She turns around at last. It’s always different seeing someone outside the mirror and not in it. Like seeing a different part of their personality. “You seem to know a lot more about stories than you do about television. That’s very unusual. I’m Louise,” she says. “What’s your name?”
“It’s Louise too,” I say glibly, because I don’t remember that part yet. “I’m looking for my boyfriend but I’ve lost him. Again.”
“You seem pretty mixed up,” she says, measuring me with her eyes. “You better watch out: Carnival isn’t a game; it’s dangerous. That’s sort of like Sleeping Beauty though, that show about losing your prince.”
“Kind of a gender reversed Orpheus. Kind of like Isis and Osiris. Is your prince going to come and wake you up?”
“Maybe. Maybe when we’ve finished making our show. I’m the star.” Louise makes a face, not entirely pleased about it. Some star; her foundation clumsily covers zits around her mouth.
“I think maybe it’s Martin’s place across the hall. D’you know him? D’you live in this building?”
She opens her eyes, the bluest blue, very wide as if she can’t believe how stupid I am. Truth is, neither can I. “Martin with the big purple eyes, the sharp nose, so handsome?”
“That’s my man,” I say, glad she jogged my memory.
“He’s your boyfriend? Really? What kind?”
“How many kinds are there?”
“I mean on this side or the other side?”
“All sides,” I say, my head splitting, figuring it’s a trick question. She nods, accepting my answer, although it seems to worry her. “Where is he?” I ask. “We said we’d do Carnival together like we do every year, and here it is not even started and I’ve already lost him and myself. They should call Carnival the Season of Memory Loss.”
Louise rolls her eyes, says curtly, “He was in here just before you. But he left.”
I want to fill in some more gaps, ask questions, but she’s gone, her chunky heels clattering. They’re too big for her, like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s shoes.
“Hey, Louise, wait up,” I yell.
She runs down the hall, turns a corner and vanishes. I hear a steel door slam; hear her feet clattering on stairs that lead downwards. Slinging my day-pack over my shoulder I follow her, slowly, down long shadowy tiers of stair wells, to the street door. Look both ways, no sign of L.
I walk, don’t recognize any street names. The few other people out walking too are so poor they seem invisible even to themselves. I pass old dry goods stores with locked doors and yellow plastic in the windows. There’s not a sign of Carnival, as if the city’s biggest party doesn’t exist. I buy Tylenol at a drug store, swallow several. Finally I come to a coffee shop called the Dew Drop Inn. I’m starving so I go in. The prices are ridiculously low: thirty-five cents for a cup of coffee, eighty-five for a fried egg sandwich; that’s what I order.
The place is empty, huge, and dim. The booths are upholstered in shiny red stuff with flecks of gold in it, just like the flecks in the dolls’ eyes, the rips held together with wrinkled silver duct tape; they wouldn’t call it gaffer’s tape here. A taupe Formica counter with red swivel stools and a green Hamilton Beach milkshake machine behind it. God, how I always loved that name. It’s always been like a picture to me, of a perfect place, where you could leave all your troubles behind, where everything would be okay and you’d be happy.
The waitress is in her fifties with bleached blonde hair and pencil thin plucked eyebrows. She sighs, bringing me my coffee. It’s terrible, from last week’s pot reheated eleven times. I stir in a whole bunch of sugar to mask the taste. I bite into Miracle Whip, not Hellman’s, stare a little.
“Are you lost, dear?” she calls from across the room, where she’s busy polishing spotless tables, filling full sugar containers, sighing.
“I’m looking for my friend. I thought he might’ve come in here.” Little does she know the half of it.
She carries my sandwich from the kitchen, walking painfully, wrapped in support bandages that go halfway to her knees.
“You must be ready for your break, Denise,” I say, now that she’s close enough I can read her name tag. Denise or Vera, I’d figured. A fifties name to match the place, her look.
“Well, yes,” she says, laughing a little. “It’s these damn legs, you know?”
“Sit down?”
“Okay, but I’ll get my drink first.” She comes back with a can of Tab. Her yellow polyester uniform hisses on the shiny flecked vinyl.
“What is it about me?” I ask, too blunt by half, as always. “People are always asking me if I’m lost.”
She reaches out, pats my hand. “The truth is, I think we’re all lost. It’s just some people try to hide it more than others.” She blows smoke rings. “I think the trick is to stay amused, don’t you?”
A woman after my own heart. And she can’t be a machine-head. They never touch living flesh.
Three years ago during Carnival I went to this warehouse party alone. Martin was gone again. Thing is, I was really drunk, soooo, on my way out I got off the elevator on the wrong floor and walked into this big eerie room full of machine-heads and their gear. I started turning so I could run, but this one guy asked me if I didn’t want to try.
I said I’d do anything once.
He gave me a VR headset and controllers; I put on the headset and entered the space they were sharing, thinking I’d get to do a handsome stranger. But the people in there, our sex partners, had arms and legs made of machines, genital organs that didn’t look human at all, but were still sexy in this creepy way: valves expanding and contracting, each black rubber exhalation a sigh. I heard the rasping cries of grinding gears, saw furtive graspings of skeletal robotic hands, all the bones showing. Beneath dirty flesh-coloured vinyl I saw chrome tendons, frayed wiring. Sucking and popping and moaning, the sounds of machines in orgasm. Then as I stayed in, it started to happen to me too; I got replaced, starting with my sex where I was the most connected. Genius embedded in this craftsman’s hand. A sad, wicked, broken-faced genius, but all the same: the sound, the texture were so detailed, so rich. The furniture was clipped, the detail in shadows, in excrescences of old pink vinyl, raised and knobby like a keloid scar, in palest conflagrations of mauve in the velvet bodysuit I wore. Sighing, sighing: only velvet sighs like that. Someone was a genius, for sure.
It could’ve been funny, I suppose, and in some twisted way it even was but it scared the hell out of me. I signed off and jacked out, left to walk city streets, shards of broken ice glinting like starlight. I knew it wasn’t real, so what was the matter? The technology’s still so new; maybe it’s like early horror movies. “The Thing” used to terrify people and now we just laugh.
I walked, turning over in my mind sensations that had more to do with pain than pleasure; the missing parts of myself, the parts I’d allowed to be replaced by robotics had all been screaming faintly, phantom limbs. But it’s still a visual medium—how can you remember sensations in VR? I had to have supplied the sensations myself, a shadow of a shadow.
Footsteps running behind me, male footsteps. I turned. One of the machine-heads, Matt, the one who’d invited me. I wasn’t afraid. Machine-heads are terrified of raping real women. They’d have to touch.
He reached for my hand, like something long forgotten, and pulled it back, his mouth twitching. It was the first sign he might yet know what he’d lost.
“You don’t like it?” he asked sadly. We walked side by side in the frozen night, the Don River snaking below us, full of moonlight. The east end has always been this sad.