Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

“So I was sleep-talking.” We passed the Mining Circle again; East Gate was in sight. “Really nice of you to fill me in, Gabe, but it isn’t the same. You could clear your conscience, and I didn’t remember any of it. It was a perfectly safe move.”

“You could look at it that way,” he said. “But I saw it as dangerous. I was speaking to a subconscious part of you — an uninhibited part of you — whose powers were a total mystery to me. I didn’t know what you’d do with the information, subconsciously or not, and I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t remember it.”

“So you were just listening to me babble on all night? What else did I say?”

I tried to play it off as though I barely cared, but the truth is I was terrified.

“You said you loved me.”

I snorted.

“I didn’t mean it. I was sleeping.”

“More than once.”

“And what version of me do you think is more trustworthy? The waking me, or the sleep me, totally unaware of what I was saying?”

“The sleep you,” said Gabe. “Without question.”

“I probably thought you were someone else.”

“That’s exactly my point. You said things in your sleep, felt things, that you could never acknowledge in waking life. We all do. We’re too goddamn scared when the lights are on — we’re pansies. But the part of you that came out when you talked in your sleep? She shows you for who you are.”

“You took advantage of me,” I said. “You pried.”

I could feel my body heating up and my mouth began to quiver. But I didn’t want to cry in front of him.

“Why don’t you trust yourself?” he asked.

“Because I trusted you.”

It came out with more venom than I’d intended. We left campus and walked down the street again. He stepped closer to me, the curves of his face shadowed by a streetlamp.

“You chose me,” he said. “You didn’t have to, but you chose me. You told me those things for a reason, just like I chose to tell you what I was doing with Keller.”

We came to a crosswalk. The light was red, but no cars were coming, and I bolted across, the wind in my face. Just then, a car made a left turn into the intersection, and I leapt forward as it sped past me, honking.

“Jesus,” shouted Gabe, running across the street to meet me. “You trying to get yourself killed?”

“Just trying to get home.”

“Listen,” he said more frantically. “Is this really what you want? Chatting with girls in the lunch line, doing your physics homework at night? Sitting in your boyfriend’s nice little apartment, reading— I don’t know — reading poetry? That satisfies you?”

“What’s wrong with reading poetry? What’s weak about it?”

“All right. Maybe it does satisfy you, for now. But what about later? You don’t think you’ll wonder what would have happened if you’d come with me? Here”—he gestured to the shops, the students shuffling down the street in groups, the lit windows of upper-story apartments—“you have a perfectly decent life, I can see that. You could marry this— David , and maybe you’ll become a professor. I can imagine how your life might go from here, and I bet you can, too.”

I was quiet as we turned onto my block. I could see the square window in the galley kitchen lit up; David was there, cooking dinner, and all I had to do was return to him.

“There’s another thing, Sylvie. Keller’s patients — they’re not like most of us. They’ve got disorders that make them do things in their sleep. Dangerous things. They walk and talk—”

“I talk, apparently.”

“But they do other things, too. They can act out their dreams, like Stu. Sometimes they hurt people — people they love.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t say much more now. But I can tell you that it’s good work. We give these people a way to protect themselves, control their demons. Keller helps them to turn their disorders into something useful — something powerful. C’mon, Sylvie.” Gabe grinned. “I know you’re intrigued.”

“But why me?” That question had been nagging at me. “I haven’t studied neurology. There must be people better suited for this.”

“You’re studying psych.”

“But you just learned that. It couldn’t have been why you came.”

Gabe looked down. We were steps away from my apartment now; David could have seen us if he’d looked out of the window.

“You’re right,” he said. “There were other people suited for the job. It was no small feat to convince Keller to let me try for you. But I lobbied for it, said you wouldn’t let us down. He remembered you from school. He likes using people from Mills, giving us a chance out in the real world. I know it sounds hokey, Sylve, but I think he feels like a kind of father to us.”

“To you,” I said. I could still call up the image of Gabe in the mailroom at Mills, how he would go up to the counter and ask if anything had come for him from Florida, keeping his voice low so no one else in line would listen in. In the weeks around his birthday, he made us take a detour to the mailroom twice a day, after lunch and before dinner, and I always knew whose letters he was waiting for.

Night was falling fast, the sky shedding blue, and it was difficult to see Gabe’s eyes. But with his hair so short, the structure of his jaw was more visible, and that made me remember something.

“When I saw you at the lamppost, in my dream. How could I have pictured you with short hair if you weren’t really there? If I was dreaming, why didn’t you look the way you did at Mills?”

“Hmm,” said Gabe, his head cocked. “You might have seen me in town, even if it didn’t register. I’ve been lurking around here for a few weeks, you know. Keller wanted me to make sure you were ready before I approached you. See how you were, what you were up to.”

“Some people would call that stalking. I could probably have you arrested.”

“Oh, that’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” Gabe grinned. “I was observing. I was coming to see an old friend.”

I squinted up at the window again. Where was David? On the couch, probably, where he spread out with papers and poster board each night. Sometimes I liked to work in bed with the pillows propped behind me, but for David it was always the couch, never the bed. He only used the bed to sleep.

“I would have to leave school, wouldn’t I?” I asked.

Gabe nodded.

“I’m sorry, Sylvie, but now’s when we have the opening. I’ll understand if it isn’t worth it to you, and Keller will, too. But think of it this way — you’d already have a job. A real, paying job, with benefits and a place to stay. Keller puts me up in Fort Bragg. It’s not a bad life.”

“Do you have friends?”

It sounded small, and Gabe laughed.

“Friends? No, not many. But I don’t need many friends. I have my research, which satisfies me, and Keller’s been a sort of mentor. I keep in touch with my gran; she’s still alive. And if you came with me, I’d have you.”

It was thrilling to hear him say those words. Still, I told him I needed the week to think about it and that I didn’t want him to come find me in the interim. He kept his promise. Whenever I sat down in a coffee shop or walked into a bookstore, I scanned it for him. But he was never there, and by the end of the week, I almost missed the feeling I got when I sensed he was nearby. Perhaps I was honored, or foolishly curious, or maybe I was still in love; it was probably some combination of the three that fated my decision long before it actually came time for me to make it.

It was the way I had felt when deciding whether to go to Mills. In middle school, I became resistant — I wanted to go to the public high school where my friends were going — but somehow I knew that my resistance was little more than a show. I had worn my dad’s old Mills sweatshirt since the age of eight, and I’d been hearing about the school for longer than that. The choice was mine to make, my parents said, but when I chose to go the route my father had, it seemed a choice made not by my rational mind but by the collective momentum of past experience. Later, in Keller’s psychology class at Mills — a subject I certainly wouldn’t have been able to take at the local high school, which adhered to a more limited state curriculum — I learned that Carl Jung had seen intuition as an irrational process, perception via the unconscious. I imagined intuition as an internal North Star, one that would lead me away from fairer climates of reason — if I chose to follow it.