My dreams are not typically nightmares, but they often involve oblique exclusions, subtle usurpations. I usually don’t remember my dreams (beyond a feeling of befuddled let-down) but today was an exception, probably the longest chunk of narrative I’ve ever dragged up from the dreamwork.
It was a cool early morning, around 7:00 a.m., and I was riding a bus through some California suburb. I wasn’t sure where the bus was headed, but when I saw we were passing through an Asian neighborhood, mostly Chinese, I decided to get off.
I stood on the sidewalk in the clear morning air, surrounded by suburban houses, grass yards. Two boys in a yard noticed me, began talking about me in Chinese, not knowing I could understand. A face glanced out at me from a window. Typical quiet morning reactions to a newcomer.
I saw a little café on the corner, decided to go in. There were no customers. An olive-skinned woman of about 25, Central Asian rather than Chinese, brought my coffee to the table, then sat down across from me. She wore a skin-fitting powder blue silk top. She was beautiful, educated, oddly animated for so early in the morning. She started telling me about her life. She gestured, joked, and as I was just beginning to get seriously charmed, I realized that her younger brother was inside her left sleeve—that he was, somehow, also wearing the blue silk top. His head finally emerged from near her shoulder.
Then I was at another table talking to the patron, her father, a melancholy Sikh man in his 70s.
“I used to be a director, you know,” he said. “I mean, before this café. I directed two films you might have seen. One was [title I don’t remember], the other was Scorsese’s Vandals.”
I thought about the titles, told him I was sorry I hadn’t seen either, but that I considered film “important”. He sensed my confusion.
“Look, here’s how it happened,” he said. “I was going to direct Vandals, then when shooting began, Scorsese showed up on set one day. Then he showed up again, and then again, making little suggestions, getting more and more involved. Finally the producer just decided to use Scorsese.”
His sense of deep defeat still weighed on him. He burst into tears. I began crying with him. We sat there crying.
“I’m the man who directed Scorsese’s Vandals,” he said through sobs. “It was me.”
Later, outside once more, I glimpsed the Pacific peeking between a line of houses, hardly a block away. I walked to the beach, stripped down to my shorts, and swam a bit along the rocky shore. The water was cool and clear. But realizing I was still lost, I decided to get out.
When I tried, however, the rocky, sandy shore had become a kind of stone embankment. I couldn’t get a grip on it. I began to tread water, scanning the shore for breaks in the wall.
This, I’m confident, is the tenor of nearly all my dreams.
QED: Idiocy, Ltd.
Chinese edition / 中文版 : Idiocy, Ltd.
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