Later that afternoon, when the sun hung too low in the sky to aggravate Linda's sunburn, they took a short walking tour of campus. Seth seemed genuinely interested when they crossed over the train tracks on the walking bridge and Linda showed him the tall towers where she'd lived during her freshman and sophomore years. "Must have felt like living in the projects," he said.
They also walked past the student center and the library with its small pond out front and the maze of concrete walkways intersecting each other. She pointed to the great big gray concrete battleship of a building where the Psych department had been housed, where she worked part time at the dream lab. "I've had a few dreams you've been in," Seth said.
Linda double-taked when she heard that. "Really? What was I doing?"
"Being beautiful, mostly. We were swimming together in a lake, kind of like the one we were at today. Except the trees were more tropical, and they hung lower over the water. The water was warm too, almost too warm, like bath water…"
Linda stopped dead in her tracks, gazing at him in awe.
Seth had walked ahead of her a few steps, still talking, until he realized she had stopped. He turned around, looked at her and let out a short, nervous laugh. "What?" he asked.
"It's nothing," Linda said, trying to appear nonchalant, rushing to catch up with him.
They were walking toward the edge of campus, into town.
"It's not nothing," Seth said. "For a second, you looked like you just saw a ghost."
"No, it was just a déjà vu," Linda continued. "Hey, we can go to this really neat record store and look around if you want."
"A déjà vu about what?"
"Do you really want to know?"
Seth blinked, then motioned to her with upturned palms. "Yes, I do."
Linda took in a deep breath. "I had the exact same dream," she said. She told him about how she'd been lucid during it and that it had all been recorded on Geraldine's pad. All during her little speech, she monitored Seth's reaction, waiting for him to recoil in horror, or at least disbelief.
He just nodded. "It means we should be together. Do you know that when Indians have a dream, they have to go do the thing in real life the first chance they get? Like if they…I don't know, dream about riding their horse nude past all of the tepees, then the next day they'd have to do it."