said, “he’s smiling at you”—so I marched over to the bar, brave with vodka, and flirted with him so flagrantly that he asked for my number before pulling me onto the dance floor.

With Gabe’s letter tucked safely away, I had tricked myself into believing that I could control whether and when news of him came into my life. In fact, after four years in Berkeley, I had practically forgotten the letter itself. But one afternoon in May, when I had just gotten home after teaching a section of Abnormal Psych — all grad students were required to TA introductory courses in return for tuition remission — Hannah bounded through the door. She was breathing hard, one hand still on the knob.

“You’ll never guess who I saw on the train,” she said.

“The guy from the club?” My curly-haired dance partner hadn’t called, not that I blamed him — I could barely remember what we’d talked about, though I did remember stepping on his shoes so many times that he asked whether it was my signature dance move.

Hannah shook her head. “Michael Fritz.”

The name hit me like a rush of cold air. Michael Fritz — one of Gabe’s best friends at Mills. Hair the color of flame and a snigger of a laugh.

“Yeah?” I asked, feigning casualness. I was stirring pasta water, and my hand on the wooden spoon was already clammy. “What’s he doing here?”

“He’s working for a start-up. Something to do with data technology.” Hannah closed the door and kicked off her clogs, walked to the couch. “Hey — sit down with me for a sec, will you?”

The pasta had two minutes left, but I turned off the water and drained it, dumped it into a bowl with a powdery packet of orange cheese. I sat down beside her and picked at the shells. Hannah’s breath was shallow, her cheeks flushed.

“Gabe has a kid,” she said.

The pasta was underdone; it crunched between my teeth, stiff and rubbery as plastic. I spat it out, my heart rattling.