Liam’s dream did not leave him unmoved the next day. He walked his small house as if trekking through a mile of morning wilderness. An earache did not precede him to waking, but a sense of pressure, first in his head and then in the walls, stayed with him past breakfast, and lastly superimposed itself over the prairie landscape while cycling to work.
He came into the break room to find a couple of his Korean overlords. Both wore lab coats and stood before the bulletin board. A needle-pointed compass for calibrating aspect ratios was shared between them. Their discussion was muffled, and conveyed the impression that it may have erupted, occasionally, into contention. Seeing the employee enter the room, they speedily departed it.
The arrival poured a cup of coffee from a thermos and inspected one of the few announcements decorating the bulletin board. Both ends of the flyer had curled around a pushpin like a scroll, and whether because of the paper’s conspicuous color, or because it was judged to be a piece of low hanging fruit, one side of it was unfurled and its information perused:
An attractive young woman offered her services as an artist’s model. A splotchy photocopied image was furnished, although little in these failed gradations held allure. Her visage was punctured at intervals: doubtless measurements taken by the technicians. Moisture from their hands had curled the announcement, and the two men must have conferenced over the picture considerable minutes before the employee appeared on the scene.
The pleasant face on the flyer resonated, but its admirer could not place the woman in any of the settings where he might have encountered her: She had not been a student, and surely not a model, but possibly someone passed in the produce aisle of the grocery store. None of these guesses won conviction.
The laborer was guarded throughout the morning, but not so thoroughly as he may have supposed. During a quieter interval on the factory floor, and while he worked with minimal distraction wrapping tool parts to be packed in a crate, a soft tap came to his shoulder. He turned, expecting to find a foreman, but instead confronted a ten-foot tall spool of bubble-plastic, which had rolled across the cement floor to bump him.
Liam did not jump from the gentle collision, yet shivered as if a glass of ice water had been thrown over him. The cylindrical object crept fifty feet to reach him from the opposite wall without assistance, and the floor did not indicate a grade.
Straying from his workstation to deal with the situation, a reverberating bang drew his head around. There the break room door was seen to ease, suggesting a reaction to whatever force threw it open.
A current of air was likely the means by which the door slammed and a towering roll of bubble plastic launched its assault from the storage bin. Drafts gained license to enlarge their territory and strengthen without the natural baffles of standing machinery; and if the forced-air furnace or an exterior door was not responsible for these effects, then another cause would need to be supplied.
Liam returned to the break room and poured a second cup of coffee. Reposing in a chair, his inaction lapsed into a vacant stare. Vibrations penetrated his cheekbones and nasal cavities, and these oscillations were likened to more opening and shutting doors originating from the other end of the building. Whatever approached dissolved these boundaries in turn, and soon it became the very atmosphere about him. His mind navigated these crowding molecules and reached from within their straits for formations of looser arrangement. Here imagination sought to envision a kinder meadow or field, but no sense could be enlisted to realism.
Howard stepped in, unbeknownst. “Are you okay?”
Liam stirred from his daymare. The look on his face was doubtless alarming. “What a fuss to slam so many doors in reaching your cup of coffee,” he complained.
The Native American was a slow read, and his expression was often one of puzzlement. Here he moaned and shuffled. “I came from the plant floor, and passed through no other doorway but the one belonging to this room, which stands open.”
The coworker showed little reaction, and perhaps fired off his question to deflect from his scattered-ness. In any case, the question was forgotten in the moment it was uttered. He swallowed a jolt of hot coffee.
Nothing of the woman’s face on the flyer could be seen due to the clamshell tendency of the paper bearing it to conceal it.
Howard was borderline telepathic most days. “Perhaps you recognize her from a picture at the post office,” said he.
“Do you think you could find her?”
“Find who?“
“That woman’s photograph makes her resemble a cadaver. And her innocent smile makes you think she may have fallen victim to unfortunate circumstances.”
“Do you imagine that a Lakota skinwalker carried her off to The BadLands? And I would be able to track her whereabouts because I am Native American?” Howard either chuckled or sighed, yet proposed, as an interested party, “I could go down there and make a show of it. Press my ear to the dirt. Hold a feather to the wind. Perhaps you’ve encountered her in a dream?”
Liam confessed, “My dreams possess genuine feelings for loved ones, surely, but I do not understand the strangers who intrude on them, or the unfamiliar locations. There is also a strange mixture of outdoor and indoor environments.”
“Are you often a child in these dreams?”
“I am always a child in these dreams.”
The adjunct therapist explained, “When you were a child of our generation, you spent as much time outdoors as indoors, and less by choice since our parents locked us outside to play until dinnertime. Your confused settings in dreams may be a blended reality of these formative experiences. One may go further in reaching for psychological meaning, of course, where corrupted domestic scenes indicate insecurity about one’s station in the world. One might also see these revisitations to playgrounds in dreams as acts of unmasking, whereby the dirt you played in as a boy foreshadows your return to it in the grave.”
The coworker ranked these speculations. “That is a morbid view, unless you intend a pivot. My dreams—at least until this recent spate—have been too unmemorable to suppose they contain premonitions. In recent years, my movement in them is restricted to a bed, and this bed is moved from room to room to join the action—of which there is little. My perspective reflects my paralyzed state.”
Howard continued his analysis. “These intense, perceptual recollections are, perhaps, also from childhood. My parents used to drag me to different places as a kid, and I was left to my own entertainment in empty parts of strangers’ houses while they caught up on an acquaintance in another room. In these situations I stared, hours sometimes, out window screens, or at crockery in a china cabinet. I have nothing like this concentration as an adult.”
“Is the mind stumped for backdrops in dreams?” posed Liam. “Does it import from a data bank of templates to fill gaps?”
The friend was not of this mind. “These impressions, imprinted indelibly on the child’s recollection, are the only faithful reckonings of an inscrutable world, which our reacquaintance with these locations reveal whenever they recur in dreams. They are to remind us that utility consciousness, experienced in daylight during business hours, is the true illusion.”
(This interpretation did not fail to affect.)
“Perhaps this is what I am driving at when I visit a graveyard and enter into a blinking contest with headstones. It’s like I am staring at one side of a wall where I know there are two. Does that make sense?” (Here Liam might have been accused of striking a pose.) “Dreams sometimes (and many times) connect to terrain of previous dreams, and peculiarly terrains that are never brought to waking conscious, but are recalled faithfully, and in detail, at the moment of their recurrence in other dreams. Do you believe in past lives?”
“I have never found the idea of reincarnation compelling,” answered Howard. “It is unimaginative: a kind of purgatory where one is trapped in what is known rather than surrendering to what is unimaginable. The meaning of the universe cannot come down to rinse, lather, and repeat, ad infinitum. Even if the idea of folded space-time has logical simplicity on paper, adding nirvana to it, as a moral corrective or as a last ditch effort to get off the merry-go-round, does not improve the idea by much. Though desire may be seen as a shackle to endless desiring, it is also through desire that we seek desire’s cessation. Paradox is the shackle, not desire.”
Liam’s thinking did not stray so far into the woods. “An impossibly large mountain often appears in my dreams, even though I have little firsthand experience with mountains. I’ve never once felt vertigo seeing a mountain in a movie, yet this dream mountain is real and menacing in a way I do not understand.”
The friend set off in a new direction. “I’ve become addicted to Google Earth on my laptop computer, and fritter away hours zooming down and visiting locations across the globe. Whether finding a Toyota pickup truck on a desolate lot in Siberian, or fruitlessly scanning Mount Everest’s summit for frozen corpses, it is a treasure trove of inscrutable questions. Some six billion people inhabit this planet, and though one sees evidence of human habitation in broader strokes, as with cultivated fields, or in roadways where one makes an effort to find them, one sees very few people anywhere on Google Earth. It’s as if someone Photoshopped them out of the picture. If you go down to Google Street View, one does not increase the chances of seeing pedestrians by much.”
The listener injected, soberly, “I’ve heard that you could fit the entire population of the Earth into an area the size of Los Angeles. That would leave a lot of empty space a lot of the time.”
The storyteller, as was his custom, enlarged this idea. “The analogy is perhaps scalable to the empty space within atoms, but no one is suggesting that atoms lack purchase. I raise Google Earth because, strangely, I have found myself twice in Google Street View: once walking a sidewalk in Deadwood, and once standing in front of a hardware store in Minot. In both pictures, no one else is around, not even moving vehicles. I find this disconcerting, and entertain the possibility that I am solipsist who has no certain knowledge of the existence of others outside my mind.”
The coworker reasoned, “That is an easy conceit in South Dakota, where there is a peculiar scarcity of warm bodies.” He hesitated before communicating, “Early in my sleep disorder, I researched natural sources of melatonin. One day I rode into town to buy a bottle of tart red cherry juice, which is unsurpassed as a source of natural melatonin. I came across a pile of trash on the sidewalk on the way to the store, and would not have paid much attention to it except for an unopened canned good in its midst; the label faced away from me. On my return trip, I passed the same pile and was compelled to read the label. It was a can of pitted tart red cherries. I took it home with me.”
Howard thought this relevant. “Miracles may be nothing more than tidily arranged cans of tart cherries that are little appreciated except by those who grasp the genius in their placement.”
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