Valerie

by Sara Stridsberg

  DR. RUTH COOPER: We’re on your side in this hospital, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Yeah.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: We have nothing to do with the police investigation.

  VALERIE: Police faggots.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: I can see you’re distressed, Valerie.

  VALERIE: I’m not distressed.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: It’s okay to cry.

  VALERIE: I’m not crying.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Crying can be beautiful.

  VALERIE: I’m not crying, it’s my brain bleeding.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Here’s a handkerchief, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Thanks, but crying isn’t my style.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Okay, what are you thinking about when you’re not crying?

  VALERIE: Regrets that I made bad art. That’s the only thing I can imagine crying about.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: How about you smoke one cigarette at a time, Valerie?

  VALERIE: Yes, how about it? When is the trial?

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Later.

  VALERIE: Is Andy still playing dead in the hospital?

  DR. RUTH COOPER: I want to talk about your mother.

  VALERIE: I’m not ill.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: I want to talk about Dorothy.

  VALERIE: May I smoke a cigarette then?

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Yes.

  VALERIE: May I smoke two cigarettes?

  DR. RUTH COOPER: You can start by smoking one cigarette. Listen to me now.

  VALERIE: Dorothy always smoked two.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: I understand. I’m going to tell you how I see your situation.

  VALERIE: Or more.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: More?

  VALERIE: Cigarettes. Come on, Cooper. Tell me who I am. I’m used to fortune-tellers.

  DR. RUTH COOPER (smiles, and then looks serious): I believe you are living in a delusion and you are currently in a schizophrenic reaction of the paranoid type.

  VALERIE: Really. And I can tell you about men’s flagrant inferiority. About nature’s true order. There is no reason to involve male mice. Mouse girls can have mouse babies with one another. I can tell you about my laboratory research.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Even though you make strenuous efforts to appear a hard, tough, cynical misanthrope, you are actually only a frightened, depressed child.

  VALERIE: Call it what you will. You will never know my real name.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: That’s my impression. A scared little child. Full of fear. Full of self-loathing.

  VALERIE: My impression is that you are a scared little male-female. My impression is that your efforts are utterly futile. My impression is that you are a really stupid little cocksucker. But it isn’t your fault. It’s all a result of your unfortunate background under patriarchy.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: So we are talking about a schizophrenic reaction of the paranoid type with deep depression and serious potential for destructive acts.

  VALERIE: I’m not ill.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: You are extremely ill, Valerie. That doesn’t mean you’re not a very gifted, headstrong woman.

  VALERIE: This is no illness. I repeat. My condition is not a medical condition. It’s more a condition of extreme clarity, of stark white operating lights illuminating all words, things, bodies, and identities. Within a stroke or a shout of you, Dr. Cooper, everything looks different. Your so-called diagnosis is an exact description of woman’s place in the system of mass psychosis. Schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, and the potential for destructive acts. Every girl in patriarchy knows that schizophrenia, paranoia, and depression are in no way a description of an individual medical condition. It is a definitive diagnosis of a social structure and a form of government based on constant insults to the brain capacity of half the population, founded on rape.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: I want to help you, Valerie. But to do that I need to know more about you.

  VALERIE: I have my own qualifications from the Psychology Institute and Animal Laboratory in Maryland, which means that I will apply my own diagnoses.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Yes, I understand you’re one of their star students.

  VALERIE: I was filled with happiness that day. I whistled and sang and drank cheap wine. I tried to keep on the sunny side. I always had gold and silver threads sewn into my dresses.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Tell me about that day, Valerie.

  VALERIE: No. Qualifications are just a way of separating people.

  BRISTOL HOTEL, APRIL 14, 1988

  The smell of dead shorebirds and prostitution permeates the hotel room and as the light slowly retreats from the window, the sounds of the night take over, sirens blot out memories, and you have given up all attempts to sit by the window making notes. To write now would be to throw yourself into an ice-cold tidal wave and drown in the searing pain of salt and self-hatred. Instead you try to sleep away an hour in the yellow sheets, to concentrate on the sound of waves from a different time, the surfboard beneath your feet, the breakers, the blue jellyfish, your childish bodies promising surf and play forever, sun and sparks of life and skin, his smile enchanted.

  Surfing days, the fifties, all spiral past into your slumber, a moment of blinding light in the screaming blackness of space. Silk Boy with his salty, unkempt braids, the irresistible junkie look. A long time ago you loved to search for sea creatures and debris out where it was deepest and bluest, small sharks, crabs, and seahorses. A long time ago you dreamed of drowning in someone’s arms.

  There is no hotel in this whoremongering state where you have not been raped and received payment and all you wish now is that you had never entered this shark industry and that death would not come so fast, not like this, and not to you. Just before you fall asleep, your hand reaches for the dying light, the glimmering luminescence in the murky brown water.

                          Silky?

                             … are you there, Silly Boy?…

  SILK BOY (his breath moist and salty): I’m here, Valerie. I’ll sit here until you fall asleep, if you like.

  VALERIE: The docks are for old thoughts.

  SILK BOY: The docks are for old ladies, you mean.

  VALERIE: Old ladies and surfing and death. In the swimming pool, Mrs. Cox always practiced farthest in, at the shallow end.

  SILK BOY: A million-dollar mermaid, a million-dollar hooker.

  VALERIE: What was it Mrs. Cox always said?

  SILK BOY: When I’m wet I’m fantastic, when I’m dry I’m just a boring housewife.

  VALERIE: It was so cold, the bridal bouquet froze.

  SILK BOY: My little bouquet of frost.

  VALERIE: It was you and me and the ocean and it was always summertime. I remember chasing you under the water. You were my underwater fantasy.

  SILK BOY: Are you cold?

  VALERIE: Are we still married?

  SILK BOY: No.

  VALERIE: Why aren’t we? All my life I’ve believed we were married.

  SILK BOY: You have holes in your memories. The drugs have blotted them out.

  VALERIE (reaches her hand out into the dying light): Give me a kiss.

  SILK BOY: Why?

  VALERIE: Because I need it. Because I’m going to die. Because I’m scared of dying.

  SILK BOY: You reek, Valerie. Your mouth smells of death.

  VALERIE (her hands fumble with the sheets): Kiss me.

  SILK BOY: Why did you leave me?

  VALERIE: Did I?

  SILK BOY: You left me.

  VALERIE: Did I? I don’t remember. I’m going to sleep now. I’m going to sleep and I’m going to dream it’s night, and I’m alone in a hotel room in San Francisco, and you’re dead, and there isn’t a question about death in every grammar.

  SILK BOY: There are no sharks in death. Death is just the end.

  VALERIE: Death is the only happy ending.

  ALLIGATOR REEF, DECEMBER 1953

  UFOS HAVE BEEN SPOTTED IN
NORTHERN JAPAN AND ALMOST ALL OVER AMERICA

  That morning the Rosenbergs were executed at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. Silk Boy had been out during the night and picked magnolias and palm leaves, sold a few wet kisses and feigned gasps outside the motel on the way home and then popped in to see Mrs. Cox’s partner in the coffee bar, where he collected his birthday present: a handful of dollars and a wedding cake with pink marzipan that someone had ordered and forgotten to pick up.

  Your scribbles float out into the ocean, they spill over onto your hands, onto furniture, walls, and the back of used paper. You write wherever there is room. Your Royal 100 was left with a shark in Alabama, a beautiful, dangerous territory with a lot of money and extravagant food; in the afternoons you went deep into the forest with him to practice shooting birds. From that time on you have avoided sharks with weapons.

  Alligator Reef, the hot, briny coast, where frost flowers spring up on all the car windows. At night you dream about Ethel Rosenberg in the electric chair, that she is alone in the desert wearing a bikini and she is weeping, that she writes reams of shocking-pink begging letters to the American government to be allowed to live.

  THE STATE (a priest, woken in the night, holds your hand tightly for a moment): Valerie Jean Solanas, do you take this boy?

  VALERIE: Yes … I take this boy, and I will always love him.

  THE STATE: Do you take this girl, Valerie Solanas?

  SILK BOY: Yes, I’ll protect her from all that scares her. When she’s with me, I’m not afraid anymore. I’ll hold her hand when she cries.

  (Fuck Silly Boy.)

  (Fuck the State.)

  (Fuck God.)

  (Fuck you, God, if you saw everything by the river.)

  VALERIE: No, thanks. I don’t need any protection. Never have, never will. I’ll protect him.

  THE STATE: Do you take his declaration of love, Valerie Jean Solanas?

  VALERIE: No. I’ve always taken care of myself. That’s just it. I have need of no husband, no state, no priest, no god, no father, no money.

  THE STATE: Yes, or no?

  VALERIE: No.

  SILK BOY: Valerie, it’s not important now. I only want to be where you are, only want to hold your hand when you cry.

  THE STATE: Do you take this boy’s declaration of love or not?

  VALERIE: No, I’ve told you. He has to say what I tell him if I’m going to take him.

  SILK BOY (to the priest): Do as she says.

  THE STATE: Well?

  SILK BOY (to you): Come on, Valerie. I’ll say what you want.

  VALERIE: Okay … I, Beach Boy, take Valerie Jean Solanas to live in her shadow and love her and she will be my officer and my warrior … my dog against the night.

  SILK BOY: Okay … I, Beach Boy, take Valerie Jean Solanas to live in her shadow and love her and she will be my officer and my warrior … and my what else?

  VALERIE: I am your dog against the night.

  SILK BOY: I am your dog against the night.

  VALERIE: You … You’ve got to say you. Not I.

  SILK BOY: You are my dog against the night, Valerie.

  ALLIGATOR REEF, 1953–1954

  NEW NUCLEAR TESTING ON BIKINI ATOLL

  The sun sinks across the sand dunes and in the campsite kiosk the television set flickers. In flippers and goggles you are waiting for Silk Boy to appear between the beach umbrellas with a plastic bag filled with a bottle of bubbly, sweets, roll-ups, and broken goggles. Mrs. Cox has given you extra sweets and extra cigarettes. She has warned you about swimming too far out, warned you about the great white sharks, the killer whales, the gigantic tiger shark.

  Mrs. Cox lights fresh cigarettes and keeps you company in a camping chair with her old shark stories and she lets you eat what you want without paying. Hamburgers with mustard and gherkins and flat Coca-Cola. There are no sharks, Mrs. Cox, just the ocean just the stars just ten sorts of flowers just happy endings. The surfers hurtle through the waves outside and Silk Boy is always late, always stays far too long at Mr. Biondi’s.

  MRS. COX: Tell me about your little brother.

  VALERIE: Seahorse. Animal photographer. Happy.

  MRS. COX: I can see you’re brother and sister.

  VALERIE: Yes. Though he was born a year after me. April ninth. Same day but exactly a year later. Dorothy wanted twins. She made sure she got knocked up good and proper. She calls us her twin boys.

  MRS. COX: When is she coming back?

  VALERIE: Dorothy?… Anytime. She’s always calling the phone booth with new dates, but we say we want to stay here.

  MRS. COX: And money?

  VALERIE: Dorothy sends us money all the time.

  MRS. COX: What’s his name?

  VALERIE: Silk Boy.

  MRS. COX: I mean, for real. An actual boy’s name, I mean.

  VALERIE: He’s just called Silk Boy.

  When Mr. Biondi pulls down the blinds in the bedroom, the beach and the sky and the light disappear, and in the sheets Silk Boy laughs. The skin nearest his eye and on his wrists and groin is quite translucent and he is always brimming with giggles and lipstick kisses and devotion. Mr. Biondi and all that silky skin, making him weep and laugh and shout out for God and his mother and eternity. And in his large and beautiful house he groans, his hands deep in the boy’s hair, and he wishes he would never need to come and the boy would never leave. And when he does finally come into that childlike mouth, he just wants to come again, to drown, to melt into the boy.

  Mr. Biondi bathes in money and loneliness and he tries to hold on to those enchanted hands that are forever on their way to somewhere else and he always has more money in his pockets and always has more drugs. Later, as he stands waving from the solarium with his swollen lips, his bathrobe slips open and he stands naked and pleading before the boy and the ocean and his face is a forest of dead white trees and the boy twists out of his hands and runs off along the boardwalk.

  When at last he returns, the sun has gone down and Mrs. Cox has closed the shop and you have fallen asleep on the flagstones outside.

  The beaches are deserted now, the bathers have gone, the umbrellas have been cleared away. The waves crash against the shore too violently for anyone to want to vacation here and there is always a black flag flying at the lifeguard tower. Silk Boy walks over the beach with his empty bottles and you lie for days on end looking for UFOs while he keeps busy, the little collector and worker. The campsite is empty and you move between the remaining trailers. All that descends over them is a green mist of beer bottles and a shower of campfire detritus and rain. Card games and dope games no longer work and Silk Boy turns his narrow back, sits smoking a pipe, complaining, and hiding from your eyes. It is impossible to write with him in the trailer. You wish he would go and talk to Mrs. Cox. You long to be alone, to be at home in Ventor, to have money, a house, a new Royal 100. Mrs. Cox is very kind, but she is a fool like all the rest. Outside the trailer, the ocean is gray and dull, and inside, all your things are wet and smelly. Hanging from the ceiling are lines of photographs and notes and underwear drying. When the tourists come back, you will leave the trailer and return to the sea. There will be lights on in Biondi’s villa again.

  Silk Boy and you lie up in the reeds, as the clouds move slowly along beneath the heavens, and everything apart from the ocean is calm, and in your bags you have limitless hash, and he is not hustling anymore, just cashing in empty bottles and begging for small change in the bars, and Dorothy never comes to fetch you, and his skin is silk and streamers, and he still wishes for his own laboratory with male seahorses and photography fluids and of supporting you both with his work on the road and the beach. At night you lie in each other’s arms and plan the future. When night sweeps over Alligator Reef, he wishes for another boy, another time, another beginning.

  VALERIE: There isn’t anything you can’t decide. I wish you’d figure that out. There isn’t anything that can’t be redone.

  SILK BOY: Death can’t be redone. Your
sex can’t. Your background can’t. Neither can your destiny. Or love. The executed don’t come back. I’m an alphabet of bad experiences.

  VALERIE: You don’t know the alphabet.

  SILK BOY: A … Alligator Reef. B … Boy. C … Cravings. D … Dead trees. Dead forests. Dead gulls. Downfall. E … Electric chair. F … Fucked up. Fucking fucked up. Forgotten. Fucked-up future. False identity. Film. Feathers. G … Grieving over nothing. Getting lost all the time. H … Hooker. Hopeless. High all the time. Happy about nothing. Hairless. Harmless. Hacking cough. Hacking hash cough. Hash hooker. Hooker kid. Whore.

  VALERIE: Whore begins with W, not H. I?

  SILK BOY: Okay. I … Idle. Impossible. J … Jackass. K … Kisses that hit you right in the heart. L … Loser. M … Mr. Biondi. N … Night. O … Outsider. Oral sex. P … Problems. Q … I don’t know any words beginning with Q. There aren’t any words beginning with Q.

  VALERIE: Quoailler.

  SILK BOY: I can’t speak Spanish.

  VALERIE: French. To constantly flick your tail. Or querelle. Meaning argument.

  SILK BOY: Q … Something French. French kisses. R … Real boy. S … Seahorses. Male seahorses. On the skids. T … Ten for a fuck. Thunderbird. U … Underwater thoughts. Unholy mess. Underworld … V … Valerie Jean Solanas. W … Wasteland. X … X gene. Y … Y gene. Z … Zebras. Zebra stripes on your skin. Zebras on TV.

  VALERIE: Being obsessed with your own doom and the netherworld isn’t going to make you free. You can control everything if you want to.

  SILK BOY: Flowers. The sun. Half light.

  VALERIE: There are so many different ways you can be in the half light. Your gender isn’t a prison. It’s an opportunity. There are just different ways of telling. Write your own account.

  SILK BOY (laughs): I can’t write.

  VALERIE: That’s not the end of the world. I’ll teach you to write.

  And then the calls home to Dorothy.

  Just the ocean in the background, terrifying telephonic creatures twisting and straining in the wires blown to the ground and you, unable to say anything and unable to hang up. Her breath, her way of exhaling cigarette smoke into the receiver. For long moments she is silent, sometimes she whispers your name. Is that Valerie Jean?