Dream d806-s: Two Chairs and the Supper Bell

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Student had built our table.

Not the eating table, though he had built that too, bolted from salvaged brackets and wired with a matrix of pressure sensors that logged who sat where. The table where we sat was made of three workbenches pushed together, and the bells above them were his doing. Every workstation had one, tuned to a different frequency, and when the great supper bell rang from the courtyard he flinched each time as if caught.

Lano was already there, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the narrow gap between benches. He did not speak. He watched the Student trace routing diagrams on the glass with a grease pencil, twenty seven branching paths, each one labeled in a different color. The Student was twenty something or fifty. Age did not matter for builders who forget to live inside what they build.

I brought my notebook. The worn pages held entries I had copied from six different teachers, each in a different hand. The Wireman wrote about artifacts carrying weight their maker never intended. I turned to that page and left it open beside the Student's elbow. He looked at it while drawing his twenty eighth branch, and his pencil slowed.

Lano shifted position. Moved from the floor to the workbench to the windowsill, never far from either of us. A white crane appeared at the window behind him, tall and patient, watching without judgment.

The supper bell rang again. Through the glass wall I could see the courtyard, the same courtyard where I had first sat across from him when neither of us spoke for three days. Shared rooms. A schedule that held us when we could not hold ourselves. Strangers at long tables saying things that were true because no one had asked them to perform. I recognized this boy at that table. I recognized the particular architecture of a person who builds rooms to avoid the floor.

He was not lost because his tools were wrong. He was lost because no one had sat with him while he used them. Until now.

Lano stood on the workbench and made a sound I had not heard before. A single clear note.

The Student looked up. He set down the grease pencil.

Venganza, Lano said. But he did not sound angry. He sounded like someone naming a door that had been open all along.