Salvaging History

It’s like a dream; or, no – not like a dream; it is a dream. I wake up in the middle of it and I am still dreaming. My desk is cluttered with papers; reminders for unpaid bills; the fruits of the research I am carrying out; books and pens and chocolate wrappers are mixed in there, as well. This part isn’t the dream, I’m sure; but then, when I’m in the dream, I’m sure that isn’t the dream as well.

It starts: I enter a large room, its walls clad with wooden shelves, its rafters exposed and supporting yet more shelves. This is someone’s office in a building we have been sent to clear. My colleagues are already hard at work, taking things from the shelves without looking at them; there is no time for assessment, we must clear the room and take everything away with us or it will be destroyed. They are taking things from the shelves and putting them into black plastic bin liners. They work as though this is a novelty to them; from the expressions on their faces, they seem not to realise that they have been here before, carried out this task before.

I take up a black sack myself and set to work. I look at the pieces of paper I remove from the shelves and I recognise each one. Something tells me that I am in this dream but not part of it. Thinking these thoughts, I continue to work as robotically and mindlessly as my colleagues, but all the time I am plotting. The pieces of paper include paper serviettes, ticket stubs for cloakrooms; all meaningless ephemera. Still we work to salvage them, placing everything into the large black sacks ready for removal to our storage unit at work.

Salvaging history, we call it.

None of us speaks to anyone else. We have a task to do and a limited amount of time in which to do it. Knowing that I am in the same dream as always, I wonder if I am the only one dreaming it or whether it is a communal dream with each of us contributing our individual effort to it.

If I control the dream, then I can break it. I prepare myself. It is too late now to do anything; the recovery process has already begun and, even if I do control the dream, there is nothing I can do to send it back to the start. I know that waking up will only place me back inside the dream. My dreams are still analogue; I have a way to go before they can be digital. Stopping the dream is like stopping a video tape: you start right back where you stopped it.

Outside of the dream, in what I call my real life, a place which is far less rich than the one I live internally, I do not mention it to anyone else. Each one of my colleagues is in the dream, as real or as surreal as I am, and I still dare not make the assumption that it isn’t something communal.

I sit at my cluttered desk, answering the letters of people who haven’t the time to sift through the detritus of history for themselves and yet who believe that the same detritus carries something of significance to their lives.

We salvage the rotting humus of the past in order to fertilise the bastard hopes of the displaced. I filter it through my fingers, seeking out the pieces that will decorate a distant past for some poor sod who thinks that it matters. My desk is covered with the written evidence of their homogenous beliefs that they are unique in this world.

We are none of us unique. If we were, then we wouldn’t understand each other so easily.

Across the room from me is a door; beyond that door is another room; within that room are shelves that glide on tracks set into the floor, and each shelf is full of boxes that are in turn full of the documented evidence of the past. It is a past that is sterile, that is open to interpretation and, as guardians of that past, who are we to say when someone’s interpretation is wrong?

We are none of us unique.

This is how I spend my days. It is little wonder, then, that it is also how I spend my nights; dreaming about the job of salvaging the evidence.

I climb into my bed; a soft place, warm and deep and musty with sleeps from the past. Closing my eyes, I fall down into the place where dreams await me.

I walk down a corridor in an ill-lit and silent building. It seems to be morning, but the part of the morning that hasn’t yet shaken off its sleep. The sky has the harsh first touches of the sun and everything is still illuminated in the uneasy monochrome of dawn.

I reach the end of the corridor and stand before a large panelled wooden door. For a moment, I pause to listen; there is no sound coming from within the room. I glance up at the high window to the left of me and see the pearlised sky like a daguerreotype photograph in the window frame.

Opening the door, I enter the silent room. It is the same as it ever is, save the absence of my colleagues. I work quickly, beginning the process of disposing of the evidence. We have cleared this room a thousand times; we have all the detritus that we will ever need. This time, I am determined: there will be nothing taken from this room. I am in control.

I work until the sun has filled the sky with pre-noon light. I push papers into bags and push bags into cupboards, under floorboards, into the rafters: wherever they will go and stay hidden.

My colleagues appear, one by one; one by one, I explain to them that there is little left here now. I say that we must have cleared the bulk of it already. They seem confused, and I realise that in the dream they haven’t been here before. None of them speaks, however; in this dream, we never speak to each other, we simply carry out the task like automatons. Instead, they take up the black sacks and copy what I am doing.

In arriving first and taking the lead, I have determined what happens in the final outcome.

I feel relief. I have somehow broken the dream. I allow myself to smile, until the realisation comes to me that I haven’t broken the dream until the dream ceases to return. All that I have done is change the direction of the dream. My heart sinks as I realise the burden I have placed on myself. Now, instead of arriving after my colleagues and carrying out the work as their actions have dictated, I must ensure that each time I fall into sleep, I must be here first. I must repeat this dream in the same way all the other dreams have been repeated.

The thought fatigues me. It doesn’t matter that I have hidden the things on different shelves and in different cupboards. They will still be here in the next dream.

I wake, sweating. The numbers on the clock beside my bed tell me that it is too early to get up, but I don’t want to go back to sleep. I lie in the dark, willing myself to stay awake, but I suppose I drift off again, eventually. The next thing I know is my alarm going off, rousing me from the dreamless dark I have allowed myself to fall into.

I arrive at work to find everything strangely still. My colleagues sit at their desks, but do no work. I go to my own desk and take up the first letter in the pile that is newly arrived today.

“Dear Sir or Madam,

My great great grandfather, Josiah Matthews, owned an umbrella shop in Shudehill in the early 1800s. I wonder if you have anything among your archives that will tell me more about him.”

I go to the index cards and open the drawer marked M. I flick through the cards to where my practiced fingers instinctively know Matthews will lie. I look down at the point where my fingers have paused. The card is blank. I flick through the cards behind and the cards in front. All of them are blank.

I look at my colleagues who are motionless at their desks. I walk past them and into the store room. The shelves are still there, ready to glide on their tracks. The boxes are still on the shelves. I walk to a shelf at random and pull down a box. It feels heavy, so there must be something in it. I open it to find pages and pages of blank paper. All information recorded on the documents and sheets that we have spent so many years of our lives salvaging from redundant buildings has been wiped clean.

I stand looking at the box full of blank paper; I have no idea how long I stand there, but I only lift my head when someone touches me on the arm. I look up to see one of my colleagues standing in front of me, holding a sheet of paper in her hand.

“What about this one?” she asks.

I look to see a sheet bearing an advertisement from the 1930s. I look at my colleague’s face and, in doing so, see the room behind her. It is the same room lined with shelves. I look up and see the same rafters, supporting more shelves.

“Yes,” I say, still staring up at the rafters. “That one as well.”

I am back where I started. More likely that I never left.

I wonder who I am when awake, because it seems to me as though my whole life is this dream. I wonder who I am at all; this dream life is anonymous, rolling on forever, and I have no means of stopping it. It seems that way to me, anyway, as I stand in the same room, staring up at the same rafters, as my colleagues work on around me.

I wonder what place it is that I work at, that has the power to send me here when I am asleep, and the power to keep me here forever.

Wondering does no good, though. I take up my black plastic bin liner and continue to fill it with pieces of nothing that will feed the emptiness of those who want to be unique.

Back where I started, and with no means of escape.

© J R Hargreaves May 2007