Serpents and Stairways

Chapter III - Part 1

Dinah hadn't had a sighted dream in a long time.

Her eyesight rapidly declined when she was sixteen. And maybe for a year or two at least her dreamscapes kept the sharp contours, until—as months and months passed and she grew accustomed to the watercolor of myopia—they too became abstract.

Today she dreamed of Timur. The plot meandered—making them adults, then children, then interweaving memories with wishes she had learned by heart, and then transforming anew.

And all, all blurred: the toy towers and the green checkered roofs of the Tretyakov's manor, the vaults of one of her London pensions, and the witch's hut with marzipan eagles at the entrance, all raised for her by Morpheus's top engineers—but she only saw shadows, outlines, stains and glares. As if someone was crying over the technical drawings.

She and Timur stepped from one dissolving image to the next, still holding hands, and the sticky warmth of his palm in the knitted mitten remained the only constant as they escaped from giants, plucked waxy apples, or stood with their mothers next to the icons, where saints wore gold blotches on their heads; all delineated with the taste of caramel, the smell of wet forests, and the echoes of voices on an empty parents' day.

In the morning, before waking up, she dreamed that the two of them were walking towards Fifth Avenue, between 49th and 50th, through Channel Gardens. Descending the stairs, Timur let go of her hand. Why? Maybe if only he hadn't done that, then...

Dinah stood by the edge of the ice rink, swaying on her skates, and Timur cut through the Sunday morning on his, like a sunrise flare. It was his first time in New Hamilton, he felt on top of the world, and he had always skated well—Dinah remembered that well.

She remembered, but she couldn't see. Even in a dream she couldn't discern anything but the hard cloudy ice under her feet, and the statue of the prophet Pythia, gold like a rye field, reigning over the skating rink. Dinah didn't like her. Dinah feared her. She somehow knew that when Timur skates past her, that malignant figure shall try to swallow him, to absorb him—crawl into his soul through the nimbic drops of his golden-red hair. And being caught by Pythia was worse than ending up in a lair of some banal cannibaltress. But why? And why did that feel so obvious?

It didn't matter. She didn't want to think about it—and she didn't have the time. All that she needed was to warn him. Yell? Yes, yell, so that Timur got out of there, yell! But the air got rubbery and didn't wish to be disturbed. She screamed. Yet no one heard her.

"Please! Don't disappear again, please!" Dinah whispered, feeling her way through the tiny, the size of an album paper, rink of Rockefeller-Center stuffed with people that she couldn't see. Neither could they see her, inheriting her malady. Foreign bodies slammed into her, surrounded her, she was shoved with elbows and almost lost Timur, as he got closer and closer to the golden idol that glittered like the sun's reflection on water.

She screamed in a whisper and once again tried to run, but tripped, of course she tripped and fell, straight through the ice and that unknowable white at the boundary of morning and fantasy.

Dinah woke up and sat in her bed. There had never been a rink like that in New Hamilton, and Timur had never come to the Commonwealth of Steel. His ticket was still back at home, in the drawer of her dressing table.

She put her fuzzy head in the cradle of interlocked fingers and squinted at the window. It must have been damn early; but the fog that crept down the mountain sides made the time of the day gray and unpredictable.

Well. Time. She always gets it wrong. Even now she'd better hurry up—she had lost an entire day and knew that there was no buying it back.

The maids read for her during her hasty breakfast and the less-hasty-than-desired dress-up—one went through a fresh issue of Vogue, the other—through the local newspaper editorials, one of which informed that, by the appointment of his Decafold highness, prince Franz shall arrive by the end of June to overlook military trainings.