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I came in a rush of foolish blood, swaddled in spent air. I had studied the floorplans
of the building, sketched out like some vast heart, but still the size alarmed me. I would
walk the corridors, some that seemed to stretch on forever. Occasionally, I would find a new
conjunction of rooms, or a new atrium, bathed in light; I would rest my hands on the peeling
paint walls. They felt sodden, damp with memories. Sometimes the noise was terrifying, especially
at night, but it would pass, dissipating into the far reaches of the hospital."
"Nights; nights were the worse time for them, I think -- both the natural fall of sleep
and the induced caverns of prolonged narcosis. In the mornings they would walk on tiptoes
as if afraid to touch the earth. Stale and drawn, smudged by sleep, they looked cadaverous
and exhausted, wracked by the haunted space of their dreams. "Wake up", I would whisper,
"wake up". I'd watch them in their actions, actions that seemed aching and random; but
over time, through the great density, I started to notice patterns, like water droplets in
the whorls of a giant thumbprint." "In music therapy they would batter the Orff
instruments with a peculiar intensity. I asked about the maps they carried. They were a long
way from home. They told me this: "You stand on hills and wonder at the silence of things;
you want to do an archaeology of that silence. An excavation. You try to speak words of water;
to lose yourself in the spaces between the water. You walk often at night and by some
design return to the banks of the same river. It is dark, but you can hear its voice in
the dark. In spring, in spate, it wants to drown; in summer, in the sullen daze of summer,
it holds, holds you, and you hold it." They told me they wanted to go back. They asked
if any of this made any sense? It did. Of course it did.
And now this. You would not think to dance in such a place, but it came, it came. With
the music silenced, we washed in embers, and fathomless and unburdened, we walked, as signatures
of the invisible, out into the welcoming wind.