The Appointment

The city arrived without preamble. I was standing on a sidewalk I did not recognize, in a place I had never been, and yet I understood that I was meant to be here. The buildings rose around me in tones of tan and gold, their facades catching the light in ways that suggested wealth, permanence, the architecture of institutions that had existed for longer than memory. Sandstone steps climbed toward entrances framed by columns. The sky above was the color of pale brass, neither morning nor afternoon, a light without source or shadow.

I did not know the name of this city. I did not know how I had arrived. These facts pressed against my awareness with a weight that felt urgent, important, though I could not have explained why. Something was expected of me. Something was about to happen. The feeling sat in my chest like a stone, and I began to walk.

The building I approached was grander than the others. Its steps spanned the entire width of its facade, rising in broad tiers toward a row of doors that gleamed even at this distance. The stone was the same tan-gold as everything else, but richer somehow, as though it had absorbed more of whatever light suffused this place. I counted the steps as I climbed them. I lost count somewhere in the middle. The number kept changing, or I kept forgetting, or the stairs themselves were longer than they appeared.

At the top, three sets of doors awaited me. They were tall—far taller than any doors needed to be—with frames of brushed stainless steel and glass so clean it seemed to not exist at all. Through them I could see a lobby of polished floors and distant walls, but the details refused to resolve. It was like looking at a photograph that had been deliberately blurred at the edges.

There was no doorman. This struck me as wrong. A building of this size, this obvious importance, should have someone standing at the entrance. A guard, a greeter, someone to acknowledge arrivals and filter out those who did not belong. But the landing was empty. The doors stood unattended. I was alone with the brass-colored sky and the weight in my chest.

I reached for the nearest handle. The steel was neither warm nor cold. I pulled, and the door swung open with a silence that felt intentional, and I stepped inside.

The transition was immediate. There was no lobby, no polished floor stretching toward distant elevators. I was in a waiting room. The space had simply changed around me, or I had moved through it without awareness, or the building’s interior operated by rules I did not understand. The walls were the same tan-gold as the exterior, the same sandstone warmth, as though the building had been carved from a single piece of ancient rock. Chairs lined the perimeter—leather, brown, expensive-looking. A low table held magazines I could not read. The ceiling was high and featureless.

I knew, with a certainty that had no origin, that I was here to look at a car.

The knowledge sat in my mind like something that had always been there, though I could not remember learning it. I did not know what kind of car. I did not know who would show it to me. I did not know why this was important, or what I was supposed to do once I had seen it. But I knew that this was the purpose of my presence in this building, in this city, in this dream that did not feel like a dream. I was here for a car.

The anxiety that had been building since I arrived sharpened into something more immediate. Time was passing. I was waiting, but I did not know for what. The appointment existed—I was certain of this—but the details had been withheld from me, or I had forgotten them, or they had never been provided in the first place.

I walked to the windows.

The city spread below me. I was high up—higher than the steps I had climbed could account for. The tan-gold buildings stretched toward a horizon that seemed impossibly distant, their rooftops forming a geometry of wealth and age. Streets ran between them like veins, carrying traffic I could not quite see. The brass-colored light fell over everything equally, without preference or shadow. It was beautiful, in the way that things are beautiful when you cannot touch them.

I turned back toward the middle of the room.

The pool had not been there before. I was certain of this. I had crossed this space, had noted the chairs and the table and the walls of ancient stone. There had been no water. There had been no depression in the floor, no tiled edge, no gentle ripple of reflected light on the ceiling. But now there was a pool, and it occupied the center of the waiting room as though it had always been there, as though the room had been designed around it.

I approached slowly. The tile surrounding the pool was the same tan-gold as everything else, but darker where water had splashed and dried. The pool itself was not rectangular. It was shaped like something I struggled to name—a minaret, inverted, the narrow end pointing down into depths I could not see. The sides curved and waved, organic shapes that contradicted the rigid architecture of the building. It was a pool that should not have fit in this space, that should not have existed at all, and yet here it was.

The water was clear. Through it, I could see the bottom—or what served as the bottom, the curved and undulating floor of this impossible vessel. And on that floor, rendered in colors that had survived millennia, were writings. Hieroglyphs. Egyptian symbols arranged in patterns I could not read, speaking messages I could not understand. They covered the entire bottom of the pool, every inch of that curved surface, a language older than the city above me, older than the buildings with their sandstone steps, older than anything I had ever seen.

I felt the age of them. Not intellectually, not as knowledge, but as pressure. The hieroglyphs had been there since before. Before what, I could not say. But they predated something essential, something that made me and my anxiety and my forgotten appointment seem very small.

The water was warm when I entered it. I do not remember deciding to enter. I do not remember removing clothing or descending steps or any of the mechanical processes that would have been required. I was standing at the edge of the pool, looking at the hieroglyphs, and then I was in the water, and the water was warm, and I was sinking.

The warmth was not unpleasant. This surprised me, or would have surprised me if I had been capable of surprise. The water held me the way a hand might hold a small object—firmly, completely, with intention. I felt myself descending toward the bottom, toward the ancient writings, and the pressure of the water increased around me like a question being asked.

I could not breathe.

The realization arrived without panic, which was itself alarming. I was underwater. I was sinking. Something was holding me under—not the water itself, but something in the water, something unseen that had taken an interest in my presence. I could not identify it. I could not see it or feel its edges or understand its nature. But it was there, and it was keeping me below the surface, and my lungs were beginning to remember that they needed air.

I tried to rise. My body would not cooperate. The unseen thing held me with a grip that had no location, no point of contact I could struggle against. I was simply held, the way I had been held in the basement among the junk, the way I had been held by circumstances I could not control or escape. The hieroglyphs watched from below, their ancient messages rippling in the warm water, patient as only dead languages can be.

My chest tightened. The warmth of the water became irrelevant. There was only the surface above me, silvered with light I could not reach, and the growing urgency of a body that wanted to breathe. I pushed against nothing. I fought against nothing. The unseen thing did not tighten its grip or respond to my resistance. It simply continued to hold, as though holding were its only function, as though it had been waiting in this pool since the hieroglyphs were written.

I do not know how I surfaced.

There was no moment of release, no loosening of the grip that held me. I was underwater, drowning in warmth and ancient symbols, and then I was not. The transition happened the way the transition from lobby to waiting room had happened—without mechanism, without explanation. I broke the surface and air rushed into my lungs and I was standing at the edge of the pool, dry, clothed, as though the water had never touched me.

“Welcome,” said a voice behind me. “We’ve been expecting you.”

I turned. A woman stood near the door I had not seen open. She was dressed in the manner of an office administrator—professional, neutral, a face designed to put visitors at ease. Her smile was warm in a way that seemed practiced but genuine. She held a tablet in one hand and gestured with the other toward a door on the far side of the waiting room.

“If you’ll follow me,” she said. “He’s ready for you now.”

He. The person I was meant to meet. The one who would show me the car I had come to see. The appointment I had forgotten suddenly reasserted itself, its details still missing but its existence now confirmed. I followed the administrator across the waiting room, past the pool that still occupied its center, past the chairs and the table and the windows that looked out over the endless tan-gold city.

The door led to a hallway. The hallway led to another door. The administrator opened it and stepped aside, and I walked through onto a balcony that should not have existed.

The city spread below me again, but different now—closer, more immediate. The buildings still rose in their tones of tan and gold, but I could see details I had missed before. Windows with curtains. Rooftop gardens. The small movements of life happening in the spaces between architecture. The brass-colored light had shifted toward something warmer, something that suggested late afternoon, though I had no sense of time having passed.

A man stood at the railing, his back to me. He was looking out over the city the way one looks at something one owns, or something one is responsible for—with attention, with weight. I could not see his face. I knew, without knowing how, that he was important. Not important in the way of fame or recognition, but important in the way of decisions, of outcomes, of paths that branched from single moments. He was the reason I was here. He was the appointment I had forgotten.

Next to him, parked on the balcony as though balconies were designed for such things, was a car.

It was not a car in any conventional sense. It had four seats, visible through a canopy of glass and aluminum that stood open like the wing of a sleeping bird. The body was sleek, aerodynamic, built for movement through something other than streets. There were no wheels. There was no engine that I could see. It sat on the balcony tiles with the casual confidence of a thing that did not need to explain itself.

A flying car. The words arrived in my mind and settled there. I was here to look at a flying car.

The man at the railing did not turn. I waited for him to acknowledge me, to begin whatever conversation or negotiation or demonstration I had traveled to this city to experience. The administrator had withdrawn. The balcony held only the three of us—the man, the car, and me—suspended above the tan-gold city in the warm brass light.

I opened my mouth to speak. To introduce myself, to ask questions, to initiate the transaction that seemed to be expected. But the words would not come. My voice had been taken, or I had forgotten how to use it, or speech simply did not work in this place.

The man continued to look at the city. The car waited with its canopy open. The hieroglyphs from the pool seemed to echo in my mind, their ancient shapes carrying meanings I would never understand.

And then the dream began to fade.

It happened slowly at first. The edges of the balcony grew soft, indistinct. The buildings in the distance lost their detail, their windows becoming smudges, their rooftops dissolving into the brass-colored sky. The man at the railing remained sharp for a moment longer, his silhouette holding its form while everything else melted, and then he too began to go.

I reached for something—the railing, the car, a handhold that might keep me in this place—but my hands passed through matter that was no longer solid. The warmth of the pool returned, or a memory of it, wrapping around me like an embrace from something I could not see. The unseen thing that had held me underwater seemed to be holding me again, but gently now, lowering me into whatever came next.

The important man turned, at the last moment. I almost saw his face. The features were forming, coming into focus, becoming someone I might recognize—

The city vanished.

The balcony vanished.

The flying car with its open canopy, the administrator with her warm smile, the pool with its ancient writings—all of it came apart like smoke in wind, like thoughts interrupted by waking.

I fell into emptiness.

The emptiness had texture. It was not nothing—it was the space between things, the darkness that exists when light has not yet arrived or has already departed. I floated in it, or fell through it, or remained perfectly still while it moved around me. Time had no meaning here. Direction had no meaning. I was a point of awareness suspended in a void that held no landmarks, no boundaries, no indication of what might come next.

The thread that connected me to my body—I remembered it now, from the basement, from the house in Hibbing—vibrated somewhere in the darkness. It was still there, still attached, still linking me to the physical form that lay somewhere far away, breathing, waiting, caught in the machinery of survival. But the thread was stretched thin, thinner than before, and the void around me pressed against it with patient, impersonal weight.

I tried to remember the man’s face. The almost-seen features scattered like leaves, refusing to reassemble. I tried to remember the hieroglyphs, the shapes of letters that had survived millennia, but they too slipped away, leaving only the impression of age, of meaning, of messages meant for someone other than me.

The flying car remained, for a moment longer than the rest. I held onto the image of it—the glass canopy, the aluminum frame, the impossible promise of movement through air. It seemed important, somehow. It seemed like something I was supposed to understand, or remember, or reach.

Then it too dissolved, and I was alone in the dark, and the dream was over, and whatever came next had not yet begun.

The void held me.

I waited.

The thread hummed with a frequency I could not hear, connecting me to a body that continued its work of living, unaware of where I had traveled, unaware of tan-gold cities and warm pools and cars that flew and important men whose faces I would never see.

Somewhere, paramedics repeated their promise. Somewhere, carolers sang to an empty room. Somewhere, a basement full of junk held the shape of my absence.

And here, in the emptiness between dreams, I floated and waited and let the darkness do what darkness does—hold everything that is not yet ready to be seen.