Leviathan Falls

Interlude: The Dreamer

The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her and hers flowing backward into a time before minds. Like grandmothers telling the stories their grandmothers told about their grandmothers before them, she falls gently and forever into black oceans the size of everything. The other two are and aren’t and are again, with her and within her like humming to the memory of songs she never quite forgot. She broadens like a sunbird spreading its wings to catch the warming light, but there is no sun and no light—not yet—and the cold darkness is wide and comforting as a bed.

And she knows things.

Once and gone so far away no one was there to think it, the it was like this: Down was the hardness of heat, and up was the hardness of cold, and between those two implacabilities was the universe. The dreamer dreams the currents of flow and force, and her blood is the ocean’s blood. Her salt is the ocean’s salt. With a hand as wide as continents and softer than her skin, she caresses the burning heat below her and the soothing cool above. Long eons, and nothing is alive until something is. Maybe many things are, but the dream is a middle dream, and she dreams the middle because the path that crooks her swimmingly on begins there, but slowly slowly slow.

The dreamer drifts and the others drift with her, and more now: little bulbs of pastness around her and within, drifting on the same flow that she is and that she is. Two touch and become one; one thins itself into two and two and two and two. She watches the languid, lightless stuttering in the blessed cold as the grandmothers whisper that here is the birth of lust. Here, the puppy-wise gambol of making for the joy of making, with nothing to make of but from self more self.

The dreamer forgets, and is the slowness. She reaches over timelessness and invisibilities, thirsty for something richer than water. Thimble feasts rise from below and sate her for decades, and she dreams that she is dreaming, safe inside the eternal flow. Her hand reaches up to her heel, fingertips stretching ahead to brush her toes. She is a child made of saltwater bubbles, and one of the others says so, like cells? but the words are another place and she is voluptuous now, outside all language.

There is no light—not yet—but there is heat far far below, stuttering and buzzing and raging. It boils up the strange taste of stones that draws her and drives her away and becomes her. Above, the cold where nothing flows, the endless curving wall around the universe. And the ripple, now the always-ripple of a flow inside the flow that only some things feel. A handhold in the waters, a something made from nothing that she shimmies wrigglingly along. She presses herself against it, and lusty, she improvises. The little bulbs of pastness complicate and reach, one for another. And for the first time in all of time, she is tired.

Watch watch watch, the grandmothers whisper. Feel that one that falls, slippingly down too far into the heat and riot; that mindless genius. This is important, they say, and the dreamer draws herself down too and others how many with her sink. The bubble rises, full of thrum and fever and ill, and when it cools, it is butterscotch on the tongue and a billion insects choiring joyful in the summer night. It is a thousand new toys wrapped in gauze and ribbon. It is coffee and candy and the first awkward kiss, the almost-almost-almost shuddering against the skin. And she knows she will go again, that she who is a child of bubbles will send herself away again to be burned and then cherish her blisters. She longs to be made strange by the hotness and the hurt.

This is how it was when we were girls, the grandmothers say, and the dreamer dreams that she understands.

That’s enough, someone says. All right, people. By the numbers and by the book.