OUTSIDE THE DOOR water continues to run. Wraparound workbenches, on every wall but this one, stacked to the ceiling with piles of doll faces. Piled one on top of the other, faces look out of faces like layers of masks. They still have their eyes; blue eyes with flecks of light in them.
Staring up.
I’ve never been here before.
There’s no one else in the room. I stay in bed, looking at the doll’s eyes. Sacrilege, those fake flecks of light. Like faking orgasm, only worse. Faking Life.
Who’d I come with? Why don’t I remember? Like other wickedly hungover mornings I know it’ll return to me. Machine-heads. Virtual sex junkies. They’ve discovered it’s pheromones that keep your memory sharpened. Kids get it from hugs and kisses. Why there’s so much more ADD now; people don’t get laid any more, and kids cuddle with virtual pets, not their parents or puppies. But I only did it once.
Water runs. My head hurts. Not only do I not remember how I got here, or where here is, I also don’t remember where I live, or what I do with myself from day to day. What do I remember?
Martin, my boyfriend. He’s not here with me now, although it comes to me that’s not unusual, for him. I told Martin about the machine-heads, and he said he’d run with them too. Once or twice, he said. Of course, he’s lied before.
I’m wearing my clothes, which gets rid of at least one uncomfortable possibility.
The sound of running water. Maybe Martin’s having a shower—a nice thought. If he was trying to duck out on me again he wouldn’t be spending so long in the bathroom.
Beside the bed on the floor there’s rumpled clothes. A soft old cherry-coloured corduroy shirt. Black jeans. Pointed shoes. Expensive once but beat-up looking now. No underwear and good cotton socks. Are those the kinds of thing Martin wears? What’s he look like? What do I look like? What’s my name? I look at the work benches, the stacks of doll-faces, glazed eyes staring ceiling-wards. As dumb as them, but a little more mobile, I get up out of bed.
The hall is empty, so empty, and the building is filled with silence. The water is still running; I open the door. A young woman is standing at the sink, painting her eyelids. Her blonde red curls are tied back in a ponytail; the red is dyed. Her mouth sticks out under jagged lipstick, soft like a little kid’s. She jumps, ever so slightly, keeps applying purple on purple as if I wasn’t there. At last her eyes meet mine in the mirror. Mine are brown; my hair’s brown too, short. I’m wearing black jeans and a grey hooded sweat-shirt, look about twenty-three. Am cute in a dishevelled gamine-like way.
But I knew all that, I just forgot.
She gives me a dark look, as though I’m not playing by the rules. I don’t know what the rules are, yet. I only just woke up, in a strange building with no coffee machine. “Is there a coffee machine around here somewhere?” I ask. “Like in the lounge or something?” She doesn’t look at me. She just paints and paints. “D’you have any Tylenol?” No answer. Her eyelids are getting very thick. “What are you going to be for Carnival?” I try, leaning back on the paper towel dispenser, watching her in the mirror. Funny I didn’t forget Carnival.
Bull’s eye! “Sleeping Beauty,” my girl says. “You?”
“I was thinking of being Darth Vader’s girlfriend. Kind of a spin-off, like Bride of Frankenstein.” Saying it, I know it’s true. Maybe if I talk enough, I’ll remember more. Seems to me it’s happened before.
“Han Solo had a girlfriend, not Darth Vader. Don’t you remember?”
“I thought Darth Vader had a girlfriend too, only they just left that part out.”
“Left it out of what?”
“Star Wars was a story before it was a movie, too. You see, I have this theory that all the movies were stories first. And before that, just pictures written on an invisible wall somewhere, waiting for someone to take them down. Kind of a Plato’s cave thing. And now they’re pictures on a screen again, just like they were in the beginning. But a screen on this side, not the other side.”
She turns around at last. It’s always different seeing someone outside the mirror and not in it. Like seeing a different part of their personality. “You seem to know a lot more about stories than you do about television. That’s very unusual. I’m Louise,” she says. “What’s your name?”
“It’s Louise too,” I say glibly, because I don’t remember that part yet. “I’m looking for my boyfriend but I’ve lost him. Again.”
“You seem pretty mixed up,” she says, measuring me with her eyes. “You better watch out: Carnival isn’t a game; it’s dangerous. That’s sort of like Sleeping Beauty though, that show about losing your prince.”
“Kind of a gender reversed Orpheus. Kind of like Isis and Osiris. Is your prince going to come and wake you up?”
“Maybe. Maybe when we’ve finished making our show. I’m the star.” Louise makes a face, not entirely pleased about it. Some star; her foundation clumsily covers zits around her mouth.
“I think maybe it’s Martin’s place across the hall. D’you know him? D’you live in this building?”
She opens her eyes, the bluest blue, very wide as if she can’t believe how stupid I am. Truth is, neither can I. “Martin with the big purple eyes, the sharp nose, so handsome?”
“That’s my man,” I say, glad she jogged my memory.
“He’s your boyfriend? Really? What kind?”
“How many kinds are there?”
“I mean on this side or the other side?”
“All sides,” I say, my head splitting, figuring it’s a trick question. She nods, accepting my answer, although it seems to worry her. “Where is he?” I ask. “We said we’d do Carnival together like we do every year, and here it is not even started and I’ve already lost him and myself. They should call Carnival the Season of Memory Loss.”
Louise rolls her eyes, says curtly, “He was in here just before you. But he left.”
I want to fill in some more gaps, ask questions, but she’s gone, her chunky heels clattering. They’re too big for her, like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s shoes.
“Hey, Louise, wait up,” I yell.
She runs down the hall, turns a corner and vanishes. I hear a steel door slam; hear her feet clattering on stairs that lead downwards. Slinging my day-pack over my shoulder I follow her, slowly, down long shadowy tiers of stair wells, to the street door. Look both ways, no sign of L.
I walk, don’t recognize any street names. The few other people out walking too are so poor they seem invisible even to themselves. I pass old dry goods stores with locked doors and yellow plastic in the windows. There’s not a sign of Carnival, as if the city’s biggest party doesn’t exist. I buy Tylenol at a drug store, swallow several. Finally I come to a coffee shop called the Dew Drop Inn. I’m starving so I go in. The prices are ridiculously low: thirty-five cents for a cup of coffee, eighty-five for a fried egg sandwich; that’s what I order.
The place is empty, huge, and dim. The booths are upholstered in shiny red stuff with flecks of gold in it, just like the flecks in the dolls’ eyes, the rips held together with wrinkled silver duct tape; they wouldn’t call it gaffer’s tape here. A taupe Formica counter with red swivel stools and a green Hamilton Beach milkshake machine behind it. God, how I always loved that name. It’s always been like a picture to me, of a perfect place, where you could leave all your troubles behind, where everything would be okay and you’d be happy.
The waitress is in her fifties with bleached blonde hair and pencil thin plucked eyebrows. She sighs, bringing me my coffee. It’s terrible, from last week’s pot reheated eleven times. I stir in a whole bunch of sugar to mask the taste. I bite into Miracle Whip, not Hellman’s, stare a little.
“Are you lost, dear?” she calls from across the room, where she’s busy polishing spotless tables, filling full sugar containers, sighing.
“I’m looking for my friend. I thought he might’ve come in here.” Little does she know the half of it.
She carries my sandwich from the kitchen, walking painfully, wrapped in support bandages that go halfway to her knees.
“You must be ready for your break, Denise,” I say, now that she’s close enough I can read her name tag. Denise or Vera, I’d figured. A fifties name to match the place, her look.
“Well, yes,” she says, laughing a little. “It’s these damn legs, you know?”
“Sit down?”
“Okay, but I’ll get my drink first.” She comes back with a can of Tab. Her yellow polyester uniform hisses on the shiny flecked vinyl.
“What is it about me?” I ask, too blunt by half, as always. “People are always asking me if I’m lost.”
She reaches out, pats my hand. “The truth is, I think we’re all lost. It’s just some people try to hide it more than others.” She blows smoke rings. “I think the trick is to stay amused, don’t you?”
A woman after my own heart. And she can’t be a machine-head. They never touch living flesh.
sss
Three years ago during Carnival I went to this warehouse party alone. Martin was gone again. Thing is, I was really drunk, soooo, on my way out I got off the elevator on the wrong floor and walked into this big eerie room full of machine-heads and their gear. I started turning so I could run, but this one guy asked me if I didn’t want to try.
I said I’d do anything once.
He gave me a VR headset and controllers; I put on the headset and entered the space they were sharing, thinking I’d get to do a handsome stranger. But the people in there, our sex partners, had arms and legs made of machines, genital organs that didn’t look human at all, but were still sexy in this creepy way: valves expanding and contracting, each black rubber exhalation a sigh. I heard the rasping cries of grinding gears, saw furtive graspings of skeletal robotic hands, all the bones showing. Beneath dirty flesh-coloured vinyl I saw chrome tendons, frayed wiring. Sucking and popping and moaning, the sounds of machines in orgasm. Then as I stayed in, it started to happen to me too; I got replaced, starting with my sex where I was the most connected. Genius embedded in this craftsman’s hand. A sad, wicked, broken-faced genius, but all the same: the sound, the texture were so detailed, so rich. The furniture was clipped, the detail in shadows, in excrescences of old pink vinyl, raised and knobby like a keloid scar, in palest conflagrations of mauve in the velvet bodysuit I wore. Sighing, sighing: only velvet sighs like that. Someone was a genius, for sure.
It could’ve been funny, I suppose, and in some twisted way it even was but it scared the hell out of me. I signed off and jacked out, left to walk city streets, shards of broken ice glinting like starlight. I knew it wasn’t real, so what was the matter? The technology’s still so new; maybe it’s like early horror movies. “The Thing” used to terrify people and now we just laugh.
I walked, turning over in my mind sensations that had more to do with pain than pleasure; the missing parts of myself, the parts I’d allowed to be replaced by robotics had all been screaming faintly, phantom limbs. But it’s still a visual medium—how can you remember sensations in VR? I had to have supplied the sensations myself, a shadow of a shadow.
Footsteps running behind me, male footsteps. I turned. One of the machine-heads, Matt, the one who’d invited me. I wasn’t afraid. Machine-heads are terrified of raping real women. They’d have to touch.
He reached for my hand, like something long forgotten, and pulled it back, his mouth twitching. It was the first sign he might yet know what he’d lost.
“You don’t like it?” he asked sadly. We walked side by side in the frozen night, the Don River snaking below us, full of moonlight. The east end has always been this sad.
“It was okay,” I lied.
“Then you’ll come back? Not many women come. Give me your number.”
“I know where to find you,” I lied again. “I’ll drop in some time, ’kay?” I smiled up at him, his shaved head.
He said, as if he was quoting: “And all because real people seemed too frightening and the machines promised to take the pain away.”
“That’s exactly right,” I said, amazed, sober. “Who said that?”
“I did,” he said, and turned to go. “I know you won’t come back. You don’t want to come that far in with us again. And I can’t come back out anymore to be with you, even if I wanted.”
“Touch my hand,” I said. “Take your mitt off, touch my hand.”
“In the virtual worlds people think they can do anything, darken as much as they want, and it doesn’t matter, doesn’t have any effect in the real world. Strikes me they might be wrong. A shadow cast from that side to this, staining us,” he said, still sounding so lost and poetic and smart. Handsome too, in a rough-hewn way.
“I thought that was just propaganda really, hype, that whole no-touch thing,” I said, half meaning it. An outlaw culture’s romance, I’d always figured. For it to be true would be too frightening by half.
He waved his wet woolly mitten at me, walked away. His footsteps sounded cold and lonely.
“And where is the one old story now that will tell us the way out of this?” I called after him, but then, I’m always saying that; it’s my thing. He stopped, turned towards me, took his mitten off. And touched the icy metal bridge rail instead. It stuck. He pulled it away, leaving behind tiny bits of skin.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, “so sorry,” the snot freezing in my nose.
“I guess they lied,” I thought I heard him say, walking away again. We were already too far apart, couldn’t hear each other anymore.
Broken mirrors. We are all holding pieces of a broken mirror, trying stubbornly to glue them back together. Maybe we should leave it shattered.
It’s too bad I couldn’t tell him that, he would’ve liked it. That’s the thing; he seemed so nice, much nicer than Martin really, in spite of his preferences. I think about him a lot, of how our hands froze on the railing, looking down at the river. Your tongue would get stuck there forever if you let it. Something so stupid only an ignorant kid would do it.
Denise’s cigarette package is red. Du Maurier King Size. She lights her smoke with a real lighter, a fake gold one and not a Bic click flick dick or whatever. She inhales as if nicotine were prana itself.
“Maybe I went to another city last night and just don’t remember,” I say, thinking what harm can utter frankness do after everything’s already gone so wrong?
She looks at me levelly. She’s been around the block a few times, this one. Knows the score. “But,” she says, blowing smoke rings, “you’d have to do an awful beer and pills cocktail to forget that much, down it with even more tequila.” Denise speaks so slowly, as though she has more time than the rest of us, only it isn’t very pleasant time.
“Problem is I don’t remember if I did that or not. Mind if I have one of your smokes?” I ask.
“Oh, please do. Please do. But finish your breakfast first. It’ll help.”
But I push my half-eaten egg away, light my butt, don’t inhale. I don’t really smoke but it seems like the right thing to do; keep my molecules moving so I don’t get petrified in the fifties like Denise. And I entertain a thin hope it might make Martin show up, like he used to do to make the streetcar come. He wouldn’t have kept doing it if it hadn’t worked so often. That’s what we were like together: two lost lambs making up our own mythology, taking solace in an urban sympathetic magic, at once invented and uncovered.
“Say, Denise?”
“Yes, dear?” She’s staring out the window at the dead buildings, the grey afternoon light.
“Do you know where anybody celebrates Carnival around here? Maybe if I could find Carnival I could find my friend.”
“Carnival? They started it up here a few years ago, right? Kind of like down in New Orleans. I’ve never paid much attention; it’s not something for us old folks. But there’s a dance at a place called The Aquarium, a week from Tuesday. Somebody left me a poster for it, but I haven’t put it up yet.” She gets up and walks ever so slowly to the counter, retrieves the poster lying there. Watching her is like watching time itself. A bad time. “Maybe if you go to this dance…”
She shows me the little map at the bottom of the poster. The Aquarium is a club just four blocks away from where we are. My life is like a video game this morning. If I follow the clues I’ll find Martin, remember where I am, how I got to be here. “Well, I guess I better get going. It was really nice to meet you, Denise. You’ve helped me out a lot.”
“Okay, dear. Hope you feel better. Do drop in again.”
I walk till night falls. I’ve slept in parks before and would do it again if I had to, but still. The street door is open: relief. The stairs as I walk up are still, so still. I don’t hear anything except my own feet, one at a time, although once I hear footsteps running along on an upper floor, but maybe it’s just a trick of memory, of desire, like knowing he’ll be there. But he isn’t, and neither is the red shirt. A stack of boxes is gone, but everything else is the same. I lock the heavy steel door and go to sleep.
sss
I make myself at home (haha) and wait for more clues.
I look in the mirror; hold a mask to my face. Still, I can’t see: eyes in the way. I cut them out with an X-Acto blade but leave the eyelids, so they open and shut, eerily mechanical, over mine. For hours then, I sit at the workbench, cutting the eyes out of a few stacks of dolls. I don’t know why, but it makes me feel good. Cut out all those fake eyes, all that sacrilege.
There’s a landline and someone calls it while I’m working, orders masks. I have to find x number of a certain type, box them, courier them to her Carnival store. “Make sure all the eye holes are cut out,” she says sharply. “They weren’t last time.”
I tell her I’m strapped, ask if she could pick them up herself, bring cash. She agrees, somewhat surly. If I’m going to be staying here, I’m going to have to have money to eat.
Wherever this is.
She shows two hours later, just as I’m finishing up. Harried and businesslike, she takes the box I’ve packed for her and gives me fifty bucks. Doesn’t bat an eye at my masked face, like she sees weirder every day.
I go to the Dew Drop for dinner, remembering at the last moment to go maskless, order a hot beef sandwich. Thick powdered gravy poured on white bread, a slab of beef and pale peas floating on the surface tension of melted marg. The fifties isn’t even my mother’s childhood; how come this place got stuck so far back?
I’m the only person there again, and Denise joins me, can of Tab and red cigarettes in hand. I tell everything I know, there’s bits that come back just in the telling. “Once Martin and I had this dream we’d get a studio together. In the east end where rent was cheap. We’d work our butts off; he’d be an artist and I’d do the production and management, and then after we got rich we could move somewhere else, like to Hamilton Beach maybe,” I explain.
“It didn’t work, did it?” she asks, and I have to nod. I ask her where we are and she laughs. I guess she thought I was kidding and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth.
sss
The next morning I take an old motorcycle helmet out of a cardboard box full of junk and trade it for my mask. I look in the mirror. Darth Vader. Could be. Just a little modification on the shape. Dig under all the workbenches; find a box of stuff for working with Plexiglas resin. I learned how to use it in art school, a million years ago, before I met Martin, back when I still had dreams of being an artist myself. What a fool.
sss
Memory returns very slowly. I haven’t had such bad amnesia since I first learned to abuse alcohol when I was thirteen. Where am I? Only the east end could be this sad. It’s just a part I never really knew; east of the Don River there are still pockets where the fifties and sixties and seventies live on, bordered now, so locked in misery they’ll never be able to catch up to the rest of time. In the store windows there are aspidistras with leaves that need wiping, and the ubiquitous layers of yellow plastic. I don’t know what all that yellow plastic is for, unless it’s to protect the plants from UV, not that they need much protecting, what with the dank grey skies. Why don’t I just get on the streetcar, go back to the west side, our old apartment, our friends, our bars, our jobs?
I can’t. We gave all that up, late summer. Came here. It’s the in-between part I’ve forgotten, and I still don’t know where Martin is. I go to the Dew Drop for dinner again, order ham with canned pineapple rings. As always, the place is empty except for me, as though only I know the way in. Denise waves distantly, sighing, but doesn’t join me this time.
When I get back I see someone’s been there while I’ve been gone, made the bed, worked on the masks. It’s happened before. Who?
sss
I take a westbound red rocket, what they call the streetcars here. I’m full of trepidation, and when the route passes through my old Spadina neighbourhood I don’t even get off, my limbs suddenly leaden. Who would I visit? Who even knows me anymore? I feel out of place again, only in a different way. Where do I really belong, or when? It seems like when people or neighbourhoods get stuck, they create little pockets of frozen time around themselves. Denise got stuck in the fifties, even though she’s too young for it. At the Dew Drop Inn, I guess the fifties never stopped. I wonder when I’m stuck in. A bad time with Martin, most likely.
I get off the streetcar and stand on the other side of the road, a faint feeling of panic rising in me. The west side looks wrong, gives me a vertiginous feeling as though I’ve stepped through a mirror and the world’s reversed; everything has different meanings. I can barely wait for the streetcar to take me back to the other side, to run upstairs, coat tails flying, sit at my bench and cut doll eyes out.
On the way back from the streetcar stop I see Louise. “Hey, Louise,” I say, grabbing her arm.
She shakes me off, glares.
“Where’s Martin?” I demand. “I still can’t find him. You know him, have you seen him? And how come he never mentioned you? What’s going on?”
“Maybe he doesn’t like you anymore,” she spits. “Maybe you’re too messed up for him. Maybe he’s got someone new.”
“Messed up? That’s a joke. He’s a way worse abuser than me.”
“You don’t really have the same name as me.”
“Course not. I’m Petra. That was a joke.”
“I thought you were her. Where’s your lost five months, Petra?”
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.”
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.
I’ll do anything once. But only once.
An oil drum, homeless men and women gathered around the fire. I go up and have a smoke with them, a DuMaurier. I’ve taken up not just her habit but Denise’s brand. I chat, pass out butts and coins as best I can. And throw the phone in, watch it hiss and bubble, the cancerous smell of melting petrochemicals. Walk away, alone, back downriver. Not afraid. They never rape real women. And then remember: they could still jump out from behind a building, chloroform you, dope you so bad you don’t know what you’re acting in, how it’ll be used. It happened to me.
What happened to Louise? Is she there by choice, because she loves Martin, because she thinks she’s being hip and noir and cutting-edge? Or are they doing something to her, like what they did to me? But I can’t help her, and least not here. I’m just a little girl, alone, screwed up. When I get back to the other side I’ll call the cops, but they’ll guess it was me. It’s no excuse but some of them, like Matt, don’t like where they are, or when.
I’ll never know now what Martin truly desires, never know what made me love the dark stranger so blindly for so many years. Only in becoming him did I see enough to fully wake up, get away.
Huge flakes of snow fall from the sky, so big and fluffy and fairy tale looking. For a moment I think I see two alike, have a nanosecond’s certainty they aren’t real but bitmapped in. VR. But then their tiny spines, their spires, melt and now I’ll never know.
I miss Matt, but know I’ll never look in there for him again, too afraid I might come face to face with myself, a hidden un-erased copy. Hail a taxi, go back to the west side, where I belong.
sss
We think what we do on the sleazy side of town is invisible, but it’s not. Perhaps it is true, and not just a crazy thought of mine, brought home from Carnival, that what we do on the other side of the screen has an effect in the real world.
I may, for a time, have forgotten my name, my address, even what city I live in, but I remembered this: we have to live as though it is true, no longer Faking Life.