Irene parked the Fiat and got out into the September heat. She walked across the sunny parking lot, breathing in that hot Ohio air. Her heart had yet to establish its own steady rhythm. It still beat and skipped and raced to find her mother’s heart beating. Walking up the sidewalk, she clutched her laptop bag to her chest. She read the names of the outlying buildings on their brass plaques: COPERNICUS POWER CENTER, THE PLANCK FOUNDATION, GALILEO HEALTH ATRIUM.

She walked past three enormous animated metal sculptures and remembered learning about each one when she had visited the campus in elementary school. There was a gyroscope, spinning sedately on its axis. Next to that, two synchronized pendulums swung in a frame. Then there was the Tusi couple, a huge circle with a circle half its size inside it. The inner circle rolled around inside the larger one, and a black spot on its perimeter moved up and down, up and down in a line. She remembered her teacher explaining the function of these sculptures with a laser pointer. Now she was no longer a child on a field trip, or a tourist or a job applicant, hopeful and nervous, but faculty, on her way to examine her appointed laboratory for the first time. If she needed something, she could ask. She was even going to have an assistant.

Irene approached the enormous wrought iron gate that stopped people from entering the institute without permission. There was a brick wall around the older part of the college, ten feet high, topped with crenellations and bird-repelling spikes. Beside the ornamental gate, which would open for cars, was a smaller door to the gatehouse. She put her hand on the door handle. It was silver and it felt smooth under her hand. She smelled the burnt grass smell of fall in Ohio, the smell of hard dirt and hot roads, and she heard the noise of a thousand insects in the fields and woods around the institute, humming.

Inside, there was a man in the uniform of a security guard. The insignia of the Toledo Institute of Astronomy was emblazoned on his lapel. He reached out his hand for her temporary ID card, and then he waved her through. She turned to the second door, on the other side of the gatehouse, and opened it. She was inside.

Irene remembered the last time she had stood here, after her college graduation. She had come for an interview with the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, and, having opened this door, she turned directly to the right and vomited into a bush. She had found the appointed room for her interview, and then had so utterly shit the bed on all the questions that the professor conducting the interview looked at her almost kindly.

“Do you really want this position?” said the professor. “You seem a little undone.”

* * *

The night before that interview, Irene had stood in her mother’s kitchen, holding her car keys and her purse. She was exhausted from the drive, but she was never allowed to fly home to visit, because Bernice had seen a vision that she would die in a plane crash, so begged and demanded Irene would stay out of them. Cried. Cajoled. Irene had conceded the point, conceded air travel entirely. Bernice was holding Irene’s face in one hand, and kind of hurting it. The words she made sounded like “told you, toldyer, tole,” and Irene wondered: How can this person have a life, and friends, and answer the phone, and not have anyone know that she is the town drunk, in a silvery gray cardigan, and Birkenstocks, and a fog of lavender oil, and dead sea salt, and jazz?

Irene hated jazz. Hated everything about it.

“Look,” her mother had said, “I made it. I bumped it over. I bumped. I buh.” Her mother smiled apologetically and shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t put my sentence in order!” she said. There were two bright spots of red on her cheeks, and her eyes were watery. “I’m so happy you’re here,” said her mother. “I bumped up a dinner. Bumped. Buh.” Her mother’s shaky hand lifted the lid from a huge oval Crock-Pot that was plugged into the wall. Inside were some gray things and some brown. “Root vegetables,” said her mother, “Buff. I can’t say it. Beef tenderloin. That’s what it is. Now I cooked it a long time. And then. Well. You get a plate. I’ll get you a plate. Sit down in the other room.”

It wasn’t funny to Irene. At all. It’s not funny when it is your own mother.

Her mother’s television had been tuned to the Food Network. Bobby Flay was auditioning some chefs who were making canapés from ingredients found in the wild. Wild Indian cucumber. Wild coconut. Wild blackberries. The chefs were winded, fraught, red in the face. Her mother brought out a plate that was a paper plate wedged into a smaller ceramic plate. On the plate was a piece of meat that was beef. There were also cubes of vegetables and runny juice pooling under all the food and in between the pieces were thick wedges of mushrooms that looked like they had been in the back of her mother’s fridge for a while.

Her mother had said, repeatedly, that if something was cooked long enough, it was fine. Ishfine. No, it’s not. Ishfine. It’s a freezer, Mom, not a cryogenic chamber. Ishfine.

“I don’t eat mushrooms, Mom,” said Irene. “I don’t like mushrooms.”

“Oh, well if you can pick that out. Those are turnips. This is beef. You want soup? I also made soup, from celery, and it’s in the car. It’s in the freezer. It’ll taste ahhh.”

“I don’t want any soup,” said Irene.

She peeled a shred of beef tenderloin off the chunk and put it in her mouth. When she was a child, she remembered eating watery lasagna, peanut soup with beet greens, flatbread, undercooked and wet, smeared with soy sauce. Irene had never developed a taste for food. She had always regarded it as a dull necessity.

“Aren’t you going to eat anything?” she asked her mother. “Aren’t you going to have some?”

“No,” said her mother. “I am not hungry. Now I just already ate mine, and it’s gone.”

Her mother sat down heavily on the red stuffed chair, watched the television while Irene ate. She ate the turnips and the parsnip, but the meat tasted as if it had been boiled in parsnip juice. She shredded the meat and then decided to leave it on the plate. When she turned to look at her mother, Bernice had fallen asleep on her chair. Irene went up to bed, and hunched over her laptop, and studied. The interview committee might ask her to name a thousand stars. They might ask her to explain the Aristotelian disunion between the perfect sky and the rotting earth, the spirit and the self, the stars and the man. They might ask her to define loyalty, or explore in an essay why a young, intelligent woman would want to come back to live at home with her mother, when her mother was likely to boil turnips in beef slag and then leave it on the counter for days, still eating away at it. The answer to every question might be, “Guilt.” Who discovered Saturn’s rings? Guilt. Who delivered Pythagoras’s pizza? Guilt. What made Irene try coming back to Toledo? Guilt.

Sitting upstairs from her passed-out mother, looking at science things on the laptop: this was a moment when Irene felt a sharp urge to find a tall, tall bridge over a deep river. The Anthony Wayne Bridge was Toledo’s suicide hotspot. Someone had even started a Tumblr, to darkly document the slippage of humans into the river from this bridge. It is a terrible way to die! The author of the Tumblr wanted people to know. Like being hit by a car, but then you drown! What was keeping her from slipping over the edge of this bridge, Irene wondered. What was keeping her awake? Guilt, guilt, guilt.

* * *

That night, laptop shut, sheets flat, Toledo drifting into unconsciousness all around her, she dreamed herself into the Hinterland. Lucid dreaming always came easiest in her mother’s home, where Irene could so well remember her early lessons in the practice. In her mother’s house, she didn’t even need the trick with ringing the bells on the shelf, because she was already home. She almost felt her mother’s fingers on her forehead, her voice chanting the words, talking Irene into dreaming, helping her stay under it. I want you safe in your own head, her mother would say. I always want you to be able to find me, no matter what happens.

If sleeping is like dying, her mother had taught her, then dreaming is like heaven. If dreaming is like heaven, then you can build your own heaven, if you know how. Or you can build your own hell, a massive Victorian monstrosity with eleven rambling wings connected by a whistling ruin that wants to annihilate you. Irene had decided maybe dreaming is a preview for the afterlife, a directionless meander through our finest wishes, our most compelling fears, our wretched secret sexual urges, our basic confusion. Like life, like memory, most of which we will experience deeply and not remember at all. She knew that science could tell her almost nothing about dreams. And almost nothing about death. The most important things are mysteries: the universe, and the way we die.

Asleep, she sat on the porch of her mother’s house and stared at the bleak Hinterland. Irene put her teeth together and kept all the guilt inside her mouth, where it piled up on her tongue and made her sick. When her mother came out of the house, at last, she went and sat on the porch rail. She pulled a stem of the climbing rosebush that had wrapped itself around the railing through her hand. It didn’t hurt her. In the dreamworld, there are no thorns on roses. If you count your fingers, you will find the wrong number. If you pull your hair out, it will be daisies. If your drunk mother talks to you, it will make sense.

“I’m sorry, Irene,” said her mother.

“It’s OK,” said Irene.

“No, I’m really sorry,” her mother insisted. “Here you are, home for the first time in a year, and I feed you mushrooms. That is just a mistake I will not forgive myself.”

Her mother did not say, I’m sorry for being drunk. I’m sorry for being incomprehensible. I’m sorry for nearly burning you to death. I’m sorry for giving birth to you. I’m sorry for delivering you from wherever you were before you were born. I’m sorry.

“It’s OK,” said Irene again.

“Did you pick them out?” said her mother.

“Yes, I picked them out.”

“And ate the beef?”

“Mmmm,” said Irene.

“When I wake up, I probably won’t remember,” said her mother. “So if you tell a lie, I’m at your mercy. But you’ll always know.”

“I’m sure I will,” said Irene.

“What do you want to do?” said her mother.

“I want to talk about my interview,” said Irene. “I don’t want to come across as desperate. But I think I am desperate.”

“You are.”

“Yes, I’m desperate to go there.”

“Did you pull it up out of the well? Did the well show you this fellowship, Irene? Or did you try to stuff it down the well yourself?”

In the center of the square of the Hinterland there was a well. An old stone well that was deep and had no bottom. When she had been learning lucid dreaming from her mother, as a child, her mother had used this well as a trick for her mind, to let her access her subconscious. So she might say, Well, show me something pretty. Then she would reach in and pull up a gardenia bush. Well, show me what I should wear to the prince’s ball. She would reach in and pull up an outfit. Now that she had better control of her dreaming mind, she didn’t use the well as much. But when her mother said, “pull it out of the well,” she was asking if Irene really wanted it, or if it was something she was only trying to want.

“Mom, I would be a janitor there, and I would be happy to get that job. A grad student, fine. I’ll pay to go. A research assistant, great. Give me a job. A fellow, my god. Could I ever deserve that?”

“You deserve everything,” said her mother. “You’re the smartest person in the whole world and I’m so proud of you.”

Irene relaxed. She put her head in her mother’s lap. She drifted farther into sleep. She left the Hinterland without stepping foot into Dark House. It was a beautiful dream.

* * *

In the morning, her mother would not get out of bed.

“How did you get in bed,” said Irene. “How did you get yourself up the stairs?”

Her mother lay in the bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, one arm thrown over her face, her nose buried in the back of her elbow. Her bedroom was quaint and quiet, white walls and carpet, an iron floor lamp with a toile shade, lace around the Victorian patchwork quilt on the bed. Many throw pillows, also edged in lace. “I have a headache,” said her mother. “I am not getting out of bed.”