by Douglas Lain
“You are not yourself,” Patricia says. That was the slogan for the exhibit and the promotional poster depicted a woman’s face reflected in a shattered mirror. The model in Kruger’s collage was a set of shards and fragments, her smile broken and her eyes closed so that what had been a moment of joy looked instead like inner torment.
FORGET EVERYTHING. The words were six feet tall printed in all caps against a blank background, taking up the entirety of the Northern Wall.
Before she started her first tour she stopped in the employee kitchen and looked for more coffee. She had a headache and hoped that more caffeine would solve it. The employee kitchen was the only room in the museum that wasn’t well lit, and she was relieved to sit in the relative darkness in a plastic charm set on rollers and examine the human-sized cupboards and perfectly serviceable sink. She put nondairy powder into the Styrofoam cup, poured cold coffee from a pitcher that had crusted to the heating element in the coffee machine, and then reheated the mess in the microwave with the hope that the powder would dissolve rather than remaining as a dry lump at the bottom of her cup.
“Will a microwave melt Styrofoam?” she asks us.
“I don’t think so,” I answer.
Charles gestures to me to be quiet with his right hand, making a slicing gesture at his own neck, and then leans forward on his leather sofa. “Does anything happen in the break room?” he asks.
Patricia doesn’t answer but just bites her lip and furrows her brow. She says she’s trying to understand something.
“What are you trying to figure out, Patricia?” Charles asks.
“One of the other docents, he’s a college student, an undergraduate, he’s going over his notes for Kruger’s art and he keeps saying the word ‘hyper-real.’ I think I know what he means, but maybe I don’t understand it. It’s just a buzzword. Sounds smart but isn’t, don’t you think? I’m going to stick with pointing out that Kruger wants to critique the museum itself, to question the aesthetics of power that we find in the museum. That’s what her artist statement says,” she says.
“Does anything happen in the employee break room?”
Patricia asks again if Styrofoam will melt in a microwave and then, when Rain refuses to answer, admits that she doesn’t want to go back to the exhibits. She’s afraid of remembering. She describes how she’s spilled some coffee on the counter, to the left of the sink and right in front of the microwave. The cup has melted a bit after all, the cup is hot to the touch, and she spills a little of the coffee on the counter and then puts down the cup and fetches a sponge from the back of the sink. The sponge is back behind the faucet, and it’s dry. She turns on the hot water.
“The coffee on the counter, it’s thin coffee, and with the cream in it I realize that it’s the same color as my hand. Wiping up my spill I realize that I’m tan, dark. I’m darker than I think I ought to be.”
“What color ought you to be?”
“I don’t know. Not coffee and cream colored,” she says. “Pinkish I think.”
“Do you still remember what you told me about yesterday?” Rain asks. “Do you remember what happened in your art class?”
The term “hyper-real” does mean something actually. It’s the idea of something that is taken to be real but that can only exist as a fiction. It’s like a map of a dream, a map wherein one mile equals one mile. Something that is hyper-real is more real than real, not because something hyper-real exists but because reality doesn’t exist. Patricia remembers this now. The other docent, the graduate student, he was explaining the concept to her when she noticed that she was spending her morning as a black woman.
“‘It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle,’” the grad student told her, quoting Baudrillard. He had longish black hair that hung down in his eyes, was wearing a plaid shirt and button fly jeans, and spoke without real inflection. Everything he said sounded like a question, like he was befuddled even as he was explaining it all.
“Does anything happen in the employee break room?” Charles asks. He’s clearly impatient now, wanting to get to the good bits. I expect him to ask her if she might be forgetting something, like maybe there was an alien in the room with them, or maybe she had an out of body experience. Rain likes for there to be lots of big effects in his stories.
The grad student thought this concept of unreality, of hyper-reality, applied to Kruger’s work because her work created the idea of a justice and equitable world that didn’t exist. Her work was about the kind of society that could only exist in critique, only exist in comparison to something that’s gone slightly wrong.
“Your moments of joy have the precision of military strategy,” Kruger’s poster read. What Kruger was positing, sneaking in, was the idea that there might be a joy, an enjoyment, that wasn’t precise or specific, but that was generalized, polymorphous, and free.
“I’m not who I think I am,” Patricia says. “I realized that. It took some time, but I figured it out.”
10
UFOs and skepticism
The hypnotic session lasts for three hours and includes a lot of repetition, going over the basic facts again and again until we finally come up with something new that’s even more absurd.
First off, to reiterate, Patricia had switched bodies. The woman who had been an artist’s model became convinced that she was Patricia and the opposite happened as well. But then, after this switch what Asket, or maybe Patricia, figured out while at the Portland Art Museum, what the work of Barbara Kruger inspired her to remember, was that her real name, Patricia’s real name, was Carole. Patricia was really Carole Flint.
Apparently before that art class, before the aliens even landed, Patricia had seen a UFO, and then, while trying to remember that encounter with the help from a prominent Ufologist, she’d switched bodies with his wife…with Harold’s wife. And, what’s worse is that this story involving Harold is something I remember. I’ve heard part of it before. That is, we did work with a contactee named Patricia. She’d auditioned for Harold and me back in 1986 and we ultimately decided not to work with her, not to include her in the book.
Harold nicknamed Patricia the Rainbow Woman because she’d come to Harold with this story about seeing a UFO at a Rainbow Gathering. We were especially allergic to what she had to offer us at the time as the book we were working on was entitled UFOs and Skepticism, but before we rejected her Harold spent several weeks working on her case. He’d examined her drawings, staged a Happening and, if I’m remembering correctly, gotten into a bit of trouble with this girl. Something about a visit to a hotel room.
“I went to his lecture at the Blue Stockings bookstore. He spoke about how Ufologists needed to stop seeking explanations and accept the experience as something that is opposed to all explanations. He thought he was being smart, but I knew. I knew he was lying,” Asket says.
What happened was that Patricia participated in group sessions for several weeks, all the while repeating her story about the Nordic types who visited her during the Rainbow Gathering.
Back then, before the landing, Patricia was in her late twenties and floating around Haight-Ashbury as if she believed she would never reach thirty. She would work as a temp sometimes, usually as a secretary or in data entry, and on the weekends she helped out with a ’zine called Processed World. That was how she first heard about Harold. The people around that little ’zine were all big fans of Fluxus and mail art.
“Johnny invited me to the Rainbow Gathering. I was about to turn twenty-five, I had enough money for the trip, and we wanted to see a UFO,” Asket says. “You were there,” she says. She opens her eyes at this point, sits up and looks at Charles Rain.
“Relax,” Rain tells her. “You’re still relaxed,” he says.
Asket closes her eyes again and lies back down on the couch.
“What?” I ask.
“Was this back in ’83?
” Charles asks her.
“It was 1983.”
“Then, yes. You’re right. I was there,” he says.
“You had a really long beard then, even longer than your beard is now, and you didn’t stay in the woods but went back to the road, drove to a hotel.”
“That’s right,” Charles says.
“Do you remember me?”
“No,” Charles says.
“I look different. I look different now. I am different.”
At that time Charles was lecturing a lot, going to Esalen, New Age conferences, and really anywhere that would pay a speaking fee. At that time part of the package, one of his promises, was that he would bring the UFOs with him.
“‘Not everyone is able to see them,’” Asket says. “Your brochure said that not everyone could see the UFOs, and that sometimes people forget. But I saw them. The aliens showed up, just as advertised. Just as advertised.”
The Pleidien craft looked right, it was exactly the kind of silver disc that she’d hoped for, but it didn’t sound right. Patricia had expected to hear music. She expected the kind of music one hears emitted from a wind-up ballerina or a snow globe. She wanted to hear tinny notes produced by a metal comb or maybe organ music from a country fair.
“It didn’t sound like a carousel,” she said. Charles nodded. “It didn’t have any sound at all.”
The Christmas tree lights dropped down from the sky, everything went silent, and the Pleidiens put spiritual thoughts into her head. Looking at the saucer Patricia realized that the theory of reincarnation was true, that she’d been born many times. She realized that the Earth was in trouble, that humans needed to let go of fear and love each other, and so on…
It was exactly the junk food version of the UFO experience that Harold hated most. And Patricia’s manner was exactly that of the airiest of West Coast airheads. He’d frequently complained that the dumbest parts of the ’70s never ended, and this girl was a prime example. He’d wanted to get rid of her, had no interest at all in her story. That is, he had no interest until she asked him about his own UFO experience. She asked him a question she shouldn’t have known to ask.
“Why did you tell them to leave back then? Back in the ’50s?”
“What’s that?” Harold asked back.
“Why did you do that? They wanted your help, they wanted you to be the one, but you said no.”
Harold brought Patricia to his studio, set her up with paint and canvas and videotaped her Happening and when that didn’t work, when he couldn’t get anything more from her that way, he asked her to go to Budd Hopkins. They’d go together, she’d get hypnotized, and they’d find out what she’d really seen. But she wouldn’t go. She just told him the same details over and over again, and wore him down that way, letting him grill her for information, letting him ask her the same question in as many different ways as he could think of, but always offering the same nonanswer.
“What did they look like?” he’d ask.
“They looked Swedish,” she said.
“What color was their hair?”
“Nordic types.”
“How did they talk, what language did they speak?”
“I don’t know if they talked at all.”
Or:
“How long were they there?”
“I just remember lights were white, green, red, and blue.”
“Did they take you aboard?”
“It looked like a Christmas tree, only it was floating.
” But most of all, what Patricia told him was this:
“They want you to know me.”
“They want me to know about you?” Harold would ask.
“No. They want you to know me.”
“They want me to know about you?”
“No. That’s not it. They want you to know me,” she’d say.
“Okay. Okay. But why? What is it about?”
“Why did you quit? What was it that you were afraid of learning?”
What was new to me about this story, what I didn’t know before, was that Asket, or Patricia, whatever her name is doesn’t matter…she met Carole. There was a confrontation.
“Harold went to her hotel at two a.m. on a Thursday night. And I followed him there,” Asket says. “That’s what I remembered. That was what I learned after the art class, after I switched bodies with Shelly. That’s what I learned at the art museum that next day.”
“What did you learn? Tell us exactly.”
“The Pleidiens sent Patricia to him so they could switch us, so that Patricia could take my body and I could take hers. Only part of me went with her, or maybe more accurately, a part of me stayed with my body.”
“Say that again? Who are you?” I ask.
“I’m Carole,” she says. “The saucers made us trade. At the St. Vincent Residential Hotel, after the two of them, Harold and that girl, when they were finished fucking, I confronted them. And somehow, during that fight, we switched. I became Patricia.”
“This,” Charles says, “is fucking crazy.”
Asket doesn’t respond to this but just lies there on the couch, waiting for the next question. She looks like she’s fast asleep, deeply asleep, and I wonder if she’ll remember. I suppose that depends on what Charles Rain decides.
“You want her to remember this?” I ask.
“What do you mean? Remember what?”
“Remember that she was once married to Harold, for one thing,” I say. “I think we should let her remember.”
Charles nods, but it’s clear that this isn’t a point of interest, not to him. And looking at him with his chin in his hand, glancing over at Asket on the leather chaise watching her breathing, seemingly asleep, I realize that I’m no better off than I was at the start. We haven’t asked her one thing about Virginia, about what happened, about where she is.
“Asket?” I start.
“We should stop now,” Charles said.
“Wait a minute, I have to ask about Virginia. Where is she, Asket? Where did Virginia go? Did she surrender?”
“I don’t remember,” Asket says.
I regret calling Harold, regret agreeing to meet him at the Cedar Tavern, and most of all I regret telling him about Asket’s hypnosis. The reason I regret this is that Harold is sitting at the bar drinking whiskey and Coke, brooding into his snifter, and I’m stuck talking to Charles Rain about, of all things, “American Cinema.” He emphasizes the word cinema, the word must taste especially good in his mouth, but the only movies he knows anything about are big Hollywood sci-fi epics from thirty or more years ago. I count the liquor bottles, both the bottles and their reflections in the mirror, drink my own whiskey fast, and notice how the neon light behind the bar reflects onto the ceiling, while Charles tells me his theory about Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001.
“He’s a contactee,” Charles says.
“Kubrick is?” I ask.
Harold is sitting on the other side of Rain, looking into his shot glass as if he’s found money in it, and refusing to meet anyone’s eye.
“If you’ve seen 2001 then you know why I say that,” Charles explains.
“I would think you’d say it because you knew. Maybe your Space Brother buddies told you?”
“Oh no. We haven’t discussed Kubrick, but that ending, with all the colors and the planet forming in the darkness, the oceans of light, I’ve seen all of that. I saw it in real time. Saw it for the first time in 1963 and not on a movie screen. Kubrick came very close to the truth there. Such a masterful representation. He must’ve seen it too,” Charles says.
The reason we’re talking about Stanley Kubrick is because, next to the mirror and right above the bar counter, there is a poster of Jack Nicholson from The Shining. I made the mistake of asking Charles if he’d seen the movie when there was a gap in his conversation, when he reached the end of his dissertation on Forbidden Planet.
“What did you think of the E.T.?” I ask.
“Haven’t seen it,” Rain tells me. “Any good
?”
Harold interrupts finally. He picks up his shot glass, slams it down on the table, and then turns to us both and tells us we’re idiots.
“How can you believe her?” he asks. “It’s ludicrous.”
“Uh…” I say. “You’ll really need to be more specific.”
It turns out that what’s bothering Harold is the body switching. More specifically what bothers Harold is the fact that Asket claims to have remembered switching bodies. “Why would she think of herself as Carole?” he asks. “She knew, remembered, that she was really the black girl, that nude model, so why would she pursue me? It’s nonsense. She’s crazy.”
Both of us agree with him. That is, we both agree that the story Asket told us doesn’t make any sense, and if it weren’t for the fact that she came to us in red sequins, if it weren’t for the Missing Time, the imitation of my wife and the counter girl at the Gap, if it weren’t for the fact that the UFOs have already landed, we’d agree with him.
“If this woman had come to me before the landing I too would turn her away. She might have spiritual insight, but her mind is too disordered. That story…there would’ve been nothing to do with it before,” Rain says. “But she didn’t come to me, she came to you, to your studio, last week, and then your friend here came to me.”
Harold falls into silence again, just stares at his own reflection while the bartender pours him another whiskey and Coke. He frowns at himself and sits perfectly still on the bar stool, and I get the impression that he isn’t thinking about anything, but just working on his rage. His rage is a physical object inside him and he’s churning it around so that, when it’s well mixed, he can spit it at us again.
“Why did you go to him?” Harold asks. “That’s another thing that doesn’t make sense. Why would you trust him? If the aliens are doing something other than selling books and video cassettes, if they have something more sinister in mind for us than occasional traffic jams and tithing for the moon, then wouldn’t Rain be the last person you’d want to consult with?”