Thomas wakes up. He has been dreaming. In the dream he and Tonie and Alexa were in some kind of shopping mall in a foreign city. It had long, grey, sinister concrete walkways as broad as motorways. There were layer after layer of them, travelling downwards into the earth.
Thomas and Tonie wanted to buy clothes for Alexa. They left her somewhere and found a small shop. The shop was full of light: its walls and ceiling were all glass. Thomas began to look at the clothes. They were very beautiful. He found a dress that was like a meadow of flowers, and another that was made of pieces of white cloud. There was a flowing garment like a Grecian tunic, composed of milk. Tonie had her own ideas, but every time Thomas found something she forgot them. She seemed to know that all of a sudden he had a special power of discovery. She waited to see what he would come up with next. From the rack he pulled a long-sleeved dress made from the original canvas of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. At its cuffs and hem were flames that flickered palely in the daylight. They agreed that this was the supreme find. It was for Alexa: it seemed to contain something of her spirit, some essence of her they recognised but had forgotten, as though it had been present at the moment of her birth but had been obscured or diluted over the years by Thomas and Tonie themselves. Now that they had chosen, Tonie volunteered to go and retrieve Alexa. She left Thomas alone in the shop. She vanished into the vast grey intestine of the shopping mall. He wondered then why they had abandoned Alexa in this strange place. He had no idea where she was or what had become of her. What had he and Tonie been thinking of? The irrationality of it spoke to him through the dream. He strained and strained to understand why they had committed this irresponsible act. At last he realised that it was because this was a dream. The realisation immediately woke him up. It seems that it requires faith to dream. Once you have lost it the dream comes apart in your hands.
He lies awake in the darkness. It is so thin, so insubstantial: he feels as if he is falling through it, plummeting outwards or downwards. The universe yawns around him. He seems to see its infinite distances, its rashes of stars. The bed is like a tiny precipice on the edge of it. His contact with material things feels thread-like and minimal. It is the irrationality of the dream that has caused him to feel this. His own belief in his life seems in that moment incredible to him. Why doesn’t he cling to the edge of the bed in terror? Why doesn’t everybody? And Alexa, Tonie – what are these people to him? What are these relationships, these convictions, these codes of conduct? This forest of objects, dark now and indistinct – what is their significance? How can he have chosen them, the armchair, the chest of drawers, the dark ornaments on the mantelpiece in their darker ponds of shadow, when the universe was yawning just to the side of them?
The clock ticks steadily on the bedside table. After a while, Thomas goes back to sleep.