Dream d477-s: Between Departures

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we were working on a train platform at two in the morning. No trains were running. The Dreamer had found the place unlocked, the ticket booth shuttered, the overhead board blank except for a row of dashes where the next departure should have been. They had set up the editing table on the platform itself, a folding table borrowed from somewhere, placed directly under the yellow sodium lamps that lit the concrete in flat, shadowless planes.

The prints were weighted with small stones the Dreamer had collected from the rail bed. Without them, the draft that moved through the station would have scattered the sequence across the tracks.

Roberto walked the platform edge with the confidence of someone who understood the gap between the concrete and the rail. He moved in a straight line, never looking down, his body parallel to the drop, and at the far end he turned and walked back, as if measuring the platform's length against the sequence's length. Forty-four images. Perhaps sixty meters of concrete. He seemed to be calculating whether there was room.

Lano stayed close to the table, his body pressed against one of its legs, his ears tracking sounds I could not identify. Stations at night carry noise differently. Metal contracts in the cold. Something dripped in the tunnel beyond the platform's end. Lano heard all of it and dismissed most of it, but his ears kept returning to the tunnel, to the direction the trains would come from if trains were coming.

"I want to show you something about duration," the Dreamer said. They picked up two prints and held them apart, one in each hand, at arm's length. The ceremony fire on the left. The underground entrance on the right. "In the cinema, these were four seconds each. On the bar, they sat for an hour. Here, I am holding them for as long as my arms hold out. When I get tired, I will put them down, and the duration will end. The duration of any image is the duration of the body that holds it."

Their arms stayed up. Ten seconds. Twenty. I watched the ceremony fire tremble slightly as the Dreamer's left hand began to fatigue. The underground entrance held steadier in the right. The fire was going to come down first. I knew it before it happened, and when it did, the Dreamer lowered the left print to the table and held only the underground entrance, alone, in the empty station, an image of a dark hole held up in a place designed for arrivals and departures.

"One image alone is not a sequence," the Dreamer said. "But it is not nothing, either. It is a question the viewer has to hold until the next image arrives. And here, at two in the morning, with no train coming, the wait could be very long."

Roberto returned from his measuring walk and jumped onto the table. He placed one paw on the ceremony fire, now flat on the surface, and looked up at the underground entrance still held aloft. His eyes moved between the two, tracking the distance, the gap between the fallen image and the standing one, as if that vertical separation were itself a cut, as if down and up were a kind of sequence.

Lano yawned. The tunnel dripped. The board above us showed its row of dashes, patient and empty, waiting for information that was not coming, and the Dreamer's arm held steady in the cold.