The Anatomy of Dreams

by Chloe Benjamin

  “He’s not lucid,” muttered Keller, leaning back in his chair.

  There was a brief murmur in the EEG. Jamie had moved his eyes to the left, then to the right.

  “Wait,” I said. “He might be.”

  Keller craned over the machine.

  “Only happened once,” he said. “It could be random. We can’t count it as an LR2 unless we get both movements.”

  “We’ll try at the next cycle,” I said. Gabe looked at the window and raised his eyebrows; then he left the room and came into 74.

  “How long do I have?” he asked.

  “About an hour, if his last cycle was any indication,” I said.

  “Right. I’ll be back in fifty minutes.”

  He left to retrieve his dinner from Keller’s office. Keller and I sat alone at the desk. In the other room, Jamie was serene, his chest filling and deflating. Keller and I sank into a comfortable silence, watching him as if in meditation. After a long stretch, Keller shifted in his chair and stretched backward, his back cracking.

  “Liking the new place?” he asked.

  “It’s not bad,” I said. “Sort of an empty neighborhood, but at least it’s quiet.”

  “Don’t you have a dog park around there?”

  “Brittingham. It’s pretty. Would be better if I had a dog.”

  “But you do,” said Keller. “That’s where you take Gabriel. Let him run around.”

  He laughed, and so did I.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Cottage Grove, right?”

  It was its own small village, close to the Dane County airport and Blackhawk Airfield. Keller had had us over for dinner when we joined him in Madison, back in August, but we hadn’t been back since; we saw him so frequently that sometimes it felt like we all lived together, here in the basement of the neuroscience building.

  “Oh, I can’t complain,” he said. “I have more space than I did in Fort Bragg. Almost as much space as there was in Snake Hollow.”

  “Gabe told me you sold it,” I said, though I hoped it wasn’t true.

  Keller nodded. “Lot of money to keep up a place like that.”

  “It must have been an ordeal to pack it all away.”

  “Mostly papers. I was lucky. Much easier to bring everything with you when your most precious possessions are two-dimensional.”

  “I suppose so.”

  My stomach gurgled. Unlike Gabe, I usually ate before we left for the lab, which had its disadvantages.

  “I never thought you’d sell that place,” I said.

  “I know.” Keller exhaled, cocking his head. “But we couldn’t have stayed there forever. And who would have lived in the house while we were here?”

  “Renters,” I said. “Renters could have lived there.”

  “Renters,” said Keller. “Nosing around in my library.”

  I shook my head, grinning. “Should I get Gabe?”

  “He’s back,” said Keller, nodding toward the window, as Gabe entered Room 76 and took his seat by Jamie’s bed.

  I watched the polysomnograph closely as Jamie entered his next REM cycle. After eight minutes, I triggered the LEDs.

  Keller leaned forward with his elbows on the desk. Another LR signal appeared on the EEG—just one movement again, left-right; we still needed a second one to count it as a sign of lucidity.

  “I’m telling you, he’s not lucid,” said Keller.

  “Hold on,” I said. “He’s trying.”

  There, in the next room, Jamie’s head was slowly rotating from left to right, as if charting the progress of a plane. He turned fully to one side, setting his ear down on the pillow, before going the other way again.

  “Well, it’s some kind of left-right signal,” I said.

  “Just not the one we’re looking for,” said Keller.

  “Wait a little longer. I think we may have something.”

  Jamie’s movements were speeding up. He turned his head from left to right more quickly now, and I stood over the EEG, convinced he was working up to an eye signal. But then he began to move faster, so fast his head was slapping at the pillow before bucking the other way, and his legs began to shake.

  “Adrian,” I said, “I think he’s seizing.”

  Such a lot of movement for a little body—Jamie’s legs strained at the straps, then his hips and arms, his breath rising in shallow bursts. Gabe was out of his chair now, standing next to the bed. Jamie had wriggled his burned arm out of the straps, and he scratched at Gabe’s face. The last two fingers barely grazed him, but Jamie’s pointer finger scraped Gabe’s eyelid.

  “He isn’t seizing,” said Keller, pushing back from the desk. “He’s trying to get out of the bed. Stay here.”

  Keller strode out of the room and reemerged in Room 76, where he ran to the bed and took hold of Jamie’s head. I put on the headphones that hooked up to 76’s audio system just as a voice came through.

  “He said he sees her,” said Gabe to Keller. I could see his mouth moving, but the sound came through with a second’s delay.

  “I’m sure he does.” Keller was facing away from me, but I knew his voice. “Get ahold of his limbs.”

  “Some help would be nice,” Gabe said as Jamie snuck his left leg out from under the strap and sent a flexed-foot kick at Gabe’s neck.

  “I have to keep his head steady,” said Keller.

  I began to take the headphones off, ready to join them, but Keller looked at the window as if he could see through it.

  “Sylvie,” he said, “I need you there.”

  “Why?” I asked, though I knew it was pointless—he couldn’t hear me in the other room. I felt useless and sick, watching through the window as Jamie writhed and hollered—he was strong in the committed way that children are strong, using every muscle he could. But I stayed where I was, afraid to go against orders.

  “Ma!” yelled Jamie.

  The mask was still on his face; he reached for it with his left hand, but Gabe was too quick. He grabbed the arm and held it back down to the bed.

  “Sylvie, send the light stimulus,” said Keller, one hand at the top of Jamie’s head, the other at his chin. “Respond to him, Gabe. Try to calm him.”

  I triggered the LEDs, and Jamie’s body paused in notice.

  “Where?” asked Gabe. “Where’s your ma?”

  “There are so many stars,” said Jamie, his body tensing.

  “That’s right,” said Gabe. “Do you remember what to do when you see stars?”

  “At the window,” said Jamie. “I see her.”

  Gabe looked at the window in Room 76, closed and barred as usual.

  “What’s she doing?” asked Gabe.

  “Climbing out,” said Jamie. “I lost her at the—super­market.”

  The mask had fallen halfway off his face, dangling over one eye. The exposed eye was still closed.

  “At the supermarket?” Gabe asked, looking at Keller.

  “No,” said Jamie. “We were—riding—on the train—”

  The shaking began again, more violently than before, and Jamie screamed. His heart rate had skyrocketed, and the underarms of his pajamas were soaked in sweat. Keller strained to keep the boy’s head steady. He looked at the window between our rooms.

  “Sylvie,” he said, “we need a current. Send it through F3 and F4.”

  These were the electrodes attached to Jamie’s frontal lobe. I shook my head, though I knew he couldn’t see me. A current to the frontal lobe—this was an electrical shock, which would result in a real seizure, brief but shocking enough to wake Jamie up. I had been taught how to do it, but I’d never tried it on a patient.

  “Sylvie,” Keller barked, his teeth gritted. I stood over the machines. The paper from the analog polysomnograph moved to the left as the pen made delicate markings, writing the story o
f Jamie’s brain.

  “We need you to do it, Sylve,” said Gabe. He was holding Jamie’s ankles and looking at me in the way he so often did—with appeal so earnest it looked almost like love.

  When I sent the shock, Jamie stiffened in Gabe and Keller’s hands as if suspended. Then, almost imperceptibly, he tucked into himself: his shoulders rose as his stomach dropped, his back rounding beneath it. Keller took off the mask, and the boy’s body went limp. He was facing away from me, but on the video camera, I could see his eyes begin to open.

  It was barely ten thirty. We called Rosemarie to take him home; the study had ended, so we couldn’t keep Jamie in the lab. While I put away the equipment in Room 74, Keller met them in the hall. It was impossible to tell how much Jamie remembered: he was woozy and confused, but he seemed to stare at the three of us with new distrust. He flinched, moving behind his grandmother, when Gabe tried to give him a pat on the head. Keller told Rosemarie we had been slightly premature: Jamie wasn’t ready; his lucidity skills would have to be worked on at home, and we could try again if he made progress. It wasn’t far from the truth—in fact, perhaps it was the truth exactly—but I still felt a long-dormant anger build inside me.

  “You’re welcome to come back in six months,” Keller said, his voice muffled by the door. Through the sliver at the bottom, I could see Rosemarie’s orthopedic shoes and Jamie’s Velcro sneakers, the red bars on his heels that lit up as he walked away.

  When I couldn’t hear their voices anymore, I rolled the cart into Room 76 to collect the electrodes. As I peeled off the white tape that had attached one of them to Jamie’s head, the electrode fell, hitting the floor with a metallic click.

  When I tried again, the same thing happened. I looked down at my hands. They shuddered in a way I had never seen before, my fingers stiff and bony as twigs. I closed and opened them, but the quavering didn’t stop—not until I leaned against the wall with my eyes closed, arms limp at my sides, and breathed as slowly as I could.

  By the time I walked into Keller’s office, half an hour had passed. I expected them to ask what had taken me so long, but Keller sat at his desk, finishing the summary report as usual. Gabe was on the floor, eating the last of his sandwich.

  “Come back in six months?” I asked.

  My voice was quiet, but I’d gotten their attention. Keller turned around in his chair, the wheels squealing on the floor.

  “Is that a problem?” he asked.

  “We just saw how damaged he is,” I said. “We watched him try to claw his way out of bed, we shocked him—and now we’re just going to send him home?”

  I felt short of breath; I had never spoken to Keller this way before. I suppose I was worried he’d fire me. But a part of me knew that would be impossible for him, and that’s where I found my nerve.

  “Sylvie,” said Keller, “the procedure tonight was no different than it is on any other night.”

  “But on the other nights we were using adults. Teenagers, even.”

  “We don’t use them,” said Keller. “We accept them as participants.”

  I inhaled sharply, sucking in my mistake.

  “We were accepting adults,” I said. “Not children. Jamie’s so vulnerable—his dreams are horrific. And we’re going to leave him like that?”

  Keller looked at me closely, his hands crossed in his lap.

  “Lucidity is the most basic demand of this study,” he said. “We make it very clear that every patient must meet the same requirement: if they aren’t dreaming lucidly within eight weeks, they can’t continue. No exceptions. Jamie didn’t qualify.”

  “But that means we just lance the wound and leave it open. We help our patients remember what they’re dreaming, we intensify their experience of those dreams, and then we leave them behind if they don’t make the cut?”

  “I don’t understand why you find this so disturbing.” Keller spoke clinically, his hands crossed in his lap. “You’ve watched me release a number of patients early. You weren’t bothered by them.”

  “Maybe it’s because Jamie’s a kid.” I felt checked and defensive. “He’s so impressionable, and he’s experienced more trauma than most adults. Besides, he’s in danger—if we hadn’t been here, he would have gotten out of bed and followed his parents right out of the window. He could have hurt himself.”

  “No, he couldn’t have,” said Gabe. “The window is barred.”

  I stared at him, wounded; I’d expected him to be on my side.

  “Here it is,” I said. “Not at home.”

  Keller eyed us briefly. Then he picked up the notepad on his desk and began to read aloud, Gabe transcribing the notes on his laptop.

  “Patient three oh four, age seven, fifty inches tall, ­forty-eight pounds, came to the lab for his lucidity assessment following a diagnosis of night terrors and/or somnambulism. In one ­single-night study, patient three oh four exhibited a characteristic lack of paralysis, but he did not meet standards for lucidity. While claiming the presence of a female intruder, patient three oh four exhibited violent behavior—”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “—exhibited violent behavior,” Keller said, continuing, “which included talking, yelling, punching, kicking, turning the head rapidly from side to side, attempting to escape his constraints—”

  “Do you really think we have no obligation to help him?” My body was shot through with heat. “Who knows what’ll happen in the next six months?”

  Keller sighed. He set the pad on his lap and looked at me with a parent’s tired patience.

  “The focus of our research,” he said, “is lucidity. Our studies are short-term; our goal is the resolution of abnormal behavior during sleep. Yes, we want to encourage self-awareness. Yes, we hope that lucid dreaming will ultimately lead to deeper understanding and reduced anxiety, but we can’t guarantee it. It’s never been within our purview to meet those particular endpoints—we don’t have the funding to keep a psychoanalyst on hand, which is exactly why I always suggest that patients follow up with a mental health professional in their area. We make recommendations; that’s the best we can do.”

  He took off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, his eyes shut. When he opened them again, they were kinder.

  “You feel pity for him,” he said. “Not surprising, given what he’s undergone—and it is horrifying, Sylvie; nobody is denying that. But you must remember that you’re a researcher. Our loyalty is to the research, not to any particular participant. If we doubted our work simply because it was occasionally unpleasant—if we braked whenever we felt badly for someone—”

  “We’d be shit scientists,” said Gabe.

  He laughed, and Keller smiled indulgently before looking up at me again.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Our patients aren’t happy people. They’ve all experienced some sort of trauma, and that’s exactly why they’ve come to us. It isn’t always a pretty process. But we can’t play God.”

  It sounded right, and I could poke no holes in it. What was rightness, I thought, if not impenetrability?

  “Sylvie,” said Keller as I turned toward the door. “I shouldn’t have had you send the shocks. I was wrong, and I apologize. It was too much responsibility for you. I should have done it myself.”

  I was quiet on the car ride home, eating the sandwich crusts that Gabe had saved for me as blood came back to my hands. When I finished, I put my palm on the back of Gabe’s neck out of habit, but it felt like there was a long corridor between us. I didn’t tell him about the sensation in my hands or the strange wash of heat, which hadn’t happened since high school. We got ready for bed without speaking and fell raggedly asleep. In the very early morning—it couldn’t have been later than four o’clock, the sky still dark—I began to shudder.

  “Sylvie,” Gabe whispered, wrapping his body around mine. “Oh,
Sylvie. It was a hard night for you, wasn’t it?”

  I was embarrassed to find myself crying.

  “I thought you would have agreed with me,” I said.

  “I did agree with you. I do.”

  “Then why didn’t you say so to Keller?”

  “Because I agree with him, too. I agree with both of you.” He smoothed my hair back, tucking it behind my ears.

  “Jamie reminded me of Anne,” I said.

  Gabe stiffened, his hand pausing on my neck. “How?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt like I had said something bad, something I wasn’t supposed to admit. “Because they both turned out wrong.”

  Gabe hesitated.

  “You’re sweating,” he said.

  “Maybe I should shower.” My entire body was sticky.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Gabe. His voice had turned soothing again, a low hum, and I sank into it. “Go back to sleep. I don’t mind it.”

  He pressed his cheek to mine, his ear against my ear.

  “We didn’t hurt the boy,” he said. “We only woke him up.”

  By the time I opened my eyes, it was almost nine, and the heat had left my body: my clothes were dry, and so was my skin. Gabe was still asleep. It was only a small scratch on his eyelid—pale as a white tattoo, a child’s scratch, the skin barely broken—that made me sure the previous night had happened at all.

  7

  BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, 2002

  By the time Gabe turned up in the coffee shop by my apartment, a week after the incident at Stinson Beach with David, I was almost expecting him. He sat at a small, narrow table, eating a biscotti and glancing around the coffee shop as though he were any other college student. There was a small yellow notebook on the table in front of him, but he wasn’t writing in it. At one point, he leaned down to fit a sugar packet underneath the rickety table stand. When he sat up again, I got up from my table and walked over to his.

  “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

  He had lifted his biscotti and now put it down in surprise. The saucer rattled lightly on the table.