A long sleep. A dream.

The morning had passed in a slow heave of hours. I stared with fixed eyes, as if in the throes of a fever, into the stack of documents that lay on my desk in front of me. My hand slowly rotated the knob that raises and lowers the voltage of the lamps. I watched the shadows leap across the yellowed page. A man hung by his neck from a tree; there were other men standing around him, they were facing the newspaperman's camera.

On my lunch hour I went to the gardens and sat on a bench high on the hill and looked out over the Great Hall and into the city. Everywhere everything was in the midst of some sort of motion. The city vibrated and hummed with cars and people; the grass and the trees moved with the push of the wind. The clouds, by that same hand, slowly and silently drifted across the pale sky casting shadows. I watched them, long like wicked fingers running across the skeleton of a building that was either being raised or demolished. The water in the fountains jumped and dove, it splashed and spun and scattered about its basins, it overflowed them and splattered across the walkway. On the limbs of the swaying trees groups of little birds sang and their beaks opened and closed as their heads darted about and they fluffed their wings and pranced on their talons.

I could hear music bubbling in all of this motion. It was bizarre and solemn. It was a dizzying convergence of events. There were bells ringing far away and dogs barking. I could not tell whether it came from the earth or the air, but as I listened I grew ever more tired. My eyelids began to feel heavy; the food in my stomach warmed me. The sun touched my forehead lightly.

I rose from where I had been sitting and found a shaded place beneath a twisted tree. A bed of leaves, orange and yellow, muffled my steps and the bare branches above bent and danced slowly. I removed my jacket and folded it and lay down on it as a pillow and watched them for a bit. But soon my eyes were shut and I was sleeping, and I dreamt.

I was following a woman up a set of spiral stairs in an opera house. I had to hurry past other people descending the stairs, twisting my body and shoulders to get by. She climbed on, much faster than I through the flow of bodies, and reached the balcony, where she disappeared behind a door. I struggled up the steep steps, clutching the golden railing and pushing through mobs of people. I finally came to the balcony and opened the door. There she was, crouched behind a rack of costumes, a prop mask over her face. I could see her eyes searching me through the hangers and the scarves. Her hair fell about the mask and crowned it with a golden bow. A harsh yellow light flickered in the corner of the room.

Then her hand hung limply in mine. It lay still, lifeless, cold like the blood had ceased flowing. I tried to speak, but my heart hesitated, halting at the heaviness of each word. And I knew not even what words were to come. I stared deeply through the eyeholes, at the little light that reflected from those black wells. Something burned through me, but I could not form it into words. I tried to speak but I coughed dry air.

And then things abruptly shifted, as happens in dreams. I was no longer among the costumes and masks with my golden-haired girl. It was a common dream I had stumbled into, one that recurs often, that I have almost come to be able to manipulate. I am walking through an ancient city, spires of cathedrals and stone buildings surround me. It is twilight, I don't know if it is morning or evening, but I am alone wandering empty streets. The dark is enough that I have to concentrate and pick my steps as not to trip across curbs or run clear into benches. There are no people about, the city is quiet and measureless in its inanition. I feel like I am a child alone at home for the first time in a big dark house.

I search the tops of the roofs and the faces of the buildings, squinting my eyes through the black at the windows of the apartments, looking for any sign that people still lived there. I hear wind rustling through the trees that I cannot see and I am so distracted by the silence that I nearly stumble over the railing and into the river. There is always a body of water, and I shiver in my dream for I know instinctively I have come to the Lethe. And there is always the dilemma of how to cross. Sometimes there is a gondola and an oarsman. Sometimes there is an empty pier and I have to swim. Sometimes I turn around and keep searching the vacant streets I've tread again and again, so as not to drink from those forgetful waters.

But today I was not to confront this. I was shaken awake under my guardian limbs by a siren. I sat straight up and for a moment could not discern where I was. Then my eyes settled on the great glass jaw of the Great Hall, sprawled there like a gaping whale on a pebble beach. Everyone was gone from the gardens, it was long past the lunch hour. And the city itself had ceased to shiver with the manic motion that had lulled me into that long sleep. I wrapped my arms around my knees and breathed deeply, the air was cool and crisp and it filled my chest and felt clean. It was good to sleep and dream, it was good to be there by myself in the gardens a moment more. I sat and watched the afternoon sun creep slowly across all I had come to know as the world. A siren, a single pitch, sustained over the calm scene. I knew that soon I would have to get back.