A year later Dan is reflecting on his life. He thinks of his death. Daniel’s voice is fainter now, sometimes it goes completely. Daniel takes strength from the fact that Dan cycled to Paris and trekked the Inca Trail, and is still going the extra mile for Groundswell 2000, although he worries about some of Dan’s meandering thoughts.
‘I can almost taste the ash from here,’ Dan murmurs, while making tea before breakfast, thinking of cremation.
‘What will be left apart from an indecipherable bag of wishes and dreams that once counted for an existence. And yet we are working for a moment that will remain in the tight coordinates of time and space…and breath…breath shared…the world shared, belonging to all who have ever loved and cared. Even those who couldn’t give a damn, all in their own particular way preserved for an instant, the thinnest slice of present, layered into a picture, integrated fraction by fraction into the universal equation of life.’
Daniel whispered, as loudly as he could, ‘Beautiful. Interesting. But you’re not really making sense, Dan’.
Dan steps back into reality. So often he’d doubted whether the gig, as it had become known, would ever go ahead. Daniel was there to reassure him, but Daniel had never realised the dream. Dan thought of the challenge of the hundreds of miles to Paris, but in spite of the doubts and the pain, he knew he’d make it in the end. And the Inca trail, not exceptionally arduous but required persistence, to hold onto the dream of Machu Picchu and the sun gate, musical pipes and the condor filling the sky.