The Anatomy of Dreams by Chloe Benjamin Page A

benefit both of them.”
    â€œFair enough.”
    â€œWhy are you looking at me like that?”
    â€œIt’s just that experimental research isn’t usually so charitable.”
    â€œHey,” I said. “I’m all for asking questions, friendly debate, whatever you want to call it—but you really don’t know very much about us. We’ve been refining this procedure for years, trying to make sure it runs as smoothly and ethically as possible.”
    â€œBut smoothly and ethically are two very different things,” Thom said. “And sometimes, I imagine, they’re completely at odds.”
    I must have bristled, because he seemed to realize he was crossing a line. He smiled, more warmly this time, his eyes wide with apology.
    â€œListen, I didn’t mean any harm. I tend to ask a hell of a lot of questions. That’s one thing you’ll learn about me, if we get to know each other better. It’s a nervous mechanism, partly.” He rubbed his palms together. “Besides, I’m an academic. I like these sorts of exercises. To me, it’s a theoretical debate—it isn’t personal.”
    â€œIt’s fine,” I said. “You certainly have the right to ask questions.”
    â€œThank you,” said Thom.
    I knew he was trying to pull me out of whatever cramped box I had gotten myself into. But what I needed was some way to trust him. This arch, impish Thom I didn’t trust; but I remembered the way he had recited the Keats poem at­dinner—or started to, anyway—his voice a heavy, kicked-along stone.
    â€œWhat was the rest of the poem?” I asked. “The Keats poem, the one you mentioned at dinner?”
    In his face there was both pleasure and surprise; he looked like a boy who did not often know the answers in class but who, called upon this time, had only to open his mouth.
    â€œâ€˜In spite of all,’” he said, “‘some shape of beauty moves the pall from our dark spirits.’”
    â€œI thought it would be more positive,” I said.
    â€œBut it is,” said Thom.
    From downstairs there came sounds of laughter: Gabe’s raucous and guttural, Janna’s climbing higher octaves. When we walked down, Gabe’s head was hanging back, his shoulders shaking.
    â€œJanna was just telling me—she was telling me—” It was a kind of laughter I rarely saw in him: keeled over, full body. “It was a terrible joke . . .”
    They were sitting at the table, bowls of half-eaten blueberry soup in front of them. Janna crossed her hands in front of her, trying to quiet him. Then she turned to Thom and me.
    â€œThree children walk into the woods,” she said. “But only one child returns, carrying a bag of bones. The child’s mother says, ‘Whose bones are those, my darling?’ And the child looks at her and beams and says, ‘The ones who walked too slow.’”
    She grinned. The points of her canine teeth reminded me of a cat. Thom shook his head.
    â€œIt’s awful,” said Gabe. But it took minutes for him to quiet down, and even when he did, little puffs of laughter escaped into the night.

5
    BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, 1999
    In August of 1999, I arrived on the UC-Berkeley campus along with five thousand other freshmen. I carried with me my dad’s beat-up blue duffel bags and a leather backpack with a magnetic closure, which my mother bought to replace the corduroy JanSport I’d carried around at Mills. I can still picture the softened blue fabric, which had lost all sense of structure from years of carrying my color-coordinated binders and drawn-on, heavy books—none of which I’d brought to Berkeley, believing their lessons behind me.
    There was a tangible feeling of precipice that fall. By 1999, theories of climate change had made their way to Rutgers Newark, where my parents taught. Earlier that year, some of their colleagues