The Faculty of Dreams

by Sara Stridsberg

  *

  Mr Biondi bathes in money and loneliness and he tries to hold on to those enchanted hands that are forever on their way to somewhere else and he always has more money in his pockets and always has more drugs. Later, as he stands waving from the solarium with his swollen lips, his bathrobe slips open and he stands naked and pleading before the boy and the ocean and his face is a forest of dead white trees and the boy twists out of his hands and runs off along the boardwalk.

  *

  When at last he returns, the sun has gone down and Mrs Cox has closed the shop and you have fallen asleep on the flagstones outside.

  The beaches are deserted now, the bathers have gone, the umbrellas have been cleared away. The waves crash against the shore too violently for anyone to want to vacation here and there is always a black flag flying at the lifeguard tower. Silk Boy walks over the beach with his empty bottles and you lie for days on end looking for U.F.O.s while he keeps busy, the little collector and worker. The campsite is empty and you move between the remaining trailers. All that descends over them is a green mist of beer bottles and a shower of campfire detritus and rain. Card games and dope games no longer work and Silk Boy turns his narrow back, sits smoking a pipe, complaining and hiding from your eyes. It is impossible to write with him in the trailer. You wish he would go and talk to Mrs Cox. You long to be alone, to be at home in Ventor, to have money, a house, a new Royal 100. Mrs Cox is very kind, but she is a fool like all the rest. Outside the trailer, the ocean is gray and dull, and inside, all your things are wet and smelly. Hanging from the ceiling are lines of photographs and notes and underwear drying. When the tourists come back, you will leave the trailer and return to the sea. There will be lights on in Biondi’s villa again.

  Silk Boy and you lie up in the reeds, as the clouds move slowly along beneath the heavens, and everything apart from the ocean is calm, and in your bags you have limitless hash, and he is not hustling anymore, just cashing in empty bottles and begging for small change in the bars, and Dorothy never comes to fetch you, and his skin is silk and streamers, and he still wishes for his own laboratory with male seahorses and photography fluids and of supporting you both with his work on the road and the beach. At night you lie in one another’s arms and plan the future. When night sweeps over Alligator Reef, he wishes for another boy, another time, another beginning.

  VALERIE: There isn’t anything you can’t decide. I wish you’d figure that out. There isn’t anything that can’t be redone.

  SILK BOY: Death can’t be redone. Your sex can’t. Your background can’t. Neither can your destiny. Or love. The executed don’t come back. I’m an alphabet of bad experiences.

  VALERIE: You don’t know the alphabet.

  SILK BOY: A . . . Alligator Reef. B . . . Boy. C . . . Cravings. D . . . Dead trees. Dead forests. Dead gulls. Downfall. E . . . Electric chair. F . . . Fucked up. Fucking fucked up. Forgotten. Fucked-up future. False identity. Film. Feathers. G . . . Grieving over nothing. Getting lost all the time. H . . . Hooker. Hopeless. High all the time. Happy about nothing. Hairless. Harmless. Hacking cough. Hacking hash cough. Hash hooker. Hooker kid. Whore.

  VALERIE: Whore begins with W, not H. I?

  SILK BOY: O.K. I . . . Idle. Impossible. J . . . Jackass. K . . . Kisses that hit you right in the heart. L . . . Loser. M . . . Mr Biondi. N . . . Night. O . . . Outsider. Oral sex. P . . . Problems. Q . . . I don’t know any words beginning with Q. There aren’t any words beginning with Q.

  VALERIE: Quoailler.

  SILK BOY: I can’t speak Spanish.

  VALERIE: French. To constantly flick your tail. Or querelle. Meaning argument.

  SILK BOY: Q . . . Something French. French kisses. R . . . Real boy. S . . . Seahorses. Male seahorses. On the skids. T . . . Ten for a fuck. Thunderbird. U . . . Underwater thoughts. Unholy mess. Underworld . . . V . . . Valerie Jean Solanas. W . . . Wasteland. X . . . X-gene. Y . . . Y-gene. Z . . . Zebras. Zebra stripes on your skin. Zebras on TV.

  VALERIE: Being obsessed with your own doom and the netherworld isn’t going to make you free. You can control everything if you want to.

  SILK BOY: Flowers. The sun. Half-light.

  VALERIE: There are so many different ways you can be in the half-light. Your gender isn’t a prison. It’s an opportunity. There are just different ways of telling. Write your own account.

  SILK BOY (laughs): I can’t write.

  VALERIE: That’s not the end of the world. I’ll teach you to write.

  And then the calls home to Dorothy.

  *

  Just the ocean in the background, terrifying telephonic creatures twisting and straining in the wires blown to the ground and you, unable to say anything and unable to hang up. Her breath, her way of exhaling cigarette smoke into the receiver. For long moments she is silent, sometimes she whispers your name. Is that Valerie Jean?

  *

  The large black receiver, the hopelessness and the sand whipping fiercely into your eyes. Her voice sounds as if it were underwater during these conversations. The smell: salt, iron, lies and menthol.

  *

  Sometimes she weeps, sometimes she holds lengthy monologues about her life in the desert. Silk Boy sits outside the phone booth, waiting.

  Alligator Reef, Winter 1955

  The Hiroshima Maidens Arrive in New York for Free Plastic Surgery

  Sweeping over the beaches is the cold breath of the white shark, the strong smell of cigars and dollars. The umbrellas disappeared long ago, there is frost in the reeds and it is no longer possible to sleep on the beach. You can stay as long as you want on the mattresses on Mr Biondi’s solarium. There is food in the house: bread, spaghetti, potatoes and things in tins and dope. All day long the boy sits in front of mirrors with salt crystals in his hair, making lipstick kisses, kissing all the mirrors, writing on the glass in lipstick, Valerie Jean Solanas will be president of America. On the veranda he works on his seahorse collection, small dried seahorses in different colors that he sorts and organizes. Some still have seahorse babies in their stomach pouch, some are shriveled and atrophied and it looks as though they have wept for their young.

  SILK BOY: This little dad has two babies in his pouch.

  VALERIE: When’s Asshole coming back?

  SILK BOY (fingering the seahorses): He’s called Mr Biondi. One small and one large baby seahorse. The mothers aren’t involved at all. They take off pronto. Water duty, water fantasies, all sorts.

  VALERIE: Listen, Sherlock. We have a problem. A problem other than seahorses. Bigger than seahorses.

  SILK BOY: I wish you were a little male seahorse with a tiny pouch like that and I could live in it.

  VALERIE (picks up some of the seahorses in her hand and talks to them in a seahorse voice): Right now we’re living in an asshole’s house. And right now I’m wondering how we can get out of here . . . (holds the seahorses in front of his face) . . . This is Asshole. And this is Dope Boy . . . And this is Valerie . . . Once upon a time there was a low-down Mr Shark who loved naïve little dope boys . . . masochistic little dickhead whore-boys . . .

  SILK BOY (pries open your hands and takes the seahorses from you): Stop it.

  They break when you do that.

  VALERIE: We’ll have to sort out this matter of the seahorses another day. I don’t want to live here anymore. And you don’t either.

  SILK BOY: Without Mr Biondi, there’ll be no money for college.

  VALERIE: It’s not real college money. We’ll just be whores there too if it’s Biondi Asshole money.

  *

  There are no more temporary photo labs in the campsite toilets. He has got his own little lab at Mr Biondi’s; he generally gets what he wants from Mr Biondi. A real room with real equipment where he can work all night in the subdued light. When you are allowed in, you usually sit with a little flashlight under a blanket, reading a book and commenting on the photographs he drops down to you. And when Mr Biondi returns from his travels, Silk Boy moves upstairs to the large floral
bedroom.

  *

  A cold spell sets in, sharks glide in and out of the bedroom, black leaves fall on the small garden and at night you lie in the porch seat wrapped in blankets, planning for the future, sending off for educational materials from every university in America.

  Or recording a tape for Dorothy.

  *

  Snow falls on the beach, a thin layer of frost on the sand and the lifeguard towers and the parasols. You record the sound of the ocean and then the sound of the snow falling on the beach. It is crackly and strange, but beautiful. Silk Boy moves noiselessly at the edge of the beach, under orders to be quiet.

  *

  Afterwards you pull the ribbon out of the cassette and use it as decoration for a present you are sending to Georgia. In the box, sand and marine toys; shells, seaweed, starfish, reeds.

  *

  And some of the wind, too, that chases between the blue-black palms.

  Bristol Hotel, April 15, 1988

  NARRATOR: The deceased is talking to herself again.

  VALERIE: What’s she saying?

  NARRATOR: She’s talking about various things. She’s saying: It’s hypothetical. She’s saying: It’s not hypothetical. She’s saying that she doesn’t like arithmetic.

  VALERIE: Arithmetic . . . No credit, no discount. No credit, no discount. I don’t like arithmetic. And don’t have gang wars over territories. It’s not nice.

  NARRATOR: I’ll tell them to change your sheets. I’ll tell them to bring some food up for you.

  VALERIE: Tell who?

  NARRATOR: The staff. I’ll sort out your papers and your ideas. If you want, I’ll make notes for you. Or read aloud from the manifesto.

  VALERIE: There’s no staff in this hotel. I don’t make notes anymore. Instead, tell me what you were thinking about when you were sitting there in the window before.

  NARRATOR: I suppose I was thinking about you.

  VALERIE: You’ve fallen in love with someone who doesn’t exist.

  NARRATOR: A virtual love affair. A girl in the sand who vanishes, my mother’s childhood, my father’s broken heart.

  VALERIE: It’s not your death material. It’s not your screwing material.

  NARRATOR: May I hold your hand?

  VALERIE: You’re romanticizing this and sentimentalizing it. The notes will go up in flames in the backyard in Ventor. The dying material is just vomit, diarrhea, phlegm and fear. There is no point in sitting here waiting. All this is just nothing-at-all material. It will all vanish.

  NARRATOR: I’m so sad you won’t survive this story.

  VALERIE: There’s really nothing to be sad about. I’ll give you some good advice if you’re sad, because the story ends here. Invite home a ragged girl panhandler who needs somewhere to sleep and something to eat. Invite the girl addicts who sleep in garbage cans. Invite a crack whore, a bag lady, a maniac. Stop in the subway and talk to the psychotic hookers. Don’t walk away when she starts ranting and raving about nothing. Ask where she comes from, what she needs, what you can help with, what she has in her notes, if you’re so interested in dying crack whores. Visit hostels, mental hospitals, drug ghettos, red-light districts, jails. The world’s out there waiting for you, baby. The material is called SHE’S EVERYWHERE.

  NARRATOR: I’m not stupid.

  VALERIE: And not particularly smart, either.

  Alligator Reef, Summer 1955

  The birds lie on the shore, battered by the wind and abandoned, and he patrols up and down in his tattered jeans and salt tangles and the perpetual cigarette in the corner of his mouth. White feathers flutter around him as he carries them away to bury them in the reeds, lifting them out of the sand with such care. The giant birds, the ernes and the largest gulls, look like children in his arms. The clouds consume the last of the wintering light and you have grown tired of the camping life and Mr Biondi and the ocean’s way of being merely beautiful and unconcerned. Silk Boy and you each have a place at Jacksonville College for the autumn and he weeps through the night because he thinks he will appear a fool there.

  VALERIE: I don’t think you should touch those disgusting creatures.

  SILK BOY: I don’t want them to lie there all alone.

  VALERIE: Death is lonely. And they’re only rubbish. Shit corpses.

  SILK BOY: I can’t be here and know they’re lying alone all over. You don’t need to stay and stare.

  VALERIE: It makes no difference how many you bury. There are more all the time. They stink. They make your hands smell of death.

  SILK BOY: Would you leave me lying dead here on the beach?

  VALERIE (laughs): Little idiot.

  SILK BOY (a gull under each arm): Would you?

  VALERIE: I’d never let you die. I’ll make sure that you get to a school. We’re going to be students. We’re going to take on all of this.

  SILK BOY: But I’m just a fool.

  VALERIE: You have a research project on the coast. And you have research manager and research coach, Valerie Jean Solanas, by your side. I swear on my career that I wouldn’t let you fall like them.

  SILK BOY: My brain is full of dope and dicks.

  VALERIE: Your brain is full of dead birds.

  The underwater days at Alligator Reef are coming to an end; the shutters are open for the season, but the tourist beach is still empty. The water tastes of seaweed and the saltwater stings your eyes. You walk along wearing a wetsuit or jeans and a jumper beside Silk Boy, who has a cigarette in one hand and the little worn-out hash pipe in the other. Your clothes are salty and flecked with white. The ice crystals still keep forming in your heart and he chases you across the motorways and sand-dunes in his dainty dresses with his delicate wrists. You read your books and re-read them, and the pages are covered in ink scrawls, a drawing of the heart, kisses, stars, moons, and inky glosses in the margins: wet kisses, girls, male seahorses, future.

  *

  Silk Boy has a bad memory and bad teeth and he hides himself away in photo fluids in the campsite toilets and he forgets that you have to go to Jacksonville to register; he carries on working with the photographs of male seahorses, as if your departure were not imminent. You smoke two thousand five hundred cigarettes outside and talk to him through the toilet door. In the pink developing light he is happy, contentment glinting off him when he comes back out to hang his photographs on washing lines between the trees. The photographs are of you, the Atlantic, crabs, starfish, handbags and the dead kitten that washed ashore.

  SILK BOY: You’ll have worn all those books out with reading before we start.

  VALERIE: It’s just reading for pleasure. I’m not learning anything.

  SILK BOY: When I’m nervous, I forget what you’re supposed to do when you’re reading. I read bits of that book about seahorses over and over again. Then, when I get kind of electric, I forget to concentrate and the words stop meaning anything.

  VALERIE: I’ll be there the whole time.

  SILK BOY: But there’ll be nothing left of the books after you’ve finished, so I won’t have anything to read.

  VALERIE: Have you packed your bag?

  SILK BOY (with his gaze on a saltwater photograph): Go on your own, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Why?

  SILK BOY: It’s better if you go and collect the papers and everything. I’ll just get nervous and start stammering and fill something in wrong and back to front and give us away. And we need more money.

  VALERIE: Sometimes I think you’re in love with Asshole.

  SILK BOY: I’m just scared of ruining something.

  VALERIE: Nothing to be afraid of.

  SILK BOY: Biondi ran down a flamingo yesterday. There was blood on the car when we got back to the house. I don’t want to stay here either.

  VALERIE: Silly darling.

  He stands in the doorway with an octopus over one shoulder and lipstick on his teeth. That hopeless, silky smooth boy, the ’50s’ boy. The summer rain keeps falling on the beach and the little trailer, the new one you broke into
when you left Mr Biondi’s solarium. Together you sort out all the things you need for the journey. Pages of notes, yellow and ink-stained, books and photographs with the boy’s face cut out. You have written a tale about two campsite whores in a trailer on a beach in nowhere land and Silk Boy laughs into the cigarette smoke and outside the violence of the ocean rages; and in the story the campsite whores fight back against the sharks. The sunspots move softly over his small hands as he turns the pages; his mouth tastes of dope and snow.

  SILK BOY: How does it end?

  VALERIE: The sharks’ bodies are shooting targets.

  SILK BOY: How does our story end?

  VALERIE: A happy ending.

  SILK BOY: You won’t leave?

  VALERIE: I’m going nowhere without you. Do you like it when I read?

  SILK BOY: I think you’re a true writer. I think you’ll be president of America.

  VALERIE: And you’ll be the president’s wife. The most beautiful first lady.

  SILK BOY: I’m just a regular campsite whore.

  VALERIE: You’re the sweetest campsite whore in America.

  When you walk to the bus, he is asleep. The little whoreboy with so much money in his pockets and so much aversion to schools and unknown cities. You kiss his warm wrists and gather up your things.

  *

  The ocean birds screech outside the trailer and when he talks to himself in his sleep he sounds like a child – I don’t want more ice cream – not the sharks – no, not more sharks – I promise – just sing a smutty little magic song for nice Mr Biondi. His shins are sticking out over the damp, threadbare mattress (there are hundreds of Polaroids of his shins) and he sleeps with his hand covering his dick.