Dream d464-s: Parked With the Engine Idling

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we were in the back of a van, parked on a gravel shoulder somewhere I did not recognize. The engine was running. I could feel it through the metal floor, a low vibration that made the images on the van walls tremble at a frequency just below visible. The Dreamer had taped the full strip to the interior walls, starting from the left of the rear doors and running all the way around, past the wheel wells, over the ribbed metal panels, ending on the right side of the doors. A complete circuit.

Roberto was in the driver's seat, paws on the steering wheel, looking through the windshield at a field that went flat to the horizon. He was not driving. He was watching what was ahead with the patience of someone who has no intention of going there yet.

Lano lay on a moving blanket in the center of the van floor, the kind with the blue and grey stripes that every rented van has. His body was relaxed in a way I had not seen since the workshop. Not guarding. Not tracking. Just warm on wool, breathing, letting the engine vibrate through him.

The Dreamer sat cross-legged near the rear doors, which were open. Behind them, the gravel, then the field, then the sky. The light came in flat and even.

"This is how most people will see it," they said. "Not in a cinema. Not in a courtyard. In the back of whatever they have. On a laptop in a kitchen. On a phone on a train. In conditions you cannot control and did not choose. The work has to survive being portable."

I stood and turned slowly, reading the strip around the walls. The ceremony fire near the hinge of the left door. The underground entrance over the wheel well where the metal buckled slightly and the image warped with it. The Wireman's hands on the flat panel above the window to the cab, where Roberto's silhouette was visible through the glass. The coast road bend on the right door, so that when the doors closed, the bend would fold in half, and when they opened, the road would straighten.

"Roberto," the Dreamer said.

He turned from the windshield and looked back through the cab window at the strip. Through that small rectangle of glass, he could see exactly three images. The Wireman's hands, the coast road, and between them, the borrowed crowd from behind.

"That is the view from the front," the Dreamer said. "Three images through a window. If those three work alone, the rest will hold."

Roberto turned back to the windshield. The field had not changed.

Lano rolled onto his side on the moving blanket. The engine idled. The doors stayed open, and the strip waited on the walls, portable and patient, ready for the doors to close and the van to go wherever it was going.