A Life of Crime With Kathy

My sister Kathy and I had a strange racket going. We would sneak into the bottom floors of a sort of wooden skyscraper and work our way up and down, robbing apartents. The bottom floors were all residential apartments. Higher up for many stories it was farmhouse-type construction—abandoned rooms, rickety construction, antique furniture, the walls, floors and furniture all the weathered gray of old farm buildings.

There was a kind of double wall along one side, about two feet of hidden space. Kathy and I would climb up and down in this narrow space and slip into people's apartments. We would steal their choice belongings and carry them up the hollow wall to the roof. We would toss our plunder to the roof of our own adjacent building, then hop across ourselves.

This night we were in the bottom floor apartment and taking the residents' clothes. We had clothes draped across the bannister of the stair rail and were about to depart with them when a terrifying thing happened: we heard the homeowners waking up and talking in scared tones in the basement. We had been discovered. 

We’d planned ahead what we’d do if this ever happened.

Noiselessly, we slipped into our secret place between the two walls and began a silent upward escape, climbing with practiced skill up the many stories, with little light, wriggling through tight spaces, navigating a sort of vertical labyrinth. When we’d put a lot of distance below us, we rested, laughing in whispers, amazed at our own great skill at burglary and climbing.

But our laughter was cut short. We heard voices below us. The homeowners had discovered the vertical crawl space and were in pursuit. We continued climbing. But even our most clever twists and turns were insufficient to leave our pursuer behind. We had felt untouchable, but now we were on the verge of being overtaken in our own maze.

We reached the roof ahead of our pursuers, but there was no adjacent building to escape to. We had reached the end of this dream's world.

The dream reset to a slightly different version of itself. Now Kathy and I were at the foot of the building and escaping not upward, but outward, running quietly into the dark. This building was on a beach—on the northern shore the sea between America and Mexico. In the near darkness we made our way over scattered lumber and giantish blocks of cement, the rubble from some demolition of infrastructure. We picked our way, fighting off our panick, through this wild rubble and down a slope to where the sea, all black beyond the first few yeards, was washing in and out of the darkness, constantly giving fresh life to stones covered in gleaming black algae.