Ancient Evenings, Distant Music

There are old winds I still do not understand, though I have been riding, forever it seems, along the curl of their spines. I move in Dimension Z; the world goes by somewhere else in another slice of things, parallel to me. As if, hands in my pockets and bending a little forward, I see it through a department store window, looking inward.

In Dimension Z, there are strange moments. Coming around a long, rainy,curve, the highway turns to a footpath and the path to an animal trail. A pass of my wiper blades, and the trail becomes a forest place where nothing has ever gone. Again the wiper blades and, again, something further back. Great ice, this time. I am moving through short grass, in furs, with matted hair and spear, thin and hard as the ice itself, all muscle and implacable cunning. Past the ice, still farther back along the measure of things, deep salt water in which I swim, gilled and scaled. I cannot see more than that, except beyond plankton is the digit zero.

Euclid was not always right. He assumed parallelness, in constancy, right to the end of things; but a non-Euclidean way of being is also possible, where the lines come together, far out there. A vanishing point. The illusion of convergence.

Yet I know it's more than illusion. Sometimes a coming together is possible, a spilling of one reality into another. A kind of soft enlacing. Not prim intersections loomed in a world of precision, no sound of the shuttle. Just... well... breathing. Yes, that's the sound of it, maybe the feel of it, too. Breathing.

And I move slowly over this other reality, and beside it and underneath and around it, always with strength, always with power, yet always with a giving of myself to it. And the other senses this, coming forward with its own power, giving itself to me, in turn.

Somewhere, inside of the breathing, music sounds, and the curious spiral dance begins then, with a meter all its own that tempers the ice-man with spear and matted hair. And slowly--- rolling and turning in adagio, in adagio always--- ice-man falls... from Dimension Z... and into him.

robert james waller