The Faculty of Dreams

by Sara Stridsberg

  VALERIE: Fuck you, Dolly.

  The Oceans

  Bristol Hotel, April 12, 1988

  THE NARRATOR: I can help you sort out your papers. I can change the light bulbs so you don’t have to lie in the dark. I can help you get up for a while.

  VALERIE: Thank you, but I’m fine like this. And I prefer lying alone. But you go ahead. Knock yourself out. I’ll sleep for the time being.

  NARRATOR: We need to talk some more about prostitution, talk some more about the American women’s movement. You have to tell me more about your relationship with the emancipation project.

  VALERIE: I don’t have to do anything. I need to lie here and wait and see if I opt for life or death. My heart is still beating. I am still full of hate. I can still see you. And all your papers. That means I’m not dead yet.

  NARRATOR: Being close to authentic material.

  VALERIE: Am I the material?

  NARRATOR: There’s more than one kind . . . You are the subject of this novel. I admire your work. I admire your courage. I’m interested in the manifesto’s context. Your life. The American women’s movement. The ’60s.

  VALERIE: Whore material. Screwing material.

  NARRATOR: The context—

  VALERIE: —there’s no such thing as context. Everything has to be wrenched out of its setting. Frames of reference can always explain away the most obvious causal connections. Buyers, sellers, slack dicks, slack pussies. It’s a question of phenomena that can be totally taken apart.

  NARRATOR: I’m interested in your world.

  VALERIE: This is not a world I want to live in. Marilyn Monroe. Sylvia Plath. Cinderella. Lying raped and murdered on the beach. I ran home to Dorothy across the desert with dying creatures in my arms. I waited for the animal to decide on life or death. Sometimes it chose death, sometimes life. Sometimes it was a giant dragonfly that would die before nightfall anyway. It has always been like that with me, I’ve always found it hard to decide. It’s been neither life nor death. And it seems from now on it will just be death. Well, at least it’s a decision to abide by. Something of a lasting nature.

  NARRATOR: Tell me about the manifesto, about S.C.U.M.

  VALERIE: A worldwide anti-violence organization. A utopia, a mass movement, a raucous slather slowly spreading across the globe. A condition, an attitude, a way of moving across the city. Always filthy thoughts, filthy dress, filthy low intentions.

  NARRATOR: Number of members?

  VALERIE: Unknown.

  NARRATOR: Which members?

  VALERIE: Arrogant, selfish women in the whole wide world too impatient to hope and wait for the de-brainwashing of millions of assholes. Rulers of the universe in every country . . . Women of the whole world, or just Valerie . . .

  NARRATOR: And you?

  VALERIE: The loneliness of a desert.

  NARRATOR: May I hold your hand?

  VALERIE: No.

  NARRATOR: May I sit with you while you sleep?

  VALERIE: Remember that I’m ill and I’m waiting to die. Remember, I’m the only sane woman here.

  NARRATOR: I love you.

  VALERIE: Fuck you.

  Ventor, February 1951

  The American Government Conducts Atomic Tests in the Nevada Desert Close to Las Vegas

  The glint of the sun as it shines on a summer that has been feverish with desertions and reconciliations. Dorothy has chased through the nights across Bambiland. The trees are dark and somber, and her dead desert animals rot at the back of the house. Moran drifts aimlessly through the rooms when she disappears into the darkness; longing for her return, he weeps, and then sits for days on end, looking through her farewell letters. There is a smell of unwashed underwear and old tinned food and corpses and finally Dorothy calls you, her voice quavering, the crackling line from the city breaking up. This time he has tried to smash her face into an oil drum.

  DOROTHY: I’m so stupid, darling. I should have realized ages ago that he’s a jerk. I look awful. My whole face is blue. My eyes. He cut my dress up, my white one.

  VALERIE: Hello, Dorothy.

  DOROTHY: I’m so stupid. I’m so naïve.

  VALERIE: Yes, you are.

  DOROTHY: I’m going to go away. And I’m going to take you with me.

  VALERIE: I don’t want to stay here.

  DOROTHY: Can you look for my white dress? I don’t want to go around in my nightdress. It makes me look like a mental patient.

  VALERIE: You said it’s been cut up, the white one.

  DOROTHY: Fuck. I forgot. I hate him. I’m useless.

  VALERIE: You’re smarter than Moran.

  DOROTHY: Yes.

  VALERIE: It’s not difficult to be smarter than Moran.

  DOROTHY: Come to the ocean, darling.

  VALERIE: When am I leaving?

  DOROTHY: The dress. You can bring another dress. And shampoo.

  VALERIE: You crazy cow. Are you wearing only your nightdress now?

  DOROTHY (giggles and sniffs): I think so . . . I look ridiculous. Nightdress and boots. No handbag, nothing. Sweetie. My little sugar lump. Bring things for yourself as well. Bring a book. Bring lots to read. I’ll buy you new books. I’ll buy whatever you like. I’ll sort money out when we get to the ocean.

  Alligator Reef, Florida, March 1951

  The Beaches, The Flamingo Park

  At Alligator Reef the skies have a sparkling, healing light that gets into your dresses and handbags and hair. Helicopters circle above the beach and all the time you keep close to the pink lifeguard tower below the flamingo park. Dorothy builds a night shelter under the tower every evening when darkness falls and the beach empties of bathers and the starry sky sinks slowly down over you like a dark blanket.

  *

  The bruises on Dorothy’s arms fade and she is far out in the waves; as she dips under, she longs to be transfigured by the ocean. When she comes back to the shore she is covered in freckles and happy. The white dress has been mended and is lying at the water’s edge, being bleached. There is sand in your sandwiches and Dorothy’s chief occupation is sweeping her eye like a radar scanning for attractive strangers and yours is eavesdropping on picnics on the blankets nearby, when you are not hunting for crocodiles and sharks and giant snakes.

  *

  Dorothy is her most beautiful on the beach and your books crunch with sand and curl with salt water when Dorothy leaves them at the edge of the sea. Sand blows in your eyes and your hair is matted with salt. But the only sharks you find have polo shirts and black cars and glide slowly down the promenade. Dorothy looks at you with fire in her eyes.

  DOROTHY: Tell me a story.

  VALERIE: I’m reading.

  DOROTHY: Tell me a story about Ventor, Valerie.

  VALERIE: If you take your sunglasses off, I’ll tell you a story. You look like a giant fly in those glasses.

  DOROTHY (lays her head on your lap, the umbrellas rattle in the wind): You know what I think about flies, darling.

  VALERIE: Once upon a time there was a filthy little hole full of dickheads, gangsters and crooks and small-town whores with small-town pimps. And along came a little girl called Dorothy. And another little girl called Valerie. The sun was always shining and they laughed and smoked cigarettes. Dorothy worked with her fox boas. Valerie wrote her books. The men in Ventor were a mob of hairy apes who hung out at bars and took care of their egos and their fists and their tiny penises. Their tiny, tiny pet penises. There was a desert and a little house and a bathtub. The desert was full of girls. Or rather, they wished the desert were full of girls. There was Dorothy and Valerie . . .

  (Silence.)

  VALERIE (pulls her hand through Dorothy’s hair): Are you asleep?

  DOROTHY: I’m listening.

  VALERIE: You’ve got blood in your hair again.

  DOROTHY: I’m asleep.

  *

  The ocean thunders around you, words drown in the waves and the blinding white light shifts into something softer. The sky and the sand turn to mu
ted pink and the beach will soon be empty of bathers again. Dorothy opens her eyes.

  DOROTHY: Then what?

  VALERIE: Then all the villains disappear. Someone removes their brains and nervous systems and their penises. Dorothy and Valerie and all the girls and the foxes and the books and the typewriters go to Alligator Reef. And they live happily ever after. They never go back.

  DOROTHY: I love you, Valerie. I love you so much my heart is bursting.

  VALERIE: And Moran?

  DOROTHY (her empty gaze rests on the horizon): I’ll never go back to him.

  VALERIE: O.K.

  DOROTHY: I swear on my mother’s grave that I’ll never go back.

  VALERIE: You don’t have a mother, Dorothy. You can’t swear on something you don’t have.

  Beneath the glare of the sun, beneath the cries of looping gulls, you walk along the beaches, seeking pieces of glass and shells while Dorothy is out for a drive in one of her many lunatic dresses. Outside the flamingo park there is a silken boy selling photographs of sharks. You get a picture of a dead tiger shark and a Polaroid of his sandy shin. The stones in the sand look like birthmarks and there are new kinds of clouds over the ocean every day. One morning when you wake up there is a package on the sand.

  VALERIE: What is it?

  DOROTHY: Open it and see.

  VALERIE: For me?

  DOROTHY: Open it now. Or else I will.

  VALERIE: What is this?

  DOROTHY: A ribbon for the typewriter.

  VALERIE: What typewriter?

  DOROTHY: I’m going to give you a typewriter.

  VALERIE: When?

  DOROTHY: As soon as I can afford it. Rich men in rich cars.

  VALERIE: I don’t want a typewriter from any rich cars.

  DOROTHY: But I’ve nurtured a little author at my freckled bosom. And for that I have to take some responsibility.

  Dorothy has never read a proper book. She reads magazines and cake recipes in cookbooks, though she does not like baking and is useless at any kind of cooking. She celebrates another birthday at Alligator Reef. It could have been a black day, but her lies about her age get wilder all the time. Officially she is just under thirty and at every birthday it goes down. On her birthday by the ocean you go to a bookshop where Dorothy is going to choose a birthday book. The pale shadows of palm trees and clouds pursue you along the promenade like huge, unsettled animals. The salt-filled winds turn at the beach’s end and on their way back they are hotter and saltier, and it has to be something simple, Dorothy says, like a film, like a lipstick, like Marilyn.

  *

  The book is thick and pink and Dorothy bears it like a jewel across the sea, the promenade and the hotel complex. Then she lies for days on end on the beach looking through it, but she does not read. The loud ocean sounds are soporific and the Atlantic bewitches her, the ocean a deep blue solace. She moves restlessly on the sand, her hand searching in her handbag despairingly and time after time she empties it onto the sand to go through her belongings.

  DOROTHY: What are you reading?

  VALERIE: I don’t know. Mine didn’t have a dust jacket.

  DOROTHY: I’m going to take my book to the bar for a while. It might be easier to read there.

  VALERIE (with her eyes on the book): Do that, Dorothy.

  DOROTHY: I’m not going to the phone booth today. I’ve got nothing to say to him. We’re not going back. Period.

  VALERIE: You’ve sworn on your breasts.

  DOROTHY (squints at her neckline): I know.

  VALERIE: All or nothing.

  DOROTHY (her eyes and eyelashes twitching in the sun): All. I choose all. I mean I choose you. Period. Absolute period. The end of the book. I’m going to the bar now. I like this book. I think this whole books thing is interesting, truly important. Even if it doesn’t seem like it. Maybe it doesn’t look as though I’m interested in books, but I am. I’m going to concentrate. Everything isn’t what it seems. Valerie . . . Valerie?

  VALERIE: I know, Dolly. Go. I’m reading.

  You keep on reading your seawater-warped books and Dorothy keeps on vanishing behind her sunglasses, keeps on forgetting. Her cigarettes always burn out on the sand as she falls asleep, her dreams invaded by black underwater trees and black luminescence, constantly descending. When she falls asleep on the beaches of Alligator Reef she dreams about someone no longer wanting to be a mother, and she wakes every time with suffocating heart and salty wet globs in her mouth. Her hand moves on the sand and in her dream and the underwater world there is no shriveled foal, knowing it is going to die, but persisting, still a sticky mucilage around its mother, constantly letting itself be kicked away, for the warm taste of her milk like a watermark on its fur, its mouth filled with black ants. She picks up her book and tries to read, but she is robbed of concentration by the ocean, and still more by her pocket mirror, nail file and cigarette, and most of all by her way of looking furtively over your shoulder at your book.

  DOROTHY: You just read and read. You must be very well informed by now.

  VALERIE: Dorothy, it’s only a novel.

  DOROTHY: I wish I could concentrate like you. I’m always thinking about something else. The letters start swimming on the page. My heart beats weirdly somehow in my chest.

  VALERIE: You’ll never go back to him?

  DOROTHY: Never.

  VALERIE: Sure?

  DOROTHY: I swear on my mother’s . . .

  VALERIE: You have no mother, Dorothy. She abandoned you in the desert.

  DOROTHY: I promise, darling. I’m not a stupid cow.

  VALERIE (laughs and strokes Dorothy’s hair): Yes, you are.

  DOROTHY: Yes, I am. But I swear on my hair and my breasts and my legs.

  VALERIE: I’m not going back to him.

  DOROTHY (a small, smiling sun): Nor me. Wherever you go, I’ll go too.

  *

  Her hair blows into her eyes all the time. Soon she is over at the bar again. The wind does not subside and there are reports on the news of typhoons and hurricanes and shark attacks. At night Dorothy sits glued to the television sets in the beach bars. The wind wrecks her hair-do and her good intentions; the sand, salt and sun both soothe and excite and in the end the ocean will have ruined all her make-up.

  State Supreme Court, New York, June 13, 1968

  Martin Luther King Assassinated in Memphis, Robert Kennedy Assassinated in California

  The State of New York and Thomas Dickens give notice of a hearing in the case of the New York State versus Valerie Solanas. You are traveling across New York’s suburbs in a police car, a beautiful drive, the sky showing no self-respect and convulsing with blood-stained clouds and you offer to pay for the ride, you are used to paying for yourself, ten for a fuck five for a blow job two for a hand job. But it is New York State paying for the sightseeing tour this time, thank you most humbly Mister, a fantastic return trip to hell.

  STATE SUPREME COURT: Description of the offence: The plaintiff Andy Warhol is reported to have implored on his knees: No, no, Valerie! Don’t do it! Please, Valerie. The defendant also shot Mr Warhol’s colleague, Paul Morrissey. After several appeals by witness Viva Ronaldo, Solanas left the premises in the elevator without a word. Several hours later she handed herself in to William Schmalix, a traffic officer on Fifth Avenue. Andy Warhol is currently on an artificial respirator in the Columbus-Mother Cabrini Hospital. It is as yet unclear whether he will regain consciousness, and if so, how, and in what condition; it is still unclear whether the offence charged is attempted homicide or homicide. Attorney Miss Florynce Kennedy will represent the defendant, instead of the attorney previously appointed by New York State. Miss Kennedy is defending Miss Solanas for no fee. Miss Solanas neither denies nor admits the charge.

  (Silence.)

  STATE SUPREME COURT: Will the defense call the accused to testify?

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY: No. The defendant is not of sound mind.

  VALERIE: I am of sound mind. My mind has never felt more fully
sound.

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY (whispers): I know you’re of sound mind, but you have nothing to gain from it in court.

  VALERIE: Win, or vanish from history.

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY (to the court): Would you please just give us a moment, Mr Dickens?

  VALERIE: Did you call him a dick, that judge?

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY: He’s called Dickens, Valerie. In court he’s called Dickens, and nothing else.

  VALERIE: In my court he’s called a dick.

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY: I’ve asked you not to speak in court. Call him Thomas Dickens from now on, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Remember, I’m the only sane woman here.

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY: I know, Valerie. You’re one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement.

  VALERIE: Are you related to that Kennedy, Kennedy? Marilyn’s Kennedy?

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY: Shush now, Valerie.

  VALERIE (whispers): — d-ick – d-ick – d-ick —

  (Silence.)

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY: I request that Valerie Jean Solanas, born 1936 in Ventor, Georgia, be declared medically unfit.

  (Silence.)

  VALERIE: I’m not unfit, Kennedy.

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY: I know, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Then why would you have him say so?

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY: Because I want you to be free, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Unfit isn’t free. Hospital isn’t free.

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY: Hospital is better than prison.

  VALERIE: But it’s not an illness.

  FLORYNCE KENNEDY: This is the law, not justice.

  VALERIE: Laws are all over, everywhere but on my side.

  (Silence.)

  STATE SUPREME COURT: Upheld, Miss Kennedy.

  (Silence.)

  STATE SUPREME COURT: Hearing adjourned.

  *

  The State of New York and Judge Thomas Dickens declare you to be of unsound mind. Henceforth you will be regarded as incapable of making your own legal decisions and you are transferred to Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital while you await trial. Later you will stand trial for attempted homicide, harassment and illegal possession of weapons.