I came home from a nine-hour bus trip, no sleep the night before. Lying down with my pillows and bolsters, I had a dream. It went on for 16 hours, me lying there the whole time, out. Because I’d been reading The Goldfinch, the dream had a lot to do with Amsterdam.
Little black kids, boys of 12 or 13, bouncing a chant among themselves: counting down six numbers, the six swelling together into a unity of some kind—not of meaning, just a sound that mattered, one that was exciting. I made a point of writing it down. Go ahead and feel silly, I told myself, go ahead and try to scribble down the moment, I can’t let this by, I have to get it. One number written in my ballpoint, the next below it, and I wondered if I’d get all six, since I know how these things go, how circumstances blip themselves out of whack and leave my will hanging. I did get the six numbers, wrote them all down in vertical ballpoint on a vertical slip of white paper, and the black kids bounced and juggled their chant one to the other.
This was in a tunnel that led off from where my hotel lobby let out. Not a tunnel underground; we were on a floor of some complex looking down on the city. Not a rock-hewn tunnel either; manmade, a rectangle with rounded corners, the walls and ceiling reaching well above us. Muted bulbs were recessed in the walls and ceiling, lighting the tunnel, and crowds strolled among the soft shadows.
Change of scene. The wide green hilltop that came to an edge, like a lap, and then tipped and rolled far down to the miniaturized population of picnickers and parkgoers waiting beneath the dim, white-blue sky. The light wasn’t all where it should be; it was half-present and the rest appeared to have gone somewhere else. The hillside and its grass were green but a different sort than usual, a kind with shadows smuggled beneath each of the blades.
The flaunting virtuoso detailedness, which I pause and take note of once.
I roll down the hill halfway, flying and bouncing along, and it’s fine. Decide I’ll do it again, surprised that I thought I couldn’t (though I’m old and creaky).
A Sunday in the vast park, which is crowded with people demanding their show, their entertainment. Me, now repositioned to the bottom of the hill, and the bottom turns out to belong to a second slope, one that leads up; it faces the hill I’d been looking down from. The two form a bowl with a narrow base between them, and that’s where the crowd of people, the showgoers, wait.
A skyscraper sort of man, a strongman with shaved head and towering bare chest, is strolling in front of me, ready for customers. Families sitting behind me, my family. I don’t know what I do—am I in the way?
Everything feeling like adventure, a panoply, possibilities leading everywhere, but all enclosed: the hotel, building, cavern, closed sky over the giant park.
I wake up and I think, That was Amsterdam.