DOROTHY: I don’t know. Last year they dropped an atom bomb on the sixth of August. The war was practically over.
VALERIE: Did the animals die too?
DOROTHY: Everything died. The trees. All the flowers, all the grass, all the children.
VALERIE: What’s the President’s name?
DOROTHY: Harry.
VALERIE: I can just imagine his fat butt when he sits down for a crap. What does he look like?
DOROTHY: Beard, glasses and shit on his ass.
VALERIE: Right.
DOROTHY: You’re my little president. My little Miss President.
VALERIE: I want pie, not water soup.
DOROTHY: I’ll have some money soon. When Louis comes back.
VALERIE: Louis isn’t coming back. Is there a war happening now?
DOROTHY: There’s no war.
VALERIE: None at all?
DOROTHY: Far away, there might be. A minor war. But not here. Not in America. Last year there was a war. Do you remember we were sitting in the bar all night and I was wearing my white dress? Louis was there. The war was over. That night . . . We found out in the afternoon. No-one wanted to stay at home that night. Louis bought me roses. He kissed me where everyone could see. He kissed us all.
VALERIE: Why are we eating war soup if there isn’t a war? I have got to be president of America.
DOROTHY: I think you will be. A nasty little president. Don’t forget you’re going to be a writer as well.
VALERIE: I already am a writer.
Bristol Hotel, April 10, 1988
Cosmogirl dances by amid small mushrooming clouds of forgotten places and words, the hotel bed a blazing desert of everything you left undone and everything done wrong, an ocean ten thousand fathoms deep with everything you forgot and all the times you failed to say goodbye. You have forgotten her breath was luminous blue, forgotten the way she kissed your back in her sleep before she woke, the way she dreamily mumbled your favorite sentence. The nicest women in our society are raving sex maniacs.
*
And you sleep and dream of Maryland and are woken again by the dark and the presence of death, a swirling, blistering abyss of black trees and black snow falling. There is no organization called S.C.U.M., there never has been. All that is left is the Society for Cutting Up Myself, a global organization with countless members. An organization that will never cease or disappear.
*
You look in your little pocket mirror (Cosmo kissed your mirrors and your lips, she pressed lipstick kisses on all the pages of your books, wrote your name in blood beside her own on the bathroom mirror that last time in Maryland) and in the mirror is a foul-smelling stranger. Remember to write, Valerie. Don’t forget to write. It is so long since you gave up writing, slaying promises and utopian visions, decades since the turquoise portable typewriter accompanied you everywhere, since your promise to yourself never to sell the typewriter.
If you have forgiven Valerie . . .
. . . how come you have not been to see her?
When you cough, you get blood on your hand. Beneath the silver coat is a screaming deep-sea creature wanting out, a birdlike monster with no feathers or skin, champing and chawing and flailing about. Your abdomen aches and weeps and the silver coat is wet and cold with urine, but you love it, and if you are going to die now anyway, you want to die in silver with silver buttons. If you are going to die anyway, you want to die with Cosmo’s hand in yours. The last thing she said to you was, “Don’t leave me here,” and the sky was heavy and oppressive and your leopard-skin fur coat was drenched with fear when you took the train back to Maryland that last time.
*
Robert Brush called and wept on the telephone and you ran through the laboratory, setting all the animals free. You know they will not survive for long out there; the albino rabbits are going to die right away, they will hide in the trees and under the snow and form strange shapes in the park outside the lab. Someone calls your name, someone touches your arm, in slow motion you walk across University Park, the wind gusting slightly, the smell of flowers and newly fallen snow, the sky made of dead faces, and all you want is a hole to open up in the snow and swallow you. What is the point of forgiveness, if death treads on its heels?
Cosmo?
Cosmogirl?
Feathery veils of light trail across the room; April is the maddest month of all with its sleet and lifeless fields. And when you open your eyes again, a lustrous bouquet of white lilies is over by the window and you cannot understand who has brought you such expensive flowers. It is a long time since anyone knocked at your door and there is no longer anyone who knows you love lilies. I do not want to die and if I have to die now I do not want any man to touch my dead body.
*
The ceiling is a swimming canvas of eyes and hands wanting to devour you and, as you stretch out your hands to the flowers in the window, you remember the scent of lilies and happiness, the faint smell of burning and lilies on her coats and dresses. The bed is a whirling chasm of unfamiliar voices and places and you long so much to hear her voice again, Cosmogirl, the most brilliant whore in the whole world, ruler of the universe, beloved. You long for snow and the sound of a typewriter and, when you open your eyes, she is sitting over by the window with a book in her hand and the sun on her hair. A cloud of smoke around her face as she smokes her strong cigarillos again, always with something to celebrate.
COSMO: What did you say?
VALERIE: Are the flowers from you? Are they for me?
COSMO: There aren’t any flowers. It’s your old sheets you can see. I helped you change them. There was blood and piss all over them.
VALERIE: Oh well. Have you read any of the manifesto?
COSMO (stubs out her cigarette on the windowsill): I love it.
VALERIE: Do you?
COSMO: You know I do.
VALERIE: It doesn’t matter if it’s only the sheets, you smell like flowers. Did you know Olympia Press published the manifesto after the shooting without asking?
COSMO: I thought you wanted them to publish it.
VALERIE: Maurice and Paul made big money from the manifesto. Everybody wanted to read it because I was in the asylum over that business with Andy. Ten years later I published it myself but no-one was interested then.
COSMO: Do you want me to read some of it to you?
VALERIE: Read to me while I fade away.
COSMO (opens the manifesto): Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.
VALERIE: And destroy the male sex.
COSMO: It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so.
VALERIE: We must begin immediately to do so.
COSMO: Immediately. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y gene is an incomplete X gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.
VALERIE: Further on. Read from further on. The end. The waves.
COSMO: Men who are rational, however, won’t kick or struggle or raise a distressing fuss, but will just sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their demise.