Dream d3037-s: Eight Places Laid Down Twice

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat at the table in the house in Brackenbrook on the fourth night of seven, and the two books were open in front of me, both turned to the same place, my hands pressing flat against the pages.

The first book held what had been written from the road, before any doorway was crossed. The second held what was written after. I had carried the first book for months before I understood it was only one of two.

Brackenbrook holds 128 places in its record. Of those, 49 have been entered and written from inside. The other 79 are names and numbers: some cold, some lit and working, none of them yet crossed into. Of those 79, 33 had been named in the record as though the name were the same thing as the room.

The eight places I laid side by side that night were not chosen for being wrong. They were chosen because I had written about them from a distance and then gone in. Six I had described as partly ruined. Three of those six, when entered, were in repair, two of them recently. The other three were ruined differently from how I had written: not in the roofs but in the floors, not at the walls but in the fixtures, specific failures my distance had made general.

Lano came and settled against my foot. She had been walking the room since I sat down, and now she stopped and pressed close and was still.

I put a mark in the second book beside each place where the two accounts disagreed. I did not correct the first book. Both accounts now stand there, the distant and the near, neither one replaced. The first records what the road shows. The second records what the room shows. They are two accounts of one place and both are true to the conditions of their making.

Rurik had come in through the lower window earlier in the evening. He was on the sill, amber eyes moving between me and the wall above the table. He watched the space above the books, not the books themselves.

Of the 33 places named aloud in the record and never entered, I could not say tonight what they would show. That was the point that arrived quietly at the table: those places were not merely unverified, they were unwritten in the second sense. Whatever I had set down about them from the road was all there was, and it was the kind of writing that disagreed with itself once you opened the door.

Lano shifted and put her chin on my foot.

The two books lay open. My hands moved across the pages, reading what was there, not yet writing anything new. Four nights remained in Brackenbrook. Where the accounts touched, they disagreed, and the disagreement was not a failure. It was the record.

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