Speakers

I'm in art school again. I have one among many cubicles in a large, white, concrete, industrial space with a high ceiling. There's a dark blue shed in my workspace. Jack Downey walks into my shed and leaves a wooden bowl of cereal on a shelf. He looks at me and I give him an approving gesture that it's okay for him to leave the bowl there. He leaves and I get up to inspect the bowl. The cereal looks funny. It's more of a porridge, lumpy skýr or rice pudding with heaps of brown sugar on top.

I understand that Jack is cleaning out his space to make room for a project, so I wander over to his space to see what he's up to. The narrow hallway through the cubicles opens up to a large space in the center of the room. The oasis is empty except for a lot of wood construction. The workspaces around the perimeter seemed to be remade in plywood. Some areas are elevated a meter off the ground on wooden platforms. It felt a little like an indoor skateboarding park, but everything looked milky and pale under the harsh fluorescent lights.

I'm walking through a tunnel hallway with big advertisements on the walls and a handrail, like in an airport. I stop, put my backpack on a bench, and rummage through it. I´m wearing white jeans and I want to wear this big, white, hooded sweater for the first day of classes in this new school. I thought I'd look pretty good in all white. In the middle of this school that looks more like an airport shopping center, I walk into a store or depot filled with used furniture and stereos. I need good stereo speakers for making electronic music so I head straight to the back to the speaker section. The space gets crowded and frustrating with so many students rushing to get supplies on the first day. I'm holding a pair of small, crappy, old speakers with formica trim.

In front of me is a large wall crammed with piles speakers in all shapes and sizes.

I spot a man working on a large speaker with a screwdriver and get him to help me. I ask him if he knows if they have a certain plug and wire so I can fix these speakers myself. He told me to forget about it, that the speakers in my hands were crap, broken, not worth it. Deep minimal techno is thumping through a large subwoofer in front of us.

I can see the vibrations of the subwoofer. It gets louder and louder as I explain myself to the man, so I'm nearly yelling at the end. I say I've been working with sound and video in Iceland for a number of years now. I would buy crazy expensive studio monitors if I had the money but I don´t, so that's why I wanted to fix these junk ones. I asked him if he could suggest some good speakers at a decent price. He put a pencil behind his ear and told me to follow him. We walk out of the store and through the airport shopping center. He tells me I'm very lucky. I'm under the impression that he's going to give me lovely expensive speakers for free. It must be some special school supply for students that no one else has claimed yet.

He leads to me to a neighborhood where the teachers live. It still looks like an airport mall, but where an airport mall turns into a hotel. Between little clothing boutiques were dark wooden lounges with brown leather chairs and couches arranged around fireplaces.

At the bottom of some stairs he gestures for me to wait with the back of his hand and rushes down a wooden hall into a lady's apartment, his mother or girlfriend. I hear some muffled arguments from them and wonder how long I'll have to wait. I move over to a plastic, seventies waiting area. There are a number of palm plants and an angular couch built into the ground. The couch upholstery is of a very strange material that grabs my attention. It´s gold fur that moves continuously in the wind from an air conditioning vent. It has a lovely space disco look and I´m hypnotized by its moving patterns of gold, black and red.

I'm running past buildings to a field at the edge of campus. As I come to the clearing and run past some trees I'm overwhelmed that everything around me is transforming. Dusk turns into a warm and sunny high noon. Fragments of Roman ruins of brown clay appear dotted throughout the field, scattered arches and columns. Yellow flowers cover the grass.

A large crooked tower with twisting stairs and a castle on top looms in the distance. I'm getting pulled very fast by a cord, waterskiing barefoot over the yellow flowers.

There's a strong smell of chopped grass and weeds. I can feel the wet plants gliding under my feet. It feels warm and smooth and smells sweet in some areas and sour and painful in areas where there are thorns and barbs in the weeds from which the yellow flowers grow. I let go of the rope and rush back to a church and square on the edge of the field. At the edge of the stone church there's a market stand where a girl is selling old hippy clothes. I approach her, feeling confused and uneasy. I excuse myself and tell her I've not been feeling well, that I've had a fever and can't remember much of what I've been doing. I ask her if she had seen anything, if she saw me arrive, or do anything out in the field.