Хлоя Бенджамин - The Anatomy of Dreams

“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 could tell you were remembering more—you were becoming lucid, Sylvie. 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.”

He was looking at me quizzically, the space between his brows furrowed. I felt reality as a whole slipping away from me like an enormous tide. I had to reconstruct it by hand, to verify the simplest details.

“It isn’t fair.” I felt frail and cold. “You saw sides of me I didn’t see myself.”

“But isn’t that incredible?” His eyes were slick. “We know each other, Sylvie, in ways other couples can only dream of.”

“People shouldn’t know each other this well. You watched me behave like an animal.”

“No,” said Gabe more forcefully, shaking his head. “That’s not true. I saw you behave honestly. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You know me, but I don’t know you.”

“I know it seems that way. But you will, I promise you. Now that you know about all this—and believe me, my God, I’ve wanted you to know so badly—we don’t have to have any more secrets. We can be totally open.”

“And what about Thom?”

“I don’t care about Thom. It was all my fault.”

“But what does he know?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t spoken to him.”

“No? You haven’t filled him in?”

“I told you,” Gabe said. “We had no way to know what happened when you got there. We couldn’t figure out much with the phone bug; whenever you picked up, you seemed to want nothing to do with him. All I could do was take down the time when you got out of bed. Then watch as you walked through the fence.”

“You were pretending to sleep.”

He nodded.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t understand which side you were on.”

“There aren’t sides,” said Gabe. “We’re all on the same side.”

He caught hold of my forearm and tried to draw me to him. But I pulled away, twisting until his arm wrenched behind his back. He let go of me with a gritted noise of anguish. Panting, he dropped forward, his hands meeting his knees.

“Jesus, Sylvie,” he said. “I just wanted to—”

But I barely heard him. I was running for the door, and then I was outside, lurching down the porch steps to the sidewalk. Across the street, a young couple walked two golden retrievers, wheat-gold and wily; the woman spoke sharply as they strained at their collars. Nausea came over me, sudden and boiling. I turned away and retched over a storm drain, vomit tumbling colorfully through the slats. One of the dogs barked, and the woman clicked her tongue, glancing at me with alarm as she ushered them forward. When they turned onto Atwood, the block was empty. I stumbled ahead.

The wire fence that separated the train tracks from our house was overrun with ivy and backed by spindly trees. I stepped around it and began to walk down the length of the tracks, my feet inches from those gleaming steel bars. The air was cool and soft. I walked until I couldn’t see our house anymore; then I hooked my fingers in the open diamonds of the fence, leaned back, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again—how much later, I wasn’t sure—I heard a whinnying noise, grievous and faraway as a ghostly animal. The sound increased in urgency, accompanied by a bellowed horn and the ghastly screech of wheels on steel.

Though I had heard plenty of trains in Madison, I rarely saw one; at home, the dark lacework of the trees blotted the tracks from view. Electricity whipped through the air. As the train came closer, my whole body shook, and I wound my hands deeper into the fence. I pictured the flash of a searchlight, a thunderous rush of air, my body whisked like a leaf. It would be so easy, so quick. The tracks were squealing, now, the ground rumbling with energy. Fear roared inside me, and I tried to yank my hands free. But my knuckles had swollen, and the sharp pull did nothing. The first car loomed into view, round nosed and gleaming, and I screamed.