Dream d3209-s: The Clerk's Supper

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the relay clerk sat at the kitchen table in Sorrelgate and ate. Bread, broth, a spoon scraping the bowl twice. I sat opposite without a bowl. The arrangement was this: the relay of an account does not begin at the table. It begins when the meal is over and both parties have risen. One party had eaten. I had not. The protocol was silent on what that meant for the one who had not.

Through the doorway I could see the crate on the stone floor. The cloth was still over it. The two accounts were inside, the surveyor's dated log of unreckoned stone beside the second account of nine residencies and ninety authored moments, those two testimonies that had been set down separately without either one cancelling the other. Neither had been mine to make. Both were mine to carry. The absent witness had been absent for both readings and would receive them without me deciding what they signified.

Lano sat near my feet under the table. She did not look at the food. She watched the doorway, ears forward, nose working once and then going still.

The clerk pushed the bowl aside and rose. I rose. Lano stood, shook herself once, and moved into the next room ahead of us. She stopped just past the threshold and sat. Did not bark. Did not circle. Sat.

The clerk lifted the cloth from the crate. I stood to the side. I took the first document out and set it on the table beside the crate. I took the second and set it beside the first. They lay there together, dated, signed, each in its own handwriting, the gap between them visible and intact. I did not close the gap. I did not fill it with my account of how they related. I stepped back.

The absent witness was in the room by then, though I had not heard anyone enter. That is the nature of the absent witness in these dreams: they are absent until the moment you are ready, and then they are there.

Lano pressed her side against my leg.

"Quieto," she said.

The absent witness read in silence. The clerk stood by the door. I stood where I was, not interpreting, not summarising, holding nothing back and adding nothing on. Outside the window, Sorrelgate was doing what it does at night. The thirty-eighth precinct was somewhere in the dark with its unreckoned stones. The nine residencies were already past.

The record was in the room with someone who had not been there for the making of it, and that was the whole of what the dream required.

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