I pore over drawings by famous psychotics. The erotomaniac Adele Hugo’s senseless novel diary, walls of black scrawl. She was trying to mirror her father, shut up in his study, except that she was writing nonsense, shut up in her madness. I borrow books from the library near the clinic. I stare through the gaping eyes of Antonin Artaud’s faces and the swirls Nijinsky drew in colored pencil and crayon. I know what these swirls mean. If I slide into them, I will never come out. I lose the ability to read, unlearning words. I don’t have to ask what happens next. The stains spread and the rope is around my neck and now the demon face lives either in my mouth on my tongue or in the place in the mind, somewhere toward the back. That place where, if you try to remember a face, it will materialize.
I write a sound play. On each floor lives a person or a family. Each floor makes different sounds which interact with the sounds of the other floors. This crescendo of sounds has a deeper meaning. I try to draw the different frequencies each human operates in. I have never studied music. I draw what sound looks like. Knocking makes straight, interrupted lines and screaming or crying makes waves of curving or jagged lines that grow and collapse like a heart monitor.
Men pick me up and bring me to parties. I spend one party weeping in a Russian’s gold-leaf bathroom. I spend another party talking to a woman reading Proust for the first time. She is encountering his work like a revelation. I sneak off in the middle of her diatribe, shuck my dress, throw it in the trash, steal a fur coat from the host’s closet.
I jump up and down in the shower, laughing. I’m getting your sperm out, I scream. I bury my face in my hands. A man drives. There’s no starting over, he says. You can move anywhere. It
doesn’t matter. He lights a cigarette. It’s still you. I forget my name. I have no name. I
named myself. Many names. None of them last. They give names like lies. Soft petals peel off
tongues. Names places things—it’s easy to get away with. Everyone does.
In the square in this afternoon, the sun was a runny egg. An image I must have read once. I dumped my omelet in the toilet this morning. I wore clothes that were too hot, an old green army jacket. I prayed. I bargained.
My mind is gone. The mind a teacher joked about when I handed him a lazy paper, gone. I still remember. He read it and said this is Cameron light. How flattered I was that he saw.