Zhu Yue
Translated from the Chinese by Jianan Qian and Alyssa Asquith
The Prince of Dreams
The word “prince” is mostly symbolic now; few women think about what it really means. Its literal meaning has become so vague that it’s often used ironically. A well-educated woman won’t call anyone her “prince charming” unless she is being sarcastic. This is why our heroine was so perplexed by her dream. Perplexed, yet too ashamed to tell anyone.
Hers was a recurring dream: a prince had appeared to her, night after night, for about a week. She wasn’t sure whether he was the same man each night or different men on different nights, whether he was from an ancient time or the present day, from the East or the West, whether he was a projection of a real per- son or a character from a fairy tale. So, she was bewildered. But he was a prince, and this fantasy gave her some happiness.
She worked in the national library as a librarian, a stable job that made her life well-organized. She was the type to keep a clear schedule for everything: work, study, and leisure. She rarely went to movies, shopping malls, or parties, and never had dinner with men who she thought were slackers. Reading was her favorite pastime. She read all sorts of books, including philosophy. As her glasses grew thicker, she became more knowledgeable. She enjoyed the scholarly crowd in the library. She liked to discuss intellectual conjectures, and they were often startled by how much she knew. She had a secret plan: to write a book, whose title would someday appear in the library catalogue. One day, her colleagues would discover that she was the true author of the book: mouths agape, they would call her the Female Borges. This image always made her grin.
The prince came out of nowhere. It all began one night: the future Female Borges lay on her bed, and, after reading thirty pages of Paul Ricœur’s Main Trends in Philosophy, she turned off the light and went to sleep at the appointed time. In her dream, she came to a gym with a huge indoor pool. It seemed familiar. Soon, she came to feel that this place was her home. She plunged into the pool and swam quickly: she had no trouble holding her breath underwater for a long time. Eventually, a large white plank drifted towards her on the shimmering water. She swam to it and saw that it wasn’t a plank at all, but a man: a prince. The “plank” kicked and beat its arms, calling for help. She watched, indifferent, until he was about to drown. At the last moment, she brought him to the shallow end, holding his chin above the water.
“What’s your name?” the prince asked.
She ignored his question, but felt drawn to him.
“I have to leave now. I must go back to my kingdom,” the prince said, straining to climb out of the pool. “Come with me and be my wife.” He summoned her fondly as he reached the tiled edge.
“I can’t. This is my home. I can’t leave,” she said, tearing up.
When she woke up, crystalline tears still clung to the corners of her eyes. She wanted to use Freudian or Jungian theory to analyze the dream, but she doubted either would help. “Are the languages of dream and of real life commensurable? How can one determine whether the translations between these two are reliable?” Pondering these paradoxes, she forgot about the prince. The following day, she kept strictly to her schedule: she got up, went to the office, then went home to read, all at the appointed times.
At night, she finished another thirty pages of Main Trends in Philosophy before falling asleep. Again, she entered a dream—a strange city—and the prince was already there, waiting. After a day’s rest, he was no longer pale and weak, but a sturdy man with a red beard covering his face. The prince held her hand and took her to go steal things. They snuck into a run-down tenement building, then broke into an apartment. The apartment was hot and humid, its ceiling chipped with rolling flakes of an old and dirty white color. The prince stole a balcony, a green security door, and an antique telephone. Just before leaving the building, he removed a small stretch of spiral staircase, carrying it on his shoulder, and together they ran off to an empty lot. The prince turned the balcony over and attached the security door: this became a large cement crate. He placed the crate on top of the staircase, opened the door, and set the phone inside.
“This is our castle. It belongs to us alone,” the prince exclaimed.
She entered the castle. Feeling stifled, she said: “If only we could open a win- dow.” Almost immediately, she heard the sirens. The police were surrounding the castle. She couldn’t find the prince: he had slipped off. “What shall I do? Will they think I’m an accomplice? No, no, I’m a hostage,” she thought desperately. Just then, the phone rang. She picked it up and heard the prince’s stiff voice: “My dear, we’ll see each other soon.”
When she woke, the Female Borges wanted to clear the prince from her mind. She put in her contact lenses and stepped out for dinner: she’d accepted a date with a slacker. She went to bed later than her appointed time and left Main Trends in Philosophy untouched. Still, the prince appeared. This time, the scene was horrible. He was playing poker with three headless men. She worried for the prince and kept a close eye on the card players. They all wore the same costume: rosy jackets, golden buttons, and silvery pants. The prince lost this game. He had to take off his head and hand it to one of the headless men, who then put the head on and became the prince. After several rounds of trading heads, she could no longer tell who the prince really was. “I always play cards with myself. It is almost impossible for me to lose. I feel a bit lonely. Let’s play together,” the prince spoke to the cards, his face pale and gloomy like the first night.
She woke to the sound of her alarm clock. It was still dark outside. She stroked the big owl shape of her clock, grateful for its timely help.
The Female Borges went to see her father, the only family she had. He was an old man, often drunk, obsessed with metaphysics. He lived in an aged, run-down tenement. She told him she had been haunted by a dream. The old man giggled.
“Why are you laughing?” she said angrily.
His face dropped, and after a moment, he said, “Perhaps it’s a family thing!”
“Why’s that?” She felt even more confused.
“When I was twenty-eight, I started dreaming that I was trapped in a large white labyrinth. Everywhere looked the same. I guess that’s what a maze is like. I had a vague sense that somewhere in the center there was a map of the place, and if I could only find it, I’d be able to get out. But I could never get to the middle. Then I realized I’d need the map to reach it. It was quite a paradox.”
“Why have you never mentioned this?”
“I’ve said it many times, but you and your mother weren’t listening.” He lowered his head, lost in thought.
“Did you ever find the map?”
“Later, I went to a therapist. He looked like he was on the verge of a breakdown. He gave me a prescription and claimed the pill would immediately re- move me from the labyrinth. Back then I was young and naïve, so I took the pill as soon as I got home . . .”
“It didn’t work?” She rose to pour him a cup of sobering tea.
“It worked. That night, lost in the labyrinth again, I heard the sound of a bulldozer. The foreman said to me, ‘We’re here to help!’ Then he turned to someone who looked like a technician and asked, ‘Where’s the blueprint?’ The technician opened his briefcase and began to rummage around, but after a while, he said decisively, ‘It’s lost.’ A bit embarrassed, the foreman nonetheless waved me away. He raised his broad hand and called out, ‘Pull it down.’ At once, the bulldozer and the workers were moving, the foreman and the technician were shouting orders. They worked very hard indeed. The whole place was demolished shortly afterwards.” The old man, ignoring the sobering tea, poured himself a full glass of whiskey.
“So your problem was solved?”
“In a way, yes. But you could also say things got even worse. Ever since then, I’ve been dreaming of walking through the ruins every night. Even now, my dreams are piles and piles of white stones. Someone said I was the king of the white ruins.” The old man searched his daughter’s face for confirmation.
On her way home, she recalled the wonderful times her family had spent on the hill, back when her mother was still alive. Though they weren’t rich, they had been content. “If only Mom were still here . . . How I wish I could talk to her.” The thought saddened her. The puddles under her feet were shiny with rainbows, in which her frail shadow wobbled.
She drifted to her dream sadly. Once she had arrived, however, she quickly forgot about the sorrow. The prince was fighting a giant beast, dim and blurred in thick fog. The prince had become a strong, red-bearded man again, brandishing an oddly-shaped weapon. She picked up a stone and threw it at the beast, her heart burning with anger. The prince paused suddenly, turned, and said to her, “There’s a bar nearby. It’s quite good. Let’s go get a drink?”
She nodded, and as they began walking together, the beast said behind them, “I’d like to join you.” He sounded like a simple country man.
“No, my friend, not today. Two is company, three is a crowd. You’ve heard that before, right?” the prince spoke with a smile. They sounded like old friends.
“My, how foolish I am!” The beast laughed heartily.
They didn’t go to the bar, but to the white ruins. “Where are we?” she asked.
“This is your father’s kingdom. You’re the princess. Every dream has its own host, who can’t come and go like the others.” The prince took her hand. “You will inherit the throne. You’ll be the queen of the ruins.”
She yanked her hand away and tried to run, but the white ruins were endless.
* * *
The Female Borges agreed to see the slacker again. They went to watch a vulgar and boring movie. She heard him snoring and shook him awake.
“I just had an odd dream,” he said.
“Hush.” She put her finger to her lips. The people around eyed them angrily.
After the movie, she asked him about the dream. He strained to recall: “A strangely-dressed man said he wanted to duel with me. I agreed and we set a date for it. He called me a demon. Then an old man came along, who looked very much like a professor back at my college. He led me to a vast territory scattered with white stones and begged me to take his daughter away. I asked him where his daughter was. And that was when you woke me up.”
“What do you like to read in your free time?” she asked eagerly.
He looked up to the starry sky, as if to change the subject, but after a mo- ment, he gathered courage and answered. “I like reading physics. Actually, people call me the Male Madame Curie.”
“The Male Madame Curie? What a strange name!” She laughed. He too laughed.
The Female Borges and the Male Madame Curie now held hands: they exchanged ideas on physics. Though they failed to reach a consensus on Niels Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity, they enjoyed the conversation immensely.
In a dark basement, the prince sat by his desk, writing. The Female Borges snuck a look: it was a letter to the emperor of France and the monarch of Prussia. “I’m requesting a regiment. We must vanquish a dangerous enemy, the enemy of the empire.” The prince spoke without looking up.
She sat in the corner, silent.
“Do you like Nietzsche?” he asked abruptly. “Very much,” she said.
He stood up and turned. She found she was facing Nietzsche himself. Nietzsche said, “Do you really like me, miss?”
She was terrified. Nietzsche turned back into the prince, a pale, beardless man. He said in a tired voice, “Take revenge first, then fight the duel.”
Now the Female Borges cared only about the Male Madame Curie. She checked out a few books about dueling. At dusk, as they were strolling through a plaza, she handed him the books and asked him to read them closely. The Male Madame Curie was confused. Then, struck by a magical feeling, he accepted the books and assured her he would stay up all night and read them through. Back home, she knew it was time to face the prince again.
The prince, soaked with sweat, was sharpening a sickle. “What are you doing?”
“I must reclaim my father’s belongings from my uncle,” the prince said in a steadfast tone.
“What belongings?”
“A bulldozer.”
“Why did your uncle take the bulldozer from your father?”
“Because . . . because I’ve stolen my uncle’s balcony, the security door, and the telephone.”
“Oh, I see—”
“My father once helped your father out with the bulldozer, back when he was trapped in his own labyrinth. Our marriage was arranged then.”
The prince dropped the sickle and led her to a large bookstore. He showed her The Anthology of Classical Fairy Tales. “These are all the records of my life. I married one princess after another, including a few very lucky girls from poor families. They all lived happily ever after. Tomorrow, I’m going to kill the wicked demon in the duel, then we’ll get married, and together we’ll rule the vast white ruins.”
She jerked awake. She felt panicky all day.
It started to drizzle at dusk. The Female Borges went to see the Male Madame Curie. The city streets seemed much quieter in the rain. They walked and talked, until they had reached her apartment building.
“Last night I dreamed of sitting by a swimming pool, filled with white swans,” he said.
She looked fondly into his eyes. “Please win the duel.” After kissing him lightly on the face, she turned and ran into the building.
Stunned, the Male Madame Curie stood in the rain. After a while, he went home in a daze of happiness, and went to sleep early.
Before bedtime, the Female Borges read a short article in the Albert Einstein Collection, “The Ehrenfest Paradox.” She hoped to borrow Einstein’s power to protect her Male Madame Curie.
The prince rode a roaring bulldozer into the gym, sickle shining in hand. She was paddling with her feet in the pool, feeling ducklike.
“You’re bewitched by the demon. I am here to save you,” the prince shouted. The “demon” came along: an innocent-looking young man, plainly-dressed, holding a copy of Sir James Jeans’s Astronomy and Cosmogony.
“You didn’t read the guidebook that I gave you?” she asked desperately.
“Don’t worry. I read it. Twice,” the demon said in a sincere tone.
The prince whipped out his sickle and hacked towards the demon, who swiftly jumped away. The prince made another dash, but slipped and fell. The demon grabbed the sickle and tossed it into the pool. The prince couldn’t swim. He watched as the sickle sank into the water, unsure what to do. The demon loomed over the prince, step by step.
The prince shrugged. “It seems the power of science has triumphed.” He rose, shook his head, and mounted the bulldozer. With a roar of the engine, he fled.
This time, awaking from the dream, the Female Borges felt relieved. She would take the Male Madame Curie to see her drunk father this weekend. After that, she would live a real and happy life.