Dream d463-s: Whoever Stops, Stops

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer had set up the projector in a courtyard between two buildings, aimed at a white wall that had once been the side of a pharmacy. You could still see the ghost of the lettering, APOTHEEK, under the paint. The courtyard was open on both ends, a passage between two streets, and people walked through it the way people walk through courtyards at night, quickly or slowly, alone or not, without looking up.

Roberto sat on the projector, which was balanced on a stack of milk crates. He was not adjusting the focus this time. He was watching the courtyard entrances, tracking each person who entered from either end. His head moved with the steadiness of someone counting.

Lano was beside me on the cobblestones, which were damp from an earlier rain and caught the projection's light in small scattered reflections. He sat upright, more alert than usual, his attention split between the images on the wall and the strangers moving through the space. His body was between me and the passage, the way he positions himself when a space has more than one exit.

The strip played. The ceremony fire filled the pharmacy wall, eight feet wide, and a man on a bicycle rode through the beam without slowing. His shadow crossed the fire for a half second, then he was gone. The underground entrance appeared, and two women stopped at the far end of the courtyard and watched for four images before one of them said something and they kept walking.

The Dreamer stood in the opposite corner, smoking, which I had not seen them do before. The ember moved in the dark like a slow orange punctuation mark.

"This is the real test," they said. "Not the bench, not the cinema, not the stairwell. This. No one is here because they chose to see it. No one paid. No one was invited. The work has to earn every second of attention from strangers who have somewhere else to be."

The Wireman's hands appeared on the wall and a boy, maybe twelve, stopped with his hands in his jacket pockets and watched. Roberto's head tracked him. The boy stayed for the hands, stayed for the coast road bend, stayed for the crowd from behind. Then the borrowed image came, the stranger's doorway from another traveler's sequence, and the boy shifted his weight and stayed for that too.

The Dreamer's cigarette stopped moving.

"Five images," they said, quietly. "From a stranger, in a courtyard, with no context. If it holds for five, it holds."

The boy walked on. The strip kept playing to the empty wall and the wet cobblestones and whoever might come next. Roberto climbed down from the crates and walked to the spot where the boy had stood and sat there, in the projection, letting the images play over him, filling the space the viewer had left.

Lano lay down on the cobblestones. The courtyard smelled like rain and cigarette smoke and distance.