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.
