Her hair was brown except for an inch-wide silver chunk, as if she’d streaked it that way on purpose. She wore a shawl with various hanging bobbles that shook when she spoke emphatically. The walls in her office were hung with woven Peruvian tapestries and framed diplomas and grisly portraits of human beings in various states of psychic pain. Though she looked too old to have young children, she had recently adopted twin four-year-old boys from Indonesia. When I saw her around campus, she stared at me with her head cocked, as though wondering whether I was somebody else.
She amazed me as much as she terrified me. The next day, I signed up for videography. I gave up painting with only a small pang—it had never stopped reminding me of Gabe. Film was a relief, for I didn’t have to create the material; I just had to capture it. That spring, I got a job as an audiovisual technician at the university, taping speech courses and oral presentations. Sometimes the professors greeted me, but often they continued talking as I set up at the back of the room, as if I required no more acknowledgement than the camera. I felt like a professional ghost. In my free time, I rented a camera from the media center and carted it as far as I could. I filmed the punk girls on Telegraph, the yolky desserts at the Russian bakery, the couples twined together in front of Sather Tower.
In the August before my junior year, I moved into a one-bedroom with David, a graduate student I’d been dating since the previous semester. My parents weren’t entirely pleased, but I was dying to get out of the dorms, having spent four years in them during high school, and my AV job enabled me to pay my share of the rent. It was a stout, twelve-unit building with peeling beige paint and a purple burst of a garden; our galley kitchen was so narrow that I could only open the refrigerator door partway before it hit an opposing cabinet. Often we ordered in from the dim sum restaurant down the block, filling David’s Ikea plates with shrimp dumplings and steamed buns, lo mai gai wrapped in lotus leaves. I did homework for my psychology courses or edited videos, and I began to read fiction—something I had never enjoyed before but that now gave me a heady feeling of adventure.
David worked on the font he’d created, the cornerstone of his dissertation in graphic design. I liked his even demeanor and his realism. Our similarities were comforting—or perhaps it comforted me to think we were similar. David didn’t ask about Mills. He seemed to assume that high school was as ancient a memory for me as it was for him. At night, we slept in his double bed, and he was always there in the morning, his hands crossed over his chest like a corpse.
Every so often, I received an e-mail from Hannah, who was majoring in environmental science at Colorado College (Happy N-Y! How was your x-mas? I sat on a mountaintop—drank champagne, made drunken angels in the snow. Heaven). We talked on the phone sporadically, but by senior year, we’d lost touch almost completely. She was happy to hear about David; once she said, “God, remember Gabe?” her tone conspiratorial and incredulous, as if he were a once-beloved leader or celebrity who had come to a disreputable end.
I couldn’t tell her that I’d started dreaming of Gabe—his taut, springy legs, the way his eyebrows leapt when he laughed. Sometimes, the dreams followed a familiar story line, something that had happened at Mills—Gabe and I filching trays from the cafeteria, then sneaking out to Observatory Hill and sliding down on our backs—but there was something slightly off. Gabe’s head was shaved, while in real life he’d had thick brown hair that stopped at his chin, or the sky was a dull black, a chalkboard black, and I couldn’t see stars.
It was the feeling of the dreams that I always remembered most. I was entirely at peace in a way I never was in waking life. But it was different from the sense of self-possession I had when operating a camera and different from the muted, colorless way that David slept. It was a deep-rooted kind of comfort, a feeling of utter appropriateness. This was where I belonged: on this hill, beneath this sky, devoid of stars as it was, and beside this boy—a boy who was, by then, a man, and who for all I knew could be anywhere.
One warm night in May, I dreamed of him again, but this time, my eyes were open. I could see all the details of David’s room—his swan-necked adjustable lamp, his tidy bureau, his poster of a cartoon woman begging at her boss’s feet, her speech bubble reading, “Please, sir—don’t make me use Comic Sans!” And I could see, outside the window, a man who looked exactly like Gabe.
I peeled my eyelids open farther, but the scene didn’t change. The man was standing at the foot of a lamppost at the end of the block, looking at a piece of paper. He glanced down the block in the other direction, and then he looked toward our apartment.
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, blin
king. 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 stood 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 Saturday 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 an
d 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.