Trieste Janeiro / Beginning Dream

The first vision from The Tower of Dreams

Mike came in from the patio and studied the stranger at the bar everyone had been talking about. She looked rather wonderfully out of place – a kind of desert shawl was draped loosely across her chest, though it wasn’t like any fashionings of any real place or the garb of any real people – it was, in all honesty, more like a costume, the kind of thing a performer would wear. She was lounging on the bar with the other regulars, an espresso slowly smoldering in her hands, the morning washing everyone golden eternal. There was some notion about her that, even though she clearly hailed from faraway places, she fit right in here. After all, why not? They were all social jetsam of some sort or another, Mike and all the other regulars. 

“The fact of the matter is, I don’t feel all that different from when I was a younger man,” Norm said, “do you get that, Mike?”

“There’s an unbroken string of consciousness I’ve had since the Age Of Reason,” Mike said, “but, no, I feel completely different. Amazingly different, even, than, say, the commencement of yestereve’s night cap.”

“Oh, come here, you mug,” Norm got up and picked Mike up bodily and smoothed out his collar like a valet when he set him down, “oh, that’s what I love about you, you mug, you take the piss out of everything, don’t you. Tell Celie about the dream again, won’t you?”

“You have a habit for cool blondes too, Celie?”

“And why not, Mike?”

“You know the one I mean.”

“I do know the one our dear friend Norman means,” Mike said, “it’s a dream that recurs about three or four times a season, I dream I only have here in this stately overgrown palazzo that is the Hotel Piccolo.”

“Won’t you have a seat, Mike?”

“Thanks; that’s a little better for pontificating, isn’t it? The dream starts in these kind of barren plains, two riders on strange horses. They’re not really horses – they’re kind of lizardlike horse-things, snouts and four legs with scales, kind of Dr. Seussy. I will say I dreamt of this model of horse even before the Age Of Reason, before I ever traveled to the Hotel Piccolo, in this strange kind of fogginess where I can’t exactly be sure if it was a dream or something I spied on an old black and white television lodged up high somewhere in the family abode.”

Across the bar some electricity flickered in the traveler’s eyes; she was picking out words from his story, listening. 

“The riders dismount at a station at the base of an old mountain. It’s an old hacienda. The end of the line. A young man comes out. Neither of the riders know him. He shows the riders where to tie up the horses and leads them in for a coffee. Windchimes blow on the portico. I remember those chimes well – all shapes and colors of glass clinking together.”

“Is that important?” Celie asks. 

“Maybe. They’re – well, they’re not real. What they’re made from, what the mountains are, they’re not any real things. You know from those chimes it’s another world entire. Those chimes – that really is the important part. After that they have coffee and the young master’s sister is there, and the younger rider takes out this device and it flashes this brilliant gold-green light over the mountains, and he gives this prophecy that, like everything else made by mortals, the hacienda will some day crumble to dust. And then it ends.”

“The world, you mean?” Celie says. Everyone laughed, then everyone was quiet. A golden light off a mirror somewhere flashes across Mike’s eyes. “But, really, Mike, what do you think it means?”

“It means we should all enjoy our time in San Navarine before it falls into the sea,” Mike said. “It’s no revelation, exactly, but it’s a well-hedged prophecy, bound to come true.”

“Maybe not,” Norm said, “maybe it’s just an endless Istrian Summer.”

“Would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Mike said. 

All of a sudden the radio whirred in cloud of static. Light Sassarian summer jazz cut into a kind of twinkling, ringing ballad, light cymbals, hand percussion, chimes.

“What can you see when your eyes are blinded by the night?/What flowers can you grow in the darkness of your mind?”

In a moment, Como came around the bar and smashed the radio with his portafilter. The strange music shot back to Sassarian jazz again. No one acted like anything really had transpired.

“You alright there, Mike?” 

“Course,” Mike said. He didn’t say it sounded exactly like the chimes from his dream. 

Celie went up to get another espresso. Norm and the others went back out. Mike was alone, but not for long. The traveling woman from across the bar was beside him.

“You heard that too, didn’t you?” the traveler asked.

“I did,” Mike said. “Was beginning to think no else did. You know that song?”

“I’ve heard it before,” she said, “I couldn’t tell you what it’s called, but it’s a beautiful song.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Mike said. “Didn’t sound like anything I’d heard before in my life. You think it was, I don’t know, interference from some Verissian station?”

A kind of disappointment flashed over her, a little crack in the light in her eyes.

“You don’t know me.”

“No, ma’am, I don’t,” he said, taking care to hit all the proper keys of kindness with his voice and none of patronizement or disdain.

“It is for the best this way,” she nodded. 

“But you know me,” Mike said.

“In a manner. I think we dream the same dreams.”

“Sounds rather intimate.”

The traveler smiled. 

“Truthfully, I do recognize your dream.”

“Ah, so you were dropping eaves on me?”

“Your voice is hard to miss. Are you an actor? Is that how I recognize you?”

“Can’t say it is.”

“You project quite wonderfully. You’ve seen those mountains from your dream?”

“In the flesh? No. You could call those aspirational mountains.”

“I’ve seen them.”

“Really. Well, I suppose there have to be mountains something like them some–”

“Not like them. I’ve seen them exactly. Those mountains that split the Golden Morning from the Emerald Night. It’s amazing that you know them, but don’t. Don’t you think?”

It was amazing, but, somehow, not surprising in the slightest. Perhaps he’d read about them, seen pictures, and his mind had brought them to life. That happened; he was good at that, for better or worse.

“I suppose so, but it also happens. San Navarine is a place plenty folks dream of, and some of them even get here. Did you dream of it before you came here?”

She paused. A glint of sunlight bounced across her brow. 

“In a manner,” she said. “I dreamt of the pieces of it. The Piccolo. The cliffs. Finding someone like you in a dingy old cafe.”

“It is a beautiful, beautiful place.”

“True,” she bristled, “but it’s not very ‘real,’ is it? The Piccolo is a tourist trap. The Architect is no legend – I saw his grave just this morning. And the coffee everyone waxes about is passable at best.”

“You’ll keep your voice down, or you’ll hurt Como’s feelings.”

“But this is my question: why do you stay? It’s beautiful, yes, but I’ve been here half a day and I’ve already seen it all. Why are you still here?”

Mike shrugged.

“Maybe if I was such a world traveler I’d know of more beautiful places, but the fact of the matter is this little dingy café is familiar to me; a place I belong. I just – ‘fit’ here, don’t you think? Once upon a time, San Navarine felt like the grand sum of my dreams. Maybe I’m too old to challenge it. What would be the point, anyhow?”

She nodded, sipped her coffee, and grimaced, a play actor’s smile flashing across her brow. 

“Can you just tell me one thing?” she asked.

“If I can, absolutely.”

“The stately Hotel Piccolo in picturesque San Navarine, one the sum of your dreams, now an incarnate fixture in your day-to-day.”

“Call it the joys of retirement.”

“Truly. But if all that’s so, what do you dream of, now that you’re here? Does it feel complete, over and done with?”

“Certainly not,” Mike said.

“What, then? What’s missing?”

He looked around the cafe. The answer wouldn’t be here; he closed his eyes, wandering through the town in his mind. Little alleyways of faraway places beckoned to him, half-remembered possibilities everywhere. He chose one that smelled like gin, and as he found his footfalls clacking over cobblestones riddled with tree roots, the seasons changing above him. A castle loomed over, ruined, beneath it a sleepy village where a thespian’s son would learn his trade. He walked by crowds that all called out to him, faces with names he couldn’t place, aging farmhouses and ramshackle barns in a country he didn’t recognize. He wandered into a bar with worn warm wood that fit his fingers like kid gloves. He had never had kidskin gloves for that matter, either.

“Something about kidskin gloves,” he said. 

“Yes.”

“And going down to a theatre. They’re – putting on a play, about the war. But I don’t recognize anyone. The whole room is a face full of strangers. It’s like they’re all putting on a play together, like I’m the only one without a script.”

The questions were racing inside him now, desperate questions that weighed the sum of the alien world this stranger beckoned him to remember. An animal bark in the back of his mind yanked his tongue away from the precipice. Deep in the maw of unnameable fear, he could only speak through his script.

“Do you want to know how the dream ends?” 

“Sure,” she says, “you can tell me.”

“He says, ‘you will be cast into the same unknown you see as your duty to shepherd the traveler from. Do not fear or deny it when it comes for there will be others to guide your way just as your waystation has. Do you understand me?’”

“I do.”

“Well, no, ‘Do you understand me?’ Is the end of it.”

She laughed. A kind of smooth golden trill that unspooled from her voice like waxed thread. He knew on his life he had heard that laugh before, but he didn’t know where, couldn’t know where. Something inside him refused itself. It spiraled further and further away from him the closer and closer he got to it, like a word that dances irrecoverably on the tip of your tongue or a sneeze that refuses to come and go, only the word was a name and the sneeze was a breath and the thing which eluded him was a life which should have properly been his, only he was here, and this beautiful, kind, enchanted person in front of him with a laugh like the double strings of a mandolin was a stranger he had never seen before and not the dear friend whose wonderful golden laugh had graced him nearly every day of those final two years.

He blinked.

“That was important, wasn’t it?”

She nodded. A stray tear whipped down her cheek.

“It was, yes. Oh, Miro. I have missed you so much.”

“See, I knew it was something like that,” Mike said. “I know you, don’t I? I met you on some travels. I’m ever so sorry, I just can’t remember it. It’s been, what, twenty years since I last crossed the Verissian?”

“Oh, I know. It’s a long way beyond the Verissian. In fact, I’m due back tonight. Must catch my train before they cast off.”

“I would like you to stay, if you can,” he said, trying to find the right thread. “Could you help me remember?”

“I can’t,” she smiled, “I owe very much to you, but you are only a shade. A slim partition of a friend I once knew very well indeed. They haven’t given me time enough to help you remember. But I’ll leave you with this.”

She pressed a square coin with a piece of glass in its center into his palm and walked off to the bar. Against his ear, it chirped like a mouse. It played a crystal rainbow in the sun. It was something from another time, another self. It belonged to another world entire. 

He heard the traveler ordering The Special, something off-menu, and quibbled with Como but Como could quibble no more with her cash on the bar. A boy who seemed perfectly ignorant of her specialness asked for her name as Come slid the strange purple drink across to her, and she laughed her mandolin laugh and downed her drink and disappeared in a flash of indigo light and smoke. The boy yelled and trampled at only an outline of a shape burned into the floor, where the traveler had stood just a moment before. 

Mike, unconsciously, understood the procedure and moved opposite of the throng that crowded around the impossible thing which had just transpired. Their day would be over soon, the fresh memory soon to be freshly sundered like all the old memories that rolled in as piecemeal jetsam on strange days when the sun and the moon hung together in the evening sky. He held the coin out into the golden light of dusk and reached impossibly for something as all the world round him fell away, some piece of the being he was fashioned from scraping itself clean. There was nothing to hold onto but a whisping sound of morning, and a faint clamor of chimes. 

---

Trieste Janeiro/Beginning Dream is the first story from a short story cycle I’ll be writing over the course of the year: The Tower of Dreams. Set in the Zosimos Mythos, the cycle explores stories from the lost world of Encaustic, memories of Old Earth, and prophecies of the many worlds to come.

Members of the Studio Zosimos Print Club will receive an illuminated, risograph-printed copy of Trieste Janeiro/Beginning Dream next month. If you’d like to get future stories in the mail every month and help make it possible for me to create and share these stories, you can join my print club on ko-fi here.

Thanks for reading!

– Zosimos