The Numbers Were an Address, Not a Ticket

For seven nights the dream was just numbers: a woman's voice, patient, slightly amused, repeating 'seven, thirty-one, four' over black. No pictures. Waking, the sequence sat in my head all day like a splinter.

I did the obvious, embarrassing thing. Lottery tickets with every arrangement of 7, 31 and 4 the formats would allow. Two weeks of them. Total winnings: one free ticket, which lost.

I decided my subconscious was noise, and I needed the lesson, because life at that point was noise too — I had been laid off in the spring and was driving to interviews for jobs I did not want.

Coming home from one of those, my fuel light came on in an unfamiliar suburb, and the engine died on a quiet commercial street before I found a station. I coasted to the kerb, swore, looked up, and the building beside me wore its address in iron numbers: 731, and the corner sign said 4th Street. I sat there with my hands on the wheel laughing in a way that worried even me.

The building was a workshop — a furniture restorer's, doors open, sawdust light. I went in to ask about a fuel can. The owner, a woman in her sixties, patient and slightly amused, got me a can, and while we walked to the corner station she asked what I did. Cabinet-making had been my grandfather's trade and my teenage summers; I had not touched a chisel in fifteen years. Her restorer had retired in March. She had been, she said, 'waiting for someone to wander in.'

I have worked at 731 4th Street for two years now. I checked once: the day the dreams started was the day her old restorer handed in his notice. Her voice, by the way, is the voice. I have never told her that part.