Хлоя Бенджамин - The Anatomy of Dreams

“Will did wind up going to Princeton.”

“Exactly. I figured Keller would do the same for me. There wasn’t any good reason not to take the job—so I started in January. The January of our junior year.”

“That was the month of the eclipse.”

“That’s right.”

Gabe looked at me appreciatively, as though he’d presented me with a riddle and I had solved it. We were in the grass below Sather Tower, where I often set up my camera. I sat down, and he joined me. The entire situation felt surreal—the haziness of the sky, the relative absence of other students, and Gabe, sturdy and tangible before me.

“What did you mean by showing me that flower? The flower with two disks?”

“The infinity flower.” Gabe smiled. “I didn’t know what it was at the time, though I found out later I was right—it was an experiment, some sort of play with garden genetics. But by then I had seen Stu Cappleman at Keller’s house, and I had a whole new set of suspicions.”

“Stu Cappleman? The guy who worked in the dining hall?”

He was a gangly boy from one of the surrounding towns who went to public high school and worked nights in our dining hall. His dad did the plumbing in the dorms, which was how Stu must have been hired. He was something of a character at Mills, with his cystic acne and loose, inventive slang. Sometimes he played basketball on campus with a few of our students, Gabe included. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to be there when he wasn’t working, but none of the teachers ever asked him to leave.

“That’s the one,” said Gabe. “This was one night in April—our junior year. I was supposed to have printed out a bunch of reports and put them underneath the door to Keller’s office in Sellery Hall. But I’d been scrambling to get a history paper done, and I didn’t finish until after midnight. Sellery was closed, so I figured I would go to his house and slip it under the door. I thought I could tell him I’d forgotten he wanted me to put it in Sellery, and he’d never know the difference. I didn’t want him to dock my pay.”

He plucked a blade of grass and played with it: rolled it into a spiral, slivered it at the center.

“When I got to the door, I realized there was light coming out from underneath it. That’s when I heard these—noises. High-pitched whines, like a little girl’s voice, and then a lot of muttering I couldn’t understand. But finally I realized someone was talking about his hands. ‘I see my hands,’ the person would say—‘Here they are, my hands,’ all in the same weird voice. Keller would offer some encouragement—‘That’s right,’ or ‘Very good, Stuart,’ or ‘You certainly do’—but Stu didn’t seem to notice him at all. He never responded when Keller spoke, and sometimes he talked right over him.”

“Are you sure it was Stu Cappleman?”

Gabe nodded. “Positive. The blinds were down, but there was a sliver of space on each side. At one point, Stu came close to the window and I saw him.”

A part of me was skeptical; the story was too fantastic. But another part of me believed Gabe as I believed in dreams, while they were happening: with absurd and unconscious trust.

“And that didn’t bother you?” I asked. “It didn’t seem to be ethically questionable, Keller keeping a school employee locked up in his house past midnight?”

“Of course it bothered me. It took me a few days, but I finally worked up the courage to ask him about it. Keller listened very quietly, not at all ruffled. You would’ve thought I was asking him about the weather. Then he looked at me in this calm sort of way and said that Stu had volunteered to be a part of his research, the same research I was helping with—as if I’d known about it all along.”

“Had you?”

“Not a thing,” said Gabe. “Believe me, Sylvie. All I was doing was entering data I didn’t understand, long strings of letters and numbers. He’d kept me in the dark, and for good reason. Now that I knew, it was like I had this special power. And I was afraid. I didn’t know what I’d gotten myself into. So I went to Keller and asked him to tell me what his research was about.”

On the other side of the trees, a group of middle schoolers, here for a summer camp, ran by, laughing. I shivered. The heat wave had long since passed, and I was only wearing a T-shirt.

“You’re cold,” said Gabe.

He put a hand on my lower arm and rubbed it until the hairs stood up. Then he smoothed them down again. Everything he touched was a nerve. I pulled my arm back, putting it between my crossed legs.

“So what did Keller say?”

“He said it had to do with sleep,” said Gabe, “and dreaming. Consciousness, unconsciousness. REM cycles. But it was Stu I wanted to know about. Keller said he had a sleep disorder, which made it so that he didn’t stay in bed when he was asleep—he got up, moved around, acted out whatever was happening in his dreams. Keller was trying to find a way to get him to figure out he was dreaming. Otherwise, Stu could hurt himself—he already had. Once, before he came to Keller, he tripped while sleepwalking and came down so hard his chin split open. Needed about twenty stitches.”

“So that’s what you were doing,” I said. “All those nights, when you left my room, and I saw you going to his house. You were helping him? On Tuesdays and Thursdays?”

Gabe nodded again.

“Why?” I asked. “What was in it for you?”

“He upped my pay—practically doubled it.”

It was the first time that day I had seen him look sheepish.

“He must have been trying to keep you quiet.”

“Yeah, that occurred to me. But it was good, honest research, Sylvie. It was clean. Some of the other teachers knew about it. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. And I was excited, for the first time, about science—I thought I might want to be a psychologist or a neuroscientist. I started to work harder in biology.

“But it got more complicated,” he added. “The farther in I got, the more confused I was. It was so much responsibility, working with Keller. I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t talk to anyone about what I was doing. I felt like a freak . And one night, toward the end of our senior fall, Keller and I got into this awful fight. I told him I didn’t want to help him anymore, that I wanted to be a regular student. He said he’d reduce my hours, but he couldn’t let me off completely. I’d signed on to assist him until the end of that year, and we were neck-deep in projects—it was too late to train anyone new.”

“Is that why you left?” I asked. “In December—were you expelled?”

“It was my decision. I figured I’d already burned my bridge with Keller, and my grades were dropping fast—I wouldn’t have been able to get into a decent school without his help. So I went back to Tracy, hopped from job to job. My mom passed the next year, right around the time you were graduating, so I went to live with my gran.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. Gabe’s head was tilted downward, but I could see the tips of his ears turn pink. “I’m sorry.”

Gabe shook his head.

“I spent a few years that way. But I couldn’t get Keller out of my head. I kept thinking about him, wondering if I’d been wrong. I called Mills, but they said he’d left. I couldn’t find anything out about him on the Internet. It was Mr. Cooke who finally put me back in touch. He had an old home phone number of Keller’s, a place in Fort Bragg where he thought Keller might be living.”

“But why did you want to go back to him?”

Gabe leaned back on his arms. Two honeybees had found their way to us and were circling him. But he was entirely calm; he didn’t even wave them away.