Short Story: The Machine of Our Dreams

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I didn’t design this!”

He gazed at me fixedly, trying to master himself in spite of the drink. Setting his beer down, he said slowly, “I know there have been changes, but they are your designs. I saw you design them when we were boarding together at school. You’ve been working on these plans all your life.”

“I designed something,” I said. “I drew up the plans, went to you for estimates, Mr. H for funding, but what you’re building, it’s not what I drew.”

“Are you saying someone switched blueprints on us?”

“No, it’s more insidious than that. They’re like my designs, just not quite . . . there’s something underneath the picture. If you pointed to any particular room or a certain hallway, it’s what I drew, but it’s how they’ve been connected, or reconnected. And what’s this central room they built? It was never part of my design. But look, everything leads to it.”

He stood up and looked out the window over the dark construction site. “That room is a puzzle. They won’t let me near it.”

“But here’s the thing I don’t understand, that room makes sense. It belongs there. You were always getting after me about superfluous doors and ducts and whatnot, and I was so insistent about them—it was my artistic vision—but look how they all fit together now that everything is rearranged and that room has been added. It’s like all my designs fit around this one room, but I don’t even know what this room is for.”

“I’ve been overseeing everything, and I don’t know what’s in it.”

I laughed, “Mr. H doesn’t know what he’s paying for either, though that’s nothing new.” Sighing, I sat down. “When I was young, I had a dream.”

“Yes,” he said. “You’re a driven man.”

“No, not that sort of dream. I meant an asleep dream. When I was a boy, I had a dream. I had it again and again. I was lost, running through corridors, opening doors to strange, terrible rooms. I would wake up screaming. My parents took me to a specialist. Doctor . . . Doctor . . . funny, I can’t think of the name. He gave me paper and a pencil. Asked me to draw what I had seen. He told me I needed to map it out. Said if I could map out my dream, I wouldn’t be afraid. I would know where I was. That’s what I designed, you know, why I became an architect. I was trying to recreate it, to map out my dream, but now, now that I’ve mapped it all out, now that we’re building it, now that I see what it is, I’m lost all over again.”