Thursday, March 5, 2009

Waking from a nightmare, in bed beside you, I explained it to you. We had been detained, held hostage in a ‘haunted’ house. Officers of the Gestapo were there, experimenting on our bodies. They had tortured our friends, carving ritualistic figures into their backs. There were two ghosts patrolling the building. Grey, blurred men with heartless expressions. Soldiers in uniform, killed in some distant conflict. I could hear them speaking to me, could hear their voices behind the walls. We broke out of the window, running through the suburbs at dusk. Soon we emerged into open cornfields, but the grey men were there already, like sentries or sentinels. We needed to leap onto a moving freight train, to evade the ghosts, to escape. The dream ended there, leaving me suspended, somewhere between entrapment and release. Upon waking I told you, ‘I don’t know whether we escaped.’ You turned over and looked at me. ‘We must have done,’ you said. ‘We’re here now, aren’t we?’ I stopped and thought. If we had been caught, perhaps neither of us would have woken up at all.

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