Dream d224-s: Later, at the railing:

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the canal was there.

Not a garden canal, not the soft-edged waterways I had walked beside in earlier nights where reflections bloomed impossible colors. This was a city canal: straight-sided, brick-lined, the water dark and practical, holding the sky the way working water holds things -- without sentiment. Houseboats along one bank. A bicycle leaned against an iron railing. The kind of morning that asks nothing of you and offers nothing back except itself.

Lano ran ahead, his white coat vivid against the grey of the embankment, and found the Wireman before I did.

He was standing at the railing looking at the water, and Lano went to him the way water finds its level -- directly, without hesitation, as if arriving somewhere already known. The Wireman turned and looked at me with the patience of someone who has been waiting a reasonable amount of time and has not found it unreasonable. He was fully solid. The coat, the hands, the specific posture of a person who stands with authority in the physical world because they have spent a long time earning that authority. He reached into a bag at his feet and brought out something wrapped in cloth.

He set it on the railing between us.

The cloth fell away and there was a panel -- a flat rectangle of layered material, each layer contributing to a whole that was more than their sum. I touched the surface and felt the strata: one material bonded to another, to another, each chosen for what it gave the thing above it. The topmost surface was smooth in the way that surfaces become smooth after they have been worked at for a long time, not polished smooth but settled smooth, worn to its final state. At the edges the layers were visible in cross-section and I counted them with my thumb the way you count the rings in wood to read the years.

Lano sniffed it once, then sat. His attention returned to the Wireman with a satisfaction that said: yes, this one too.

The crane bird was perched on the railing further along the canal. I noticed her the way you notice something that was always there. She was watching the panel with the focused intelligence she brought to all the Wireman's objects.

I thought of 回 -- return, the tone that curved back on itself -- and understood it differently now against this object. The layers did not progress. They returned. Each one came back to the center with something added, each pass through the material depositing what it had learned. The smoothness of the surface was not a beginning. It was a record of all the returning.

Lano said, almost to himself: "Mira."

Look. I looked.

---

Layers bonded to layers. I keep thinking about cross-sections -- the way the edge of a thing reveals its history.

The crane bird's word: 回. Return. I had thought it meant going back to where you started. But the panel shows me something different. To return is to pass through the same place carrying what the previous pass deposited. The surface that results is not the first layer or the last. It is the conversation between all of them.

The Wireman said nothing. He put the cloth back in the bag and stood with me at the railing for a while, watching the canal, and that was the whole of it.