“I dreamt I injured an elk,” I said.
“What?” he said. “What time is it?”
“5-something,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
My too-early silent alarm buzzed on my left wrist, the alarm I usually ignore but don’t erase because it keeps me honest. Our bodies were wound together, limbs heavy and warm with sleep. I was pinioned. I freed my right arm to silence the haptic harassment.
“I dreamt I injured an elk.”
He nuzzled his face closer to my back.
“I didn’t hear you,” he said, his voice gravelly still.
“I dreamt I injured an elk,” I said.
“I did hear you,” he said.
He rethreaded his arm to fit it more effectively under my arm and breasts. Then he kicked the bottom edge of the comforter out of its tangled state, and with his heel, pulled it back underneath himself to trap more heat. He was an engineer, always improving his systems.
“Go on,” he said.
“I had bought a house,” I explained, “named Chateau Dûtoit.”
I let its specificity linger there. Perhaps one of us might divine meaning out of the name? We didn’t. I closed my eyes, calling up what was next.
“It was way far away, and I would have to take the commuter train to work. It wasn’t Seattle, I guess; I was in a city with a commuter train.”
“I love commuter trains,” he said.
“Me too,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind a daily train.”
We were thinking of Europe, trains he rode when working at his company’s European offices, trains I rode as a child growing up in Switzerland. My dream pulled me back.
“There was a vista, with water. It was the oddest thing. I couldn’t remember seeing the house, or how I came to be its owner. I drove out there, or I found myself suddenly there, you know how it is in dreams, and it was beautiful and silent and there was nobody around.”
“Except you, toi, like Chateau de toi,” he said, satisfied with his solution.
“It was Dutoît, not de toi.”
“Never mind, in that case. What’s that mean?”
I shrugged, no referent coming to mind, and looked over my shoulder at him. His face was rumpled, only half alert, one eye open and the other squeezed shut against the light slicing in through the window where the drapes didn’t meet.
“There was bright sharp sunlight,” I remembered. “I had forgotten my sunglasses and the light was bleaching the horizon some. I could see the appeal of this lone house set near the water. I hoped there was a view in the house, but I didn’t know. I guess I hadn’t even gone on Redfin to check out the pictures before buying it.”
This seemed unlikely. We were junkies: Redfin, Zillow, whatever apps came with maps, acreage, historical value, the more raw data the better. He even tapped into the city records sometimes and studied plats and plans for fun.
“I turned and tried to get a panoramic sense of my bearings. I kept marveling at how I had made the choice to abandon the city, to live so remotely. I imagined I would be afraid when I lived alone there, no city noises or neighbors. Somehow the kids were not with me; you were not with me. I would be alone; it made me realize suddenly that I was alone, and afraid.”
He squeezed his bicep and drew me close for a moment, constricting me with love, a forceful reminder that I was not alone.
“As my fear mounted, I heard a rustle in the leaves. Now there were leaves, and a forest, suddenly too, like it was two different ecosystems at once. A large, slow-moving elk came through the clearing.
“Oh, no, the elk! The one you injured?”
“Yes, but not at first. The elk paused to graze on something. It was nightshade. I wondered if nightshade was poisonous to elk.”
“What does nightshade look like?” He asked.
“I don’t know; it was there, and I could recognize it, but I couldn’t tell you what it looked like then or now. The elk was peaceful, doing his thing.”
“As they do.”
“I guess? I’ve never seen an elk. I don’t think, anyway. I pulled out my phone to capture it. Time changed from being slow and spacious to speeding way up. The elk didn’t like being looked at and the camera triggered it. When I looked again, it had changed. Instead of a stately older elk, it was a young elk, lithe and wiry and fast-moving. It moved in an arc behind me. I was on a bridge, with a railing at my back, and it leapt up and stood on a railing on the bridge and breathed down my neck—it was small for an elk, suddenly more like a large goat now—and I could feel that it was about to attack, it was breathing down my neck, and I reached for a branch and shoved it up into its guts and tried to impale it, so I could run away.”
“That’s quite a dream,” he said.
“There’s more,” I said.
It hadn’t left my system; I could feel my breath losing depth and my heart picking up its pace as I relived the panic of one fear becoming another, the threats morphing unpredictably. I was alone, and under attack, but from what? It kept shifting.
I took a deep breath and tried to slow myself down.
“There was a man there, 10 feet away from me, checking on the elk, and I was trying to get back to my car, and for no reason—it wasn’t about the elk, who was still a threat to me, wounded and angry—the man started swinging a long sharp blade, wait, make it two; he had one in each hand. He warned me that he was about to throw them at me. He said he needed to.”
“At you? What was his problem? Also, why would he warn you?”
“Yes, aiming at me. I was perplexed. I asked him why he needed to do that, and he told me he did it every day. I had zero idea what he meant.”
“And he was a stranger?”
“I think I knew the man, or knew of him? I didn’t expect him to throw knives at me. I didn’t follow why he was being all deranged and cryptic, swinging his knives like they were nunchaku, and with the elk injured and everything.”
I paused, unsure of what would reveal itself next. He rubbed my midback, the spot between my shoulder blades that was always persuasive, one way or another.
“Was I there?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “You’re not jealous, are you?”
“No, of course not,” he said, pulling away.
“Come back,” I said, angling my arm out behind me like a disjointed wing to pull him back to me. “You didn’t want to be there. This wasn’t a romance thing, I promise. This guy wasn’t an ex or a love interest. He was a Machiavel, you know, just wants to be bad for the sake of being bad?”
“A Machiavel?”
“A manipulative character like Machiavelli; or like Iago in Othello. Have you read Othello? Shakespeare, I think, coined the term Machiavel for characters like that. No reason to be bad, except his badness.”
He was puzzled by the reference but didn’t ask for elaboration, nudged my back to go on.
“Right, sorry, never mind; the point is it was unmotivated, which made it confusing. I couldn’t predict what he would do next. I didn’t know what he wanted, except to hurt me or cause me fear.”
“Gotcha. Scary.”
“Yes. Plus, I was still scared of the elk I had injured. He was pissed at me, too!”
“Ah, back to the injured elk.”
“Yes. I was worried about the elk’s health even though I was afraid of it. I wondered if I should call wild animal control or something. But I was frozen in place by this guy, who was describing what he was going to do to me, like a villain in a movie drawing out the moments before his attack. You can’t outrun my knives, he said, spinning his weapons.”
His hand stopped making circles, and the hypnotic effect of the caresses withdrew.
“Where was I in this dream?” he demanded.
“You didn’t want to be in this dream.”
He looked offended.
“I would have helped you.”
“Seriously. You didn’t fit. And it was about being under threat and alone, unexpectedly.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
“Except for this one guy.”
“Well, yes.”
“And the injured elk.”
“The elk doesn’t count.”
“Fine.”
“Oh!” I said, seeing the face more clearly, the bad guy’s face, “it was Joseph— that guy with the two first names, the actor? Joseph—”
“No idea,” he muttered. “Never any idea with celebrities,” he reminded me, withdrawing his hand from my orbit to muffle his yawn and stretch.
His hand resumed tracing tentative patterns on my back.
“The younger brother in 10 Things I Hate About You? Joseph… Jason? Gordon Joseph?”
“Nope. Nothing.”
“Anyway, he bore a grudge.”
“I’ll say,” he said. He stroked my hair, the back of my neck. “It sounds stressful!”
I accepted the kindness everywhere it traveled and arched into his hand like a compliant cat, the kind that follows, or maybe artfully directs, someone’s affection.
“And I really wasn’t there at all?”
“No, but trust me, that’s a good thing. You weren’t throwing knives at me.”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t throw knives at me.”
“True. But that’s a low bar.”
“True.” He untangled his arm, gently, rolled 180 degrees away from me and stated: “I’m going to go back to sleep now.”
“Oh, of course,” I said, with a pang, realizing how long I had kept him awake. I reached my arm over to him and stroked his back in apology and thanks.
It had poured forth, this dream, an oddly lit window into the fearful inner energy that raced within as this pandemic wore on, deepening the isolation and the mental weariness and the uncanny combination of sameness and strangeness. The same thing every day, time distended and disorienting, but also this unrelenting oddity of being locked in—if one were lucky!—and under general and amorphous siege.
Dreams had been mostly absent for months, or had come as waking dreams, strange reveries while dissociating with my camera still on, on Zoom calls, almost like the little absence seizures that ran on one side of the family. I tried to be “present,” whatever that meant. I tuned into my breathing, I deepened my yoga practice, I timed short meditations, I thought about “connecting” and what it meant to be present. Still, I was in and out, struggling to stay yoked to the real.
It felt meaningless to be quote-unquote present. Presence, and place, felt beside the point. The distance between people grew, even as the time to see them shrank: an impulse, or a summons, could land you in front of someone’s screen in minutes or seconds. Connection could be immediate, but disconnection felt omnipresent. Planning to actually see people might require COVID tests, and masks, and assessing everybody’s comfort and risk levels, plus checking the weather and making provisions for the activity as well as the attendant anxiety. Recovery time (and maybe tests) might be required after the fact, as well. Being human, with other humans, was taxing on the entire system. So we boxed ourselves up in screens, and either hid or unhid, muted or unmuted, our whole selves consisting of these fluctuations of energetic availability that were fatiguing to maintain and to receive.
I felt it especially sharply during the ten weeks this fall when I was teaching a large section of first-year law students on Zoom. The class covered Torts, the law of injuries where I had probably been reading cases about attacks by animals, including elk; defense of property; and other nightmare-inducing violent encounters. I resolved myself to memorizing the names and basic profiles of my 74 students. This homework was harder for me than it usually is.
From 74 surveys, I gathered information about their hometowns, their prior study, places they would like to go in the world, their favorite foods. I matched this with the moving-postage-stamp affect of their Zoom-boxed faces. I made a little lookbook for myself. I tried to close the distance between us as best I could. I tried to make them present for me, and to make myself as present as possible for them.
But it was difficult to remember who they were as they appeared, like avatars, flat, and more similar to each other than different. Ten percent of them had first names that began with a variant of Kat-, not an unusual phenomenon in higher education, but much harder to manage in this non-corporeal form. There were reading glasses that disappeared some days, changing the way their eyes connected with mine; faces framed with long brown hair that was sometimes strung up; lighting just marginally worse than mine; college-branded sweatshirts: I loved these, appreciating their mnemonic function. That’s Ohio State Kat, not Pacific Lutheran Kat.
They wore the same air of exhaustion, of constant unregulated and undefined fear. I could feel their fear. First-year law students are always capable of dropping into panic, god bless them; they run at high levels of anxiety (and can soar to astounding heights) in ordinary times, but these weren’t those. Students were afraid and almost as soon as we had started, they were exhausted, too. They tired much sooner in the quarter than they usually do.
They were holding it together, most days. They sometimes sported that just-polished-enough look that was code for “unshowered, but I’m here, dammit.” I recognized it because I sported it too, sometimes. Sometimes their rooms, like my own, looked as though a swath had been cut and tidied for the purposes of professionalism on Zoom; if their camera angle shifted at all, an unholy stack of papers, or untended laundry, or a baby’s exersaucer, might appear in the margins of the shot; if I was lucky, I got a glimpse of baby, too.
I was caught once when Zooming with my kitchen in view behind me, thinking I’d cut the messy part out. I must have adjusted my angle during class because I later discovered on the recording the evidence of last night’s family dinner project: dishrags, spatulas, pasta-tagged colander and a solitary marinara-stained potholder strewn in the background like domestic confetti from a party that was supposed to remain a secret.
There was a sense of enforced intimacy, of being suddenly in someone’s home, wondering how you wound up there, or how they wound up here, in my messy kitchen. Students often opted for a virtual background to avoid this. But these were unfriendly on the hair of some ethnicities, such as my own, and I abandoned the option with some chagrin. It was all a challenge, but I felt my fondness for these avatars grow as their understanding of various doctrines deepened, and their collective adventure into the rules of lost limbs and wrongful deaths continued.
One day before class, I arrived to discover that a glitch in Zoom meant that I could hear the students and see them, but they could not see or hear me. The chat function was unavailable, the volume was up, there was no issue with unruly Bluetooth hijacking the laptop’s speakers. In short, I had troubleshot.
The problem was in the software. I exited, rebooted, came back on the class call stifling tears at the experience, which had prompted, at first, mere ordinary panic: what if I started class late as a result (I did), what if I couldn’t get Zoom to work at all, just a couple of classes before the midterm (but I did), what if it happened again and I was suddenly rendered silent and invisible to my students, my presence effaced?
But while I was frozen there, present, but not to them, I heard them talk about me, in the way that students do, offhand remarks about the slower-than-optimal pace of grading, the predictable fumbling with technology, and so on. It was just callous bonding over instructional imperfection, certainly merited in this moment of total institutional and national turmoil. Still, it stung to hear the avatars bonding with each other, over my little failures, just as these avatars were becoming more real, more known in my mind.
I had a hard time shaking the feeling it left in me, of being frozen out, but forced to listen in. Invisible, paralyzed, and only allowed to eavesdrop.
The episode triggered a memory from my childhood, a tv episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I couldn’t remember any details except this: a man is in a car crash on a rural highway. He wakes up, paralyzed, and appears dead to the emergency team that eventually rescues him. The character narrates, with rising panic, the experience of being taken for dead, carted away to a morgue and everything.
There was something about it that reminded me of life on Zoom. Even when the whole apparatus was working and you remembered to press unmute before speaking and your Bluetooth earphones were charged and your wifi didn’t crash, and so on, it was so unsatisfyingly liminal: you were there, but not there. As the pandemic wore on, a mismatch grew between what was roiling on the inside and what I projected on the outside, a face made up with manufactured steadiness and mechanical warmth.
I had taken to privately calling my office my Zomb tomb; with the shades down to make the camera lighting work, I couldn’t see out and there was no natural light. I felt guilty about the term, but used it in my head anyway before I’d shuffle up to shut myself in for the day, reminding myself of the privilege of having a home office, the gift of holing up in an internet-connected chamber far from most humans, the luck of not being sick and actually dying or entombed myself, the unfair advantages I enjoyed in not losing and entombing my loved ones. There were all privileges! But isolating privileges, even if ones to celebrate.
Life on Zoom reminded me of the Hitchcock episode, except the inverse: being inside an external body taken for live and functional, but full of indiscernible rage and terror on the inside. Quaking, invisibly; not something you can see on the screen. Dying, in some way, on the inside, but taken as alive on the outside, with each little yellow thumbs up or waved hand a false flag, signaling presence and life instead of what that flat affect was masking. Others felt it too, I assume. Internal systems were failing, whether from loneliness, sheer fatigue, fear of the thing that you suspected would eventually get you, fear that you didn’t yet know the thing that would eventually get you, fear of being unable to imagine life anymore that wasn’t governed by a constant sense of fear.
Joseph Gordon Levitt!
That was his name; the man with the knives who was going to wind up killing me when actually the threat I expected in my dream—that I steeled myself for—was death by vengeful elk, or death by derailment of commuter train during the last stages of a pandemic, or death by disease, or death by vaccine, or death by freak weather force, or death by sorrow at the losses piling up around me, or death by loneliness in a too-sunny house far away from the world with my people nowhere in sight.
Zahr Said is a law professor in Seattle, a single mother of two and an emerging author of non-fiction. She is currently working on a memoir about growing up as an Arab-American abroad.