After the flood.

After the events of the flood and the dream of the masked girl the qualities of the Great Hall began to leave a remarkably different impression on me. The long corridors, deep in shadows, the luminous vault of the library in the afternoon, the lunch time walks through the gardens... they all seemed to flatten out, to cease to draw me into that same intoxicated gaze through which I had up until that point observed the various dimensions of this place. As I used to imagine the building as a body, teeming with its corporeal components, the people like the flow of blood in the veins and the walls and rooms the tissue and organs, now when I sat on a clear afternoon on my bench on the terraced footpaths and looked out across the gardens and the Hall and the city, I instead saw something more akin to an ant farm. The glass wall of the library seemed only the small frame in the wooden stand, set to expose the chambers and the tunnels of the colony, to allow the intrepid observer access to the hidden world, where the workers and scouts moved about in their implicit repetitive motions.

I remember not so long ago I would wake up in the morning and instantly, abruptly, a procession of ideas, wishes, vague hopes and goals, would flit about, would rise and turn and shift before my half woken eyes. I would try briefly to trace each to its origin, the secret desire that came before me in abstract terms, in symbols fixed in my memory that related to my interior life in ways that I had yet to untangle. They were not yet distilled into words but still they existed, and something ominous and pressing was behind them. In them I became aware of an approaching dread that I had woken back into my own skin, my own life, that I was doomed today to repeat the doom of yesterday and all that saved me were these impalpable images that hinted at a second life, another field of possibility that lived beside me, running parallel to my own particular stream. And throughout the day these hopes and floating possibilities colored everything before my eyes as much as the sun did, or the little lamps that always hung above my head.

Now each morning I found myself empty, alone, in a new and vacant world, swept clean, as if the dream I just woke from, instead of opening up a portal to my dark, interior world, now only obliterated the self of the previous day, left no shards to trace. I wondered where all I wanted went. I sat at my desk and thought of the last year here in the Hall and all that I had imagined and come to discover, how each year circles are added to my sphere, my knowledge and my intuition grow... but I felt my hopes had halted. I didn't know who to reach out to, I didn't know if there was anyone to reach out towards, or if I had missed something, lost something...

But in losing that undefined thing, I had come to find these words, and these words I must sustain to sustain myself. And I close my eyes and whisper to the girl in my dream, "These are the words of my recollection that I am using to fasten you in my memory, to find and still myself in the center of motion. I cannot clamor and grasp for things that have passed, flail in my sorrow for voices and faces that have faded away. All that has passed is now a vast landscape of impressions, a skyline, a rooftop, a bridge, a mouth... I can only wait in mute patience for some spark to flare like when a match is struck in the dark and I see something of myself in the shadowy eyes in front of me. I had come such a distance from that point, I can hardly remember when I was there. But I can organize my impressions, what lingers, I can see them as songs and I can make houses out of words and places for all of them to populate and they can live with me, in me, changed as they would be, but alive, and I too could live."

And it was at this time, when I was losing my hope for anything beyond these walls, when I was ceasing to remember the dream of the girl, when the majesty and the terror of the Great Hall were diminishing and I began to feel myself wavering like a dry leaf caught in the wind, only tenuously holding on to its branch, that I got my first promotion.

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.