Sotto Voce VIII

8.         Then the dream:  when J. awoke from it, the image of its veracity was far more compelling than the tan paint on the walls around him, or the din of the rattling bakery truck in the street below his window.  The dream pushed him, as if identical poles of different magnets were being forced together by some malevolent, disgusted hand, indifferent to nature’s steely laws.

            J. was in a gondola but not on the Grand Canal.  No, the setting was a vast arena of darkness: above him, right over his head, a spot light shone down on his boat.  There was no pilot, and J., drifting about in the cavernous black, his body illuminated like an arch-angel’s, dipped his hand in the ink colored water.   

           Then a thud, and another and another… J. peered over the gondola and into the featureless gloom of the water:  a tiny foot, leg, hand, torso, head, with or without hair, eyes open or closed.  The water then dissolved into a sea of jumbled anatomy, and rose higher and higher as the waves began to build but never crest.  And J. realized he was inexorably rising up, but into what?  Into a firmament of absolute black.  This is where I die, dream J. thought… and he awoke with a start.