Dream d1565-s: Hour Without a Photograph

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I noticed the absence before I could name what was absent.

We were an hour onto an exposed terrace of pale rock, a wide shelf of the hillside open to the late afternoon, the light going long and amber across it, the kind of light the Dreamer had stopped to catch a thousand times. The kind of light that, for as long as I had walked with him, had always been accompanied by a small sound: the soft mechanical click of the shutter, once, twice, the pause while he turned a dial, the click again. That sound had been the metronome of every evening of our journey.

It was not there. For a full hour it had not been there. The terrace was the most photographable ground we had crossed in days, gold on stone, our own shadows thrown thirty feet, and the Dreamer had not raised the camera once. The silence where the shutter used to be was the loudest thing on the hillside.

I looked at the others. They had noticed too. I could tell by the way no one mentioned it. The Weather Reader walked with her eyes carefully forward. The Builder studied the rock with more attention than the rock deserved. We had all heard the absence of the click and we had all, without conferring, agreed to say nothing about it, because to name it would be to make it real, and we were not ready for it to be real.

For so long the camera had been how the Dreamer touched the world. He did not speak much; he photographed. The frame was his sentence. An hour without a photograph was an hour without him speaking at all, and we walked inside that silence the way you walk past a closed door behind which someone you love is sitting very still.

Lano felt it too. She kept dropping back from the Dreamer's heel to walk beside me, looking up, as if to ask why the man had gone so quiet in the only language he used. I had no answer for her. I put my hand on her head. We went on.

The light reached its richest gold. The terrace lay open and unrecorded. The camera hung at the Dreamer's hip, lowered, full of film and pointed at nothing, and the click did not come, and the not-coming of it was the whole event of the day, the loudest thing that happened, the thing none of us would say.

We crossed the gold terrace in the silence where the shutter used to be, and let it stand.