Dream, Caviar

A Dream

I shook myself free from my previous dream and ran down the green grassy hillside that was drenched with the deep yellow sun of the evening. Without slowing, I jumped through a French window in a white wall that blocked my way. At the flat rock at the edge of the cliff, I paused for a tenth of a moment. Then I bent my knees a little and pushed, pushed away at the earth below me, and lifted into the air. Once I was as high as I wished I moved forward speedily, the light brown sea gliding away below. Smooth rolls of brown water coursed just below the surface of the ocean, making parallel patterns as they caught the sunlight. I banked left willfully and the waves now moved at an angle to my path.

Nearby a whale dived into the water head first, its flipper making a loud crash beating the water just as it went under. "What a loud report!" came a child's voice. Now a channel of tame water appeared in front of me and immediately I was swooping low over it breathing in lung-fulls of air that were alive with fine spray. A few people filled the stands on each side to see the setting up of the paraphernalia for the evening show. Here and there large gray shapes slid below the water. Performing dolphins? I moved so close over them and so lightly touching the water with my chest, that it was no surprise when I found myself moving on the back of one of these animals. For a brief moment, the animal and I cut through the water and air together.

Then I was off again, heading back down the channel the way I had come. But now I could see rows of vertical black iron rods and other hanging metal shapes that slowed me down. Some moved, jerkily. One was shaped like a particular toy soldier I know who has been standing for years with a frozen expression over a twin barrel gun made of red shellac and painted silver. The toy soldier, the other shapes - it was all a giant metal mobile, creaking and clanging.

At the head of the channel was a little yellow room like an elevator room with a small window and on a high platform outside it stood a mildly dapper man turning a gear over in his hands and examining it in the deep yellow evening light. I stood formlessly beside him. Below us stood an old and weary Russian workman. The dapper man said with a slight shrug, "This mobile will not run, for the gear I made to drive it has too small a perimeter and too few teeth. You'll have to do rework your mobile somehow." The tired Russian said of the giant works around him, "All this is heavy iron. This is not caviar that one can play with."