Sixteen Windows in the Dark (Or How I Almost Lost…
Sixteen Windows in the Dark (Or How I Almost Lost My Mind at Sixty-Five)
Lead-in:
Someone left this on a gallery floor in Minneapolis after an opening. Water damage makes some words illegible. A janitor saved it, said it reminded him of his own dreams. Now it keeps appearing in different cities, always after art shows, always slightly wet.
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You're in the dark and—
No. I'm in the dark. This is my dream. My mess.
Something's behind me but I can't turn around. Dream rules. You know how it is. Or you don't. I barely know and it's my dream.
Sixteen windows floating in nothing. How do I know sixteen? Same way you know things in dreams. You just do. They're brown. Sepia. Like those photos your grandmother kept in the drawer with the broken handle.
First window: dead bird. Small. Black. Dirt around it.
I stare at this bird for what feels like hours because in dreams you can't just look, you have to LOOK, and I'm thinking about my archive—140,000 files of what I've been calling "Beautiful Garbage" for thirty years, actual trash I turned into art or "art" or whatever the fuck it is.
My daughters keep texting. "Dad can we see the archive?" "Dad when?" "Dad?"
The bird's so still it hurts.
The thing behind me moves. Sounds wet. Or like fabric. Or like—I don't know. It's a dream. Things sound wrong in dreams.
Second window and I'm already tired. Water maybe? Sky maybe? Can't tell where anything ends or starts. Brown on brown on brown.
This reminds me of—what? Something about wire melting. Someone told me about a checkpoint that burned for six minutes. The boundaries disappeared. Then they rebuilt them stronger. But for six minutes—
Who told me that? Can't remember. Might have dreamed it too.
Third window is nothing. Or something so dark I can't—
This is when my brain does the thing. The spiral thing. What if some of these windows are empty? What if I get to sixteen and half are nothing? What if thirty years equals nothing?
Fourth window: me at thirty-five holding garbage from behind—was it the Vietnamese place? The owner said something about garbage remembering. No, that's insane. But I took it. Made something.
What did I make?
Can't remember.
Fuck.
Fifth window: different darkness. How is darkness different from darkness? It just is. Dream logic. Or life logic. Same thing maybe.
The thing behind me isn't chasing. It's just there. Always exactly as far as it needs to be. Like my shadow if shadows could breathe.
Sixth window: my handwriting. Pages and pages. Other people's stories I collected. Displacement. Trauma. Like I was the trauma janitor, sweeping up everyone else's pain and filing it.
Why? So I didn't have to look at my own probably. Therapy's cheaper than thirty years of art-making. Should've just gone to therapy.
Seventh window and I'm what, not even halfway? A hammer. Sitting there. Looking accused. Looking like "you used me to beat garbage into submission and called it transformation."
Did I?
Eighth window: thread so tangled I want to cry. Orange-brown. No start. No end. This is my practice? Thirty years of knots?
Ninth—wait, was that eight or nine? I'm losing count. Fuck.
A woman in a purple dinosaur suit. She's waving. Can't talk because—cancer? She shouldn't be here. This is my dream. But dreams are like that. People show up.
Tenth window: nothing. Worse nothing than window three. The kind of nothing that means something.
I wake up here usually. Sheets soaked. But tonight I don't. Tonight I keep going because I'm sixty-five and running out of time to keep running.
Eleventh: a checkpoint but medieval? Like a tapestry. The wire is decorative. Someone's sister lives three kilometers away but it might as well be Mars. Why do I know this? Whose story is this?
Everything's bleeding together. My stories. Their stories. Dream stories. Real stories. Garbage stories.
Twelfth: my daughter at five looking at something I made. Her face is—what? I can't read five-year-old faces anymore. Or sixty-five-year-old faces. Or my own face.
Thirteenth: tools I bought and never used. Arranged like evidence at a trial. "Exhibit A: hammer purchased with intention, abandoned in drawer."
The thing behind me breathes on my neck. Smells like rust. Smells like thirty years of questions I kept not asking.
Fourteenth: a map but wrong. Streets don't connect. My studio is thirty years from home instead of thirty minutes. This might be accurate.
Fifteenth: another dream inside this dream. Someone watching someone watching someone call garbage beautiful. Mirrors facing mirrors. You know that trick. Infinite nothing pretending to be infinite something.
Sixteenth:
Please. Let this one matter. Let this be the answer.
It's me. Now. Looking at windows. But the thing behind me is also there, finally visible and of course it's me. Younger me. Carrying all the questions I wouldn't answer, holding doubt like a backpack full of stones.
We're both looking at window sixteen which is the window I'm looking through which means—
I wake up. Not sweating. Just exhausted.
My daughter texts: "dad please respond"
I text: "soon"
Been saying soon for five years.
The dream comes back. Different but same. Sometimes the bird's dying instead of dead. Sometimes the checkpoint burns forever. Sometimes the dinosaur woman has my mother's voice but I can't hear it.
Sometimes I get to window sixteen and it's just another window with another window inside and I realize it's windows all the way down and I'll never get to the end because there is no end just more looking and more nothing and more me following myself through dark.
I thought I was making art. Thought garbage could be beautiful if you arranged it right, if you believed hard enough, if you devoted thirty years to the belief.
But at sixty-five, in this dream that won't stop, I know what I've been doing: walking through dark, making things to avoid admitting I'm walking through dark.
My daughters will open the archive. Find 140,000 variations of the same question: is this beautiful or is this garbage I insisted was beautiful because I needed transformation to be real?
Needed it like that checkpoint needed to burn.
Like that woman needs to wave at traffic.
Like I need these windows to mean something.
But meaning and needing aren't the same thing.
The dream tonight. Tomorrow night. Every night until—what? Until I let my daughters see? Until I admit the archive might be nothing? Until I stop following myself through darkness?
Sixteen windows. Thirty years. One bird that's definitely dead no matter which window you look through.
We're all making something while hoping it's something else. The only difference at sixty-five is you're running out of time to pretend.
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Coda:
Almost lost my mind means I found it at the last second. Or means I'm still losing it but slowly enough to document the loss. Either way, the daughters get the archive. Either way, thirty years of garbage waits in storage to be judged. Either way, the bird stays dead and the windows keep floating and somewhere behind me or inside me or ahead of me, the question I've been avoiding keeps pace, patient as rust, certain as Tuesday, waiting for an answer I may never give.
