The Tower of All Things

A dream of distraction

I walked within the herd. Guttural noises and the sounds of hooves were my guide. I wore leather skins and the pelt of polar bear over my back. Ice matted my beard and the whiteout threatened to freeze over my eyes. I held on to an antler and huddled my body against the warmth of the caribou around me. There was no stopping alone, the herd moved and so I moved. We walked for ages across the land and if a circling raven were to see our pattern it would appear as a spiral moving upwind in the midst of a frozen hurricane. The animal next to me stopped moving. The herd pressed up against it, four straddled its sides to keep it alive, to move it closer to wherever the collective conscious of the herd led us. The exhausted animal went limp and slumped to the frozen ground and the herd moved on. I wondered how long they would try to keep me up, the strange mammalian brother with no antlers, two legs, and the skin of a predator. I suspected the herd would move on without me, that the storm would rage until snow and ice enclosed my tomb.

There was no sun in the far northern reaches where I roamed. Darkness was the only constant. Once there were stars and glittering lights but now there was only snow and clouds. My foot caught on something, a stick perhaps, until I remembered, there were no trees in this part of the world. I wondered if there were any trees left at all. It was an antler at my feet, the same antler of the fallen animal we had left behind just minutes hours days before. All but his one crowning scoop was frozen beneath the ice and his deadened blue eye looked as if it still held life. I shuddered at the thought of being frozen alive and considered another kind of death, an end of my own making somewhere beyond the ice.

The herd continued its pace but now the radius stayed the same. The animals to my right moved faster than the animals to my left and I released my caribou companion and shouldered my way through the crowd toward the center of the writhing circle. Along the way other animals joined the herd in unison. Arctic hare darted beneath a million legs and white foxes bounded under the claws of polar bears. A snowy owl took rest on my shoulder and its yellow eyes bade me onward. Eyes. I opened my own as my eyelashes thawed and blinked to reawaken them. A soft glow emanated from the center of the moving, living circle of fauna and I watched the owl fly from animal to animal guiding me toward the source.

The temperature warmed and the sky calmed, but the ice beneath my feet was still frozen solid. It was clear like an alpine lake and when I looked into the solid depths it was as if the stars above the eye of the storm were frozen in its reflection, ancient constellations and comets from eons gone stuck in place. Beneath the ice was a warm glow, and the light reflected through the ice in coruscating color. At the center of the storm, in the middle of the calm, rose an obelisk that towered like a tree. The light it gathered in its translucent construction shot downward like a pulse and the ice blinked in rhythm. Below the obelisk was a structure that extended deep into the frozen world beneath me. My eyes followed the pulsing light downward until it dissipated in the gloom. At the base of the obelisk I stared downward. The smooth surface below me showed off my reflection. It was the first time in years I could recall the look of my face, the length of my beard, the color of my hair. As the structure pulsated in light my reflection changed to a clean shaven appearance, a desperate pair of eyes more amazed by me than by I by them. My reflection reached out to me, and I extended my arm in turn downward into the ice. My skin carried the warmth through the ice and it slid as a burning stick through the veil between the upper and lower worlds. In the moment I was to touch the hand reaching up at me the shining tower burst with light and I flew backward into darkness, back into the fray of the circling herd. In my hand was a set of coins. I fell backward, deeper, down into the warping ice. A thousand hooves walked over me.

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I walked through a door and a man handed me a set of coins. A cap hid his eyes and I made out only his height and gait. One of the coins was smushed like a souvenir and had the imprint of an owl. I pushed them into my pocket and nodded as a colleague welcomed me back; from where, I am not sure. I was in an office made of two by fours and draped with construction materials that sprawled in all directions. Finished spaces were scattered between the new additions and I navigated the hallways with familiarity. I was no stranger here, at least not to others. We were building something, repairing what was yet to be. I avoided the faces and walked downward toward the base of the building. Foundation stones merged into the rock beneath the soil and a smooth black marble surface created a squared passageway. I stepped through it.

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Steel frame was covered by moss and epiphytes. The structural material did not rust and when it glimmered through the overgrowth it looked as smooth as the day it was forged. I heard something drop from above me and a man in a brown cloak jumped from branch to branch toward me. He grabbed my wrists and passed on the same set of coins in my hand and slid downward like some kind of gibbon out of site in the arboreal thickness. The owl coin glared at me, and next to it a revolutionary’s profile shone silver as a twenty-five cent piece.

A howl tore through the branches and I knew it was time to run. The moss on the steel slumped off as I tried to swing and jump from limb to limb and tore at my skin. A giant vine twisted through the metal and I hopped down colossal epiphytes that glowed with the hue of a blood moon. I splashed into each flower and hid behind the crook of a branch to catch my breath. The howling came closer. I felt its thunder in my chest and glimpsed arms that dropped to the ground, dark hair tufted above bleak eyes that reflected the green of the flora. It leapt for me. I looked down and launched myself off a gnarled branch toward a hollowed out arm of a trunk wide enough for a car. I hit the reflection of water inside the cavity and held my breath.

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