Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

In the spring, my adviser suggested a class in the film department. Painting 201 conflicted with my abnormal psych requirement, and she’d heard good things about Intro to Videography.

“At the very least, it’ll give you some good material,” she said, leaning forward. “It’s sanctioned people-watching. Legal voyeurism! A few of my kids got a lot out of it.”

Her hair was brown except for an inch-wide silver chunk, as if she’d streaked it that way on purpose. She wore a shawl with various hanging bobbles that shook when she spoke emphatically. The walls in her office were hung with woven Peruvian tapestries and framed diplomas and grisly portraits of human beings in various states of psychic pain. Though she looked too old to have young children, she had recently adopted twin four-year-old boys from Indonesia. When I saw her around campus, she stared at me with her head cocked, as though wondering whether I was somebody else.

She amazed me as much as she terrified me. The next day, I signed up for videography. I gave up painting with only a small pang — it had never stopped reminding me of Gabe. Film was a relief, for I didn’t have to create the material; I just had to capture it. That spring, I got a job as an audiovisual technician at the university, taping speech courses and oral presentations. Sometimes the professors greeted me, but often they continued talking as I set up at the back of the room, as if I required no more acknowledgement than the camera. I felt like a professional ghost. In my free time, I rented a camera from the media center and carted it as far as I could. I filmed the punk girls on Telegraph, the yolky desserts at the Russian bakery, the couples twined together in front of Sather Tower.

In the August before my junior year, I moved into a one-bedroom with David, a graduate student I’d been dating since the previous semester. My parents weren’t entirely pleased, but I was dying to get out of the dorms, having spent four years in them during high school, and my AV job enabled me to pay my share of the rent. It was a stout, twelve-unit building with peeling beige paint and a purple burst of a garden; our galley kitchen was so narrow that I could only open the refrigerator door partway before it hit an opposing cabinet. Often we ordered in from the dim sum restaurant down the block, filling David’s Ikea plates with shrimp dumplings and steamed buns, lo mai gai wrapped in lotus leaves. I did homework for my psychology courses or edited videos, and I began to read fiction — something I had never enjoyed before but that now gave me a heady feeling of adventure.

David worked on the font he’d created, the cornerstone of his dissertation in graphic design. I liked his even demeanor and his realism. Our similarities were comforting — or perhaps it comforted me to think we were similar. David didn’t ask about Mills. He seemed to assume that high school was as ancient a memory for me as it was for him. At night, we slept in his double bed, and he was always there in the morning, his hands crossed over his chest like a corpse.

Every so often, I received an e-mail from Hannah, who was majoring in environmental science at Colorado College ( Happy N-Y! How was your x-mas? I sat on a mountaintop — drank champagne, made drunken angels in the snow. Heaven ). We talked on the phone sporadically, but by senior year, we’d lost touch almost completely. She was happy to hear about David; once she said, “God, remember Gabe ?” her tone conspiratorial and incredulous, as if he were a once-beloved leader or celebrity who had come to a disreputable end.

I couldn’t tell her that I’d started dreaming of Gabe — his taut, springy legs, the way his eyebrows leapt when he laughed. Sometimes, the dreams followed a familiar story line, something that had happened at Mills — Gabe and I filching trays from the cafeteria, then sneaking out to Observatory Hill and sliding down on our backs — but there was something slightly off. Gabe’s head was shaved, while in real life he’d had thick brown hair that stopped at his chin, or the sky was a dull black, a chalkboard black, and I couldn’t see stars.

It was the feeling of the dreams that I always remembered most. I was entirely at peace in a way I never was in waking life. But it was different from the sense of self-possession I had when operating a camera and different from the muted, colorless way that David slept. It was a deep-rooted kind of comfort, a feeling of utter appropriateness. This was where I belonged: on this hill, beneath this sky, devoid of stars as it was, and beside this boy — a boy who was, by then, a man, and who for all I knew could be anywhere.

One warm night in May, I dreamed of him again, but this time, my eyes were open. I could see all the details of David’s room — his swan-necked adjustable lamp, his tidy bureau, his poster of a cartoon woman begging at her boss’s feet, her speech bubble reading, “ Please , sir — don’t make me use Comic Sans!” And I could see, outside the window, a man who looked exactly like Gabe.

I peeled my eyelids open farther, but the scene didn’t change. The man was standing at the foot of a lamppost at the end of the block, looking at a piece of paper. He glanced down the block in the other direction, and then he looked toward our apartment.

I stumbled out of bed and into my shoes. I was wearing an old tee of David’s and a pair of raggedy shorts from high school that, narrow hipped as I was, still fit. The legs that led me out of the apartment didn’t feel like mine — they were only my dream legs, I thought, and nothing I did with them would be of any consequence when I woke up. So I was brave: I didn’t stop to grab my keys, and I let the door lock behind me. In the pink glow of early morning, the streets looked softened and empty. It wasn’t until I walked uphill, closer to the lamppost, that I saw a body standing behind it.

At first, the man didn’t look very much like Gabe. His hair was short, and he was stockier than Gabe had been in high school. But then I noticed his sharp jaw, his chipped bottom tooth and wide shoulders — the same shoulders I had held on to at night and followed, that November morning, to Keller’s house. Still, it was difficult to be sure. Like a hologram, he kept moving in and out of focus, flattening curiously into the background before springing alive again.

“Can you see me?” he asked.

I nodded. He was staring at me with such force.

“I think I’m dreaming,” I said.

“Is it a dream,” asked the boy, “if you know you’re dreaming?”

“But I don’t know if I am.”

Behind me, there was the quick slap of footsteps on pavement, and I turned. “Sylvie!”

It was David. He was barefoot in boxers; he hadn’t even put on a T-shirt. It was the most spontaneous thing he had ever done for me. I walked toward him, and he collected me in his arms like a wild rabbit, stroking my face, my arms. Now my eyes were closed, and I could see stars, or something like them — glittery, silver bursts beneath my lids, as if I were going to faint.

But then the silver cleared, and there was David, panting as he held me out at arm’s length. I tipped my head back. The sky above us was the warm indigo of new blue jeans, speckled with white lights.

“Look,” I said. “There’s Venus.”

“Venus?” David shook his head. “Sylvie, what was that?”

I remembered and turned around, but the man by the lamppost was gone, and the entire block was empty.

“I saw someone I knew.”

“What do you mean? What the hell d’you—”

“I swear, David, there was a man right here. Thinner than he used to be, with shorter hair.”

David’s voice lowered. “You’ve seen him before? Some man in the neighborhood? A thin man, with short hair?”