The Dream

Our family of three lived in a high-rise apartment. The building management carried out pest control twice a year, and ordinarily you couldn't find so much as an ant in our home. Why a cockroach this size had appeared today, I had no idea.

Ruoli was badly shaken — she had never seen a cockroach that large. At bedtime she pressed herself tight against me and whispered, "I'm scared. Don't get up again tonight."

I pretended to be already asleep and said nothing.

Hearing no response, she only held me tighter and wound her legs around mine, afraid I would slip away. A wave of drowsiness washed over me; my thoughts blurred in her grip, and I felt my body slowly sinking. The legs wrapped around me began to change — smooth skin turned rough, then bristled with hard spines that scraped along me with a dull, faint pain. When I opened my eyes again, what was holding me was no longer my wife Ruoli, but a cockroach — a meter long, its spine-covered legs pinning me down, its antennae sweeping back and forth across my face.

I was too terrified to resist, too terrified even to scream. I lay rigid on the ground and waited for the end. My stillness seemed to satisfy the creature's expectations; after the antennae had swept for a while it opened its mouth, two blade-like fangs parting to either side, aimed at my throat, and bit down.

I thought it was over. But I waited and waited, and the fangs merely hung above me, suspended. Then I saw a hand reach up, grab the antennae on the cockroach's head, and wrench them back — and a Swiss Army knife with a red handle sliced through the cockroach's neck.

By the time my senses returned, Wu Wei was standing in front of me, knife in one hand and the severed cockroach's head in the other. The headless body lay beside me still thrashing, all six legs clawing at the air.

"You're remarkably cool-headed," Wu Wei said between heaving breaths. "Cockroach climbs right on top of you and you sleep like a log."

I took a long time to find words. "Weren't you scared of it? That size?"

Wu Wei flung the head aside. "Scared of what? Big as it is, it's still an insect. I'm a primate mammal, several evolutionary rungs above it."

He wasn't wrong — but in the wild, evolution doesn't determine who wins. I said nothing to contradict him and got to my feet to look around.

The flashlight lay where I had dropped it — the cave's only light source. It pointed toward the entrance we had come through, now buried under a pile of sand and soil. Our pickup was somewhere under there, along with our food, our water, and that strange box.

I swept the flashlight around the cave. Beneath our feet was a thin layer of loose sand over solid rock. One hundred meters ahead was the edge of the rock shelf — and beyond it, a bottomless abyss. At our backs, the hard rock wall. Below the wall was the buried entrance. Above it, clinging to the rock face, were cockroaches of every size, from palm-sized to meter-long, all waving their antennae, keeping a wary watch on us. When we moved, they wouldn't dare come down — but when we slept, who knew.

I shuddered at the memory of the cockroach pressed against me, its fangs hovering at my throat. The flashlight beam trembled with me.

Wu Wei seemed to read my thoughts. "Honestly, these cockroaches are nothing to worry about. Sure, they're big and there are plenty of them — but they're cowards at heart. If they wanted to take us, they'd have done it in a rush while we were unconscious. They didn't. They prefer to lurk and scheme, which is why they're stuck here in the dark where no light ever reaches."

Wu Wei had laid bare the tragedy of the cockroach's existence in this underworld. In the real world, wasn't the same true of people? The thought brought my own reality to mind: a manager who forced you to work overtime, and all you could do was curse him behind his back while smiling to his face like a proper subordinate. If every employee simply stood up at closing time and left, there wasn't a thing the manager could do. But not a single one of them had the nerve. Those who did had quit long ago and gone off to exploit others.

Thinking about reality reminded me I was in a dream. I should push the plot forward — if I kept dawdling, morning would come and I'd have nothing to write.

"Let's keep moving," I called to Wu Wei.

Wu Wei was on his knees at the entrance, digging at the sand with both hands. He looked up with a start. "Keep moving — where?"

"The path has to be ahead of us."

I started walking toward the abyss. Wu Wei followed. In the end we both stood at the edge of the precipice, staring down into its bottomless dark.

"What path?" Wu Wei looked thoroughly confused.

"We jump. The path's down there."

His look deepened. "You mean the path to the underworld?"

I didn't want to waste time arguing. "Don't ask questions — the story demands it. Just jump and see."

Wu Wei grabbed my arm. "Story? Come on, man! Did that cockroach knock something loose in your head? Stop talking nonsense. Let's go back to the entrance and dig."

I finally lost patience and came clean: "It's all a dream! We can't go by common sense here — we only need to think about pushing the plot forward. Would the story ever send us back the way we came?"

Even as I said it, I wasn't sure why I was explaining this to a dream character. I'd have to cut this exchange when I wrote it up. Wu Wei said nothing, listening quietly.

I pressed on: "There are no cockroaches in real-world deserts, and real cockroaches aren't this size. In real life I have a wife and child — I would never come to a place like this for a treasure hunt. So this desert, this cave, these cockroaches — and you, Wu Wei — exist only in the dream. I created all of it."

Wu Wei still said nothing, regarding me with the patient tenderness one reserves for a child with special needs. When he was confident I had finished, he spoke: "Wow. You created me. Very impressive."

Then he drew the Swiss Army knife from his pocket and made a quick slash across my arm. The sudden pain made me throw my hand back instinctively and press the other one over the wound.

He looked at me: "Does that hurt? Still think you're dreaming?

Wake up. You don't have a wife or child. You're a single man. That's reality."