The Process of Discovery

In the months before their separation, Priya had been subject to predictable dreams, textbook things.

She’d be a child again, running up slick marble stairs in sock feet and then tumbling, wildly, airborne, free of anything solid, waking suddenly in a sweat, muscles clenched in expectation of the inevitable snap of impact.

In another that repeated, her childhood dog, but bigger and shaggier, would be sleeping, its head on her stomach, only to suddenly wake in a rage, bite her, clamp her arm in its teeth, jaw locked, shaking back and forth, growling.

She told Ben these dreams sometimes. Sometimes she didn’t.

Ben never dreamt, or, as he’d been told by physicians and coaches, a college psychology professor, a few stoner friends, and even the erstwhile couples counseling therapist Priya has insisted he go with her and try, he dreamt, he had to dream, everyone did, to stay sane, to balance out brain chemicals and such, to keep from hallucinating in traffic midday, but he, he had a condition wherein he didn’t remember his dreams, ever.

He had heard various explanations for it, but it remained to him a sort of curse, a special burden, both of memory and of comprehension.

As Ben figured it, he had to work harder just to get by in life. Whatever other people got told or managed to realize through their dreams, Ben had to riddle out as he went along, piece by piece—the who and where and why of every scene.

He didn’t forget things per se, but the connections between always remained vague, the details confusing, blurred, and he felt he had to rely on a kind of puzzle-work, using the future to figure out the present and the past.

It was as if he woke up in the middle of things, events happening around and to him, but with circumstances already formed, lacking any exposition or background.

In this way, he came to feel that he was a victim of his own life.

In one of Priya’s dreams, she was dropped from the sky into a flood, where she had to learn all over again how to swim, how to dog-paddle or just tread water, to stay afloat in rocking, increasingly towering waves.

That, Ben thought when he heard it, is how it is for me, always.

In the months before their separation, Ben stopped sleeping with Priya, at least for most of the night.

He would stay up late in front of the TV, dozing in his recliner, coming to bed only after she was already asleep, often at nearly dawn, the blinds of the bedroom gone reddish pink, a sore and swollen color.

But then he found it hard to sleep and would lay awake on his back pondering things, turning things over in his mind to get a feel for their weight and contours.

Sometimes Priya made noises—whimpering, moans. Sometimes she snored. Sometimes she drooled. Sometimes she did some or all or none of these things.

She was hot. This is what he told the guy on the so-called date and party line, a California number with only standard long-distance charges.

She was a yoga instructor and could touch the soles of her feet to the crown of her head by curling up in a C-shape on her stomach, or put both feet behind her neck by curling in a sort of pretzel-shape, splayed at the crotch.

He had his dick in his hand, and he was telling this guy about the sort of head she gave, how her nose always ran, so sloppy, with such thick liquid sounds, and, yes, she would let it pop, audibly, out of her mouth and wipe her chin with the back of her wrist and—.

The phone cut to elevator music, a piano cover of an old Depeche Mode song. The guy had hung up, finished, so Ben hung up, too. He’d lost the mood.

With television, either spliced by the remote or, late at night, fading in and out with his own consciousness, Ben experienced something innate to his condition.

There was some hint here to the greater secret, and something soothing about the contained aspect of it, how here he could work a test case, solve a small-scale mystery.

He read backwards from what he was presented with: the invention of saltwater taffy, the life cycle of a tribute band. He dreamt via his thumb’s quick pulse on the remote control.

In life, the margins were always wider, and never so clean.