The Faculty of Dreams

by Sara Stridsberg

  I. The mythical essence of drives and instincts, the monumentality of their indeterminateness. Neurosis, culture, apathy, linguistic style, perversion, immensely infantile child sexuality. Many degenerate phenomena and pathological perversions have their basis in childhood. It is no longer possible to record and catalogue sexual phenomena without the need to create an overarching theory. The life-threatening bond between children and mothers, between babies and breast-feeders. Amendment to the theory of sexuality. Hey wait, Mister.

  J. There is no sun in the house. No light. I have an artificial body, an artificial longing. The doctors say to me: It is a physical disorder, not a condition. Your hatred of men is going to destroy you. You have no reflexes, you are malnourished and in trouble. Hatred of men equals trouble.

  K. The ocean’s influence on your plans for the future. He became obsessed with her and wanted to paint her and photograph her all the time. It was a struggle, an ongoing contract. He was there, pawing at her house. Discreet battles. He dreamed of dying of a heart attack in the ocean. Or a shark attack. Like a warrior.

  L. She has so much time in her eyes. An army of men in black. How many has she screwed? I don’t know. How many have you screwed? One thousand and one nights.

  M. My sexiest quality is that I’m always game. I never tire. I love semen. I love dicks. It does not matter who it is, what it is, where, or how. I just love it. My sexiest quality is that I’m always game. I never tire.

  N. The evil structure of language. It was an illness, a deranged, totally inappropriate grief response. I laughed and flew straight into the light. There was nothing to respond appropriately to. Everything but her voice was sucked into a black hole and vanished. What difference does it make if you have regrets?

  O. Call me what you will. You are never going to know my real name. Theatricality. Setting the stage. Annihilation.

  P. You want a ride? I am a death machine. There is a group of people in the city who are neutral. I don’t want to come out of the closet. I am discreet. It is nice in here in the dark. Lampshades, walls, houses, roads, the state. I work with the surface. The street is a metaphor and also quite real. Like the ocean. The deep blue yonder is always present. Death is always present. I wake at night. Alone.

  Q. It was a house full of secrets. A sky full of stars. Mothers with their stars and smiles.

  R. White interior. Who created it? What does the white stand for? Blond woman, women’s building, World’s Fair. The White House. It’s the white color, the clear white thoughts.

  S. The American woman. History of the beauty contest. Freak show. Angel snake girl. Come (CUM) and see her beautiful body and her ugly face. Snake face. A white circus, white presidents. America is governed by white presidents. Men trapped between being humans and apes. Fuckiefuckie.

  T. Daddy’s Girls and Rulers of the Universe. They were not all alike. They were not all white. None of them was genuine. They all ruled and destroyed things. They all loved sucking cocks.

  U. Cock-sucking is a fantastic thing as well. Sucking dicks all day long is something real. It tastes of salt and shit and human being and black water. You can think about something else, you can’t think about nothing. Ten dollars. Nothing. White houses in your mouth. Clear white thoughts.

  V. Death is black. Sleep is black. Night is black. When it’s black you might as well be dead. I want to know that they will not burn my body. I want to be buried as I am. I don’t want any man to touch me when I’m dead. I want to know: How many times can my heart break?

  W. Some experiences are significant. Who you are screwing is significant. If you have a house is significant. If you are white if you are a woman if you are alone. Your feather fingers, please caress me with your feather fingers. Harder with your fingers. That smooth tongue you have in your mouth.

  X. It just happened to be like that. Everyone has a background. Everything has a beginning. Everything reaches its end.

  Y. A vision of the city. Reproduction. Machines. Now artificial reproduction is possible. Reproduction of history. Artificial historiography. Artificial bodies.

  Z. It shaped an entire upbringing. It was overrun with weeds around the house in Ventor. Textile. Surface. Text. Theater. Stage sets. Fabric. It wasn’t architecture, it was pure white thoughts. It wasn’t real life; it was an experience. The textile character of the text. They were just fictional characters, a fictional girl, fictional figurants. It was fictional architecture and a fictional narrator. She asked me to embroider her life. I choose to believe in the one who embroiders.

  Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, July 29, 1968

  In a summer of never-ceasing rain, the doctors do not halt their diagnoses. Heavy curtains of tears and time and therapy sessions outside Dr Ruth’s window. Vicious explosions of sunlight inside your hospital gown amidst the summer downpours, invasions of insects into the depths of the hospital and hospital food, and all the time you light new cigarettes and leave them to balance on the edge of the desk.

  DR RUTH COOPER: We’re on your side in this hospital, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Yeah.

  DR RUTH COOPER: We have nothing to do with the police investigation.

  VALERIE: Police faggots.

  DR RUTH COOPER: I can see you’re distressed, Valerie.

  VALERIE: I’m not distressed.

  DR RUTH COOPER: It’s O.K. to cry.

  VALERIE: I’m not crying.

  DR RUTH COOPER: Crying can be beautiful.

  VALERIE: I’m not crying, it’s my brain bleeding.

  DR RUTH COOPER: Here’s a handkerchief, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Thanks, but crying isn’t my style.

  DR RUTH COOPER: O.K., what are you thinking about when you’re not crying?

  VALERIE: Regrets that I made bad art. That’s the only thing I can imagine crying about.

  DR RUTH COOPER: How about you smoke one cigarette at a time, Valerie?

  VALERIE: Yes, what about it? When is the trial?

  DR RUTH COOPER: Later.

  VALERIE: Is Andy still playing dead in hospital?

  DR RUTH COOPER: I want to talk about your mother.

  VALERIE: I’m not ill.

  DR RUTH COOPER: I want to talk about Dorothy.

  VALERIE: May I smoke a cigarette then?

  DR RUTH COOPER: Yes.

  VALERIE: May I smoke two cigarettes?

  DR RUTH COOPER: You can start by smoking one cigarette. Listen to me now.

  VALERIE: Dorothy always smoked two.

  DR RUTH COOPER: I understand. I’m going to tell you how I see your situation.

  VALERIE: Or more.

  DR RUTH COOPER: More?

  VALERIE: Cigarettes. Come on, Cooper. Tell me who I am. I’m used to fortune tellers.

  DR RUTH COOPER (smiles, and then looks serious): I believe you are living in a delusion and you are currently in a schizophrenic reaction of the paranoid type.

  VALERIE: Really. And I can tell you about men’s flagrant inferiority. About nature’s true order. There is no reason to involve male mice. Mouse girls can have mouse babies with one another. I can tell you about my laboratory research.

  DR RUTH COOPER: Even though you make strenuous efforts to appear a hard, tough, cynical misanthrope, you are actually only a frightened, depressed child.

  VALERIE: Call it what you will. You will never know my real name.

  DR RUTH COOPER: That’s my impression. A scared little child. Full of fear. Full of self-loathing.

  VALERIE: My impression is that you are a scared little male-female. My impression is that your efforts are utterly futile. My impression is that you are a really stupid little cock-sucker. But it isn’t your fault. It’s all a result of your unfortunate background under patriarchy.

  DR RUTH COOPER: So we are talking about a schizophrenic reaction of the paranoid type with deep depression and serious potential for destructive acts.

  VALERIE: I’m not ill.

  DR RUTH COOPER: You are extremely ill, Valerie. That doesn’t mean you’re n
ot a very gifted, headstrong woman.

  VALERIE: This is no illness. I repeat. My condition is not a medical condition. It’s more a condition of extreme clarity, of stark white operating lights illuminating all words, things, bodies and identities. Within a stroke or a shout of you, Dr Cooper, everything looks different. Your so-called diagnosis is an exact description of woman’s place in the system of mass psychosis. Schizophrenia, paranoia, depression and the potential for destructive acts. Every girl in patriarchy knows that schizophrenia, paranoia and depression are in no way a description of an individual medical condition. It is a definitive diagnosis of a social structure and a form of government based on constant insults to the brain capacity of half the population, founded on rape.

  DR RUTH COOPER: I want to help you, Valerie. But to do that I need to know more about you.

  VALERIE: I have my own qualifications from the Psychology Institute and Animal Laboratory in Maryland, which means that I will apply my own diagnoses.

  DR RUTH COOPER: Yes, I understand you’re one of their star students.

  VALERIE: I was filled with happiness that day. I whistled and sang and drank cheap wine. I tried to keep on the sunny side. I always had gold and silver threads sewn into my dresses.

  DR RUTH COOPER: Tell me about that day, Valerie.

  VALERIE: No. Qualifications are just a way of separating people.

  Bristol Hotel, April 14, 1988

  The smell of dead shorebirds and prostitution permeates the hotel room and as the light slowly retreats from the window, the sounds of the night take over, sirens blot out memories, and you have given up all attempts to sit by the window making notes. To write now would be to throw yourself into an ice-cold tidal wave and drown in the searing pain of salt and self-hatred. Instead you try to sleep away an hour in the yellow sheets, to concentrate on the sound of waves from a different time, the surfboard beneath your feet, the breakers, the blue jellyfish, your childish bodies promising surf and play forever, sun and sparks of life and skin, his smile enchanted.

  *

  Surfing days, the ’50s, all spiral past into your slumber, a moment of blinding light in the screaming blackness of space. Silk Boy with his salty, unkempt braids, the irresistible junkie look. A long time ago you loved to search for sea creatures and debris out where it was deepest and bluest, small sharks, crabs and seahorses. A long time ago you dreamed of drowning in someone’s arms.

  *

  There is no hotel in this whore-mongering state where you have not been raped and received payment and all you wish now is that you had never entered this shark-industry and that death would not come so fast, not like this, and not to you. Just before you fall asleep, your hand reaches for the dying light, the glimmering luminescence in the murky brown water.

  Silky?

  . . . are you there, Silly Boy? . . .

  SILK BOY (his breath moist and salty): I’m here, Valerie. I’ll sit here until you fall asleep, if you like.

  VALERIE: The docks are for old thoughts.

  SILK BOY: The docks are for old ladies, you mean.

  VALERIE: Old ladies and surfing and death. In the swimming pool, Mrs Cox always practiced furthest in, at the shallow end.

  SILK BOY: A million-dollar mermaid, a million-dollar hooker.

  VALERIE: What was it Mrs Cox always said?

  SILK BOY: When I’m wet I’m fantastic, when I’m dry I’m just a boring housewife.

  VALERIE: It was so cold, the bridal bouquet froze.

  SILK BOY: My little bouquet of frost.

  VALERIE: It was you and me and the ocean and it was always summertime. I remember chasing you under the water. You were my underwater fantasy.

  SILK BOY: Are you cold?

  VALERIE: Are we still married?

  SILK BOY: No.

  VALERIE: Why aren’t we? All my life I’ve believed we were married.

  SILK BOY: You have holes in your memories. The drugs have blotted them out.

  VALERIE (reaches her hand out into the dying light): Give me a kiss.

  SILK BOY: Why?

  VALERIE: Because I need it. Because I’m going to die. Because I’m scared of dying.

  SILK BOY: You reek, Valerie. Your mouth smells of death.

  VALERIE (her hands fumble with the sheets): Kiss me.

  SILK BOY: Why did you leave me?

  VALERIE: Did I?

  SILK BOY: You left me.

  VALERIE: Did I? I don’t remember. I’m going to sleep now. I’m going to sleep and I’m going to dream it’s night, and I’m alone in a hotel room in San Francisco, and you’re dead, and there isn’t a question about death in every grammar structure.

  SILK BOY: There are no sharks in death. Death is just the end.

  VALERIE: Death is the only happy ending.

  Alligator Reef, December 1953

  U.F.O.s Have Been Spotted in Northern Japan and Almost All Over America

  That morning the Rosenbergs were executed at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. Silk Boy had been out during the night and picked magnolias and palm leaves, sold a few wet kisses and feigned gasps outside the motel on the way home and then popped in to see Mrs Cox’s partner in the coffee bar, where he collected his birthday present: a handful of dollars and a wedding cake with pink marzipan that someone had ordered and forgotten to pick up.

  *

  Your scribbles float out into the ocean, they spill over onto your hands, onto furniture, walls and the back of used paper. You write wherever there is room. Your Royal 100 was left with a shark in Alabama, a beautiful, dangerous territory with a lot of money and extravagant food; in the afternoons you went deep into the forest with him to practice shooting birds. From that time on you have avoided sharks with weapons.

  *

  Alligator Reef, the hot, briny coast, where frost flowers spring up on all the car windows. At night you dream about Ethel Rosenberg in the electric chair, that she is alone in the desert wearing a bikini and she is weeping, that she writes reams of shocking-pink begging letters to the American government to be allowed to live.

  THE STATE (a priest, woken in the night, holds your hand tightly for a moment): Valerie Jean Solanas, do you take this boy?

  VALERIE: Yes . . . I take this boy, and I will always love him.

  THE STATE: Do you take this girl, Valerie Solanas?

  SILK BOY: Yes, I’ll protect her from all that scares her. When she’s with me, I’m not afraid anymore. I’ll hold her hand when she cries.

  (Fuck Silly Boy.)

  (Fuck the State.)

  (Fuck God.)

  (Fuck you God, if you saw everything by the river.)

  VALERIE: No, thanks. I don’t need any protection. Never have, never will. I’ll protect him.

  THE STATE: Do you take his declaration of love, Valerie Jean Solanas?

  VALERIE: No. I’ve always taken care of myself. That’s just it. I have need of no man, no state, no priest, no god, no father, no money.

  THE STATE: Yes, or no?

  VALERIE: No.

  SILK BOY: Valerie, it’s not important now. I only want to be where you are, only want to hold your hand when you cry.

  THE STATE: Do you take this boy’s declaration of love or not?

  VALERIE: No, I’ve told you. He has to say what I tell him if I’m going to take him.

  SILK BOY (to the priest): Do as she says.

  THE STATE: Well?

  SILK BOY (to you): Come on, Valerie. I’ll say what you want.

  VALERIE: O.K. . . . I, Beach Boy, take Valerie Jean Solanas to live in her shadow and love her and she will be my officer and my warrior . . . my dog against the night.

  SILK BOY: O.K. . . . I, Beach Boy, take Valerie Jean Solanas to live in her shadow and love her and she will be my officer and my warrior . . . and my what else?

  VALERIE: I am your dog against the night.

  SILK BOY: I am your dog against the night.

  VALERIE: You . . . You’ve got to say you. Not I.

  SILK BOY: Yo
u are my dog against the night, Valerie.

  Alligator Reef, 1953–1954

  New Nuclear Testing on Bikini Atoll

  The sun sinks across the sand dunes and in the campsite kiosk the television set flickers. In flippers and goggles you are waiting for Silk Boy to appear between the beach umbrellas with a plastic bag filled with a bottle of bubbly, sweets, roll-ups and broken goggles. Mrs Cox has given you extra sweets and extra cigarettes. She has warned you about swimming too far out, warned you about the great white sharks, the killer whales, the gigantic tiger shark.

  *

  Mrs Cox lights fresh cigarettes and keeps you company in a camping chair with her old shark stories and she lets you eat what you want without paying. Hamburgers with mustard and gherkins and flat Coca-Cola. There are no sharks, Mrs Cox, just the ocean just the stars just ten sorts of flowers just happy endings. The surfers hurtle through the waves and Silk Boy is always late, always stays far too long at Mr Biondi’s.

  MRS COX: Tell me about your little brother.

  VALERIE: Seahorse. Animal photographer. Happy.

  MRS COX: I can see you’re brother and sister.

  VALERIE: Yes. Though he was born a year after me. April 9. Same day but exactly a year later. Dorothy wanted twins. She made sure she got knocked up good and proper. She calls us her twin boys.

  MRS COX: When is she coming back?

  VALERIE: Dorothy? . . . Any time. She’s always calling the phone booth with new dates, but we say we want to stay here.

  MRS COX: And money?

  VALERIE: Dorothy sends us money all the time.

  MRS COX: What’s his name?

  VALERIE: Silk Boy.

  MRS COX: I mean, for real. An actual boy’s name, I mean.

  VALERIE: He’s just called Silk Boy.

  *

  When Mr Biondi pulls down the blinds in the bedroom, the beach and the sky and the light disappear, and in the sheets Silk Boy laughs. The skin nearest his eye and on his wrists and groin is quite translucent and he is always brimming with giggles and lipstick kisses and devotion. Mr Biondi and all that silky skin, making him weep and laugh and shout out for God and his mother and eternity. And in his large and beautiful house he groans, his hands deep in the boy’s hair, and he wishes he would never need to come and the boy would never leave. And when he does finally come into that childlike mouth, he just wants to come again, to drown, to melt into the boy.