Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

“How could this happen?” I asked. “Legally?”

“That was part of the problem. But we had you sign a research release, just to be sure.”

“I must have been sleeping. I could sue you.”

“But how could you prove you weren’t conscious?”

“Because I was sleeping .”

“Sleep and consciousness aren’t mutually exclusive, Sylvie. You know that.”

My brain was moving with remarkable speed. I was trying to think of every possible question, as if I knew, even then, that I would go over and over Gabe’s answers for years.

“Did the other teachers know?”

“Some knew more than others. Mr. Cooke left because of it.”

How much easier it would have been if the room was swimming, as I’ve heard rooms do at times like this. Instead, it was clear as day: the shapes of the kitchen static and angular, the clock ticking evenly, as if everything inside the room had conspired to stay still enough for me to remember it.

“I know you’ll want to know why I came back,” said Gabe. “To Keller, and to you.”

“I was in college,” I said, as if to remind myself. “I had almost graduated. And I kept seeing you. That day I left the apartment, and I saw you by the lamppost — I thought I was dreaming. But you were really there, weren’t you?”

Gabe nodded.

“It was me. When I saw that boyfriend of yours, I split. I took off down the block and hid behind a car. I knew then that I had to be more careful.”

“But you also knew that I was still sleepwalking,” I said. “Is that why you came to me? To see if you could make me into a lab rat again?”

“I’ve never thought of you that way.” Gabe squeezed his eyes shut. “You’re special, Sylvie. I didn’t want you to hurt yourself. When I left Keller, left Mills, all I could think about was you. And what would happen to you, if you got into the wrong hands.”

“And you don’t think I did?”

I was seething. But some part of me still wanted desperately to be convinced.

“I know it feels that way,” said Gabe. “But we had other motivations for recruiting you. Everything I said to you, that day in the coffee shop — it was true. You were smart and resourceful, a psychology major. You knew Keller and me. And you’d understand our patients, however subconsciously. The fact that you were a sleepwalker — it was just an added bonus.”

“An added bonus.” The words were dry in my mouth. “So what did I do?”

I still imagine how it would be if I hadn’t asked. Would I think of myself differently? Or would I still have known, somewhere deep in the recesses of my consciousness, as Keller and Gabe believed I did?

“In Fort Bragg,” Gabe said, “you did little things. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find you in the computer room, searching for something on Google, or sitting at the kitchen table doing your transcription work. Sometimes you even went up to the ground level, walked around in the grass. You never went very far. You just seemed to want a little air.”

“And here?” I asked. “How far did I get here?”

“Do you know?”

Again, his face had the same odd expression — that mixture of shame and curiosity, of pain and hunger.

“You tell me,” I said.

Gabe inhaled, his breath uneven. He pushed himself to a standing position. The blood around his nose was still wet, and I could tell he was faint. But he walked slowly to the back door that led to the yard.

“You went outside,” he said. “Through this door here. Took the stairs down to the yard. Come.”

I followed him into the grass. Outside, it was dizzyingly bright, the sky the harsh gray-white specific to March. We stepped around the dogwood trees, which had managed to survive the winter; some had even sprouted fleshy little leaves, oily and lined like palms. Gabe led me to the back corner of the fence that separated our yard from Thom and Janna’s. Three planks had been removed, leaving a jagged hole through which an animal or a small person could pass. The hole was mostly hidden from view by a weedy bush. I didn’t remember seeing it before.

“Did I make this?” I asked.

“You or him,” said Gabe. “I wasn’t sure.”

Thom. His calls in the night, the oddly familiar way he spoke to me after the bocce match.

“You egged me on,” I said. I remembered the night of the match — how I had woken to find Gabe looking at me. “You asked me if I could see my hand — you said it made the dreams less real. You were trying to make me lucid.”

“We’ve been trying for years. Keller thought it would be better if I worked with you — he obviously didn’t have access to you at night, and we didn’t want to make you suspicious. In Fort Bragg, I would talk to you in your sleep, but you didn’t make much progress until we came to Madison. These past few months, you got so close — I couldn’t help but nudge you when you were conscious. I felt like I was helping you do something extraordinary.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“Do you really think you would have stayed? We should have told you at the very beginning, back at Mills, but we didn’t. We couldn’t tell you now.” Gabe’s eyes were swollen, his nose already bruising blue. “I didn’t want to lose you, Sylve. I still don’t.”

“But you were losing me. That’s exactly what you were doing — you sat there and watched me leave. It didn’t bother you? It didn’t hurt you, when you saw me go into his house?”

“Of course it did. It was excruciating.” Gabe eyed the house next door and lowered his voice, though the rooms were dark and the shutters closed. “But we were doing something that had never been done before: we observed the subconscious mind in a totally uninhibited state over the course of almost seven years. You gave us the opportunity to watch a sleep disorder evolve in real time, to see how it was affected by lucidity. Keller was convinced you’d change the way parasomnias are understood. If it was the other way around — if it had been me — would you have been able to resist?”

Gabe had gathered energy. He looked entreating and cautiously optimistic, as if convinced of a truth that I would come to see myself.

“You’re sick,” I said. “You are verifiably fucking insane. This isn’t my achievement. You forced me into it — you took away any freedom of choice I had.”

I was walking back to the house, stumbling over stepping stones and tangled plants, winding my way around the dogwood trees.

“Do you really believe that?” asked Gabe from behind me. “You knew , I’m sure of it — at some level, even if it wasn’t conscious, you had to have known.”

“Don’t tell me what I knew. I didn’t know a goddamn thing.”

But I wondered if it was true. Had I wanted this? Had I been complicit? And, in some way, had I already figured it out myself?

We walked into the kitchen again, and I pulled the glass door shut. All outside noises were sucked from the room. The hum of the refrigerator, now, the click of the clock. The slight buzz of the overhead lighting.

Gabe held his hands up like a camper trying to calm a bear.

“If that’s what you think, fine. But I think that, with time, you’ll come to see a picture that’s more complicated.”

“Did you bug the phone, or was it Keller?”

“We did it together.”

“To listen to my conversations with Thom.”

“Partly, yes. We had no way to know what was going on otherwise. We didn’t have anything set up at his place. And then there was the business with Anne.”

“So Anne March is on trial.”

“Of course she’s on trial.”

“She killed her parents, and her sister, too.”

“You know that, Sylvie.”