The Anatomy of Dreams (12 page)

It was the way I had felt when deciding whether to go to Mills. In middle school, I became resistant—I wanted to go to the public high school where my friends were going—but somehow I knew that my resistance was little more than a show. I had worn my dad's old Mills sweatshirt since the age of eight, and I'd been hearing about the school for longer than that. The choice was mine to make, my parents said, but when I chose to go the route my father had, it seemed a choice made not by my rational mind but by the collective momentum of past experience. Later, in Keller's psychology class at Mills—a subject I certainly wouldn't have been able to take at the local high school, which adhered to a more limited state curriculum—I learned that Carl Jung had seen intuition as an irrational process, perception via the unconscious. I imagined intuition as an internal North Star, one that would lead me away from fairer climates of reason—if I chose to follow it.

In putting on a show of resistance, then, what had I been showing? Perhaps I meant to exert what I thought was my will, to prove I was governed by forces more logical, more solitary, than gravity or magnetism—the earth's magic tricks. My friends would be attending the public school; therefore, I would be happy there. It was a simple equation, and like most simple equations, it probably would have been true. It would have fulfilled me, I think. But I made the decision to fulfill something else; or, as it happened, the decision made me.

When I told David that I was leaving—leaving both him and the university—he blinked at me not with sadness or anger but with absolute surprise. For a moment, I was disappointed that he didn't react more strongly. Perhaps he had
intended to break up with me, too, and was startled when I beat him to it. But if that were true, wouldn't he have also looked relieved? There was such wonder in his face, such astonishment; it was as though I had vanished, and in my place was someone he had never seen before.

8

MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2004

The morning after Jamie's session, I woke to thick, aggressive rain. It was nine o'clock, but it felt much earlier. The sky was a matte, slate blue, and I knew I hadn't slept enough. Gabe was dozing with a peacefulness that irritated me, his arms curled to his chest. I pulled on an old pair of sweats and went downstairs to work in what he had dubbed my Oval Office. I couldn't concentrate: I was still disturbed by what had happened the night before and angry that Gabe hadn't stood up for me in front of Keller. When he woke, I wanted to talk about it again. But when I checked on him at eleven, he was still in bed. I decided I would wake him at noon, and in the meantime, I went outside to the porch.

The rain had stopped. Instead, a faint mist hung in the air. It made the world look static and grainy, like an old photograph. I sat down on the couch the former tenants had left. Time had softened the nubbly fabric, and its deep brown color hid any stains. I must have closed my eyes, because I felt myself wafting in and out of consciousness. Every so often, I came to, feeling the couch beneath me, and then I slipped away again.

“Sleepy Sylvie,” said a voice, too high to be Gabe's. The couch gathered substance beneath me. When I opened my eyes, I saw a shadowy figure on the other side of the porch screen. Thom.

Though I knew I was awake, the quality of the light made him look like an old movie actor. I thought he was smiling at me, but I couldn't be sure.

“Hello, you.” Thom poked his head in the door, and his features sharpened. “Didn't mean to wake you—my apologies. Mind if I come in?”

“Sure,” I said, pushing myself into a seated position. He ducked his head beneath the door frame and dropped two large bundles on the wooden floor.

“Got caught in the rain,” he said, leaning against the screen. “I was picking up laundry. I'll just take a moment—my arms need a rest. Not working today?”

“We had a lab last night, so I'm working from home.”

“Nice job.”

He lifted his head and grinned. His eyes were bright and owl-like behind the thick rims of his glasses, and his bangs were slicked to his forehead.

“And what are you doing today,” I asked, “besides laundry?”

“I teach a freshman composition course in the evening. And I'll work on my dissertation.”

He hoisted one of the bags of laundry up on his back and straightened, tilting his head toward the door.

“Why don't you come with? You can help me carry the laundry, have something to eat at our place. More fun than sleeping, I'd hope.”

“That sounds like free labor.” I grinned. “What's in it for me?”

“The pure and stirring pleasure,” said Thom, “of hearing about my dissertation. Lots of people vying to hear more
about this project, you know. It's sure to make me a very attractive job candidate.”

Now I almost felt sorry for him. “What time is it?”

“Noonish.” Thom shook his shirtsleeve back and checked his watch. “Quarter after.”

I craned my head to look in the kitchen, but Gabe still hadn't come downstairs. I wondered what he would think if he woke up while I was next door, but I wasn't doing anything wrong. Besides, it would be nice to spend time with another person. So I took one of the bundles and followed Thom from my front porch to his, where hanging chimes made frantic, high-pitched music in the wind.

“Is Janna home?” I asked as we crossed through the kitchen. I hadn't been to other parts of their house before, but now I saw it was the mirror image of the one I shared with Gabe—the rooms were identically shaped but laid out in opposite formation. In the living room, there were two wooden rocking chairs, a low table stacked with books, and an oval-shaped rug, knit in spiraling shades of pastel yarn. In front of a boarded-up fireplace, someone had set a row of candles on a tray. Along the wall were stencils in colored pencil, framed behind glass. The images were abstract, and they seemed to have been drawn in a quick, jittery hand; the thin lines had a sense of impulse and movement, and I had a strange feeling that the walls were quivering.

“She's at work,” said Thom. “She has a new pair of clients, filthy rich, who founded some sort of artists' colony in the Driftless Area. Janna takes care of the grounds, so I take care of the laundry.”

We set the laundry bags, the sort of drawstring sacks that may have once held a tent or a sleeping bag, down on the floor. They wavered, tubular and soft-bodied as dummies, before tipping over. A piece of Janna's underwear, silky and magenta, sprouted from the mouth of the bag I'd carried.

I took a seat in the smaller rocking chair and crossed my legs on its salmon-colored cushion. In the wall closest to me was a small door that our apartment didn't have.

“Where does that door lead?”

“The basement,” said Thom, sitting down.

“Funny,” I said. “You have a basement, and we have an attic.”

Our attic was a small, cobwebby space accessible only by way of a rickety staircase. Probably it could have been an airy haven of some sort, if we'd put time into cleaning it, but we'd opted to use it for storage. There were piles of canvases and paints, boxes filled with winter clothing and Christmas ornaments.

“It's where I go to write,” said Thom. “Clears my head to be underground. Nothing to look at, nothing to hear.”

“It isn't depressing?”

Thom extended his legs and crossed one over the other. He wore a ragged sweater over a starched button-up shirt and a pair of beige slacks, which rode up around his ankles to reveal bones both large and delicate. His legs had the awkward grace of a giraffe, an unwieldy nobility, which made me want to pause in deference as he arranged himself.

“Depressing?” he asked. “It can be, but it also has the opposite effect. Sometimes I have to go to a place where there's nothing to look at in order to see clearly. The more attractive the outside world, the more difficult it is for me to retreat into my head.”

“And what do you do there? What's your book about?”

“Keats,” he said. “The poet who wrote the piece I quoted the other night—‘yes, in spite of all, some shape of beauty . . .' You remember? He died at twenty-five, but he got more done in those years than most of us could hope to do by eighty. Keats was obsessed with beauty, thought it was the highest form of truth—he was a Romantic, so we can't
blame him—and he rejected the rationalism that was taking hold at the time. Other artists tried to analyze the world, pin it down like a butterfly staked to a board, but old Johnny just wanted to stare. He got itchy around people like Coleridge, who sought knowledge over beauty—people who were incapable, as Keats put it, of being content with half knowledge. In 1817, he wrote to his brothers about it, and he came up with this phrase called
negative capability
.”

“Negative capability?”

“‘When man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'—his words, not mine. What I want to figure out is how this
not knowing
can be productive—how it isn't a purely negative capability after all.”

“But isn't that the point? That it isn't productive?”

“That's certainly the point a lot of people are making,” said Thom. “Most of them are economists or scientists, some of them are educators, and plenty of them are ordinary, practically-minded people. People who chase facts like they're drilling for oil. People who don't believe in the value of poetry and who think the study of the humanities is a luxury. A part of me believes they're right. But I still chose to pursue this life, and now I'm trying to figure out why. If I can't defend myself—even if it's only
to
myself—then I don't want to finish the degree. I want to know why we bother with mystery and what leaving it alone has to offer us.”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“You probably don't find much use for it, do you, being in the sciences?” he asked. “Probably think it's a lot of hot air, poetry?”

“I read fiction. I can understand the value of escape.”

But I couldn't remember the last time I had read a novel; it must have been in college. Mostly, I didn't want to prove whatever theory he had about me right.

“But that's precisely my point,” said Thom. “Reading, writing—engaging in this kind of negative capability—I don't think it's an escape. I mean to argue that the real world, our world,
is
negative capability. Not knowing is the only reality, and our escape is the unreality of knowledge.”

“So what you're saying,” I said, “is that the world of poetry is the only reality, and whatever else we're doing besides reading it—like building irrigation canals, or improving electrical systems, or, I don't know, searching for a cure to HIV—all of that's just escapism?”

“So says the scientist.”

“I don't consider myself a scientist. I'm a researcher. And all right, it's true—researchers pursue facts—but the facts I'm researching are a lot closer to your world than you give them credit for. We're looking at the mind and what lies underneath it. We're investigating mystery—and doesn't poetry do the same thing?”

Thom leaned back in his chair and brought his hands together so that the fingers were slightly bent, the pads touching, as if he were holding a large glass ball.

“It's different,” he said. “Poets question mysteries: they observe, they stand witness but they don't necessarily try to solve them. What you're doing is much more dangerous. You're trying to put a face to the subconscious—something that should, in my opinion, remain faceless. You're dragging it out of its cave, shining a flashlight in its eyes.”

I could tell that Thom was enjoying the debate, but after Jamie's session, I was squirming with discomfort. I was irritated, too, for being so susceptible to doubt. It was as though I'd discovered that the elegant system of rationale I'd built around our research was actually made of cards—as though I'd seen how very little it took for it to fall apart. Why I put so much stock in Thom's opinion, and so early, I wasn't sure; perhaps it was that he was the only person with whom I'd shared
so much about our research, and his judgment, now, was the only one I could receive. But I had too much pride to tell him any of this. I raised my eyebrows, leaned back in my chair.

“Well, good luck writing a dissertation without answering any questions.”

“Thank you,” said Thom, with no trace of irony.

“Just because we seek answers doesn't mean we're being invasive or turning over rocks that would be better left alone,” I said, gaining momentum. “I think your argument's too simple. Ignorance isn't always so noble, you know. We're meant to ask questions—that's what makes us human. And answers proceed naturally from questions.”

“Do they? Naturally?” he asked. I paused, and he smiled, more gently this time. “Look at us. Put two academics in a room and all they can talk about is work. Tell me something else about yourself. Do you have a hobby?”

“I used to paint,” I said. “But I haven't in years.”

“Why not?”

“No time.”

“No?”

I shook my head, my eyes level with his. I felt exposed, plucked from my usual habitat. Here the ground was flat, without boulders to hide behind, and there was no wind to make noise of the air.

“Do you have a hobby?” I asked.

“I do,” he said. “I like to cook, and I make a damn good sandwich. Chicken salad's my specialty, and I've got some fresh in the fridge I made yesterday. Would you like one?”

“A sandwich would be great,” I said. Thom stood and left.

“Anyhow,” he said, shouting from the kitchen, “I didn't mean to push too hard on your research. I'm a poetry scholar, for God's sake. What do I know? I'll have to ask Janna—see how she feels about having her rocks turned over. Was she approved, by the way?”

“Approved for what?”

“For your research. She told me she stopped by your place a few days ago to ask about getting involved.”

“Are you sure?”

I'd seen Janna at our house the day before, when she and Gabe were planting trees, but he hadn't mentioned that she'd come over before that. I remembered the remark she'd made about wanting to be hooked up to our machines. I just never imagined she'd try to go through with it.

“I'm positive,” said Thom. “This must have been about a week ago. She said she spoke with Gabe, but I assumed you were home.”

He came back into the room with a halved sandwich on a yellow plate. Each half had a generous helping of chicken salad held together with thick mayonnaise, bits of grapes and chopped-up apple visible throughout.

“Does she have any kind of sleep disorder?” I asked. I took a bite and licked the mayonnaise that spread to the side of my mouth.

“Not that I know of.”

“You'd know.”

“How?”

“Trust me.” I shoved another bite in my mouth, and two grapes plopped onto the plate. “You'd know if she was violent, if she screamed in her sleep or kicked and thrashed. You'd know if she tried to hurt you—”

“Jesus, Sylvie.” The amusement on Thom's face was gone, and he looked uneasy. “Is that what your patients do?”

“Like I said. You'd know.”

Thom was silent as I finished the sandwich. I wiped the sides of my face with my hands and brought the plate to the kitchen. As I washed it at the sink, I noticed that the lights in the downstairs level of our house were on. It was still misty, but when I brought my face closer to the window, I could see
Gabe's shape moving from room to room. I put my plate in the drying rack and went back to the living room to tell Thom I had to leave, but the room was empty.