The performance artist’s ears go full-blown tinnitus because it’s the poet going Just calm down and then the playwright going Use your imagination and the filmmaker going Just wait Just wait It’s not as bad as it sounds so she amplifies her voice and launches it at them. “It’s not as bad as it sounds? You want me to fake being hollow headed all the way to Europe and it’s not as bad as it sounds?” She can’t believe it, can’t believe what they are saying. This is the plan? She stares at them all like they want to eat her, saying, “You want me to do fucking what?”
And then it’s the playwright going Look do you want me to say it all again and everyone getting impatient with her like she’s a child, look at all their smug fuck faces with their we’re all a decade older than you paternalism and her going, “Um, actually, yeah, I fucking want you to say it again because this sounds, you know, insane.”
She crack-twists another tiny bottle of vodka open, pours it into her plastic airplane cup, slams it, then returns the empty miniature to the poet’s tray table. Well, she’s got to hand it to them, they fucking got her on this goddamn plane with the Nazi poet, didn’t they, and they used the oldest trick in the book, the trick of Catholics and Jews. Mega-guilt. Pure and simple. When she had resisted, the poet had walked up to her and like gotten all up in her face, going Look this is the least you can do you’re screwing him and we all know it you have been for years, you owe her this, she went, like there’s some kind of woman sexual history rule book. Some kind of woman sexual sin plus-and-minus column. Like they’re all holier than her. She reaches up and hits the flight-attendant-get-the-hell-over-here-I-need-a-drink button, then looks briefly at the poet, at the side of her face, and yes, she has to admit it, she’s a little afraid of her.
She rubs the letter she’s carrying pinned by her bra against her skin underneath her clothes. A letter from the painter. Well, you make your bed, you lie in it, that’s what her mother used to say, so here she is on a plane to Eastern Europe drinking midget vodkas with a lesbian dominatrix. When the flight attendant arrives, she leans over in the flight-attendant way and says to the poet in pity hush tones, “What does she need?” Because when you’re wearing a special helmet acting like you haven’t enough brains to buckle a seat belt you can’t be seen drinking vodka like a normal adult woman. She has a cuss-fest inside her head. The poet stamps down on her toe underneath the tray tables. She tries to make her face go slack. The poet asks the flight attendant for a pillow for her, and more vodka for herself. When the flight attendant leaves, the poet elbows the performance artist so sharply she cries out.
“What? I was just adding a little Tourette’s to the scene.”
When more vodka comes, the performance artist turns her head to the airplane window as far as she can. How did she get here, I mean how did she really get here, what were the choices, what’s a past—she takes a long drink—what is psychological development? Is it as fucking Freudian as it sounds? She sighs the big sigh of twenty-six, wondering if we are all trapped inside identity, genetics, and narrative—some whacked-out Kafka god handwriting our unbearable little life stories. Then she thinks an American-artist thought, the rough-and-tumble kind: how can I use this? She rubs the letter underneath her shirt, she thinks she sees the reflection of herself in the airplane window, like a black twin, and she’s falling back to memory, she prays to the god of Diamanda Galás.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Well, let’s have it then.
When she was seven years old, a mediastinal cystic parathyroid grew in her head. The tumor, the medical professionals told her so-called parents (one a famous architect, the other a famous concert pianist, both mega-narcissists), was “inoperable.” And there was this: the tumor was pushing on the beautiful gray folds of her brain in just the right way as to make her behavior look, well, there’s no other way to say this . . . retarded. Like in immediate need of a helmet.
The effect this had on her mother was momentarily devastating. But that isn’t the story. What her mother did with her devastation was to jettison it, and jettison it the way intellectual mega-famous narcissistic people do, until it was so buried in the layers of her psyche and her body and her motherhood that it rested at the base of her spinal cord near her fucking tailbone. She didn’t shit right for years.
And what her mother—her famous concert pianist mother—did next was . . . well, a performance worthy of an ovation. Brava.
Her mother used the notoriety and fame she had garnered as a pianist to be something even bigger, better: She became a triple-A martyr, a mother of tragedy and pain, and—most important—a spokesperson. She headed every lost cause, she was awarded community prizes, was featured on Good Morning America. No mother in the country could outperform her, at least when it came to volunteering for lost causes, illnesses, and deformities. Cancer, AIDS, MS, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, lupus, leprosy (yes, there is still leprosy), and all this WAY before she went third world. You get the picture.
Total abandonment of her daughter to the hired caregivers and medical staff and physical, speech, emotional, and spiritual counselors in favor of the martyr limelight.
What her father did with his devastation was a great bit more concrete; perhaps the simplest things we think about gender are utterly true.
It was his role to take the impaired daughter on excursions, so that her seemingly retarded little life didn’t suck outrageously, but only mildly.
So he took her all kinds of places, even though it made his heart have a hole in it.
He took her to the movies.
He took her to McDonald’s.
He took her to libraries.
He took her to the big red bull’s-eye of Target.
He took her to Shari’s.
He took her to water parks.
He took her to boatyards.
He took her to the beach.
He took her to bookstores.
He took her hiking in the forest.
He took her to museums.
He took her on the light rail system.
Again.
Again.
He took her horseback riding.
He took her go-cart racing.
He took her on Ferris wheels.
He took her to record stores.
He took her to music concerts.
He took her to buildings he’d designed, walking her through light and shadow and form.
He.
He.
He was more tired than any man alive, since she expressed her outrageously embarrassing glee at every one of these places he took her, all of it while wearing a helmet, and everyone always stared and said things under their breath, I mean everyone, I mean always, and at some point, no matter where they were or how it was playing out, she’d get to some frenetic moment where she was in danger of injuring herself or others, a tiny amount of drool sliding from her mouth, pee darkening the front of her crotch, the look of . . . Well, I think you can picture her grimace-smiley too-white face, right?
And so it was that one day, inside his role, this particular thing happened. She was in one of those inflatable worlds that appear at county fairs . . . the kind of inflatable hut kids can crawl inside and jump up and down. You know what I mean.
She entered.
He left.
No, really.
He left.
He left his daughter, he left his wife, his family, his life, radically and without hesitation.
Not that much later—four years, to be precise—her mother was giving a lecture on the child-tragedy circuit. Afterward, a neurosurgeon came up to her and said he knew a doctor in Europe who specialized in the type of operation they’d been told was impossible, and so nearly by accident she got her daughter a different medical team and a world-famous surgeon in Europe, and guess what?
They operated successfully and her so-called retardation disappeared and she bloomed into a completely normal, beautiful, American teen.
Completely normal, except for the pearly skull scar and the emotional scars for fucking life.
And that’s how she comes to be sitting in an airplane with the poet pretending to be her past. Because she’s a stand-in. She’s a retarded girl again, being taken to Europe for experimental treatment again, a story from her real past invading her present. Because without makeup and face jewelry and vintage clothes and hair products, without anything on her head besides that disgusting helmet, she looks much younger than she is. Just past puberty. Which means they can swap her. Which means they can use her special retard-girl identity papers to enter the country with her, but leave the country with a different girl. Later, someone will come back and get her and take her back home.
It’s the least she can do.
And besides, the poet had said, this is the most radical performance art she’ll ever do in her life.
Emotional cripple. Adult need machine. Fuck addict. American artist. She rubs the scar on her head. She rubs the letter against her flesh. The last thought she thinks before she drops into a twenty-something-year-old vodka sleep is: I hate women.