FUNGUZZ

I dreamed that I must have been in China. I was inside a café, it was a decrepit but spacious and well-lit room with wooden dividers between seating spaces. There were tall windows with tattered velvet draperies. I was sitting at a short table next to a wall, on an armchair that looked a lot like those red armchairs at Stairway to Love. I was having coffee.

I was acutely unhappy. I’m not sure why, but I was hungover or depressed or extremely tired. Suddenly, insanity possessed me. My logic might have been that I could purge the unhappiness if I said a positive thought out loud, a thought that equated to a piece of a plan. So I got up and yelled at nobody in particular: “I want to open a bar in China.”

I immediately felt silly because I noticed two pairs of western eyes measuring me with amusement. There was a long glass counter in the room, like they might have at a jewelry store, and there were two middle-aged Russian women behind it. Both of them were tall and thin, wearing waisted gray dresses. They looked like aging Soviet commune beauties from the 50s. One had blond hair in a voluminous bun on top of her head, the other had short black hair in 20s hairstyle.

“Of course you are going to open a bar in China,” said the blonde in Russian, who was seated on a backless rotating chair, possibly filing her nails. “And I’m going to help you.” She beckoned for me to come towards the counter with a friendly smile. Some of her teeth were gold. It was unsettling.

“Oh. I didn’t mean, open one right this second…” I replied, walking towards her. I remembered I still had to graduate from college; think about opening bars later.

My apprehension did not convince the women. The blonde placed a square piece of napkin on the glass counter and began charting out some kind of plan with a blue pen.

The next thing I remember, the three of us were in the backseat of a green and yellow Beijing taxi, floating down a countryside road. The road was foggy. Suddenly, even with the fog, I noticed a dark figure walking towards our car, far down the road ahead. I could see his silhouette through the windshield. Then I realized that he was holding a camera, he was filming me and the Russian women through the windshield of our car. I don’t think we even had a driver.

Then, suddenly I became the camera lens. The mind-boggling logic of the dream was suddenly painfully clear. I knew exactly what was happening and it terrified me. I knew it: the man had been filming my life. He had filmed the scene at the coffee shop earlier, where I’d declared my desire to open a bar. I saw bits and pieces of his footage like a flashback – he had a few interesting angles of me and the blonde Russian from beneath the glass counter.

In the world of the dream, the man was a famous avant-garde filmmaker. He filmed people’s lives. He must have been a ghost; an extraordinarily stealthy character. I could not think of what his face looked like. I just knew it was a man, a tall and shadowy figure. His films were not like reality TV. He captured people’s solitary rituals; random conversations they had throughout the day; odd aspects of their daily lives. Nothing sensational, no drama – just a lot of information about a single person’s specific life.

In the dream, I knew that I’d heard about the filmmaker before, and I was mildly fascinated by his work. However, I was happy that I was not one of his subjects. The thing that seemed most terrible to me in the dream was that if he chose someone as his subject, their name and their life up to the current point became written, recorded, set in stone. They lost the freedom to be who they wanted in front of the new people they met. It was as if the minute this man tapped your life as one of his subjects, everything about you was exposed to the world forever, it became public knowledge. It was almost as if everybody came to know every single detail of your life automatically, without ever having to actually watch the film. Friends, family, potential employers. This man was filming me.

Feelings of panic and paranoia overwhelmed me. I tried to explain to the Russian women what was going on. But their presence was melting away. I could hardly communicate with them anymore. They were quickly becoming ghosts in the backseat of the car. Soon enough I was alone.

The car came to a slow halt next to an enormous drop-off. We were on the edge of a massive quarry with walls of red earth. It must have been a mile deep. Mist settled below, so I could not see the bottom. Many people dressed in orange jumpsuits were scurrying about the edge of the quarry. They were directing a long line of regularly dressed people who looked like they were waiting for a ride of some kind. Some were young, some were old; some looked rich, some looked poor. All were men.

I got out of the car and it sped off into the fog ahead.

One by one the men at the front of the line were jumping into an opening of huge metallic tube that began at the drop-off and appeared to be reaching down to the very bottom of the quarry.

Then I had a flashback. Greg was telling me: “It’s really cool, I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. It’s called passing through 200 burning iron bricks.” I realized vaguely that he was talking about some kind of extreme sport activity, like bungee jumping or sky-diving. Except this was “passing through 200 burning iron bricks.”

Back at the quarry site, I noticed that further along the road there was another concentration of people in orange jumpsuits. They were pulling what looked like large cocoons out of a smaller tube that came out of the quarry. The cocoons were the men who had jumped, returning from the bottom of the quarry. I hurried down to the spot.

The next cocoon the jumpsuited men pulled from the “return tube,” I realized all of a sudden, was my friend Greg. They cut the crusty white fabrics away and his body was suddenly exposed.Hot steam was rising from it. It was blue-white in color and unmoving, but somehow I realized he was alive. He looked like a perfect but lifeless sculpture, with long black hair frozen into form. He looked nothing like the real Greg in fact, but for some reason I knew it had been him. The body had a smooth, marble-like surface, covered with a thin, uneven layer of liquid grime, like a piece of pottery before it’s fired. His skin was glistening. Then he opened his eyes; they were beautifully-shaped but black empty slits. A beautiful stone face with black slit-eyes. I was fascinated and horrified.

Suddenly the hands of the jumpsuited workers swarmed to his body and began to crack and peel and chip off bits of the top layer of grimy white marble, the smooth stone, as if Greg had been encrusted with it. like in that. What fell to the earth, however, were not pieces of white stone-shell, but gleaming metallic bricks. Lots and lots of metallic bricks. His body was shuddering and breathing heavily. I remember vaguely thinking that a woman’s body probably wouldn’t survive the 200 burning iron bricks experience.

At that moment I had a profound sense that the situation was a significant metaphor, but that sense never crystallized into a coherent thought and I could never put it into words. It was just this “cool thing” Greg really wanted to do, a painful process involving falling down a tube into a bottomless quarry, fire, and 200 burning iron bricks.

I don’t, in reality, want to open a bar in China.

I dreamed that I was still packing when my flight to Beijing was going to take off in 15 minutes. I panicked, but not intensely, because in the world of this dream I knew that the airport was just across the road from where I lived, and neither check-in nor security existed.

I scurried about the apartment – a darker, bigger version of the one I had back in Voronezh – trying to find things, and shouting at my grandmother, who was the only other person present. As I heaped clothes and books into multiple bags, I grew frustrated with my sudden inability to find anything or even remember what I needed. I don’t think I packed any toiletries. I hovered over the bags in a sort of paralysis, not knowing where to shove a pair of pants to maximize efficient use of space.

My grandmother was bickering at me in a very uncharacteristic way. She was trying to guilt trip me into washing her clothes right there and then. I would have to hand wash them, seeing as we didn’t have a washing machine at the apartment. She was saying something along the lines of “you owe me this much.”

I was exasperatedly trying to point out to her the fact that my plane was taking off in 15 minutes, and I hadn’t even finished packing yet, so there was just no way I was going to wash her goddamn clothes too.

I can’t remember whether I made it onto the plane or not, but the next thing I knew I was on some dark street in a crowd of strangers with bags, waiting to get on a big bus. Were we in China? I’m not sure. It was dark all around, except for a few streetlights, which created dramatic shadows. The wide road in front of us was empty, except for the giant decrepit bus that stood waiting. Suddenly I heard someone yell: “Ana, you insane motherfucker.” It sounded like something Matt would say. I looked around and saw the head of my ex program director from IES, Brian Eyler, soaring disembodied somewhere in the dark space behind the bus. He yelled again. Dumbstruck, I waved at him. Then he stepped down from the sky onto the road and was lost on the crowd of students.

An engine roar approached from the left and soon a smaller bus full of people came into view. “Ana!” I heard someone shout. I saw that it was Matt, hanging out of a window of the small bus as it rolled by. “Fucker!” I yelled back, as would have been customary between us.

“Quick dude, get on the bus!” Matt said, stretching his arms out to me from the window of the bus, and I suddenly realized that I had to get on that bus, because it was going somewhere good, and Matt was there, and I had no idea where the fuck the big bus was going and when. I tried to run after the bus, stretching out my hand towards Matt’s.

Then suddenly, just when I was about to reach his hand, I dropped my bag. There was something very important in the bag that I knew in my dream mind I simply couldn’t leave behind. I’m not sure what it was. I jerked my body back towards the bag and I tried to seize both the bag and Matt’s hand at the same time, but I couldn’t. I missed Matt’s hand and the bus surged ahead of me.

I was devastated for a split second, but then I remembered that Matt was going to be in China as well. (Weren’t we already in China? I don’t know. Why did I suddenly think that then?) “Anyway, I’ll see you soon!” I shouted after him, thinking that we’d be in the same place soon enough anyhow. As soon as he heard me though, his usually insane smile faltered in a confused sort of way. Hold on, I thought. What does that mean? Where the hell is he going on that small bus? What the hell is really going on?

Then I woke up.