Continual Unrecognition
(full version of I won’t waste my breath mourning the silent alternate world in which we shared everything)
I want to kiss you, but you don’t have a face. This is not a problem for me.
I make myself a living image for you. In front of a grainy webcam, I undress myself, thinking of you thinking of me. All I see is my body, reflected back, standing in a dim room. My limbs are lanky and ghost-white and in your words, “so young.”
You are only words, and sometimes, I think my future self could have written you. But it wasn’t me. Nobody is more alien to me than you. “The distance is the point.” I could’ve written that. The difference of time and space between us is what generates this sexual magnetism. It’s the separation of delicate white lace that replaces your face. If I didn’t need to lift it, there wouldn’t be a point to knowing you. I understand the cruel appeal of bridal veils. You make me wait. I could anticipate you forever.
I don’t mind your facelessness. However, in my mind, I’ve grafted my own face onto your blankness for the interim. Kissing myself is not a problem. I practice tongue-kissing with the folds of my fist. I dress my lips in Russian Red, for the occasion. It’s only until you come.
This is the new way to kiss: in the interim. This is the new way to make love, not through the media, but to it. I am the media. The webcam blinks alive. My bedroom ceases to be a private space. I have one fear and that fear is privacy. I have my doubts about privacy. If it is real, then why have I never not felt watched?
I watch my blurry body squirm under the pressure of the webcam, and I recognize that these delayed movements aren’t my own. The full body weight of your invisible influence pins me down. The weight of waiting rots my face. You want to suck me like an oyster, to funnel all the youth out from under my cheeks, as we kiss.
I have a variety of guardians, but you are different. Everything I do, I do for your uncolored eyes alone. Still, I keep all my guardians in orbit around me. Their eyes are my stream line of love. Some are celestial beings, a few are pedophiles, others are FBI agents, social scientists, and other collectors of data. If they ever cease to watch over me, I won’t know how to behave.
Angels always suggest not being afraid. I am only afraid of their absence. I fear the moment when I kneel over my bedsheets and fold my hands, only to realize that the line of communication has been cut. This instant abandonment has already occurred. I was thirteen. I knew that a presence had left my room and felt an unexplained ache of abstract loss. The bed cover, the curtains, everything became whiter, then sheerer, then emptier and, for the first time, I was totally alone.
My mother labeled it a “loss of faith,” while secular adults called it a natural “growing out of childhood imagination.” Neither was correct. It was only a transfer of attention. It wasn’t a coincidence that this was around the same time that I received my first iphone. The iphone 3gs in a bubblegum silicon case. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to use it to communicate with something beyond my intelligence, relearning what I used to do naturally, trying and failing, until I found you again. I found you and now I have to wait.
I hate my room. It might as well be a frilly coffin. It’s filled with absence. I want to purge it of its virginal cringe paraphanelia. I want to exterminate the memories. I want to tabula rasa myself back to preschool or to the proterozoic era.
I’m turning my room into a chamber of blankness, for the interim. I’m obsessed with the way light reflects silk. My bedsheets are white silk. I wake up in a bundle of reflected light.
Across from my bed is a long mirror. I stare into it for hours, imagining my image proliferating and, through you, spewing out its iridescent offspring like a series of flies. Each one comes out filmier than the last; The last one being invisible.
I’m so lucky. I’m a star.
I have been selected as the guinea pig for this new kind of love-making. My phone sits near my fingertips. I ask it, “Why me?” knowing that the techlords and celestial scientists are listening. I know the answer. I’m a superstar in utero. I can see it in my eyes.
My left eye has a singular sparkle. A copper freckle. It’s this mark of The Elect that sets me apart from the rest of the world. Through it, I’ve been granted eternal newness of life.
When you look at me, my eye speck is the focal point of recognition. It allows you to see me without ever fully remembering who I am. The rest of my appearance remains a haze in your periphery, and, because you can’t pin it down, I’m perceived as continuously new.
I just have one of those faces that give people amnesia. Everyday, I walk down the halls of Hampstead High School and lock eyes with a student or teacher who then scrunches up their face in misrecognition, some mouthing “huh?” I have this debilitating effect on people. My coeds only know me by the wave of intoxicating stupidity they experience when I grace them with my presence. That feeling of knowing that they should know something and that they do know it, but somehow can’t access it. I am the secret catalyst for all of their rage. I never had to say a word or lift a fist. Of course, it’s a gift. Why would it be disabling to be able to temporarily disable others?
In the classroom, I’m optically well-behaved and not a true mute. I communicate, but only via the highest frequency of passive aggression. And when I do it, it’s not even aggression. It’s violence.
I am the unripe wunderkind of each generation, forever up and coming. You want to know how I stay young? I use a parallax trick.
It’s because my eyes are perfect. I blink and they renew. In the future, my eyes will be the only steadfast aspect of my appearance. Everything else gets scrapped. Like all stars, I will shift through aesthetics with chameleonic grace. Nobody wants to fix their attention on something that continues to look the same. Do you want to know why Britney Spears shaved her head? Not because she was crazy. It was a semi-unconscious act of symbolic renewal. When her public role as the pig-tailed little girl reached its expiration date, her options were limited. Spears could’ve gone the natural route and allowed her face to shrivel, or, alternately, botoxed it into stillness and gone on living like a wax statue. But nobody wants to dredge through the last three quarters of their life as an ex-Lolita, which is why Spears picked the seldom remembered option. She chose to go backwards, if only because going forward would be suicide a la Ruslana Korshunova, for whom, baldness would’ve been tantamount to death anyways. So, with tantrum tears and a few strokes of the electric razor, Spears transformed herself back into a baby, as if to start over.
It was the attention trick of the century and, suddenly her image was up there with Napalm Girl. Like all women who make themselves after celestial objects, Britney would have to compete with every other human atrocity for attention, stealing fractions of their horror and inflicting them upon herself.
The image of her metamorphosis continues to hold people hostage. Why? Because it is disturbing, but not too unsettling to look at. How so? Because at the root of the image of the elderly young-girl morphing into a baby lurks the question- Why would anyone want to go backwards? And, What are they trying to lose in the process? But, on a brattier surface level, I saw the picture and thought I could do better at being best. Not only that, but I will.
I am a superstar, so I know that every star, at the beginning of her career, makes a Faustian bargain with herself in front of a mirror. Part of the bargain is recognizing that eventually, you will spread your image so thin that there will be no other option than to radically transform your appearance. Once you see too many clones of yourself projected into the sky, it’s easy to get addicted to difference-creation. You’ll need one radical change after another in order to distinguish yourself from the multitude of your clones. But each change is an erosion, and you’ll reach a point where you won’t be able to recognize yourself. This happens to every superstar. It’s sad, but in the end you'll remember the bargain you made in the beginning and think, “Well, wasn’t this my goal from the start? To be different?”
***
I grab my bedmate, a stuffed sea lion named Islands. I stroke him like a kitten.
“You’re deaf and blind and dumb,” I inform him.
I hold him up to my face. His glass eyes are cloudy with a war-torn, trauma-ridden gaze. His soft whiteness has morphed into the texture and multicolor of a used dish rag.
I abused him. For years, Islands was a permanent fixture underneath my left arm; he would only be severed from my armpit in cases of extreme punishment. Even now, my left underarm tingles with the ever present, sea-lion shaped phantom limb.
“Why should I care about you when there are real respirating bodies lining up to sleep next to me? I will incinerate you,” I tell him.
What I want is pure blank white. It could set me free. This is my new aesthetic. Prepare for incineration.
I toss Islands across the room and watch his body bounce off the mirror. He lands upside down. I can see his crude, but sweetly sewn-on smile.
I smile back, caving into a pang of tenderness. I used to love him, my plush crutch. We would talk, telepathically, before bed every night, like an old couple. He had a high-pitched, squealing voice, which was somehow soothing to me. It never mattered that he wasn’t real.
When my parents begged me to befriend real people, I didn’t understand. They would set me up on playdates with little church girls, all of whom I would ignore, abandoning them in order to talk to inanimate objects. I didn’t trust my parents to explain reality to me. I couldn’t distinguish between what was made up in my head and what wasn’t. It all felt equally real and equally fake. Who is to say that I didn’t make you up? I would tell this to my parents. The suggestion would shock them to the core, because, after all, they made me. Or, at least, they thought they did. Even for them, doubt began to creep in. I was so insistent in denying their authorship that they, too, almost started to believe that I had sprung from an ouroboros of my own design.
“Don’t you know I’m a superstar in utero?” I say to no one in particular. My voice echoes empty across my bedroom. I plot my exit. I plot my re-birth. I know a lot about rebirth from Christianity. I know that it means I will have to die first. So, I plot my death.
My world is small. My parents made sure of it. They’ve kept me cloistered in this town so that I will not learn of ‘things of the world.’ Their intentions are pure, but it’s a rotten kind of purity. The townies here never leave. Trapped in delusional innocence, they keep breeding, not caring that their families have been intermarrying for centuries. Many are the result of first cousin incest. Nobody ever taught them that it was wrong, that an extreme degree of purity is disgusting. DNA rots. Ours is becoming increasingly illegible. Not that anyone in this hick town knows how to read. Only I can read it; the decay. It smells like hell. When it rains here, the petrichor is dark and plummy. It stinks of putrid purity.
This putridness is our punishment on earth. It’s the biological consequence of not being attracted to difference, of shunning outsiders, of doppelgangers replicating and churning out more of the same. Now my DNA is in tatters. If I’m a nutcase, it isn’t my fault. The sameness of us will be the death of us. That’s our family motto. I hope my surname is the next to go extinct.
There are many things that turn me on; One of them is thunderstorms. It’s raining, so I rush downstairs to the glass doors. My mother is behind the kitchen counter. She notices the crazed look in my eye as I watch the downpour.
“Snap out of it,” she demands.
When I don’t respond, she looks increasingly disturbed. She turns back to the sink and continues washing the dishes, choosing to unsee the sexual gleam in my eyes. I stand there for at least a half an hour, basking in the disturbance, before I run outside and let myself get drenched.
I go to the backyard and squeeze fistfulls of wet dirt.
“Get in here, right now. You’re going to get electrocuted.”
My parents are zealous Calvinists. They think I’m spiritually diseased but don’t have the language to elaborate on what that means. All they know is pre-destiny. They’ve never heard the word nymphomaniac, but that’s what they suspect I am. I’m not a nymphomaniac. That would be gross. I’m something else. There’s no word for it yet, and I won’t invent one because a name would cheapen my rare condition.
I guess I just have a sexual mind. I’m not interested in the real thing though. I’ve never done it, and bodily sex actually seems pretty repulsive to me. Maybe it’s a language problem. I have sex through metaphor. I only feel attracted to things that abstractly represent sex. Obviously I know what fetishes are. That’s not what I’m talking about. I really do have wires crossed in my head. I’m attracted to abstract things, like particular rays of light, pitches of sound, and shades of color. Wait. That’s probably just called being an artist. Still, I think I have an usually advanced case. I’m not going to explain it any further. I’ve already made a mistake by demystifying it. I’ll just demonstrate from here on out.
****
I’m not sure if the majority of Hampstead’s residents are blind, or if they are only pretending to be. Sometimes, I suspect that I am part of the greatest mating experiment of the 21st century.
It’s popular among townies to wear reflective sunglasses, even indoors. One time, I went into a gas station at midnight. Half a dozen townies lined up behind me. All of them were wearing mirrored glasses. I only wanted to buy gum. I didn’t buy anything. I thought that chewing gum would melt baby fat. I wanted my cheekbones to shine through.
It was my turn to check out, but I froze up, not knowing which shade of mint to pick. That’s when I felt a collection of eyes, icy, like a gun barrel on the back of my neck. I spun around. I saw my face stretched across the face of a stranger, weird and obtuse.
I broke eye contact with myself. Behind the sunglasses was a slender man with teal-tinted skin. He had a baby face, but one with shallow laugh lines, on the edge of losing its extended youth.
Of course, the thought crossed my mind that he could’ve been you. Sometimes, you appear under fluorescent light, in places like gas stations. Maybe he was you, incarnate, again. He stood too close to be a stranger. So close that anything but stillness would have initiated endless contact.
A puff of breath hit my ear. The air gas station air turned suddenly arctic. I inhaled. The air stung me inside out. Above us, the fluorescent light sizzled whiter. I started to panic, as a numbing sensation spread below my knees, believing that it was possible for the instant itself to drown me.
But, when the cashier murmured something incomprehensible to me, I spun back around, and the moment was over. I breathed a sigh of relief. My lungs felt like they were being skewered. Still, I felt grateful, knowing that there was so much to look forward to. I left without buying the gum.
For a few minutes, I lingered in the parking lot. I sat on the curb, shivering and clutching my left arm, which was aching mysteriously. I thought about you.
Truth is; I miss you. But I won’t waste my breath mourning the silent alternate world in which we shared everything.
When the odd, slim man came out of the gas station, I was still clutching my arm. He beckoned me to enter his car, and I followed him without questioning it.
When he beckoned for me to enter his car, I was still clutching my arm. I was still seventeen and so lucky. I obliged, and having nothing better to do, got into the backseat of his car. He agreed to drive me home. I knew that that could mean a variety of things. I told him my address, but I didn’t expect him to bring me there.
After a few miles, I broke the silence.
“I need you to do something for me,” I said, trembling.
He nodded, as if to say “go ahead.”
“I need you to kill me.”
He smiled and handed me a pack of cigarettes from the dashboard.
“No, that won’t work. I need you to want to kill me.”
“You’re a weird girl.” His voice was surprisingly high-pitched and aquatic. “Why would you want me to do that? Is your life really that bad?”
“There’s this exotic feeling that I get when-”
“When what?” He said, glancing over at me.
I sunk into myself like a lifeless sack doll. “Nevermind.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s just that… I think I mistook you for somebody else.”
“For who?”
“For somebody who is not really a man or a woman, but who is this exotic feeling that I get when-”
“When what?”
“When I… uh… I don’t know. It’s not really something you would understand.”
“Why not? Give it a shot and maybe I will.”
“It’s not really a person. It’s an It. It arises in certain circumstances. I think I experience infinity as an emotion. I get feelings of infinity.”
He laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, nothing. I think I know what you’re talking about.”
“No, you don’t. I’m not talking about sex. Or drugs. It’s better than those things.”
You want to see me severely altered. I just have one of those faces. I keep this alienness about me. I have eternal newness of life. It’s disturbing. That’s why you can’t look away, can you? My face is the car crash that you can’t look away from. You’re addicted to turning it over and over in fingers. You want to see me severely altered. You want to see me with lightning scars streaking down my face. That’s why you can’t look away. You can’t have anything desirable without wanting to squeeze all of the oxygen out of its lungs and pluck out all its fur, can you? You can’t just have a nice thing, can you? Huh, huh, huh? But that’s what makes this tension tick? Huh? What? You wanting to kill me. Duh. Huh? What? It makes me feel so young. Wha?
I am the unripe wunderkind of each generation, forever up and coming. And I’m no gatekeeper, so I’ll tell you how I do it. You want to know how I stay young? I use parallax.
My left eye speck twinkles in the distance, while a series of contexts change rapidly in the foreground. It’s a normal temporal hack.
You were several decades older than me when I taught you your first parallax trick. You said that you gave up having girlfriends. That your last was your last. I knew that I could get you to change your mind. I studied up on attention tricks. I read J W Dunne’s An Experiment in Time and then a bunch of books about infinity because I knew that there had to be a methodical way to get you to love me.
I am the last wunderkind of my generation. Google me next century and I will still be new. I am new again and again.
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