73 Dream

 

I’m wandering a maze of blocks, the shadows of daylight eclipsing the open-sided blocks at my sides. Glimpses of a town I’ve seen before, just outside. But I can’t go to them: I turn, around a column that juts out at angles from the wall beside it. Like Lego blocks constructed of clay-tile material painted in bright blues, oranges and yellows.

Nobody’s on the other side of the column. But I hear her voice—Vivian: “We’ve got to find the lake.” Inside the maze?

Another turn, around another column of the pottery Lego blocks, in green and red. Not here. Nothing’s here, nobody’s here. Her footsteps fade away. I glance upward. There’s a sign on one of the corridor walls. Viale Gruber. The last name of Rachel, one of Vivian’s closest female friends. “She’s the girl I’d marry if I were attracted to girls.” Why would they’ve named a street after her in this place?, I wondered.

I followed Rachel’s alleyway out of the maze, into a dusty piazza like the ones you see at noon on a summer day in the South of France or Italy. I know this town: the plaza, the houses, the dusty pastel light all belonged there. But not that maze—I didn’t remember it there. Of course, things change but I could never’ve imagined such a thing in that town.

I stand, right foot forward, my torso leaning but unable to move. Vivian sprinted up to me.

“We’ve gotta find it.” She gasped.

After she caught her breath, I pointed to an opening around the next wall. “Let’s go in there.”

White sign, blue letters: Esposizione.di Ogetti Egizi. Arrow pointing inside.

“Do you really wanna look at a bunch of bones,” Vivian huffed. “We’ve gotta find the lake!”

As far as I know, Vivian’s never been to France or Italy. Knowing her, I’d guess she still hasn’t gone there, even if she could. They simply were never places she wanted to visit.

Although I am glad I spent time in Toulouse, in France,  I never wanted, and still don't want, to go to any place in particular. I have never fantasized about other places for the same reasons, really, I have never fantasized about sex: You don’t fantasize about what’s been forced on you. If you’re raped at a very young age, sex is not something to wonder about or hope for. And so it is when you’re connected to some place by something that is not of your doing. So even though I had no particular desire to travel, I knew I’d have to get away from this block. But I didn’t know where I’d go, much less how I’d get there.

But back to that maze. She didn’t want to go back in unless we were going to find the lake. Normally, I’d have to talk her out of going in, out of taking a chance. At least that’s how it seemed until she’d decided I’d become too much of a woman to suit her. “I just can’t go there,” she’d say. And I knew I couldn’t change her mind about that one.

Or about not wanting to see the bones, or about wanting only to see the lake. She had no interest in seeing the town, which was somewhat familiar to me, although I didn’t know why. There was, outside one of the Lego blocks, a turreted place I’d seen before—with or without Vivian? And the cathedral, in the texture of chalk and the colors of flint and rust after it’d absorbed sun, rain, wood smoke, more rain, cannon smoke, frosts, smoke from railroad engines , tanks and mustard gas, and the dissipating sunlight of October dusks. The cathedral’s stones imbedded it all; the lake Vivian wanted so much to see reflected it.