“So,” I say. “This video,” I say. “This woman, in her underwear.”
Valerie begins to laugh. Her teeth are still rich-girl teeth, still straight and bleached despite the cigarettes. “This woman? That gorgeous creature is me.”
“You?”
She studies me. For a moment, I see the old Westie, the venomous flirtation that was her MO. Then she smiles. “Shit, Mellie. You always kept it together. I did not understand how far things had gone. But you’re like my aunt, now, aren’t you? Like full on Alzheimer’s. People still call it cloud sickness? That would be a terrific painting, I think. Cloud sick. Cloud sickness. What’s it like?”
“You ate it. You know.”
“I never got that taste of crazy like people do. But, I mean, I guess there’s a bottom for each of us, some crappy outcome where we all end up, right? Look at Lew. Two years, and in Federal.”
“I think you’re working on bad information,” I said. “Lew Cohen? He had a terrific legal team, those law enforcement connections. It was going to be time served and probation.”
“You left in a hurry. Things shifted around. But, he’s out now. I’m not trying to be cryptic. I thought you’d know all this.”
“I’m piecing it together.”
“Still—” She cracks another big, bitchy smile. “The worst tragedies of your life. People have to break them to you again and again. It’s monstrous.”
My stomach contracts, like it’s absorbing a blow, like the feeling coming without the memory. “Break what to me?”
“You have no idea what it is, actually?”
“It’s nothing,” I say. “It’s just a woman walking back and forth.”
“That’s my work you’re talking about. Your work, too, for that matter.” She inhales, blows out a big stream of smoke. “And it’s not just one video. You should watch, maybe. It might give you a sense of how things went down in the end.”
The first thirty seconds of a sex tape. The missing middle. I start to get itchy, the bug of writing it down burrowing into me. Someone had said something about it, me on the other side of the camera. Who had it been? Anywhere else in the world, you could get a piece of paper, but not here. How things went down in the end. The sense memory is of thirst, of an exhausted thirst, and of sand, sand stinging my skin. Of a weeping that lasted until I was as dry as dust. What led me there? Was it something I’d done to someone, or some stupid heartbreak because I loved someone who preferred someone else and left me?
“That’s it,” she says, studying my face. “You’ve got something. OK. I’m ready with my guess. This is my guess. It’s about my lovely co-star—no? You don’t even remember him? But you feel it, right? What does that feel like? You guilty? You mad? You want to get back at me? Look at where I am, Mellie. Look at where you are. Everything turned out pretty nice for you.”
The speakers begin to crackle with their unintelligible code. Eight forty-nine med call maintenance bay six front desk shift operator.
She smiles. “God, Mellie. You’ll see; you were right there with us. Everything vaporized; everything its own shadow burnt into the wall. The release date is coming; the thing is counting down. Even now, all those sweet numbers are being collected. It could hit a half a million, maybe, before those sleepers wake up. And you know what that translates into? Say it’s just a hundred per user. Say it’s twenty. It’s going to be more than twenty. But nothing’s going to happen until you do your part. You think it doesn’t matter? You think it’s none of your business? Check out my other works. I’m huge these days. I’m extremely popular. A question I’d wonder, if I were you. If I’d seen you at the end. How did you deserve to get plucked out of that mess and plopped down in this nice new life? How could you fail to pay that kind of favor back?”
Emily comes to me and puts a supportive arm around my shoulder. I resist.
“What about the end? What other works?”
Then, the two guards are opening the door, the speakers repeating whatever prose is the opposite of cloud speech. All Call For Mod Seven. Procedure seven. Operation time clear.
Emily steers me backward, and the inmates form a single file. The speaker continues to emit its nonsense. All accounted for eight fifty front desk station nine.
Then Westie, scratching at a patch of white, dried skin beneath the bandana, becomes indistinguishable from the other inmates.
On the two-hour van ride home, I wait while the conversation frays into silence. Around me, the Independence women drift into sleep. Everything massing in the same direction. Niani has fallen into my lap, her fingers loosening on her phone, and so I slip it out of her grasp and begin to tap. Now, when I search the headless woman video, there are hundreds of hits, people speculating. It’s all a hoax; it’s conceptual; it’s exploitative; it’s a scam; it’s only a copy of the real thing. But it’s Valerie I’m pursuing here, and after a few clicks, I land on the page of her gallery.
Gallery Schlegel-Heinfer, Los Angeles
Ruin Tape (2008–2010)
Director: Westie (Valerie Weston)
Producer: Lew Cohen
TRT 5 mins
In Ruin Tape, Westie interrogates a woman in her studio. The aesthetic makes explicit the editing process. Jump cuts and radical changes in angle highlight the framed nature of the conversation, its incompleteness. The subject of their exchange is a sex tape. At a certain point, the light shifts and the woman is alone, her back to the camera which may be hidden. She turns. In the final frames of the work, we see clearly the woman. Her eye sockets are swollen full; her mouth is a clown ring of raw red pucker. Her cheeks, puffed with fat, are indistinguishable from her chin. There is a buzzing noise, and she is engulfed in a fine peach-colored mist: vaporized.
Other Projects: West 125 (June 1998), Bright Big Future (March 2010), Found Footage (release date: May 2010)
There are many reasons I choose not to play the video. The first is that being caught with another resident’s possessions is grounds for terminating my stay. The second is that I am in a van of sleeping women who have just returned from a place they would prefer to never visit again. The last thing I want to do is wake them up with a video which may also be a sex tape. In the still image, I can see the woman as described in the gallery notes. She is horrific, inhuman, unrecognizable. I scrutinize the still image for as long as I can bear and then I drift off or I short out again because I am dreaming. I am thumbing through my paperback. The pages are thicker, sealed with old glue. There is something between, thin and hard with irregular edges. I slip my nail between the pages, and lift, but this is a mistake, a terrible mistake. My face begins to swell. My head is being stuffed full, like a laundry bag. The seams at my hairline are tearing.
I jolt up from the van seat. A woman is shaking me. It is ten thirty, eleven, and we’ve just pulled into the driveway at Quincy Independence. I am fine, my face is fine. I’m awake. I’m awake. I’m awake. We go to the nursery and collect our sleeping bundles, and when I hold Juni’s sleeping warmth to my chest, I feel myself again. Juni is almost twenty pounds now, getting harder to carry. The weight in my arms is growing heavier. This is what’s real, I think, this girl in my arms, and I let her anchor me, hold me in place until the feeling passes.
Nine
New York City
1993
What have I said already about the cause and frequency of cloud sickness? Most people think of it as a species of withdrawal, though certainly, you can be cloud sick while high. As well, the mechanism of the trigger is also different. It is not about receptors in the brain, not something that kicks in three days after you stop, and then gradually lessens until it’s bearable. It’s kin, if you will, to the LSD flashback, which is the capacity to reexperience a trip if the user has, for example, a sudden weight loss, chemicals stored in the fat reactivating weeks or years after the original high. It is the capacity of the user to experience hallucination without the ingestion. In cloud, it’s not weight loss which sets off sickness, necessarily. In fac
t, we know very little about what initiates an episode at all. Maybe sex triggers it, or loneliness or exhaustion or experiences which are simply too vivid to be borne.
In cloud sickness, you occupy the initial state of disorientation typical of a high not for minutes, but for hours, or even days. Nothing during this time may be recognizable. Nothing may feel familiar. Words jumble. Even one’s own body may feel strange. It may be likened to the state following concussion, wherein the injured party retains her muscle memory, the skills of life, but significance, the sense of history embedded in that knowledge, are missing. As the victim gradually emerges from the state, that significance returns, but imperfectly. It will feel, often, as though memories have been desequenced or that in certain cases a stranger’s memories have replaced your own.
As I have discussed, many users take these features of the returned memory as a sign that the world has somehow slipped. Or, rather, that the user has slipped from one world into another, where slightly different things are true. In this view, cloud sickness may be seen as a kind of jet lag, the body metabolizing a new history as it moves from one existence to another. After a few hours or days, the body will integrate these strange memories in with the more familiar ones, until it is no longer possible to tell what we might call the originals from the impostors. Still, the sense of wrongness remains, the sense of terrible, inexplicable loss.
The first time I got cloud sick, I was twenty-one and I’d been clean for four weeks. After that, it was never totally clear. Was I cloud sick or just sickened, just sickened with the thing I was making of myself?
I have taken extension after extension on my residence in the dorms, but tonight campus security is finally kicking me out. I’ve scraped through my exams with time only to shove my belongings into Hefty bags. All along the hall, the doors hang open, the bare mattresses and full garbage cans gape at me from within. The guy from security keeps stopping on my floor, giving me a look. I’m sweaty and my fingernails are jagged, but I’m done.
Tonight is also Paul’s opening. After a two-week delay, the curtain is going up on the revamped production, with Paul still in the lead role. Truth? I’m grateful to have the excuse to miss it, to miss the experience of crafting believable praise to deliver to the cast afterwards. Paul has said tomorrow, Friday, is the real event anyway, with Davos’s people coming in, the cast party after. As the audience claps downtown, I struggle to the corner of Broadway with my two suitcases, my backpack and my garbage sacks. Paul delivers his first lines to a house of thirty-five relatives from Queens and Norwalk. I hail a cab to my sublet, a second-floor studio on 109th. It’s 1,400 for the whole summer including the futon, a kitchen table, a set of chairs. I need two trips up the stairs to move in, my luggage temporarily stashed on the entryway’s filthy hexagonal white tile that is the universal flooring of the Manhattan walkup. For dinner, I eat a Yankee Muffin and then listen to the passing traffic, the occasional pulse of a car horn. It’s been four weeks since Paul arrived, I think. I am exhausted, but I want to write things. I want to note things down in the paperback I carry. I write sex → need → everything else → sex. As I drift off, pencil dropping to floor, I think, I have to get more of this down or I’ll forget it.
I wake. I am lying on a bare mattress. The empty room fills with red flash. The red flash is gone. My chest aches, my throat. For minutes, I have absolutely no idea who I am, where I am. I am a round clown. I need a downtown. I wear a weed gown. I hurt loud. I feed proud. Clap greed. Power down. I heed crowns. I need cloud. I need cloud. I need cloud.
The sky lightens. The muezzin calls. I remember a person called Mellie. She is 3.05 GPA and she is 20/650 vision and she is West 109. She is not a person, really. She is not me. I am wearing parts of someone else, some of her toes and some of her elbows and we need cloud.
I feel along the wall for the unfamiliar light switches, find my keys in the artificial light. There are garbage bags but no garbage can, phone jacks but no phones, a door but no keys. I need cloud. Outside, it is suddenly cool, and the pavement is dark with rain. There has been a storm. The gutters run with brown water. Filth collects at the drains. I have a vague recollection of restraint, some period of trying not to do something, of struggling to resist my hunger. Why? There’s nothing wrong with cloud; cloud washes everything clean.
The street is almost empty, except for a shadow slumped in a doorway, a vagrant or a pile of shirts. It shimmers, that pile, familiar and beckoning, but it is just rags and I need cloud. There is a fine gravel of glass and plastic caps littering the sidewalk, the crushed vials left by addict traffic. The guy running for mayor, I remember, wants to clean all of this up, wants to make New York into Disney. But no one can clean up New York; New York is filthy in all its cracks, is veined with dirt and debris.
I find a corner phone booth. The plastic receiver is unscrewed, but it still works. Nancy, I think. I should call Nancy. But where is she? She is drinking tequila in the Dean’s office. She’s on a train to California. She is coming to opening night. I can’t make it make sense. A little cloud will put me right. I phone the number, and I get the pager on the first try. My cloud guy will call. All I have to do is wait. Light is coming and you can smell the bagels boiling on 125th Street. Soon, any minute, the city will wake from its slumber and begin to stir around me, but still, everything is quiet.
And then the pile of shirts stands. It is exactly like a child’s nightmare, like what you imagine will happen if the shapes in your darkened room turn out to be alive. I think, it’s true; I fell asleep and woke up somewhere else where clothing hides monsters. The phone begins to ring, but I am running.
I let my feet make the decisions, move on instinct, fast. The blocks between Broadway and CPW are deserted. Steps match my steps. They sound human, but I am convinced it is a giant rat, a creature made of all the rats from rat rock, a creature escaped from The Nutcracker. I measure the shadow on the pavement beside me. Human size, rat-face. Where are the cars? Where are the people? Open the doors and look at all the steeples. Corner, now, the creature reaches me. It grabs my arm, wheels me around.
It is human, a human I know.
“You look afraid,” says Mr. Boyfriend. “No need to be afraid.” Something is wrong with his mouth.
“Wonder you allowing me,” I say. “Act on some kind of spy?”
“Spying?” he asks. “I’m just trying to talk to you. I’m just waiting for you to ever call me the fuck back.” I think of the knocking on my dorm door. I think of the missed telephone calls. I think of the piles of opened envelopes I found on his desk.
“Stop throwing me.” I struggle, but he has me fast, presses my arm against my back with his one hand and holds tight to my free wrist. When will it be morning? Where is everyone?
There is new scar tissue where his lips join.
“Waddle over your face?” I say.
“This?” His eyes are shallow and green as a tornado sky. “What’s weird is how you never asked much about my family.”
“Four parents under grave,” I said. “Should pain grapple—”
“I mean the rest of my family. The Jersey family. Big family, cousins and uncles all that shit. You never asked.”
“Let me grow,” I say. “I need to grow.”
“I’m walking you. Where we headed? The B? You wanna visit your pansy fuckbuddy? That who you were waiting on at the phone?”
“Morning flower. Exchange vows later.”
We have reached CPW, and Mr. Boyfriend pushes me up against an electrical box, his crotch shifted into me, my back grinding against the cool metal.
“You sound like one of those junkies,” says Mr. Boyfriend. “Like a real junkie. Which is what they suggest about you, my family. You think they don’t care about me, but they keep interested. In my financial well-being, in my ‘am I leading a full and productive life’?
“It’s not like a pure sentiment. It’s not entirely just fraternal feeling. Certain funds are meant to be reinvested. It happens at the acc
ountant level. I don’t concern myself with the details. But these other people do.”
Mr. Boyfriend works his arm behind me and grasps my wrist then pulls it back and pins it painfully to my opposite hip.
“Gelt,” I choke. “Gelt me.”
Mr. Boyfriend pushes me in front of him, and we’re walking. “This cousin of mine, I don’t follow the family politics, but he came to see me last week, ostensibly over that factory in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.” The scar on Mr. Boyfriend’s mouth is fresh enough that it tears open as he grimaces, a little blood wetly swelling in the seam.
“Sasha—we’re not close. He’s into dogfighting, which although I may not be museum-cultured like you, not Pluto and Aristocraces, is not really my line. But he raises pits mean; teaches them to make their brothers into meat. He drives his Eldorado in to see me, and understand, Sasha hates the city, hates Manhattan people. Thinks I’m crazy to live here. The girls, for example, are tramps. But he brings his prize dog last weekend, for a visit. Because out of concern. In case I might be getting in over my head.”
Now, I can see the outline of a jaw mark circling his entire mouth, as if the dog had gripped him in a tender kiss.
“It’s not the cash, Mellie. Though that adds up. It adds up to just over eight grand, now you’ve given me time to do the math. In the scheme of things, that is not that much. Is an amount I could forgive you. I want to forgive you. But my family has a thing about respect, about self-respect. Getting taken by a girl who is fucking some faggot, that’s hard to explain to my people. And, being honest here, it’s hard to explain to myself. So, I’m interested in your opinion, Mellie. Do I tell my cousin about your new boyfriend? Is this information you’d like me to be sharing?”
He loosens his grip slightly, to lean back and assess my face. Far, far away, a single yellow cab speeds toward me, its light signaling available. I wait. I imagine I am a piece of scenery in a video production, that I am the studio on 125th. I wait until the moment sharpens, until I am on the edge of the razor, and then I wrench my hand free, hailing.
The Likely World Page 24