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 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 five 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 I see you come into my house again,” she said, “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 the 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!”).
She was living in a squat, sixties apartment building in the Gourmet Ghetto (“Hideous—we’re talking wood-paneled walls and orange shag carpeting, but what can you do?”) with her ex-boyfriend, a chef at the same restaurant (“Don’t ask—it’s about as terrible as it sounds, but it’s only for another nine weeks, not that I’m counting, and on the upside, he’s obsessively tidy and does all of my dishes”). Their lease was up at the end of July, and she needed a n
ew roommate.
“I’d love to have you, obviously,” she said. It was nine in the morning in California, and I could hear her bustling around the kitchen: the clink of a knife, plates rattling, the swift wheeze of a window being pushed up. “But what would you do here?”
“I’ve been thinking about going back to school, actually,” I said. It was true—I still had that damn application for readmission, and it was becoming clear that this was my best option. I knew that if I lived with my parents for much longer I’d become self-pityingly depressed, and I needed a college degree. “I could come out in August, get a job waiting tables while I work on my application. Maybe I could start up in the spring semester.”
And that was what happened. I spent the early summer tying up loose ends in Newark, not that I had many: I packed my bags, trashed my mementos of Snake Hollow and my photos of Gabe. I ate more consecutive dinners with my parents than I ever had as a kid. In June, Rodney came home from college, where he was studying creative writing; in the evening, we kicked a Hacky Sack around as the sun’s golden yolk smeared the backyard. After weeks of apartment hunting, Hannah found a turrety little Victorian just blocks from her restaurant. She sent me photos via e-mail: two bedrooms, a turquoise-tiled bathroom, space for a garden.
I could put Gabe out of my mind during the day, but at night, memories of him throbbed beneath my skin. I dreamed of his off-kilter smile, the particular tenor of his voice, and woke sweaty and gasping. I didn’t pick up his phone calls, though each one was a fresh puncture, followed by a dull ache that lasted for days. If he asked me to come back, if he told me again that he loved me, I didn’t trust myself to move to California. It would be so easy to slip back into our life together before I even knew I was doing it—to edge quietly through the door like a teenager returning after a long night out, to climb the stairs and take my old, soft place beside him in bed. He would wake up to find me there, fold his body around mine in habit before the surprise of it registered. But I would have to return to Keller, too—to the bare halls of the lab, the perpetual exhaustion, and the stagnant, indoor air. I felt as if I’d spent years within the glass segments and cyclical view of a revolving door. Outside, I was so dizzy that I could probably have fainted on command, but at least there was wind.
Gabe wasn’t the only one who called me. My cell phone rang constantly, the area codes ranging from Madison to Massachusetts, and the voice mails were all from Keller. In the beginning, they were curt—Sylvia, it’s Adrian; I need you to call me—but as the days passed, his voice became strained, an undercurrent of panic impossible to cover up. He called from the private number at the lab, his Boston-based cell phone, and eventually, from pay phones. Ignoring him made me feel sickened and blasphemous, but I never picked up.
Instead, I wrote a letter. The silver lining of Anne March’s trial was that it gave me a prepackaged excuse. I can still recall, with mild embarrassment, the convolution of the first paragraph: Though the past three years of my life have been dedicated to my work with you, and I have believed in that work as ardently as my conscience has allowed, certain events of late have forced me to see our research, and its terrible complications, in a new light. It is with great sadness that I recuse myself from an effort in which I have been so profoundly invested, but I can no longer ignore the evidence that suggests our work has been of primarily negative consequence to the lives of our participants and their loved ones.
I wrote that I wouldn’t share the details of our work with the media or the police, and I’ve kept that promise, though I’ve never been able to figure out whether it was for their sake or my own. In return, I asked Gabe not to tell Keller what I’d learned. I’ve no idea whether he honored his part of the pact; in any event, when the case against Anne came to a sudden close later that summer—Anne changed her plea to guilty and was sentenced, without a trial, to twenty-six years in a federal prison for women—Keller’s calls dwindled to a stop.
Maybe even he knew by then that an era was coming to a close. While in Berkeley, I followed him and Gabe from afar. They continued on for another two years, traveling like vagabonds from one college town to the next. They spent the fall after I left in Ann Arbor, the spring in Bloomington. From there, the universities became more and more obscure. After the 2005-2006 academic year, which they spent in a small New York college so far upstate that it bordered Canada, their work was no longer tied to any school at all.
I’ve often wondered how they felt in those final months, when the East Coast was just beginning to wake after a winter in hibernation. Were they filled with despair, so incongruous when the outside world was in bloom? Or did they surrender quietly? They must have known that their time had come and gone. As the twenty-first century continued, nobody wanted to learn how to live in their dreams—they just wanted to stay asleep. Out was the touchy-feely naval-gazing of the eighties and nineties; when gas prices were soaring, ice caps were melting, and resources were becoming thin, insurance was the best thing money could buy. You’ll Sleep Like a Baby, one mattress ad promised—and what was more attractive, more elusive, than that sort of ignorance, harder-won in adulthood but no less blessed?
I should have felt a sense of redemption when Interactive Lucid Dreaming finally dissolved, but all I felt was mourning. Until that moment, the research itself had stood as witness to my life, both personal and professional. When Keller dropped out of the academic landscape, his work as brief and brilliant as a species gone extinct, it was as if none of it had ever happened at all.
20
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, 2005
Five months after I left Madison, in October of 2005, my mother called on the half-broken Nokia I’d brought to Berkeley. A letter had come to my parents’ house, addressed to me. At least, it appeared to be a letter: it was a thick, large envelope, taped shut over the tack. Three stamps were pressed in the upper left corner. The return address was Gabe’s. She had mailed it to me.
“Don’t read it,” said Hannah. “It’ll only torture you. Who cares what he has to say?”
Hannah was, and still is, the only person who knows the story in all its humiliating detail. I had already told her about how I’d reconnected with Gabe and had left school to join him, but she knew nothing of my work with Keller until our first night in California. We were sitting on the living room couch, eating takeout from the vegan place down the block whose utter lack of cheese and meat made it clear I was no longer in Wisconsin. The room was hedged with boxes, and I barely recognized Hannah: the slight, wiry girl I’d known at Mills had became tall and womanly, butter skinned, her curly hair piled in a bun and held with chopsticks. She had gained weight, but it suited her: with her sturdy, round thighs and flushed cheeks, she looked as if she had grown into the body she was always meant to have. I couldn’t help it. I began to cry.
“What is it?” she asked, setting her seitan on the ground.
Before I could stop myself, I was telling her everything. She listened to me with quiet focus, her blue eyes wide and barely blinking. The gentle attention of an old friend, of someone who wanted nothing from me, was enough to make me cry harder. I blew my nose so loudly that Hannah leaned away, laughing until she snorted.
“She’s still got it,” she said.
When Gabe’s letter came, she stood between me and the counter where it sat like a parent separating two warring children. For the first few days, the curiosity gnawed at me so badly that we stuffed the envelope in a shoe box in her closet. Soon, though, I realized I had more power if I didn’t know what was inside it. What if Gabe revealed something new? What if he asked me to come back or let go of me completely? I wanted none and all of these things to be true. And for the first time in my life, I learned the value of ignorance. We drove to the beach boardwalk in Santa Cruz and drank cheap, warm beer, sitting on the dock with our feet in the surf, screaming as the Giant Dipper dropped. We huddled in dive bars with her coworkers deep into the morning; hours later, I hik
ed across campus to gather signatures for my readmission forms and course preferences, as sleep deprived and coffee-high as any other undergrad.
I was twenty-five and a college senior, but I didn’t feel like either one of them. I’d been so serious about college the first time around—even my relationship with David had felt like a kind of work-study. Now, if only to take my mind off Gabe, I was determined to have fun. On weekends, Hannah and I took BART into San Francisco and went dancing downtown. I had never been so close to that many bodies at once, writhing and shouting en masse; with the music pounding and dizzyingly sweet drinks coursing through my blood, I could almost forget myself. It was a tradition of ours: even years later, when I finished my undergraduate degree and began the PhD, we made a monthly pilgrimage to our favorite spot. On one of these nights, Hannah spotted a curly-haired man with a suit jacket thrown over his shoulder, standing at the bar and eyeing us with amusement. “Go on,” she said, “he’s smiling at you”—so I marched over to the bar, brave with vodka, and flirted with him so flagrantly that he asked for my number before pulling me onto the dance floor.
With Gabe’s letter tucked safely away, I had tricked myself into believing that I could control whether and when news of him came into my life. In fact, after four years in Berkeley, I had practically forgotten the letter itself. But one afternoon in May, when I had just gotten home after teaching a section of Abnormal Psych—all grad students were required to TA introductory courses in return for tuition remission—Hannah bounded through the door. She was breathing hard, one hand still on the knob.
“You’ll never guess who I saw on the train,” she said.
“The guy from the club?” My curly-haired dance partner hadn’t called, not that I blamed him—I could barely remember what we’d talked about, though I did remember stepping on his shoes so many times that he asked whether it was my signature dance move.