The Faculty of Dreams

by Sara Stridsberg

  Alligator Reef, April 1951

  Dorothy’s Book Continues, the Atlantic Carries on Working

  An ocean of dark mirrors. Dorothy holds your hand while she sleeps in the shade of the umbrellas. Salt waves sweep down the beaches, seabirds screech their hollow cries, ten thousand fathoms of ocean water seethe and sigh. The beach book (the pink one) lies open, filling with sand and wind and sea-water. The pages are curled and sun-bleached and on some of the pages the water has erased the text. Dorothy is still only on page eleven. She read the end first and finds out that the lovers separate on a misunderstanding; she is inconsolable, thinking the book is about her, and then she cannot read any more. Instead she tosses her hair and flips her scarf and her eyes dart ever faster between sea and sky.

  *

  Down by the water’s edge Silk Boy passes and inside his sweatshirt is a baby flamingo that has escaped from the flamingo park. He spends a long, chilly afternoon sitting beside your beach towel, listening to you as you read from your notes. Afterwards your clothes are covered with flamingo feathers. Rotten seaweed and shimmering green seashells float ashore; some days the effluent from the textile mills makes bathing impossible. Swimsuits smell of chemicals and decaying algae. For several weeks now Dorothy has been running back and forth between the telephone kiosk and the beach bar. She stands for hours arguing with Moran, slamming down the receiver and calling him back, weeping loudly into the sleeve of her bathrobe, the phone booth steamed up with desperation. Once again she starts burning herself on candles. The sleeves of her dresses are always edged with black. Once again she is thrown out of cars, bruises on her arms, underwear ripped. Your skin is pink and blistered after all those hours in the sun.

  Dorothy keeps on forgetting things. First she forgets her promises, then she forgets her child; her angry, sunburned child who only thinks about books, and in the end she forgets herself. Moran drives to Alligator Reef in a stolen Mercedes and his hands are wild animals again, chasing around in Dorothy’s hair. She runs like a deer along the promenade. She forgets her name, she forgets the long happy spring spent by the ocean; all she remembers is their submerged screams from Ventor, all she remembers is his dead roses, his tongue and his hot stomach against hers. And she forgets her book in the sand, a forsaken scrap of pink paper about lost love by the ocean’s edge. The wind turns the pages a couple of times and the stars read it one night before it disappears into the sea.

  *

  Moran has a suit and bright eyes, he is drenched in cheap aftershave and his hand shakes when he greets you. Dorothy gets a new ivory-colored dress and on the back seat is a parcel wrapped in shiny paper and done up with silk ribbon; it is a light blue typewriter. A Japanese-made Royal 100. And as the stolen Mercedes drives along empty roads, through forests and deserts, the sky is pale and calm between the treetops. The seats are hot and cracked by the sun, and Dorothy tosses her hair and laughs her desperado laugh into the cigarette smoke, as if no dangers exist. You type on your typewriter; the sound is a sound of joy and the pages are pages of mysterious beauty lying like fans on the parcel shelf at the back and you love that typewriter far too much to give it back. It is April 9, 1951. It is your fifteenth birthday.

  Happy Birthday, little Valerie.

  Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, New York, July 2, 1968

  Dr Ruth Cooper sits lost in thought behind her white lace curtains in the therapy room at Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital. She fantasizes about Andy Warhol and his unconscious, hairless body on the respirator and of a world without clamoring, sobbing patients. Her hair lies in impeccable blond waves on her head and in her cool, ringless hand she takes yours, and she holds it awhile as you speak. And there are so many questions when you are in Dr Ruth Cooper’s presence; all the silence you have swathed around you for the last few weeks surrenders in your conversations, and you assume that this is her intention. Why did you do it, Valerie? What were you thinking, Valerie? Do you realize Andy Warhol is dying?

  *

  Your answers:

  One. Don’t know.

  Two. Don’t know.

  Three: I don’t know what dying means. We’re all dying, you know.

  The patients who sit and wait in the hospital corridors all look as though they are already dead – pallid, bloated beings with darting eyes, drowning people who masturbate with the aid of hospital fixtures, old women who stink of urine and excrement – you could tell all these lost individuals that nothing else will ever happen to them, that their turn will never come, that the doctor will never have time, their visitors will forget when visiting time is, you could tell them the mental hospital is their last stop, their final repository.

  *

  And while you all wait in hope, those who are drowning hoping that it will be their turn, and you hoping it will not be yours, you recite aloud from “Up Your Ass” to a small group of castaways outside Dr Ruth’s office. The only one who listens properly and whose glance does not flicker is a new arrival with blue eyes and freshly washed hair and your heart bleeds with your desire for them to grasp that the doctor’s office is not the way out, that the road from Elmhurst is not via the Therapy Room, Diagnosis and Doctors.

  VALERIE (on her way in to Dr Cooper): Now you have to get your asses in gear. You over there with the bird’s nest hairdo, stop humping the décor. Yes, I understand it’s more exciting than screwing one of these guys, but stop it anyway if you ever want to get out. And you over there, you have to stop stinking of piss and puke, it’s a goddamn awful strategy if you want to get out of here. Get yourself some soap and some self-respect. Remember, girls, sex is just a hang-up and we don’t have time to waste on meaningless sex. Remember that S.C.U.M. is the future. Remember the future’s already here.

  DR RUTH COOPER: Hello, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Giving up isn’t the answer, fucking up is.

  DR RUTH COOPER: Take a seat.

  VALERIE: I congratulate you on wrangling a lovely room, Dr Ruth Cooper. But you don’t seem totally abreast of the situation outside in the waiting area. I don’t know if you’ve been out there – I assume you take the back exit, or you prefer to lower yourself down by the curtains rather than be confronted with the wreckage out there. All they want is to come in here and receive your blessing and forgiveness and your permission to go on being ill. I don’t know how you define clinically dead, it’s something you must have considered in detail during your training. Living dead, apparently dead, brain-dead, etcetera, etcetera.

  DR RUTH COOPER: Take a seat, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Have you been out and looked at the patients? Perhaps you ought to schedule a study visit into your calendar.

  DR RUTH COOPER: My name is Dr Ruth Cooper and I will be responsible for you here at this hospital.

  VALERIE: Thanks very much for nothing. “Up Your Ass” makes them laugh, anyway.

  DR RUTH COOPER: “Up Your Ass”?

  VALERIE: My play.

  DR RUTH COOPER: I understand. What’s it about?

  VALERIE: It’s about Bongi, a man-hating panhandler.

  DR RUTH COOPER: Is the play about you, Valerie?

  VALERIE: Is the medical report about me?

  DR RUTH COOPER: Tell me about your play.

  VALERIE: It’s not bad art, it’s just my brain bleeding. I don’t think she’ll ever come back.

  DR RUTH COOPER: Who?

  VALERIE: Bongi. My text. My play. My life.

  DR RUTH COOPER: O.K., Valerie. Let’s talk about why you’re here. You know that Andy Warhol is still unconscious at Mother Cabrini Hospital. It’s still not clear whether he will survive. As far as I understand, you hit his chest, stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus and lungs.

  VALERIE: I’m sorry I missed. It was immoral to miss. I should have done more target practice.

  DR RUTH COOPER: We’re talking about a person. We’re talking about a person who’s dying. Why did you do it? Why did you try to murder Andy Warhol?

  VALERIE: We’re all dying. Mortality in this country is one
hundred percent. We’re all sentenced to death, the only lasting thing is annihilation, we’re all going to disappear, death is the end of every story. Death will triumph over you too, Doctor.

  Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, July 13, 1968

  There are new meetings with Dr Cooper all the time to get the Diagnosis the court in Manhattan is awaiting. I don’t want any diagnosis, I have my own qualifications from Maryland. I apply my own diagnoses. This is my diagnosis: Goddamn pissed off. Fucking angry. Hustler. Panhandler. Man-hater. It’s a nightmare to wake up in hell every day.

  DR RUTH COOPER: Why did you try to murder Andy Warhol?

  VALERIE: Is Andy still in hospital playing dead?

  DR RUTH COOPER: His condition is still critical, which makes your own situation critical, to say the least. It doesn’t look good for you, Valerie.

  VALERIE: I was a pretty child. I was the prettiest nine-year-old in America. The fastest surfer at Alligator Reef. I was the star student from Maryland.

  DR RUTH COOPER: And why did you shoot Andy Warhol?

  VALERIE: Have you never shot anyone, Dr Cooper?

  DR RUTH COOPER: No.

  VALERIE: Never wanted to shoot anyone?

  (Silence.)

  DR RUTH COOPER: No, never.

  VALERIE: I don’t believe you.

  DR RUTH COOPER: This conversation is not about me. Why did you shoot Andy Warhol?

  VALERIE: And they continue to ask her: Why doesn’t she just go right away when he has repeatedly crushed her hopes and cut up her favorite dresses? A more appropriate question is: Why is she going? If there are women who step out of their shredded dresses instead of trying to mend them, they are the ones you should study. Study the refugee species. Study the laboratory mice who time after time fall outside the scope of the experiment. The laboratory animal that leaves its species owing to a belief in non-affinity or alternative affinity as a matter of choice. The mammal transformed into alien. Creature of the future. The possibilities for transcendence are endless.

  DR RUTH COOPER: I think we are getting off the point. We were talking about Andy Warhol. We were talking about why you shot him. I’d like us to keep to that for now. Later there will be a chance for you to tell me about yourself and your childhood.

  VALERIE: I’m talking about Andy Warhol and his way of pretending he has gunshot wounds to attract yet more attention. It’s the wrong question. It ought to be: Why doesn’t she shoot? Why in hell’s name doesn’t she shoot? All her rights were under attack. A state of raped she-babies and raped she-animals. And why don’t they shoot? I don’t actually know, Dr Cooper. If I knew, we wouldn’t be sitting here. Half a civilization on its knees and an arms industry that turns over more every month than the third world’s combined debt to the corrupt world. And that’s not including the porn industry.

  Bristol Hotel, April 13, 1988

  NARRATOR: What sort of material do we have?

  VALERIE: Motorways. Trucks. America.

  NARRATOR: And what else?

  VALERIE: Ocean material.

  NARRATOR: Tell me about the ocean.

  VALERIE: Alligator Reef. The Atlantic. White sand, white stones. The all-bright water surface of steel and brume. Bladderwrack. Beach umbrellas. Tourists. Mine and Dorothy’s beach. Later, Dorothy in the desert. She never finishes the book.

  NARRATOR: And then?

  VALERIE: The little male seahorse roaming across the beaches with his flashing camera. There’s him and me and the pounding of the waves.

  NARRATOR: Tell me more about the material.

  VALERIE: The material is called SHE’S NOT COMING.

  Ventor, June 1951

  Dorothy and Moran lie exhausted in the flowery bedroom. Dorothy sleeps her deep, wine-induced slumber, chewing her way through the nights as though her dreams were always about food; her nightdress has ridden up to expose her private parts, which are dark and swollen. Moran has placed his hamburger-hand on her stomach like a stone. Her liver-spotted skin is a curtain across the sky and the trees. You take all the money you can find, a few clothes and some photographs, a bottle of wine, a packet of cigarettes, your notebooks, a dress that belongs to Dorothy, the transistor radio. And your Royal 100.

  *

  The wallpaper is yellow with age and sun, with desperate, joyful days of dirty windows and bad food, with all the years, all the flies. Dorothy’s warm hands on your face. Dorothy’s face between the huge shadows of the trees. Dorothy, full of sweet wine, lying in your bed in the afternoons when you come home from school. Dorothy with the flypaper and soap and desperado-voice: I don’t want to choose, Valerie. I don’t want All or Nothing. If I have to choose, I choose All. I choose you, Valerie. And I choose Moran, Valerie.

  *

  The stink of wine and sweat and their horror-film love, pounding with passion, is like a foul-smelling wall around them when you take your things and flee. The sky outside is flaming pink, faint stars in the garden everywhere. Glasses and bottles by the swing seat, the porch drenched in morning sun. You slam the door to the house one final time and for the last time walk across the desert. The desert where Louis cleared off, where the river was poisoned and Dorothy chased around and burned the sleeves of her dresses, where you both zigzagged hand in hand beneath the heavens. You tell Sister White about it later:

  I ran away in the desert. I never found my way home. Everything was cold blue sharks. I was a sick child. I missed Louis. Missed the electricity, the tingling sensation in my legs and arms. I was impossible to love. I walked through the desert. It was bright and white and lonely and I took my things and left. Everything inside me screamed, my heart, Dorothy, the light flickering. The soup bowls and bottles from the night before were still on the table, wine stains, a filthy cloth, Dorothy’s pink letters, insects chasing each other across the plastic tablecloth. There was a smell of rain and water and gasoline and old wine. A lizard was standing in Moran’s old whisky glass, looking at me. It was windy that day. I put the lizard inside my jumper and ran.

  America, Road Movie

  May 1951 – October 1952

  The sky is a skin-colored curtain descending over you and Georgia.

  *

  You are on your way to nowhere in particular, just away. Motorways, deserts, trucks and forests. After Georgia, there is Alabama, Virginia, Florida, Philadelphia, and you walk between the trucks begging for a lift and money and hamburgers. Exhaust-fume flowers dance past at the side of the roads and sometimes Ventor flickers past with its shacks, its car wrecks and dirt roads and the reek of gasoline and motorway. Outside, the winds spiral, your jeans are dirty and you try to concentrate on the typewriter instead of America passing by with its blacked-out towns, housewives and churchgoers all behind their lace curtains. Atlantic City. Baltimore. Washington. Richmond. Norfolk. Portsmouth. Wilmington. Charleston. Jacksonville. Key West.

  *

  In the White House new wars are planned, new family programs, the President sitting at his great desk, musing about America. Dorothy continues to send him fan letters from the desert. The sky is cold and filled with lightning and when you wake in the mornings at filling stations, service areas and motels someone has always placed a soda or a sandwich in your hand. The drivers want nothing special from you, they like your company and do not care where you come from. They let you sleep and work in peace for hundreds of miles and hundreds of versions of America. Sometimes you jerk someone off, sometimes you let someone jerk off onto your panties or on your jeans. It never goes further than that and so it is of no account. The best time is when you are waiting in roadside cafés, before you are thrown out. There you can organize your papers and use your wash-machine, which is a can with detergent and hot tea-water, and you make sure your hair is always clean. And when you fall asleep in the cargo space at night, your dreams are full of sand and rose wallpaper. Dorothy is carrying you through the desert, Dorothy in tears chasing you across America, Dorothy finding you and taking you home. The most beautiful dream of all is where Dorothy h
as tattooed her old surname on her arm like a bumper sticker and your name on her left breast like a cry for help inside her dress. Valerie. Ocean bird. Solanas.

  The Architects

  A. The body is a part of the building. Buildings create people. The body, the surface, America.

  B. You cannot imagine a text without people. A building does not exist before the building is inhabited. The apparel, lower forms of art, the architect’s genesis. The architects. The narrators. I fix my attention on the surface. On the text. All text is fiction.

  C. Surface, clothes, femininity. Flocks of girls moving through the cities. Public women, public relations. Street love. Happy, sunny streets. Regulated prostitution.

  D. Don’t hang about in windows. Don’t wander up and down a street. Don’t walk around in a group of girls. Don’t address strange men in the street. When can a woman spend time outdoors? Never. The winds of rape are blowing across America.

  E. Heterosexual neurosis. Postmodern parasites. You have to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex. Martin Luther King Jr speaks to the darkness. The black panthers sit and wait. In his last speech he is mild and tender and he is no longer afraid. You will not miss me when I am gone. It will be better for you when I am no longer here. An amazon’s odyssey.

  F. The interior consists of femininity and sexuality. Roses and pussies. Embellishment is removed from the male. He is the black suit. He is black cars in the city.

  G. She was dressed in a fantastic white fur. She wanted to take part in a beauty contest. She wanted to look like a sculpture. Miss America. The history of the blonde. Of the whore. The world’s finest, oldest profession.

  H. Miss America contests were introduced the same year as electoral reform. In 1952 Colleen Hutchins from Salt Lake City was the tallest, heaviest, blondest girl in the history of Miss America. Electoral reform was implemented, men returned to the factories, new world wars began, the first wave was swallowed up by the oceans.