An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(59)

“First, anything unusual. You need to spend the next few hours and maybe the next few days learning everything you can about airplanes. Try to figure out what kind this is in your first go. Is it a Boeing? An Airbus? A CRJ? You can start broad and narrow it down doing research between sleeps. You might just have a sensation that something is a little off. Dream clues are often omissions, things that aren’t there that should be, but you might not be able to spot them if you don’t know what the plane’s cockpit is supposed to look like.

“Second, any broken repetition. Usually repeating units in the Dream are identical, so anything that makes one thing different from others of the same type is probably important. If one of the seats isn’t in its full, upright, and locked position, or one of the windows is single-paned, or one of the bathrooms smells weird. It could be anything.

“Third, don’t try to do this on your own. Talk to me. I’ll get together a few people I trust who might have relevant knowledge. I know that it can be really appealing to you to win independently, but there haven’t been any puzzle sequences solved by a lone Dreamer for over a month now. These things are complicated, and it’s clear to me that the Carls want us to be working together. Find what you can find and report back to me. I know what I’m doing.”

I had been taking notes. I tabbed over back to Skype. “Any other sage wisdom, O Guru of the Dream?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Don’t mock me or I will leave you alone with this mystery and your failure to solve it will eat you alive.”

“Right!” I said.

That entire conversation had the feeling of a pleasant stroll inches away from the edge of the Grand Canyon. It was really quite nice, wonderful, even. But it was impossible to forget that I was one stumble away from some serious unpleasantness.

“I will report back in the morning,” I said.

“If you’re lying to me about any of this, I will set fire to your apartment building,” she said.

It was not particularly easy to fall asleep that night. Anticipation always negates grogginess, even if you’ve become the kind of person who is perpetually groggy like I had. But I kept reading a biography of Rodin that I’d been working my way through for the fourth time until I finally found myself in the lobby. I did just what Maya told me to, and soon I was running toward a plane that was headed for a landing somewhere in the city. After having done some preliminary research on airplanes, I could tell that this was a big plane but not a huge one. It didn’t have two stories like a 747 or an A380, which meant it was, like, one of twenty-five different types of planes that all looked practically identical.

As I ran toward where I thought the plane was landing, I noticed that I wasn’t getting tired, I could run at full speed for as long as I wanted to. I guess that’s not weird for dreams, but being in control and aware the way I was in the Dream made it a thrill. So I let my feet carry me as fast as they could, which was about as fast as I could go in real life. Which is to say, not particularly fast.

After I lost sight of the plane, I had to make an educated guess at where it landed. It would keep moving after it touched down—planes did that—so I headed off roughly to where I thought it might end up.

I failed. I got lost, wandered the city for forty-five minutes, had a thought, and then slammed my head hard against a tree. On purpose, of course. There were a number of ways to wake up from the Dream, but the easiest was to try to hurt yourself. It never actually hurt and you found yourself lying in your bed.

Getting back into the Dream required that you spend some time awake. If you just went straight back to sleep, you’d have normal dreams all night.

So I groggily checked Twitter, read a couple of top posts on the Som, and then, judging it to have been long enough, went back to sleep.

This time, I headed toward the edge and then walked around a bit until I found what I was looking for: a building that was taller than most. It was maybe seven stories high, some dope Japanese pagoda. It was only a few blocks from the edge of the city, and it was higher than the vast majority of buildings around it. I scouted it and found that the stairs indeed led all the way to the top story.

So I went all the way to the edge of the city, saw the plane, and then ran like mad to the pagoda and up to the top floor. I still couldn’t see where the plane was ending up, but I got a much better idea of some nearby landmarks. It dropped below the skyline in front of the main skyscraper, so it was in my part of town. An experienced Dreamer would have been able to walk straight there, but the city’s winding, angled, narrow streets still baffled me.

But I got there.

To this day I don’t know how it’s supposed to have landed, but the plane was there, nestled into a little park that now looked to clearly have been made for a plane to fit into it. Apparently, it didn’t need a runway. I mean, obviously these things don’t have to make sense. That was emphasized as I approached the plane and something felt really off about it. Maya said that that might happen, something might be missing, except that this wasn’t subtle. The plane’s landing gear wasn’t down. It was floating, its belly six or seven feet off the ground, the engines just a couple of feet. I could walk right up to them and touch them. Overcoming some seriously irrational fear, I put my hand into the jet engine and spun the giant fan inside.

It was painted to look like it was owned by an airline, but I didn’t recognize the logo. It was a gray horizontal bar with a lighter gray circle overlapping it. Like a sun rising behind an ocean, except the circle was in front of the horizon. The image’s intense simplicity made it look more like a country’s flag than a corporate logo.