The Anatomy of Dreams: A Novel

by Chloe Benjamin

  Keller sighed. He set the pad on his lap and looked at me with a parent’s tired patience.

  “The focus of our research,” he said, “is lucidity. Our studies are short-term; our goal is the resolution of abnormal behavior during sleep. Yes, we want to encourage self-awareness. Yes, we hope that lucid dreaming will ultimately lead to deeper understanding and reduced anxiety, but we can’t guarantee it. It’s never been within our purview to meet those particular endpoints—we don’t have the funding to keep a psychoanalyst on hand, which is exactly why I always suggest that patients follow up with a mental health professional in their area. We make recommendations; that’s the best we can do.”

  He took off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, his eyes shut. When he opened them again, they were kinder.

  “You feel pity for him,” he said. “Not surprising, given what he’s undergone—and it is horrifying, Sylvie; nobody is denying that. But you must remember that you’re a researcher. Our loyalty is to the research, not to any particular participant. If we doubted our work simply because it was occasionally unpleasant—if we braked whenever we felt badly for someone—”

  “We’d be shit scientists,” said Gabe.

  He laughed, and Keller smiled indulgently before looking up at me again.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Our patients aren’t happy people. They’ve all experienced some sort of trauma, and that’s exactly why they’ve come to us. It isn’t always a pretty process. But we can’t play God.”

  It sounded right, and I could poke no holes in it. What was rightness, I thought, if not impenetrability?

  “Sylvie,” said Keller as I turned toward the door. “I shouldn’t have had you send the shocks. I was wrong, and I apologize. It was too much responsibility for you. I should have done it myself.”

  I was quiet on the car ride home, eating the sandwich crusts that Gabe had saved for me as blood came back to my hands. When I finished, I put my palm on the back of Gabe’s neck out of habit, but it felt like there was a long corridor between us. I didn’t tell him about the sensation in my hands or the strange wash of heat, which hadn’t happened since high school. We got ready for bed without speaking and fell raggedly asleep. In the very early morning—it couldn’t have been later than four o’clock, the sky still dark—I began to shudder.

  “Sylvie,” Gabe whispered, wrapping his body around mine. “Oh, Sylvie. It was a hard night for you, wasn’t it?”

  I was embarrassed to find myself crying.

  “I thought you would have agreed with me,” I said.

  “I did agree with you. I do.”

  “Then why didn’t you say so to Keller?”

  “Because I agree with him, too. I agree with both of you.” He smoothed my hair back, tucking it behind my ears.

  “He reminded me of Anne,” I said.

  Gabe stiffened, his hand pausing on my neck. “How?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt like I had said something bad, something I wasn’t supposed to admit. “Because they both turned out wrong.”

  Gabe hesitated.

  “You’re sweating,” he said.

  “Maybe I should shower.” My entire body was sticky.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Gabe. His voice had turned soothing again, a low hum, and I sank into it. “Go back to sleep. I don’t mind it.”

  He pressed his cheek to mine, his ear against my ear.

  “We didn’t hurt the boy,” he said. “We only woke him up.”

  By the time I opened my eyes, it was almost nine, and the heat had left my body: my clothes were dry, and so was my skin. Gabe was still asleep. It was only a small scratch on his eyelid—pale as a white tattoo, a child’s scratch, the skin barely broken—that made me sure the previous night had happened at all.

  7

  BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, 2002

  By the time Gabe turned up in the coffee shop by my apartment, a week after the incident at Stinson Beach with David, I was almost expecting him. He sat at a small, narrow table, eating a biscotti and glancing around the coffee shop as though he were any other college student. There was a small yellow notebook on the table in front of him, but he wasn’t writing in it. At one point, he leaned down to fit a sugar packet underneath the rickety table stand. When he sat up again, I got up from my table and walked over to his.

  “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

  He had lifted his biscotti and now put it down in surprise. The saucer rattled lightly on the table.

  “Sylvie,” he said.

  I hadn’t realized how furious I was until I started speaking.

  “Coming to Berkeley, following me around, meeting me at the lamppost? Specifically coming to the beach, my beach, only to swim away from me—and now you’re here, at the only coffee shop I ever go to, pretending to eat a biscotti—”

  “What’s wrong with eating a biscotti?”

  “Nobody,” I said, “goes to a coffee shop just to eat a biscotti.”

  The people at neighboring tables had turned to look. One of them was a professorial-looking man in a corduroy coat. On his table was a biscotti in a small dish. Gabe looked at him pointedly before turning back to me.

  “Besides,” he said, in his pleasant way, “it isn’t your beach, Sylvie. And I wasn’t swimming away from you. I was swimming away from some hysterical guy who looked like he wanted to drown me.”

  “That was my boyfriend.”

  “Was?”

  It was Gabe, all right. The same dogged insistence, the same lopsided grin.

  “Is,” I said. “But you knew that.”

  “What gives you that impression?”

  “I just have a feeling.”

  Gabe stared at me quizzically. “What was that you said about a lamppost?”

  “Two nights ago. I saw you through the window, and we met at the end of the block. You asked me if I knew I was—”

  But I left off there. Gabe’s face was filled with a wondering kind of confusion.

  “I had a dream about you,” I said shortly.

  “You did?”

  I could tell he was flattered, and I immediately regretted it.

  “Forget it.”

  “You’ve always been intuitive.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  I was leaning forward, my hand on his table, and now I straightened up. I needed time to think, to sort out what had happened that summer and how much of it had been real. So Gabe had been at the beach, but I really had been sleepwalking on the night I walked out of the apartment to meet him. Why he would lie to me about one incident and admit the other?

  “Sylvie.”

  I turned around again. Gabe’s voice was quieter, stripped of its charm.

  “Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”

  I wasn’t sure if I did. Despite how much I missed him, I knew there was a cost to being with Gabe, that other things came with him. Other parts of myself rose to the surface, like fish on a line; other edges of life had their coverings pulled back. But I was too angry to leave him just yet. I had caught him, and I wanted my questions answered before I let him go.

  We left the café and took the street that led toward campus. I think I was in shock. Physically, he looked like any other undergrad, but there was something about the way he observed the students that marked him as an outsider. He asked me what it was like to go to college—where I lived, how the dorms were different from the ones at Mills, what my major was.

  “Psychology?” he asked. “That’s perfect.”

  “Perfect?”

  “Perfect for you. You’ve always wanted to figure people out—and you’re good at it, Sylve.”

  I flinched when he used my nickname. “I’m not sure that’s true.”

  “You figured me out.”

 
“No, I didn’t. You left before I could. And you’ve never told me why.”

  We walked into campus through East Gate and made our way along University Drive. It was emptier than usual in the summer, but there were still clumps of students reading on towels or throwing Frisbees, their shadows winging through the grass.

  “It’s a long story,” said Gabe. “And a messy one. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  It was clear he had come here to tell me this story, but also that he felt he needed permission. Whether it was out of courtesy or guilt, I wasn’t sure. But he waited until I nodded to continue.

  “I came to Mills for ninth grade, just like you.” He glanced at me as we passed Hearst Mining Circle, the elegant three doors of the Memorial Mining Building. “I was on scholarship—maybe you figured this out. At the time, my dad was living in Florida. He didn’t pay child support, and my mom’s health was so bad that I think the school took pity on me. I always wondered, at least. I didn’t have terrific grades.”

  He kept his eyes on the road, but I stared at him as he talked. The feeling of his body so close to mine was so uncanny I couldn’t help it.

  “Anyway, I was always looking for ways to make a little extra money. I loved Mills; I considered it my home. My tuition was covered, but I imagined I’d repay the school eventually—I’d make a big donation, cover the tuition of another student, maybe fund a new computer lab. You know how it was with the computers in the library—there was always a line out the door.

  “So I started taking these odd jobs. I’d do whatever anybody wanted. For a while I gave haircuts in the Moberly Common Room. They didn’t mind so long as I cleaned up afterward. I started a group that played poker on Sunday afternoons, but I got too worried we’d be found out. And I worked night shifts in the dining hall.”

  “I know.”

  “Please be patient with me,” he said. “I know nothing makes sense yet.”

  There was genuine appeal in his face. I kept us going straight, rather than turning off one of the side paths that would take us farther into the web of buildings.

  “In our junior year, Mr. Keller approached me. I’d been a smart-ass that day in psych, and he asked me to stay after class. I thought I was going to get in trouble. But he sat me down on the other side of his desk, and he told me my problem was that I had too much energy.”

  “I remember that.” I stopped. “We’d been studying—early childhood development, was it? We all figured you were going to get in trouble. I stopped on the hill as we were walking back to the dorms. I tried to look in the window.”

  “I saw you,” said Gabe. “And I thought, That’s Sylvie, she would do such a thing. You were always loyal, even before we were together.”

  He started walking again, and I followed him.

  “You told us you were fired, that you’d lost your job at the dining hall.”

  “I was. But that wasn’t the full story. Keller gave me this whole spiel—said I reminded him of himself at my age, that I needed something to pour myself into. I tuned out a bit until he mentioned the pay. Twenty dollars an hour for such menial work: data entry, mailings, things I could do in my sleep. I thought he was joking until he had me sign a confidentiality agreement.”

  “So it was true,” I said. “Keller’s research assistants.”

  Gabe nodded. “He said he chose one or two students each semester, students who showed promise and seemed trustworthy, but he didn’t want the word getting around. That was fine with me—I already tried to keep my scholarship as quiet as possible, and I would’ve been an obvious target if anyone had known about this.”

  “Was Will Washburn his assistant?” I asked. I remembered the time that Keller had come upon us standing on the library stairs, when Will had been excluded from the larger group.

  “The year before me.” Gabe tore a twig from the dangling branch of a nearby tree and chucked it in front of us. “So I went to talk to him before I gave Keller an answer. Asked him what it was like, how much money he made, whether he was skeeved out by the confidentiality agreement. Honestly, I was kind of offended to think that Keller had put me in the same camp as Will Washburn—you know how Will was, always throwing some fit—but what I noticed that day was that he’d really calmed down. A thoroughly useful experience—that was how Will described it. He said he’d made tons of money and Keller had already written a personal recommendation on his behalf to someone on Princeton’s admissions committee.”

  “Will did wind up going to Princeton.”

  “Exactly. I figured Keller would do the same for me. There wasn’t any good reason not to take the job—so I started in January. The January of our junior year.”

  “That was the month of the eclipse.”

  “That’s right.”

  Gabe looked at me appreciatively, as though he’d presented me with a riddle and I had solved it. We were in the grass below Sather Tower, where I often set up my camera. I sat down, and he joined me. The entire situation felt surreal—the haziness of the sky, the relative absence of other students, and Gabe, sturdy and tangible before me.

  “What did you mean by showing me that flower? The flower with two discs?”

  “The infinity flower.” Gabe smiled. “I didn’t know what it was at the time, though I found out later I was right—it was an experiment, some sort of play with garden genetics. But by then I had seen Stu Cappleman at Keller’s house, and I had a whole new set of suspicions.”

  “Stu Cappleman? The guy who worked in the dining hall?”

  He was a gangly boy from one of the surrounding towns who went to public high school and worked nights in our dining hall. His dad did the plumbing in the dorms, which was how Stu must have been hired. He was something of a character at Mills, with his cystic acne and loose, inventive slang. Sometimes, he played basketball on campus with a few of our students, Gabe included. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to be there when he wasn’t working, but none of the teachers ever asked him to leave.

  “That’s the one,” said Gabe. “This was one night in April—our junior year. I was supposed to have printed out a bunch of reports and put them underneath the door to Keller’s office in Sellery Hall. But I’d been scrambling to get a history paper done, and I didn’t finish until after midnight. Sellery was closed, so I figured I would go to his house and slip it under the door. I thought I could tell him I’d forgotten he wanted me to put it in Sellery, and he’d never know the difference. I didn’t want him to dock my pay.”

  He plucked a blade of grass and played with it: rolled it into a spiral, slivered it at the center.

  “When I got to the door, I realized there was light coming out from underneath it. That’s when I heard these—noises. High-pitched whines, like a little girl’s voice, and then a lot of muttering I couldn’t understand. But finally I realized someone was talking about his hands. ‘I see my hands,’ the person would say—‘Here they are, my hands,’ all in the same weird voice. Keller would offer some encouragement—‘That’s right,’ or ‘Very good, Stuart,’ or ‘You certainly do’—but Stu didn’t seem to notice him at all. He never responded when Keller spoke, and sometimes he talked right over him.”

  “Are you sure it was Stu Cappleman?”

  Gabe nodded. “Positive. The blinds were down, but there was a sliver of space on each side. At one point, Stu came close to the window and I saw him.”

  A part of me was skeptical; the story was too fantastic. But another part of me believed Gabe as I believed in dreams, while they were happening: with absurd and unconscious trust.

  “And that didn’t bother you?” I asked. “It didn’t seem to be ethically questionable, Keller keeping a school employee locked up in his house past midnight?”

  “Of course it bothered me. It took me a few days, but I finally worked up the courage to ask him about it. Keller listened very quietly, not at all ruffled. You would’ve t
hought I was asking him about the weather. Then he looked at me in this calm sort of way and said that Stu had volunteered to be a part of his research, the same research I was helping with—as if I’d known about it all along.”

  “Had you?”

  “Not a thing,” said Gabe. “Believe me, Sylvie. All I was doing was entering data I didn’t understand, long strings of letters and numbers. He’d kept me in the dark, and for good reason. Now that I knew, it was like I had this special power. And I was afraid. I didn’t know what I’d gotten myself into. So I went to Keller and asked him to tell me what his research was about.”

  On the other side of the trees, a group of middle schoolers, here for a summer camp, ran by, laughing. I shivered. The heat wave had long since passed, and I was only wearing a T-shirt.

  “You’re cold,” said Gabe.

  He put a hand on my lower arm and rubbed it until the hairs stood up. Then he smoothed them down again. Everything he touched was a nerve. I pulled my arm back, putting it between my crossed legs.

  “So what did Keller say?”

  “He said it had to do with sleep,” said Gabe, “and dreaming. Consciousness, unconsciousness. REM cycles. But it was Stu I wanted to know about. Keller said he had a sleep disorder, which made it so that he didn’t stay in bed when he was asleep—he got up, moved around, acted out whatever was happening in his dreams. Keller was trying to find a way to get him to figure out he was dreaming. Otherwise, Stu could hurt himself—he already had. Once, before he came to Keller, he tripped while sleepwalking and came down so hard his chin split open. Needed about twenty stitches.”

  “So that’s what you were doing,” I said. “All those nights, when you left my room, and I saw you going to his house. You were helping him? On Tuesdays and Thursdays?”

  Gabe nodded again.

  “Why?” I asked. “What was in it for you?”

  “He upped my pay—practically doubled it.”

  It was the first time that day I had seen him look sheepish.