VALERIE: I liked surfing so much, Cosmo.
COSMO: Shh . . .
The Narrators
A. A heart full of black flies. The loneliness of a desert. Landscape of stones. Cowboys. Wild mustangs. An alphabet of bad experiences.
B. Blue smoke on the mountains. I am the only sane one here. There were no real cowboys. There were no real pictures. I vacuumed all the rooms; the dust was still there. I cleaned all the windows; I still could not breathe. It had something to do with the construction. The sun burned through the umbrellas.
C. The American film. The camera’s lies. World literature’s. America was a big adventure with its unreal blue mountains, its desert landscape.
D. They were filming in the desert. Wild horses chased by helicopters. She never understood what was in the script; she could never remember her lines. They were always covered by something plastic. Men had a tendency to be sucked into her mother. Men are happy in my company. It does not mean that I am happy.
E. “I, a Man” and “Bike Boy” by Andy Warhol. The story of the dissident, of frontier language, of the scream, of suicide. All these compelling mutations and machinations, without being regarded in retrospect as a tragic fate. She vented her heart between the high-rise blocks. Death’s field was hers.
F. There should be a story set in the desert. There was no electricity. There were no telephone lines. How might the story be told? There would be endless dead blondes.
G. Stories. Overdoses. Sleeping tablets. Everything reaches its end.
H. Dead trees. Dead stories. Hold your horses. You must hold your horses, darling.
I. Valerie. Marilyn. Roslyn. Ulrike. Sylvia. Dorothy. Cosmogirl. A kind of insane genius. She has lost her marbles. That means we will wipe out her memories. Electroshock, injections, straitjackets, Elmhurst.
J. Remember, I am ill and I am waiting to die. Remember, I am the only sane woman here. Remember, he took my plays and killed them. They were already dead, Miss. My plays were not dead. Your plays were already dead, Miss. I want it added to the record of proceedings that he has killed my plays. What record, Miss?
K. They had waited for hours. The harsh light over the set. That little white polka-dot dress. It was quite epic, timeless. I could have told you from the start how it would end. It could have had a different ending. There are other narrators. There are happy endings.
L. Experiments. Horses. Sunset.
M. I think you are the saddest girl I have ever met. There are no paths in the dark. There is nothing to tell. I cannot tell you how sad I am. I cannot talk about it. It is not possible to think outside your thoughts.
N. The compulsive calling forth of fragments of text and body tissue. Pain’s sickness. Defense and defeat. Smiles and tears. The blues. Trying to relate to the matter then was like relating to fresh snow on an August day in New York.
O. If we called the text “The Snow”, it would not be censored. It could happily be sentimental and dirty. That was actually an ideal. What was the point? There were only filthy texts. What was the point? There were only filthy girls. Unclean, overblown, much too rhythmic. I dreamed of spotless white paper and clean unblemished people.
P. The story’s flight response. A demonstration of pain. The sentences are blank. Rhetorical clumsiness. Contagious universes.
Q. Everyone else in the world would have loved me by now. Take everything from me, do it, that’s what I want. When I have got what I want, I never want it again. How many times can my heart break? I am the only one here without a soul. I could have told you from the start how it would end. Take everything from me, do it, that’s what I want.
R. I write for the dead. What does it matter if everyone is dead?
S. She keeps on being dead. She will always be dead. She is the only one I think about. A lie. All I want is to be with her. Rubbish. What does it matter if the narrator lies? What does it matter who tells the story?
T. Black-clad female grasshoppers and screaming fetuses. You cannot write yourself out of patriarchy. You cannot film yourself out. You stand in a desert, alone, frightened, weeping. You cannot think outside your thoughts. It is not the character’s structure. Massive hegemony. The death of languages in exile.
U. Daddy’s Girls unite. Isn’t that American white-trash girl far too violent and naïve? You mean that dreadful woman with the manifesto, shrilling hysterically? What is she trying to say anyway? No, I really can’t hear what she’s trying to say in that deep, animal voice.
V. She is saying: I dream that you will never stop searching for me.
W. How will I find my way back in the dark?
X. Darkness. Silence. The desert does not reply.
Y. She says: Follow the star. The lost highway.
Z. Follow it to the end.
Ventor, Summer 1948
Dorothy and Valerie in the desert kitchen again. Valerie is cleaning the floor and the cupboards and everything in her path. Wearing her big black scarves and newly pressed skirts, she is washing away all her woes so that Red Moran cannot sniff them out, she says. In character, Red Moran is something of a disaster, but Dorothy is happy once more, lighting candles in all the rooms without burning her sleeves, stuffing desert animals and nailing them up on the wall, selling fox boas and having her handbag full of dollar bills, playing music on the radio without drinking wine; and all the time swarms of freckled hands surround your face. Never quieting, liable to come back later in your dreams.
DOROTHY: Housewives all love using soap.
VALERIE: Oh.
DOROTHY: Housewives clean away old misery and they love their daughters.
VALERIE: But you’re no housewife. You’re a barmaid. A working girl.
DOROTHY: You shouldn’t be so smart and split hairs, Valerie. Splitting hairs is just a fool’s way of making a point. I may not be a housewife on paper, but I feel like one. Happily married. Happy for my daughter. Flypapers and fly swatters to keep the shit away. Soap. Hydrogen superoxide. Soap flakes. You know you have a standing offer from Moran, Valerie?
VALERIE: I intend to carry on without a father.
DOROTHY: It’s a nice offer to a nice girl.
VALERIE: There are no nice girls.
DOROTHY: You’re a nice girl.
VALERIE: There are only nice girls.
DOROTHY: Well, it’s a nice offer anyway.
VALERIE: It’s a shit offer, Dorothy.
DOROTHY: I made some soap bubbles. Run and have a look in the kitchen.
VALERIE: I’m too old for soap bubbles. And you’re definitely too old.
*
The soap bubbles float in and out of the window and Dorothy tries to catch them with the fly swatter. She is obsessed with cleaning the house, as if she were under a spell. Then she chases you with soap bubbles through the junk and rubbish in the backyard until you both crash onto the sand among the fallen dragonflies and quenched bubbles and she laughs and smokes and waves the swarms of flies from your face and foretells a happy ending for everything. Your hopeless feral creature, your burning paradise.
Dorothy has remarried, to Red Moran. Moran is dark and obese, he pops sleeping pills like sweets and takes pride in never drinking anything other than whisky. He puts you into a Catholic school and wants you to call him Daddy and he sits napping at the filling station instead of selling gasoline and papers. The fans go like planes above his head and there he sprawls, slumped over the counter, letting the customers drive past. You take some boys back after school and steal cigarettes and piss in his hip flask. He and Dorothy are closeted for hours in the bedroom with the blinds down and it is dark and draughty and cramped in the house and at any moment Moran could be standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, naked, rooting in the refrigerator. Dorothy is known for her bad taste and her bad judgment.