by Camille Roy
liquifies, falls suddenly into another
There’s a tangle of questions all over the floor, stepped on
“My argument of silence—what else could it be—negated the presence of others.”
—Mike Amnasan
New feminist slasher narratives, I thought while watching the “Revising Romance” program of Cecelia Condit videos at New Langton Arts. It felt like opening the post office package and finding an actual fluffy white cloud dripping with blood. In these videos the narrators sound like sweet white girl waitresses telling us about disasters in the kitchen. We are compelled—after all this is the story of our food. But the narratives become unhinged at the place where we expect the waitress and the enraged chef to be separate people.
“No one saw him upset but he was very upset.”
In the first video (Beneath The Skin), a woman tells us her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend was discovered in one of the closets in their apartment. Dead, in a smelly locked box. We get nothing solid (fear, shock or rage) to encapsulate this, but rather a narrator whose voice reminds me more and more of mall music. It’s a kind of decorative scroll, contained, elaborate—a vocal style reminiscent of Patsy Cline. Images of this scene are spliced with bald mummies, muddy blood-like stuff, and finally the narrator herself in a swing, her smiling face tinted with pastels that slide across her figure.
“But people just don’t go around killing other people.”
Now her red lips are speaking through a plastic mask and she is in bed.
“We are very different. She was epileptic and I’m diabetic.”
“He was just incredibly magnetic, and he has a huge body.”
Trying to move towards a point, while skirting the issue. Turgid and cloud-like resolution. The narrator is no author—but so what? The purpose of narrative authority is to contain the audience. Take that away and what happens? Logical relations are points of contact as events spin out of control.
There’s one plot point after another, each more perfect than the last. For example: she murders her husband and then says he abandoned her. He was a space that wasn’t being occupied so, she absorbed him. He murdered her. Then she found the body. And so on.
In the next video, the male character wears a mask, a distorted face with a gaping mouth. Possibly In Michigan opens with two women in a shopping mall being followed by a man. The women are well-groomed, white, their skin has a shiny video moistness. These are attractive images disconnected from any soothing qualities—the representation is both totally flat and excessive. They strike stewardess poses and speak in sing-song rhymes while they shop for perfume, oblivious to their follower with the huge mouth. Their indifference to danger erases our relation to them, so that hysteria—not suspense—slides out into the audience. The video stays at the verge of violence of a particular feminine type: being consumed, eaten alive. It seems to be making a paranoid argument: dismemberment lurks at the mall. Is this what makes the video “feminist”? A lurch towards the surreal stalls consumption at the point of contact. No one can do anything. Then the grid shifts inside the black screen frame as the elements decompose. Eventually, one of the women is captured. The man in the mask tells her she has two choices: he will eat her, or he will cut off her limbs one by one and eat them. But her friend arrives in the nick of time and she shoots him dead. They cut him up and eat him.
A theory of appetite begins where contamination rubs consumer into
object, contradicting itself.
Desire and nausea are dog-like myths, guardians to a boundary
which shrinks to nothing.
The quarantine of menstruating women begins private life.
A consumer’s only defense is appetite, engorging objects to
prevent loss of control.
Oscillation between consuming and expelling the maternal image
characterizes his sexual response.
As Sherlock Holmes says, after you’ve eliminated everything, what
you’re left with is the truth.
The role of discipline is unclear.
Why?
My tactic, vis-à-vis narrative, is really just to bring abandonment into the relationship.
Darling X marks the beginning of my story, before theorems arrive. At that time, cheap food was very important. My beloved was on welfare, which required that she apply for several jobs a day. In fact, this was the equivalent of a job. Making sure she remained jobless required certain tactics, for example her bomber jacket and rolling stride. Only several years later did I find out she had been turning tricks on the side. I was living off a check from a magazine and fantasizing a career in journalism. The room we shared had no heat but a Crockpot which all day every day transformed whatever we put into it. Potatoes, leeks, and ham hock for example created thrilling society, and embellished our room—in fact the long hall of little rooms, padlocked like bicycle sheds—with a fragrant signature.
Only later did we find out that Tanya had worked in the restaurant when she was a member of the commune. Margo had told us it was cheap, and it was practically under her apartment. One evening, we walked in to check it out and found live jazz and mounds of food steaming on low black tables, with a few quiet people scattered among the pillows. They served a full, cafeteria style dinner for $1.50—beans, rice, soup, yogurt and tea, carrot juice and sweet potato pie extra. Some sort of political group ran it. A tall Asian man and a stout Jewish woman ladled out food with grim expressions, making them unrecognizable no matter how many times I went there. I peered at them, as if into a haze of arguments.
The city had taken on a ruined and post-war atmosphere, there was an undercurrent of agitation and distress. In my area, there occurred a proliferation of black berets: one for anyone. Tanya, uncovering her head, slipped forward thru the dark streets, past the rosy medallions, past the storefronts with Germanic emblems. Bars on the basement window did not conceal the peeling paint of the window frame. At the end of the street, the auditorium sat like a granite fist. Tanya sat by herself. The auditorium was nearly empty, implying decisions, a chain of command. A few journalists lounged like sackcloth. I was waiting under the red exit light when my beloved mounted the podium. She spoke in the style of a Marxist revolutionary, in which every muscle is connected to every other in short sharp strokes. (A few years later this becomes a robotic style of dancing.)
My beloved told me the commune had guns in the basement. “They had the tools to do it,” she said.
Returning to the memory of the scene, there were several disturbing odors. Climbing the stairs to Tanya’s room in the Tower hotel, I found her sitting outside her room with the padlock hanging on the open door. Her shaved head is a round spot in our conversation, there are also nervous gusts from her mouth. It’s hard to get the whole story from her. She sort of peels off at the edges of her sentences, while holding the red bandanna in her hand and rubbing it back and forth across her scalp. A fast series of smiles indicates that her information may be unreliable. Or, she is ashamed of what she knows. She says she sure she’s not a druggie because whenever she wants drugs she’s usually satisfied with a cigarette. She says her father is a Berkeley psychiatrist. This is the context: someone got murdered, or possibly three people. I can’t remember if I saw her only before or also after this occurrence.
The truth of a story becomes evident in its anatomy, in the bones of narrative structure. Like the drag queen who says to the straight audience, “I’ll take it all off and dance in my bones for you.” Gestures of mercy proceed from either side in staccato bursts.
Tanya’s thick waist and then branches, as X precedes Y, leaving each white foot paler than before. Rumors of her death preceded her death. The smear left on the pavement exhibited interference patterns, but the sound is hard to recognize. My hand-held wrist, so cool and sucked dry.
It was Tanya, because of her placement in the middle, who had the child’s position. Crouching down, she held her hand over her mouth as the man and woman paddled the aluminum canoe. This went on f
or too long.
Someone else in the Tower Hotel was killed by a Canadian Mountie, the victim was a small guy who was manager at the time. He was an indifferent man with curly hair, I don’t remember his face. The case involved either drugs or diamonds, with a South African locale. If it was diamonds, there was also a blond involved. The story was so bottomless it detached and turned into fiction the instant I heard it; that made it tolerable.
The murdered manager was replaced by a friend of Margo’s, part of a very large circle, all of whose members were peripheral. This friend was a big scarred Bohemian, his face seemed to have tiny chips knocked out of it. After his girlfriend dumped him, he carried on for months in stunned and silent grief. Then she came to visit. She looked like a diesel dyke with lead eyes, gliding up on her motorcycle, then clomping up the stairs in her heavy leather chaps.
A Conversation
Three women are sitting in a cafe at a small round table, spotlighted by a low overhanging lamp. The table is in the corner by the window. The cafe name, a scroll in red fluorescent light, hangs in the window.
“A long time passed before I was able to regard these feelings with relief, a sign of liveliness in adverse weather, as it were. All the brows I had ever admired were now like bird tracks on the beach, or loose change. In the beginning, of course, there were uneasy transitions between conversation and sexual activity. But eventually she built a nest of aromatic twigs at the foot of my bed and every evening accompanied me on a stroll, perched on my wrist. What a creature. Leaning towards her delicately feathered neck, gently entwined in the smells of musk and cedar which emanated from her, I grew oblivious to the outside world.”
Tanya drew a long sigh. “How slowly one recovers the sense of smell, which is how I recognized her.” Rosa smoked a Marlboro, tapped it on the edge of her saucer with a wry smile. “I would never court oblivion for a girl. We’ve all lost the love of our lives at least three times by now.” The overhead fluorescent light lined each wrinkle on Onya’s face with shadow. She was tired, but when sincerity overcame her she became soft and rather smaller. “What sort of lover evades description?” she asked. “Or is he really pink and longlimbed, as I sometimes think.”
“Having been in similar situations, I know I possess remarkable nerve,” said Rosa. “I would venture a hardy and unequal transition to enthusiasm.” Tanya had lowered her head and was staring in the direction of her espresso. “That time, after a certain point, I shut my eyes. Not because I didn’t want to see what I was doing, but I wanted to hear, smell, and touch what I was doing.” For myself, at first, I simply followed the custom. Feelings of pleasure, however insubstantial and transitory, caused me to feel disorganized and therefore at a disadvantage.
Tanya said I was too eager to take personally the attentions of any person with money.
The End of the Commune
Tanya did try to leave the commune. She wanted to embark on a course of study. Her tool was employment as a bicycle messenger in the canyons of a large economy. She felt attached to a line of communication. One shake and she knew illusion, the bright and colorful underside of her father’s psychiatric certainties. Her smile was her advance into silence, wiping clean the sentences she shredded. The vowels peeled back, unable to fit her. Riding with traffic, from business to business, thru uniforms of prosperity, she understood her journey as implicated in, and identified with, techniques of coercion. The guilt she felt weakened her.
A Drive in the Country
Mud as red as your head, with scalped cliffs. A kind of donkey toughness (stuck to you) but there are also leafy sections. The roads lead to an indentation along the outer rim. The cabin in the woods emits a kind of musical groan, but there is something insect-like about the grammar. That resemblance fades when I remember where I am. My speech fibers. Trying to wrap a tree. The leaf world whitely barking. And cottonwood by water yessing like her little boy as he mouths a thistle’s purple bud.
The dirt road led thru a grove of eucalyptus along the top of the Marin Headlands. Their crisp brown leaves clicked at the approach of the sea green Mercedes. Sitting back on the quilted leather, while Hal drives along the shadowed road. I just listen as Hal says he likes women and boys until their skin gets rough. When he draws his lips back in a smile his teeth are shining—he runs his tongue over them. His eyes slide towards mine, offering an apology. There are rosy tips on his cheekbones, in contrast to a sharp humorous gaze. He slaps his palm on the steering wheel as the car stops. My beloved is standing with her back towards us, her long thin legs seeming to drop from her leather jacket. She has spread a white tablecloth on the ground, high above the gleaming bay dotted with white sails. There is bread, fruit, wine—some plastic containers of chicken salad.
My beloved was working for Hal, the moon geologist, painting his house, while he was at the NASA office, drawing topographic maps of the moon. He said drawing the maps felt like having webbed feet on the moon. He was another friend of Margo’s; it was a curious friendship which seemed to recede entirely and then reappear under new circumstances. By the garden in the dry valley, for example, with its messy plumage of black-eyed Susans, blue sage and larkspur. Hal had laid out a large map on the red sandstone patio, under the shade of a twisted cedar with shredded slivery bark. Margo with a martini was stepping gingerly thru the garden, peering at the flowers. Hal rapidly circled and hunched over the map. He said it was a triumph of state-of the-art computer imaging technology.
My beloved was a strong woman with small breasts and a sensual roll in her walk. Skin so soft it would yield to any touch, then foam back and enclose it. Struggling to emit sound, one after the other. She is not leaving me alone; she nibbles at my lips. Waiting for the white belly to fold back into sky, as fog sheepishly grazes the low hills. I avoid what I want to do tonight and instead lie down with a magazine.
We had two rooms in the Tower Hotel. Her room was on the street. When we slept in her room the garbage men woke us up at 6:00, shouting in Italian. The scent of yellow broom slipped in from the hill down the street. The hill’s steep slopes were gravelly and seemed parched, but it was the only green spot for miles. A proliferation of waxy leaves on unrecognizable plants and bougainvillea so brilliant it left a blank spot on my retina. In the street, I passed the shut-in faces of people who lived next to the park, their small houses tucked in livid tropical gardens. Fingering items in various stores, occasionally I stole them: a blue macramé star which I tied to the string hanging from the lightbulb in my room. On the street below us and slightly to the right was a fortune cookie factory. A strong and sickening sweetness came from the place, a smell of quarantine. The sign said, “We have adult X-rated cookies.”
Her room overlooked the street, mine overlooked a pebbled roof that stopped at the sidewall of a larger building. Dingy lightwells make the border of the world. Curling up under her covers, crying and relaxing, later draping myself in newspapers in the cafe around the corner, I explained to everyone that I was preparing for my career in journalism. Everyone was indifferent, a sign of erosion I thought.
Each morning, Lonny swore and screamed, at the police, at “faggots,” his preacher’s voice thundering. Was he a rude man at flashpoint, or just wringing out emotion as a side effect of his position? He lived down the hall with two women in one room, a tribe. They had been together seven years and were all under twenty-one. “Girls in a commune in a love bed,” that line stuck in my head. I imagine a bare mattress the fog drifts over. Fog, mattress, windowsill, all the same color. Little and Beanpole were the names he’d given them. His screams, always directed outside, created a buffer of silence around the women. They worked as cooks in a team, thus limiting the amount they’d have to talk to anyone else.
Little was bright and hard enough for a better story. A small woman, she swaggered right into my face when she spoke—as if she were looking at me, but her eyes had always found some spot just to the side. But when Beanpole passed me in the hall, hatred grazed the floor like the uneven hem
of a long skirt. A false modesty, lowered eyes. She had the thinness of a long depression, and a body that receded like a hairline. Her way of seeking shelter silenced her, was out of her control.
I wondered what shape the three of them took over that foggy bed.
The words break up under pressure into small distinct clods: hardly something I can listen to. Fear, I am someone who is supposed to have that characteristic. Weaving it back in, a breath down the horizon of an incalculable mistake. I see Beanpole leaning against the wall by the pay phone, where the wall is covered with scrawled messages. I finally spoke. I said, Girl, you never look at anyone, how come?
“Our eyes met—her gaze told me nothing but that I had passed across it, as close and as remote as a figure in a dream.”
1. Social Life
It was because of Gray that I got to know Alice. Gray Loving. That was his actual name. He loved me in his own weird way. If I had been capable of normal responses myself, I might have found it creepy. But I was new in the school, and going through a bad period: stunned, speechless. I didn’t eat. I got thinner. My only social characteristic was an amazing invisibility. The more wrecked I became, the more the air seemed to eat me alive. Gray had a wasted quality that was a kind of a throb. His hair was stringy, greasy, and long, like mine, but his skin was bad, and he was always clammy—due to illicit substances, probably. He had that toxic sweat. He followed me through the halls, and when I stopped and turned around, he stopped too. He gazed at me longingly like we were twins of the spirit. His eyes filled up and dripped—like grief sloshing. Tears magnified his pupils and irises, so they seemed to swell in my direction. I never saw him talk to anyone.
Gray didn’t make me uncomfortable, because I didn’t have that feeling. I lacked the internal scale that distinguishes comfort from discomfort. In my social paralysis, I was composed of tiny habits, such as what I would eat (cottage cheese with sprinkled wheat germ, stiff-skinned sour plums). In between, in the cracks in my daily routines, were those utterly random moments I lived for. One morning, I didn’t go to school because I discovered three little black wiggling tubes had hatched in a puddle on my window ledge. I named them: Riddle, Giggle, and Smack. They were mosquito larvae. I pushed them around with a tiny stick, trying to create a scenario that would demonstrate whether or not they were intelligent. When this became frustrating, I tried to read them like tea leaves. The fortune I read in the worms seemed to be that if I went to school late enough I’d avoid running into Gray Loving at lunch.
