Dream d3399-s: Chalk and Distance

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the wind at the top of the tower smelled of chalk and distance. I had climbed the stairs before the keeper left, and Lano had climbed them with me, her small white shape tapping ahead on the stone treads, unhurried.

From the summit the road ran straight south until it joined the sky. No figure moved on it. The surveyor was below somewhere, checking the outer course of the wall. The relay clerk sat at the small table near the arch, writing something that had nothing to do with me or the notebook under my arm.

I held the notebook the way you hold a letter you have already carried too long. It was not heavy but it had weight. I did not open it. I had not opened it at any of the seven nights of this residency, and I did not open it now. The road offered no reader. The tower offered no hand.

Lano put her front paws on the low parapet and looked south. Her ears were still. After a moment she came back and pressed against my leg and sat.

The distant reader was somewhere in the lower town or in the memory of the lower town; I could not tell. The keeper had gone to tend the inner passage and left a lamp oil smell that lingered in the stairwell. None of them came to the roof.

The condition of this place was known to me now in the way that seven nights makes things known: the sound it makes before dawn, the way the moss grows wetter on the east side, the fact that the road is always empty from this height even when someone is on it, because distance turns a person into nothing remarkable.

I set the notebook on the parapet beside me. The chalk smell rose again. Below, the surveyor crossed from the outer course to the inner, unhurried, noting nothing yet. The relay clerk turned a page. Lano's nose twitched once at the wind.

The road did not ask for the notebook. The tower did not ask for it. The place went on in its dormant way, holding its seven nights of witness in whatever form places hold things.

I picked the notebook up again. The road stayed empty. The distance stayed the distance it had always been.

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