Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

“No,” I said. “I only saw him this once.”

I was dizzy. I leaned against the lamppost, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands.

“What are you talking about? You said you knew him from—”

“Before. I knew him from before. Let’s take a look around the neighborhood, okay? See if he’s still here?”

“I don’t have any shoes on,” said David. “I don’t even have a shirt. I came out here because I was worried you’d lost it, Sylvie — I felt you get out of bed and then I saw you walking down the street in your goddamn shorts, and I didn’t know whether you’d been— compelled by somebody—”

“I was sleepwalking,” I said, more quietly, for suddenly it was clear to me. “I dreamed I saw someone, and I got out of bed. I used to do it as a kid.”

David shook his head, blinking. We eyed each other for a moment. Finally, he stepped toward me, and I sank into his chest.

“You scared me, Sylvie. I was really frightened.” He paused, lifting his chin from the top of my head, and scanned the block. “You must have dreamed it. If someone had been here, we’d be able to see him now.”

It was true. Gabe wouldn’t have been able to get very far. The lamppost was uphill from our apartment, higher than most of the neighborhood, and we could see the streets that spread below. Except for a garbage truck making the early-morning rounds, they were empty.

That afternoon, we arranged a picnic to take to Stinson Beach, packing David’s cooler with water bottles and the grapefruit he liked to eat without sugar. He had graduated less than a month before, and though we’d talked lightly about whether or not we would stay together, we hadn’t come to a decision: we were both reluctant instigators, experts in avoidance. I hoped the beach trip would be romantic, but the strangeness of last night was still with us. As we drove down Highway 1, we were both on edge. A green Corolla swerved out from behind us and accelerated into the next lane.

“Damn Corolla,” said David, slowing to let it pass. “Been trailing us since we left Berkeley.”

I leaned forward and looked into the Corolla. A broad-shouldered, red-haired woman sat in the driver’s seat, steering ahead of us. I sat back again.

“Everyone’s trying to get to the beach,” I said. And when we arrived, it did feel that way. Small camps of people stretched down the sand: families setting up beach umbrellas and folding chairs, college students with beers stuck deep in the sand. We spread our towels near the shore. David took out a tube of sunblock and began to slather his legs.

“Something a little disgusting about beaches, don’t you think?” he asked as I set up my tripod and camera. “Everyone swimming in this communal… bath .”

He was grinning. Sometimes he said things he knew I’d object to, just to get a rise out of me.

“Stay dry, then. I’m going to bathe. But first,” I said, lifting the tripod and camera up with both arms, “I’m going to film it.”

“Don’t you think you should ask for consent?” called David. “These people are going to be in an Oscar-winning documentary one day — don’t you think you should make sure they don’t mind? I smell something smelly, Sylvie, and it just might be a lawsuit.”

But I was already walking down to the water, laughing, the sun hot on my back. I wore a yellow bikini that I’d bought on Telegraph Avenue that week, feeling daring and unlike myself. I nestled the three legs of the tripod into the sand and took off the camera’s lens cap. It was such a bright day that the iris had to be considerably adjusted. I was focusing the camera, squinting at the horizon line, when I saw a body slicing easily through the waves.

I wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t so much farther out than everyone else. The first ten feet of water were filled with children and parents. After that, there were teenagers playing catch, a few loners doing laps. But no one was as far as the person my camera had focused on, a man with the elegant, compact musculature of a dolphin.

His body was familiar to me, even from so far away. I had only seen him swim once, when we signed out from Mills to go to the pool at Michael Fritz’s house. Gabe and I had been dating for a month by then, and I was thrilled by the way he tunneled through the water and somersaulted off of the diving board. It was as if he’d grown up not in Tracy, but in San Diego. Diana Gonzalez’s parents lived there, and she claimed she could walk to the beach from her house.

“Where’d you learn to swim?” I asked when he came to sit beside me under the shade of the porch. I leaned over and kissed him stickily, my mouth wet with watermelon and the punch Mike’s mom had made.

“My dad lives in Florida,” Gabe had said, shaking his head with the vigor of a wet dog. Little droplets sprayed my cheek. He nuzzled me, kissed me again, and when he came up, there was a small black teardrop on his tongue. “Seed.”

I tried to follow the man’s progress in the water, but I kept losing him. For stretches of time that felt impossibly long, I couldn’t see anything. Then he burst out of the water in a different part of the ocean, twenty feet away from the view of my camera.

In my first psychology class at UC-Berkeley, I learned that an acute stress response triggers over fourteen hundred changes in the body. Blood flow is increased by 300 percent and directed toward the muscles. Stores of fat and sugar are released. Our pupils dilate, our hearing becomes sharper, and normal processes of the body, like digestion, turn off, no longer important. I stood staked to the ground behind the camera for what felt like minutes, though it could only have been a few seconds. Part of me wanted to jump into the water and leave the camera behind, but I knew I couldn’t do that — it belonged to the school and was worth thousands of dollars. So I lifted the tripod and lugged it across the beach as quickly as I could manage.

“Nothing interesting?” asked David. He was lying flat on his back, limbs spread like a starfish. He held one arm over his eyes like a visor.

“David.” I was already sweating. “I need you to watch the camera for me. I saw someone in the water.”

“Someone in the water?” He sat up. “Did they need help?”

“No, no,” I said. David had been a lifeguard in high school. “It was someone familiar. I have to go. I just need you to watch—”

“Was it the person from last night?” He was staring at me intently, his voice a conspiratorial whisper. “The man in the neighborhood — it’s him, isn’t it?”

I was so flustered that it must have been an easy guess.

“Let me go,” David said. “You’re a terrible swimmer, Sylvie. You’ll never catch him. Point him out to me.”

He was right — I couldn’t swim more than a few yards, and even with the benefits of adrenaline, I doubted I could make it much farther. I wanted to be the one to find Gabe, but David had a better chance of bringing him to shore.

“We’re going to run out of time,” said David, scrambling to his feet. His chest was pale and narrow, the sternum concave. Between his nipples was a dark burst of chest hair the size of a small sunflower. “Just point him out to me, will you?”

I pointed to the man. He was still farther than all of the others, swimming surely to the left. David followed my hand, breathing quickly. Then he set off for the shore at a run. I watched him splash into the shallow water and awkwardly navigate the narrow channels between children. Once he passed them, he broke into a quick, smooth freestyle. Gabe, or the man who looked like him, turned his head every so often as he traveled west, though I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at David or trying to breathe.