I myself raping Louise.
I’m a man.
In the act of rape.
She’s wearing a white satin party dress, incongruously over a dirty T-shirt and too big satin old lady pumps. Her purple eyelids streaking, purple tears running down her whiteface. Raping a sad dirty clown.
She’s acting of course, just pretending she’s being raped. These guys aren’t pros, just very good amateurs. Who’m I kidding? The details are too fine, too expensive looking, laid over video Louise. Her scarred, toothed black rubber vulva, the antique glow of her copper automaton hands. No one puts in hundreds of hours of bit-mapping without a payoff at the end. Of course they distribute, sell it on the black market.
She is screaming and screaming.
I’m cynical, though, participating in the rape. Because it’s not real I’m safely almost enjoying it, perhaps because Louise always seems so stupid. It is the stupidity in her that one enjoys seeing raped. Enjoys raping.
But stupid how?
Who’m I kidding? That could be me up there. Is. A part of me. I can tell. Instead of projecting my personality into the guy, like I’m supposed to, I’m suddenly “inside” Louise. Sometimes that’s the best you can do, is say, “I saw it happen.” What part of her feels really raped after these performances?
Before it’s over I take off the headset and leave.
More reversals.
The phantom limbs in that other scenario I once participated in. This time, a phantom dick. A phantom nasty dick, too; not one of the nice kind. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to enjoy sex again.
It didn’t work, though. In spite of the technology, I couldn’t be him for long.
I leave just in time. I hear footsteps on the stairs, and duck into the open door of an empty unused office. I sneak a peek after he’s passed (they were male footsteps) and check him out.
It’s Martin.
I remember when I was a little girl, walking home from a friend’s house after dark. I’d be frightened, even if it was only five-o-clock, dark already in winter. I’d hear footsteps on the pavement behind me, and not wanting to turn and look, I’d listen to hear if they were male or female. You could always tell. It was always the male ones you feared. Who taught me to do that? What words did they use?
Watch out for bad men.
I work on my last order, the last before Carnival Tuesday. Everything’s changed; I keep the studio door locked, hear footsteps upstairs when I know there are none. What do I fear now? I know only too well.
I fear my lover. I fear he’ll want me to act for those things, like she does. I fear how it would change me.
This is why I like wearing the helmet; in it, on the street, I no longer have the fear, walking at night.
Except of course, for them. For him.
Persephone, bride of Hades. Now we can only wear our power clothed in darkness.
Mardi Gras Tuesday I go to the party at the Aquarium, wearing the Vader helmet. It’s like a Carnival warehouse party anywhere, lots of poseurs drinking their faces off and trying to look dangerous in their costumes. Glamorous, like they have exciting lives.
And some even do. I run into Matt. His shaved head, his lonely boots. We slug beer. He says, “You came in further than you thought.”
“What d’you mean?” I ask. The only way to get people to stop talking cryptic Carnival style gibberish is to ask them straight out, I figure. Even when they’re machine-head poets you once thought you could maybe love.
“You were very, very good,” he says.
“Good when?”
“Good in your lost months?”
“Good where, good how, what kind of good?”
“Good fuck good. Good on the other side.”
“The other side of what?”
“You don’t know. That’s what I thought.”
“Damn right I don’t. Getting tired of it too.”
“Dope cocktail for months, someone said, I didn’t know if it was true. You’re the hottest new thing.”
At last I do know. “I found the system,” I say, “at least one of them. I did see a rape, I mean do it. But it wasn’t me, it was Louise.”
“Layers and layers of rape. An endless bottomless rape. You only accessed the top layer. Thought it was just her, never you. But what if you’d gone deeper, raped yourself?”
He hands me a smartphone, the first one I’ve seen. “It’s the master. We’ve just been beta testing it. It has no distribution yet. Get rid of it, get out of here, far out.”
“Don’t I want to try it first, see?”
His eyebrows go up. As though I revolt him. Funny coming from a guy like that.
“Why are you helping me?” I ask.
“Because you came in one night, just to be nice, to offer company. You didn’t have to. You don’t know what it’s like for us. That we can’t get back out. I’d touch you but…”
“You’re afraid.”
“We’re all trapped in there with her, being fetishistically fucked by technology.”
“We have to bust Martin!” I cry out. “We have to save Louise.”
“Shhh, they’re both here.” His eyebrows shoot up again; he says, “but don’t you see? I work with him, we’re on the same side, the other side.”
Oh, that other side.
Now who’s so stupid, Petra?
Walk along the Don River. Stick my tongue to the icy railing just to see what it feels like. Pull it away before it gets stuck. Denise tried to help. What little she knew, all rumour and threat, smoke and mirrors. Without getting herself in trouble. Or me in more.
I’ll do anything once. But only once.
An oil drum, homeless men and women gathered around the fire. I go up and have a smoke with them, a DuMaurier. I’ve taken up not just her habit but Denise’s brand. I chat, pass out butts and coins as best I can. And throw the phone in, watch it hiss and bubble, the cancerous smell of melting petrochemicals. Walk away, alone, back downriver. Not afraid. They never rape real women. And then remember: they could still jump out from behind a building, chloroform you, dope you so bad you don’t know what you’re acting in, how it’ll be used. It happened to me.
What happened to Louise? Is she there by choice, because she loves Martin, because she thinks she’s being hip and noir and cutting-edge? Or are they doing something to her, like what they did to me? But I can’t help her, and least not here. I’m just a little girl, alone, screwed up. When I get back to the other side I’ll call the cops, but they’ll guess it was me. It’s no excuse but some of them, like Matt, don’t like where they are, or when.
I’ll never know now what Martin truly desires, never know what made me love the dark stranger so blindly for so many years. Only in becoming him did I see enough to fully wake up, get away.
Huge flakes of snow fall from the sky, so big and fluffy and fairy tale looking. For a moment I think I see two alike, have a nanosecond’s certainty they aren’t real but bitmapped in. VR. But then their tiny spines, their spires, melt and now I’ll never know.
I miss Matt, but know I’ll never look in there for him again, too afraid I might come face to face with myself, a hidden un-erased copy. Hail a taxi, go back to the west side, where I belong.
We think what we do on the sleazy side of town is invisible, but it’s not. Perhaps it is true, and not just a crazy thought of mine, brought home from Carnival, that what we do on the other side of the screen has an effect in the real world.
I may, for a time, have forgotten my name, my address, even what city I live in, but I remembered this: we have to live as though it is true, no longer Faking Life.