Dreams

She was under the surf – not drowning, but suffocated, pressed down by the water and tumbled by the waves. The water drew into itself and was a translucent, pulsating blob. Then it resolved into Ryan, at once vivid and insubstantial: for all that it was clear to her it was him on top of her on a bed of sand, she did not feel him inside her, or his skin on hers or his hot breath on her cheek; all she felt was a weight rocking her, shaking her bodily. She willed herself to fly away, saw Ryan making love to her from above – a porn scene from an overhead camera – then slowly drifted away.

She slept.

Stephanie awoke slowly, sullen and sad and not knowing why. She turned to Ryan, asleep beside her, saw his morning erection bulging his boxers, and the dream, which had been slipping away quietly, flew quickly back and played in her mind. She leapt out of bed, went to the kitchen, and started a pot of coffee, quivering with rage.

“We don’t fuck enough that you still have to have wet dreams of me?” she yelled at him the moment he appeared at the kitchen door, hearing the injustice ringing in her words but not caring. Shock, bewilderment, recognition, guilt, defiance flickered in rapid succession on his face, which finally settled into pained silence. She knew he was riffling through all the things he might say, trying to pick the words that would make things right. But what could he say that would explain, atone for, the egregious, unintentional violation? It was just a dream, Steph? I can’t control my dreams? I’m sorry? I can’t help it, baby, I’m just so hot for you? He just stood in the doorway in anguish, accepting her angry glare.

He was a good man, and he adored her. That was the tragedy of it.

She seethed through the morning shift at the bank, HR-mandated smile on her face, soft words floating sweetly out of her mouth into her customers’ ears, but her eyes blazing bright. Her phone vibrated twice during her lunch hour; she ignored it. By mid-afternoon, anger had given way, in inches, to an enormous lassitude, a somnolence as heavy as the planet. She slogged through to the end of the day. She dragged herself into her homebound bus and lowered herself with relief onto a window seat.

It had seemed a strange, inconsequential thing at first, that they began to slip into each other’s dreams when they first moved in together. One of them would describe over breakfast a dream fragment recalled, and the other, startled, would recognize it from his or her own slumberous visions from the previous night. It was peculiar, but it sort of seemed natural enough. They were in love; ergo, their dreams started to merge. Their friends, on the other hand, found the odd convergence curious and enthralling. How such a thing could happen was a source of avid speculation among them – psychological, psychic, metaphysical. Jasmina, their friend from college, a romantic, opined over dinner that it was a sign of how they truly were meant for each other, a notion Stephanie found vaguely unconvincing but that Ryan had latched onto eagerly. He had been happy for days. Indeed, he cherished the images he woke up with, the fragments of her no matter how strange and alien to him; he saw them as a gift. But the more it happened, the more she felt hemmed in by his memories distorted; the people and artifacts in his life reshaped, misshapen, made ineffable; his wishes, feelings, fears, desires given fleeting and incomprehensible forms. She felt she was wading in the muck of their co-mingled minds, and she began to resent it, then to be repulsed by it.

The lights streaming past the window of the bus were a growing burden on her eyes. The days were so short nowadays; the body felt the weight of the long nights bending it to stupefaction. She started to nod. She was in their living room – only it was the living room of Ryan’s parents’ house, the house he grew up in. Ryan was kneeling under the Christmas tree, a boy of six or seven cast in the yellow, rippling glow of the tree lights. He was blissfully, carefully removing the gift wrap from his present. Only it wasn’t Ryan, but his son, their son, and he was not taking something out of the box, but putting something in: a gift for her: a heavy, jeweled necklace. The necklace seemed to grow, its links multiplying, so that the box filled to the brim with cold, coiled, writhing metal, then overflowed. She backed away in horror.

She came to with a gasp and slammed the bus’s stop button on the side panel with her palm before she was fully awake.

In their living room, Ryan, who had given up trying to fix the glitch in his client’s website in the morning, left messages for her midday, spent the afternoon furiously cleaning their apartment, and finally fallen asleep on the couch in weary hopelessness, opened his eyes. Though he woke in the dark, disembodied, he knew with perfect clarity where he was, who he was, and what he had lost. He knew she was not coming home.

(November 2011)