The Faculty of Dreams
Page 22
VALERIE: My hands are so heavy . . . I wish I could still ride a bicycle . . . I cycled in Central Park, I wrote postcards to you from the café in Central Park, I telephoned you from Elmhurst, telephoned from everywhere, but I didn’t know what to say . . .
DOROTHY: I’m an idiot. I missed all your calls.
VALERIE (holds Dorothy’s hand, it smells of soap and smoke): Your hands have grown old, Dorothy.
DOROTHY: Never mind. I wish I’d not been so afraid of getting old and disappearing. All that longing for eternity. Moran got sick from all those gasoline fumes.
VALERIE: You left me to drown.
DOROTHY: Mr Emin died in the swimming pool the other day. He wasn’t even particularly old, or particularly overweight. His heart just stopped mid-stroke. Do you remember Mr Emin? You used to play by the river and he was always following you like your little tail.
VALERIE: I don’t give a fuck about Mr Emin. I don’t give a fuck about Moran. I don’t give a fuck about you being scared of getting old. I want to know why you left me to drown.
DOROTHY (her face is just a glimmer, but her hands are warm and real): I don’t know anything, Valerie. I remember your hair being quite fair, I remember you catching sunbeams and tiny animals in your dress . . . You’re wearing that dress again, the little white one, it’s tight. I’m standing on the steps after a night in the bar. You’re sitting at the back, crying. Don’t leave me, you say. Don’t leave me with him, you say. I always left you. And I don’t know why. The sun glinting on the porch, the smell of sand and the netherworld on you when I return, and when I have to go again you try to hold me back. I leave you. And I don’t know why.
VALERIE: I don’t want to die with a side part, I don’t want to die in ugly clothes. I want you to help me put my silver coat on.
DOROTHY: I was so happy when you came along and I remember thinking I should travel that road with Louis once a year with new babies under my dress. At the hospital I swayed my butt to ward off the pain. And then, afterwards, when you were lying in my arms, the sky was all flamingo-pink. I have a memory of flamingos hurtling past in the sky outside the hospital window. Hundreds, thousands. All those skies that never come back. I’ll help you on with your beautiful silver coat.
VALERIE: Will you hold my hand when I die?
DOROTHY: I’ll hold your hand. I’ll stay with you until you fall asleep. We’ll say it’s night-time now and night-time is dark like a mother’s embrace or an eclipse of the sun.
The highway the lost highway headlights shining on the tarmac
fleeting white flashes the rain hitting the car windows dead animals asleep in the grass motel signs beside the motorways neon rain darkness girls with their
handbags under streetlamps
trucks lipstick gasoline desert oblivion America
ten thousand fathoms of ocean water
ten thousand different stories about water
lips hands milk teeth
drowning dresses and memories gaggles of girls
pussy souls pussy material death material lipstick literature
prostitution stories horses hegemony dream landscape
world literature presidents utopias a girl can do anything she wants
’50s ’60s ’70s ’80s Carter Reagan Warhol
you know I love you you know I love you
I’ll sit here until you fall asleep
there are no happy endings
you’re going to go to sleep now
you’re going to sleep and dream you’re flying over snow and over people applauding
that death is like a dark embrace
or an eclipse of the sun
when you shall pass through waters I will be with you
the rivers shall not cover you
and when you walk in the fire
the flames shall not burn you
One Last Lit Up Room, One Exploding Lily in the Darkness
Cosmo stands in the corridor with a bunch of enormous flowers in her hands. She smells of trees and water and she still remembers that you used to love lilies. Around her is a pall of smoke, or maybe frost, and little white clouds escape from her mouth when she breathes. The ceiling above you changes into sky and in the distance is the sound of the night watchmen disappearing in their clogs with their bunches of keys. She stands in the doorway to the laboratory in her newly washed white coat, and she and her towering boots take a few rapid strides toward you. And she kisses your mouth and your neck and her hands are all over your face. The color of the lining in her coat is gentle and comforting.
VALERIE: Who are the flowers for?
COSMO: We got the money.
VALERIE: What money?
COSMO: The research money. All the money we applied for. We got it in the end.
VALERIE: I don’t believe it.
COSMO: It’s true. We can do everything we want now. No restrictions, no limitations. We can make just mouse girls.
VALERIE: Just mouse girls?
COSMO: Just mouse girls.
VALERIE: No Y genes?
COSMO: No Y genes.
VALERIE: No walking abortions?
COSMO: No abortions.
VALERIE: You remembered the lilies this time.
COSMO: I bought lilies, I bought champagne. I forgot to buy cigars.
VALERIE: How much did we get?
COSMO: As much as we wanted. And more if we need it.
*
She takes your cool hand and pulls you up onto the workbench and she lies behind your back and holds you. Outside the window, hundreds of white albino rabbits are playing between the trees.
VALERIE: What are the rabbits doing?
COSMO: I let them out into the park.
VALERIE: Shall we go out with them?
COSMO: We’ll sleep for a bit first.
VALERIE: You’re not leaving now?
COSMO: I’m going nowhere.
VALERIE: You bought night-flowers filled with sunshine. Do you remember when the night watchman chased us across the park? Your hair always smelled of rain and grass. Your hair still smells of rain . . . I remember you held my hands above my head, you kissed me so hard I thought I would break.
COSMO: Sleep now, Ruler of the Universe.
VALERIE: Where’s the money?
COSMO: Shh . . . We’re going to go to sleep now and dream that there isn’t a question about death in any sentence. Death didn’t happen and we weren’t there. We’re going to dream that we’re not in a San Francisco welfare hotel for dying drug addicts and whores. We’re going to dream that I’ve been here all the time. Death isn’t in the same place as us.
VALERIE: Read me something while I fall asleep.
COSMO: Do you promise to sleep then?
VALERIE (faint smile): I swear on my breasts.
COSMO (opens the manifesto): You’ve never had any breasts to speak of.
VALERIE: Read it now.
COSMO: 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. It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so.
VALERIE (begins to fall asleep): Keep going. I want to know how it ends.
COSMO: The female function is to explore and discover the world, solve problems, invent, crack jokes, make music; it is to create a magic world. Every woman knows instinctively that the only wrong is to hurt others and the meaning of life is love . . . Valerie?
VALERIE: —
*
Cosmogirl holds you in her arms and her embrace is a black expanse of velvet in which to plunge and be enfolded. Desert animals screech in the darkness, waves pound against the shores, nurses turn on the lights in the dormitories at Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital, Dorothy sleeps her wine-induced slumber surrounded by rose wall
paper in Georgia. When Cosmogirl sees you are awake no longer, she stops reading, takes off her white coat and drapes it over your shoulders. Then she carefully closes the book.
Afterword
August 2005
After the novel is finished, I visit the Tenderloin in San Francisco, that small area of affliction in the middle of the city beside the Pacific Ocean. The Bristol Hotel is still a welfare hotel under the auspices of the city and the Tenderloin is still a form of hell. The hotel is said to have improved greatly since the ’80s, when Valerie lived there.
*
I have never been in a place that puts me so much in mind of death. The smells and the dirt, the vomit marks on the carpets and the wizened figures moving hurriedly up and down the corridors. The mangy cats and dogs, the scraps of food, the wheelchairs. Lost women, lost men.
*
They are all near death, they are all sorrowful, all smiling, many with the characteristic red patches on their faces; it is an incurable disease they share. Out on the street are men whispering, “Kill me, just kill me,” and women go in and out in their blood-stained furs.
*
The view from most of the rooms is dominated by a gigantic billboard covering the wall of the building opposite. In the entrance there is a soft drinks machine and a pay phone. I visit the hotel only a few times, fearful of being contaminated by their ruin. The smells scare me and all the time I long to be sitting in a bar in another part of town, long to be by the ocean. And I never understand what that billboard is trying to sell, but the text is a simple appeal in orange capitals: S T A Y.
*
This novel is dedicated to the residents of the Bristol Hotel.
SARA STRIDSBERG
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