Dream d480-s: One Print Per Landing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer had taped a single image to each landing of the stairwell, starting at the ground floor and going up six flights. The stairwell was old, the kind with an open center shaft you could look down through from any floor, the railings iron and the steps worn smooth in their middles from decades of feet. The walls were painted a green that had once been institutional and was now just old. Each landing had one print, centered on the wall at eye height, and the Dreamer had placed a small battery-powered clip lamp above each one.

"Walk up," the Dreamer said. They stayed at the bottom, their hands in their pockets, looking up through the shaft.

Roberto was already climbing. He took the stairs in a diagonal, crossing from railing to wall and back, and at each landing he paused at the image, studied it briefly, then continued. He was faster than I was. By the time I reached the second floor he was on the fourth, and I could hear his claws on the steps above me, a precise clicking that echoed in the shaft.

Lano climbed beside me. He took each step individually, his body working harder than it did on flat ground, and at the first landing he stopped and looked at the image. It was the ceremony fire. He sniffed the wall near it and moved on. At the second landing, the underground entrance. He gave it the same investigation. By the third, the coast road, he had established his rhythm: arrive, look, sniff, continue.

Each landing held one image. The time between images was the time it took to climb a flight of stairs. Twelve steps, a turn at the half-landing, twelve more steps, then the next photograph. The sequence was no longer a line on a wall or a row on a bar or a film in a projector. It was a vertical climb, and each image cost effort to reach.

By the fourth landing I was breathing harder. The stranger's staircase photograph, the archive image the Dreamer had introduced weeks ago, hung on a wall of an actual staircase, and the doubling was disorienting. A photograph of stairs encountered on stairs. I stood in the thing I was looking at.

Roberto had reached the top and was sitting on the final landing, the sixth floor, beside the last image. I could see his small shape through the open shaft, looking down, watching me climb toward him. He had seen the whole sequence already. He was waiting.

Lano stopped at the fifth landing. The Wireman's hands. He lay down in front of them, not blocking the image but resting near it, and when I reached him he looked at me with the expression of a dog who has decided that this is far enough.

I climbed the last flight alone. The final image was the dark ceremony fire, the same subject as the first but printed so dark the flames were barely visible. I stood in front of it, breathing hard from the climb, and understood what the Dreamer had done. The sequence was the same. The body arriving at each image was not. By the sixth floor the viewer was winded, heart working, legs aware of themselves, and the images entered differently because the body receiving them had been changed by the effort of reaching them.

From below, the Dreamer's voice rose through the shaft: "Now come back down."