I dream him in knotted clumps, caught in the tangle of puzzled occurrences. Wedged between the pages of books on how to just get through this one next moment. He has taken the one page I need in the phrasebook of a foreign tongue. He comes to me as a man in a hurry, a woman in denial, an old wizened hag weighted down with too much knowing, a child with big eyes full of inexplicable whims, serrated like plastic knives at a late summer picnic.
But I always know it’s him, looking out from those eyes. Hey there, stranger, I say. And the spectre grins and gives me a wink. How do we play this one out? Let’s see how it goes. There is no resolution to the nightly glass bead game. Different rules, different places, another obstacle course.
The obstacle used to be getting to him. Now the challenge is to get through to dawn. To break the surface at a place where time and space matter.