white girl, red hall, black house

This is a dream I had last night…

My parents bought a new house… it wasn’t long after they bought their first townhouse. But this one is completely different—It was an actual house. It was a previous political leader Jeffery Williamson’s house. He kept this house so his nannies and teachers could live here. It sits on a quiet and under-visited street in the city. (the city… looks like it could be San Francisco, all the house are wooden and 3 stories).

The house has 3 floors, all tiny floors, and the sharp roof loft tips out like a black witch-hat. The house is extremely old and dark. When I walked in, it felt like the house was falling apart and not fixable. A lot of spider webs. The connection between the floors was a spiral staircase, all wooden handrail. A middle eastern patterned carpet lined all the stairs with seemingly-unremovable cat hair that was sitting inside for centuries.

At the back of the house, there was a space that seemed to extend into something else. I walked to the back and found a small backyard with a back door. It sit elevated above the ground floor, creating a terrace-like space. The yard was enclosed, the opposite fence wall was distinctly Chinese—it looked like it had been scooped out of the Emperor’s Garden in Beijing, with a few flights of stairs and a door that led to something else.

On one side of the yard, there was a washing station with an old, moldy, and cracked mirror on the wall.

I moved in. The house seemed to breathe and slowly began to look different day by day, as if it was waking up and coming alive. It was still an exciting home because it was a house, not an apartment.

I saw Jeffery Williamson’s nanny. She appeared in the living room. She was also in the small room near the loft and on the stairway.

I opened the door to the backyard. I could feel her walking at the washing station, as if she was getting dressed.

One day I saw a bottle of thick orange juice in a closed lid plastic jug that was so pure and sturdy that almost looked like glass. But it was plastic.

Another time, I noticed a bug floating at the top of the juice. It looked both dead and alive, just existing. I thought it must have fallen into the juice. It was a beetle-looking bug with a shiny green shell. It was huge and so beautiful. It looked so strong and bulletproof like it could fight and protect you from the war. But the lid was so tightly sealed that the bug must have grown inside it from an egg fallen into the juice before.

After some time, another bug emerged. Now there were two—like twins. I was a little scared but I still wanted to drink the juice. The bugs looked so clean that I thought it must be fine to just pour out the drink, move the bugs aside, and drink it.

I can’t remember what I did after. I probably let them be, because I was so curious if there would be a third one coming. They didn’t look like they were going to make a baby, or romantically interested in each others. So if there were a third one, it must just emerge from nothing.

I started noticing there were another juice in the house. That one was red.

“This house is totally fixable,” I thought.

…

The first time I walked through the door in the backyard, I found a huge, long red hall resembling the Long Corridor of the Chinese Summer Palace. In the middle of the corridor was a circular resting pavilion. To the left was a red Japanese shrine, and to the right was a wide, long long staircase descending into a vast green, like a lawn.

At the center of the pavilion was a heavy-duty old stone table. There were people dressing like Chinese palace maid laughing around the table. They didn’t see me walking in. They were so happy and playing with their dresses flying in the air. They weren’t afraid of me walking in like I was only existing.

I walked deeper into the hall, but there was no end. I eventually turned back.

I loved this place—it was my favorite now. I left my black Sony camera on the stone table. I used it a lot but somehow felt safe leaving it there.

Another day I walked in. I saw a huge group of people occupying the hall. They were shooting a movie. They dressed in red work sweatshirt with a huge N logo on the back—they are from Netflix! “Netflix people in my backyard?” I thought. They for sure didn’t get our permission, but I wasn’t annoyed at all. They looked so happy. They probably got some really nice scenes.

I started to worry about my black camera so I walked to the stone table. I went and I saw a little Sony camera sitting there. I was relieved. Then I had a thought. “What if the camera was white? It might fit me better, cuz I am a white girl.”

I took the camera and walked into the depth of the hallway, and turned around to look at these people. They were so beautiful. So I took a picture of the people through the depth of the hallway with the camera. But I looked down to checked the playback, in the picture, there were no people—only red leaves laid freely on the table and fell on to the long stairs, in the exact position where the people had been.

“This is so exciting!” I thought, “I must tell Seth!” Sometimes my life can be quite boring and there was little to say, but this was truly exciting and I must tell him. So I took some more and walked back.

I walked past the stone table. People were packing up. I saw big cameras on cameramen’s bodies. They looks like big boxes outlined with red strip light, encased in long frosted covers. The red light became very dreamy and magical. I could stare at it for hours.

I kept walking back to the door close to my house. The walk felt impossibly long.

When I finally reached the yard door, I looked down on my camera. It… It wasn’t mine! Someone else’s camera. It was white! And the body of the camera with a screen was turning slightly pink and into a irregular shape, and the more I looked into it the more irregular it became. Like a swollen fist! “I must return this camera.” But I had those photos on it. So I carried the white camera with pink skin back into my house.

…