by Ursula Pflug
Where?
She’s wearing a white satin party dress over her jeans. She doesn’t make any sense. Her frizzy ponytail, her strapless dress over her dirty T-shirt and satin old lady pumps. Maybe if I’m nice to her she’ll tell me what she knows.
“Look,” I say kindly, “you can’t even get the zipper done up. How is your prince going to recognize you looking like that?”
“You stay away from me,” she hisses. “You’ve always said you didn’t even want to be on this side. And you can’t come without your mask.”
“What is with your crazy outfit, then?” Some Carnival thing going on this year that I don’t understand.
But she snaps her silver purse shut and runs.
She’s running again.
What’s she so afraid of?
sss
Can there be such a thing as a wrong neighbourhood of the soul?—a time in life (for all feeling displaces time—although often in unusual and unprecedented ways) when one is continually doubling back on one’s tracks, meeting, it seems, none of the right people, everything taking place in fits and starts and going nowhere? And, if so, is there a reason for this, a purpose behind it that we, in our diminished state, cannot comprehend but only intuit? And why is everything a mirror of everything else? And why does my heart quake so unexpectedly and how beautifully the winter light falls across the snow, and that does lift my spirits.
Someone has washed and ironed Martin’s burgundy shirt. I see it now, hanging from a rod amidst the clutter on the far side of the room. Martin himself would have ironed only the front and the sleeves—he always wore a vest with his shirt—a paisley brocade waistcoat from a vintage suit, covering the shirt’s still wash-wrinkled back.
sss
“It’s the memory thing that bugs me the most. I’ve lost months, and if I could just figure out what they were, I’d have Martin back.” Denise shakes her head, sighs distractedly and looks out the window at the trashiness of the passing parade, humming a dance tune from the fifties. Poor Denise. Still singing the same song, over and over, like a wind-up jewellery box ballerina.
“I think you mean you wonder where you lost them?” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Seems to me it’s a location, much as anything. You were used far worse than she ever was. At least she’s awake for it.”
Sleeping Beauty awake? I ponder that, ask what she means, but she shrugs, sighs as if I’m a dirty business, she’s said too much. I pay and leave, thanking her for the clues, such as they are. I don’t know if I should pay her any attention, but then, I’m not getting much help from anyone else. Besides, I like her dottiness: half oracle and half crazy-old-lady, perhaps even something to aspire to. She’s my fairy Godwaitress, this time around.
sss
That night I take the streetcar to my old west side local, the Fishbowl. I don’t really want to but I make myself, thinking it’ll be good for me. I run into Martin, of all people. I’m so relieved to see him I pretend nothing weird is going on. We talk and drink all night, dancing and leaning our heads on one another’s shoulders. It’s the beginning all over again, like when we first fell in love.
“Hey listen, Louise,” he says. “I’ve got this really great idea for a mask. I think it’ll sell like crazy, for Carnival, you know.”
“How come you called me Louise?”
“I did? Oh. Isn’t that what you call yourself now? Hey, tell me what you think. Darth Vader. You remember Vader. He’s out of an old movie, Star Wars.”
“Yeah, I know. Funny, but I’ve been thinking about him too.”
“Great minds think alike,” he says. Snow falls as we go outside and hail a cab. “You know I love you, don’t you, Louise?”
“Sure,” I say, closing my eyes, leaning into his shoulder in the back seat. I’m so happy to have him back I ignore his name calling.
Together we tramp up the now familiar stairs. We’re dressed alike, in old black sweaters and jeans. His are corduroy. He’s wearing the pointy shoes I remember from the first day and when they’re lying on their side on the floor I see they have a hole in the bottom. After we’ve finished making love Martin goes to sleep. I lie there for a while, just thinking. The lingering sexiness carries me into a dream where everything is pleasure, where the moment is all that exists, like at Hamilton Beach. The window high above is turning blue.
In the morning he’s gone, but I find I don’t much care. I have orders to fill, Denise to talk to over dinner, my lost months to uncover.
sss
My window is bleak, wintery, star filled. I read old magazines, stir my instant coffee. There is never enough sun in the wintertime, never half enough damn sun. It’s so hard to even remember ever having had any other life than this one. You wake up going “Where am I?” and you end up forgetting there ever was a Before. Kind of like life.
I stay in, living on boxed cereal, apples, and instant coffee. Between mask orders I cut out four-year-old newspaper clippings I don’t bother to read and glue them into a scrapbook. With a hot gun yet; no Uhu glue sticks here. Very wasteful. No sign of M.
sss
When I wake in the middle of the night Martin’s there. “I love you,” he says, and I hear someone murmur in response. It’s Louise. She is here, in bed with him, with me.
It’s feeling a little cramped tonight, I have to say.
Rage. Louise the ugly, the misshapen, has my Martin. What can the attraction be? Perhaps she’s good for his ego. Perhaps I should tell him how brilliant he is more often. But, I think angrily, I’ve never really been that kind of girl.
I go back to sleep, hoping I’m dreaming. Hoping they’ll go away.
sss
I stare at the walls, the endless stacked faces. Layers and layers of masks. I’ve got to start thinking of my costume, and not just how to make it, but what it means. Vader is the exterior. I’ll be his inner girlfriend; his anima. But what is beneath the mask, historically? Who was Vader before he was Vader? Dark Father. Hades was dark husband, but then, husband and father are the same in more than one story. Dark incest.
One night I take out the VR headset and realize it’s part of the mask. I hot glue it to the motorcycle helmet, carve out a piece of plexi and mould it to the back to get the shape right. It’s nice to be using my education for something. I look in the mirror, very pleased with my results. A little matte black spray paint and I’m in business. Too bad I couldn’t record the heavy breathing, but a smartphone or even a cassette recorder are things I haven’t come across. They probably sell old Vader voice-chips at surplus electronics stores, but I haven’t found one anywhere near here. I haven’t come across a computer either; I could probably find a sound file of Vader’s breathing on the interwebz but the out of time quality here seems to extend to technology.
sss
Darth Vader. Well.
Fancy meeting you here.
It doesn’t occur to me till morning that I’d planned to be his bride and not the man himself.
But the soul reaches blindly, unbidden, for what it needs.
Louise and Martin shared my bed again last night.
sss
I start wearing my Vader mask on my daily walks. Also a length of black velvet for my cape—it must’ve been used for photography backdrops. So strange to borrow clothes from people I only live with intermittently, in the middle of the night, for snatched moments of crowding elbows and knees, nanoseconds of overheard lovemaking, as contextually odd as dream, before I drift to sleep again. Always drifting to sleep again in this life. What would it be to wake up for good? It’s all too much like wearing a mask whose symbolism you don’t understand, have to piece it together from the reactions you get.
Denise smiles but looks worried as I take my helmet off, set it beside me on the red vinyl banquette. “Sometimes,” she says, “it’s better to forget. Don�
��t you see?”
“I can’t see till I cross,” I say, “to the other side.” Not knowing what I mean, just listening to it. How to follow clues. Eat my Hawai’ian burger, drink my milkshake, not because I like them, but so I can watch the Hamilton Beach machine. I take my dinner reading out: The Larrousse Encyclopedia of Mythology.
Denise looks impressed by the size of my tome. I turn it around, show it to her. “I always carry it around in my day-pack this time of year. Some people laugh but it carries so much information about Carnival, about stories. Carnival is like living myth, living fiction. The only problem is every once in a while it feels like we’re all going just a little mad. But then, that’s what it’s supposed to be like, isn’t it?”
“Be careful,” she says, “maybe you’ll get out yet.”
I look in the mirror beside the coat rack, at Vader. My eyes stare out. Have I given life to the mask, or has it made me dead, a doll, an only partially alive thing?
Almost like a machine-head.
sss
People on the street are afraid of me, giving me a wide berth. They must think I’m a machine-head, unafraid to wear my gear on the street. There are jacks in my helmet, the goggle jacks. They are like a question, an anticipation, a challenge. I wait, trying to be open-minded.
What does it mean, to be a machine-head for Carnival, but not in real life? It’s like my mother telling me she used to go out as a punk for Halloween when she was young, even though she wasn’t one. Wear her hair shampooed green and spiked with egg white, henna tattoos, fake safety pin earrings. For a night.
But I’m living the deconstruction of myth, and not just pretending to it. Besides, I am dangerous: I really don’t know much about who I am, brain burned out by drugs, by drinking, by other things I’ve forgotten or never knew about. But maybe not those things at all. I mean, I’ve never really been any more excessive than most people I know, probably less. I just use it in a different way. Sometimes you have to forget yourself to remember who you really are. It’s kind of funny. I mean, you’re supposed to lose yourself during Carnival, but I’ve really done it this time.
sss
I love Vader, because he gives me power where I had none before. How does a timid, poverty-stricken, vague, unemployable, confused, and self-abusing but basically good-hearted young woman become so quickly transformed into the terror of the neighbourhood? It could only be because of those whose presence I feel nearby. Everyone thinks I’m one of them. One day I will meet them for real.
What if I decide to join?
I like the power. Still, I know it isn’t really mine, although it could be, perhaps should be. It’s his.
I know it’s a him. I can feel it.
And someday I shall have to pay him back.
Or perhaps wrest back what he has stolen from me.
You know when you pass a store window and see someone faintly unattractive and somehow dowdy looking and then realize with a shock it’s yourself, that you look ordinary when you aren’t preening in the mirror? Well, that happened to me, but in a different way. I saw a man (I walk like a man now!) in machine-head gear, modified to resemble an evil villain from a kid’s SF movie that was popular when my mother’s mother was young and still won’t go away. In the split second before I got it, I was terrified, a sick shock in my stomach. I almost ran.
Curious to run from yourself.
But why are people so afraid of machine-heads? Is it the self-destructiveness, the memory loss, the outlaw quality? I mean, everyone knows they’re terrified of real women. Of touch. Wouldn’t rape us if they could.
sss
I decide to explore the building. I was always afraid to before, but now I’ve got Vader to protect me. Not a sign of life anywhere … but at the end of the hall on the top floor the door’s open and inside, well, I’m not really surprised … a VR imaging system.
I put on the glove that’s sitting on top of the console, plug in the jacks for my Eyes, settle into a big comfy chair, which, I realize, is an old dentist’s chair. It seems somehow appropriate, like pulling the dark teeth of desire. A line for a poem; I’ll have to remember it later. Would give it to Matt if I could. Funny how I still save poem lines for him. A machine-head poet: what a combination. As though I’m still waiting to see him again.
I enter the scenario that’s already booted up. I know I should be more circumspect; if the system’s still running I could be discovered at any moment, but, my helmet and the concomitant by-passers’ fear of me has made me brave, even foolhardy.
I myself raping Louise.
I’m a man.
In the act of rape.
She’s wearing a white satin party dress, incongruously over a dirty T-shirt and too big satin old lady pumps. Her purple eyelids streaking, purple tears running down her whiteface. Raping a sad dirty clown.
She’s acting of course, just pretending she’s being raped. These guys aren’t pros, just very good amateurs. Who’m I kidding? The details are too fine, too expensive looking, laid over video Louise. Her scarred, toothed black rubber vulva, the antique glow of her copper automaton hands. No one puts in hundreds of hours of bit-mapping without a payoff at the end. Of course they distribute, sell it on the black market.
She is screaming and screaming.
I’m cynical, though, participating in the rape. Because it’s not real I’m safely almost enjoying it, perhaps because Louise always seems so stupid. It is the stupidity in her that one enjoys seeing raped. Enjoys raping.
But stupid how?
Who’m I kidding? That could be me up there. Is. A part of me. I can tell. Instead of projecting my personality into the guy, like I’m supposed to, I’m suddenly “inside” Louise. Sometimes that’s the best you can do, is say, “I saw it happen.” What part of her feels really raped after these performances?
Before it’s over I take off the headset and leave.
More reversals.
The phantom limbs in that other scenario I once participated in. This time, a phantom dick. A phantom nasty dick, too; not one of the nice kind. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to enjoy sex again.
It didn’t work, though. In spite of the technology, I couldn’t be him for long.
I leave just in time. I hear footsteps on the stairs, and duck into the open door of an empty unused office. I sneak a peek after he’s passed (they were male footsteps) and check him out.
It’s Martin.
I remember when I was a little girl, walking home from a friend’s house after dark. I’d be frightened, even if it was only five-o-clock, dark already in winter. I’d hear footsteps on the pavement behind me, and not wanting to turn and look, I’d listen to hear if they were male or female. You could always tell. It was always the male ones you feared. Who taught me to do that? What words did they use?
Watch out for bad men.
sss
I work on my last order, the last before Carnival Tuesday. Everything’s changed; I keep the studio door locked, hear footsteps upstairs when I know there are none. What do I fear now? I know only too well.
I fear my lover. I fear he’ll want me to act for those things, like she does. I fear how it would change me.
This is why I like wearing the helmet; in it, on the street, I no longer have the fear, walking at night.
Except of course, for them. For him.
Persephone, bride of Hades. Now we can only wear our power clothed in darkness.
sss
Mardi Gras Tuesday I go to the party at the Aquarium, wearing the Vader helmet. It’s like a Carnival warehouse party anywhere, lots of poseurs drinking their faces off and trying to look dangerous in their costumes. Glamorous, like they have exciting lives.
sss
And some even do. I run into Matt. His shaved head, his lonely boots. We slug beer. He says, “You came in further than you thought.”
&nb
sp; sss
“What d’you mean?” I ask. The only way to get people to stop talking cryptic Carnival style gibberish is to ask them straight out, I figure. Even when they’re machine-head poets you once thought you could maybe love.
“You were very, very good,” he says.
“Good when?”
“Good in your lost months?”
“Good where, good how, what kind of good?”
“Good fuck good. Good on the other side.”
“The other side of what?”
“You don’t know. That’s what I thought.”
“Damn right I don’t. Getting tired of it too.”
“Dope cocktail for months, someone said, I didn’t know if it was true. You’re the hottest new thing.”
At last I do know. “I found the system,” I say, “at least one of them. I did see a rape, I mean do it. But it wasn’t me, it was Louise.”
“Layers and layers of rape. An endless bottomless rape. You only accessed the top layer. Thought it was just her, never you. But what if you’d gone deeper, raped yourself?”
He hands me a smartphone, the first one I’ve seen. “It’s the master. We’ve just been beta testing it. It has no distribution yet. Get rid of it, get out of here, far out.”
“Don’t I want to try it first, see?”
His eyebrows go up. As though I revolt him. Funny coming from a guy like that.
“Why are you helping me?” I ask.
“Because you came in one night, just to be nice, to offer company. You didn’t have to. You don’t know what it’s like for us. That we can’t get back out. I’d touch you but…”
“You’re afraid.”
“We’re all trapped in there with her, being fetishistically fucked by technology.”
“We have to bust Martin!” I cry out. “We have to save Louise.”
“Shhh, they’re both here.” His eyebrows shoot up again; he says, “but don’t you see? I work with him, we’re on the same side, the other side.”
Oh, that other side.
Now who’s so stupid, Petra?
sss
Walk along the Don River. Stick my tongue to the icy railing just to see what it feels like. Pull it away before it gets stuck. Denise tried to help. What little she knew, all rumour and threat, smoke and mirrors. Without getting herself in trouble. Or me in more.
