Chapter 3: Dreams Can Come True, As Can Nightmares

Was this how Maria Ambramovič felt before stepping into Studio Morra to let the public loose on her body? Some of the men at that performance violated her and one of them might have killed her except for the intervention of another member of the audience. In my hands was the strangely fluid, latex hood that would allow DreamAds into my mind. I was terrified at the prospect of the changes it might introduce to my personality. I did not want to surrender myself to other people.

‘I can’t do this,’ I said, ‘it’s too frightening.’

On the other side of the bed, Daniel was reading his book, tipping the pages away from me and into the warm glow of his bedside light.

‘“Tydides paused amidst his full career; then first the hero’s manly breast knew fear. As when some simple swain his cot forsakes. And wide through fens an unknown journey takes.”’

‘Are you calling me simple?’

‘Not at all. Is that what it means? I thought Homer was saying that even the hero Tydides feels fear in the face of the unknown.’

I made Daniel repeat the quote, then said: ‘I think it’s the other way around. Tydides, for the first time, feels fear, which is as unworthy as if he was a simple child on the fens.'

Closing his book, Daniel put it on the locker beside him. His reading light was now full on my face and I had to squint until Daniel came close enough to me to put his arms on my shoulders. Once in his shadow, I opened my eyes wide again and looked at his. Hazel, flecked with yellow, sincere, wanting to help.

‘I wish I’d never painted that mural.’

‘Cyn. It was your best work. It’s amazing. Everyone loves it.’

‘Not everyone. Not the management of the shopping centre; not the judge. And even if they do love it, so what? I’m the one who must pay forty-five thousand.’ Not that I could possibly pay such a fine or even make a start on paying it. Meeting rent every month was always a challenge. Given my current dependency on social welfare, even new brushes and paint were unaffordable just now.

‘What if you do a GoFundMe for your fine?’ Daniel, it seemed, had been thinking about the fact that a number of people loved my mural.

Hope came running up the garden path but I closed the door in her face before she could disorientate me. ‘I should. I really should. But that will take time. And I have to put this hood on now or I fail the programme. How much do you think a GoFundMe will raise?’

‘Honestly… about two thousand.’

My mouth was dry. As dry as a lost beach. And the waves? They were the tears filling my eyes.

I unzipped the grey mask and pulled it on.

My whole head was encased. The only opening in the hood was at the mouth. My eyes and ears were completely covered. Yet wearing the mask wasn’t as claustrophobic an experience as I had imagined it would be, the latex was so soft and stretchy it felt like I was wearing a woollen balaclava.

‘Jesus, Cyn.’

‘What?’ I discovered I could speak easily.

‘You look so hot.’

‘Here’s a riddle for you. A girl with beautiful green eyes and fine cheekbones covers up her head. Her lover says that now she’s hot. How can that be?’

‘Don’t get me wrong. It’s the overall effect that’s turning me on. Just the ends of your hair are visible beneath a grim, prisoner mask. Then, below the neck, you’re a perfect sweetheart. Pink tank top, silk shorts, slender limbs. You should see yourself. I’ll take a picture. It’s the contrast between the sinister hood and your lovely, warm body I’m talking about. You’re giving off a BDSM heat and the temperature is way off the scale.’

For a second I rehearsed an angry response. You’re thinking only of yourself; you’ve no empathy for my fears; you’re reducing my personality to a pornographic visual. But no sooner had I formulated these thoughts than I rejected them as boring.

‘Take a few photos. I might use them.’

Nothing in my art would ever look like the photographs. Nothing rubber, mechanical, or technological had ever appeared in one of my paintings. But whatever erotic juxtaposition was driving Daniel’s desires right now, might, if reworked in my visual language of petals and pistils, be worth investigating.

When he was done, I reached up to remove the mask to see for myself.

‘Cyn, before you take that off. How about I tie you up for a ride?’

I’m not a sub. I am, however, uncensorious, performative, and keen for my partner to have a fulfilling sex life with me (and his other lovers). The theatrics of sex can bring me to an intense and potentially very satisfying place, no matter what the role I’m playing. So Daniel’s proposal wasn’t out of the question. Under other circumstances I would have tried it and been happy to oblige him. Fear, however, is devastating to the libido.

‘Sorry, my love,’ I took the hood off and shook out my hair. Daniel’s eyes met mine with the same insistent stare as our cat when it wanted feeding. ‘Maybe in time, when I’ve gotten used to this. Right now though, my stomach is in revolt against the rest of my body.’

‘You’re going to go ahead?’

‘I’ve no choice.’

Later, lying in the double darkness of bedroom and hood, I thought I would not be able to sleep. I was wrong. Perhaps I’d worn myself out through worry. Tiredness rose up and on its wave I floated into my dreams.

I knew I was dreaming. Whether I could or would interfere with my dream was moot. What mattered if the meaning were plain? The sighs of the world surrounded me like waves and said, ‘Dream. Dream holily. Dream deeply. Let you be carried along by the beauty of the world. This is not a surrender, it is a bather, bathing.’ By which I understood myself to be in a prologue or preamble or theatrical address like that at the opening of Henry V. Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of Neo?

The dream proper began with my foreknowledge that the building would fall. Nevertheless, I walked along corridors and attended classes with my fellow students and whether they would die or not in the forthcoming collapse, no one but me seemed to particularly care. Like a toy tower of wooden blocks from which children were removing pieces, sudden drafts of cold air struck my face and precipitous drops came into view as walls and floors and roofs disappeared.

I did not like it, not at all. I did not want to risk a fall. I did not like it on the stairs; I did not like it anywhere. I did not like to dream like this; I did not like to take the risk.

A student who was talking to me was careless, even walking backwards along an exposed iron girder while pointing to her new glasses, which she had chosen because of how they reminded her of John Lennon. For lunch, my entire class sat in a row on that girder, feet dangling over a grey, fatal void. They each had a burger inside a McDonald’s box.

‘Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.’ Oscar Wilde stood at edge of the cut-away room from which the girder protruded.

We all turned to look at her, my other classmates doing so with identical head gestures. That felt odd; that they were alien to me. Oscar Wilde, on the other hand, was a comfort to look at. She required no explanation for her presence. She was as natural and as vital to my dreams as the sun and the sky to my waking self. For a moment the wrongness of my experience was removed. For a moment I was back in the languorous world of my unadulterated dreams.

‘Who are you?’ asked the student beside me of Oscar Wilde. The stare of the other students was unwavering. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

‘Cyn, dear, I do not care for the company you keep. I can forgive them eating without cutlery, but I can’t forgive them the foul excrement on their boots, which they are depositing everywhere without the slightest consideration.’

Immediately, I got up and walked along the girder towards Oscar. Was this Daniel? Was she my partner? I loved her. But I was also afraid of her. With Daniel, I could picture our future together and those pictures made me happy. I could not picture anything of a future with Oscar. Even by trying, my imagined scenes seemed incongruous and false. They made me afraid. My love of Daniel was playful and I knew all there was to know about him. Oscar was quite different from, and better than, anyone I had met before, and above all better than myself.

When I reached the end of the girder and the – temporary – safety of the building, Oscar kissed me on the lips and then whispered: ‘To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long relationship.’

‘But you’re not me.’

‘Aren’t I?’

‘No, you’re not.’ Although I asserted this, I couldn’t be sure.

‘What about them? Who are they?’

Of the other people now walking towards us I could only think that they made me unhappy. I said so.

With a clap, Oscar Wilde severed the girder. As they tumbled into the abyss, the students gave me looks of extreme disappointment.

‘Now, Cyn, dear. Take my hand. A little tête-a-tête is called for.’

I took her outstretched hand.

We were in a cosy library whose affectionate nature was formed by several features: a fireplace containing glowing logs whose amber light competed with that of a chandelier holding fifty or more candles; a large wooden table, with a highly polished dark wood surface; two identical chairs, armless with figure-eight backs and padded with blue velvet; a rug of deep blue with a design in white of intertwined lines near the perimeter; and, on the table, a silver dish holding a bottle of red wine and two glasses.

On the shelves were every book I’d ever read, bound in scarlet leather and identified with gold lettering. Aware of my interest in these volumes, Oscar, who had stretched out on a chaise-longue said, ‘you must read more Cyn. Only a person who has read more than a thousand books is worth talking to.’

‘What about you, how many books have you read?’

‘Trying to trick me, dear? You know I have read exactly as many as you.’

‘Oscar Wilde?’

‘Yes?’

‘I mean, Oscar Wilde read many more books than I.’

‘Very true.’

‘So, you’re not Oscar Wilde.’

‘I am. And I am not. Insofar as I am, I have indeed read a great deal, though not above ten books worth reading, for I did not write any more than that. But I have a question for you. Why has something unpleasant and ugly entered my world?’

The judge who had sentenced me came through the door and into the library without knocking. She looked at Oscar with a sneer.

‘Dear God,’ said Oscar, springing to her feet, ‘if there is one profession more calculated to fashion a person into a monster than any other, then it is that of the judiciary.’

‘Sit down Oscar,’ her voice attempted unsuccessfully to adopt a paternal tone.

‘Sit you down father? Rest you?’ Oscar plucked a poker from where it was hanging beside the fireplace.

I began crying. It was my fault that our world had become soiled. On seeing my tears, visibly mastering herself, Oscar drew a deep breath and spoke with composure:

‘Cry not, dear child. An artist’s job is to create beauty. We shall leave patricide to playboys and Greek gods.’ She put the poker down and the judge, perhaps realising that she had narrowly escaped being murdered, gave an uneasy laugh.

‘My mural deserved your praise, not your censure,’ I said to the judge aware of Oscar nodding and settling once more on the chaise-longue in the exact pose of my sensual woman in yellow.

The judge shrugged. ‘Between ourselves, speaking as a human being, I rather liked your art. Looking at the mural I felt young again. And, indeed, a pleasant erotic charge radiated from my loins. In my capacity as a regulator of a society that might so easily fall asunder, however, I followed both precedent and the definitions provided in the Criminal Damage Act to issue you with an appropriate fine. I encourage you by all means to continue to paint such murals, but not on private property for which you have no permission.’

‘It made all the difference that I did not have permission. It mattered that this was an offense to private property, that the users of the shopping centre felt more than presence of a patch of yellow at the edge of their vision. My intention was that they should find themselves outside of the rules; feeling free; sexual; joyful.

‘Would you even have noticed the painting if it was official? Or worse, holding a container of butter as though a product was making her happy? If the context was commercial, Woman in Yellow would have been invisible not sensual.’

‘Perhaps we three can agree on this,’ said the judge, ‘in speaking like Breton, it is clear you should not have opted to be a participant in the DreamAds pilot scheme.’

Feeling guilty, I looked at Oscar.

‘While I cannot pretend that I fully understand the judge, I can confidently assert that you must stop this Cyn. For both our sakes.’