Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

He took off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, his eyes shut. When he opened them again, they were kinder.

“You feel pity for him,” he said. “Not surprising, given what he’s undergone — and it is horrifying, Sylvie; nobody is denying that. But you must remember that you’re a researcher. Our loyalty is to the research, not to any particular participant. If we doubted our work simply because it was occasionally unpleasant —if we braked whenever we felt badly for someone—”

“We’d be shit scientists,” said Gabe.

He laughed, and Keller smiled indulgently before looking up at me again.

“You’re right,” he said. “Our patients aren’t happy people. They’ve all experienced some sort of trauma, and that’s exactly why they’ve come to us. It isn’t always a pretty process. But we can’t play God.”

It sounded right, and I could poke no holes in it. What was rightness, I thought, if not impenetrability?

“Sylvie,” said Keller as I turned toward the door. “I shouldn’t have had you send the shocks. I was wrong, and I apologize. It was too much responsibility for you. I should have done it myself.”

I was quiet on the car ride home, eating the sandwich crusts that Gabe had saved for me as blood came back to my hands. When I finished, I put my palm on the back of Gabe’s neck out of habit, but it felt like there was a long corridor between us. I didn’t tell him about the sensation in my hands or the strange wash of heat, which hadn’t happened since high school. We got ready for bed without speaking and fell raggedly asleep. In the very early morning — it couldn’t have been later than four o’clock, the sky still dark — I began to shudder.

“Sylvie,” Gabe whispered, wrapping his body around mine. “Oh, Sylvie. It was a hard night for you, wasn’t it?”

I was embarrassed to find myself crying.

“I thought you would have agreed with me,” I said.

“I did agree with you. I do.”

“Then why didn’t you say so to Keller?”

“Because I agree with him, too. I agree with both of you.” He smoothed my hair back, tucking it behind my ears.

“He reminded me of Anne,” I said.

Gabe stiffened, his hand pausing on my neck. “How?”

“I don’t know.” I felt like I had said something bad, something I wasn’t supposed to admit. “Because they both turned out wrong.”

Gabe hesitated.

“You’re sweating,” he said.

“Maybe I should shower.” My entire body was sticky.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Gabe. His voice had turned soothing again, a low hum, and I sank into it. “Go back to sleep. I don’t mind it.”

He pressed his cheek to mine, his ear against my ear.

“We didn’t hurt the boy,” he said. “We only woke him up.”

By the time I opened my eyes, it was almost nine, and the heat had left my body: my clothes were dry, and so was my skin. Gabe was still asleep. It was only a small scratch on his eyelid — pale as a white tattoo, a child’s scratch, the skin barely broken — that made me sure the previous night had happened at all.

By the time Gabe turned up in the coffee shop by my apartment, a week after the incident at Stinson Beach with David, I was almost expecting him. He sat at a small, narrow table, eating a biscotti and glancing around the coffee shop as though he were any other college student. There was a small yellow notebook on the table in front of him, but he wasn’t writing in it. At one point, he leaned down to fit a sugar packet underneath the rickety table stand. When he sat up again, I got up from my table and walked over to his.

“You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

He had lifted his biscotti and now put it down in surprise. The saucer rattled lightly on the table.

“Sylvie,” he said.

I hadn’t realized how furious I was until I started speaking.

“Coming to Berkeley, following me around, meeting me at the lamppost? Specifically coming to the beach, my beach, only to swim away from me — and now you’re here, at the only coffee shop I ever go to, pretending to eat a biscotti —”

“What’s wrong with eating a biscotti?”

“Nobody,” I said, “goes to a coffee shop just to eat a biscotti.”

The people at neighboring tables had turned to look. One of them was a professorial-looking man in a corduroy coat. On his table was a biscotti in a small dish. Gabe looked at him pointedly before turning back to me.

“Besides,” he said, in his pleasant way, “it isn’t your beach, Sylvie. And I wasn’t swimming away from you. I was swimming away from some hysterical guy who looked like he wanted to drown me.”

“That was my boyfriend.”

“Was?”

It was Gabe, all right. The same dogged insistence, the same lopsided grin.

“Is,” I said. “But you knew that.”

“What gives you that impression?”

“I just have a feeling.”

Gabe stared at me quizzically. “What was that you said about a lamppost?”

“Two nights ago. I saw you through the window, and we met at the end of the block. You asked me if I knew I was—”

But I left off there. Gabe’s face was filled with a wondering kind of confusion.

“I had a dream about you,” I said shortly.

“You did?”

I could tell he was flattered, and I immediately regretted it.

“Forget it.”

“You’ve always been intuitive.”

“It’s nothing.”

I was leaning forward, my hand on his table, and now I straightened up. I needed time to think, to sort out what had happened that summer and how much of it had been real. So Gabe had been at the beach, but I really had been sleepwalking on the night I walked out of the apartment to meet him. Why he would lie to me about one incident and admit the other?

“Sylvie.”

I turned around again. Gabe’s voice was quieter, stripped of its charm.

“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”

I wasn’t sure if I did. Despite how much I missed him, I knew there was a cost to being with Gabe, that other things came with him. Other parts of myself rose to the surface, like fish on a line; other edges of life had their coverings pulled back. But I was too angry to leave him just yet. I had caught him, and I wanted my questions answered before I let him go.

We left the café and took the street that led toward campus. I think I was in shock. Physically, he looked like any other undergrad, but there was something about the way he observed the students that marked him as an outsider. He asked me what it was like to go to college — where I lived, how the dorms were different from the ones at Mills, what my major was.

“Psychology?” he asked. “That’s perfect.”

“Perfect?”

“Perfect for you. You’ve always wanted to figure people out — and you’re good at it, Sylve.”

I flinched when he used my nickname. “I’m not sure that’s true.”

“You figured me out.”

“No, I didn’t. You left before I could. And you’ve never told me why.”

We walked into campus through East Gate and made our way along University Drive. It was emptier than usual in the summer, but there were still clumps of students reading on towels or throwing Frisbees, their shadows winging through the grass.

“It’s a long story,” said Gabe. “And a messy one. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

It was clear he had come here to tell me this story, but also that he felt he needed permission. Whether it was out of courtesy or guilt, I wasn’t sure. But he waited until I nodded to continue.

“I came to Mills for ninth grade, just like you.” He glanced at me as we passed Hearst Mining Circle, the elegant three doors of the Memorial Mining Building. “I was on scholarship — maybe you figured this out. At the time, my dad was living in Florida. He didn’t pay child support, and my mom’s health was so bad that I think the school took pity on me. I always wondered, at least. I didn’t have terrific grades.”