d r e a m 9 9

I remember walking into the stage right middle balcony of a theater that was enormous, able easily to seat the entire United Nations General Assembly. It had two balconies above the orchestra level, stepped back as they rose, with small boxes above those around the walls. In one of those across from me as I scanned the crowd of thousands, I could see two figures in green outerwear- my brother T--- and his friend (my friend) G---. They were waving enthusiastically. I waved back; worked my way up along the back of the theater and up narrow steep steps in the balcony itself, before reaching them.

The show that night was The Premiere; I recall the teaser playing on the screen, with snatches of Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Babylon 5, and Star Trek interspersed with a fast-paced soundtrack. Reaching their seats, I hugged my brother, shook G---'s hand.

"Did you hear about that airplane?" T--- asked.

"No, which one?"

"Man, it was huge," G--- chimed in. "Crashed right on the northern border coming into the country."

"Yeah, and now there's all kinds of crazy shit...I hear U.S. forces are on some kind of alert, and there's all kinds of back-and-forth between DC and Moscow."

"But," I asked, "if it was coming into the US, what does Russia have to do with it?"

"I don't know," T--- replied. "I presumed that there was some kind of link, though, CNN's been full of nothing else. They're playing it up like the middle of the Cold War."

At this point, as I finished doffing my weather gear, T--- and G--- began readying themselves to leave, causing me to notice the audience was gone and the theater was empty, morphing slowly into a scattered ruin of seats atop a hillside with mountains in the distance. I was holding some sort of breadboarded electronics, and as they set off down the mountain, I began trying to get the electrical system up; it would come up slightly, then die, or sputter and refuse to light.

Gentle persuasion coupled with the occasional judicious use of main force eventually rewarded me with a steady amber glow from the instrumentation, and with finicky, obsessive care I told the poor computer to activate the disaster beacon, which it did and began blinking a small red light to trumpet its accomplishment. I hurriedly shut the rest of the circuits down to conserve power, and only then looked out and around me.

The countryside was not pristine. Directly to the front as I looked - I couldn't tell in which compass direction - was a fairly large ridgeline, traversing my field of vision. I wasn't able to tell how high the top of the ridge was, but there was a definite treeline below the summit. More interesting, however, were the five small clearings that were visible just short of the treeline, with clear paths and slopes leading from their positions down towards the base of the ridge.

Five evenly-spaced clearings, and in each, the visible wreckage of an airliner or other large craft. Despite the distance, which surroundings led me to believe was enormous, the blazons of their service were sharp and visible on bent and shattered tailplanes and fuselages. The colors and edges were not dulled by time; I wondered, if I were to ascend and enter them, what I would find. Bodies? Seats, as were strewn about me? Aluminum altars to a god of survival that had already shown His indifference through their eventual resting places?

I attempted to trace the paths down from the crash sites - had the passengers escaped? I couldn't tell, however; they slowly vanished into the woods as I lowered my gaze.

In a field hard by, there was wreckage of a different sort; two or three shipping containers such as are seen atop the decks of freighters were haphazardly lying about, one with doors open. An amazing variety of trash littered the remainder of the ground.

I looked about me, but T--- and G--- were nowhere to be seen. There was a crisp wind gusting, which smelled of pine trees and altitude. It was fairly chilly. The red and amber lights of the mutilated emergency beacon blinked at me with empty warmth.

In the distance, there was the whistle of wind and an occasional scream of an eagle, hunting- to me it brought the unshakable feeling that the birds were crying their triumph over their clumsy metal descendents, soaring untouched in the thermals and currents above the mountains, looking down on the wrecked and scattered dreams of the humans who had, for so long, looked longingly back up at them as they wheeled against the painfully blue sky-

Again, I'm not sure what to make of this. Some of the imagery I can trace directly to stimuli from the preceding day - discussions of the release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and news of an airliner crash near New Delhi, India. Still, it took the eccentric stirrer of my brain to mix and meld the mystic mud and produce this sequence.

-the custodian