The Anatomy of Dreams

by Chloe Benjamin

  Gabe had frozen. But he did not seem to be in shock; he listened to me with the stoic commitment of someone carrying out orders. I opened the computer and double-clicked the file.

  It took no more than a glance at the form for me to realize what it was. I had seen hundreds of them before. Now my heart began to knock against my ribs. I should have looked at the file by myself at the lab. How had I not looked at it?

  “Did you know about this?” I asked.

  “Sylvie,” said Gabe. His hands found their way to my shoulders. “Let me explain.”

  The words on the page were startlingly clear. Weren’t they supposed to blur, change form and run away from me, at a time like this? Outside the kitchen window, there was a scrabble of feet and a rush of air. A clump of blackbirds rose from a tree and scattered like pebbles.

  My shoulders shifted beneath his hands—the small, barely perceptible movement of an animal readying to strike.

  “Read it to me,” I said.

  Gabe removed his hands.

  “Sylvie.”

  “Read it.”

  He sat down beside me and took the laptop in his hands. Ordinary noises were amplified: the dull creak of the floorboards beneath his socks, the crack of his jaw as he opened and closed it.

  “‘Patient name.’” His voice was quiet and muffled. “‘Sylvia Patterson. Female. Patient number—one eleven.’”

  I had never seen him cry before, not like this. He was silent, his face rigid, each drop pooling at the side of his lower lid before beginning its own slow, meandering trajectory down his cheek.

  “‘Birth date—January fifth, 1980. Referring physician—Adrian Keller. Marital status—single. Chief complaint—trouble sleeping at night. Unwanted behaviors during sleep.’”

  How many times had I seen this form, filled it out myself? I knew what question came next.

  “For how many months or years?” I asked. I was biting down so hard that my teeth shook.

  Gabe made a barely audible noise. It sounded more like his voice cracking than a single word.

  “Seven years.”

  “I don’t understand. Seven?”

  I still had some hope that this was a mistake, that Gabe knew nothing of what he was reading. But he held my gaze.

  “Seven,” he said.

  My voice came out as if dispatched by someone else.

  “Typical amount of time it takes to fall asleep,” I said.

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Typical number of awakenings per night?”

  “None.”

  “Sleepwalking episodes, and how many?”

  “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 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 yo
u 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.

  “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?