I stay in, living on boxed cereal, apples, and instant coffee. Between mask orders I cut out four-year-old newspaper clippings I don’t bother to read and glue them into a scrapbook. With a hot gun yet; no Uhu glue sticks here. Very wasteful. No sign of M.
When I wake in the middle of the night Martin’s there. “I love you,” he says, and I hear someone murmur in response. It’s Louise. She is here, in bed with him, with me.
It’s feeling a little cramped tonight, I have to say.
Rage. Louise the ugly, the misshapen, has my Martin. What can the attraction be? Perhaps she’s good for his ego. Perhaps I should tell him how brilliant he is more often. But, I think angrily, I’ve never really been that kind of girl.
I go back to sleep, hoping I’m dreaming. Hoping they’ll go away.
I stare at the walls, the endless stacked faces. Layers and layers of masks. I’ve got to start thinking of my costume, and not just how to make it, but what it means. Vader is the exterior. I’ll be his inner girlfriend; his anima. But what is beneath the mask, historically? Who was Vader before he was Vader? Dark Father. Hades was dark husband, but then, husband and father are the same in more than one story. Dark incest.
One night I take out the VR headset and realize it’s part of the mask. I hot glue it to the motorcycle helmet, carve out a piece of plexi and mould it to the back to get the shape right. It’s nice to be using my education for something. I look in the mirror, very pleased with my results. A little matte black spray paint and I’m in business. Too bad I couldn’t record the heavy breathing, but a smartphone or even a cassette recorder are things I haven’t come across. They probably sell old Vader voice-chips at surplus electronics stores, but I haven’t found one anywhere near here. I haven’t come across a computer either; I could probably find a sound file of Vader’s breathing on the interwebz but the out of time quality here seems to extend to technology.
Darth Vader. Well.
Fancy meeting you here.
It doesn’t occur to me till morning that I’d planned to be his bride and not the man himself.
But the soul reaches blindly, unbidden, for what it needs.
Louise and Martin shared my bed again last night.
I start wearing my Vader mask on my daily walks. Also a length of black velvet for my cape—it must’ve been used for photography backdrops. So strange to borrow clothes from people I only live with intermittently, in the middle of the night, for snatched moments of crowding elbows and knees, nanoseconds of overheard lovemaking, as contextually odd as dream, before I drift to sleep again. Always drifting to sleep again in this life. What would it be to wake up for good? It’s all too much like wearing a mask whose symbolism you don’t understand, have to piece it together from the reactions you get.
Denise smiles but looks worried as I take my helmet off, set it beside me on the red vinyl banquette. “Sometimes,” she says, “it’s better to forget. Don’t you see?”
“I can’t see till I cross,” I say, “to the other side.” Not knowing what I mean, just listening to it. How to follow clues. Eat my Hawai’ian burger, drink my milkshake, not because I like them, but so I can watch the Hamilton Beach machine. I take my dinner reading out: The Larrousse Encyclopedia of Mythology.
Denise looks impressed by the size of my tome. I turn it around, show it to her. “I always carry it around in my day-pack this time of year. Some people laugh but it carries so much information about Carnival, about stories. Carnival is like living myth, living fiction. The only problem is every once in a while it feels like we’re all going just a little mad. But then, that’s what it’s supposed to be like, isn’t it?”
“Be careful,” she says, “maybe you’ll get out yet.”
I look in the mirror beside the coat rack, at Vader. My eyes stare out. Have I given life to the mask, or has it made me dead, a doll, an only partially alive thing?
Almost like a machine-head.
People on the street are afraid of me, giving me a wide berth. They must think I’m a machine-head, unafraid to wear my gear on the street. There are jacks in my helmet, the goggle jacks. They are like a question, an anticipation, a challenge. I wait, trying to be open-minded.
What does it mean, to be a machine-head for Carnival, but not in real life? It’s like my mother telling me she used to go out as a punk for Halloween when she was young, even though she wasn’t one. Wear her hair shampooed green and spiked with egg white, henna tattoos, fake safety pin earrings. For a night.
But I’m living the deconstruction of myth, and not just pretending to it. Besides, I am dangerous: I really don’t know much about who I am, brain burned out by drugs, by drinking, by other things I’ve forgotten or never knew about. But maybe not those things at all. I mean, I’ve never really been any more excessive than most people I know, probably less. I just use it in a different way. Sometimes you have to forget yourself to remember who you really are. It’s kind of funny. I mean, you’re supposed to lose yourself during Carnival, but I’ve really done it this time.
I love Vader, because he gives me power where I had none before. How does a timid, poverty-stricken, vague, unemployable, confused, and self-abusing but basically good-hearted young woman become so quickly transformed into the terror of the neighbourhood? It could only be because of those whose presence I feel nearby. Everyone thinks I’m one of them. One day I will meet them for real.
What if I decide to join?
I like the power. Still, I know it isn’t really mine, although it could be, perhaps should be. It’s his.
I know it’s a him. I can feel it.
And someday I shall have to pay him back.
Or perhaps wrest back what he has stolen from me.
You know when you pass a store window and see someone faintly unattractive and somehow dowdy looking and then realize with a shock it’s yourself, that you look ordinary when you aren’t preening in the mirror? Well, that happened to me, but in a different way. I saw a man (I walk like a man now!) in machine-head gear, modified to resemble an evil villain from a kid’s SF movie that was popular when my mother’s mother was young and still won’t go away. In the split second before I got it, I was terrified, a sick shock in my stomach. I almost ran.
Curious to run from yourself.
But why are people so afraid of machine-heads? Is it the self-destructiveness, the memory loss, the outlaw quality? I mean, everyone knows they’re terrified of real women. Of touch. Wouldn’t rape us if they could.
I decide to explore the building. I was always afraid to before, but now I’ve got Vader to protect me. Not a sign of life anywhere… but at the end of the hall on the top floor the door’s open and inside, well, I’m not really surprised… a VR imaging system.
I put on the glove that’s sitting on top of the console, plug in the jacks for my Eyes, settle into a big comfy chair, which, I realize, is an old dentist’s chair. It seems somehow appropriate, like pulling the dark teeth of desire. A line for a poem; I’ll have to remember it later. Would give it to Matt if I could. Funny how I still save poem lines for him. A machine-head poet: what a combination. As though I’m still waiting to see him again.
I enter the scenario that’s already booted up. I know I should be more circumspect; if the system’s still running I could be discovered at any moment, but, my helmet and the concomitant by-passers’ fear of me has made me brave, even foolhardy.