by John Gould
“And you weren’t wasted or anything?”
“No.”
“Are you worried?”
“Not really. A little.”
What I didn’t tell her was my Jayne Mansfield dream. Then I changed my mind and I told her. “But Jayne was you,” I assured her, which was kind of true, as much as a person in a dream is anybody. “You with a big blonde wig.”
“Perv,” said Pam. The kids were at their cousins’ place that night, so we did it right there on the couch, me and Pam. The thing is, I had a head the whole time.
After that I started keeping track of when I had a head and when I didn’t. The only pattern I could make out was that the headless episodes were getting shorter and less frequent. One of my last ones was at another party. I was watching Pam eat peanuts, this finicky way she has where she gets one on her thumbnail and flicks it into her mouth. I was there at the party too, but then also not. There was a me who was at the party, alive and doing stuff like everybody else, but also a me who was different, dead or never born. Something like that.
Since then there’ve been a couple more, but nothing for a while. If I could get some of that hash, I’d smoke it. If I could get back into my dream with blonde Pam I’d slow it down, I’d take for fucking ever.
Project Description
Cupid, for which I am requesting a Level II grant (see attached form 3B), will be the final installment in my bODYbROKEN triptych of performance pieces. Like Jesus (in which I carried a cross the thousand miles from Moncton to Toronto and invited people at a gallery there to help nail me onto it) and Thích Quàng Dúc (in which I used gasoline and a spark from two rocks rapped together to set my clothes alight, and left onlookers to douse me), this work is designed to be long and dangerous and painful and pointless.
Long because only fatigue will render me incapable of acting, specifically of acting like a performance artist. I must be reduced to being myself, whatever that might turn out to be.
Dangerous because only the possibility of harm will force me to be present, which is the point of this and every other work of art. Any piece that isn’t potentially fatal is dead.
Painful because pain is the body’s way of registering danger. Pain is destructive, and what it destroys is whatever you were thinking a minute ago, whatever trick your mind was using to keep you lashed to the hands of the clock.
Pointless because any trace of narrative coherence will suck me and my audience back into time. A substantial stretch of uninflected anxiety will lead us through boredom to some other place.
The instructions for the piece are as follows:
• I stand naked and alone on a dais at one end of the gallery (TBA). My sole task is to remain conscious and upright for the duration of the piece, a maximum of twenty-four hours, if I live that long. Other than standing, I perform only unavoidable actions (urinating, weeping, etc.).
• A man-shaped, man-sized hourglass stands six feet away from me, a drawn bow in his arms. He is rigged such that he will loose his arrow once all the sand has passed through his radically-narrowed waist.
• The arrow is aimed at my heart.
• The man’s waist, and thus the rate at which the sand flows, is flexible. At its initial setting, the hourglass will empty itself after approximately twelve hours. Any member of the audience may speed up or slow down time at any time, and thus shift the odds of my survival.
• If I survive one full day, the piece is complete. During that day I do everything in my power not to collapse. What collapses is the rigmarole of self which keeps me separate from my audience and them separate from me, and each of us separate from everything else in the universe.
In The Lovers, Marina Abramović (see her letter of support, attached) and her lover walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and met in the middle to say goodbye. Cupid is my breakup with life, or my reunion with life, one or the other. It is dedicated to my on-again off-again partner Oji Gray (see his letter of support, attached), whose likeness (rocking his current look, mid FtM transition) will be tattooed onto my left breast, above my heart.
There will be no rehearsal and only one performance. When Marina was young she painted dreams and then car accidents and then clouds as they formed and dissolved. This is the truth. I will die if no one shows up, or if no one intervenes to retard time. I will live if I collapse, but I will not collapse. If I live it will be because the audience was moved by love and mercy rather than by something else. When Marina invited people to do whatever they wanted to her (in, for instance, Rhythm 0, for which she equipped them with various weapons and granted them absolute freedom), some savaged her but others succoured her. There is no way to know, and this is the point.
The point is that you’re only your body, but your body isn’t what you think it is.
I am applying for the maximum grant. As detailed in the attached budget, I require food and supplies for four months of training (at an abandoned trapper’s cabin belonging to my uncle, near Moose Factory on James Bay). Like Marina I am subject to severe migraines, ideal preparation for this form of expression, but my suffering must of course be intensified in advance of each new piece.
The remainder of the budget is for the creation of an hourglass trans man, pudgy like a renaissance Cupid but with a waist like Oji’s, which is to say with a waist like Scarlett O’Hara’s once Mammy has done with her.
Pain and beauty. Beauty and pain.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Voicemail
Emilia checked messages the minute they got in the door. A reflex, and an irksome one as far as Steve was concerned, especially since almost nobody called the landline anymore. What was she hoping for? What did she dread?
He tossed his jacket, rooted in the fridge for a beer. Bad enough to be at an art opening. Worse to be at your girlfriend’s ex’s art opening, and worse still to be at your girlfriend’s ex’s art opening and find there’s no bar.
“This one’s for you,” said Emilia, and she replayed it on speaker. Hi, it’s Bridget. I’m calling for Steve. He knows why. A few fitful breaths and then, Toodle-oo.
So, an evening of exes. What was weird was that he’d almost thought of Bridget earlier on. One of Patrick-the-prick’s paintings was, if you could be objective for just a moment, kind of good. Steve had been trying to look absorbed in it so he’d be left alone, and suddenly found that he was absorbed. The painting was on plexiglass, and maybe wasn’t a painting at all but some sort of messed-with collage. Realistic images had been bled into abstraction — it was cool because you didn’t always know what you were looking at, or if you were looking at the right thing. The little card on the wall no doubt explained how the effect had been achieved, and offered a disambiguating title, but Steve’s one policy at art galleries was never to look at those little cards. Should a man not let himself see what he sees?
Certain objects had survived. In the lower left-hand corner, a candlestick teetered on the edge of what appeared to be the gunwale of a canoe. At dead centre, an eye, likely that of a goat, gazed out of its mail-slot pupil. Steve gazed back. He unlistened to Emilia and the prick murmuring civilly to one another on the far side of the room — or more than civilly, they were laughing together now at something Patrick had just said — and to the animated chatter of various people he should but didn’t know by name. He allowed his focus to trace an architectural projection of some kind up into the piece’s pewter sky, and then east across a series of amber striations. In the top right corner, the plug of a fire hydrant curled cozily, orangely in on itself. If you saw this swirl as a cat it would be Bridget’s tabby from back in the day, the one who’d station himself at the foot of her bed and growl whenever you got Bridget moaning. Steve didn’t quite have this thought at the time, but saw now that he could have.
“So why?” said Emilia.
“What?”
“Bridget. She says you’ll know why she called.”
“Oh, I’m not sure. She was pretty sick
at one point, maybe it’s that. Farewell call, sort of thing.”
Emilia was in the middle of slipping her bra out from under her blouse. She paused, bra hanging from her sleeve. “Like, she’s dying? What of?”
“Breast cancer. I told you.”
Had he? This was the worst thing about lying, or one of the worst, having to keep track. Steve never lied to Emilia about anything else, but about Bridget he couldn’t stop. Right at the start, three years ago, he told her he and Bridget were finished, whereas in fact he was still succumbing to occasional regret-sex with her. He also claimed she’d left him, whereas in fact he’d left her. And now, for no good reason, here he was pretending not to have been following her on social media, tracing the ups and downs of her remissions and recurrences, even sending the odd supportive message and signing off love as always S. No good reason indeed — Emilia was almost insultingly unjealous, as though the thought of Steve straying, or for that matter finding somebody to stray with, was absurd. She seemed to trust him, too, perhaps because she knew he trusted her.
Emilia pulled her bra the rest of the way out of her sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You did tell me.” She touched Steve’s shoulder.
“No worries,” said Steve. “Some decent stuff tonight, hey? Of Patrick’s?”
“Beautiful, his best ever.” Emilia spun her bra like a lariat once or twice, then scrunched it up and stuffed it in her pocket.
Steve said, “I’ve been a bit of a dick to him, haven’t I? I should have said something tonight.”
“No, you were fine. Don’t think about that. Think about … yikes. What will you say to her? Bridget, I mean.”
“I don’t know. What does a person say to somebody who’s, you know, not going to be alive pretty soon?”
Emilia frowned. “A person? I think it’s you we’re talking about, Steve.”
Mystifying, this thing with Bridget. People talked about the end of a relationship as a death, but surely it was the other way around. Surely what killed you was the start of a relationship. Once you were with one person you were one person, you were nobody else. You were born, so you’d die. So then Bridget, all the times he’d fantasized about her over these last few years, represented the possibility of a new life for him, a rebirth, a reincarnation. Which left him where, now that she was done for?
“Did she ever find somebody else?” said Emilia.
“Bridget? Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
It made the whole thing worse, Bridget still being single. It made his lying and fantasizing worse, and it made Bridget’s predicament worse, no one to hear or hold her. She’d always been crazy for contact, spooning him at night, her small breasts flattened big against his back. Those breasts were gone now — she’d posted from the hospital after having them removed, linking to a piece about Angelina Jolie undergoing the same surgery. She got to keep her nipples, the lucky biatch!!!
Steve thought he might cry. “I gotta go call her,” he said. He took a last slug of his beer. “I’ll do it from out on the steps so I don’t bug you.”
“Okay. But there’s something we need to talk about.”
“Yeah?”
“Later. Tomorrow. I’m sorry. Tell her I’m sorry, okay?”
“Sure,” said Steve.
Sorry. Maybe that’s what he should say too. Sorry I broke up with you. Sorry I haven’t been any help since you got your news. Sorry I’ve used you, the ever-amenable you in my head, and offered nothing in exchange.
“Sorry,” said Steve.
“No,” said Emilia. “For what?”
“I need to be better.”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “Please don’t say that.” And she really seemed to mean it.
About Me
I’m a fun-loving guy looking to be a little less alone for whatever time I have left. My friends, those who still have command of their senses, would describe me as aporetic, puzzled to the point of dismay. I like walks at sunset but rarely take them. Perhaps with you. I’m most deeply drawn to music that can be played by a string quartet on period instruments, but a colleague of mine once went through a bluegrass phase and I found myself humming “Bible in the Cabin by the Sea,” so anything’s possible. My favourite author is Chuang Tzu, a Taoist of the fourth century BC. I won’t bore you with him or any of his aphorisms. I like bourbon, which is odd because I’ve never been anyplace where that’s what you drink.
You’ll notice I’ve left “Pets?” blank. My dog Dionysus died of kidney failure last week. Do I have a pet or don’t I?
You’ll notice I’ve left “Do you want children?” blank. I have four children, none of whom I understand, but all of whom I adore. They are shards of their shattered mother, whose decline is something from which I’ll never mend. I want children, and I have them. If you have some that’ll be great too.
You’ll notice I’ve left “Age?” blank. As we all do, I forgot everything when I was born, unremembered the perfections I’d witnessed in the fleshless eternity between my little lives. Since, as Socrates argues, “all nature is akin” (συγγενοῦς), it was necessary for me to recall just one thing, and everything else began to come back. Now it’s slipping away again. Age? I’m at that moment in life at which anamnesis, the recovery of forsaken insight, tips over into senility. I’m forgetting exactly as fast as I remember.
“Kum ba yah,” for instance, the folksong my wife took to singing in her final months, when she could no longer speak. Sometimes I recall that the phrase means “come by here,” other times I don’t. I lose it, not just the literal meaning but the notion itself, that something supreme might inhere. I’m curious to see how long it will take this idea to desert me altogether. If there’s a saviour it is this kind of curiosity.
What else? I don’t have a favourite colour, though if I did I suppose it would be the red of a candy apple. My johnson still works now and again. I run, or rather ran, a moderately successful closet and garage storage solutions business. I’d like to hear some things about you.
You’ll notice I’ve left “Do you do drugs?” blank. There wasn’t enough room. Atenolol, Dabigitran, Ramipril, Flomax, Finasteride, Rosuvastatan, Synthroid, Lasix, Citalopram.
“If you hide the universe in the universe you can never be robbed of it.” Sorry, I lied when I said I wouldn’t bore you with any aphorisms. My friends, those who still have command of their senses, would say I rarely lie.
Am I signing up here in a fit of grief over Dionysus? Quite possibly, but I’m of the opinion that there’s a deeper impulse, a truer one.
I seem to be having difficulty with the “She wants to meet up” feature. If you click on me and don’t hear back, this may be the reason. I would ask you to try again.
Date
She spots him half a block away. One of the Mitchell boys, the one who didn’t die, obviously. Ricky. Ronny? He’s on the far side, maybe he won’t cross over. It was Ronny who died. Or Ricky? A few years after they all graduated, twenty-five years ago now. Good lord. The story was he lost a bet he could hold his breath under water for two minutes. Or won it, in a way — he never came up. Ricky found him there under the dock, if it was Ronny who died, or vice versa. They were twins, not identical but the other kind. Both of them were chunky, and had that ridiculous red hair. Ricky was the one who asked her out a couple of times. She should have gone. It might have saved her from Ken Grant, that conceited brute, which would have saved her a nervous breakdown, which would saved her all sorts of other troubles too. Who knows, maybe it would also have sent Ricky off in some other direction, maybe he wouldn’t have had to die, if he was the one who did. Fraternal. Fraternal twins, which meant they were just plain old siblings, like her and Helen. If she died, or Helen died, would people remember which one? Would it matter? Like at dinner the other night, squabbling with Martin about whether it was Frank or Charles from M*A*S*H who died. Not squabbling, but yes, squabbling.
Yikes. He’s glancing over her way, Ronny or Ricky. She slows, peers into a shop
window. Kids’ stuff, and she does need something for her friend Nicole’s daughter’s baby shower. The first grandchild in their group. It isn’t fair, really, that she and Martin have just the one kid and he turns out to be gay. Of course she loves her son-in-law, Jamal, she couldn’t have hoped for anybody better, unless he was a daughter-in-law instead. But there are lots of gay couples adopting, or maybe not lots but some. Or finding surrogates. Hopefully they’d use Bill’s sperm, though to be honest Jamal is smarter and better looking, plus she might end up passing on the diabetes through Bill. It can skip a generation. That’s probably what will carry her off, some organ that’s given out because of the wonky sugar in her blood, though what carried her off in her dream last night was a salmon, one of those ones with the hooked jaw, which meant it was male. Or did that mean it was female? It struggled upstream with her and lost her in amongst the rocks, which were actually books, dictionaries of all sorts of other languages she used to know but had forgotten. Funny. In high school she took Spanish, and either Ricky or Ronny was in that class too, or maybe both. Dónde está something-or-other. Where’s the loo?
Oh, dear. She catches his reflection in the shop window as he crosses the street. Yep, it’s him, Ricky or Ronny. She busies herself trying to make out the price tag on a little kids’ tent set up in the shop window. Maybe not the most sensible gift for somebody who hasn’t yet been born, but —
“Helen?”
She turns. “Um, no.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. From the side you just … I’m sorry.” He’s not as portly as you’d expect, after all these years. He’s minus most of the ridiculous red hair.
“Helen’s my sister.”
“Yes, so you’re … You won’t remember me, but I’m Ricky’s brother. I was in your year too.”