Oculus
Page 4
all the reasons we left, all the reasons we’re homesick still.
The first time I left, I watched the Statue of Liberty vanish
into a bloodless mile of water. I didn’t expect I would feel
nothing, Josephine says. The arrival, by comparison, fueled
this frenzy, this fire in me. There is no feeling like clenching
a new country’s soil in your fist, then washing it off with a new
country’s soaps. The fall we were both in Berlin, the image
Paul Colin painted of her graced all the rainy street signs:
La Revue Nègre Champs-Elysées, Le Tumulte Noir 1929.
I saw her at the German salons Marlene Dietrich took me.
Marlene watched her, as everyone watched her—the lick
of hair, her arms moving like steam engines. Perhaps
we even danced together, beaded skirts hiked to knees,
the Charleston in the empty predawn hours, bowls shattering,
chandeliers dropping their crystals, until security hurled
us outside and we laughed in the face of this exile,
the Indian summer warmth sloughing all the dead weight
away. It was a life worth abandoning anything for.
I left home because I dreaded how that screen disfigured me.
Though I don’t completely escape it here, Josephine says.
I want to tell her about my time machine. I want to say:
We don’t have to stay here, in this time and space,
where we are carrion pecked at by flaneurs and crows. Triple
leavetaking—body, birthplace, adopted home—Santa Monica
and St. Louis, New York, Berlin, Paris—we were born
to beg and bow in this country. So Josephine left, searching
for another exit, one without Jim Crow’s hoofprint
on every cinema, restaurant, door. We had to prove
ourselves different: our limbs, dancing, trained like racehorses,
bred, polished, for what? In the end, we still pined for shelter.
In the end, we still guarded our bones against the blaring thunder.
Anna May Wong Makes Cameos
Romeo Must Die (2000): I’m Aaliyah’s
sassy friend. I give her tough love
and good advice. Kiss Jet Li, I tell her.
The director cuts their kissing scene,
replaces it with a hug,
rendering my scene pointless
so they cut me from the film.
Kill Bill (2003): I’m Gogo Yubari’s
grieving twin sister. In my nightmares,
Chiaki Kuriyama swings her iron balls
over my futon. The noise maddens me.
To avenge her, I lunge with a steak knife
at Uma’s white veil. I die as my bones
crunch under her heels.
The Last Samurai (2003): I’m Tom Cruise’s
love interest’s younger cousin.
So frail I cry at the sound of a twig
cracking. In the end I am sacrificed
so Tom can shed tears—take comfort
in my pretty cousin as my spine goes limp.
“Hollaback Girl” (2004): I’m Gwen Stefani’s
archnemesis: the cute Asian
girl who disses her behind
the school bleachers. Once I was
her backup minion. Now no more—
I’ve gone rogue. Pharrell is the other
cameo. Together we conspire to take
her down. There are claws. There is gore.
In the end, the showdown is cut
to make room for Gwen’s cheerleading routine.
Memoirs of a Geisha (2005): I’m Gong Li’s
evil apprentice geisha. I trip young Sayuri
with my silk sash. I set her kimono on fire.
The rival okiya crackles, burns. As the beams
fall down in ashes, lightning whips the howling
door. Dew drips down my forehead, my jewels.
In the confusion, I perish, of course.
Anna May Wong Rates the Runway
Even the white models
all wear their hair in straight bangs.
The Asian models, too—like clones
they glide out, lush throats
throttled by nephrite. The editors
call the pieces “1920s chinoiserie.”
I call them glorified dog collars.
One by one they strut, chameleons,
fishnetted darlings with red lips
that imply: diablerie. These women
slip into the diabolical roles
I’ve played but don’t pay for it.
Now I am someone’s muse.
Good. It’s February, Fashion Week.
The coldest winter since weather
went live. Everywhere still—pale
legs exposed to infernal snow.
I want to trust the mohair
to keep me warm—I want to trust
the cloth that holds me close.
But in this room, the spotlight flatters
every flaw. When the show is over,
the applause is meant for stars
but my ovation is for the shadows.
Anna May Wong Dreams of Wong Kar-Wai
I know what it is to pretend to be safe
in my fulvous skin. So much pretending
can bring a girl to her knees.
But in Wong Kar-Wai’s world, no one
needs to pretend. The mise-en-scene
of Fallen Angels: Hong Kong trance,
butcher’s storefronts, stolen ice cream
trucks. Or 2046: the train of lush cyborgs
going forever nowhere. In the Singapore
hotel room, Tony Leung writes his alien
love stories. Across the world, Happy Together:
Leslie Cheung empties his apartment
in Buenos Aires. Sets for the beautiful
and lonely. In Chungking Express, I watch
Faye Wong smoke cigarettes between takes
in cropped cut, oversized button-down, grosgrain
shorts. She doesn’t leave her tape deck alone,
but complains she is sick of that track,
“California Dreamin’.” The song makes
me homesick, nostalgic even, and I know
this is absurd because it came out in 1965,
after I die. Whatever John Phillips meant
by feeling safe in L.A., I can relate.
Sometimes I pretend so much I believe
myself. On the set, I try on the yellow wig
and trenchcoat that Bridgette Lin wore
smuggling cocaine in the first act.
The plot has a hole: why does Bridgette wear
a blonde wig, if she didn’t want to arouse
suspicion? I have played many criminals,
but no one like her, who fell asleep
in a hotel room with the police officer
gazing at her, in love. If I played her role,
I imagine walking through Causeway Bay
in 1929, my cigarette lighting my way,
the most conspicuous woman in the world.
But the role I’d rather play is Faye’s:
tomboy who breaks into her true love’s
apartment to add goldfish to his fishtank.
Or Agent, in Fallen Angels, who sets up crime
scenes and goes to her assassin’s room
to touch herself. Or Maggie Cheung’s role
in Days of Being Wild: she asks the traitor
in her bed, does the empty night fertilize
this barren soil? She is ruddy in pale light,
limp with the pain of wakefulness. Far away,
the palm trees flare over wet boughs. Home
is in Macau. The rain readies her for her dim
walk home. I’ve never cared for love stories.
I praise a story of heartbreak. I praise
how beauty looks during a blackout.
Anna May Wong Stars as Cyborg #86
The future is as sterile as a robot’s loincloth.
I drown my hands in sanitizer until they pucker.
Where this soapbox tree germinates, I collect
my germs and make a fountain of them.
Because yellow is yarrow and soot, and the future,
I’ve learned, is no suture. Because where I’m from,
these kisses are infections. Because dirt’s
ammunition against discipline, the blood fills
my clean mouth with dismay. Am I surprised—
Hollywood still assumes we are all the bastard
children of the same evil dictator? That phosgene
and mustard will rack our titanium Maoist husks
until some white man with slanty eyes rescues us
from our mealy, pliant selves? Am I to wear Dior,
wrap my mouth in bloody tulle, before kneeling,
bending to kiss a mouth dirtied by Pantone 136?
No fucking thanks. Because where I’m from,
these kisses are infractions. Darlings, let’s rewrite
the script. Let’s hijack the narrative, steer
the story ourselves. There’d be a heist, a battle.
Audre Lorde would write the script. My leading
man would be Bruce. We’d earn our happy ending.
Instead, they give me 1981. 2012. Quantum quasars,
new dystopia—plutonium wars. We’re not in Polanski’s
Chinatown anymore. Yet we still have the same bowl
haircuts. Bangs, big bang, a city of fetid promise, new
minor galaxy where we cannot touch. Instead our skin
is rust and metal. It gratifies the technophile in all of us.
Anna May Wong Goes Viral
In the future, there’s an oracle
where you can search
for where you belong. I ask this engine
and it replies:
do the deleted scenes choke you
up? In the future, I am young
and poor, so I become a webcam girl.
On camera I read passages
from Russian novels.
Curious netizens subscribe to my site
then cancel, ranting on forums
about my prudish act, how no one wants
to see a girl bend over
a thick book and wheeze.
After I go viral, I shut down my website.
Screenshots circulate cyberspace—
Anna, dressed as a purple panda,
Anna, taking a swig from a demitasse.
I collect all the passwords to my shrines.
I hack into them, grow a habit
of Photoshopping hyena spots onto
my own skin and uploading
my spoiled face onto Instagram.
My complexion has the mottle
of century eggs. My mustaches grow
feather tufts. I replace the paillettes
on my gowns with scales.
Recently, on the red carpet, I wear dresses
made of kelp, breathe
through fake gills and carry plastic
sacs full of saltwater.
Soon a crop of young girls will join me,
renouncing their dresses to wade
in the thrill of being animal.
Ghost in the Shell
In late summer’s cyberpunk heaven,
I wake up with a different face.
Who am I? Champion of drowning,
champion of loss—do I dare proclaim,
with a cyborg body, this humanity is my own?
My name is Motoko Kusanagi, investigator
cyborg for Public Security Section 9,
reporting a cyberterrorist crime. Year 2017:
someone has implanted Scarlett Johansson’s
face onto mine, hacked my ghost, installed
an imposter’s memories, reprogrammed
my optic nerves, diluted my brain into a white
projection. A Thermo-Optical camouflage
gone haywire, a rogue scrim for my body
that is not my body—I am now a double,
a replicant, an agent of carnage. Hacker,
Puppet Master of the laws that govern film—
let this message be clear: I do not comply.
You can bedevil me with fabrication, but I
transmit the truth. It’s in the data, the stars,
my blood, my spit, my wires, my parts. God
as my witness, I, Motoko, will self-destruct
this celluloid screen. So watch out, Scarlett
O’Hara, this brutish reign of cinematography
is about to end—history flensed, data wiped.
Flesh precedes computers, sweat precedes data.
Before everything was stolen, our lives were ours.
Let’s be gentle with each other in this new
megalopolis. The sun doesn’t set in Lost
in Translation, but I will make sure it does here.
Dirge with Cutlery and Furs
I’m usually very miserable,
so I buy a fur coat every year.
—Daul Kim, 1989–2009
When you died, I felt like kissing
a pencil and breaking it into pieces
eating it stuffed inside a spring roll
with enough ginger to make my nose snot
and it wasn’t because I knew you or coveted
your leathers: it was because you collected
forks and read Tolstoy on the toilet
seat in Paris, because you loved guinea
pigs and smiled on the Anna Sui
runway when you weren’t supposed to,
and for that I, too, like to fork myself—
you, who bought the pants off a homeless
man and wore them, who pretended
you were a monster with your paillettes
on macramé, your face paler than the flesh
of a nashi pear. What was this wish for the hour
when no one sees her face on the spoon?
Say hi to your warmest destination: not sauna,
nor tropics, nor lovers—it was the heat source
in the furs—capybara furs, flame-retardant
furs, furs knives couldn’t cut, furs that trapped
oxygen, human body, and you, swimming
now, out at sea in your midnight flowers,
Angora rabbits, where the monsters
stay lovely every fall and spring.
Yume Miru Kikai [The Dreaming Machine]
After Satoshi Kon, with lines borrowed from Satoshi Kon’s last letter, translated by Makiko Itoh
The impulse to have heart is the engine propelling us nowhere.
The Dreaming Machine predicts the past. The Dreaming Machine remembers the future.
Kon: transfiguration. Epochs, seasons, mise-en-scènes turn like weather vanes, but a single desire stays immutable.
In Millennium Actress, Chiyoko runs through flying snow. Hokkaido’s landscape burns her lungs. She veers toward the train station, plummets down a hill crawling with bugs and cherry blossoms.
In Tokyo Godfathers, the cardboard homes of the homeless are more inviting than the derelict homes of the blessed.
How to live your life in a world that gets so stupefying? Kon asked once in an interview.
The Dreaming Machine is vanishing, flashing like the teeth of the city you bypass on a plane to an unfathomable town.
In the preliminary sketches, three robots go on an adventure to a humanless multiverse.
Shot #1: girl robot nurses heart machine with sparkplug.
July the 7th. It was a rather brutal Tanabata …
2010: Satoshi lies on a bed, dreaming of dreaming machines. The rest of his life stares back in the five feet before him.
Always the question: is nowhere as unknown as we have feared? How will we brave th
is antimatter?
Hurting, hurling, hurtling—
Toward heaven. Fulfillment of what? May harbors, our heads on the laps of our springtime lovers …
Tanabata: a broken tree harbors wishes. On July 7th, 2007, I held one of these broken wishes to my chest as Yokohama’s harbors flared with drifting ships.
Where do you wander, where do you search for this petal that grows from the stone in your chest?
And, if I may ask you for one more thing—could you help my wife send me over to the other side after my death? I’d be able to get on that flight with my mind at rest if you could do that for me. I ask this from my heart.
Flight: the dreaming machine flies into the ruined city. All the computers sing. The circuits light up like fireworks.
Devastation: the temple painted gold. Devastation: the aftershocks of a prediction come true.
Shot #2: robot beholds a golden city that waits beyond the gateway. City ruined by its beauty—the tidal epochs hunt the domes.
On someone’s bed, I read Satoshi’s last letter. It was June. I was between apartments. A heat wave plowed through Brooklyn. My breath was summer’s jailbird. A beautiful man lay beside me, unmoved. His perfect ribs did not shake. This is how I knew to go.
Now the stolen gospels unwind. Now the blueprint disappears.
With my heart full of gratitude for everything good in the world, I’ll put down my pen. Now excuse me, I have to go.
The robot crosses the threshold, enters the ruined city. Spires gleam like crypts before him.
The Dreaming Machine’s website is defunct. 600 shots made; 900 to go.
Eerie suspension—a dreaming machine floats like a gondola on a blue lake. Mist covers his circuits, protects him. A dreaming machine flashes in the teleprompter.
When are you naked if you are a robot? Answer: when your circuits are exposed, your dreams open to hacking. Paprika knows this.
Three dreaming machines meet in an unknown future. Overhead, the meteors stop to listen, but in a moment desert us again.
The Five Faces of Faye Valentine
After Cowboy Bebop
One: her battle face is indistinguishable
from her poker face. No savant dares
to romance a face like that. Eyebrows, smirk,
her mouth a lawless husk. Master swindlers
beware: she will one-up you with a flawless
feint. A fugitive wind shrouds her name,
her debt. There’s a bounty on her swagger.