Хлоя Бенджамин - The Anatomy of Dreams

“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 the next day—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.”

“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, 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?”

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.