Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

“Yes. One to two per night.”

“Dream enactment?”

“Yes.”

“Typical time patient gets out of bed.”

“Between twelve thirty and two A.M.”

Something had lodged in my chest like a bone. I could breathe only shallowly.

“Sleep habits,” I said.

Even in the first weeks of my work with Keller, I could have uttered the list that followed on command. It measured almost a full page. It had been my job to check the applicable boxes for each participant.

“‘Patient has nightmares as an adult,’” read Gabe. “‘Patient sweats during sleep. Patient kicks or jerks arms and legs during sleep. Patient wakes up at night gasping for air.” He began to read more quickly. “Patient drinks alcohol during the night. Patient wakes up early in the morning, unable to return to sleep. Patient grinds teeth during sleep.’”

“I don’t do that,” I said. “I’ve never ground my teeth.”

Gabe looked at me. Then his eyes returned to the form.

“‘Patient grinds teeth during sleep,’” he said. “‘Patient walks in sleep. Patient talks in sleep.’”

His head rolled forward. He supported it with his left palm, his elbow on the table.

“Sylvie,” he said. “Please.”

I had stood. I couldn’t sit still next to him; I needed some leverage, a broader view.

“Keep going,” I said.

“‘Patient has had blackouts or periods when she is unable to remember what has happened. Patient has fallen asleep during conversations. Patient has fallen asleep in sedentary situations. Patient has had injuries as a result of sleep. Patient has had hallucinations or dreamlike images while falling asleep or waking up.’”

I knew we had come to the end of the section.

“Past sleep evaluation and treatment,” I whispered.

“‘Patient has had a previous sleep disorder evaluation. Patient has had a previous overnight sleep study. Patient has had a daytime nap study. Patient has previously been treated for a sleep disorder.’”

“Social history.”

“‘Patient shares a bed with someone,’” said Gabe. “‘Patient has a partner.’”

“That’s enough.”

It was not blood in my veins — it was something faster, hotter, and more slippery, a violent substance that gave me powers I did not normally have.

“Please, Sylvie,” he said. His voice was urgent, rising in pitch. “I’m begging you. Let me explain.”

We were a foot apart, maybe less. I waited until I could trust myself to speak steadily.

“You’ve been watching me,” I said.

He was silent. He stared at the table, his eyes wide. Two small fire ants walked across the center plank, next to the salt and pepper shakers. Then they slid into the crack between two planks and were gone.

“How would you feel if you found out I’d been watching you?” I asked.

“I would feel grateful.”

He spoke slowly, carefully, as if he had rehearsed this line before.

“For what?”

“That you loved me enough,” he said. “Enough to help me.”

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t have done this. You couldn’t have.”

He reached out for me, but I sprang away. I wrenched my right arm back and struck him, the edge of my palm colliding with the hard bridge of his nose. I heard a soft pock, and then I felt the bones loosen.

Gabe opened his mouth in pain, the lips peeling back to the gums. Like mine, his blood seemed too bright for blood, too fast; it emerged from both nostrils and streamed into his mouth like paint. He tipped his head back, so that it hung over the chair, and moaned.

“That’s not the full file, is it?” I asked. “How long is it?”

Gabe shook his head. He made small snuffling noises, his snot streaming red.

“How long, Gabe?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He voice was nasal, pleading, his eyes squeezed shut. “Estimate.”

“A hundred forty-five pages,” he said. “A hundred fifty.”

The numbers were too large. I needed something to do with my hands. I walked to the sink, doused a towel in water.

I returned to him and wiped the blood from around his mouth, his teeth. Later, I would find this towel in a box filled with winter clothes. Somehow, in my haste, I had taken it with me.

“You don’t need to take care of me,” said Gabe.

“I’m only doing this so that you’re well enough to talk,” I said. “To start from the beginning.”

With his nose clogged, Gabe sounded younger than he really was. I remembered him at seventeen, racing the other boys up the hill on the night of the eclipse. His strong, moist palms, the wide hooks of his shoulder blades. Dolphining through the water at Will Washburn’s pool, bursting through the surface every few minutes — his head turning wildly, wet hair splattering the others, until he found me. The look on his face of bare pleasure and surprise, as if he could not believe I was still there, watching him.

“You must have realized by now that it started at Mills,” he said. He closed his eyes as I pressed the cloth to his nose. “You know that I talked to you while you were sleeping, that I told you what I was doing with Keller. You were so damn helpful . You had ideas, good ones, and you weren’t even awake. You weren’t lucid — I knew that much. You didn’t remember anything when you were awake — I asked these little probing questions, trying to find out — but when you fell asleep again, you remembered it all. It was as if you dropped into this other life at night, and your brain kept separate track of it. It was eerie. Impressive. But I was afraid for you.”

“So you took me to Keller.”

Gabe nodded. He lifted his head, winced as I wiped around the rims of his nostrils.

“He couldn’t believe it. He’d never seen anything like you, even compared to other sleepwalkers. You could talk to us. You had impeccable control of your motor functions. You were you , I mean — an alternate version of yourself, a double.”

“Were you training me?” I asked. “Trying to get me to be lucid?”

“At that point, no. All I did was take you to his house. Let you walk around — three times, maybe four. But you didn’t like it there. You were freaked. And when I saw you that way, I wondered if I’d been wrong.”

“The day I followed you,” I said. “It was the last night of Thanksgiving break, our senior year. I was awake. You came out of Keller’s house. He chastised you — he took away your night privileges. He made you write an essay.”

“It was an act. We had been working. He’d told me what to say if it happened.”

I jolted through the years. My senior fall at Mills — waking up with the cuts and bruises that I thought were from sex. The strange sense of foreign landscapes, trees, new rooms, ebbing from my body. The brush of a small creature with a stiff bright tail.

“The cat.”

Gabe stared.

“Keller’s cat,” I repeated. “Orange, with a long tail. I was always repulsed by it, and I never knew why.”

He still looked ashamed. But is it possible that I saw something else in him? A curiosity, some thrill — and somewhere, faint pride, as if I had impressed him?

“You never liked that cat,” he said. “You got spooked when it touched you, like a little kid. I can’t believe you remember it.”

I sat down opposite him, leaving the rag on the table.

“How could you do it?”

“It was awful, Sylvie. It felt wrong, and I knew it. So I left school.”

“Without warning me? Without telling me what could happen when you were gone?”

“You don’t understand. You wouldn’t go to Keller’s place without me. He could hardly go to the dorms to retrieve you. I had clearance to assist him, and if we got stopped by a hall monitor or one of the house fellows, you were okay so long as you were with me. I was the link. And if I took myself out of the equation entirely, I thought I could free you.”