Circular City

Preface:
I never know whether dreams should be written in ink or in the patience of ants. Every time I set them down, they become labyrinths. Every time I forget them, they return as a hand offering a pearl—and another hand, perhaps the same, taking it away. So this notebook is meant to lose myself better.

---

1

Last night I dreamed a drawing. It was a circle with low walls, like those models built so a child can understand what “inside” and “outside” mean. There were two figures: myself, with the hair I had at seventeen, and a woman I had never seen—or maybe had seen always (I don’t rule out that I met her in 1978 or in 2027; years mean nothing in dreams). We looked at each other over the walls without moving. When she advanced, I stepped back; when I moved forward, she paused, as if listening to a wind that only spoke to her.

There was no roof, so the sky was the clock. The sun passed by, arguing with a bird about whose shadow belonged to whom, and I amused myself searching for the exit that was always two steps behind another curve. The strange thing was that, after many turns, I discovered it wasn’t a maze but a frozen carousel. It would have been enough to push it for everything to spin. No one pushed.

I woke up with my hands shaped like a bowl, as if I were holding something I hadn’t brought back. Still in the half-darkness, I felt the house breathing like a sleeping cat.

---

2

This afternoon I fell asleep by accident while reading a book of myths. In that dream the city was built of pale stone and empty as a square at siesta time. From the Pyramid of the Sun I recited some verses about a plan: “Once, when nothing was but night, all the gods of greatest might gathered to plan the dawn of day and light.” They weren’t my words, yet the voice belonged to me. Nobody applauded; there was no one to applaud, only a current of air smelling faintly of obsidian.

At the base of the pyramid I saw two eyes—not on any face, but sewn to an invisible fabric, like buttons left on a blouse whose owner time had taken. I picked them up—or rather, they climbed into my hand—and they asked to see. With the eyes in my palm, I looked.

What I saw was not the valley or the causeways but a gray-walled room with a lamp flickering like a nervous firefly. There sat the woman from the first dream, in profile, a string of black beads slipping from her shoulder, and a red ribbon fastening her dress like a secret refusing obedience.

She spoke without moving her lips: “Dawn was an experiment, a committee, a wager. Someone forgot to leave us the instructions.”

Not to remain mute in my own dream, I told her that perhaps the instructions were written in the shape of the corridors, in the curves of the walls that barely separated us, like the edges of two bodies that never quite cast a single shadow.

The eyes closed in my hand—as if blinking inward—and the city fell silent again.

---

3

As a child I learned that every time you dream of a woman you don’t know, a dog barks on the other side of the world. An alarm that can’t be heard. Last night the dog was an elevator. It descended without stopping, a cheerful pit. I stepped in with the woman of the ribbon. She held in her hand a pearl-like sphere marked faintly with the number 2, and warned me not to call it a sphere—it was, she said, a pearl or a clock.

When the elevator reached floor 0, we came out into a hallway that smelled of new clothes. On the opposite wall, another door: I opened it, and it was the same hallway. I laughed; she didn’t.

“It’s not that the corridor repeats,” she said. “It’s that we always arrive at the same one. The gods invented the dawn, but not the map.” It sounded true in that way only temporary truths do.

I dared to take her hand. It was warm and faintly absent, as if borrowed from someone else. At the end of the corridor, a mirror reflected three figures: her, me, and a third that was neither of us.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

She kept her eyes on the mirror. “The one who pushes the carousel.”

We turned around at once to catch him, but there was no one—only the rounded corner of a wall beginning to curve, promising another circle.

---

4

It’s dangerous to listen to the house at night. It makes noises it hides by day. In last night’s dream, the house decided to speak. It used a language I somehow recognized: a mixture of coughing pipes, wood stretching in its sleep, and the wind trying to be a violinist. The house invited me to its concert. I went in pajamas, which felt appropriate.

In the large hall downstairs, chairs arranged themselves into a spiral. On each seat rested an object: a key, a subway ticket, a plastic fish, a photograph of someone’s back. In the spiral’s center waited the woman with her beads—larger now, almost planets. She said, “Each object is a door, each door a corridor, each corridor a thread of the same skein. You only have to choose the right order.” The house coughed approvingly.

I began with the photograph and found myself staring at the neck of a stranger who seemed to know my name. I followed the thread and appeared in another house, with a gravel garden and a green table. I turned to the key and opened a drawer that was not a drawer but a sentence too long. I pushed the sentence and fell into the subway ticket, which carried me to a station where trains never stopped, only brushed the platform to remind us that one doesn’t have to arrive to be there.

One by one, I played the objects like musical notes. When I finished, the woman was gone. In her place hovered the pearl marked 2, while the two eyes orbited it like obedient satellites.

“And now?” I asked—not to anyone, but to the house.

“Now you wake up,” said the house, sensibly. “And don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I woke. My pajamas were dusty with fine grit. In the pocket I found the subway ticket. It read: Valley of Murmurs. I don’t believe such a place exists.

---

5

Not all dreams come straight in; some call you on the phone and ask you to come down. This time, I did. On the sidewalk waited a man without a face. Nothing tragic—anyone can become faceless given the right mix of light and embarrassment. He handed me a paper: a map of the circular city, with several exits marked in red ink. In the corner, written by hand: “Teotihuacán is pronounced with the tongue like a stone inside water.”

“Who sent this?” I asked.

He shrugged. When I looked again, he was gone. I went back upstairs, hid the map under the pillow, and fell asleep inside the dream—an indecency I recommend.

Now the city was spinning. I felt dizzy with joy, like a child finally allowed to play with sacred toys. Somewhere the carousel descended, and when it touched ground the walls grew lower. I crossed from corridor to corridor until I saw her. She was gazing toward the center, where a pedestal held the absence of something long gone.

“You took your time,” she said.

“I had to find a map,” I said, and showed her the paper.

“Maps exist to get lost methodically,” she smiled. “Come.”

On the pedestal, an inscription alternated symbols and blanks. I understood enough: “Here stood the pearl when dawn was invented. It rolled away by human error.”

I looked at the pearl in her hand. The same, and not the same. I didn’t know whether to return it.

“When you sleep,” she said, “the city rehearses. When you wake, it performs.”

“And if I don’t wake?”

“Then the performance remains a rehearsal forever, which is a kind of eternity…”

She offered me the pearl. It weighed little, like a promise. At that moment, the eyes floated in, adhering to the opposite wall, staring outward. Through them we saw a sunrise that didn’t belong to our season. The light fell like an upside-down rain. I meant to say something solemn, but my tongue turned to stone and she smiled at me.

---

6

This morning I understood my dreams are conspiring. It’s not the first time. They used to conspire to make me take detours and find, say, a coin from a country I’ve never visited. Now they want something else. “Don’t look for her awake. Awake, you’re only a tourist.”

I sat with the notebook. On the table: the cup. At the window: a truck’s noise. On my back: a faint memory of music. I wrote:

Instructions to continue the interrupted dream:

1. Remember the city is patient.
2. Do not push the carousel until someone says your name.
3. Accept the eyes as part of the furniture.
4. Don’t distinguish between pearl and clock.
5. Pronounce Teotihuacán as one lifts a stone from water with the tongue.

---

7

I did it. Slept at the wrong time, like skipping class to watch trees without guilt. The moment I closed my eyes, the city opened like a nocturnal flower. Everything was in place, perhaps a bit clearer, the way paintings seem brighter when you return to the museum years later.

At first, the woman wasn’t there. I went to the center, to the pedestal. The inscription had changed: “Dawn isn’t planned; it’s practiced.” I placed the pearl on the stone and the number 2 turned into 0, a promise of a beginning. The carousel spun, ringing like a bicycle bell. I laughed—who would have thought dawn announced itself that way?

She appeared from a side corridor, careful not to interrupt. She carried the eyes, now tamed, and set them beside the pearl.

“Look,” she said.

We looked. The pearl began to roll in small orbits, each turn releasing a scent: bread, rain, jacaranda shade, old ink, a child’s hair, warm stone. The pearl stopped, and far away I heard the murmur of a waking city—not ours, but another, built of slanted corridors and plazas made of tepid mirrors.

“So dawn…” I began.

“…is learned,” she finished. “Like laughter, like music, like not fearing corners.”

“And us?”

“We push when it’s our turn.”

We stayed silent. The quiet was a cat undecided about affection. The pearl returned to its place; the eyes shut with a soft click. I thought of the map, the ticket, the photograph; perhaps it had all been arranged long before, with equal parts cruelty and tenderness.

“You’re going to wake up,” she said.

“I know.”

“Don’t forget the pearl.”

“I can’t take it.”

“You don’t need to. It comes back.”

Before opening my eyes, I knew the carousel had begun to spin without me.

---

8

Final note of the day, almost night. I walked through the real city, which sometimes disguises itself better than the dream one. On a corner I saw a woman resembling the one with the ribbon—not by face but by the way she looked at shop windows as if they were maps. She walked with the haste of someone who never arrives yet always does. I followed her a block and lost her, a courtesy on her part.

In my pocket, the ticket to the Valley of Murmurs is fading. Only a violet stain remains. No matter. I still feel in my hand the weight of something I don’t carry. On my tongue, a stone that has turned into a bird. Outside the window, the evening sky turns red in so circular a way that one might expect to hear a bicycle bell announcing, belated or early, tomorrow’s dawn.

If I dream of the city again—and it’s not if, but when—I won’t push right away. I’ll wait until someone says my name, then push gently. After all, we wouldn’t want to frighten the gods. I don’t know if they mean for the dawn to be the same for everyone. It’s enough for me that sometimes, halfway down the repeated corridor, her hand brushes mine, and I feel on my skin that tiny electricity of what is just about to begin.

Good night, circular city.
If you wish to see me, call me.
I’ll come down.

The Dual Bird

When my cousin Leonardo disappeared in the summer of 1996, he left behind a collection of ceramic fragments and a black notebook full of half-translated glyphs. He said he had been corresponding with an archivist from Baracoa who claimed the glyphs were remnants of an extinct language spoken in dreams and he claimed the dreams were dangerous. The archivist warned him not to read them aloud. He read them aloud anyway.
The notebook arrived in a padded envelope marked only with a blurred red seal that looked like a bird or a bent clock. It contained one final entry before the pages turned to smudges: “The mirror-wings are real. I saw one land on the mural behind Café Colonial. It sang with my voice but in reverse.”
That was the last anyone heard from him.

***

Leonardo had been obsessed with a ceramic bowl painted with the likeness of a creature he called El Ave Dual. The Dual Bird. It looked like a heron drawn by someone in a trance—spiky legs, a triangular eye, and what seemed to be a second being dangling from its beak. “It eats symbols,” he told me once on the phone from Havana, drunk, his voice covered by static. “Or maybe it gives birth to them. Depends which side of the bowl you’re looking from.”
The bowl, he said, had been recovered near the Zapata Swamp, beneath a building that no longer existed. He had seen it once in a museum, but later he claimed the real one had vanished and been replaced by a copy. “The copy doesn’t sing,” he muttered. “The glaze is wrong. They silenced it.”
I thought he was having one of his episodes, like when he believed the murals around Havana were trying to communicate directly with him. He was especially fixated on one mural: a half-erased wall painting that read “CARE” in ghostly letters. “Look how the A is breaking apart,” he whispered. “Like it’s trying to leave the word.”
I visited the wall myself after he vanished. It was just brick and red paint, peeling in the heat, but I have to admit something stirred in me when I stood before it—a kind of pressure in the air, like being underwater. I thought I heard a voice. Not speech, exactly. Just a breath with a hint of meaning.

***

Later, I received an audio cassette in the mail. No note. Just a loop of someone whispering in a language I couldn’t place. I sent it to a linguist friend in Mexico City who said it was some mangled form of Taíno, or maybe a synthetic dialect. He didn’t like it. He said he’d been having nightmares after listening to it too long.
“I dreamed a bird flew backwards into my room,” he said. “Its shadow passed through my chest, and I woke up unable to move.”
I played it once more, late at night. The whispering didn’t scare me. But there was a part—about 37 minutes in—where the voice stopped, and I heard what sounded like the clatter of talons on tile.

***

Leonardo had once written a poem about a machine that hovered over cities like a chandelier made of prison bars. He called it La Araña del Tiempo, the Time Spider. I thought it was just surrealist junk, maybe inspired by some fevered psychedelic trip. Then I saw it.
It was August in Manhattan. I was visiting an old friend near the East River when the sky split into two tones of yellow. I looked up and saw a structure—not a machine exactly, but something assembled from pieces of cranes, cameras, and rusting cathedral spires. It hung over the skyline like an unanswered question. And underneath it, the Chrysler Building shimmered as if caught in a different dimension. The air buzzed, and, for a second, the sun turned black. Then it was gone. No one else saw it.
I asked my friend if anything strange had happened. He shook his head.

***

By then I had started collecting fragments of Leonardo’s research. People he had sent letters to. Places he had marked on old maps. One recurring site was Cuba, of course, but not the Cuba of airports and guidebooks and tourists. His maps named places like Valle del Eco Ciego—Valley of the Blind Echo—and Isla Gemela, which I couldn't find on any satellite image. In the margins of one notebook he wrote: “Cuba is the twin of an island that doesn’t exist. A double that cast a shadow before it was born.” Another note read: “The island exists slightly to the past of the present. You can reach it, but only if you forget what you’re looking for.”
I spent months trying to decipher this. Eventually, I came to believe he wasn’t talking about a geographic Cuba anymore—but a metaphysical one. A symbolic Cuba, adrift in the twilight between memory and forgetting, vibrating in the deep ocean of eternal signifiers.

***

A woman named Maritza contacted me through encrypted email. She said she knew Leonardo. They had attended a symposium in Cienfuegos on the esoteric traditions of pre-Columbian rites. “He spoke of the Bird That Carries the Double,” she said. “He believed it could unhook the soul from the false body and carry it to the Mirror City.”
I asked what the Mirror City was. She replied with coordinates off the coast of Santiago de Cuba and a grainy photo of the same wall mural Leonardo had described—the word CARE flaking off a red-brick ruin. Except in this version, there was something else: a shadow of a beak traced faintly beside the letter C. She warned me not to go.

***

It was hot and wet when I arrived and the mosquitoes were unrelenting. I hired a driver named Tomas who didn’t speak unless I asked him direct questions. I showed him the mural photo. He knew the wall. “Old American factory,” he said. “Painted over many times. Now just ghosts.”
We drove for hours. The city peeled away. Sugar fields, swamps; finally, a narrow road overgrown with vines. The air shimmered with heat and insect drone. I saw the wall before we reached it. The red had faded to rust. But the letters were still there. And the shadow-beak was real. I stepped out of the car.
There was no birdsong. No wind. The silence was full of thoughts that weren’t mine. And then I saw it.
Just beyond the wall, in the tall grass, the ceramic bowl. Cracked. Glazed with mud. The bird was still visible, drawn in black, its eye a perfect spiral. It held something in its beak—a smaller bird, or maybe a doll. I don’t know what possessed me, but I touched it.

***

I awoke in a different city. Or maybe the same one, but reflected. Everything was doubled. Every building had a twin, slightly off-kilter. People walked backwards, laughing in voices pitched too low. The sky was the wrong color—like boiled gold. I passed the mural again. This time the letters were reversed: ERAC.
In a store window, I saw myself. But older. Hollow-eyed. Smiling in a way I never had. I ran.
Eventually, I found the bowl again. It was sitting on a table in a room with no distinct doors. I picked it up and felt a presence split from me. A second self, pale and translucent, slipped from my skin and whispered, “Now you see what he saw.” I turned.
Leonardo stood in the doorway. He didn’t speak. But his shadow moved like it was breathing.

***

I don’t remember leaving the city. Or the island. Or how I got back. I just woke up in my apartment in Miami with the bowl on my kitchen table and sand in my shoes.
The bowl has changed. Now, when I look at it, I see myself inside. Not the reflection—something deeper. A version of me holding a version of Leonardo. We are both birds. We are both dolls. We are both language about to be forgotten.
Sometimes, late at night, I hear the cassette play on its own. The voice is no longer whispering but singing. And the song is a melancholic warning in reverse.

She Sailed Through The Caves

And then she sailed—yes, sailed, not in any boat you or I might recognize (though we might, in the heart’s midnight, wish otherwise), but in a vessel of bone and dusted stars, through the caves where language was first hidden and perhaps first betrayed.
Not the tourist caves. Not the ones with guided lights and brochures promising stalactites like fangs and minerals like gods. No. These were other caves.
She sailed them with her eyes closed.
The darkness pressed, not like velvet, but like something more granular. Like the hush of a lover you’ve not yet met, whispering your name in a dialect that aches.
In those caves, were echoes of the tantalizing dreams of nearby strangers—half-wanted, half-stolen. It wasn’t the content of those dreams that mattered (the man with the broken harmonica; the girl whose limbs were made of ash), but their residue, their abandoned textures. The sweat on their necks. The trembling of almost touching.
She sailed by them, each dream a wet candle.
Above her, stalactites breathed. Below her, the shadows stirred. Occasionally, a sound would bloom. The tales from the other side of closed doors—they floated in the water like old photographs, half developed, half erased.
“Mother?” one of them asked, voice muffled by time and apology.
Another: “He didn’t mean to.”
And then: “We were just children.”
How heavy are stories when they have no one left to remember them?
She did not speak. She had left her tongue at the threshold, as was custom. A tongue is too noisy, too proud. Instead, she listened. The haunting cries half heard before waking—the ones that slither back into the skull just before you open your eyes and decide they were nothing—these cries curled around her ankles, licked her ribs. They did not want rescue. They wanted witness. And so she gave them that.
She passed the smile in the shadows, too. You know the one. You’ve seen it. Maybe in a mirror once, when your reflection delayed just slightly. Or in a hallway, just before sleep, when you thought the coat rack twitched. The smile where there is no mouth. The eyes that do not exist, and yet ache as if they’ve been weeping for centuries. That smile lingered in the air like a bad promise.
She didn’t flinch.
Because she, too, was becoming.
Not woman, not ghost, not myth. But something else. Something between the breath and the name. She remembered her father once told her, “Beware of the silence that hums. It means something wants to be born.”
She was humming now.
The vessel rocked. The caves began to tighten around her. Bones remembered being crushed. Air remembered being lost. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the only thing she had carried: a key made of sleep. Useless in most doors, but not these.
She turned it in the air. There was no lock, but the key twisted just the same.
And then: light.
No, not light—awareness.
The boat dissolved. The caves sang. The strangers dreamt of her now.
Somewhere above, in the shallower world, a woman woke with tears in her eyes and did not know why.
But beneath—below—within—she sailed on.
Still listening.
Still humming.
Becoming.