So-Say

Imagine you’re in a parking garage. And it’s a really big one, floors above and below you, underground so you can’t see the horizon. No cars, it’s empty. It’s midnight. Now imagine suddenly the concrete beneath your feet crumbles, steel bars rust and give way, and you fall through the rubble to the level below. It looks exactly the same. Other than you, in the middle of a pile of dust and debris, everything is identical. Concrete pillars with arrows on them. Lines painted on the floor in the same spots. You fall through again, and the second floor down is still identical. You hit the ground hard enough to collapse the next level almost immediately, and fall again. Now faster, smashing through each floor of this garage almost without slowing down, a cloud of rocks around you. Dozens, hundreds of floors. You’re moving so fast, the passing floors begin to sync up like a film reel. To your eyes, it almost looks like you’re hovering. But you’re falling real fast.

Now say you began to see figures - peering out from behind corners, ducked behind pillars, staring at you. You pass so quickly that you’re gone almost as soon as they see you, but they can always see you just in the split second that you’re there, and from your perspective it feels like you’re being stared at from a thousand places at once. And then they begin to synchronize, so even though you’re passing through levels real quick, the figures start getting closer and closer each floor. Maybe they hear you coming, down below. They’re getting closer, and they’re all staring, and they’re shrouded in darkness so you can’t make out much more than eyes. There’s so much dust and you’re moving so fast that it’s hard for you to see anything but their eyes. And you can sense malice in them. Now they’re standing around the hole you’re falling through, on every floor, standing in a perfect circle around the part of the garage you’re about to fall through, just waiting, and you can tell that if you slowed down at all they would reach out and grab you and tear you apart. So this falling, that started out being terrifying and unnatural, all of a sudden it’s the only thing protecting you. Slow down, and you die.

Then suddenly you fall through the last level of the parking garage and smack solid earth. You’re unhurt, but completely stationary.

That’s a dream I used to have. The instant I hit solid ground, and knew they were gonna get me, that’s when I woke up. I’d have rolled out of bed, see, and I slept on a high bunk. When I hit ground in the dream, it’s because I just hit ground in real life. That’s how the mind works.

A lot of things like that dream. Riding a bike downhill, for instance. Ziplining over a canyon. Or the maneuver that killed me, smearing my ashes against the sky. It’s dawn over Australia - ha-yeli-kahn. That’s what the code-talkers called it, when they were here. Memorized all 411 words in their dictionary, then got started on the Bible, but it felt too much like learning a real language, so I gave it up.

I’m having that dream, right now.