Hi Friends,
I won’t say much up front, because this post is already on the longer side.
These lines of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid spoke to me:
We are like people drawn inside of a square on a piece of paper. We cannot get out of the black lines, we exhaust ourselves by examining, dozens and hundreds of times, every part of the square, hoping to find a fissure. Until one of us suddenly understands, because he was predestined to understand, that within the plane of the paper escape is impossible. That the exit, simple and open wide, is perpendicular to the paper, in a third dimension that up until that moment was inconceivable. Such that, to the amazement of those still inside the four ink lines, the chosen one breaks out of his chrysalis, spreads his enormous wings, and rises gently, leaving his shadow below in his former world.
So did these from Mike Nagel’s Culdesac:
No matter how out of control your life feels it’s always possible to act like you’re running the show. I once saw a toddler at a firework show pointing up at the sky like he was conducting the New York Philharmonic. According to developmental psychologists, it takes a newborn human nine months to realize that its actions can affect the world. Then another thirty-four years for it to realize that no, actually, they can’t.
And finally, from William Gay’s Provinces of Night:
It seems to me the limits are self-imposed, set by misconceptions of authorship, the thinker behaving as if she were the author of thought, the self writing its own story as though life depended on it, as if identity were real and not imaginary.
Each excerpt has a predominant color I associate with it and with this one I associate yellow, the color of the solar plexus, the seat of will.
There’s some exposition in the writing so I hope it provides enough context as to the overarching plot. Though I aim to make these excerpts self-contained pieces, each enjoyable on its own.
Thanks for reading.
“hrh!” Mae grunted. A circle of condensation shrunk on the surface of the mirror she stood inches from. Her hand snapped like a clamshell shut, knuckles contouring the soft skull of a puppet she called June. She swiveled her head, on her face a look of coquettish mock horror, as if she were just discovering her hand had grown a face and it could talk, but the mutant was kind of cute. It took after her. The doll could talk and boy did it have a mouth on it. It never said anything nice, and usually it levied accusations as pertained to Mae’s lascivious character. Whatever it said, you knew it was defamatory.
Rae sat at her desk on the far end of the room pretending to read a book. The book was a novel called A Personal Matter and it chronicled horrors such as that had visited the author Kenzaburō Ōe. A baby born with a brain abnormality disfiguring its downy head. This plight transposed to a protagonist named Bird. The book had come to her karmically and this enhanced its meaning before she even opened it to read. It had come to her like a thing abandoned out of love, and the understanding that to leave behind a book was to pass on a world. One of the Brazilian Girls, a band recording at Electric Lady Studios where Elliot worked increasing hours, had left it for her, that is to say, for the right person. Much in the same way it had found the Brazilian Girl (him or her, it wasn’t clear). Or this is what Elliot told her when he gifted it to her. Now it lay folded in her lap, her very own Japanese Existentialist stray cat, adopted to a good home. Though only on occasion did she cast her eyes down to it, because she could not resist the spectacle of mind over matter, over mind that was her new roommate, the ventriloquist whose name was just a letter shy of her own.
“hrh!” Air blew out Mae’s nostrils, her hand massaging the pliable puppet brain. The puppet mouth that would not enunciate. Could not enunciate so long as it was subject to the polite human mouth that was closed. Sealed shut with the word whore trapped inside it.
Mae glared at her reflection. The defiant mouth made of flesh, unrepentant red lips. At the corners of them lipstick crusted. Mascara ringed around the lifeless planets of her eyes. Mae was always coming from or about to go on a run. Whatever it was she was trying to outrun always catching up with her. In between runs she did not remove her makeup. So she was forever wearing yesterday’s makeup. When she wasn’t wearing a sports bra and spandex pants, it was a nightgown, no matter the time of day. The kind you thought only came in silver because it appeared on the silver screen, on an actress who deliquesced so into chaise lounges before dramatic curtains you could be fooled into thinking the movie set was her own home. As was the case now Mae did not looked dressed for a dorm room of factory-made flooring, blinds of the cheap Venetian make normally furnishing dour office spaces. In real life the negligee was cherry-red. The fabric so clung to Mae it seemed to show the parts of her it covered as much as the ones it didn’t. It exposed moles in soft places, on milky-white skin never touched by ultraviolet light. Perilously draping from nipple to erect nipple, like it were pinned to each one, barely-there and ready to fall. It was made of viscose primed for static electricity and stood her hair on end like she were palming a plasma ball.
The dust-coated plastic slats of the blinds cut light so it dappled the walls in concertina patterns. The light filtered through Mae’s flyaway blond hair and shone from her head like the halo of a fallen angel.
“Wt u nd is a Sct Ptrsn!” The doll’s head reared and whiplashed so, it threatened to twist Mae’s wrist right out of its socket.
“Did you say I need a Scott Peterson?” The words came staccato from Mae’s emboldened lips.
The plush head nodded vigorously, jaw sprung open like something on the inside had come uncoiled and left it hanging loose on its hinges. Mae’s hand gone slack as if to mortify the defanged cotton mouth. A mouth mapping the crawl back toward infancy, to where the ends of a life join.
Rae pulled on a string to raise the blinds. The blinds made a dull rustling noise. At midday the sun hung defeated at its highest point. A muted pale yellow as if in a gauze sling. On the windowsill a glass-blown salamander curled around the shank of a pipe. Next to it a dime-store lighter filled with water twinkled in the light like a tiny aquarium.
“hrhng arnd gt u prgnant, Sct cld do the drty wrk fr u!” June writhed furiously, impossibly trying to force air out through Mae’s puckered lips and have it formed into coherent speech. The doll looked bewildered, lost in a heap of garbled language, trying to find sustenance in meaning, no matter how mangled.
“Jesus,” Rae pried the window frame from the ledge. She sparked the lighter and caught on fire dry herb at the chamber of the pipe. It crackled and gave off an elemental odor. She pulled smoke into her lungs and it reached the place where her soul lived. The burning bush had things to tell her, prophecies to deliver but in a magical plant language she could not understand. She blew smoke out the window and it rose, her eyes following it like a balloon disappearing into the clouds. A balloon you know really is you, never to come back down to Earth.
Out the window the City moved. Rae could not see its essence but just a lot of elements supporting it, keeping it going—cranes, utility vehicles, taxis. The City absorbing all other cities into it in one metonymic swoop. It could make you a star, and that’s why Mae was here. She wanted to shine. Rae read it in the writing on the wall the day she came to move in: bordering the ceiling above Mae’s bed, a parade of headshots announcing her ambition. Glossy airbrushed images of her all made-up, June on her lap, master and puppet cheek to cheek. Before they met face to face Mae had Rae dumbstruck. For a time she just stood there clutching a moving box, trying to give the benefit of the doubt at the same time wondering if it weren’t too late to turn back.
These were family photographs on the wall above Mae’s bed.
Because wherever Mae went June followed. Wherever Mae went June was not far behind. Looking out onto the City Rae imagined them: Mae hobbling in high-heeled boots, pulling June bouncing in a rolling suitcase over storm drains and curbs. Stray blond hairs caught in the teeth of the suitcase zipper. Even the most jaded New Yorkers rubbernecking. The ones who had seen everything, but not this.
“June, you need help,” Mae did her best bad impression of concern.
Silence.
Returning her gaze to the mirror Rae jumped. There were Mae’s insipid eyes awaiting hers, gray-green orbs floating in the silver substrate. No telling how long they’d been there, trying to make contact.
“You gonna put that in your show?”
Mae batted coy black lashes. “The Peterson bit? You think it works?”
“It’s dark,” Rae glanced at her book, on its cover forms inside of forms, a child emerging seamless from a man in silhouette.
“I did try a version of it the other night, didn’t really take. Too soon I guess.”
Mae began exercising her vocal cords, evidently her right to torture under a creative license. Rae pretended to read. After warming up for a slow and painful death Mae queried, “Didn’t you say you wanted the uncensored version?”
Rae looked back up. “Yeah,” She did not let her gaze falter, much as she wanted to climb out the window, rappel down the building to safety.
“You’re not ready for it.”
“I’m ready for it.”
In truth she was not at all sure about that. This was the part when things melted a little. More than June’s speech, the inaudible lines between puppet and master began to blur. Mae was looking at her like she were a blank patch of wall, a site for projecting the showreel of her unlived life as a celebrity ventriloquist. The soundtrack to this moving picture: one long laugh track only Mae could hear. She was in her own world. When she got like this it was hard to look away from her. Hard to look away even as you felt like a lunatic staring into the void, trying to find humor in it. A sidesplitter in the yawning abyss. Apparently the doll had drained her vital energy, the warm life force animating her body, from her hand to her brain. Her eyes glazed-over windows to a soul lost in some liminal space between alter ego and authentic self. Lights out as if dispossessed. The signals were broken. Her lips upturned as if at an inside joke her eyes had not been let in on. There was no coordination between them. Like a stain her smile would not come out, it stayed on her face for too long, like it were on its own hankering after some happy thought long gone. One preceding a series of others not worth smiling about but there it was. And Rae could just about hear the commotion it caused in the dank comedy cellars where Mae performed. That sad-eyed smile making it impossible for her audience not to feel something. Impossible to flee, not her so much as themselves who they had come to get away from. Their closeted deviance she brought out into the light. Even as they jeered, “Look what a sorry impersonation of her doll she is!” or “You can hardly tell the difference between them!” the sound of their metal chairs creaking. And hearing them squirm Mae would know she had them, inside she would squeal with glee. Rae could just about see the eyes darting around the room, only to meet other eyes doing the same thing, nobody knowing who the joke was really on, if it was only Mae laughing and at their expense. To what extent she was cracking up in public, to what extent they were implicated in a kind of psychosis tourism, nobody knowing. Stumbling out into the night returning dazed to normality, with a feeling akin to that you have standing in the grocery store checkout, the National Enquirer plying your eyes with headlines like, Dolphin grows human arms! or Bigfoot kept lumberjack as love slave, headlines grouping things that do not belong together, before your cucumbers and vitamin water, your organic peanut butter and ripe avocados travel down the conveyor belt to the bagging lady.
phphphphph, Mae fluttered her lips spraying saliva on the mirror. The effort sent her reeling a bit and she steadied herself, a hand on her hip. Sometimes it looked as though she was holding herself together. Sometimes it looked as though she had cast herself in the role of Sexually Frustrated Maiden. Traipsing around with the desirous air of Miss Hannigan from Little Orphan Annie, like all she wanted was a man to nibble on her ear but all she got were little girls. Miss Hannigan stirring a bathtub of gin. When Elliot came over she would greet him as if he were there to see her, not Rae. Hey there, her body collapsed against the doorframe, as if she needed his help standing up. She did this because she knew Rae would never notice. Elliot only told her about it later. She was a damsel whose hero never came to rescue her or was unmoved by her distress. Mae screwed up her face baring her teeth.
“Trmp!” June enunciated as though through a piece of Duct Tape.
“Does it ever not abuse you?” Rae’s question did not intone with concern but just a subtler form of dis. Her masochism was boring, is what she meant to say.
“It?!?” the doll shrieked, biting down hard on the consonant, apparently forgetting itself, taking new liberties in Mae’s mouth.
“Yeah, don’t call her it,” Mae instructed.
“Sorry.”
“Seriously. I’m in a legal dispute about her personhood status. It matters if you call her it.” Mae put up air quotes around the dehumanizing pronoun. “You think you’re dealing with professionals, who can treat people fairly—”
“A legal dispute?”
“That’s right. The contract clearly listed Mae and June both as performers. We fulfilled our end of the bargain. Pretty straightforward—”
“Wait—you’re trying to get her paid?”
“Good girl,” Mae’s smile was a snarl was a smile. You never could tell which was which with her, even her taunts had a hint of seduction to them. “Contract Law for Dummies clearly stipulates that puppets are performers and should be treated as such—”
“That’s funny.”
“Can you ever stop butting in?!?” Mae hyperventilated. “It’s simple! June’s name was on the fucking program therefore she should be fucking paid!”
“Acrdng to Cntrct Lw!” June squawked.
Rae tried for the first time to keep from laughing. She could not and it seemed only to enrage Mae. She could say she thought this is what Mae wanted but Mae being versed in different species of laughter would call her bullshit.
“Have some respect, for Chrissake!” Mae growled.
“You mean treat your doll like a person?”
“I wrk hrdr thn u!” The sounds labored wriggling out the old lady maw, the toothless gums providing words no traction. Mae pivoted her wrist so the doll looked askance, apparently suppressing laughter of the scornful variety.
“She’s got a point,” Mae smoothed her hair, her nose turned superciliously up as if to a bigot.
Rae’s eyes went back down to her book and this time she read but there was no escape in it. Bird was not doing well. Not coping as a man should. Bird was just trying not to become the monster who killed his monster baby. Bird was in flight from his life. He’d fled the scene of the hospital where his son’s fate was to be determined, into the arms of his mistress Himiko as if in attempt to extricate himself from fate altogether. For Himiko was propounding her theory of a pluralistic universe: at junctures of life or death, the soul shedding the corpse and transmigrating, ergo infinite bifurcations, chances for new Birds. Himiko began, “Right now you and I are sitting and talking together in a room that’s a part of what we call the real world.”
The problem was Mae wanted Rae to believe in a world where dolls were human beings. Even reality was not an assumption they had straight between them. Their cohabitation did not depend on such luxuries. It did not rest on a foundation of peace but limped along a fault line of bad faith. They could play games, make believe there was some semblance of good will between them, but sooner or later the jig would be up. The situation was only tolerable because Rae was at St. Mark’s more and more of the time. MTV had started filming that dating show with Paul in it, the one casting him as The Nice Guy, so Elliot and Rae often had the place to themselves.
“Anyway,” Mae flung the doll so it face planted into a black cotton thong. “We don’t put out for free.” The thong overflowed from a hamper shoved conspicuously behind the door. Plainly visible because a mandate was in place ordering the once-weekly washing of her soiled clothes and Mae wanted to show off being in breach of it. After violating every standard of personal hygiene, breaking every rule of social conduct, she had left Rae and their suite mates Marta and Eileen (who occupied the bedroom across a common space—kitchen, bathroom, living room) no choice but to act and so they had, taking up matters with the NYU management who furnished the injunction, a slap on the wrist. And Mae responded by allowing for the transformation of her hamper into a mildewing public landfill.
It was not a big ask to do her laundry once a week. But it was not about that. It was about the alliances already formed before Rae had even entered the scene. Because of her friendship with Dina, Rae was the lever to pull for Mae’s ejection. Marta had been the one to help uncover the strange coincidence of Dina. On the day Rae moved in, Marta came in and made things better. Things could have been worse. It could have been Rae alone with the headshots, imagining what her new roommate would be like, what life would be like living with her. But they got to talking and Marta told Rae she was designing her own curriculum, something to do with the study of people. Rae told Marta she had an old friend who lived in the same building, Marta asked what her name was and Rae told her. Marta had big almond eyes that gleamed when she had something to tell you, something you knew would be good by the way they gleamed. She revealed: Dina had occupied this very space! Dina who was making a habit of falling in Rae’s path, who, when they collided in Washington Square Park two years after rooming together in Italy, had encouraged her to apply for a dorm transfer, surely never guessing it would be granted, only for Rae to fill the vacancy left by Dina herself, transferring from her own room. It was an open secret why Dina had moved out. The reason had three letters and started with an M.
Rae knew how it must’ve looked to Mae. Dina and Rae were friends with a history and she was supposed to believe it was all by happenstance, Rae a neutral party, taking the place of her old foe Dina? Uh huh. Every move to correct her was just a sign of the bigger play to oust her and return Dina to what was believed her rightful place. And Mae was not wrong about this. With every minor offence the lobby of her opponents Rae, Marta, Eileen and by proxy Dina grew stronger.
A horse fly had flown in where Rae had left open the window to air out the room and it buzzed as it hovered over a soggy paper plate on Mae’s desk, the remains of a lunch from days ago. Like a bird of prey over carrion it hovered, over a tomato like the sun-dried entrails of a small animal, shriveled, laid to rest on a bed of wilted lettuce. Cold grilled vegetables with black marks like tire impressions on them. And Rae wondered how long they could both leave out the melange before an intrusion of cockroaches came to feast and, engorged, sent word to the rats. She wondered how one acquired a taste for the sun-dried tomato, the thing looking already chewed up and spat out.
It brought to mind other abandoned food—on that fateful move-in day, a hunk of baguette under the bare mattress reserved for Rae. Gnawed-on and discarded. Meant ironically or not, a bread-crumb trail to a pattern of things in their wrong places. Exhibit A: on the stove, a black cotton thong like the one June nuzzled now, dried blood on the liner. On the stove?? Eileen had been the one to happen upon that puzzle and Marta told Rae how she pinched the specimen between two fingers, “Flammable,” her blue eyes blinking from under chestnut bangs, “not to mention disgusting.” It might’ve been the thing to drive Eileen, the Matthew Barney intern who wore button-up silk blouses, to text art and skin. Always on the run between runs, Mae never had time to shower or flush the toilet, so Eileen posted to the bathroom wall a sign to prompt her. PLEASE FLUSH!!!!! the letters popped, casting shadows on the white page. For extra impact, the sign had on it a visual of Britney Spears, cracking the whip in that seminal late-nineties choreography inspiring teenage dominatrixes across America. Anything to grab Mae’s eyeballs, restore some sanity to their lives.
But Mae paid Britney no mind. Her attention had a single focal point and that was becoming one with her doll. Which is why, after only a brief interlude, Mae had a fistful of synthetic blond hair in her hand, June in her grip, the two of them right back at it again. Until that day Mae’s lips submitted, obedient to the command of her mind, don’t move, never stopping, onward marching toward complete unification, the elision of puppet and master. Because control right down to the fascia is what Mae was after.
It was right about then Rae caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. The skin smooth as silk, face like a collagenic mask. It had no wrinkles on it, no lines. The mirror did not lie but the reflection did. It wanted you to believe it was just that, a reflection, of insides on the outsides, one a natural extension of the other. And this was the first of fallacious conclusions it invited, illusion of illusions that it was. Even Rae did not trust it. Sometimes she checked it like it were a wad of cash under a mattress, bills still there, not dissolved to an unusable currency.
Mae went back to rehearsing for the end of her time as an autonomous person, June dancing maniacal on the stump of her arm. If you broke it down, the work of the ventriloquist was not so different from that of the classical pianist. Both involved mind-numbing repetition, pouring zillions of hours into something until it looked effortless. Both involved training the body to do unnatural things. Mae rehearsed until she could no longer rehearse and the doll hung limp by her side, flaxen hair grazing the floor like a mop.
Was this a young woman just trying to make a living at something she loved?
There was an honesty Rae had not noticed before, in the poorly executed act of deceit, a kind of double negation making a wrong in some way right. She wondered was Mae, in her display of repressed material, airing society’s dirty laundry, in her way trying to flush out the toxins, take out the collective trash even while she could not manage her own?
Mae spun around, a girl in a state of undress made to feel her nakedness. And then she was coming toward Rae, no mirror mediating them, fist clenched and bulging June’s temples. The doll wore a tasered expression.
“Why don’t you ever tell me about you?” She put a hand on Rae’s desk, Rae at eye level with her chest. “That boy toy of yours?” At close range that post-(pre-)run smell came off her, that robe ever closer to an exposure sparing no private part of her.
“Ah, not much to say about that,” Rae shrugged because actually there was too much to say about that, the first cracks in the Elliot foundation presenting.
“So she’s one of those,” Mae said to no one, June well out of commission, eyes exophthalmically open.
“One of what?”
“Who want all-access, a backstage pass without anything to offer in return.” Mae plopped down at her own desk and with a fork began stabbing listlessly at the sun-dried tomato, the gory fruit-vegetable. Like somebody having just blown a fuse, a blond bombshell.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Rae lied.
The horse fly buzzed quieter then louder. Like a drunk it careened and smacked into surfaces, like Bird trying to find an opening, bouncing everywhere but the exit. Rae tried to read. Out of the corner of her eye, Mae flapping her bare wrist, kneading it with her non-dominant fingers.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A Work In Process to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.