Dream d3267-s: The Arch Without Its Twin

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the stair climbed in a spiral too tight for two abreast, and Lano went up ahead of me, her nails ticking against the worn treads. The keeper waited on the landing above with a lamp already turned down; she had not climbed here to show us anything, only to be present when we arrived.

Through the tower window the bridge lay over the canal below. Its arch was clear against the night, the amber of a distant lamp catching the keystone. Beneath it the canal carried the bridge's shape - almost. There was a seam where the real arch ended and the reflected arch began, a thin dark line where the two did not quite complete each other. I had noted this before, in an earlier account. The seam was still there. I did not measure it.

The relay clerk stood beside me and said nothing. The surveyor was one flight below, not climbing. The distant reader was not here; that is the nature of the distant reader.

Lano pressed her nose to the window glass and made a small fog circle on it, then looked back at me. The keeper touched the wick of her lamp once, not adjusting, only touching.

The bridge went on without us. Boats might have passed beneath it in other hours; none passed now. The seam in the canal was a thing that would not close regardless of the hour or the witness. I wrote down: arch present, reflection present, seam as before. I did not write that the seam was wrong. It was what was here.

Below, on the quay, a heron stood on one leg in the amber dark and did not move. Whether it was the same heron as the last account I could not say. I put nothing about the heron in the record. Some presences are not for the record; they are simply in the picture.

Lano sighed against the glass, soft and brief.

The keeper brought the lamp to the sill. For a moment the reflection sharpened - bridge, and below the bridge its wavering twin - and the seam grew brighter, not smaller. Then the keeper moved the lamp back and the seam dimmed into ordinary dark.

We did not speak about what this meant. We climbed down the stair and the door of the tower closed behind us, and the bridge went on keeping its seam the way a place keeps anything: without effort, without explanation.

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