Lat night, I looked out of the windows of a building that exists only in my mind, at the windows of another building. The facing wall was old, and brick, and the windows set in the brick were dark. Multiple layers of glass blurred the reflections I saw in them.
The curious thing was that the windows did not reflect the viewer’s image, peering from the facing windows. Rather they reflected two black and white photographs, images I’ve never seen previously. I only recall one clearly, and it appears to be an image from a series of pictures found in my sister’s camera after her death. The series of images shows her taking candle-lit self-portraits in a mirror; the film containing these images was developed a month or so after she died. The photographs I dreamt of do not appear on the film roll, and presumably my subconscious whipped them up in response to the ghostly time of year and Suzy’s incipient birth anniversary, October 28.
On aspect of the images that was a bit odd was the presence of a white-handled Xacto knife; it’s a knife I have seen and held in real life. I don’t recall if it was among Suzy’s possessions or not. I do know that at times she engaged, like many depressed adolescents, in cutting; it’s possible that she had taken up the practice again at the time of her death.
I’ve been puzzling over this a bit today and I think the dream may also have been prompted by the death, in Boston, of a young college student in the street celebrations that followed the Red Sox win in the American League playoffs. The young woman was hit in the eye by a pepper-ball pellet, a one centimeter diameter plastic ball used as rounds in contemporary crowd control by police. I myself have scars on my ass and thighs from being struck by this kind of round during the events surrounding the WTO meeting held here in Seattle a few years ago.
Contrary to published manufacturer’s claims that the pellets do not break the skin, the pellets that struck me tore through three layers of clothing before opening bloody, three-quarter inch sores on my ass and legs. To the best of my understanding, these pellets were being used in accordance with the manufacturer’s operational training, which specifies that they should be directed at the lower body of persons in a crowd being herded. In the Boston fatality, it seems that the officer who fired the weapon into the crowd was not aiming low. When you own the equipment, you will certainly find the opportunity to use it. Each use increases the possibility of misuse.
Following her death, the Boston Herald, a tabloid-format paper, published a Friday edition with a cover photo of the young woman being tenderly cradled by her companions as she dies. The cover image ignited a firestorm of criticism and was followed up by a Saturday apology from the newspaper. I remain puzzled by the controversy. I found the image tragic and beautiful, in that it clearly records the fact of the love the dying woman was receiving. I dearly wish that I had such an image of my sister in the moments after her fatal impact on the station wagon windshield.
