Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

“Sylvie. What is it you wanted out of this visit? Did you want to see me stripped, displaced, an old man living alone?”

“I want to know what you’ve learned ,” I hiss. “Your wife kills herself, you manipulate your own researcher, you’re practically an accessory to murder, and then you abscond to Martha’s Vineyard. So what did you learn, Adrian? Where has all of this high-minded research gotten you? Was it worth it?”

I stand, my jaw locked with something like despair. I’ve fantasized so many times about saying these things to him — telling him off, cutting him down, watching his face fall and his veneer crack. In real life, though, it doesn’t feel good. It feels humiliating — for each of us individually, for both of us together. I think of the time in my sophomore year of college when, home for the holidays, I opened the bathroom door to find my father getting out of the shower. He squawked, pulling the shower curtain around him, but it was too late. The curtain was clear. We never spoke of it again.

Keller stands, too, pushing with effort out of the recliner.

“I have to believe that it was,” he says.

The sky is warming in color: the sun rusty and smudged, the horizon line a ribboned, bloodshot red. When I was driving from Berkeley to Martha’s Vineyard — beneath the orange stalks of the Golden Gate Bridge, through Nevada’s feverish lights and across the northern plains of Missouri — I imagined how I would leave Keller’s house: a slammed door, a final word, a look I’d make sure he’d remember.

Reality, though, is never so satisfying. He walks me to the door and opens it. Then he pauses, one hand on the knob.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he says.

Perhaps it is an act of generosity: the gift of closure, however belated. Perhaps, pulled by the yoke of conscience, he wants deliverance himself. But I detect, too, the peevishness of a child pushed forward by a parent and forced to apologize.

I look at him without responding. Then I step outside into the wild, green dune grass and climb back to the car. I’m ready to go home.

A year ago, I visited Rodney in Seattle, where he works for a start-up that develops games for smartphones. All of the games are supposed to offer mental and physiological benefits. Rodney had spent the past year developing ShepherdZZZ, a game that is literally supposed to put you to sleep: the objective is to shepherd a lost, hyper sheep back to its herd via a battery of dizzying obstacles so overstimulating that most users are exhausted in less than fifteen minutes.

Rodney picked me up at the airport in a Zipcar. He’d inherited our father’s height and our mother’s quick hazel eyes; his hair was shoulder length, tied back in a short ponytail. He looked more mature than I’d ever seen him and also, somehow, impossibly young.

“It’s basically a dream job,” he said, pulling onto the highway. “Initially, there were like, four employees, and now there are thirty of us, running around like gerbils. But the really great thing is that it’s so innovative. It’s like a baby Google. Baby Apple. I mean, we get creativity time. And paternity leave!”

“What’s creativity time?”

“You know,” he said, waving one hand. “Creativity time? A bunch of companies are doing it. It’s basically half an hour each day when we can play Ping-Pong or read for pleasure or wander around, lost in creative thought. It’s supposed to be really generative. We get paid for it.”

The week before, Rodney had e-mailed me the download link for ShepherdZZZ, along with an employees-only free download code.

“It’ll save you the five dollars,” he said. “You need it.”

“The app or the five dollars?” I asked.

“Both, probably,” he said brightly. “Grad school and all.”

Rodney was hired right out of college. Now he lived with his boyfriend, Peter, in a loft in Belltown. Downstairs, Peter ran a trendy ice cream company that sold counterintuitive, savory flavors: sweet arugula, prosciutto and fig, olive oil ribboned with red veins of balsamic. He had recently received a write-up in the Seattle Times , and now, on warm days, the line coiled around two blocks.

“Try the sweet arugula with the olive oil and balsamic,” Peter said when we arrived, swinging open the door of an industrial freezer. “It’s the most popular thing on the menu! I call it the Naughty Salad.”

While Rodney was at work, I hid out in a massive deli in downtown Seattle, where the patrons were as hopelessly unhip as I felt. As large as a school cafeteria and stubbornly devoid of any cultural identity, the deli was home to a bewildering buffet: there were bagels, sushi, a Chinese noodle bar, a sandwich station, eight steaming trays of Indian food. It was cheap and crowded, dully safe, the kind of place where people only came to disappear.

I sat at a long bar in front of the window with a plate of chicken tandoori and a Chinese dessert, translucent and shaped like a drawstring pouch. Outside, it was somber and drizzly; the two umbrella buckets in the deli’s entrance were stuffed to capacity, and a pile of additional umbrellas lay to one side. I had just finished eating when a tall figure came through the doors and stopped.

He wore a slick black raincoat and expensive-looking, Italian-looking shoes — the golden-brown color of scotch with leather tassels at the toes. The bottoms of his slim slacks were drenched, and his strawberry hair was thinning; at the crown of his head was a pink bald spot, dappled with raindrops. He hunched as if the ceiling in the deli were slightly too low.

There was a moment in which we both weighed the costs and benefits of pretending we hadn’t seen each other. Then he sighed and offered a small, grim smile.

“Sylvie Patterson,” he said. “I thought it was you.”

I was stunned numb. Like the second in which a toe is stubbed or a finger jammed, I felt the impact but not yet the sting. I glanced at the tables nearby, but the people around us were unconcerned, engaged in conversation or tabloid magazines or the complicated disentangling of wads of chow mein.

“I never knew your last name,” I said. “That’s strange, isn’t it?”

“Perkins.”

“Perkins. Thom Perkins.”

“That’s it,” said Thom. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

His voice had the same playful inflection I remembered, but it was effortful now, his smile wooden, like an actor forced to play a part he had long ago outgrown.

We regarded each other. I wondered if I looked as old to him, as changed, as he did to me. His eyes were sparsely lashed, a chilly, arctic blue. The skin of his cheeks looked translucent and exposed.

“I suppose there are a few different ways this could go,” he said.

I had no idea what he thought of me — whether he was resentful or bewildered, whether he’d passed me off as crazy. Through the years, I’d remembered snatches of my time with Thom, and I had stitched the story together square by square. Scratching a mosquito bite, I saw my head against his crossed ankles, our bodies making an L shape on the floor and crumpling with laughter. Going through a turnstile at the BART station, I remembered crawling under the broken fence plank, Thom helping to pull me through. We stole through the yard and tugged the basement door closed, the moon swallowed like a lump in the throat.

A subway train squealed its approach, and I heard Louis Armstrong on low as we clung and spun together, Thom singing a hushed harmony. The way you hold your knife; the way we dance till three … A drizzly Thursday morning in October, pouring hot water into a packet of oatmeal: You promised you’d show me , he said, you promised —and we were wrestling, knees scraping the concrete floor, until I let him peel my fingers open and out fell a small yellowed photo in a plastic frame. Solemn gaze, ketchup fingers, the bangs my mother cut below a bicycle helmet: the only childhood photo I have.