“Oh, Sylvie.” Keller frowns in disappointment, as though I’ve failed an easy test. “That’s very simplistic. I thought I’d at least taught you that life is never so black and white. Besides, look at you now. You’re, what—thirty years old? You went back to school. You seem to be thriving.”
“Which has nothing to do with you. Those were my accomplishments.” I pause. “And how did you know?”
“I’ve followed your success. You spoke at the ceremony, didn’t you?”
The year I finished my undergraduate degree, I was asked, along with two other nontraditional students, to give a speech at the commencement ceremony. The university wanted us to paint them as a progressive institution, embracing of difference and alternative paths. The fact that Keller can still follow me, however benignly, triggers the paranoia that sits under my skin like an implant.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “No bugs. I saw an article in the Chronicle. I meant to write to Mills, in fact. I thought your story might be of interest to the alumni quarterly.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. My story isn’t yours to hand out.”
Keller opens his mouth as if to speak, then closes it again. He looks at his lap, his lips pursed in what is either a gesture of contemplation or a small smile. I wonder, suddenly, if he’s slipping, his mind fraying with age. In that case, it could be difficult to get much from this visit at all.
“Sylvie,” he says quietly. Then he stands, wipes his hands on his apron, and walks toward the kitchen. “Can I get you anything else? Something to eat? A piece of fruit?”
“I won’t be staying long.”
He waits in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Fine. A piece of fruit.”
He returns with an apple and places it on the table in front of me. Then he settles back into the recliner again.
“I’ve been afraid of this,” he says. “Afraid you’d come to me. Not for my sake—you can ask me whatever you like, and I’ll answer you. But I doubt there’s anything I could say to give you the closure you want.”
“You can let me be the judge of that,” I say. But already I feel the wind stilling inside me, sails beginning to fold in defeat.
A faint ticking noise comes from the kitchen. Through the open archway, I see an octagonal wooden clock. The hands point to the place where five o’clock should be, but the numbers are heaped in a jumble at the bottom of the clock’s face. At the top, in block letters, are the words WHO CARES?
“I want to understand how it happened,” I say. “I want to know how I did what I did.”
“I doubt I can tell you anything that you don’t already know.” He takes off his glasses and rubs his nose—that old, familiar gesture. “During the day, your subconscious mind was muffled. But at night, when it took over, your consciousness was no longer fully accessible, and your subconscious reigned. Your subconscious had, so to speak, outrun your consciousness—outsmarted it.”
“I tried to figure out whether I was dreaming. I thought I must have been, because I kept seeing Meredith. How was that possible?”
Keller raised his eyebrows.
“Sleepwalkers can interact with the real world, but visual hallucinations aren’t uncommon. You were dexterous and agile, clearly able to communicate, but you were still asleep. It stands to reason that your mind would incorporate some things that were real and some that were not. That’s part of the reason why the disorder can be so dangerous.” He sighed. “But you were on the brink of lucidity. If you had only stayed with us until the end of the semester—even another month—I think you would have achieved it.”
“Yeah? And what would have happened then?”
Keller’s eyes were far away. He stroked the skin beneath his chin.
“My guess is that an opportunity would have been created—space for your conscious and subconscious minds to reconcile. Once you became consciously aware of your subconscious activity, your sleep disorder could have resolved—and, aired in the aboveground arena of the consciousness, your repressed urges might have followed suit. But if I knew with any certainty, I doubt we’d be sitting here now.”
“No. You’d be the head of the neuroscience department at a cushy university, wouldn’t you? Sitting in a choice office with a spectacular campus view? And where would I be?”
Keller doesn’t blink. “In the office down the hall.”
“That’s absurd. You really think you would have gone to the university, put out a press release, told them your most successful experiment revolved around your assistant? The scientific community would have laughed in your face. And there’s something else I don’t understand.”
Keller is quiet. He watches with interest as I inhale and begin again.
“There were too many clues. That’s what I keep thinking about—how I didn’t figure it out sooner. You knew I was assigned to the file reorganization project, but you didn’t hide Meredith’s file. You asked me about my nightmares, and you had Gabe drop hints, ask me whether I was lucid or if I saw my hand.”
The hall falls into shadow as a cloud passes over the sun. Keller settles farther back in his chair.
“So I have this theory,” I say. “I think you wanted me to know about it. I think your time was running out, and you were getting impatient. So you nudged me. Dropped a hint here and there. Tried to get me to realize something I wouldn’t on my own.”
“We were experimenting,” says Keller, “with methodology.”
“Methodology. You should be jailed.”
His face still doesn’t change. But he crosses one leg over the other and clasps his hands, pulling his elbows toward the chair, as if retracting into himself.
“You’re lucky,” I say. “You’re lucky I still have a shred of loyalty to you. I can’t say why.”
“Sylvie. What is it you wanted out of this visit? Did you want to see me stripped, displaced, an old man living alone?”
“I want to know what you’ve learned,” I hiss. “Your wife kills herself, you manipulate your own researcher, you’re practically an accessory to murder, and then you abscond to Martha’s Vineyard. So what did you learn, Adrian? Where has all of this high-minded research gotten you? Was it worth it?”
I stand, my jaw locked with something like despair. I’ve fantasized so many times about saying these things to him—telling him off, cutting him down, watching his face fall and his veneer crack. In real life, though, it doesn’t feel good. It feels humiliating—for each of us individually, for both of us together. I think of the time in my sophomore year of college when, home for the holidays, I opened the bathroom door to find my father getting out of the shower. He squawked, pulling the shower curtain around him, but it was too late. The curtain was clear. We never spoke of it again.
Keller stands, too, pushing with effort out of the recliner.
“I have to believe that it was,” he says.
The sky is warming in color: the sun rusty and smudged, the horizon line a ribboned, bloodshot red. When I was driving from Berkeley to Martha’s Vineyard—beneath the orange stalks of the Golden Gate Bridge, through Nevada’s feverish lights and across the northern plains of Missouri—I imagined how I would leave Keller’s house: a slammed door, a final word, a look I’d make sure he’d remember.
Reality, though, is never so satisfying. He walks me to the door and opens it. Then he pauses, one hand on the knob.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he says.
Perhaps it is an act of generosity: the gift of closure, however belated. Perhaps, pulled by the yoke of conscience, he wants deliverance himself. But I detect, too, the peevishness of a child pushed forward by a parent and forced to apologize.
I look at him without responding. Then I step outside into the wild, green dune grass and climb back to the car. I’m ready to go home.
22
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, 2009
A year ago,
I visited Rodney in Seattle, where he works for a start-up that develops games for smartphones. All of the games are supposed to offer mental and physiological benefits. Rodney had spent the past year developing ShepherdZZZ, a game that is literally supposed to put you to sleep: the objective is to shepherd a lost, hyper sheep back to its herd via a battery of dizzying obstacles so overstimulating that most users are exhausted in less than fifteen minutes.
Rodney picked me up at the airport in a Zipcar. He’d inherited our father’s height and our mother’s quick hazel eyes; his hair was shoulder length, tied back in a short ponytail. He looked more mature than I’d ever seen him and also, somehow, impossibly young.
“It’s basically a dream job,” he said, pulling onto the highway. “Initially, there were like, four employees, and now there are thirty of us, running around like gerbils. But the really great thing is that it’s so innovative. It’s like a baby Google. Baby Apple. I mean, we get creativity time. And paternity leave!”
“What’s creativity time?”
“You know,” he said, waving one hand. “Creativity time? A bunch of companies are doing it. It’s basically half an hour each day when we can play Ping-Pong or read for pleasure or wander around, lost in creative thought. It’s supposed to be really generative. We get paid for it.”
The week before, Rodney had e-mailed me the download link for ShepherdZZZ, along with an employees-only free download code.
“It’ll save you the five dollars,” he said. “You need it.”
“The app or the five dollars?” I asked.
“Both, probably,” he said brightly. “Grad school and all.”
Rodney was hired right out of college. Now he lived with his boyfriend, Peter, in a loft in Belltown. Downstairs, Peter ran a trendy ice cream company that sold counterintuitive, savory flavors: sweet arugula, prosciutto and fig, olive oil ribboned with red veins of balsamic. He had recently received a write-up in the Seattle Times, and now, on warm days, the line coiled around two blocks.
“Try the sweet arugula with the olive oil and balsamic,” Peter said when we arrived, swinging open the door of an industrial freezer. “It’s the most popular thing on the menu! I call it the Naughty Salad.”
While Rodney was at work, I hid out in a massive deli in downtown Seattle, where the patrons were as hopelessly unhip as I felt. As large as a school cafeteria and stubbornly devoid of any cultural identity, the deli was home to a bewildering buffet: there were bagels, sushi, a Chinese noodle bar, a sandwich station, eight steaming trays of Indian food. It was cheap and crowded, dully safe, the kind of place where people only came to disappear.
I sat at a long bar in front of the window with a plate of chicken tandoori and a Chinese dessert, translucent and shaped like a drawstring pouch. Outside, it was somber and drizzly; the two umbrella buckets in the deli’s entrance were stuffed to capacity, and a pile of additional umbrellas lay to one side. I had just finished eating when a tall figure came through the doors and stopped.
He wore a slick black raincoat and expensive-looking, Italian-looking shoes—the golden-brown color of scotch with leather tassels at the toes. The bottoms of his slim slacks were drenched, and his strawberry hair was thinning; at the crown of his head was a pink bald spot, dappled with raindrops. He hunched as if the ceiling in the deli were slightly too low.
There was a moment in which we both weighed the costs and benefits of pretending we hadn’t seen each other. Then he sighed and offered a small, grim smile.
“Sylvie Patterson,” he said. “I thought it was you.”
I was stunned numb. Like the second in which a toe is stubbed or a finger jammed, I felt the impact but not yet the sting. I glanced at the tables nearby, but the people around us were unconcerned, engaged in conversation or tabloid magazines or the complicated disentangling of wads of chow mein.
“I never knew your last name,” I said. “That’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Perkins.”
“Perkins. Thom Perkins.”
“That’s it,” said Thom. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
His voice had the same playful inflection I remembered, but it was effortful now, his smile wooden, like an actor forced to play a part he had long ago outgrown.
We regarded each other. I wondered if I looked as old to him, as changed, as he did to me. His eyes were sparsely lashed, a chilly, arctic blue. The skin of his cheeks looked translucent and exposed.
“I suppose there are a few different ways this could go,” he said.
I had no idea what he thought of me—whether he was resentful or bewildered, whether he’d passed me off as crazy. Through the years, I’d remembered snatches of my time with Thom, and I had stitched the story together square by square. Scratching a mosquito bite, I saw my head against his crossed ankles, our bodies making an L shape on the floor and crumpling with laughter. Going through a turnstile at the BART station, I remembered crawling under the broken fence plank, Thom helping to pull me through. We stole through the yard and tugged the basement door closed, the moon swallowed like a lump in the throat.
A subway train squealed its approach, and I heard Louis Armstrong on low as we clung and spun together, Thom singing a hushed harmony. The way you hold your knife; the way we dance till three . . . A drizzly Thursday morning in October, pouring hot water into a packet of oatmeal: You promised you’d show me, he said, you promised—and we were wrestling, knees scraping the concrete floor, until I let him peel my fingers open and out fell a small yellowed photo in a plastic frame. Solemn gaze, ketchup fingers, the bangs my mother cut below a bicycle helmet: the only childhood photo I have.
And this: A tinkle of Christmas bells. Our hands on a glass door, breaths drifting through the air like parachutes. Inside, we took our gloves off and raked our cold red fingers through the candy aisle. It was the twenty-four-hour gas station on Williamson, blocks from our houses. We were attached at the neck, a thick black scarf of Thom’s wound around both of us at once. I blew the fringe out of my mouth. He chose a Twix. Why do you always get to pick? I asked. Last time it was the—
Snatches. Half memories: pathetic, wispy things. Often, they’d leave off like this, in the middle of a sentence. But it didn’t really matter how I finished the sentence. What mattered was that now I could remember I’d said it.
It occurred to me now that I’d never told him good-bye.
“Do you want to sit down?” I asked.
Thom paused. Then he set his briefcase down and shook off his coat, hanging it on the back of the chair beside me.
“I only have a few minutes,” he said, sitting down. “I have a meeting.”
“Where do you teach?”
He looked at me quizzically. “Teach?”
“I just—I assumed you were a professor.”
“Ah.” He laughed shortly. “No, I don’t teach. Had to give up the old Romanticism when Jan was born. Grad students don’t make very much money. Neither do professors, for that matter—not unless you get lucky. I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I was never going to finish that dissertation, anyway.”
We sat side by side, looking out at the street. Men in suits and sharp-heeled women passed interchangeably in front of us. There must have been two feet of space between our chairs.
“Jan,” I said. “Is that your son?”
“I hope so.” There was a glint of his old puckishness, a lightbulb swinging in the dark. “He’s my oldest. Then there are the twins.”
He rooted around in his pocket and came up with a battered leather wallet, flicking it open. Inside a clear sleeve was a family photo, taken against a marbled studio background. Thom sat in a stiff-backed chair with a child on his lap. The boy looked to be four or five, with fiery red hair and a solemn gaze that matched his father’s. Janna sat beside them, wearing a puff-sleeved floral dress and
a canary-yellow, off-kilter hat. Her hair was cropped short, and it was a pale, diluted blond—what must have been her natural color. At her feet were twins, a boy and a girl, both in suspenders and shorts. Their hair was white-blond and cowlicky, and they had familiar smiles: catlike, toothy, the incisors crooked and sharp.
“Henrik and Inger,” said Thom, pointing. “Hooligans, those two.”
I didn’t ask about Janna, but neither did he ask about Gabe. He put the photo away.
“How did you end up here?” I asked—I couldn’t help myself. “I never thought I’d see you in a place like this.”
“A place like what?” he asked, one eyebrow arched.
“I don’t know—like this.” I waved a hand, looking around at the people reading newspapers at single-person tables or eating the miniature pickles that came free with each sandwich. “It’s so—corporate.”
“Snob. Have you tried the chicken tandoori?”
“I have, in fact,” I said, gesturing to my empty paper plate, where orange oil had melted into in psychedelic pools.
But the routine had become tired. It took an extraordinary amount of effort to make our conversation appear so effortless, to conceal the strain it took to ignore the subjects that stood so persistently between us.
“No,” said Thom. “The story’s not very exciting, I’m afraid. When Janna got pregnant, we both decided it would be best if I left the university. My cousin found me a copywriting job here. I’ve been in pharma ever since—that’s pharmaceuticals to you outsiders. Basically, I write the little black script at the end of commercials and magazine ads, the stuff that reminds you not to take your antidepressant while operating heavy machinery or drinking like Dylan Thomas. It’s a rare trade—requires years of apprenticeship. You may have seen my work in last month’s issue of Cosmopolitan.”