Хлоя Бенджамин - The Anatomy of Dreams

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 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 a few 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.

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 you come into my house again,” she hissed, “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 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!”).