Valerie

by Sara Stridsberg

  They say the winds of the future are blowing across America. Later you will find out that all the girls on need-based scholarships have been given the same timetable. They are few in number, but they are there. The roll call continues and the names flash past your head like a lightning storm or an exploding sunset. Sam Abbotsway? Harry Bottomley? Arthur Josebury? Jack McDonnell? Dino Rock? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. When your name is finally called you leap to your feet in a flash. Yes, sir.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: State scholarship?

  VALERIE: Yes.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: A hundred percent or partially self-funded?

  VALERIE: A hundred percent.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: Welcome, Miss Solanas, to the University of Maryland. A warm welcome to the American education system.

  VALERIE: Thank you very much. I’m so pleased to be here. I’ll do my best, I promise.

  A hand in white gloves pulls you back onto your seat, interrupting your thank-you speech. A stranger’s voice, high white boots, a girl who does not look like a student, a girl who looks as though she has gone out in her underwear. Expensive dark glasses, a seductive aroma and rhythm, a smile and a way of whispering so that everyone hears her, a cigarette burning in her hand under the desk. You were so focused on your name being called, you failed to hear the clack of her high heels stop in the corridor outside, failed to see the cloud of smoke, perfume, and blond hair over by the door, you were too preoccupied with Robert Brush to notice this stranger’s deep, black gaze sweeping like a radar over all the freshmen before settling on you, right at the back by the emergency exit, or to see her working her way along a row of students and sitting down next to you. She does not let go of your wrist; her breath is warm and sweet and smells of beer.

  COSMOGIRL: There’s no need to thank them. Rule number one. Never get down on your knees, at least not in public and at least not if it’s really of no advantage to you. You have nothing to be grateful for. They should be glad you chose to set your smart little foot in here. Do you want a cigarette?

  VALERIE: Are you allowed to smoke in here?

  COSMOGIRL: A more appropriate question would be: Can you think in here? Do you want a cigarette or not?

  VALERIE: Yes, please.

  COSMOGIRL: Cosmogirl. Or Ann Duncan.

  VALERIE: Be quiet now.

  COSMOGIRL: Valerie?

  VALERIE: Yes.

  COSMOGIRL: Solanas?

  VALERIE: Yes.

  COSMOGIRL: What are you doing here?

  VALERIE: Shhhh.

  COSMOGIRL: What are you doing here?

  VALERIE: I’m going to be a psychology professor.

  Cosmogirl puts her hand up and interrupts Professor Robert Brush and his lecture before being asked to speak. She stands up and wafts the hidden cigarette about under the desk, signaling its whereabouts with a slender column of smoke at the side of her dress.

  COSMOGIRL: Do you support abolition of the death penalty?

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: We don’t take a political position in the department.

  COSMOGIRL: I’m not asking what the department thinks. I’m asking what you think. Just you, up there at the lectern.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: Personally, I take a stand neither for nor against the death penalty. As you already know.

  COSMOGIRL: And students who don’t receive state funding?

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: Well, that’s hardly our problem. Every student does as he chooses. If funding comes from stolen goods or organized crime and prostitution, it’s of no interest to us.

  COSMOGIRL: And the rapes in Laboratory Park?

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: We will naturally take action. The safety of our female students is a high priority.

  COSMOGIRL: I understand.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: My advice to you, Ann Duncan—

  COSMOGIRL: Cosmogirl.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: —is to become involved in one of the university’s many student societies and efforts to bring about those improvements you’re always talking about. We are here today to welcome new students.

  COSMOGIRL: And the allocation of scholarships and research funding based on gender?

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: The criteria are knowledge and analytical skills. Not gender.

  COSMOGIRL: And the requirement for dresses in seminars?

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: New times are on their way, Miss Duncan. I can promise you that. The winds of the future are blowing here already.

  COSMOGIRL: And woman’s place in the system of desire?

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: We’ll have to save that for another day, Miss Duncan. Today is a welcome day for new students.

  This is first-time Cosmogirl, first-time Cosmogirl in a lecture hall early one morning; and the room is set alight, a field of blazing daffodils, when she turns to look at you, eyes heavy with honeyed light and hubris. You find yourselves in the most beautiful of buildings, made of books, papers, the future, science, and she holds your gaze in hers and the breeze turns again beneath your blue school dress.

  COSMOGIRL: Are you going to smoke that cigarette or just hold it?

  VALERIE: Outside.

  COSMOGIRL: You’re sweet when you’re embarrassed. Where do you come from?

  VALERIE: The desert.

  BRISTOL HOTEL, APRIL 17, 1988

  THE SOVIET UNION AND AMERICA COMBINE FORCES TO SAVE TWO WHALES STRANDED ON THE ALASKAN COAST

  It is impossible to judge whether it is day or night, but the sky out there is on fire and dark clouds of birds swarm over the buildings. Dusk, dawn, or apocalypse, in the room in Mason Street it matters not. Your guts howl again; it smells as though a lump of rotting flesh is settling in your underpants. There was someone here earlier, a few hours ago, and you ended up with a couple of dollars and half a sandwich. It might have been the man who always talks about going back to Philadelphia, or the one who once said that clients can always recognize you by the ligature marks. You wish that someone you loved long ago was with you. You miss Cosmogirl, but all you have are chaotic, meaningless memories.

      Cosmo?

  No Cosmo, just a blood-drenched pall of trivial recollections now, of strangers’ voices, strangers’ hands, your skin stretched tight between the buildings, a crowd of freezing, shaggy coats. There is always snow, glistening over the trees and the sixties, and it never stops falling; when you think about it, there is always snow on the campus.

  You return repeatedly to a shark who wanted you to help him reenact executions in the turn-of-the-century electric chair he had in the bedroom of his luxury loft apartment in the East Village. He loved switching roles. Victim, killer, executed, executioner. He would come violently at the moment of death, and always gave you a ridiculous sum of money afterward. You remember other stiff dicks in your mouth, and soft, filthy lumps of meat in the palm of your hand, scrawny fingers, heavy, clammy bodies, expensive suits, tongues, nauseating aftershave, saliva, semen, tears, slobbering wet kisses, all these sewers disguised as mouths. You have always been so scared that Louis would appear in the street, that you would not recognize him. And that is why you do not pick up men in yellow Fords, and rarely blond men, and never men called Louis.

  It does not matter how many sharks you have had, how many journeys you have made into the underworld, now you are just a fading consciousness, oozing, bleeding, and all you want is Cosmo’s hand in yours again. Vaguely you recall the outbreak of a war you were surely too young to remember, and a green-tinged research library. The decaying walls of science collapsing around you, a catalogue of American women put to death, that last snow falling on Laboratory Park.

  Cosmo?

  Cosmo?

  Cosmo is sitting by the window with a cocktail in her hand, flicking through some magazines, the titles of which you cannot make out. They are probably articles about executions. The only things Cosmo reads are about executions and she wakes each night submerged underwater, her mouth full of black ants, believing the
American government is spraying gas into student dorms in College Park. She mumbles and whispers into the drink … goodbye, Silena Gilmore … goodbye, Earle Dennison … goodbye, Rhonda Belle Martin … goodbye, Eva Dugan … goodbye, Ethel Juanita Spinelli … goodbye, Louise Peete … goodbye, Barbara Graham … goodbye, Marie Porter … goodbye, Julia Moore … goodbye, Mary Holmes … goodbye, Mildred Johnson … goodbye, Mary Farmer … goodbye, Ethel Rosenberg … goodbye, Rosanna Phillips … goodbye, Bessie Mae Smith … goodbye, Betty Butler …

  VALERIE: What are you drinking?

  COSMOGIRL: Apricot cocktails.

  VALERIE: What are you reading?

  COSMOGIRL: Senseless farewells at the American government’s expense. Subjects who no longer belong in this world.

  VALERIE: Cosmo, do you know that in 1972 the Supreme Court decreed that the death penalty was incompatible with the Constitution? You would have been so happy.

  COSMOGIRL: I’m not happy. My Elizabeth is falling asleep in San Quentin. The California Supreme Court won’t budge. The orange overalls represent death. In the death chamber they’re waiting until the very last moment for a call from the president. Thiopental causes a drop in blood pressure and induces sleep, pancuronium bromide paralyzes the muscles so that breathing ceases, and the last injection of potassium chloride stops the heart.

  VALERIE: But in 1976 they decided it was compatible with the Constitution again. Your absence then felt like an eclipse of the sun.

  COSMOGIRL: I’ve never been happy. Every night Elizabeth dreams about Ethel Rosenberg in the electric chair. On the morning of October 9, wearing her white overalls, she walks from the death cell to the death chamber. The call has come from the attorney general and the governor. Kill that woman. Kill that bitch. Cannulas have been attached to her arms. The government has said a prayer for her soul. White clothes, rubber gloves, catheter, diapers, drugs, nurses, chaplain. When the execution has been performed, Elizabeth is still on the table in her white clothes. She’s in the desert now. She’s in her bikini, crying, wondering where little Frankie and I have gone. The doctors declare her dead, they say a prayer for her soul. Then the American government draws the curtains.

  VALERIE: I think about you all the time.

  COSMOGIRL: And my brain is an electric chair in which innocents are always being executed.

  UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, OCTOBER 1958

  Cosmo shuffles along in her clogs, guiding you round the experiment rooms. Cigarette in the corner of her mouth as she speaks, whisky bottle in her lab coat, she has a way of constantly delivering long monologues about everything. About the drugged mice and the cancer mice, about scientific methods. Cosmo’s column of smoke forever rising above her as she gives lectures with her head in the glass cages, issuing you instructions on how to take photographs. Then she gives you a ride on her scooter along the corridors and sits you down on the sofa in Robert Brush’s office; it is hard to understand where all the keys come from, and from nowhere she brings out notebooks, alcohol, cigarettes, and peanuts and carries on her lecturing, and only Cosmo can make you feel like a starchy, well-brought-up middle-class girl in a borrowed lab coat with no brain and nothing to say.

  Cosmo puts on more lipstick, more mascara, ever more makeup, more of everything, smudges and shadows round her eyes; snapping away, flashing, obsessed with taking photographs of you both with her Polaroid camera, your lips and hers full with kissing and happiness, a new languor in your gaze. Pictures she sticks up on all the walls in the student dorm and later places in the pockets of your coat hanging in the corridor outside, while you sit in a lecture hall. And notes, always new notes pinned up in the dorm and the library. Her words are witches’ kisses and her kisses are kisses that go straight to your heart.

  You dash along the corridors, Cosmo and you, through the fluorescent lamps and the night, in and out of locked offices and laboratories, snatching organs and human fetuses, cavorting with stuffed animals and old skeletons. The laboratory director gets a new family in the gold frame on his desk: a Polaroid collage in which Daddy is a psychotic ape, his wife a dissected, bleeding heart, and the children mutants. Aborted fetuses, calf-human hybrids, cancerous lumps.

  The laboratory director is in the habit of taking Cosmogirl out on nocturnal drives along the motorways and forests of the night. He and a few other members of the academic staff fund her tuition fees, her student room, her drugs, and her textbooks. Cosmogirl refuses to accept any government funds on the grounds that the government is trying to murder her mother in San Quentin. I would rather sell my pussy than my soul. My pussy is not my soul.

  And to the state of California she writes letter after letter after letter to save Elizabeth Duncan. The walls in her student room are plastered with newspaper cuttings and photographs about the death penalty and scientific discoveries, animals tested beyond recognition. Monkeys, mice, rabbits, and murdered women.

  Cosmo has decided to enter your life and she is everywhere; at first nowhere, and then everywhere. In the telephone at night, in your dresses, in your coat pockets, in your photographs; you can forget everything, but you cannot forget her. You never forget the first guided tours in the laboratory, those first crystalline nights, unending, simply continuing, the flickering feeling like a fluorescent lamp when she looks at you. And every time you touch her skin, it is a step further from your own plans, from the Future and Science. And still your hand moves on, inch by inch. A rectangle of light shines in her face when you touch her. Her hair looks like a bird’s nest.

  VALERIE: I’m afraid, Cosmo.

  COSMOGIRL (holds up a Polaroid photograph): Look at this picture, Valerie.

  VALERIE (sits up): I just want to have a degree. I’m here for the future. I don’t want the future to disappear.

  COSMOGIRL: You can do what you want. Someone like you isn’t going to fall apart. Your mind is like steel. What can you see in the picture, Valerie?

  VALERIE: Some skin, some hair, our mouths.

  COSMOGIRL: Anything else?

  VALERIE: I suppose you want me to say we’re laughing, we look happy. We look happy and we’re laughing in these photos.

  COSMOGIRL: Valerie?

  VALERIE: Yes.

  COSMOGIRL: We’re not laughing in the pictures, we’re not happy. We’re invincible. We’re rulers of the universe. We can do what we want. That’s what’s in the pictures.

  VALERIE: I mean to become a professor. I have to hold back.

  COSMOGIRL: I don’t intend to hold anything back. We’re going to remake history. Artificial intelligence, artificial insemination, artificial historiography. You and me and the future. The first intellectual whores of America.

  VALERIE: Hold my hand forever. Hold me back. Hold fast to my plans. Promise me you’ll never go.

  COSMOGIRL: Never.

  UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, FEBRUARY 1959

  The student bed is a place of shadow and lonely swooning. Cosmo in the sheets with her yellow hair, her conviction, her desire. Her body wanting to work its way into yours and disappear inside. Yours is a target that has nothing to do with Valerie. Just the burning, throbbing, tingling sensation in your arms again, do what you will and whatever you do let it be quick, and everything covers its eyes and waits and rigor mortis spreads through the room. At first you are scared of everything in Maryland, of Cosmo, of her kisses, of the professors, the lecture halls, the middle-class girls, the middle-class boys. Then you fly along the corridors with Cosmo’s hand in yours, invincible, your brain ablaze with desire for science and the future.

  Elizabeth Duncan gets a new execution date every month. In telephone calls to Cosmogirl she is incoherent and paranoid. She is crazed with fear, convinced that they will release gas into the death cell without warning. She knits hundreds of identical girls’ dresses and yearns for the desert and little Frankie. Cosmo stands in the dorm in a sea of clemency appeals and weeps into the phone. The sun rises and sets on the horizon behind the hospital grounds, while you create your own after-school experim
ents and scientific texts. The nights are dark and swollen.

  Elizabeth Duncan loved getting married. She and Cosmo criss-crossed America in search of handsome, dark-haired men to whom she pledged large sums of money in return for marrying her. And later, when they wanted the marriage annulled, she carried on to a new state and wed again. And when the money ran out, as it always did, she sent pregnant girls to the doctor and claimed it was her, and then sued her ex-husbands for child support.

  VALERIE: What’s she sentenced for?

  COSMOGIRL: Murdering two of her new husbands with arsenic.

  VALERIE: Is she guilty?

  COSMOGIRL: Very guilty, I suspect.

  ELMHURST PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, DECEMBER 24, 1968

  The snow is melting on your head. It is a long time since you stopped waiting for a telephone call. You usually give away your weekly call to one of the drugged-up girls who always hang around in the corridor so they do not miss the calls that never come. Over Christmas all the non-new arrivals have the privilege of three conversations each. It is very generous of the hospital administration, but at present they are not able to propose any kind people the patients can contact.

  The windows in the dining room are covered with frost patterns, the birds stare at the patients through the panes of glass, the snow glistens and sparkles between the hospital curtains. Andy Warhol himself answers, in his hesitant, whispering voice. Talking to Andy is like talking to yourself; his voice has changed since last time, dissolved, distorted, and everything he says sounds like a question. H-h-h-hello?