Back in the states he sat in his room and watched the wind move palm trees outside his window. The wind was blowing from the Southeast, and it was warm, a fire danger. The smallest spark would send a fire raging up into the hills, threatening mansions and drawing engines from all over.
He fell asleep to the sound of the wind.
In the dream he was lying in the grass. A woman was lying next to him, her body pressing down reeds of grass, blond hair pillowed on the ground. Even though he did not know the woman in his dream; he saw in the woman in his dream something like the girl he'd been with during his first six months in Rome.
The two of them had met in a modern art class during a section on sculpture. The two of them had worked painstakingly on a tacky clay models, shaped over the course of a four hour class session to look like the naked model, an old man with age marks on his ribs and back, who stood in the front of the class, shivering and nude.
When they stepped back from their designs the teacher asked them to look at their neighbor's and comment. The two of them stepped away, eyes blurred, and stared at the sculptures. They were, even by a rough estimate, not particularly good. But how did one say this to a stranger?
As they stood there, in the cold and silent room, he started to offer a critique, complimenting the shape of the clay's right arm, some tenor of movement that he wanted to say that she'd captured.
Her lower lip started to quiver and at first he was certain that she was going to cry. She burst into a quiet laughter instead; her eyebrows lowering as she tried to contain fits of laughter. Her whole body shook with the effort. At first, he was offended and almost walked away, but then he looked again at his sculpture with new eyes. The head was like a watermelon that had been sliced open, the arms were uneven, and the legs seemed to have more in common with the legs of a very large herbivore than a human being. He started to smile and then found himself trying to control his laughter as well. The girl put a hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle, failing, and the two of them walked quickly from the room and out onto the street.
On the street a church bell was tolling and a flock of pigeons were wandering around after a boy peddling his bicycle down the alley, dropping bits of bread over his shoulder as he went.
"What did it look like?" the girl asked, pausing to catch her breath.
"Something subhuman," he said. "Like a cross between a panda bear and a cougar, in which the mating didn't go well. Like it was something they tried but called off mid-way. Like Victor Frankenstein would walk by and be appalled at what he saw."
She smiled at him, which he didn't notice because he was looking down at the cobbles, too shy to raise them. The light from the sun was making a dazzling display on the ground where water trickled down from the eaves and ran between the cobbles and towards sewers 2,000 years old.
