Zero history

87. THE OTHER SIDE

Clockwise, this dream: eighteenth-century marble, winding, worn stone unevenly waxy, tones of smoker’s phlegm caught in its depths, profiles of each step set with careful segments of something lifeless as plaster, patching old accidents. Like the scribed, transected, stapled sections of a beloved limb, returned from voyaging: surgery, disaster, a climb up stairs taller still than these. Westernmost, the spiral. Above the lobby, the stripes of Robert’s shirt, the Turk’s head atop the stapler, above the subtly rude equine monkey-business in the desk’s carved thicket, she climbs.

To this floor unvisited, unknown, carpet flowered, faded, antediluvian, beneath incandescent bulbs, an archaic controlled combusion of filaments. Walls hung with madly varied landscapes, unpeopled, each haunted, however dimly, by the spectral finger of the Burj Khalifa.

And at the far end of a vast, perhaps endless room, in a pool of warm light, a figure, seated, in a suit of Klein Blue. As it turns, pale fur, muzzle rouged, the wooden painted teeth-

She wakes beside Garreth’s slow breathing, in their darkened room, the sheets against her skin.