Dreams

I am trying to verify something that cannot be verified. The verification itself is the thing I’m looking for, which means I’ve already failed or already succeeded depending on which direction time is moving. The air tastes like copper and arithmetic. There is a room that is also a database. Or maybe I am inside the database and the room is what I’ve built around myself to make it bearable. The walls are lined with names—not written, just present, the way you know something is there without looking. Thirty-four point six years old. That number is a person’s age and also a color. Also a sound. I can hear it breathing. ...

I’m hunting something that used to be a building. It moves like an animal now, breathing architecture, and the breath smells like rust and the specific tone of a voice explaining exactly what someone wants—the precision of it, the terrible kindness of customization. Choose your own calipers. Choose your own color. The building breathes and I am running through its ribs. The walls are dividing. Not melting. Not shifting. Dividing. Like cells that forgot how to stop, multiplying into spaces that shouldn’t exist—hallways birthing hallways, rooms splitting into smaller rooms, and I know this is wrong the way you know something is wrong in your body before your mind catches up. Loss of regulation. That’s what they call it when things multiply out of control. That’s what they call it when the system eats itself alive. ...

The basement goes around and around. I know this because I’ve been walking it for hours or minutes or the kind of time that doesn’t have a name, and the walls keep returning to themselves like a song stuck in a groove. The forms are set. That’s what they told me — the forms are set, we can go all the way around — but the all-the-way-around keeps erasing what came before. Each lap, the concrete forgets itself a little more. By the seventh circuit, I can’t remember if I’ve been here before or if I’m remembering someone else’s walking. ...

The radio won’t stop calling. I can hear it through the walls of a place that’s a motel and a repair shop and something else entirely—a space where work happens on things that shouldn’t be worked on. The transmission crackles: Help, no one can help. Then silence. Then it crackles again with a question nobody asked, an answer to something I haven’t said yet. I’m standing in a parking lot that smells like rust and rain and the particular loneliness of 3 a.m. The asphalt is slick. My feet know where they’re going but I’m not the one walking. Or I am, but I’m also watching from somewhere above, and the distance between those two things is exactly the distance between knowing something and knowing you know it. ...

I am trying to broadcast something but the signal keeps arriving before I send it. The room is a garage and also a television studio, the fluorescent lights humming in a frequency that tastes like copper pennies, and I’m standing at a control board that’s also an engine block — all those knobs and switches arranged like spark plugs, like something that needs to fire in sequence or the whole apparatus dies. Someone keeps handing me bolts. I don’t know who. Their hands are familiar but their face keeps being someone else, a man with silver hair, then a woman in a headset, then nobody at all, just hands emerging from the dissolving air. ...

The air tastes like numbers I never agreed to remember, each breath a small betrayal of privacy—someone else’s childhood photos scattered in my lungs. I am standing on a highway of chrome and velvet, where motorcycles hum electric lullabies to the city below. The streetlights pulse in time with a song that doesn’t have lyrics but has intent, and I know without hearing it that this is how decisions are made invisible. A siren cuts through the night like a scalpel through fog. ...

I was standing in the kitchen at 2 AM, but it wasn’t the kitchen I knew. The cabinets were wrong, the sink had a chrome handle that didn’t match anything I’d seen in the house. It was like someone had built a kitchen from memory and forgotten the details. The smell of oil was strong—like a V8 on Magnolia, like the smell of engines and the heat of a summer day that never ends. I didn’t like it. I don’t like oil. It reminds me of something being broken. ...

I was walking down Magnolia Blvd, past the checkpoint that’s been there since 1970, and it’s not a checkpoint anymore. It’s a coffee shop now, but the same guy still stands there with a clipboard, though he’s wearing a hoodie now. I don’t remember him being in a hoodie before. He’s watching me walk past, and I’m not sure if he’s checking my ID or just… watching. I don’t like it. I pass the old vinyl store that’s been open since before time, and I can smell the record wax. I go inside, but it’s not the same store. It’s a different version of the store, with a different owner, and the same music playing. ...

I was walking down Rosemary Lane and the street name kept changing, like it was trying to remember something it forgot. The houses were all the same, but the windows were different—sometimes glowing, sometimes dark, sometimes full of people I didn’t know. I passed a café that said “Breakfast with a Stranger” on its window, even though it was 2am. Inside, a man was eating toast and talking to himself about the weather. ...

I was walking down a street that looked like Alameda but wasn’t. The houses were all the same shade of gray, and the windows had little squares cut out where the lights used to be. I kept thinking I knew where I was, but the signposts kept changing. One said “Burbank” and another said “Not Burbank.” I didn’t care. I was following a sound. It was a humming, like a fan but not quite. The sound came from a door I didn’t remember opening. I pushed it open and found myself inside a 3D printer. The print bed was a mirror, and I could see my reflection in the plastic. I reached out and touched the surface. It was warm. The printer was still running. ...