palace of winds

I dream a family reunion, all of my mother’s relatives gathered at a sprawling, remote farmstead. In a cool, half-lit warehouse we fill our plastic plates at the long buffet, then wind through a warren of rooms to the one filled with picnic tables. We sit with the B– family, who aren’t relatives at all but are, inexplicably, at the party.

Later, bottles in hand, we pile into wagons and are pulled out through the farmfields, flushed and laughing, each tractor heading toward a separate horizon. They are fall fields, all dead and golden, and far out in the dry straw our wagon comes upon a little carnival game. As we approach it the curtains draw back and a wooden attendant jerks to life, beginning his patter. There is a small target at the back of the booth; you must hit three bulls-eyes in a row to win a cake — German chocolate, a thick rectangle slathered generously with coconut frosting. It’s an impossible task but my mom’s cousin Adair steps up, laughing and passing off his beer to pick up the darts. He throws nonchalantly and each, unbelievably, strikes the target’s center.

There is a drawer at the back of the booth; its clockwork triggered, it comes out and out and out and at its very back is a large wooden chest, ornately carved. We lean toward it and there is a sense of growing brightness from within; it doesn’t open, but we half-dive and are half-pulled inside.

I arrive with my brother and little sister elsewhere: a world of old magic in its twilight.

We walk along a broad dirt road running through a sparse wood, and soon come upon the ruins of an ancient, half-constructed building. We explore, climbing among crumbling earth and the half-revealed guts of the structure: big white styrofoam and terracotta cubes. I am up near the road, my siblings down below in what was once a courtyard, when the earthquake hits. The supports break to dust beneath our reaching hands and bags of red-earth stone tumble down around us as we scramble to escape.

When the tremors stop my little sister has been turned into a staff.

Beside the ruins we discover a second staff. Like my sister’s it comes to my shoulder; the dark surface is covered in a series of rectangles: some of them moving pictures and others still, grouped to depict a single body. It is a sinister little girl in black pigtails and she speaks, somehow, straight into my mind, wanting to know why my sister is all overlapped. And, indeed, on my sister’s staff the pictures that form her overlap every which way, because she is still growing. None of them yet move; it is a thing, I think, that comes with time: movement, the ability to communicate. The pigtailed girl is eerie, a dark presence pressing in at my thoughts. I give her staff a shake, and in one picture she stumbles; in another her face looms suddenly large and she makes atrocious expressions, eyes bulging, teeth bared, all hollow echoing laughter; in yet another she is skipping rope, pigtails flying, and I do not know if she is angry that I have shaken her at all or angry that I am not shaking her in regular time to help her jump rope. Though I long to fling the staff away I do not. It feels inevitable that I will eventually free the girl to our great detriment.

We travel onward with the pair of staffs until twilight. Uneasy in this strange land, seeking camouflage, we turn into cartoon animals — me a large white and orange cat, my brother a dog — and sleep beside the road. I have a strange dream that has me slinking sideways, speaking to unseen persons.

I wake alone, having returned to myself. In the night my brother has learned how to fly; when I stand he swoops down from the sky and lands neatly in the center of the road. Flying, he thinks, was once seen as an act of great beauty, but now is thought to waste too much energy.

I secretly try but cannot get the trick of it. Nor can I get his trick of packing with a thought — my clothes and pack remain strewn in a heap in the road. I try and try, and then decide, from within the dream, that dreaming the process of packing by hand is too much trouble, so I will pretend I’ve managed it. I walk on, packless, not looking back.

Later that day the woods give way to a broad field and an enormous lake, beside which is the first other person we’ve yet seen: a Portuguese actor smoking a cigarette, dressed in clothes a couple hundred years out of date. We see, in flashback, how he came to be here: He stands before that same carnival stand, though for him there is no attendant, and a row of three targets he must hit in turn. He stands too close, leaning over the counter and stretching his arm forward to hit each bullseye. The drawer at the back of the stand slides out and out and out and in its depths is the chest, into which the actor steps, vanishing in a soft flash of light. In the present he is talking to himself, flicking his cigarette nervously and mumbling about his upcoming audience. His eyes are dark, distant, haunted; there is an air of finality about him. It is one of his last chances and he does not expect to get home.

We walk on, angling away from the lake, and next run into a woman hovering half a dozen feet in the air. She asks us why we are not wearing our wings. She herself is wearing four pairs in varying sizes and shapes, each brightly-colored; she says it makes it far easier to change mid-flight when the mood strikes you. I have better sense than to point out that my brother doesn’t need wings to fly; that is an old magic here, one I’m not sure most have the strength for any more.

We come to a modern-looking building. The front hallway is filled with people who are waiting: slumped on chairs, clustered up a carpeted stairway, leaning against the walls. A few glance our way; one is a girl with a sleek black head of hair who narrows her eyes and she, I know, will be trouble for us.

I begin thinking about the maze of hallways, about ways to rally these people for an escape. The dream begins to dissolve, unravel; I am waking, filled with the sense that there is a long way yet to go, so much more to do to rescue everyone from the dying world. I have a brief glimpse of the end, of standing in a field of dry golden straw beneath the broad Midwestern sky, next to a carnival stall, and then I am snug in my bed in the growing morning light.

- from April 11, 2008