Nine Kinds of Naked (30 page)

“Hmm,” Elizabeth observed. “Evolution doesn't sound very loving.”

Diablo shrugged. “Fuck that. The bus has room enough for everybody, it's just not going to slow down. The evolutionary moment is here, right now, and everyone has to take responsibility for their point of view. If your point of view is nothing more than the make-believe meanings of the long-ago dead—which
is what you are if you're confident that the world as we have it constructed is fine—you are obsolete, as far as evolution is concerned, simple as that and later on, Captain Cave-man. Ignorance is not a point of view, and the fact of the matter is this: We've inherited a broken civilization. A stupid civilization, even. If this is the best that we the living can do, then I hate to interrupt all the war and stamp collecting, but we have failed, and it's not even like we failed trying. We've got a smorgasbord of jumpy catastrophes all jockeying for position, and we just sit around in our burning house flipping through glossy catalogs.” Diablo shrugged at his own jeremiad. “But then again, history has already ended. In fact, it never really even began. People just haven't realized that yet. The new evolution sees beyond the confines of culture and social role, and knows that the security blanket their ancestors stuffed them under is threadbare. And without that security blanket, we're entirely unprotected from the dazzling sunshine of love.”

“So this new evolution,” Elizabeth pressed. “What do we do, just dance around, masturbating in hedonistic self-righteousness?”

“No.” Diablo shook his head. “Don't sell me that sorcery. Narcissistic posers don't change the fact that there is an awakening afoot, an adventure beyond the security blanket. Do you understand what I'm saying? If you're not awake, you're just mumbling in your sleep, drooling on your pillowcase. If you're awake, you live in ways our ancestors did not, and humans have tried everything twice except for one thing.”

“And what's that?”

“Love, goddamnit! Haven't you been listening?”

“Okay, but how do you wake up?”

“How do you wake up?” Diablo repeated impatiently. “What kind of a crazy question is that? You wake up the way you wake up. This isn't allegory. Little by little or all at once, it depends on what kind of a dream you're having. I guess maybe it helps to start by realizing that you're having a dream, and once you realize that, you can do anything you want to do. Life as a lucid dream, right? That'll kick you awake eventually. Or better yet, think of life as a novel where the most heroic characters are those who suspect the dream. That's probably not a metaphor either, by the way. Haven't you ever felt like a character imprisoned in some bizarre novel? Life has some chilling twists in it, you have to admit. Ironies of kindness and cruelty, symphonies of synchronicity, metaphors of meaning. And the proof is all around us. The human experience and books are made out of the same thing—words, right? Language. So, human life is a con, a fiction, a novel, and that makes us characters, clueless characters, and the roles and identities we take so dreadfully serious are the characters of some divine drama. Our lives are bookended by silence, the pages in between are the only opportunity we'll ever have to make any noise, and most of us spend more time sitting in traffic than we do on vacation. How's that for
a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing
? It's this surreal, dystopian satire that we live in, stranger than fiction, actually.

“So maybe it works like this: Maybe the more you kick at the security blanket, the more you attract the attention of the
divine novelist, who, seeing an interesting character, arranges plot twists and synchronicities to dazzle and delight, and maybe even a climax beyond any expectation. But I think the truth is that there is not one master novelist. I think the truth is that God is the sum of all histories, and we fear to see that we are free. The story we are caught in is written only by ourselves, and too many of us are insecure and uninspired hacks. History is pulp fiction, another spy thriller, another trashy romance, another courtroom drama. Or maybe, maybe human history is all just spoof, did you ever consider that? I mean, is it possible to conceive of a more ridiculous tragedy than the human condition, a more farcical parody of pride and self-importance? History, as it turns out, history is a slaphappy spoof of nothingness, and here we are.” Diablo gestured broadly. “The sleeping godhead, and the fact is this: We are nothing but the stories we tell ourselves. So the question, my godchild—and I don't want you to forget this—the question to you becomes this:

“Are you writing your own story, or are you being written off by someone else's story?”

 

77
I
N THE MOMENT
, Elizabeth had no ready answer to Diablo's query. Later, while she was wearing a G-string and writhing around a pole at Red's Cabaret, she finally came up with what she should have said.

“I am in this world as I am,” she should have said. “And not as others might prefer. No one masters my marionette but I.”

And here she imagined that Diablo would interrupt and
attempt to correct her grammar. “Me,” Diablo interrupted and attempted to correct her grammar. “You meant to say, ‘No one masters my marionette but
me.
'”

“No,” Elizabeth imagined her mighty reply, twirling expertly down the pole. “I said what I meant. No one masters my marionette but
I
. Me is someone's else's directed object.
I
am under no one's direction.
I
am a subject.
I
know who I am, and
I
will not be confused.”

So there, she thought feebly, doing all that she could to disregard the taunting truth that there would never, under any circumstances, be any do-overs.

 

78
D
IANA ONCE
told Elizabeth about a divination practice called bibliomancy. Bibliomancy, as she described it, is when you pick a random book off the shelf, open it to a random page, and read a random sentence or two. The synchronicity between the text and your mind is supposed to bear insight on the situation at hand. It worked, sometimes.

The next day, while walking the French Quarter, Elizabeth impulsively wandered into a random bookstore, strode down a random aisle, picked up a random book off a random shelf, and opened it to a random page, where her eyes, blinking with dismay, fell upon the following words:

You are fooling yourself.

 

 

 

 

79
H
AVING LONG AGO
lost her patience for uninspired social gatherings, Elizabeth might have guessed by the naked light-bulb that illuminated the barren décor of the sparsely attended party in which she found herself that she was waking into a dream. But nonetheless she stood, vaguely contemplative, watching lifeless conversation slurch about the room as if drunk on its own drabbery, stoned on the catatonic madness of the mundane.

It was a deeply unremarkable dream, until a little girl abruptly presented her with a crumpled strip of leather. “I dare you to untie this knot,” she said, very cheerful.

Elizabeth accepted the strip of leather and the dare, noticing that the little girl's grinning face and bare arms were swiped with scratches, as if she had just run the gauntlet of a cornfield. Unalarmed by any of this, Elizabeth simply untied the single knot and handed it back to the little girl, who responded by handing her a seashell pipe.

“I dare you to smoke this,” she said, again very cheerful.

Elizabeth accepted the pipe in automatic courtesy. “What is it?”

“M2.”

Having no recollection of her waking consciousness, Elizabeth had never heard of m2. “What's m2?”

“Just smoke it.”

Careless experimentation with exotic drugs offered by unsupervised children at lame parties not being her custom, it might have been another clue that she was dreaming when Elizabeth unhesitatingly hit the pipe twice in rapid succession. But she had no time to piece these clues together, for no sooner had she exhaled her second hit than each moment of her formerly dull
dream began to pulse against her in all its unreduced infinity. She felt her body collapse under an unrelenting
tremendum
, freeze-frames of her fall trailing after as she heard her own whispered
help
strobe across a dozen syllables. Her entire being shattered as she hit the floor, abandoned by her every illusion: no party, no drab décor, no wild child, no room, no floor, no clothing, no body, no time, no identity, no concept, no point of reference anywhere. There was only a scream,
the
scream, the scream of a self, a crackling bolt of electricity arcing across eternity like a supernatural synapse, and neither horror nor hell can describe the unspeakable terror of a spirit choking on its own life, howling and blackened, a writhing wraith of wrath, the subjectivity of the damned.

Hatred, fury, rage, and fear, her existence screamed nothing else and nevermore. There was nowhere else, there was no one else, there was actually nothing at all, but then there it was nonetheless, blinking awake like a child forever from a dream, beginning to stir and starting to stretch, yawning and dawning and glowing and growing and offering only its unfathomable chorus of being to soothe the tars of nothingness into their slithering nonexistence, and no longer is there nothing.

Lux profundo
, there is something, a cheering chiming shining, and it vanishes into Elizabeth's gasp, and she's back at the lame party, bolting upright just as a chain mail and cheerful crusader with a sprig of mistletoe behind his left ear and a strip of leather in his grasp jangles forward and says, “Unnerved, I am, sometimes in the stillness of an approaching sleep,” just before touching the side of his nose and fading into the blinks of Elizabeth's awakening.

 

80
T
HE MORNING AFTER
her ultimate nightmare, Elizabeth felt like she'd eaten a salad of four-leaf clovers for breakfast. So much more than luck, Elizabeth was feeling love. Not a love for anyone in particular, but a love for everyone in spectacular, an ecstatic sort of madness, the rumored paradise of mind known to mad poets and rowdy saints, and whether it was truth or mania does not really matter. For Elizabeth, it was truth. Absolute truth.

And it probably
was
truth. After all, having just survived her own worst nightmare, Elizabeth awoke to find her life transfigured. Suddenly, the universe was saturated with meaning and purpose, and it was so perfectly evident that it was impossible for her to imagine a shroud that could ever again shadow such brilliance. And that is how it goes. Slapped by the grim reaper, lives formerly mundane take on a sudden luster:
TIME EXPIRED
parking meters offer red-flag reminders of impending impermanence,
JUST DO IT
advertising slogans reveal a deeply mystical significance, and the irate “watch where you're going” grumbles of passing strangers present sagelike suggestions.

Thus was Elizabeth's morning, awakening from her m2 dream refreshed and reborn. Synchronicity was no longer a concept, but an irrefutable experience as obvious as the sunshine itself. It was in this soaring state of awareness that she showed up at Red's Cabaret for another day of flaunting her assets and taunting the libido of the lunchtime crowd. Diana was not working that day, and so Elizabeth kept to herself in the dressing room and was even left to herself by the others, exacerbating her sensations of depersonalization and detachment.
Unable to ascertain whether it was the world or herself that was the ghost, Elizabeth merely observed with passive equanimity the antics of the other dancers, drinking, smoking, bitching, arguing, and gossiping. Someone even passed her a joint, and she could have participated if she had wanted to, as she certainly had on countless prior occasions, but today it all seemed unreal, dreamlike, nothing more than an elaborate ruse, a hoax upon humanity, and she couldn't possibly take any of it seriously. Not in the dressing room, not anywhere.