Come Back
Page 20
What about death? What is going to happen to me? Am I going to die? Because if my body is not here and I am talking to you . . . does that mean I’m dead?
Oh, I see; yes, obviously. You say I mustn’t talk about life and death because those terms are now meaningless.
Sorry, I’m not buying any of it. This is a postmodern manipulation. This is the ultimate postmodern nightmare. Look what you have done. The pope was right to warn us about you. Yes, the pope denounced postmodernism. I think it was the one called Ratkiller or Ratcatcher, the German Nazi, whatever his name was — no, wait, he was the Austrian. That’s it, he was the Austrian — like Schwarzenegger. He denounced postmodernism. Or he should have. As if you’re going to go around killing death! You can’t kill death. And you certainly can’t kill it by telling people not to use the word death.
At least admit this: if my body is gone, then . . . Jesus, how much I loved that cramped-up dry husk!
You are right, aren’t you? I was complicit. I was willing to watch my body gradually disappear and be replaced by various mechanical — or am I not supposed to use that word too? — devices.
So it’s all my fault? Everything is my fault?
Where is my body? It doesn’t hurt anymore. I am conscious of that. But when the pain goes away it’s as if it never hurt. It’s so easy to forget, isn’t it? They used to say that when you had a limb cut off, you would have phantom pain near where the organ existed. Will I experience phantom pain from the loss of my whole body? Or have you erased things from my memory? You say you didn’t. And I seem to remember everything. But how can you remember something like a body when it’s been gone for so long? When it’s been a long time, I may forget forever.
I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for everything I said about the homosexuals. I know why I was obsessed with Dash King. He was a saint. He should be canonized! He was the last of those who had any affection for the body. I mean, he was all fucked-up about it, with a perfect boyfriend he couldn’t touch.
And the drugs. Drugs are cyborgian, are they not? Part of the plot? Is it a plot? I was wrong to think drugs are reality. They are the opposite. Cyberspace is a drug.
This is very important. We are no longer in control of our own minds or bodies. Am I in control of what I’m saying?
“Why wouldn’t you be?” you say.
What kind of an answer is that? You’re not supposed to be some sort of non-directional narrative therapist, you’re supposed to be my friend. Maybe you’re not my friend. Maybe you’re my enemy. And maybe the homosexuals were my only true friends.
Of course, they were irritating and stupid, and ultimately their celebration of my life — way past my death — was a celebration of their own mediocrity and lack of imagination. But at least they liked to fuck. Oh, how they loved the body. They got AIDS. Some of them even continued to fuck after they had AIDS. Those homosexuals were addicted to the body, God bless ’em! Someday someone will realize how heroic they were. Of course, they had to die off. Even porn kills sex eventually, because eventually you become addicted to not having real sex — because who wants real sex when sex is better in cyberspace.
But there is no cyberspace.
So, right, okay. You say it’s just the difference between carbon-based and non-carbon-based technology. And I am no longer carbon-based. That’s very simple. You can certainly say it very calmly. So why do you look like that? Why do you look exactly the way you looked when I last saw you? I haven’t seen you in twenty years. Why do you look like that? It’s very comforting; but it’s not comforting to see you that way if that’s not the way you look. So, you don’t have a body? A real, sorry, carbon-based body? You can have any body you want, and you picked one today that you thought I’d like? Do you realize how condescending and fucking crazy that sounds? You say you picked that body just to please me? First of all, it’s not a fucking body.
I want my real body back. I want my old, decrepit, dry, smelly body. I know it wouldn’t have lasted forever — but I thought that when it died my soul would too. I see it all clearly now, you tried to give me hints. . . . Well, why didn’t you just tell me? You thought it would be traumatic? Well, it certainly fucking is.
So what about the Tranquility Spa? What about Allworth? The Doll Boy? Didn’t they exist? I saw them. I went there.
I miss Allworth.
You still don’t think it’s a good idea for me to hang out there? Why? Is it because it’s too real? Those people struggling with plastic surgery and their own bodies are simply too real? Is that it? Oh, you don’t want me to use the word anymore? Can you see how fucking hypocritical that is? Jesus, you can’t stop me from saying real if I want to. That bar was real and those monsters were real. And if I want to go out the door, they are still. And you can’t stop me from going out if I want to.
I’m going there.
Wait, how can I go out the door if I don’t have a body? How does that even work?
What about the human spirit? Isn’t that what we’re talking about? You may have put everything that was in my brain into a computer. All right, fuck you — bad word. You may have taken all my data and put it somewhere in cyberspace and given me this replica, this fog of a body, but what did you do with my spirit? I had a spirit, you know! I was her; no, I am not her. I was her; you’re not going to convince me that I am her. What is a human being without the spirit? You can’t capture the spirit and bottle it. That’s the whole point. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. That’s the whole point about spirit — you just have to believe in it. You have to have faith.
So what if that makes me sound religious. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of words. You don’t have to give power to them if you don’t want to. I still haven’t bought into this new universe you are trying to sell me. Maybe I have become religious — if religious means believing in the spirit.
One of the ten commandments is . . . don’t have idols. Thou shalt not . . . graven images. And all those puritans, and Quakers, and people who hate TV and entertainment — they distrusted imitation. And Plato hated it. Not like Aristotle. Plato didn’t like it that we imitated the real, because the real was not the real. The real was already distanced from his utopian vision of über-reality. And so to imitate that was to be even less real still. No, he didn’t like those lies upon lies upon lies. And then it’s in Shakespeare’s sonnets — the fake beauty of the dark lady: the dark lady is art and sex, that’s easy enough to figure out. The sonnet that’s all about her painted face — but it’s really evil. Shakespeare’s work creates a supreme discomfort with this love of paint, with art in general.
Excuse me, where did that come from? It’s from an essay by Dash King, about Shakespeare. But that’s not something I know. How did it get into my head?
Right, I don’t have a head!
We have always distrusted imitation. And even Baudrillard’s Simulations was a diatribe against a digitalized world — a world in which the real became a copy. Have I become a copy?
Christ, that’s not an answer to a question — when you say “don’t talk like that” or “don’t use those words”!
I’m thinking now about Dr. Ahmed. I didn’t talk all that much about him. I know you know he saved me and brought me to you. But that’s all you know. Well, he taught me to meditate. He took me through those dark times. He took us all through dark times. He is the one who saved us. And I’m sworn to secrecy. I was not to talk about him, because you know who he didn’t keep alive.
I felt so strange when Michael Jackson was in Dubai and Dr. Ahmed was considering doing the same thing for him that he did for me — giving him another life. Liza was there too. And I know she would have wanted another life, and needed one. And you know I love her; I will always. I feel sorry for what I didn’t give her. But she didn’t turn out too badly. Still, I don’t know if she was the real thing. Period. You know? I hate to say that, she wasn’t me — as much as I fucking
love her. And there we go. There was something of her that was already in real life a copy. I mean, every child is. I don’t think she would mind me saying that. She was a very talented copy — just not the real thing. You know, for some it didn’t matter; it never mattered. . . . Maybe that proves your point.
When Dr. Ahmed got me through the final liver transplant and I got the fake liver I have today . . . sorry, that I don’t have today . . . I almost forgot I have no body. Anyway, he taught me to meditate. To sit beside my thoughts and be silent with myself and the world. I learned that my thoughts — which can run to obsession — were not me. They were separate from me. I could almost watch them from afar.
So when I was meditating, who was watching my thoughts?
My spirit; the real me.
Where has she gone? I discovered that person, that spirit. And it’s what allowed me to live another forty years after those operations almost killed me, again and again. You can’t answer that question, can you? I don’t know how I feel about having you here, supposedly, but not talking to you out loud.
Are you saying we might merge? I don’t know what that means. Don’t ominously say, You will. I don’t know if I want to merge with anyone.
I remember talking to Noël Coward about the afterlife. We got into a very drunken discussion. As I’ve said, he bugged me, because he would never get quite as drunk as Stritchie or me. And we talked about merging into the mist of time when we were dead. And he said, “I’m a very bad merger.” I thought it was hilarious at the time. Stritchie told me it was actually a line from one of his plays.
Well, I’d be a bad merger too. You know that about me.
What about my famous personality? My famous pluck? You say my personality is still there; it’s what’s talking. Or thinking. Or whatever I’m doing. I would say it is me — it sure feels like me. I guess it would be nice if it was me.
But thinking requires a body. It requires a head. Remember Descartes? Oh, I see, we are not in a Cartesian universe anymore. Well, that’s a shame. Just like that, you can snap your fingers and now, “I think, therefore I’m not?”
I want to hold off on this merging thing. Of course I love you, and I love the fact that you are talking to me in my head, I have to admit. Except — I don’t have a head. I love the fact that we are able to answer each other’s questions, and argue, and that you are still admonishing me. We still have our personalities, because personality is important. I have a certain amount of affection for what, you know, Oscar Wilde said: Jesus was memorable because he had a peerless personality.
I miss Dash. I know why I didn’t want to let him go. Why I didn’t want to let the papers go. Because he was so of the world, of the body. I miss them all. I miss them so much, the homosexuals. I want to apologize, again, for everything I said. They are precious failures. The precious failures are more important than anything now, because that’s what the world as we knew it was.
I remember when I was eight — before I became a star. We made a movie with somebody, I can’t remember who. But he was a greasy man like the Cantilevered Lady. So of course the EBOAM connected us. No, he didn’t molest us. But he put us in a little movie — a short. And the short was lost. And in it my sisters Virginia, Sue and I played moonbeams. I didn’t remember much about it. I do remember getting dressed up in elaborate costumes, and that there were lights galore. It was a blinding experience. But we did it because we were troopers. It was work.
We had a supper to sing for.
I thought the movie was lost for many years. And then, when Dr. Ahmed rescued me and kept me alive in his desert hideaway, he told me he had a copy of the movie where we played moonbeams. Or rather, to be clear, he had found the negative of the film, and he had processed it himself. Dr. Ahmed was a real movie fan — hence my existence. I wanted desperately to see it, so he screened it for me.
I swear to you, I absolutely swear: the movie was all moonbeams. And I couldn’t see myself or Virginia or Sue anywhere in it. I mean, I know we must have been in it, somewhere, in costumes. But this man was such a magician that we disappeared. What I saw was simply a movie about moonbeams. What are moonbeams anyway? Beams of the moon.
“The weaver’s beam . . .” Where is that from?
The Bible? Shakespeare?
I don’t know why that comes into my head — I don’t have one. Wait a minute, “He beat me grievously, in the shape of a woman; for in the shape of a man, Master Brook, I fear not Goliath with a weaver’s beam; because I know also life is a shuttle. . . .” Falstaff, The Merry Wives of Windsor.
How do I know that? Where did it come from? Are you saying that I can access any information at any time? But how do I stop it? I can learn? How? Apparently Dash King discovered that “weaver’s beam” was underlined in de Vere’s Bible. And this proves that de Vere must have been the real Shakespeare.
What am I supposed to do with all this information?
I’m afraid, Johnny. I love you, but I’m afraid.
Looking back, I wonder if we should have done it; I wonder if we should have gotten into those costumes and dressed up as moonbeams. Or maybe we should have just left the moonbeams alone.
I don’t know. It would help if I knew if I were actually here. You say one of the things I must do is lose my affection for dying. Why is it that I am so attached to the notion? I suppose it’s because at one time the fear of death was proof that we were alive. Now I don’t know what I’m saying or thinking. As long as you don’t leave me, then I think . . . how can I be all right? I know I’ll never be me again. What was me? I wish you, or I, or someone, could answer that question.
Just tell me it wasn’t our fault . . . for impersonating moonbeams. . . .
Sky Gilbert is a writer, director, and drag queen extraordinaire. Dr. Gilbert holds a University Research Chair in creative writing and theatre studies at the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.
Copyright © Sky Gilbert, 2012
Published by ECW Press
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Gilbert, Sky
Come back / Sky Gilbert.
ISBN 978-1-77041-049-7
ALSO ISSUED AS: 978-1-77090-188-9 (PDF); 978-1-77090-189-6 (EPUB)
I. Title.
PS8563.I4743C66 2012 C813’.54 C2011-906972-5
Editor: Michael Holmes / a misFit book
Cover design: Rebecca Lown
Cover images: Ruby Red Slippers © mikeledray/shutterstock;
landscape before storm © Orientaly/shutterstock
Type: Troy Cunningham
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publication of Come Back has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, and by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Can
ada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit. The marketing of this book was made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation.