Particularly vivid dream.
Posted in Personal on August 15th, 2010 by byronkhoI woke up at 6 AM (only a 5 hour sleep? Come on!) and realized that I just had a really vivid dream. I’m headed to New York in another hour. Am currently enjoying an early morning dose of Lusine’s Twilight.
Cosmic dust, set against the South Pole sky.
I must have murder on the brain… I dreamed that I was a detective, working with a partner on a Homicide case. Some clue or other led us to the downtown apartment whose tenant was missing and presumed dead. We were moving through her rooms and her presence was heavy in the air, a sad ghost peering at us around shadowy corners and from darkened hallways. Listening to her voice messages, it was easy to tell when people were starting to feel panicky, and where they began to be, of all things, resentful. It spoke volumes that her disappearance of several weeks looked to most people to be a regular practice of a reclusive type; that she should disappear into the wilderness was somehow expected, instead of a worrying fact leading to a lonely bag of bones.
On her phone, still plugged into the charger, the last call and message was from a woman who cried a bit and said “I think it’s you.” A picture was attached: the bottom snippet of a drawing, with a scribble where our missing girl’s signature was and the inscription “I’ve just remembered.” The rest of the drawing was obviously detached. We knew full well what the drawing had been of. A melancholy artist and photographer, our girl had worked off a shot she had taken off a Balinese woman looking over her shoulder. In pencil, she had enlarged a section of the photo that just included the charged space right over the woman’s shoulder where she happened to be turning her face. She had a faintly confused expression, as if the person she wanted to address was gone, and her moment of remembrance was futile. I knew because I had seen the original photograph. We had included the affair with the woman’s husband as a point of interest in the case, but we knew he couldn’t have done anything directly to our victim – having been under arrest and in lockup for the past few weeks due to a gross embezzlement charge unrelated to this case. In jail, the photograph was the only thing he had brought in from outside. I pictured him at night, staring at a picture of a woman he didn’t know, taken by a woman he must have loved, and how that loose connection was enough. Strangely, he asked no questions about her when I had interrogated him; it seemed as if he was stuck in the past, and had given up on her future. I pictured him forgetting how our victim looked like.
I was even forgetting. Me with a headshot of her taken by an ex-boyfriend who passed it on only after coercion; it was clear he didn’t miss her and didn’t care that she was missing. She was “poisonous,” the only adjective he could bring himself to use in describing her. I wondered why he still had a picture of her, and why it was a professional headshot instead of the two of them laughing in a park or by herself, with some languid and unposed expression on her face. I would look at her stiffly set face and wonder why the color was gradually leaching away, why she was getting paler as my hopes for her survival died, and why it is I felt the whole thing would disintegrate, the dust falling through my fingers into the cracks of the boards under my feet. Why that last imaginary spreading of ashes was her eulogy; no one else stepped up to the plate, and I was, figuratively, the last person in the universe that cared what happened to her. My partner was ready to move on and throw this case into a filing cabinet, moving it from active to cold. I stood on the balcony of her apartment, ground out a cigarette on the stone railing, and said goodbye to her ghost.
