Dream d898-s: Rebar and Open Sky

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road bent east and the trees fell away behind me, replaced by something harder and more deliberate. Scaffolding rose on both sides - raw steel pipes clamped into grids, plywood hoarding painted with permit numbers no one would ever read. Lano walked ahead of me with his nose low to the pavement, reading the ground the way I used to read schematics.

The lot to my left had been cleared down to subsoil. I could see the orange chalk lines marking footings, and the rebar waiting in bundles, still tied with wire, not yet bent. There was a quality to it I recognized but couldn't immediately name - the quality of a problem reduced to its load-bearing elements. The Student's workshop had been layered, branching, everything connected to everything else. Here there was only what would carry weight.

Dust hung in the air. Somewhere beyond the hoarding I heard the low grind of an excavator, the beep of something reversing. I couldn't see the machinery but I felt its work in the ground underfoot - a small rhythmic shudder, regular as a heartbeat.

Lano stopped at a fence post where someone had hung a hard hat, white with a red stripe. He looked at it for a moment, then at me. "Cimiento," he said, and walked on.

Foundation. I wrote the word in the notebook without fully understanding why. The notebook was heavy now - everything from the six before the Student, and everything from the Student, pressed into pages that had started to warp at the edges from being opened so often in different kinds of air. I had stopped trying to organize it. The weight was the organization.

The white crane passed high and to the right, angled south, unhurried. It appeared and disappeared above the edge of a scaffold tower. I watched the empty sky where it had been.

The scaffolding changed as I walked. Some frames were fully planked and sheeted. Some were just bare pipes with nothing between them and the sky. Through those open sections I could see the interiors of buildings being stripped back or built up - I could not always tell which. The work was the same either way. Get down to what holds. Build from there.

The road curved and I lost sight of Lano for a moment, then found him again where the lane opened onto a broad cleared site, the soil raw and orange-red, the sight lines long. He sat on the edge of a concrete footing and waited. Beyond him, the district continued. Somewhere in it, ground was being cleared.