plays

This is Nothing

I surface with the words in my hand like an earring dropped into a lake. I’ve been under only a moment and the ceiling resolves from soft focus.  I open my eyes to my room, lamp still on beside me, book open on my lap.

 
Where was I? I think I was at a party by a pool at night. The pool was lit and heated and breath filled balloons bobbed on its placid surface. I was standing on a bridge over the pool, the glow from the underwater lights shining up from beneath us.  The man leaning over to speak to me looked like Kevin Kline in “The Ice Storm,” brown suit, butterfly collar, oblate slightly shaded glasses.  Only, he’s German. I think he’s German.  The night is stirred by a light breeze that feels as though it comes from very far away.  I believe we are at the top of a canyon, perhaps in Los Angeles.

I’m looking at the words in my hand. Did he say them?  “Doss iss nisht.” 

 
I look at the clock on the wall.  No time has passed; I haven’t been gone at all. Is that where I was? Was I in a pit of dirt stretching up above me fifty feet? The walls beaten flat by my shovel and I’m excavating deeper and deeper. I’m chewing on something it tastes like root or bark. I pat the walls smooth with the shovel. Is that where I was?

At the penultimate moment of the dream I searched a lake floor in the dim light that made it through the layers of murk. My touches obscured the bottom and stirred up more silt. My air was running out. I began grasping desperately about, flailing, and my hands closed around this phrase.

I try it on, sound it out: Doss iss nisht.

 
I turn off the light and dive again. This time I’m somewhere dark and green, some forest. When I wake I don’t remember the jaunt until in the shower the phrase swims back to me. I don’t speak German, but in the light of day it isn’t difficult to piece together:

Das ist nicht.

 
This is nothing.