Your own private noise concert, said my friend, with the intent to reassure. It’s not so much what you know they might find, but what you didn’t even know could be there: a shadow in the sheltered mass.

Behind the door, a darkened room. Inside the room, the machine: a tubular void within an ambient halo; a smooth assemblage of curved surfaces. Outside, there had been next to nothing. A basement. A water-cooler. Lockers for our belongings. Makeshift key-rings — a piece of thread, an old CD — dangled from their locks, a surprise of hard glimmer in the dim, still atmosphere. Outside, you could hear the machine’s faint chop and thud, like the butcher at the back of a grocery store. Inside, the mouth of the sound widened so that I could go inside it. An adrenal response to the rhythmic beat, as if it were music from a nightclub I was approaching from afar. They laid my head on a white pillow and me on a track that travelled smoothly into the machine. My field of vision narrowed into a close, radiant horizon. Closing my eyes opened sensations too loosely universal: the spin of deep space. I was wearing foamy little headphones tethered, not to a music player, but to a panic button. The tech checked in, their voice spackled with the patina of a faraway Earth. And then it began: a series of rapid, diligent ticks and their alarming accompaniment, a siren without shrillness. I felt, or imagined, heat. I thought of an artwork by Nam June Paik: a magnet passing over a cathode ray, gathering luminous mass and distorting prickly darkness. I felt, or imagined, a concentration of force. Tears ran sideways, surprising me, out from under my lashes. The white void backfilled with coruscating ocean, navy and amber. The mouth of the tube beamed warm West Coast sun. The sound grew deafening — a warning coming from elsewhere in the dream, a signal that assumed reality will soon begin to come apart. I could see it plunging into an ulterior structure, like a glacier succumbs to the ocean.

I was happy we’d spoken just the previous day. I was able to roam into that close memory, rather than further into the horror of my body — slippery organ, netted vessel, pumping along in the darkness within. It was foolish to think I didn’t need reality — didn’t need the litter of blossom petals gathered against the kerb, nor the manmade river rushing between half-built buildings, nor the voices of my friends coming in from a distance. So silly to think I didn’t need it at all.