Another Dream

This time I was in a hotel and knew the girl was in the hotel also, ten floors below me. Rides in the elevators and loiters in the lobby revealed her presence; she was coincidentally in the same areas at the same times as myself however we were forbidden to talk, and moreover I believed that she enjoyed and wanted to perpetuate this painful silence between us.

She was undergoing metamorphosis. Her eyes became tear shaped and deeply purple and her hair, which was brown and naturally curly, grew gloss-black and straight. She reformed along taller and leaner lines, her bodily contours so elastic and swaying as to suggest that she'd dispensed with her skeleton altogether. She had an air of obscure glamour; a kind of elegance that inspired intense desire and fear. Her outfits were made of silk, hovering in that twilight area between mint and beige and gray, adhering to her contours and then fading imperceptibly away to reveal long stretches of close-knit flesh.

I went to my room and resolved not to come out until she'd gone. Dream-time weighed heavily on my hands and I went mad after only few seconds' interment in that tiny plastered room. Sweating, anguished, I crawled through my doorway (contracting into nothingness) and rode down to her floor. The elevator opened on a vast plateau of glass and brass, long staircases leading to glass rooms through which one could see endless diminishing repetitions of this motif. There were vivid ferns and white furs. There were sudden cascades of warm water that ran down staircases to plunge in a white, foaming pool that underlay this terrain of cabled platforms. Her rooms were the last word, fulfilling the wildest dreams of 70's opulence. She appeared before me, at the towering window, wearing a formless shift made of that chromatically unstable fabric. On her wrist was a silver bracelet whose lines were interrupted by a metallic swelling which, when inspected, revealed a tiny holographic image of a clock. This was her way of telling me that it was too late. She had grown a dusting of fine golden hair which lay in sweeps and whorls against her skin. I turned around and began my search for the elevator, terrified lest I fall into that white boil below where, I somehow knew, she was floating at her ease.