Dream d491-s: An Audience of Empty Seats

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer had carried the sequence into the cinema down the street. It had been closed for years. The marquee outside was blank, the ticket window dark, but the Dreamer had a key for this door too, the same cord around the wrist, and the lock turned with the sound of something that had not been opened in a long time agreeing to open once more.

The auditorium held perhaps two hundred seats, red velvet gone dusty pink, some folded up, some stuck permanently open. The screen at the front was intact, slightly yellowed, the size of a wall. The Dreamer set up the projector on the projectionist's table in the booth above, threading the sequence through the machine with the patience of someone who had done this many times in this exact room. I sat in the seventh row, center, because that was where the Dreamer pointed and said "there."

Roberto had gone ahead of us into the auditorium. He moved along the rows methodically, crossing from aisle to aisle by walking across the seat backs, his balance precise, his weight barely pressing down the velvet. He paused at certain seats and investigated the armrests, the cup holders, the gaps between cushions, finding what people leave behind in cinemas: a pen cap, a folded program, a coin. He collected nothing. He just confirmed that each object was there.

Lano walked down the center aisle to my row and sat in the seat beside mine. Not on the floor. In the seat. It had folded down under his weight and he sat in it like a person, his front paws on the armrest, his head facing the screen, and the strangeness of it made me laugh, which was the first sound in the auditorium and it echoed off the far walls and came back different, thinner, like a memory of the sound rather than the sound itself.

The projector started. The sequence appeared on the screen the full width of the wall, each image enormous, and the room went dark except for the light from the machine, and the prints I had been looking at on a table for weeks were suddenly the size of rooms. The ceremony fire filled the screen and I could see details I had never noticed at table scale. A figure at the edge of the fire. A mark on the ground that could have been a footprint or a shadow. The texture of smoke against a sky that was not black but deep blue with a grain of stars behind the grain of the photograph.

"At this scale you see what the image contains that you did not put there," the Dreamer said. They stood in the booth doorway above and behind me, their voice carrying down through the empty room. "Everything you photographed included things you were not photographing. Those things are also the sequence. They have been there the whole time, waiting for a screen large enough to show them."

The images changed. The underground. The coast. Roberto had finished his survey of the seats and now sat in the front row, directly beneath the screen, looking up at the images from below, seeing them from an angle no audience member would choose, where the light hit his face and his eyes reflected the sequence back at itself.

Lano watched the screen from his seat beside me. His ears moved with each cut. His body was still. The cinema held us and the sequence and the empty seats and the dust in the projector beam, and the images were the same images, and they were completely different at this scale, and both of those things were true at the same time.