I remember, in 1992 or so, listening to Kim Gordon’s voice monologuing over the Sonic Youth song “Kool Thing.” She was talking about a white girl lying on a bed with a dagger in her hand, staring at a black panther in a tree; and she said it had something to do with Patty Hearst. I didn’t know who Patty Hearst was then. Years later, when I visited the Joyce Museum in the gun-tower where he spent the night that Ulysses emerged from, there was a life-sized black panther in the bedroom: Joyce’s roommate, like his hero Stephen’s, had a nightmare with one in it and, picking a gun up in his half sleep from the night table beside his bed, fired it over Joyce’s head. Beneath the bedroom was a storeroom for gunpowder; in past centuries the guardians of the tower had to be careful not to generate any sparks. Maybe all avant-gardes begin with gunpowder and a dream of a black panther.
•
I imagine her standing in a bathrobe and alpaca slippers, her hair still wet from the shower, her fingers sticky from the homemade pastry she’s been rolling on her kitchen counter. I imagine peering at her through the front door’s frosted glass, her face distending as she moves behind it; or how it looks from her side, the figures dark and imprecise against the night, the stick-shapes by their waists she doesn’t know are guns. Or later, after they’ve knocked her down and carted her off to their hideout, the way she squints through a black eye at the TV screen, watching the news, seeing the building where she lived all cordoned off by police-tape, reporters crowded round her mother who wears black, and thinking: No, that’s wrong, it’s she who’s dead, not me. My father standing beside her is dead as well. And the detectives, anchormen and commentators, the others too, everyone behind the screen: all distant, unreal, dead.
I picture her sitting in the closet with its musty carpet and rubber-foam mattress, its soundproofing pads that smell of old sweat, listening to the radio they’ve placed there with her, listening hour after hour, like Orphée, as the song-lyrics, bulletins and station-idents run together, all the voices blurring: disc jockeys, announcers, lonely nighttime callers. I hear her solitude in theirs, and theirs in hers, and in both of these the solitude of fur-trappers and gold-prospectors, bums and traveling salesmen, taxi drivers and night watch men, a continental loneliness booming and echoing through centuries. And behind all these, I hear the solitude of her own grandfather: the only child, estranged husband, jealous sugar-daddy, would-be president who couldn’t get the people to like him enough to elect him so had his own world built for him to rule over and peopled it with elephants and zebras, lions, tigers, tahr goats, monkeys; filled its dining halls and billiard rooms with gargoyles, frescoes, tapestries and kantharoi; obliged his guests to watch each evening the films, still unreleased, that he’d produced; forced them to wear fancy-dress so they would all stay behind masks; forbade them to speak of death, which made the word hang in the air unspoken all the time; stayed up long after they and all the butlers, gardeners, gamekeepers and switchboard operators had gone to sleep and, reclining on his four-poster beneath a painting of Napoleon alone before the Sphinx, would drift off to the sound of panthers shrieking in the night.
I imagine her hairs bristling as she tells her parents that they’re bourgeois pigs and that she’ll never come back home; her voice crackling with excitement as she reads onto a tape the revolutionary statement that will soon be played on every radio and television station in the country. I see her eyes blaze like coal fires as she poses with a machine gun in front of the Egyptian symbol painted on the wall: the seven-headed cobra Wadjet, Lady of Devouring Flame, Wadjet the Invincible whose presence causes malachite to glisten, she who lives according to her will, the pupil in the eye of Re the sun, who hisses: Few approach me. The confederacy of Seth is at my side and what is near me burns.
I picture her as the heroine of the pulp-porn novel published several years before her kidnapping in which a black man steals a debutante named Patricia, locks her in a hide-away and has his way with her until the negro semen pickling her brain makes her a criminal. I wonder if her kidnappers had read it, then realize that it doesn’t matter: it’s all fiction, the whole thing. I tell myself she understands this, and that she’s letting the story play itself out by assuming the main role.
I picture her as Tania, Che’s lover; as Ophelia the teenage suicide; as Antigone the goth; as Sylvia Plath, panther-stalked girl who never had a gun placed in her hands but stuck her head inside an oven; as Molly Bloom who lies in bed bleeding, thinking of all the men she’s had; as Stephen Dedalus, boy-Cordelia who hears the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame; as James Joyce himself, who summoned it all up from a dream of a black panther; or as his favorite child Lucia, the mad spark who cracked under the weight of her inheritance. I picture her as the Statue of Liberty holding a stick of dynamite instead of a torch. I picture her as Lara Croft, Raider of Tombs, running through urban landscapes out of Eldridge Cleaver: armored vehicles crisscrossing city streets, black smoke billowing against the daylight sky, the sound of Tommy-guns and snipers’ rifles, barbed wire closing off whole sections of the city, “and everywhere the smell of cordite.”
I see her riding in a car through San Francisco with the window wound down, breeze tickling her hair and flapping her donkey jacket’s collar, the untinned air and clear blue daylight making her giddy; then running from the car into a bank, shouting her name out as she waves her gun at terrified customers and staff. I picture the movements of the other revolutionaries as they vault the counters, throw open the cash drawers; the cascade of glass as the bullet-peppered windows crystallize and fall; the screech of the car’s tires as it pulls off again; and her, staring back through the rear window as the bank and street and people drain away and the world retreats again behind a screen.
Like Orphée through the silver mirror: Patty in the Zone. I see her multiplying into a thousand different women as the hotlines set up in her name jam up with calls reporting sightings of her in supermarkets, cinemas and cafes, pool halls, libraries and trains. She’s morphing from a typist in Louisiana to a hitchhiker in Tennessee, a croupier in Vegas, Sacramento dancer, toll collector on the Arizona interstate, a hundred New York students, seven hundred California teenagers—and splitting further in kaleidoscopes of fantasies and dreams, her image broken down to arsenals of double-gauges, thirty-calibers and twelve-bores, grenades and pipe bombs, angles of limbs on shadows of assassins climbing staircases at night. And she becomes some of these images, some of the characters as well: dressing as an airline stewardess, a hotel clerk, a secretary—or, when she and her comrades leave San Francisco for Los Angeles, a jazz musician, face blacked up and instrument case full of weapons. I see her looking at the traffic on the freeway, playing with the radio, always the radio, hearing revolutionary subtexts in the songs and sympathetic propaganda in the interference between broadcast areas; then, cruising round Watts and Compton, seeing the ruined houses and the gutted busses, thinking: Yes, this is the Zone, and it’s begun, the final uprising, the crisis, the dénouement.
I understand she has to miss it, like a lead player wandering offstage in some anxious dream and getting waylaid among props and curtain ropes. There’s a correctness in her decision to go shopping for provisions just before the police swoop on the house with armored cars; and in the way she hears it, on the radio (where else?); and the way she checks into a Disneyland motel and turns the TV on to see the house go up in flames, one of her friends run out and have her lungs ripped from her chest by bullets, blood shoot backwards from another’s head, the rest burning inside, the angle changing slightly with each channel. I picture her biting her hand to stifle screams, the makeup running down her face, her body bouncing on the bed, and think: this is the Patty Hearst I want to fuck—not the chat-show guest or irony-trophy movie extra she became, but this one here. I want to fuck this one because this one’s America: all of it, sitting in a motel bedroom, watching the apocalypse on television.
2008