I was hanging out near the Molave dorm on the day that Björk was having a concert at the UP Film Institute. There was a Peyups member whom I knew was going to see it, I've exchanged messages with him online and we even had each other's cellphone numbers. He just texted me about how great the show was and that he was watching it again as we spoke.
I began to wonder why I never made any plans to see the concert myself. I wasn't really the biggest Björk fan but I've always found her music to be interesting --- surely much interesting to see live, what with her outrageous antics. Besides, there were hardly any interesting acts that has come to the Philippines recently.
All of a sudden, I heard Björk's singing. Wow, that was louder than expected, that must be some powerful sound system over there. I peeked towards the direction of the Film Institute and realized that the concert was actually being held outside, much like how The Dawn performed after the Tulad ng Dati screening there last year. How cool is that? I thought it was a paid concert but it looked like I can watch this for free. I then found a great spot to stand on where I can have a good view of her, but I had to go back to get my phone and wallet which I left lying on the grass in my hurry. When I got my stuff, there were other people sitting by, listening to the music. ML.D. from the office was there and shouted out to me, "who is that? Is she Japanese?" "No, she's Icelandic", I replied.
On my way back, I noticed something strange. Running across the width of the street (where the Kalayaan dorm was) was a kind of laserbeam, that when cars passed by, the portion of the car that touched the beam looked invisible. They were like beams of sunlight passing through tall grass at sunrise, except that it wasn't sunlight, it was just a beam of nothingness. I thought of the tesseract, from A Wrinkle in Time... could this be it?
I didn't have time to investigate, though, gotta go to that free concert. However, I lost that nice spot to a crowd already. I went over nearer the stage to find a new one. The crowd was actually thinning over there. When I reached the stage, Björk was asking a girl from the audience to sing (it was actually S.M., a girl in my high school), with a grand piano and organ as accompaniment. (The guy in the organ was also someone I knew, a guy from the office that I barely talked to.) That was unexpected, I thought. Who'd have imagined Björk was into encouraging audience participation? After a couple of song numbers from the audience, I turned back to the stage only to find Björk gone. Oh, is the show over already? The audience participation was the closing number, after all, and perhaps she did that to distract people so she could leave without anyone noticing. Strange, but only true to form. Too bad that I missed most of her show, though.
Then I saw R.A. (a co-worker from my department) walking over from a study session from another dorm. He was talking about the tesseract! I jumped in to tell him that I saw it, too. Now that there was nothing to keep me, it was time to finally check it out. We went to the spot by Kalayaan and tried putting things against it, like a rubber slipper, just to check if the beam burned a hole through it or made it disappear or tesser it somewhere in time or Camazotz or any other foreign dimension. We wouldn't dare touch it with our bare hands, of course.
With the intervention of a streetkid, we noticed that the "tesseracts" (by this time, we noticed there were actually three of them) were coming from what looked like electrical outlets. And they weren't really invisible. If you looked closer, they were rainbow colored, with bands of color running vertically along the beam. The kid touched one without hesitation and even pulled it out of the sockets, much to my panic. But with that gesture, the beam revealed itself to be a plain rubber-insulated cable without the power from the outlets. I wondered if he broke it, thus probably cutting communications with another planet. I wondered if we should be expecting a plane to come crashing over us because of this. Hahaha, it did have a Lost feel to it --- like these cables dragged on under the ocean onto some kind of communications station and now that we destroyed that, some electromagnetic force would now cause that station to implode. I braced myself for what can possibly happen.
Well, we never knew for I woke up soon after.
Meanwhile, this could have been another run-of-the-mill strange dream if not for this eerie coincidence that Madeleine L'Engle has recently passed away, not even a whole two weeks ago. What could a dead writer possibly be telling me?
(Hours later I originally wrote this, I am beginning to have a pretty good idea...)
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