I blinked in the darkness, my heart thumping, Gabe beside me. Sleeping with Thom—this was what I had been dreading and what a part of me wanted, too. But just as unnerving was the fact that the lightbulb—a dream bulb, and therefore, according to Keller’s rules, impossible to turn on—had almost worked.
It was five in the morning now, Christmas Day. Gabe stirred heavily, sighing, and sat up; then he pushed out of bed and trudged into the hall. I heard the bathroom door close, the light turn on, the rushing noise of Gabe peeing. Full with the memory of Thom’s slack, open face—the way the lines on his forehead erased themselves as we rocked together—I slid my hand beneath my pajamas. Inside, I was slick, the flesh molding snugly around my finger. When Gabe stopped peeing, it was silent again, and I froze. After a pause, the toilet flushed and I pulled my thumb downward, my body beginning to shake.
•••
Christmas Day seemed to yawn on infinitely: the practical gifts, the rigid appreciation, walking around in our sleeping-bag coats because the living room furnace still hadn’t been fixed. Every half hour we refreshed the major news websites, scanning them for news of the March case. So far, there had only been a brief addendum in the San Francisco Chronicle about the press conference, which devoted more space to the speeches of Anne’s relatives than to the insanity defense. Neither of us was very hungry, but the thought of the year-old cans of chicken soup in the pantry made me feel sick, so I left for the market with two layers of sweatpants beneath my coat. I brought home a rotisserie chicken for dinner, and because we’d eaten so little all day, our appetites surged: we picked it clean to the bone.
That night, I felt too guilty to sleep. I lay awake until the clock on my night table read two thirty, then three thirty, then four. At four thirty, as the sky turned from black to charcoal, I pushed out of bed and went downstairs for a glass of water. I turned on the tap and let it run until the water turned from reddish-brown to clear. Outside, our car was a great white beast, magnified with snow. After drinking, I climbed the stairs to the attic.
I opened the door slowly, so that it didn’t creak, and sank to my knees in front of the window. The moon glared outside the window like a policeman on night watch. As the rug printed my legs with the nubbly pattern of its yarn, I sketched my transgressions: Thom’s hips pressed to mine, the red-haired woman watching us. Angel or prison guard, I painted her in angles: the sharp points of her bob, the slice of nose, the eyebrows arced in expectation. She was orange, the floor mahogany, and I was red as pleasure.
When it came time to paint the canvas black again, I paused. This time, I wasn’t ready to return to bed, but I forced myself to open the lid of the black tube. As I did, the phone began to ring.
I froze for only a second before running down all three flights of stairs. We had two landlines, one at the first-floor landing and one in the bedroom. Gabe was out cold, but I knew he’d wake up if the phone kept ringing. I picked it up downstairs, the tube of black paint still in my hand.
“Hello, neighbor,” said the voice on the other end.
It was Thom. His characteristic lilt made me grow warm.
“Thom.” I was stunned. It came out as a whisper, almost a question.
“Don’t wear it out.” Thom was whispering, too; we had dropped into a low tone of intimacy that was as confusing as it was electric.
“You shouldn’t call at this time of night,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I was sleeping.”
“You were not.”
“How do you know?”
“You answered the phone.” He paused. “Plus, your light is on.”
I turned. Faint light spilled into the stairwell—one of the lamps in the bedroom. My stomach clenched. Had I turned my lamp on before getting out of bed without realizing it, or had Gabe woken up?
“Anyway,” said Thom, “I only called to see if you’d be interested in a nightcap. Fellow owls and all that.”
“I was sleeping,” I said, more sharply than I’d meant to. Suddenly I felt guilty; he couldn’t know why he made me so uncomfortable. “Maybe another time.”
“Strange,” said Thom. “I thought I saw you go downstairs for a glass of water.”
“You were watching me? That’s harassment.”
“I didn’t mean to.” The playful edge of his voice was gone; he sounded affronted. “I was sitting in my living room—couldn’t sleep, like I said—and I saw a shadow at your kitchen sink. Slight, so I figured it was you. Anyway, it was your shades that were up. Don’t leave your shades up if you don’t want to be seen.”
I had stiffened, but not because of what Thom had said. It was because I’d heard the quietest click, the sound of a receiver being picked up.
“Please don’t call again,” I said.
I hung up. The phone rattled in its cradle, a smear of red paint across the back. Upstairs, I heard a louder click—a door being closed. I cursed, licking my finger, wiping at the red paint until it was clear. When I went upstairs, there was a sliver of light beneath the door of the bathroom, the rushing noise of Gabe peeing. I padded to the bedroom and climbed back under the covers, my pulse thumping. The lamp on Gabe’s side of the bed was on. I was terrified he’d be angry with me, but when he came back into the room—adjusting himself through his boxers, his hair sticking up on one side—he looked at me with groggy surprise.
“Hey,” he said. “Had to pee. I turned my light on and you weren’t here.”
“I went for a glass of water.”
“I figured.”
He looked at me for a moment, as if waiting to see if I’d say anything else. Then he climbed in bed, pressing his chest to my back. I could feel him growing hard through the seat of my cotton pants.
“Hey,” he said again, more quietly this time. He burrowed his face in the back of my neck; a train howled its hoarse approach outside our window.
It was the first time in years that we slept together the way we had at Mills. Slept together—a funny phrase for sex, though perhaps it’s not so unlike sleep after all: the mindless force of it, the slick grasp, the wild and glassy-eyed awareness. My shins rubbed to a burn against the sheets. Gabe rose and fell above me with rhythmic, tidal sway. I had forgotten how it felt, this closeness. I floated with relief, the old love bounding back to me like a dog.
When we woke the next day, it was already eleven, winter’s bright cold sun washing the room. Gabe went downstairs to start the coffee, and I began to make the bed, but as I pulled back the down blanket, I saw a streak of red paint in the center of the white sheets. I stared for a moment before stripping them, my heart pattering in its cage.
I had almost made it to the laundry machine when Gabe came upstairs, a mug of coffee in each hand. He glanced at me with surprise.
“We washed the sheets last week,” he said.
I had bundled them in my arms, but the red was too loud to hide. I could see his eyes find the bright spot.
“I bled,” I said, edging past, leaving him alone at the top of the stairs.
Like a plane blinking in the night, my progress away from Gabe was steady. Perhaps if I had told the truth that morning, I could have changed the course of that dark machine, wrenched it around by the wings. But blood had already become less threatening than paint, reality the fair sister of illusion; and so, pouring bleach into the mouth of the washing machine, I continued.
13
FORT BRAGG, CALIFORNIA, 2002
When August came in Snake Hollow, we began to prepare for our departure to Fort Bragg. After leaving Mills, Keller had settled in this small coastal city, a Civil War military garrison about two and a half hours south of Eureka. In the summer, tourists came to visit the remains of the fort and walk Mendocino’s rocky, glass-strewn beaches. The entire city smelled like salt water. It was quiet enough for Keller to afford an abandoned redbrick storefront at the edge of tow
n, which he converted into a small laboratory and research center. Many of our patients drove from other parts of California—Fort Bragg is three hours from San Francisco by car—but those who flew in were offered lodging in a studio apartment above the lab, which Keller had renovated to accommodate overnight sleep studies.
It may have been picturesque, but it was an odd place to plop a research facility. Martha’s Vineyard was no academic stronghold, but Fort Bragg was practically barren in that respect. It was fortressed by the toothy cliffs of Mendocino County, and its main industries were logging and construction. The closest universities were two hours north and south. But Keller did nothing unintentionally; he was as fearful as he was crafty, and I began to suspect that Fort Bragg’s isolation was part of its appeal. After five years at Mills, after leaving higher education entirely, he chose to build himself up again in relative secret.
Keller’s house was small and shingled, several blocks away from the lab. When he was being self-deprecating, he called it his cottage, but it was clear he took pride in it: he’d refinished the wood floors, installed new windows, and painted the exterior himself—robin-egg’s blue with white trim. Gabe offered to share his basement apartment with me—he could sleep on the fold-out couch in the living room, he said, chivalrously offering me the bedroom—and I agreed. The distance between us filled me with a pained, nostalgic longing for the way we used to be, but I still thought I’d be happier living with Gabe than being on my own. Besides, his place was fully furnished, so there was nothing I had to bring or buy.
We lived a block away from Keller. That fall, we spent most of our dinners at his place. We made many of the same meals we had in Snake Hollow, but the frenzied electricity of the summer was soon replaced by a lower frequency, a worker-bee’s hum. Though our small group hadn’t shrunk in size, I experienced small moments of loneliness. They came like chills as we sat at Keller’s round table with the windows open: rain tapping the sidewalk, the sky a lunar indigo. We ate in new silence, interrupted only by the clink of a knife on the butter dish or the dull ring of a water glass set down. There were only so many things for us to talk about, given how often we saw each other. Still, I was reminded of dinners with my family in New Jersey, when we’d exhausted the usual topics and the day’s fatigue set in—how disappointing it was to discover that even my closest relationships were not immune to distance.
Sometimes, though, our patter was as quick and engaged as it had been that summer. In the early days of September, Keller briefed us on the case that we’d begin midmonth. We cleared the round table of place settings, replacing them with a corked bottle of wine and a stack of files. I was excited: it was the first time I would see an actual patient, take part in a real experiment.
Keller pushed his glasses up on his nose and opened the manila file in front of him.
“She’s younger than I usually see for RBD,” he said. “But she shows all of the signs.”
We looked at the photograph on the top. It showed a woman with light blond hair pulled into a slick bun and pale, powdered skin; she looked like the sort of person who never left the house without sunscreen, even in winter. There were two bluish half-moons beneath her eyes, shadows of fatigue that she had tried to disguise with yellow foundation. Keller publicized his research through various channels, including state universities throughout California, and this woman had seen an ad for his study on the bulletin board of the nursing building at Humboldt State. Her name was Anne March, and she was twenty-four years old. In our research, she would be called patient 222.
Two weeks later, I met Anne for the first time at the lab. She hesitated before speaking, and when she did, her voice was halting; she could barely finish a sentence without encouragement. Because this was my first study, Keller asked me to observe her interview without interfering. He told Anne that I was a new trainee, a student, but her eyes still flickered at me with distrust.
For six months she had been living with disturbing, daily nightmares—nightmares she described as having a hallucinogenic quality, which compelled her to get out of bed to protect herself. When she woke, she found herself standing in another part of the house—once in the shower with the water off, another time in front of the living room window, her hands against the glass. Her heart was always racing, and she was so drenched in sweat that she had to bathe or change clothes (she said this in a voice so quiet that Keller had to ask her to speak up). The dreams, she said, were horrific, but she could not remember their specifics, only the lingering sense of fear and revulsion that was present when she woke up. That, she said, was why she’d come to us—so she could figure out what she’d been dreaming and why.
She was also newly engaged. She and her fiancé shared an apartment, but now they slept alone. Three months before, Anne had been forcibly woken by her fiancé, who’d opened his eyes to find Anne’s hands around his neck. As a nursing student, Anne knew the importance of documented evidence. She brought him to the laundry room in her apartment complex, where the fluorescent lights were brightest, and took photos of the scratches along his neck, the crescent imprints made by her nails.
As she showed us the photos, copies of which we’d already seen in her file in Snake Hollow, Anne was not emotional. In fact, whenever I saw her awake, she was restrained—delicate, perhaps, but with an inscrutable comportment that veiled whatever was going on inside her like the mess of a teenager’s room shoved underneath the bed: a haphazard method, but one that did make the floors look temporarily clean.
Gabe told me this was normal. “Most of our patients seem entirely sane when they’re awake,” he said as we packed up one day after a lucidity training session. “They’re mild mannered, sort of embarrassed—and they’re a lot more pleasant than she is, to be honest.”
The night before, Anne had slept at the lab during her first lucidity study. She seemed on edge when she arrived, and her mood worsened as we prepared her. She complained that the lab was too cold and then, when we turned the heat up, too warm; she had forgotten her usual Colgate toothpaste and refused to use the Crest we had in the lab, so I drove to the closest twenty-four-hour pharmacy. Because I was new, Gabe took Anne’s vitals and set up the video camera while Keller readied the EEG. I scarfed my dinner in Keller’s office. Minutes later, Gabe burst through the door.
“It’s bullshit,” he said. “Absolute bullshit. She said I touched her—inappropriately, that is. I was only trying to take her goddamn pulse.”
“What?” I put down my fork. “Did she know that was part of the procedure?” “Of course she did. Keller briefed her on the whole thing, just like usual. Thank God I already had the video running.”
That tape was enough to clear Gabe of any wrongdoing—it was obvious that he had affixed the straps exactly as we had been trained to do. But Anne’s accusation was enough to hint at what she would soon discover herself. She was a fantastically quick learner; participants were required to show signs of lucidity within six weeks if they were to continue in the study, but Anne was dreaming lucidly within the first three nights. She responded with the necessary left-right eye movements to our LEDs, though it was days before she would tell us what she’d seen.
“I think a part of me has always known,” she said. “But I never let myself think about it.”
We were in Keller’s office. Anne sat across from Keller, rigid-backed as a vigilant cat, one crossed leg twitching; I sat to Keller’s right, scribbling notes. Later, I would edit them for accuracy, sitting at the kitchen table with a tape recorder, pausing it every few seconds. When Keller told us, that day in Starbucks, that he had gotten rid of the files, this is what came to mind—not Anne, not her parents or sister, but those hours of meticulous work beneath the kitchen’s low bulb. The research was Keller’s, and Gabe assisted him during the trials. But it was my job to write our patients’ stories, and that work made me feel valuable. Even my parents could not deny that Keller’s research was intriguingly cutting-
edge, and they slowly came to see my decision to leave Berkeley as evidence of my skill. It was a fib I told myself, too—that I had been chosen for my talent and not something else—but it kept me going.
It was easiest for me to do this transcription work alone. At night, after Gabe went to sleep, I sat at our rickety kitchen table with my headphones in and Keller’s tape recorder in my lap. Anne’s voice filled the room, ghostly and delicate as a night-blooming flower. When the interviews began, her tone was flat, but over the course of the session it became wispy and faltering. Always, though, there was an undercurrent of challenge, sharp and glinting like steel.
“Do you believe your sister to be at risk?” Keller asked once. His voice was clinical, impartial.
“Tell me, doctor,” said Anne, pronouncing the consonants with particular relish. “Do you?”
The dreams were not always the same, but they followed a reliable pattern. First, there was an image of trespass: a dog with hanging jowls pissing on a green lawn or a rat scurrying into a child’s bedroom. Next, Anne became conscious of her body in space. Sometimes she huddled in pillows, her limbs pretzeled into tight shapes. Other times, she found herself on the lawn of her childhood home, the stench of urine thick in the air. She experienced a growing sensation of defilement. She stood, her movements blundering but determined—it was only after Anne that we started to strap patients to the bed. At that point, it was only moments until she struck. Once, she pummeled the wall with such force that the skin ripped across her knuckles before Keller could stop her. After that, we had her wear thick, puffy gloves. Though she spoke of seeing a rat or a dog while dreaming, she always reported, upon waking, that she’d believed the animal to be her father. She reported, too, that she had gotten rid of him.
Within weeks, we learned to estimate the moment of her attack and flash the light stimulus right before it happened. If we could remind her that she was dreaming, we reasoned, we could help her intervene in her behavior before it turned violent. We were right: Anne paused in the room, dazed, and responded to the stimulus with the eye-movement signal we’d taught her. Then she returned to bed and woke out of slow-wave sleep about twenty minutes later.
The Anatomy of Dreams: A Novel Page 19
