"Ore-Grimace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ore Rebecca)

REBECCA ORE

ACCELERATED GRIMACE

AH, YES, I'LL SHOW YOU US, Ralph and Marilyn, together forever in photograph,
being rich on a sailboat Off the Hamptons. Ralph was never an unsuccessful
artist in any medium but the dollars-for-kilobytes really came in after Ralph
began selling virtuals antholographs based on his take on my inner thoughts. He
put up with me because my meanness is so visual. I put up with his brain rape to
become his widow. Sometimes, when we were sailing, I wondered if he wanted me to
murder him. His brain suck went deep.

Back when we were semi-rich, I reamed significant things and how to forget them,
putting together memories of a woman turning in a night party with my husband
Ralph's nervous hands twitching over his computer mouse and keyboard as he
pulled images from his files. Put up with it --he's doing so well I'd remind
myself. Forget it. Wives inherit. If I killed him, his child would be the sole
heir.

One Sunday, Ralph quoted from and commented on the Sunday New York Times article
on the brain-scanning machines, "'Each human being tested believes he or she is
the center of the universe.' Marilyn, they can't know this absolutely. The
sample is too small."

Every Sunday, Ralph walked Jones the dog and came back with frozen croissant
dough, fresh fruit, and chocolate while I downloaded The New York Times through
the modem. I printed a paper copy on the large printer/ scanner so we could read
it traditionally. I'd fold it in traditional order and would hand it to Ralph
when he came back. Then he stripped down again to pajama bottoms and bare feet,
curling around the newspaper as though he'd tear it to shreds for a nest, his
Sunday New York Time.

He always pulled the art section free first, but was possessive of it all,
though he'd read bits to me. I couldn't look at any section until he finished
the whole paper. While he read to me, I made our breakfast, wrapping croissant
dough around Belgian chocolate bars, dipping strawberries in cream and arranging
them with cheese slices on the breakfast plates. These rituals we called our
marriage. His lovers didn't have rituals.

As I listened to Ralph read this Sunday, I wondered why the scientists needed a
machine to know each living being was the star of its own story. Everyone was
egotistical. I almost said, but of course it's true but perhaps I'd become the
Artist Widow if Ralph didn't realize that I, too, was a Center of the Universe.
So I asked, "How large a sample? How diverse?"

"Four hundred people. IQs from 63 to 155. Female, male."

"Mothers?" I asked.

"The mothers were more important than their children who needed them to be born
and raised."

My mother always told me reared, not raised. Cattle are raised. Children are
reared. "What about Buddhists? " I asked. "Artists? "

"Each Buddhist meditated perfectly, saving the unenlightened by the bushel. But
they didn't have any artists. That's why I said the sample was too small. You
can't sample the human race without artists."

As the croissants came out of the oven, I remembered gorges. "What if it's true?
The center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere. Or
something like that?"

He looked up at me over his reading glasses, an image prop. Before Ralph let me
sign the pre-nuptial agreement, I had to have vision corrective surgery. Glasses
intensify the eyes, remind of the brain directing the eyes, not the effect he
wanted on his women. He asked me, his own eyeballs severe as he liked behind the
black frames, "Do you think you're the center of the universe?"

Not the center, a center. Of course, the center of my own universe. l said, "I'm
an observer. I love beautiful things." Ralph was close to becoming a thing. I
gave him his plate and wondered if I could slip the Book Review Section away
from him without his noticing.

"`Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,"' Ralph quoted from Ezra Pound. In my
passage through the art world, boring and intriguing anecdotes alike spiraled
into my memory waiting to be rescued by a semantic sailor who could untangle
golden stories from weed pulp. In that nothing quite my own was me.
Undifferentiated from my anecdotes, a nothing not quite my own, I could be
cheated on, my past lovers freeing him for his present adulteries. Art and
artists were not time bound --all past, no present.

In my future, I'd be on the prow of a sloop off the Hamptons, with another art
widow, laughing as we hauled up sails made of our husband's surplus canvases. We
baked excess CDs into clay targets and shot them as they began tumbling to the
ocean. Excess production -- blam fallen to a sporting clay shotgun.

Would Ralph die in a car wreck like Pollack, be hit by a beach cab, stroke out
in a mistress's bed, or bleed out the gut-shot victim of a wannabe's violence?
I, who could always recognize talent that intrigued with the morbid, picked
Ralph because he reeked of success and early death.

When we first met, he had put me naked on a dais, my hair flowing like seaweed
over my skull bones and skin, wearing glasses then myself. Still a canvas man
then, he painted deviations from me, while I snapped my thoughts around his
future coffin. My imagination sailed the art widow's schooner off Southampton,
leaving behind at Springs his perfect tombstone.

His first wife had been the fellow art student; the second had been the gallery
owner who ignored all her artists' affairs with wealthy buyers. Now I was
devoted to becoming his widow.

So we could read brains now. "Marilyn, what are you thinking," he asked. "I'd
like to know."

Under my skull bones, wrapped in aura mater, my thoughts, aware they could be
read now, began to move anxiously along the neurons and dendrites. "I don't like
the idea of this machine," I said. "Shouldn't some things stay mysteries?"

"I want to read you," Ralph said. He looked over his glasses at me again, the
half glass coming up to the bottom of his irises. His chest hairs were beginning
to fluff up after his sweaty walk with the dog. Jones came up and pushed against
Ralph, begging for croissant.

"But what will you know?" I asked. "The sample is too small to prove anything.
They didn't include artists."

He said, "I can use your thoughts as metaphors."

I wondered if the wild boy mask concealed a mirror reflecting void. The two
nouns bounced the mediating participle between them as though thinking about
whether to insert a hyphen. I almost said, Only if you let me read you, then
realized I preferred my idea of him to any possible reality. "But I'm your
mirror, the woman you look at." Jones came over to me and nudged me with his
nose. I fended him off, wondering if dogs also thought they were the centers of
their universes.

Ralph put the Book Review beside my plate without looking at it himself. Did
this mean he doubted my mind was as dedicated to his image as his mirrors were?
"If you need to stay mysterious, I understand," he said, meaning I'll never
forgive you for denying me access to material.

The Book Review lay beside my chocolate croissant. I picked up the croissant
first, its chocolate heart congealing. He'd found the classic croissant
chocolate this time, slightly gritty, more bitter than sweet, an Aztec flavor.
And it had chilled enough while we talked of brain readings so it didn't squirt
when I bit down. I looked back at Ralph, then opened the Book Review.

While I ate the croissant and looked for interesting books, Ralph shot me with
strobes and the data-back view camera. I'd see myself tomorrow on photo canvas
or in a virtual space, Mandlebrotted into the brainscape Ralph wanted to invade.

But you can't figure me out. I'm attached at the back to infinity, I wanted to
quote from Lafcadio Hearn. But, the future widow sails flapping in a tack, I
just said, "Looks like the most interesting books are now CD-ROM only."

He took the Book Review away from me to see what had intrigued me. They were all
histories--art, technology, and war. I said, "My mind and I are your Sargasso
Sea." Perhaps I could cheat the machine. Perhaps the technicians doing the
reading could be bribed.

DISBELIEVING the mind-reading machine turned out to be popular at the next
couple of gallery openings. Technology in general faded in the art market that
month. More and more people claimed to be able to tell the difference between
machine-ground colors and those the artist ground by hand. Ralph sold nothing
that month, but I still trusted my bet.

Ralph's ex-wife brought neo-primitives to the opening of someone else's light
sculptures. She pulled out two Lucite-boxed paintings from her portfolio. Ralph,
despite being a techno-man who sent his sculpture designs out to CAM workshops
and his virtuals and holo works to the best recording and editing studios, had
already begun to get fascinated with the theory. No sales for a month will do
that to anyone. His ex-wife opened the boxes and said, "Look. Tell me if you can
see the difference or not?"

Ralph juggled the two paintings before him, talking as he looked. "If a machine
does any of the work, it isn't the machine and you, with the machine as a tool,
it's the person who made the machine and you. Then the patron looking at the
work is at least the third collaborator. Plus I steal or not from all the past
artists who become my collaborators either way. Do you think anyone can express
a private vision unmediated by collective experience?"

His ex-wife said, "If you grind your own colors, you know what you're using them
for. The emotionality affects the grinding. And I can see this. I'm not saying
this means collaborative art is wrong, but the actual physicality of it is a
visible distinction the artist can use semiotically."

That season, we could all see the difference between hand-ground pigments and
machine-milled before the tedium of grinding one's own colors obliterated the
making of those distinctions.

I asked, "Ralph, why don't you start working in egg tempera?" If I remembered
correctly, egg tempera must be used by the end of the day and is harder to
retouch than watercolors. I wondered, too, if the mind-reading machine was
utterly transparent or if the conceptions of the designers colored the end
result. His ex-wife took the paintings out of his hands before I could see them
and slid them back into their lucite jewel boxes.

Ralph swung around one of the support posts in the gallery, not exuberantly
enough to avoid the appearance of pose. Everyone looked once to see who, then
turned Manhattan faces back to each other, all centers of the universe. Ralph
said, "So, this is what you're representing now? "

The ex-wife smiled at me, and said, "Yes. Clear messages from human to human."

I said, "Who makes the paper or weaves the canvas or planes the boards? "

"All hand-done," she answered, but she didn't claim by the artist who signed in
the comer. In past big-money art eras, artists' apprentices ground the paint,
gessoed the boards, put down the plaster for the frescos, hauled the blocks from
the quarry, painted draperies, sky, and settings. So, now, in Mexico or India,
other hands left their messages under the ones given by the primary artist.
Probably a computer-aided workshop technician had more optimistic messages than
a Third World craftsman.

Ralph said, "I'll follow it, but now I'm trying to get Marilyn to sit for a
brain-machine reading."

The ex-wife asked, "Why?" as though what he asked was essentially absurd.

"For images to twist," Ralph said. "For another brain to collaborate with."

The ex-wife swung her eyes at me, just noticing I was really there, not a
semiotic indicator for the position new wife. I remembered her name. Judy. She
said, "But all you'd know is that you aren't the center of her universe any more
than you were the center of mine." Judy was mother of The Child. When I was
growing up, I wondered what kind of children Kafka would have had. Now, I'm not
curious. Ralph sees The Child alone most of the times, taking him to the Bronx
Zoo, the Metropolitan, the Frick, the Coney Island Aquarium where dolphins who
also think they are the center of the universe tease their handler by doing the
trick before the one she asks them to do now.

I said, "The sample isn't large enough," and smiled to back her away from us.
Go, ex-wife, back to your accounting programs and your brave new artistic
movement and your Artist's Child. After she made her excuse about coming back
after she'd talked to her artists, I asked Ralph, "Do you really think I'm
different from everyone else?" My question's tone seemed a trifle off.

Ralph said, "I want to know you even better."

Though her tender flesh is near, her mind I cannot fathom. Whose quote was that?
From Asia, no doubt, not a Western sentiment at all. "Ralph, don't." The brain
machine was a hoop to jump a wife through. I remembered the one time I'd gone
with Ralph and his son to Coney Island. The dolphins and the handler locked
themselves into mutual piss-off, the handler's face getting redder and redder.
Even the adults who'd only come with children realized what the dolphins were
doing to her. Perhaps we didn't understand it from the dolphins' point of
view--trapped in a sonic cage, perhaps hearing the sea echoing beyond them
through the water table, the filtration pipes. Maybe they just couldn't remember
the tricks in time? Maybe they didn't want to be possessed completely and
disobeyed out of anger, not knowing what it was to tease. "Are you teasing?
Don't tease me with this. I want to always be able to surprise you. "

"We could read each other," Ralph said. "No secrets."

I tuned my vocal chords to perfect jest. "What if I told you I tolerated your
mistresses because I plan to be your widow?"

He smiled. I smiled back, eyes corrected so I could drive him while he thought
up images unrestrained by stop lights. Hips wiggle, a hint. My eyes unfocused to
look at him the way a cat looks with half-closed eyes at a favorite. I said,
"Let's read Jones first. What will he think?" Could I convince myself to adore
him for the duration of the reading? I'd seen fully intelligent women appear to
adore dolts, but then I hadn't been inside their minds.

From the outside, I looked like those women. I wore the heavy silks fashionable
with artists' wives this season, the cut as curious as a Klein bottle, buttoned
with one piece of monkeypod wood. My blonde hair, each strand coated with
density enhancers, swung in an asymmetrical cut. For an instant, I see myself
from the outside in my mind's eye, a construction from earlier mirror
inspections as to how I should appear, then I look through my own eyes at Ralph,
an artist in spectacles.

I left him at the party, flirting with a woman in a mohair sweater dress.

"We'll both do it together," Ralph said over another Sunday New York Times.
"Make it mutual."

"Do what? " I asked, hoping he didn't mean for us to be brain-scanned together.

"Have our thoughts read."

"Isn't the technique still a bit primitive? " I asked, then bit into my
croissant. The chocolate this time was too sweet and too runny inside the hot
pastry. Blisters rose behind my top incisors. I wiped my chin and took another
bite anyway. The times called for pain. "Can they really read someone as complex
as an artist?"

"I've been asking friends with Columbia-Presbyterian connections," Ralph said.
"The researcher in charge is fascinated by the idea of crossreading a couple."

Stop thinking of the sloop off the Hamptons. "Ralph, you'll ruin my mystery."
Oscar Wilde's mean quip, women are sphinxes without secrets, popped into my
thoughts.

"Both into both," Ralph said. "They only ask that we sit in on the discussion."

How could the experimenters check the veracity of their machines? Wasn't anyone
embarrassed about being the center of the universe? "Whatever." I wanted to ask
him to promise not to leave me whatever I thought, but didn't want to suggest
that anything might go wrong with these readings.

"I'll lead you into my mind," Ralph said.

Oh, so that's it. Ralph wants me to know even more about his real center of the
universe. But was he being completely honest? He started by wanting to read me.

Before our time in the mind machines, I went to my beauty technicians. They
tightened my skin, resheathed my hair, re-tinted the violet in my eyes, smoothed
out wrinkles with tiny injections, waxed my legs and superfluous pubic hair,
shaded my face to show heart-breaking cheekbones. I couldn't ask if there was a
way to beat the mind-reading machine.

Home with my beauty tuned, I looked through my dresses for one Ralph seemed to
like best and found one I'd forgotten, the one I'd worn when we first met: red
silk knit. Not a wife's dress at all, I first thought, then I reconsidered. I
would add a scarf to close up the open-work top.

I left the loft in dark sunglasses. Ralph and I took a taxi up to
Columbia-Presbyterian. Ralph put his hand on my knee to steady himself through a
turn, but didn't say much. He was waiting for the real communication.

We went into the big buildings and found a guide to the NeuroPsychiatry
Department, then followed a post-doc through the halls to the lab.

The five lead researchers moved around in a mess of VR suits, helmets, gloves,
pots of electroconducting jelly. The lab looked like a parody of an artist's
lab. Or perhaps a contemporary artist's studio was a parody of this. The one
woman on the team was dressed in a suit her body wasn't accustomed to. She was
slightly overweight, blonde but not enhanced. The senior man wore sweat pants
and a neoprene ear warmer pushed above his ears to keep his hair back. The other
three wore college student jeans and shirts.

The woman was Dr. Drake, whom we could call Beth. I did precisely that, asking,
"Beth, what are the VR suits for?"

She said, "The brain goes down to the fingertips. We need to read from the whole
body."

VR suits were sweaty. All that beauty work for nothing. The senior man and Ralph
huddled together, talking tech in front of the monster Cray computer that would
construct my thoughts from twitching fingernails and the brain's electromagnetic
currents. I asked, "Where can I hang my clothes? And do you have somewhere I can
shower after?"

"I'll get a tech to show you," Beth the woman science person said. I wondered if
she slept with the senior male, but then decided I didn't want to know. Could a
woman make a place without the mate? I knew several women in the art world who
weren't spousal proteges. Three were gay. Five married safe guys who supported
what their wives did. Only one was ambiguously alone, not using sex for
connections or support. Unmated, she was a sexual threat to or a sexual reject
by both sexes. We all wanted her to fall desperately in love with one of the
ruthless ambisexual boys just to see her turn human.

So, whatever this science woman was, I left with her to change into the VR suit.
She smeared my head with electroconducting jelly. The helmet's electrodes
crunches through my expensive hair. I came back out to see Ralph also
approaching me in another suit. We should have flippers on our feet, I thought,
we so resemble divers.

What is Ralph expecting? I'd know soon.

The head scientist said, "We're going to let you see into each other's mints
through the VR goggles. I'd like to remind you that this will be digital
simulation of your minds, not precisely your own visual cortex constructions.
You'll `hear' each other, see what visuals you imagine."

Beth added, "It will take time to fine-tune. You both might want to lie town for
a few minutes."

I'd rather have run. Would they drug me? Would they please drug me. Ralph ant
the chief guy scientists chatted. I slipped the VR goggles over my eyes and
began adjusting the machine to my thinking, trying to see if I court image fake
things.

Beth salt, "Sometimes the suggestibility effect brings things to consciousness
that you might not want to think about. We can cut out if you remember anything
really upsetting, give you a milt shock."

The VR goggles fed me my thought images.

"Who goes first?" Ralph asked.

"Flip a coin," I salt, caught in the memory of the ex-wife's hand-done art.

Beth said, "Ralph's better calibrated."

Ralph said, "But I want to read her."

I walked into his heat and found my image waiting. He was the center of the
universe, an artist and a poseur, married to the only woman in the universe who
knew that being the best of poseurs was an art form....

But I'd never thought he was a poseur. Ralph showed me how he'd calculated his
work to cultivate the rich women who bedded him and bought his work and talked
of him as their artist. Each time, he married with progressively better
calculations about a wife's value. My beauty blunted husbands' fury ant
flattered wives in their adulteries.

We were jolted. Ralph said, "She knows this. Before we came here, she spent five
hundred dollars on face and body tuning."

I was his mortal pay-back for the high status games played with kitsch art
counters: the cheap-trick pasta neons ant black velvet jolting the visual
cortex; the computer art stolen from gainers.

A fraud, but then that, too, is an art form. Besides, all his colleagues were
frauds, too, only he was the best fraud.

I don't think so. But the thoughts in the goggles came only from him. A
quivering eyelid, a muscle spasm in the hand, eyebrow flinches, shifts of
electric currents in the brain--all these things read as visible expressions of
the invisible.

Ralph said, "And you'll love me anyway." His image of me nodded.

Then, from the back of his mind, a slender river filled with fractal images
began to flow. "The subconscious, are you ready for it or is there anxiety?" one
male voice said.

I looked in the river and saw a thousand images better than anything he'd done.
Young Ralph dissolved into his work, then I saw his memories of Raphael at the
National Gallery in Washington, those sinister Madonnas and Children. Somehow,
underneath it all, Ralph wasn't a fraud. The game he played was the art of
sliding his images through preconceptual barriers.

And there were no other artists except for him and the great dead. Inside the
self-depreciation concealed by the public ego was the private ego, a tender
monster.

"Enough," Ralph said. "It isn't real, just my young self's fantasies."

So we switched. I couldn't feel or see Ralph making his way through my mind. I
tried to hold on to the river he'd sent out of his subconscious, but then I
remembered, trying hard not to think about it, the sloop off the Hamptons. The
VR goggles began to play my own visual images. I mourned Ralph and my youth and
the painted sails tattered. Then I remembered my own days in art school and felt
like a bitch sharpening her teeth on other people's bones because it was easier
to steal than to bring down my own deer.

You are my artist, I thought at Ralph. Did I ever have an image river flowing
through my subconscious? I saw myself beautiful, then time carved wrinkles into
my face, pulled down my bones, broke my hip, and threw me into the grave,
remembered only as The Widow.

And there was no more universe after me. Hideous and deformed as Time made me, I
was the true center figure of the story.

Webbed in Sargassum weed, I floated through the art world, my beauty a lure for
the bloated self behind the weeds. Ralph's fractal river floated into my sea and
the images spread out. I drew them close with my wiggling lure that looked like
a clitoris and ate them.

I loved Ralph's images. I hated them. My own river dried behind my eyes. The
single woman artist, sexually ambiguous as ever, walked through as though
neither river or sea existed and said to me, "But this was your choice, to lose
what you could do."

Ralph's voice beyond my VR suit said, "Oh, but your sea is fantastic. That
Sargassum fish dangling a woman in front of her huge maw."

The brain machine wasn't completely honest. In my own VR goggles, I'd seen the
lure as only a body part. I rethought fiercely and Ralph said, "Ah. Marvelous,
marvelous self-hate."

I realized that he'd always be the center of his universe, no matter what he saw
of mine. My fierce craving to be his widow....

"Yes, your fierce craving to be my widow is your true identity, " Ralph said,
his voice as though his throat had engorged with blood.

We were centers of the universe, uncommunicative even when ultimately revealing.
Whatever my mindput on the virtual goggles, Ralph could distort it with his own
eyes and mind.

I was relieved and horrified. I'd seen too much of my own mind.

Ralph's next project, of course, was high tech and virtually real. A skeleton
fucked me. I sailed on his image river, the sails his black velvet optic cheats.
He led me on a leash to his adulterous patrons. On the end of a Sargassum fish's
first dorsal ray, long and bent into a fishing pole, I dangled naked, luring
floating panels of Raphael madonnas into the gaping fish maw.

I looked across the gallery and saw Ralph smiling through his spectacles while
gallery hounds ate his images of my images of me. A line waited for the prime
goggles: a huge body of Ralph sailing a Sargasso Sea, dominating its weeds and
four-inch angler fish waving even tinier naked me's at him.

My mind and I were his Sargasso Sea. A sea's thoughts were more trivial than a
dog's.

I can't kill him. I must outlive him.




REBECCA ORE

ACCELERATED GRIMACE

AH, YES, I'LL SHOW YOU US, Ralph and Marilyn, together forever in photograph,
being rich on a sailboat Off the Hamptons. Ralph was never an unsuccessful
artist in any medium but the dollars-for-kilobytes really came in after Ralph
began selling virtuals antholographs based on his take on my inner thoughts. He
put up with me because my meanness is so visual. I put up with his brain rape to
become his widow. Sometimes, when we were sailing, I wondered if he wanted me to
murder him. His brain suck went deep.

Back when we were semi-rich, I reamed significant things and how to forget them,
putting together memories of a woman turning in a night party with my husband
Ralph's nervous hands twitching over his computer mouse and keyboard as he
pulled images from his files. Put up with it --he's doing so well I'd remind
myself. Forget it. Wives inherit. If I killed him, his child would be the sole
heir.

One Sunday, Ralph quoted from and commented on the Sunday New York Times article
on the brain-scanning machines, "'Each human being tested believes he or she is
the center of the universe.' Marilyn, they can't know this absolutely. The
sample is too small."

Every Sunday, Ralph walked Jones the dog and came back with frozen croissant
dough, fresh fruit, and chocolate while I downloaded The New York Times through
the modem. I printed a paper copy on the large printer/ scanner so we could read
it traditionally. I'd fold it in traditional order and would hand it to Ralph
when he came back. Then he stripped down again to pajama bottoms and bare feet,
curling around the newspaper as though he'd tear it to shreds for a nest, his
Sunday New York Time.

He always pulled the art section free first, but was possessive of it all,
though he'd read bits to me. I couldn't look at any section until he finished
the whole paper. While he read to me, I made our breakfast, wrapping croissant
dough around Belgian chocolate bars, dipping strawberries in cream and arranging
them with cheese slices on the breakfast plates. These rituals we called our
marriage. His lovers didn't have rituals.

As I listened to Ralph read this Sunday, I wondered why the scientists needed a
machine to know each living being was the star of its own story. Everyone was
egotistical. I almost said, but of course it's true but perhaps I'd become the
Artist Widow if Ralph didn't realize that I, too, was a Center of the Universe.
So I asked, "How large a sample? How diverse?"

"Four hundred people. IQs from 63 to 155. Female, male."

"Mothers?" I asked.

"The mothers were more important than their children who needed them to be born
and raised."

My mother always told me reared, not raised. Cattle are raised. Children are
reared. "What about Buddhists? " I asked. "Artists? "

"Each Buddhist meditated perfectly, saving the unenlightened by the bushel. But
they didn't have any artists. That's why I said the sample was too small. You
can't sample the human race without artists."

As the croissants came out of the oven, I remembered gorges. "What if it's true?
The center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere. Or
something like that?"

He looked up at me over his reading glasses, an image prop. Before Ralph let me
sign the pre-nuptial agreement, I had to have vision corrective surgery. Glasses
intensify the eyes, remind of the brain directing the eyes, not the effect he
wanted on his women. He asked me, his own eyeballs severe as he liked behind the
black frames, "Do you think you're the center of the universe?"

Not the center, a center. Of course, the center of my own universe. l said, "I'm
an observer. I love beautiful things." Ralph was close to becoming a thing. I
gave him his plate and wondered if I could slip the Book Review Section away
from him without his noticing.

"`Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,"' Ralph quoted from Ezra Pound. In my
passage through the art world, boring and intriguing anecdotes alike spiraled
into my memory waiting to be rescued by a semantic sailor who could untangle
golden stories from weed pulp. In that nothing quite my own was me.
Undifferentiated from my anecdotes, a nothing not quite my own, I could be
cheated on, my past lovers freeing him for his present adulteries. Art and
artists were not time bound --all past, no present.

In my future, I'd be on the prow of a sloop off the Hamptons, with another art
widow, laughing as we hauled up sails made of our husband's surplus canvases. We
baked excess CDs into clay targets and shot them as they began tumbling to the
ocean. Excess production -- blam fallen to a sporting clay shotgun.

Would Ralph die in a car wreck like Pollack, be hit by a beach cab, stroke out
in a mistress's bed, or bleed out the gut-shot victim of a wannabe's violence?
I, who could always recognize talent that intrigued with the morbid, picked
Ralph because he reeked of success and early death.

When we first met, he had put me naked on a dais, my hair flowing like seaweed
over my skull bones and skin, wearing glasses then myself. Still a canvas man
then, he painted deviations from me, while I snapped my thoughts around his
future coffin. My imagination sailed the art widow's schooner off Southampton,
leaving behind at Springs his perfect tombstone.

His first wife had been the fellow art student; the second had been the gallery
owner who ignored all her artists' affairs with wealthy buyers. Now I was
devoted to becoming his widow.

So we could read brains now. "Marilyn, what are you thinking," he asked. "I'd
like to know."

Under my skull bones, wrapped in aura mater, my thoughts, aware they could be
read now, began to move anxiously along the neurons and dendrites. "I don't like
the idea of this machine," I said. "Shouldn't some things stay mysteries?"

"I want to read you," Ralph said. He looked over his glasses at me again, the
half glass coming up to the bottom of his irises. His chest hairs were beginning
to fluff up after his sweaty walk with the dog. Jones came up and pushed against
Ralph, begging for croissant.

"But what will you know?" I asked. "The sample is too small to prove anything.
They didn't include artists."

He said, "I can use your thoughts as metaphors."

I wondered if the wild boy mask concealed a mirror reflecting void. The two
nouns bounced the mediating participle between them as though thinking about
whether to insert a hyphen. I almost said, Only if you let me read you, then
realized I preferred my idea of him to any possible reality. "But I'm your
mirror, the woman you look at." Jones came over to me and nudged me with his
nose. I fended him off, wondering if dogs also thought they were the centers of
their universes.

Ralph put the Book Review beside my plate without looking at it himself. Did
this mean he doubted my mind was as dedicated to his image as his mirrors were?
"If you need to stay mysterious, I understand," he said, meaning I'll never
forgive you for denying me access to material.

The Book Review lay beside my chocolate croissant. I picked up the croissant
first, its chocolate heart congealing. He'd found the classic croissant
chocolate this time, slightly gritty, more bitter than sweet, an Aztec flavor.
And it had chilled enough while we talked of brain readings so it didn't squirt
when I bit down. I looked back at Ralph, then opened the Book Review.

While I ate the croissant and looked for interesting books, Ralph shot me with
strobes and the data-back view camera. I'd see myself tomorrow on photo canvas
or in a virtual space, Mandlebrotted into the brainscape Ralph wanted to invade.

But you can't figure me out. I'm attached at the back to infinity, I wanted to
quote from Lafcadio Hearn. But, the future widow sails flapping in a tack, I
just said, "Looks like the most interesting books are now CD-ROM only."

He took the Book Review away from me to see what had intrigued me. They were all
histories--art, technology, and war. I said, "My mind and I are your Sargasso
Sea." Perhaps I could cheat the machine. Perhaps the technicians doing the
reading could be bribed.

DISBELIEVING the mind-reading machine turned out to be popular at the next
couple of gallery openings. Technology in general faded in the art market that
month. More and more people claimed to be able to tell the difference between
machine-ground colors and those the artist ground by hand. Ralph sold nothing
that month, but I still trusted my bet.

Ralph's ex-wife brought neo-primitives to the opening of someone else's light
sculptures. She pulled out two Lucite-boxed paintings from her portfolio. Ralph,
despite being a techno-man who sent his sculpture designs out to CAM workshops
and his virtuals and holo works to the best recording and editing studios, had
already begun to get fascinated with the theory. No sales for a month will do
that to anyone. His ex-wife opened the boxes and said, "Look. Tell me if you can
see the difference or not?"

Ralph juggled the two paintings before him, talking as he looked. "If a machine
does any of the work, it isn't the machine and you, with the machine as a tool,
it's the person who made the machine and you. Then the patron looking at the
work is at least the third collaborator. Plus I steal or not from all the past
artists who become my collaborators either way. Do you think anyone can express
a private vision unmediated by collective experience?"

His ex-wife said, "If you grind your own colors, you know what you're using them
for. The emotionality affects the grinding. And I can see this. I'm not saying
this means collaborative art is wrong, but the actual physicality of it is a
visible distinction the artist can use semiotically."

That season, we could all see the difference between hand-ground pigments and
machine-milled before the tedium of grinding one's own colors obliterated the
making of those distinctions.

I asked, "Ralph, why don't you start working in egg tempera?" If I remembered
correctly, egg tempera must be used by the end of the day and is harder to
retouch than watercolors. I wondered, too, if the mind-reading machine was
utterly transparent or if the conceptions of the designers colored the end
result. His ex-wife took the paintings out of his hands before I could see them
and slid them back into their lucite jewel boxes.

Ralph swung around one of the support posts in the gallery, not exuberantly
enough to avoid the appearance of pose. Everyone looked once to see who, then
turned Manhattan faces back to each other, all centers of the universe. Ralph
said, "So, this is what you're representing now? "

The ex-wife smiled at me, and said, "Yes. Clear messages from human to human."

I said, "Who makes the paper or weaves the canvas or planes the boards? "

"All hand-done," she answered, but she didn't claim by the artist who signed in
the comer. In past big-money art eras, artists' apprentices ground the paint,
gessoed the boards, put down the plaster for the frescos, hauled the blocks from
the quarry, painted draperies, sky, and settings. So, now, in Mexico or India,
other hands left their messages under the ones given by the primary artist.
Probably a computer-aided workshop technician had more optimistic messages than
a Third World craftsman.

Ralph said, "I'll follow it, but now I'm trying to get Marilyn to sit for a
brain-machine reading."

The ex-wife asked, "Why?" as though what he asked was essentially absurd.

"For images to twist," Ralph said. "For another brain to collaborate with."

The ex-wife swung her eyes at me, just noticing I was really there, not a
semiotic indicator for the position new wife. I remembered her name. Judy. She
said, "But all you'd know is that you aren't the center of her universe any more
than you were the center of mine." Judy was mother of The Child. When I was
growing up, I wondered what kind of children Kafka would have had. Now, I'm not
curious. Ralph sees The Child alone most of the times, taking him to the Bronx
Zoo, the Metropolitan, the Frick, the Coney Island Aquarium where dolphins who
also think they are the center of the universe tease their handler by doing the
trick before the one she asks them to do now.

I said, "The sample isn't large enough," and smiled to back her away from us.
Go, ex-wife, back to your accounting programs and your brave new artistic
movement and your Artist's Child. After she made her excuse about coming back
after she'd talked to her artists, I asked Ralph, "Do you really think I'm
different from everyone else?" My question's tone seemed a trifle off.

Ralph said, "I want to know you even better."

Though her tender flesh is near, her mind I cannot fathom. Whose quote was that?
From Asia, no doubt, not a Western sentiment at all. "Ralph, don't." The brain
machine was a hoop to jump a wife through. I remembered the one time I'd gone
with Ralph and his son to Coney Island. The dolphins and the handler locked
themselves into mutual piss-off, the handler's face getting redder and redder.
Even the adults who'd only come with children realized what the dolphins were
doing to her. Perhaps we didn't understand it from the dolphins' point of
view--trapped in a sonic cage, perhaps hearing the sea echoing beyond them
through the water table, the filtration pipes. Maybe they just couldn't remember
the tricks in time? Maybe they didn't want to be possessed completely and
disobeyed out of anger, not knowing what it was to tease. "Are you teasing?
Don't tease me with this. I want to always be able to surprise you. "

"We could read each other," Ralph said. "No secrets."

I tuned my vocal chords to perfect jest. "What if I told you I tolerated your
mistresses because I plan to be your widow?"

He smiled. I smiled back, eyes corrected so I could drive him while he thought
up images unrestrained by stop lights. Hips wiggle, a hint. My eyes unfocused to
look at him the way a cat looks with half-closed eyes at a favorite. I said,
"Let's read Jones first. What will he think?" Could I convince myself to adore
him for the duration of the reading? I'd seen fully intelligent women appear to
adore dolts, but then I hadn't been inside their minds.

From the outside, I looked like those women. I wore the heavy silks fashionable
with artists' wives this season, the cut as curious as a Klein bottle, buttoned
with one piece of monkeypod wood. My blonde hair, each strand coated with
density enhancers, swung in an asymmetrical cut. For an instant, I see myself
from the outside in my mind's eye, a construction from earlier mirror
inspections as to how I should appear, then I look through my own eyes at Ralph,
an artist in spectacles.

I left him at the party, flirting with a woman in a mohair sweater dress.

"We'll both do it together," Ralph said over another Sunday New York Times.
"Make it mutual."

"Do what? " I asked, hoping he didn't mean for us to be brain-scanned together.

"Have our thoughts read."

"Isn't the technique still a bit primitive? " I asked, then bit into my
croissant. The chocolate this time was too sweet and too runny inside the hot
pastry. Blisters rose behind my top incisors. I wiped my chin and took another
bite anyway. The times called for pain. "Can they really read someone as complex
as an artist?"

"I've been asking friends with Columbia-Presbyterian connections," Ralph said.
"The researcher in charge is fascinated by the idea of crossreading a couple."

Stop thinking of the sloop off the Hamptons. "Ralph, you'll ruin my mystery."
Oscar Wilde's mean quip, women are sphinxes without secrets, popped into my
thoughts.

"Both into both," Ralph said. "They only ask that we sit in on the discussion."

How could the experimenters check the veracity of their machines? Wasn't anyone
embarrassed about being the center of the universe? "Whatever." I wanted to ask
him to promise not to leave me whatever I thought, but didn't want to suggest
that anything might go wrong with these readings.

"I'll lead you into my mind," Ralph said.

Oh, so that's it. Ralph wants me to know even more about his real center of the
universe. But was he being completely honest? He started by wanting to read me.

Before our time in the mind machines, I went to my beauty technicians. They
tightened my skin, resheathed my hair, re-tinted the violet in my eyes, smoothed
out wrinkles with tiny injections, waxed my legs and superfluous pubic hair,
shaded my face to show heart-breaking cheekbones. I couldn't ask if there was a
way to beat the mind-reading machine.

Home with my beauty tuned, I looked through my dresses for one Ralph seemed to
like best and found one I'd forgotten, the one I'd worn when we first met: red
silk knit. Not a wife's dress at all, I first thought, then I reconsidered. I
would add a scarf to close up the open-work top.

I left the loft in dark sunglasses. Ralph and I took a taxi up to
Columbia-Presbyterian. Ralph put his hand on my knee to steady himself through a
turn, but didn't say much. He was waiting for the real communication.

We went into the big buildings and found a guide to the NeuroPsychiatry
Department, then followed a post-doc through the halls to the lab.

The five lead researchers moved around in a mess of VR suits, helmets, gloves,
pots of electroconducting jelly. The lab looked like a parody of an artist's
lab. Or perhaps a contemporary artist's studio was a parody of this. The one
woman on the team was dressed in a suit her body wasn't accustomed to. She was
slightly overweight, blonde but not enhanced. The senior man wore sweat pants
and a neoprene ear warmer pushed above his ears to keep his hair back. The other
three wore college student jeans and shirts.

The woman was Dr. Drake, whom we could call Beth. I did precisely that, asking,
"Beth, what are the VR suits for?"

She said, "The brain goes down to the fingertips. We need to read from the whole
body."

VR suits were sweaty. All that beauty work for nothing. The senior man and Ralph
huddled together, talking tech in front of the monster Cray computer that would
construct my thoughts from twitching fingernails and the brain's electromagnetic
currents. I asked, "Where can I hang my clothes? And do you have somewhere I can
shower after?"

"I'll get a tech to show you," Beth the woman science person said. I wondered if
she slept with the senior male, but then decided I didn't want to know. Could a
woman make a place without the mate? I knew several women in the art world who
weren't spousal proteges. Three were gay. Five married safe guys who supported
what their wives did. Only one was ambiguously alone, not using sex for
connections or support. Unmated, she was a sexual threat to or a sexual reject
by both sexes. We all wanted her to fall desperately in love with one of the
ruthless ambisexual boys just to see her turn human.

So, whatever this science woman was, I left with her to change into the VR suit.
She smeared my head with electroconducting jelly. The helmet's electrodes
crunches through my expensive hair. I came back out to see Ralph also
approaching me in another suit. We should have flippers on our feet, I thought,
we so resemble divers.

What is Ralph expecting? I'd know soon.

The head scientist said, "We're going to let you see into each other's mints
through the VR goggles. I'd like to remind you that this will be digital
simulation of your minds, not precisely your own visual cortex constructions.
You'll `hear' each other, see what visuals you imagine."

Beth added, "It will take time to fine-tune. You both might want to lie town for
a few minutes."

I'd rather have run. Would they drug me? Would they please drug me. Ralph ant
the chief guy scientists chatted. I slipped the VR goggles over my eyes and
began adjusting the machine to my thinking, trying to see if I court image fake
things.

Beth salt, "Sometimes the suggestibility effect brings things to consciousness
that you might not want to think about. We can cut out if you remember anything
really upsetting, give you a milt shock."

The VR goggles fed me my thought images.

"Who goes first?" Ralph asked.

"Flip a coin," I salt, caught in the memory of the ex-wife's hand-done art.

Beth said, "Ralph's better calibrated."

Ralph said, "But I want to read her."

I walked into his heat and found my image waiting. He was the center of the
universe, an artist and a poseur, married to the only woman in the universe who
knew that being the best of poseurs was an art form....

But I'd never thought he was a poseur. Ralph showed me how he'd calculated his
work to cultivate the rich women who bedded him and bought his work and talked
of him as their artist. Each time, he married with progressively better
calculations about a wife's value. My beauty blunted husbands' fury ant
flattered wives in their adulteries.

We were jolted. Ralph said, "She knows this. Before we came here, she spent five
hundred dollars on face and body tuning."

I was his mortal pay-back for the high status games played with kitsch art
counters: the cheap-trick pasta neons ant black velvet jolting the visual
cortex; the computer art stolen from gainers.

A fraud, but then that, too, is an art form. Besides, all his colleagues were
frauds, too, only he was the best fraud.

I don't think so. But the thoughts in the goggles came only from him. A
quivering eyelid, a muscle spasm in the hand, eyebrow flinches, shifts of
electric currents in the brain--all these things read as visible expressions of
the invisible.

Ralph said, "And you'll love me anyway." His image of me nodded.

Then, from the back of his mind, a slender river filled with fractal images
began to flow. "The subconscious, are you ready for it or is there anxiety?" one
male voice said.

I looked in the river and saw a thousand images better than anything he'd done.
Young Ralph dissolved into his work, then I saw his memories of Raphael at the
National Gallery in Washington, those sinister Madonnas and Children. Somehow,
underneath it all, Ralph wasn't a fraud. The game he played was the art of
sliding his images through preconceptual barriers.

And there were no other artists except for him and the great dead. Inside the
self-depreciation concealed by the public ego was the private ego, a tender
monster.

"Enough," Ralph said. "It isn't real, just my young self's fantasies."

So we switched. I couldn't feel or see Ralph making his way through my mind. I
tried to hold on to the river he'd sent out of his subconscious, but then I
remembered, trying hard not to think about it, the sloop off the Hamptons. The
VR goggles began to play my own visual images. I mourned Ralph and my youth and
the painted sails tattered. Then I remembered my own days in art school and felt
like a bitch sharpening her teeth on other people's bones because it was easier
to steal than to bring down my own deer.

You are my artist, I thought at Ralph. Did I ever have an image river flowing
through my subconscious? I saw myself beautiful, then time carved wrinkles into
my face, pulled down my bones, broke my hip, and threw me into the grave,
remembered only as The Widow.

And there was no more universe after me. Hideous and deformed as Time made me, I
was the true center figure of the story.

Webbed in Sargassum weed, I floated through the art world, my beauty a lure for
the bloated self behind the weeds. Ralph's fractal river floated into my sea and
the images spread out. I drew them close with my wiggling lure that looked like
a clitoris and ate them.

I loved Ralph's images. I hated them. My own river dried behind my eyes. The
single woman artist, sexually ambiguous as ever, walked through as though
neither river or sea existed and said to me, "But this was your choice, to lose
what you could do."

Ralph's voice beyond my VR suit said, "Oh, but your sea is fantastic. That
Sargassum fish dangling a woman in front of her huge maw."

The brain machine wasn't completely honest. In my own VR goggles, I'd seen the
lure as only a body part. I rethought fiercely and Ralph said, "Ah. Marvelous,
marvelous self-hate."

I realized that he'd always be the center of his universe, no matter what he saw
of mine. My fierce craving to be his widow....

"Yes, your fierce craving to be my widow is your true identity, " Ralph said,
his voice as though his throat had engorged with blood.

We were centers of the universe, uncommunicative even when ultimately revealing.
Whatever my mindput on the virtual goggles, Ralph could distort it with his own
eyes and mind.

I was relieved and horrified. I'd seen too much of my own mind.

Ralph's next project, of course, was high tech and virtually real. A skeleton
fucked me. I sailed on his image river, the sails his black velvet optic cheats.
He led me on a leash to his adulterous patrons. On the end of a Sargassum fish's
first dorsal ray, long and bent into a fishing pole, I dangled naked, luring
floating panels of Raphael madonnas into the gaping fish maw.

I looked across the gallery and saw Ralph smiling through his spectacles while
gallery hounds ate his images of my images of me. A line waited for the prime
goggles: a huge body of Ralph sailing a Sargasso Sea, dominating its weeds and
four-inch angler fish waving even tinier naked me's at him.

My mind and I were his Sargasso Sea. A sea's thoughts were more trivial than a
dog's.

I can't kill him. I must outlive him.