The Faculty of Dreams

by Sara Stridsberg

  If you have forgiven Valerie . . .

  . . . how come you have not been to see her?

  When you cough, you get blood on your hand. Beneath the silver coat is a screaming deep-sea creature wanting out, a birdlike monster with no feathers or skin, champing and chawing and flailing about. Your abdomen aches and weeps and the silver coat is wet and cold with urine, but you love it, and if you are going to die now anyway, you want to die in silver with silver buttons. If you are going to die anyway, you want to die with Cosmo’s hand in yours. The last thing she said to you was, “Don’t leave me here,” and the sky was heavy and oppressive and your leopard-skin fur coat was drenched with fear when you took the train back to Maryland that last time.

  *

  Robert Brush called and wept on the telephone and you ran through the laboratory, setting all the animals free. You know they will not survive for long out there; the albino rabbits are going to die right away, they will hide in the trees and under the snow and form strange shapes in the park outside the lab. Someone calls your name, someone touches your arm, in slow motion you walk across University Park, the wind gusting slightly, the smell of flowers and newly fallen snow, the sky made of dead faces, and all you want is a hole to open up in the snow and swallow you. What is the point of forgiveness, if death treads on its heels?

  Cosmo?

  Cosmogirl?

  Feathery veils of light trail across the room; April is the maddest month of all with its sleet and lifeless fields. And when you open your eyes again, a lustrous bouquet of white lilies is over by the window and you cannot understand who has brought you such expensive flowers. It is a long time since anyone knocked at your door and there is no longer anyone who knows you love lilies. I do not want to die and if I have to die now I do not want any man to touch my dead body.

  *

  The ceiling is a swimming canvas of eyes and hands wanting to devour you and, as you stretch out your hands to the flowers in the window, you remember the scent of lilies and happiness, the faint smell of burning and lilies on her coats and dresses. The bed is a whirling chasm of unfamiliar voices and places and you long so much to hear her voice again, Cosmogirl, the most brilliant whore in the whole world, ruler of the universe, beloved. You long for snow and the sound of a typewriter and, when you open your eyes, she is sitting over by the window with a book in her hand and the sun on her hair. A cloud of smoke around her face as she smokes her strong cigarillos again, always with something to celebrate.

  COSMO: What did you say?

  VALERIE: Are the flowers from you? Are they for me?

  COSMO: There aren’t any flowers. It’s your old sheets you can see. I helped you change them. There was blood and piss all over them.

  VALERIE: Oh well. Have you read any of the manifesto?

  COSMO (stubs out her cigarette on the windowsill): I love it.

  VALERIE: Do you?

  COSMO: You know I do.

  VALERIE: It doesn’t matter if it’s only the sheets, you smell like flowers. Did you know Olympia Press published the manifesto after the shooting without asking?

  COSMO: I thought you wanted them to publish it.

  VALERIE: Maurice and Paul made big money from the manifesto. Everybody wanted to read it because I was in the asylum over that business with Andy. Ten years later I published it myself but no-one was interested then.

  COSMO: Do you want me to read some of it to you?

  VALERIE: Read to me while I fade away.

  COSMO (opens the manifesto): Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

  VALERIE: And destroy the male sex.

  COSMO: It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so.

  VALERIE: We must begin immediately to do so.

  COSMO: Immediately. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y gene is an incomplete X gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.

  VALERIE: Further on. Read from further on. The end. The waves.

  COSMO: Men who are rational, however, won’t kick or struggle or raise a distressing fuss, but will just sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their demise.

  VALERIE: I liked surfing so much, Cosmo.

  COSMO: Shh . . .

  The Narrators

  A. A heart full of black flies. The loneliness of a desert. Landscape of stones. Cowboys. Wild mustangs. An alphabet of bad experiences.

  B. Blue smoke on the mountains. I am the only sane one here. There were no real cowboys. There were no real pictures. I vacuumed all the rooms; the dust was still there. I cleaned all the windows; I still could not breathe. It had something to do with the construction. The sun burned through the umbrellas.

  C. The American film. The camera’s lies. World literature’s. America was a big adventure with its unreal blue mountains, its desert landscape.

  D. They were filming in the desert. Wild horses chased by helicopters. She never understood what was in the script; she could never remember her lines. They were always covered by something plastic. Men had a tendency to be sucked into her mother. Men are happy in my company. It does not mean that I am happy.

  E. “I, a Man” and “Bike Boy” by Andy Warhol. The story of the dissident, of frontier language, of the scream, of suicide. All these compelling mutations and machinations, without being regarded in retrospect as a tragic fate. She vented her heart between the high-rise blocks. Death’s field was hers.

  F. There should be a story set in the desert. There was no electricity. There were no telephone lines. How might the story be told? There would be endless dead blondes.

  G. Stories. Overdoses. Sleeping tablets. Everything reaches its end.

  H. Dead trees. Dead stories. Hold your horses. You must hold your horses, darling.

  I. Valerie. Marilyn. Roslyn. Ulrike. Sylvia. Dorothy. Cosmogirl. A kind of insane genius. She has lost her marbles. That means we will wipe out her memories. Electroshock, injections, straitjackets, Elmhurst.

  J. Remember, I am ill and I am waiting to die. Remember, I am the only sane woman here. Remember, he took my plays and killed them. They were already dead, Miss. My plays were not dead. Your plays were already dead, Miss. I want it added to the record of proceedings that he has killed my plays. What record, Miss?

  K. They had waited for hours. The harsh light over the set. That little white polka-dot dress. It was quite epic, timeless. I could have told you from the start how it would end. It could have had a different ending. There are other narrators. There are happy endings.

  L. Experiments. Horses. Sunset.

  M. I think you are the saddest girl I have ever met. There are no paths in the dark. There is nothing to tell. I cannot tell you how sad I am. I cannot talk about it. It is not possible to think outside your thoughts.

  N. The compulsive calling forth of fragments of text and body tissue. Pain’s sickness. Defense and defeat. Smiles and tears. The blues. Trying to relate to the matter then was like relating to fresh snow on an August day in New York.

  O. If we called the text “The Snow”, it would not be censored. It could happily be sentimental and dirty. That was actually an ideal. What was the point? There were only filthy texts. What was the point? There were only filthy girls. Unclean, overblown, much too rhythmic. I dreamed of spotless white paper and clean unblemished people.

  P. The story’s flight response. A demonstration of pain. The sentences are blank. Rhetorical clumsiness. Contagious univers
es.

  Q. Everyone else in the world would have loved me by now. Take everything from me, do it, that’s what I want. When I have got what I want, I never want it again. How many times can my heart break? I am the only one here without a soul. I could have told you from the start how it would end. Take everything from me, do it, that’s what I want.

  R. I write for the dead. What does it matter if everyone is dead?

  S. She keeps on being dead. She will always be dead. She is the only one I think about. A lie. All I want is to be with her. Rubbish. What does it matter if the narrator lies? What does it matter who tells the story?

  T. Black-clad female grasshoppers and screaming fetuses. You cannot write yourself out of patriarchy. You cannot film yourself out. You stand in a desert, alone, frightened, weeping. You cannot think outside your thoughts. It is not the character’s structure. Massive hegemony. The death of languages in exile.

  U. Daddy’s Girls unite. Isn’t that American white-trash girl far too violent and naïve? You mean that dreadful woman with the manifesto, shrilling hysterically? What is she trying to say anyway? No, I really can’t hear what she’s trying to say in that deep, animal voice.

  V. She is saying: I dream that you will never stop searching for me.

  W. How will I find my way back in the dark?

  X. Darkness. Silence. The desert does not reply.

  Y. She says: Follow the star. The lost highway.

  Z. Follow it to the end.

  Ventor, Summer 1948

  Dorothy and Valerie in the desert kitchen again. Valerie is cleaning the floor and the cupboards and everything in her path. Wearing her big black scarves and newly pressed skirts, she is washing away all her woes so that Red Moran cannot sniff them out, she says. In character, Red Moran is something of a disaster, but Dorothy is happy once more, lighting candles in all the rooms without burning her sleeves, stuffing desert animals and nailing them up on the wall, selling fox boas and having her handbag full of dollar bills, playing music on the radio without drinking wine; and all the time swarms of freckled hands surround your face. Never quieting, liable to come back later in your dreams.

  DOROTHY: Housewives all love using soap.

  VALERIE: Oh.

  DOROTHY: Housewives clean away old misery and they love their daughters.

  VALERIE: But you’re no housewife. You’re a barmaid. A working girl.

  DOROTHY: You shouldn’t be so smart and split hairs, Valerie. Splitting hairs is just a fool’s way of making a point. I may not be a housewife on paper, but I feel like one. Happily married. Happy for my daughter. Flypapers and fly swatters to keep the shit away. Soap. Hydrogen superoxide. Soap flakes. You know you have a standing offer from Moran, Valerie?

  VALERIE: I intend to carry on without a father.

  DOROTHY: It’s a nice offer to a nice girl.

  VALERIE: There are no nice girls.

  DOROTHY: You’re a nice girl.

  VALERIE: There are only nice girls.

  DOROTHY: Well, it’s a nice offer anyway.

  VALERIE: It’s a shit offer, Dorothy.

  DOROTHY: I made some soap bubbles. Run and have a look in the kitchen.

  VALERIE: I’m too old for soap bubbles. And you’re definitely too old.

  *

  The soap bubbles float in and out of the window and Dorothy tries to catch them with the fly swatter. She is obsessed with cleaning the house, as if she were under a spell. Then she chases you with soap bubbles through the junk and rubbish in the backyard until you both crash onto the sand among the fallen dragonflies and quenched bubbles and she laughs and smokes and waves the swarms of flies from your face and foretells a happy ending for everything. Your hopeless feral creature, your burning paradise.

  Dorothy has remarried, to Red Moran. Moran is dark and obese, he pops sleeping pills like sweets and takes pride in never drinking anything other than whisky. He puts you into a Catholic school and wants you to call him Daddy and he sits napping at the filling station instead of selling gasoline and papers. The fans go like planes above his head and there he sprawls, slumped over the counter, letting the customers drive past. You take some boys back after school and steal cigarettes and piss in his hip flask. He and Dorothy are closeted for hours in the bedroom with the blinds down and it is dark and draughty and cramped in the house and at any moment Moran could be standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, naked, rooting in the refrigerator. Dorothy is known for her bad taste and her bad judgment.

  *

  Dorothy groans from the next room. Red Moran and she are wrapped in sheets and sunlight and only you and the rose wallpaper can see them. Moran is on his knees, his huge body rocking. His stomach is tense and hairy and Dorothy loves it so much she almost bursts and he bends like a swaying baton over her as she lies there gazing at the cream-colored curtains billowing out of the window. Then he is on his knees in the bed and Dorothy is on all fours tensed like a desert dog; her thin, glowing body trembling in ecstasy. Her mouth is a gash on her face that you wish you could mend instead of standing there with the flies, staring into their pulsating pit of sweat and glassy eyes. And their smell that will follow you through the forest. A smell of something sour and sweet, like old fish or hamburgers.

  VALERIE: I intend to keep the name Solanas.

  DOROTHY: A father’s name is beautiful on a girl.

  VALERIE: I’m going to keep it because it means ocean bird.

  DOROTHY: Your father will always be able to find you.

  VALERIE: I have no father.

  DOROTHY: You know I love you?

  VALERIE: I know.

  Bristol Hotel, April 11, 1988

  When you wake again patches of sunlight are spreading over the hotel room; you are not sure if the shimmering and flickering by the window are disco lights, or miniscule neon cities or only little fairgrounds on the wallpaper. For once there is silence in the corridor and on the street, just a gently buzzing light, the sound of overstrained electricity and a hazy strip of sky behind the curtains. By the window it looks as though someone has left a silver fox fur or a fox boa, and her perpetual cloud of menthol smoke obscures the view of the room. A silver thread flashing in her hand.

  Dorothy?

  DOROTHY: My little sugar lump.

  VALERIE: What are you doing?

  DOROTHY: Sewing lucky threads.

  VALERIE: In what?

  DOROTHY: In your silver coat.

  VALERIE: It’s too late.

  DOROTHY: Threads of gold and silver. Lucky threads in your clothes at all times.

  VALERIE: It’s too late and they’ve never worked. Like your fortune-telling cards.

  DOROTHY: Sometimes my predictions were right.

  VALERIE: Bullshit. What do the cards say now?

  DOROTHY: They say that you’re not going to die. That love is eternal. That by May or June you’ll be out again in your silver coat. And I’ve been sewing lucky threads in it. It will all be alright. You have to believe that.

  VALERIE: Your predictions have never come true.

  DOROTHY: They did sometimes.

  VALERIE: Put your cigarette out and name one occasion when they did.

  DOROTHY: Lots of men thought I was beautiful and I predicted they would carry on thinking that.

  VALERIE: And now you’re an ugly, hunched old hag with rustling skin and bad teeth and nicotine hands.

  DOROTHY (looks at her hands as she splays her fingers): Red Moran said I was beautiful. Mr Emin said I was beautiful . . . Everybody said it . . . By the way, did I tell you Moran died of that terrible lung disease?

  VALERIE: You told me, yes.

  DOROTHY: I thought everything was alright. That we were doing fine. And then he went and got that cough keeping me awake at night. I visited him in hospital every day. He should never have taken the job at the filling station. I said all along it was full of poisonous fumes and gases and shit.

  VALERIE: He cut up all your clothes and pulled huge chunks of your hair out.


  DOROTHY: What did you say?

  VALERIE: You’ve got a memory like a sieve, Dorothy. All you’ve got in your head is sweet wine.

  DOROTHY: I can’t remember anything anymore, Valerie.

  VALERIE: I remember everything.

  DOROTHY: I know, thank you very much. It’s like a photograph being developed inside that sharp little brain of yours. I have always chosen to remember only the wonderful things . . . clouds of pink flamingos flying low over the house . . . those skies that never return . . . kites and soap bubbles . . . a petticoat of the Stars and Stripes that I sewed for Independence Day . . . I looked fantastic in that cretion.

  VALERIE: Cre-a-tion, Dorothy.

  DOROTHY: Oh yeah. You’ve always thought words were important. I’ve always had so much else to think about.

  VALERIE: I can remember Alligator Reef, for instance, and the ocean . . .

  DOROTHY: That’s right. I could see it in my cards. You and I on that beach. The umbrellas. The miles of sand.

  VALERIE (emits a laugh edged with steel): And then what, Dorothy? What happened then, Dorothy?

  DOROTHY (her needle moving faster and faster, up and down): I don’t remember. There are lots of things I don’t remember. I haven’t thought about my hands before. It’s true, Valerie. Completely yellow with smoke and night-time. But it’s night-time now. You’re going to go to sleep now, my baby.

  VALERIE: I’m not a baby. And there is a very literal beach. There are a number of unanswered letters. Did we stay on the beach? You have to answer my questions.

  DOROTHY: I’m going to concentrate on sewing now. And you’re going to concentrate on sleeping now. Goodnight, little Valerie.