“It’s unfair,” I said, “that a decent man like you should have to endure that kind of interaction. We don’t deserve this. I often resent Anna for her failure. Her failure is our failure, and how can it not make us feel like bad parents? John O’Connor is right: Anna had so much promise. It’s ironic that our son is the one who made something of himself. At first it looked so different.”
“Yes, but it does no good to dwell on it. We should think of pleasant things,” concluded Damon as my father. Then, Damon as Damon didn’t wait a moment to say, “Wood! You were wood! Wooden, wooden, wooden. You are wood when you’re supposed to be water. You were not as good as yesterday. We’ll have to do it again later. You obviously didn’t like the scene and didn’t make much effort to hide the fact. You must be more convincing, more fluid, more liquidy.”
I had a floating sensation. My body felt as if it had lost its physicality and turned into an emotion: hate. I couldn’t speak, and I had no need to speak. I gazed at him, and I was hate.
We sat staring at each other, me with my hatred, and he closely observing it, as if measuring it, even appreciating it.
Finally, he slowly and deliberately broke the silence: “Now I want you to act telepathic.”
I acted telepathic. He watched me doing it for five minutes, and then looked at his watch. I looked at mine. It was 1:23 P.M. He stared at me, as if waiting for me to say something. I just stared back at him.
“You see,” he said, “this would have been a good moment for you, since you’re doing telepathic, to say, ‘You are now thinking of leaving for a little while.’ Too bad, you missed a good opportunity.”
He got up and started walking out, and I said, “You’re intending to come back in half an hour, and you will have cried like a baby — a baby automaton who cries every day at the same time when plugged in.”
“Better late than never,” he said, and left.
I took up my position in front of the monitors, and sure enough he went into the same unfilmed space, and came back half an hour later having cried.
As for the blasted scene in which I expressed my disappointment with my daughter Anna, he made me do it again during an unexpected session of swimming in the watair. I almost drowned.
While I relaxed in my cell for a short while in the afternoon, I saw an astonishing program on TV. Geraldo was doing a “special” about the Pursued Woman. The count had risen to fifty-three since I had last watched the news two days before. Fifty-three women pretending to be me. And Geraldo had invited the thirty most plausible candidates, offering them an opportunity to prove their authenticity on his show. The audience was to decide which one was the real pursued woman. It made me sick and gave me all kinds of unpleasant symptoms.
The women were required to do two things: (1) Be filmed from the back while they ran from the front to the back of the stage. (2) Explain why they had been pursued by Chriskate Turschicraw.
I turned off the TV to soothe my symptoms. Thirty seconds later I turned it back on and watched what could have been my life. Not that it was that glamorous to have the jiggle of one’s running butt analyzed, evaluated, and compared to the jiggle of the butt on the original footage. But still, it could open doors.
After the butt evaluation, they voted. And then came the explanation category, where the women told their stories, most of which were banal. Some were far-fetched, without, however, significantly sacrificing their banality. What would the audience have thought of my story: Chriskate, in love with a man in love with me. She wants to study me, to be like me. It was the best story. It was unguessable.
Then the final vote took place. The woman who won was called Armory Jude. She didn’t look like me at all.
That evening, during dessert (fruit salad), Damon made me do “jumping to conclusions,” which immediately gave him the idea to make me do it while jumping on the trampoline. I actually rather enjoyed doing “jumping to conclusions,” because it was not so far removed from my natural inclination in my current situation. Unfortunately, Damon realized this right away and made me instead act “tanned.” Having never noticed that tanned people had a particular way of acting, all I could think of doing was rolling up my sleeves and my sweatpants, to show off my “tan.” I also caressed and gazed at my bare arms and legs to show I was enjoying my “tan.” And I spoke in a slightly languorous way, assuming for some reason that tanned people were more languorous, having laid out in the sun all day.
He then left me to relax for an hour, saying we would watch a movie when he returned.
Of course, I knew he would expect me to still be tanned when he came back. I hated doing tanned. I thought about how much nicer “jumping to conclusions” had been, and I decided I would do it again in the future whenever I felt like it.
Suddenly, I was appalled at myself for thinking this way. There was no future for me in this house. I could not let there be a future.
It frightened me that I did not feel more horror, more panic, more agony; I had accepted my predicament. It was this realization that finally awoke the full extent of my horror.
I rolled down my sleeves and my pants. I would not be tanned when he came back. I would let him shoot me. I would endure the shards as long as I could, or the ice blades, or boiling bullets, or whatever, even if they brought me near death. But I would not do tanned again. Nor any other state of being.
I waited, feeling nervous, but also brave and invigorated, like Joan of Arc or Antigone.
When he came back, he chatted about this and that and did not even notice I had stopped acting tanned, which just showed how absurd the whole thing was. Without telling me that I could stop acting tanned, he told me to do “realist.”
I stared back at him and firmly said, “No.”
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “I don’t have much patience anymore for the whole threats process. From now on I’m skipping the threats and going straight to the shooting. Now do realist.”
“No. You can shoot me all you want, until I look like a porcupine and die. I will never do realist or ever again obey any of your orders.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that. It’ll hurt your pride when you cave in and do realist after a couple of shards. Spare your pride. Do realist.”
“No. I’ve never cared much about my pride.”
“I’m not kidding. Do realist.”
“No.”
He shot me in the arm. I barely flinched.
“Do realist,” he said.
“No.”
He shot me again, in the breast. This one hurt a lot and I did murmur “Ow.”
“Do disobedient,” he said.
Ah, a trick. If I said “no,” I would be obeying him. How to dodge it? No way to. It didn’t matter, I wouldn’t play his game.
“No,” I said.
“Good. Now do stoic.”
“No.”
“Excellent. Now do realist.”
“No.”
He was starting to look pained. I could see him trying to decide on a body part to shoot, away from the other wounds. He shot me in the shoulder. That one hurt a lot too and I said “Ow” again.
“Do realist.”
“No.”
He shot me a tablespoon of boiling water in the stomach.
“Ow.”
“Do realist.”
“No.”
He raised his gun to shoot, but then lowered it. He slowly turned away and walked out of the cage with his head hanging, not forgetting of course to lock the cell behind him. I had won.