Dearest Rachel –
It’s not often that I find myself in the middle of an actual nightmare, particularly one as vivid and engrossing as this. Normally, of course, my worse dreams tend to be muddled and confusing, and those bad ones that are clear leave me wanting to escape them. Which, of course, I eventually did in this case, too, but not before becoming “that guy”; you know, the fellow no one is supposed to be, because of his bad behavior. The guy who the rest of us look at and realize he was put on the earth as an example to the rest of us what not to do in life – or, in this particular case, in a life-or-death situation.
For what it’s worth, I think what I saw and found myself running through probably could serve as evidence that I’ve never experienced such an emergency in real life. Which, as grateful as I am for the fact, means that my description of it (and my reaction) will probably seem ridiculously unrealistic. But I had to commit this to text before I forgot all about it, so take everything here with as much salt as you can, given the circumstances.
The scene initially had me working in an office building not unlike the one I all but called home for the last twenty years of my employment history. Top floor (although in this case, it was the seventh floor as opposed to only being the second), open-cubicle layout, so that everybody could see the outside world from their workstation, that sort of thing. Not this the view was nearly as pleasant as mine had been, with natural wetlands as well as nearby office buildings; this was more like a typical urban landscape, with similarly tall buildings surrounding ours. Perhaps the most curious thing about it was that I found myself assuming that I was working in downtown Ukraine. Not because of any evidence of the effects of the war (yes, that’s still ongoing, and it’s a whole lot less clear these days as to who the good or bad guys are – or if there are any actual ‘good guys’ in the conflict), but rather that everything written seemed to be in Cyrillic. Despite this, somehow I seemed to be at least able to go through the motions of a typical working drone without any apparent difficulty, even apparently having a rapport with some of my neighboring co-workers.
My mental curtain opened on me taking some sort of break, away from my desk; I might even have been on an outside balcony, although in retrospect, I can’t imagine having access to the outside from so many floors up. Not that it’s necessarily likely to happen, but one might guess what a worker who’s fed up with his or her lot in life might do should they somehow be given access to such a height at their workplace. But that’s little more than an observation, hours removed from the dreamscape my mind had built; just something that I was aware of, but gave no thought to at the time.
What I did notice in the moment was smoke in the air; and not the sort that my fellow workers might engage in while on break with me. This wasn’t tobacco, but something – and I couldn’t tell you what, or even precisely where, apart from emanating from our floor – that wasn’t supposed to be burning, and we needed to get emergency services here, and ourselves out. Upon re-entering the building to investigate, I could see flames in a certain part of the floor, opposite from my own workstation.
Which was a good thing, as my first instinct was not to evacuate, but to dash over to my desk and gather my jacket, keys and a bagful of my stuff (there may have been a fourth item, but as I can’t remember what it was, it’s hardly important to the story, especially since I can’t go back and retrieve it now) before making my way to the exits, even as awareness began to spread just as fast as the fire itself. Somehow, I was still among the first few to get there, and I even found the room to vault over the stairrail a time or two in order to expedite my departure while all the other drones were making their way in a much more orderly fashion down the open-air stairwell.
The building was obviously designed for aesthetics rather than ease of egress; at the fourth floor, we had to transfer from one stairwell to another, even as the crowd of office workers attempting to escape grew on our way down. It was at this moment that I realized I was no longer carrying my bag – and for some reason, I found myself thinking I’d left everything behind at my workstation; a patently absurd conclusion, after deliberately having done the ‘wrong’ thing by returning to collect those things in the first place.
Nevertheless, I began to retrace my steps, all the while panicking that I wouldn’t be able to get home and away from the place if I didn’t have my car keys in particular (which, again, you would think I would have put in my pocket immediately upon collecting from my desk in the first place, but in my panic, I obviously wasn’t thinking clearly). I fought my way against the crowds now stampeding down the stairs, and charged back into my department on the seventh floor.
By this time, the area was completely ablaze; the ceiling was basically entirely made of flame, and the smoke was so thick that I couldn’t find my way back to my workstation even if I could recognize where I was. To be sure, I could neither smell the smoke nor feel the flames, so I wasn’t as deterred as I should have been. But no matter; I was doing basically everything I shouldn’t have in the situation. Had this been real, I wouldn’t have had a chance; then again, had this been real, I might well have sensed a lot more danger in terms of those other senses, and had the good sense to get out of the building like everyone else was doing, rather than try to gather everything that, supposedly, I’d already had on my person. As it was, there was a point at which I realized the strangeness of the whole situation, and escaped it all by the simple expedient of waking up.
Now, whether there’s a message in all this, I couldn’t say. Maybe I need to not hang onto things so tightly; maybe there’s a point in letting go, if not doing so will cost me my life. It seems like a lesson I wouldn’t have to learn, after what I’ve gone through throughout this time. I wish you were still here, so that I could tell you this directly, and we could parse this together (assuming you saw the need).
But for now, honey, all I can do is ask you to continue to keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 