Dream d777-s: His Hands Were My Old Maps

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the morning light came into the waystation courtyard at a low angle, the kind that makes shadows longer than the things that cast them. I had been there two days already. I knew the schedule. I knew which bench was quietest before the meal. I knew the smell of the place: woodsmoke and something herbal from the kitchen, and underneath it the faint iron smell of old pipes.

He was at the table in the far corner. Young. Younger than I remembered being, though I had been that age once. His hands were already moving when I saw him, fingers running wire through a small housing, connecting two boards with a ribbon cable, and around him on the table: twenty-seven tools laid out in order of use, and sheets of paper covered in branching lines. Routing trees. Orchestration diagrams. The kind of structures that take real skill to draw.

I stopped walking.

Lano had reached him before I did. The dog circled the table once, sat beside the young man's feet, and looked back at me. Just looked.

I know that look.

I stood at the edge of the courtyard and watched for a moment. The hands never stopped. A wire here. A connection soldered. A new diagram started before the old one was finished. The eyes were somewhere else entirely. Not on the work. Not on the courtyard. Somewhere the hands could not follow.

I knew the pattern. Not the tools. Not the skill, which was real. The pattern underneath. The one I had carried for years before I could name it: building rooms because entering the room you are already in is unbearable. Making systems because a system has a purpose and a purpose is a reason and a reason keeps certain questions from being heard.

I had filled notebooks with that kind of silence. I had drawn those diagrams.

I walked to the table. I did not speak. I pulled out the empty chair across from him, sat down, picked up a spare wire from the pile near his left hand, and began to work alongside him. Two people at a table. Tools between us. Morning light on the diagrams.

He did not look up. He did not stop.

But after a moment, his shoulders dropped a half-inch.

Lano said, quietly: "Espejo."

Mirror.

I held the wire and did not speak and let the morning do what I could not yet do, which was be patient with myself, at twenty-seven tools, still building.