The Floating World

I don’t mean that evil was among the incidental properties of the cloud, like its color or its state of matter, but that the essence of the cloud was evil, traveling only in order to fall. As the cloud approached me, a change in the pressure of the dream medium would pin me down by the chest, leaving me unable to breathe. Only once the cloud had passed could I gather enough air to scream.

And this was how I woke the next day. I reached for the bottle of water on my bedside table, hoping I had not woken Sybil in the neighboring room, and then I practiced the breathing exercise I had learned from a friend in remission. A gap in the curtains cut the streetlight into an accusatory finger pointing across the floorboards.

I closed my eyes and felt the air move through my body, displacing panic. The absence of Cora was every morning a shock. Seeking solace in scale, I spun the material of my love for her into a silk thread that wrapped around every star in the galaxy.

I thought about the microbes in my gut that would persist after my death as a diaspora, each of them finding new communities in foreign bodies and writing modernist novels in exile. With my mind’s eye I followed the beams of light carrying pictures of Cora on their journey through space, bent out of shape by gravitational fields but unimpeachably beautiful, until I came to a hubcap spinning on the forecourt of the petrol station next door to my childhood home and realized that I was dreaming. I woke for the second time into a room radiant with the morning.

The spider that might, in combination with Sybil’s hallucinogens, have prompted these associations tiptoed across the white curtain rail, thinking itself unseen. I took a cold shower to shock the night’s excesses out of my system. The Technicolor dust motes dancing through the kitchen suggested that this plan had not entirely succeeded; that the garden was a network of incandescent lineaments corkscrewing through the ground to feed on the greenish sins of the dead was enough, on balance, to confirm it.

But the liveliness of this autumn day seemed benign, and I was pleased to take advantage of being awake before Rotimi to pack the stovetop machine with his superior coffee. When the music on the radio was replaced by dispatches from a strictly limited intervention I turned it off. The news was to be avoided.