I think I'm beginnin to see several problems.
Yes. This traveler also has a life and there is a direction to that life and if he himself did not appear in this dream the dream would be quite otherwise and there could be no talk of him at all. You may say that he has no substance and therefore no history but my view is that whatever he may be or of whatever made he cannot exist without a history. And the ground of that history is not different from yours or mine for it is the predicate life of men that assures us of our own reality and that of all about us. Our privileged view into this one night of this man's history presses upon us the realization that all knowledge is a borrowing and every fact a debt. For each event is revealed to us only at the surrender of every alternate course. For us, the whole of the traveler's life converges at this place and this hour, whatever we may know of that life or out of whatever stuff it mad be made. De acuerdo?
Andale.
So. He composed himself for sleep. And in the night there was a storm in the mountains and the lightning cracked and the wind moaned in the gap and the traveler's rest was a poor rest indeed. The barren peaks about him were hammered out of the blackness again and again by the lightning and in the flare of that lightning he was surprised to see descending down through the rocky arroyos a troupe of men bearing torches in the rain and singing some low chant or prayer as they came. He raised himself up from his stone the better to make them out. He could see little more than their heads and shoulders jostling in the torchlight but they seemed to wear a variety of adornments, primitive headpieces contrived from the feathers of birds or the hides of jungle cats. The fur of marmosets. They wore necklaces of bead or stone or ocean shell and shawls of woven stuff that may have been moss. By the smoky lamps hissing in the rain he could see that they carried upon their shoulders a litter or bier and now he could hear echoing among the rocks the floating notes of a horn and the slow beat of a drum.
When they came into the road he could see them better. In the forefront was a man in a mask made from the carved shell of a seaturtle all inlaid with agate and jasper. He carried a sceptre on the head of which was his own likeness and the likeness carried also such a sceptre in miniature and this sceptre too in what we must imagine to be some unknown infinitude of alternate being and likeness.
Behind him came the drummer with his drum of saltcured rawhide stretched upon a frame of ash and this he beat with a sort of flail made of a hardwood ball tethered to a stick. The drum gave off a low note of great resonance and he struck it with an upward swing of the flail and at each beat he bent his head to listen as perhaps a man might who were tuning a drum.
There followed a man bearing a sheathed sword upon a leather cushion and after him the bearers of torches and then the litter and the men who carried it. The traveler could not tell if the person they carried were alive or if this were not perhaps some sort of funeral procession passing through the mountains in the rain and the night. At the rear of the enfilade came the hornsman bearing an instrument made of cane bound with wrappings of copper wire and hung with tassels. He played it by blowing through a length of tubing and it played three notes which hovered in the shrouded night air above them like a ponderable body itself.
How many of these people were there?
I believe eight.
Go ahead.
They advanced upon the road and the traveler sat up and swung his legs over the side of his altarstone and pulled the blanket about his shoulders and waited. They came on until they were opposite to the place where he sat and here they stopped and here they stood. The traveler watched them. If he was curious he was also afraid.
What about you?
I was only curious.
How did you know he was afraid?
The man studied the empty roadway beneath them. After a while he said: This man was not me. If he may have been some part of me that I do not recognize then so may you. I fall back upon my argument of common histories.
Where were you all this time?
Asleep in my bed.
You were not in the dream.
No.
Billy leaned and spat. Well, he said, I'm seventyeight years old and in that time I've had a lot of dreams. And as near as I can recollect I was in ever one of em. I dont recall a time that I ever dreamt about other people but what I wasnt around somewheres. My notion is that you pretty much dream about yourself. I even dreamt one time that I was dead. But I was standin there looking at the corpse.
I see, the man said.
What do you see?
I see you've thought a bit about dreams.
I aint thought about em at all. I've just had em.
Can we come back to this question?
You can do whatever you want.
Thank you.
You sure you aint makin all this up.
The man smiled. He looked out across the roadway and the fields and shook his head but he didnt answer.
Or did you want to come back to that?
The problem is that your question is the very question upon which the story hangs.
A tractortrailer passed overhead and the swallows nesting in the concrete coves flew forth and circled and returned.
Bear with me, the man said. This story like all stories has its beginnings in a question. And those stories which speak to us with the greatest resonance have a way of turning upon the teller and erasing him and his motives from all memory. So the question of who is telling the story is very consiguiente.
Every story is not about some question.
Yes it is. Where all is known no narrative is possible.
Billy leaned and spat again. kndale, he said.
He was curious and afraid this traveler and he called out to the processional some greeting which echoed among the rocks. He asked them where they were bound but never did they answer back. They stood in the old road through the pass huddled together, these mute and midnight folk with their torches and their instruments and their captive, and they waited. As if he were a mystery to them. Or as if he were expected to say some particular thing which he had yet to say.
He was really asleep.
That is my view.
And if he had of woke?
Then what he saw he would no longer see. Nor I.
Why couldnt you just say it would of vanished or disappeared?
Which?
Which what?
Desaparecer o desvanecerse.
Hay una diferencia?
S'. Lo que se desvanece es simplemente fuera de la vista. Pero desaparecido? He shrugged. Where do things go? In a case such as that of the traveler and his adventureswhere one is on uncertain ground to even say from whence they came at allthere seems little to be said as to where they might be when gone. In such a case one can come upon no footing where even to begin.
Can I say somethin?
Of course.
I think you got a habit of makin things a bit more complicated than what they need to be. Why not just tell the story?
Good advice. Let's see what can be done.
Andale pues.
Although I should point out to you that you are the one with the questions.
No you shouldnt.
Yes. Of course.
Just get on with it.
Yes.
Mum's the word here.
C-mo?
Nothin. I'll shut up askin questions, that's all.
They were good questions.
You aint goin to tell the story, are you?
So perhaps he struggled to wake. For all that the night was cold and his bed hard stone he could not. In the meantime all was silence. The rain had ceased. The wind. The processioners consulted among themselves and then the bearers came forward and set the litter on the rocky ground. Upon the litter lay a young girl with eyes closed and hands crossed upon her breast as if in death. The dreamer looked at her and he looked at the troupe standing about her. Cold as the night was and colder as it must have been in the windswept reaches from which they had descended they yet were thinly clothed and even the capes and blankets that they wore over their shoulders were of loosely woven stuff. In the light of their torches their faces and their torsos shone with sweat. And strange as was their appearance and the mission they seemed bent upon yet they were also oddly familiar. As if he'd seen all this somewhere before.