The Dream That Isn't Mine

Adam is in the doorway with the prototype over his heart, and the email I cannot prove I did not mean is open behind me on the screen, and the first thing I do, before the dread, before the reflex, before the cello can pour anything at all, is reach back without looking and close the laptop.

It is the wrong move. I know it the second the lid clicks down. A founder does not flinch a screen shut when her fiancé walks in. Cosima would have left it open. Cosima would have spun the chair, screen and all, and said something bright and unbothered, because the surest way to hide a thing is to leave it in the light and dare anyone to read it. The body knew that and reached for it, the spin, the brightness, and I overrode the body to hide my own confession, and now the small wrong gesture is sitting between us like a slammed drawer, and Adam, who has spent two years learning the shape of this woman, has seen it.

He does not say anything about it. That is the worst of him, the decency, the way he files a thing and waits, exactly the way Elliot files a thing and waits, two men in two different rooms of my life both learning, this same week, to write down what does not add up and let it lie there until I trip on it.

"Cosima," he says again, softer, because I have not answered the first time. "Facilities rang me in a flap. You're gutting the old studio. Tonight."

Three things at once, then, because that is how it comes now, the dread arriving in pieces I have to give edges to or go down. One: he heard about the gutting from facilities, not from the email, which means the email is still unsent, which means the line the sleeper wrote in my own hand, hold the basement, for the film, has not yet left this room, is still mine to delete, if I can find which words are mine. Two: he is standing where the screen light was, and the screen is dark now, and the only light on his face is the river, going to ink, the same ink as the night I died in it. Three: he is holding the prototype. He is always holding the prototype now. He carries the proof that I existed over his heart like a man who does not know he is carrying a gravestone, and he has carried it up here, to me, the woman who erased the name it proves.

"It's overdue," I say, and the cello does it for me, smooth, founder-tired, a woman explaining a whim she does not owe anyone. "The studio's been a sentimental dead cost for years. Petra wants the birthplace for the film. If we're going to do it we do it properly, and if we do it properly we start now, before the deal closes and there's no budget that isn't the buyer's."

It is all true. Every word. That is what frightens me, standing there with my hand still on the closed laptop, that I have just spoken four true sentences that together build a perfect public reason to spend two months and a great deal of the company's money doing up the one building in the city with a basement in it where I am scheduled to die, and that I built the reason so fluently I could not feel the join between the part of me that wants the room full of witnesses and the part of me that wants one room kept dark. I never once had to lie. I just kept the room. She told me that an hour ago, fond, patient, and I am already doing it. I am already a woman with a true reason.

Adam comes in. He does not turn the lights on, which means he wants this to be the kind of conversation you have in the dark, and he sets the prototype down on the desk between us, deliberate, the worn case with the ghost of the scratched T catching what little light there is, and he says, "You hate that studio."

"I don't."

"You do. You've told me a hundred times. You said it smelled of the worst two years of your life. You wouldn't go to the leaving party. You sent Damien." He is not accusing. He is reading me the way I read a wire I do not trust, slow, hand over hand. "And now it's eleven at night and you're spending a fortune to lovingly restore it for a documentary you've been dodging for a month. So." He stops. He looks at the prototype, then at me. "Help me understand."

And this is what I cannot tell him, that the woman he is engaged to hated that studio because it is where she watched a junior designer build the only true thing Halcyon ever made, and that she is doing it up now because somewhere under the founder's pulse she is planning to bring that junior back to it one last time, and that I am the junior, and I am also, now, the founder, and I cannot untangle which of us reached for the chequebook because we both did, at the same instant, for opposite reasons that arrive at the same dark room.

So I do the only thing left. I tell him a true thing that is not the truth, which is the whole craft of this body, the craft I am trying not to learn.

"I'm tired of being a myth, Adam." The cello cracks a little, on purpose, and under the purpose, real. "Everyone wants the flash of insight. Petra wants the flash of insight. The board wants it on a slide. And it didn't happen like that. It happened in a horrible cold room over fourteen months and nobody who was in that room got their name on anything. I want to stand in it again before they make it into a set. Is that allowed?"

It is the closest I have come, since I woke up inside her, to saying it out loud. It is so close that my own breath stops on the back of it, waiting to see if he hears the name under the words.

He hears something. Not the name. But something. He keeps his eyes on me in the river-dark, and his hand drifts, the way it drifts when he is upset, to the prototype on the desk, and he turns it over once with his thumb, over the place where the T is, and he says, quietly, "You've sounded like her all day. Do you know that? Since the cameras. You sound like the person who made this."

Something goes out from under me, quietly, a stair that is not there. I put both palms flat on the cold glass, the anchor, and I count the room to keep from answering with my whole life. One desk. One dark window with the wrong smile in it if I look, which I will not. One man who loved me first and does not know it. One small worn light he carries that has my real name carved into the back of it by my own frightened hand with the point of a compass, the week I first took it home.

"I should get home," I say, instead of everything. "You should too. It's late."

He nods. He picks the prototype back up, over the heart, and he goes, and at the door he stops, the way he always stops, the people-pleaser who is, slowly, growing the spine to ask the question, and he does not ask it, not yet, he just says, "Don't stay all night," and then the carpet takes his footsteps, and the lift takes him down, and I am alone in Cosima's office with the closed laptop and the unsent email inside it, and I do not open it. I cannot look at it again tonight. I am too tired, and tired is the one thing I cannot afford to be, because tired is hers.

I go home to the glass apartment. Pim will not come out from under the bed. I lie down in Cosima's bed in Cosima's dark with the city burning soft and orange below, and I do the thing I have been putting off since the mirror this morning, because I am afraid of what is on the other side of it.

I fall asleep.

And I dream, and the dream is not mine.

I am standing in the riverside studio, the old one, the cold one, but it is years younger, the paint not yet peeling, and I am holding a cup of coffee I would never drink, the espresso, bitter and right, and I am looking down through a glass partition at a junior designer bent over a tablet at a desk on the floor below, a small dark-haired woman who does not know she is being watched, who is talking softly to a paper grid taped to the desk, who reaches out and adjusts one square of light on a screen and goes still, the particular stillness of a person who has just made something work for the first time, and I feel, watching her, a thing I have no word for in my own life, a thing that is not envy and is past envy, a clean cold wanting, the want of a hand for a thing that is not its own and will be, the want that does not see a person down there at all, only an unsigned drawing left out on a desk, only a room with one quiet thing in it that everything else depends on, only the part you pull. And I think, in the dream, in a voice that is not my voice, in the voice that has been learning to speak under my breastbone all day, oh, there she is. There's the real one. We'll want to keep her where I can find her.

I wake up in the dark with the taste of an espresso I never drank in my mouth and my own two hands held up in front of my face in the orange light, turning slowly, the way you turn a thing over to find the catch, and I am looking at them the way the dream looked at the junior, fond, cold, owning, and I cannot tell, lying there, which of us just woke up.

And then I hear it. Not the office this time. Here. Down the hall, in the dark of the glass apartment where he has hidden under the bed from this body since I came home, Pim begins to scream, and the screaming is not coming toward me, the way a frightened animal runs to the nearest door. It is coming at me. The dog has come out from under the bed. The dog is in the bedroom doorway, a pale shape rigid in the orange light, screaming at the bed, at the thing in the bed, and I am the only thing in the bed, and I am holding up my own two hands, and I still cannot tell which of us he can smell.