The Anatomy of Dreams Read online

  I stumbled out of bed and into my shoes. I was wearing an old tee of David’s and a pair of raggedy shorts from high school that, narrow hipped as I was, still fit. The legs that led me out of the apartment didn’t feel like mine—they were only my dream legs, I thought, and nothing I did with them would be of any consequence when I woke up. So I was brave: I didn’t stop to grab my keys, and I let the door lock behind me. In the pink glow of early morning, the streets looked softened and empty. It wasn’t until I walked uphill, closer to the lamppost, that I saw a body standing behind it.

  At first, the man didn’t look very much like Gabe. His hair was short, and he was stockier than Gabe had been in high school. But then I noticed his sharp jaw, his chipped bottom tooth and wide shoulders—the same shoulders I had held on to at night and followed, that November morning, to Keller’s house. Still, it was difficult to be sure. Like a hologram, he kept moving in and out of focus, flattening curiously into the background before springing alive again.

  “Can you see me?” he asked.

  I nodded. He was staring at me with such force.

  “I think I’m dreaming,” I said.

  “Is it a dream,” asked the boy, “if you know you’re dreaming?”

  “But I don’t know if I am.”

  Behind me, there was the quick slap of footsteps on pavement, and I turned. “Sylvie!”

  It was David. He was barefoot in boxers; he hadn’t even put on a T-shirt. It was the most spontaneous thing he had ever done for me. I walked toward him, and he collected me in his arms like a wild rabbit, stroking my face, my arms. Now my eyes were closed, and I could see stars, or something like them—glittery, silver bursts beneath my lids, as if I were going to faint.

  But then the silver cleared, and there was David, panting as he held me out at arm’s length. I tipped my head back. The sky above us was the warm indigo of new blue jeans, speckled with white lights.

  “Look,” I said. “There’s Venus.”

  “Venus?” David shook his head. “Sylvie, what was that?”

  I remembered and turned around, but the man by the lamppost was gone, and the entire block was empty.

  “I saw someone I knew.”

  “What do you mean? What the hell d’you—”

  “I swear, David, there was a man right here. Thinner than he used to be, with shorter hair.”

  David’s voice lowered. “You’ve seen him before? Some man in the neighborhood? A thin man, with short hair?”

  “No,” I said. “I only saw him this once.”

  I was dizzy. I leaned against the lamppost, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands.

  “What are you talking about? You said you knew him from—”

  “Before. I knew him from before. Let’s take a look around the neighborhood, okay? See if he’s still here?”

  “I don’t have any shoes on,” said David. “I don’t even have a shirt. I came out here because I was worried you’d lost it, Sylvie—I felt you get out of bed and then I saw you walking down the street in your goddamn shorts, and I didn’t know whether you’d been—compelled by somebody—”

  “I was sleepwalking,” I said, more quietly, for suddenly it was clear to me. “I dreamed I saw someone, and I got out of bed. I used to do it as a kid.”

  David shook his head, blinking. We eyed each other for a moment. Finally, he stepped toward me, and I sank into his chest.

  “You scared me, Sylvie. I was really frightened.” He paused, lifting his chin from the top of my head, and scanned the block. “You must have dreamed it. If someone had been here, we’d be able to see him now.”

  It was true. Gabe wouldn’t have been able to get very far. The lamppost was uphill from our apartment, higher than most of the neighborhood, and we could see the streets that spread below. Except for a garbage truck making the ­early-morning rounds, they were empty.

  That afternoon, we arranged a picnic to take to Stinson Beach, packing David’s cooler with water bottles and the grapefruit he liked to eat without sugar. He had graduated less than a month before, and though we’d talked lightly about whether or not we would stay together, we hadn’t come to a decision: we were both reluctant instigators, experts in avoidance. I hoped the beach trip would be romantic, but the strangeness of last night was still with us. As we drove down Highway 1, we were both on edge. A green Corolla swerved out from behind us and accelerated into the next lane.

  “Damn Corolla,” said David, slowing to let it pass. “Been trailing us since we left Berkeley.”

  I leaned forward and looked into the Corolla. A broad-shouldered, red-haired woman sat in the driver’s seat, steering ahead of us. I sat back again.

  “Everyone’s trying to get to the beach,” I said. And when we arrived, it did feel that way. Small camps of people stretched down the sand: families setting up beach umbrellas and folding chairs, college students with beers stuck deep in the sand. We spread our towels near the shore. David took out a tube of sunblock and began to slather his legs.

  “Something a little disgusting about beaches, don’t you think?” he asked as I set up my tripod and camera. “Everyone swimming in this communal . . . bath.”

  He was grinning. Sometimes he said things he knew I’d object to, just to get a rise out of me.

  “Stay dry, then. I’m going to bathe. But first,” I said, lifting the tripod and camera up with both arms, “I’m going to film it.”

  “Don’t you think you should ask for consent?” called David. “These people are going to be in an Oscar-winning documentary one day—don’t you think you should make sure they don’t mind? I smell something smelly, Sylvie, and it just might be a lawsuit.”

  But I was already walking down to the water, laughing, the sun hot on my back. I wore a yellow bikini that I’d bought on Telegraph Avenue that week, feeling daring and unlike myself. I nestled the three legs of the tripod into the sand and took off the camera’s lens cap. It was such a bright day that the iris had to be considerably adjusted. I was focusing the camera, squinting at the horizon line, when I saw a body slicing easily through the waves.

  I wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t so much farther out than everyone else. The first ten feet of water were filled with children and parents. After that, there were teenagers playing catch, a few loners doing laps. But no one was as far as the person my camera had focused on, a man with the elegant, compact musculature of a dolphin.

  His body was familiar to me, even from so far away. I had only seen him swim once, when we signed out from Mills to go to the pool at Michael Fritz’s house. Gabe and I had been dating for a month by then, and I was thrilled by the way he tunneled through the water and somersaulted off of the diving board. It was as if he’d grown up not in Tracy, but in San Diego. Diana Gonzalez’s parents lived there, and she claimed she could walk to the beach from her house.

  “Where’d you learn to swim?” I asked when he came to sit beside me under the shade of the porch. I leaned over and kissed him stickily, my mouth wet with watermelon and the punch Mike’s mom had made.

  “My dad lives in Florida,” Gabe had said, shaking his head with the vigor of a wet dog. Little droplets sprayed my cheek. He nuzzled me, kissed me again, and when he came up, there was a small black teardrop on his tongue. “Seed.”

  I tried to follow the man’s progress in the water, but I kept losing him. For stretches of time that felt impossibly long, I couldn’t see anything. Then he burst out of the water in a different part of the ocean, twenty feet away from the view of my camera.

  In my first psychology class at UC-Berkeley, I learned that an acute stress response triggers over fourteen hundred changes in the body. Blood flow is increased by 300 percent and directed toward the muscles. Stores of fat and sugar are released. Our pupils dilate, our hearing becomes sharper, and normal processes of the body, like digestion, turn off, no longer important. I s
tood staked to the ground behind the camera for what felt like minutes, though it could only have been a few seconds. Part of me wanted to jump into the water and leave the camera behind, but I knew I couldn’t do that—it belonged to the school and was worth thousands of dollars. So I lifted the tripod and lugged it across the beach as quickly as I could manage.

  “Nothing interesting?” asked David. He was lying flat on his back, limbs spread like a starfish. He held one arm over his eyes like a visor.

  “David.” I was already sweating. “I need you to watch the camera for me. I saw someone in the water.”

  “Someone in the water?” He sat up. “Did they need help?”

  “No, no,” I said. David had been a lifeguard in high school. “It was someone familiar. I have to go. I just need you to watch—”

  “Was it the person from last night?” He was staring at me intently, his voice a conspiratorial whisper. “The man in the neighborhood—it’s him, isn’t it?”

  I was so flustered that it must have been an easy guess.

  “Let me go,” David said. “You’re a terrible swimmer, Sylvie. You’ll never catch him. Point him out to me.”

  He was right—I couldn’t swim more than a few yards, and even with the benefits of adrenaline, I doubted I could make it much farther. I wanted to be the one to find Gabe, but David had a better chance of bringing him to shore.

  “We’re going to run out of time,” said David, scrambling to his feet. His chest was pale and narrow, the sternum concave. Between his nipples was a dark burst of chest hair the size of a small sunflower. “Just point him out to me, will you?”

  I pointed to the man. He was still farther than all of the others, swimming surely to the left. David followed my hand, breathing quickly. Then he set off for the shore at a run. I watched him splash into the shallow water and awkwardly navigate the narrow channels between children. Once he passed them, he broke into a quick, smooth freestyle. Gabe, or the man who looked like him, turned his head every so often as he traveled west, though I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at David or trying to breathe.

  David was only ten or twenty feet away when he paused and punched the water’s surface. I didn’t know why until I saw a fleet of sailboats making their way toward him—­college students, probably, who could rent boats after taking a quick licensing course. The boats were set to cut right between David and the other man, who was swimming closer to the horizon with increasing speed. David tried to speed up, too—I had zoomed in with my camera and could see the water flurrying behind him—but it was no use; he had to tread water to let the line of boats pass, and when they had, the other man was gone.

  Not gone, of course. No longer visible. He couldn’t have disappeared, because this time, I wasn’t the only one who’d seen him. David had, too, and this was so validating that by the time he returned, his chest heaving, I almost felt calm.

  6

  MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2004

  By October, the air had cooled in Madison, and the trees made quilts of red and brown and gold. On a Thursday afternoon, returning home from a trip to the market, I saw Gabe and Janna kneeling in a patch of dirt in our backyard. They were scooping earth into a large clay pot and packing it down, Gabe gathering large fistfuls, Janna pressing down with precise and expert speed.

  I stepped onto the back porch and set my bags down. The milk, sweating, leaned against my leg.

  “’Lo,” said Janna. “I’m teaching your husband how to grow a dogwood tree.”

  She smiled in her brief, catlike way before returning to the mound—a flash of a smile, fool’s gold in a pan.

  “Boyfriend,” said Gabe. He looked up at me and grinned.

  “That’s right.” Janna slapped at a mosquito that had landed quietly on her arm. “I forget.”

  “I thought it would be nice for us to have a little flora around here,” said Gabe, still squatting. “A little fauna. What say you”—he raised himself, propping his elbows on his knees—“about that?”

  “Fauna means ‘animals,’” I said.

  “Right,” said Gabe. “But with flora comes fauna. Spiders and dragonflies and ladybugs.”

  “You don’t like spiders,” I said. “And have you ever seen a swarm of ladybugs?”

  “It’s grotesque,” said Janna cheerfully.

  “Anyway,” I said, “isn’t it a bit late to be planting trees? Doesn’t that happen in summer?”

  “That’s what I thought. But it turns out,” said Gabe, “that autumn is the perfect time for planting.”

  “It isn’t the only time, but it’s really ideal,” Janna said. “After a few frosts, you’ve still got soils that are warm enough through the winter to allow for root growth. Then, when spring comes, the roots are dying for water, and they’re much easier to transplant.”

  Janna stood and wiped her hands on her jean shorts, which sagged around her waist. She’d rolled the legs up to the top of her thighs.

  “So they can keep growing,” she said.

  I thought of the bags at my feet—the twelve eggs, the avocados Gabe liked to eat plain with a spoon. He scarfed them with such boyish enthusiasm that finding the best ones was a secret pleasure of mine. I could spend ten minutes in the produce section, gently prodding their leathery skins.

  “I have to put these away,” I said.

  “But it’s so glorious out.” Janna stretched her arms, slender but packed with stringy little muscles. “You don’t want to join us?”

  “Maybe afterward.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Gabe.

  I was irritated by the Labrador look of his face, his smile hanging open.

  “You’ll be ready to leave in a half hour?” I asked.

  “Course,” he said. “I’m never late.”

  It was true: Gabe was a stickler when it came to timing. That night, he was in the car fifteen minutes early, his bag packed with lab work and the dinner he carried in separate Tupperware containers—one for cooked pasta, one for cold sauce, one for salad leaves, one for dressing. His packing process was by now so rote, so obsessively standardized, that it almost seemed like an act of resistance rather than submission.

  The sky became dusky as we drove to the lab. We were quiet on these rides: while Gabe stared at the road, I read through the notes Keller had sent about tonight’s participant.

  “Who do we have tonight?” asked Gabe, parking.

  We stepped out of the car and walked down the sidewalk beneath a line of trees. Their leaves were dark cutouts in the royal-blue sky.

  “The kid,” I said.

  Gabe’s jaw set the way it always did when he was thinking more than he wanted to say. We both felt conflicted about Keller’s use of children. Still, Gabe was near-paranoid about criticizing Keller; he certainly wouldn’t do it when we were within spitting distance. Gabe and I had worked with patients as young as fifteen, but we knew that children had been part of Keller’s early tests in Fort Bragg. Tonight’s participant was seven.

  At the heavy metal doors, we fell into a single-file line and took out our ID cards. Gabe held his to the square reader next to the doors, which emitted a short, high-pitched beep. The doors opened automatically to allow him inside before closing again. When they shut behind me, clapping together with a rubbery noise of suction, we started down the left corridor.

  “Evening,” said Gabe to the Hungarian researcher, who was pushing a young man in a wheelchair across the hallway.

  “And to you,” said the researcher. He paused and nodded at us; the man in the wheelchair stirred, his head rolling from one shoulder to the other.

  We took the staircase to the basement level of the building and passed three of Keller’s rooms, the doors locked, before we came to his office. It was a windowless bunker at the end of the hall. Inside, there were meticulously organized metal cabinets, a closed door that led to a small close
t, and a bulletin board with pinned notes and schedules. Keller sat at a large metal desk, facing away from us.

  “Just a moment,” he said.

  He was hunched over, taking longhand notes on a yellow pad of paper—he preferred this to the laptops Gabe and I used, claiming it helped him to write more intuitively. He held the cap of his pen in his teeth.

  We waited. After a moment, he capped the pen and turned to face us. His eyes went immediately to Gabe’s shirt.

  “You’re dirty.”

  Gabe set down the cooler with his dinner and leaned against the door frame.

  “I was planting a tree.”

  “Planting a tree,” said Keller, glancing at me.

  I shook my head. “This was his venture.”

  “Our neighbor’s a gardener,” said Gabe.

  “Well, you can tell him,” said Keller, mildly, “that if Rosemarie Sillman complains that my assistants look like they’ve just buried someone, I’ll be holding him accountable.”

  “Her,” said Gabe. “The neighbor’s a woman. You do know it’s the twenty-first century, don’t you? Next thing you know, you’ll be assuming all scientists are men, and Sylvie will have to put you in line.”

  Gabe was able to rib this way with Keller; in their relationship, there was always a line being narrowly walked. Over the years, it had become almost familial—something that made me vaguely jealous, even though I knew Gabe had always needed a father more than I did.

  “Noted,” said Keller shortly, though he was smiling. “Go on and set up. Room seventy-six.”

  It was seven o’clock now; we had half an hour until Jamie arrived. We walked to Room 76—the only one with a window, though it was a small square close to the ceiling and barred. Gabe rolled the bed to the center of the room. It was similar to a hospital bed, with white sheets and a remote that allowed us to raise or lower it. Gabe left the room for the closet in Keller’s office, then returned with straps that he affixed to hooks down the length of each side of the bed. I walked into Room 74, raised the blinds on the large window that allowed me to see through to Room 76, and powered on the polysomnograph machine and telemetry equipment. I made sure that the amplifiers and the CPAP machines were working properly. I set up the montage, the configuration of all the channels we’d be using, and I did the amplifier calibrations.