Madame Bleue’s Essay, Part III
Committing suicide made me SO happy, becuz it got me reborn as a new, improved Christ Jesus: rich and handsome. (The trick is to choose wealthy parents who are easy on the eyes; NOT stupid, ugly, poor parents.) No longer am I a bathing beauty in a white one-piece; I am now wearing a finely tailored Italian suit and armed with two AK-47s, among other weapons.
Quickly I locate my comrades Jacques Rivette and Luis Buñuel. “Hi guys,” I say.
“Hello Bryan,” Jacques Rivette and Luis Buñuel smile and embrace me and pat my back, “you look great: we almost didn’t recognize you! — You look like the reader now.” (They say this in unison, in a mixture of Spanish and French.)
“I AM the reader,” I declare, with a slightly smarmy smirk. “I have arisen. But touch me not; for I have unfinished business to attend to — in short: vengeances — which I recall from my previous life. For I held my breath while the Archons were baptizing me in Lethe, that so-called River of Unmindfulness which one’s soul must pass thru when entering the underworld, and all who drink from it experience total forgetfulness about their past lives.”
“Oh, sorry for distracting you,” Jacques Rivette and Luis Buñuel step back a pace while speaking a mixture of French and Spanish at once, “I didn’t realize that you weren’t fully ‘moved in’ to your resurrected flesh yet.”
“No,” I laugh; “I’m only joking — I thought you guys would laugh at that — seriously, you can tell the editor to cut the part where I growled ‘Noli me tangere’. Come, approach! be not afraid of my body; let’s have another group hug, and then lock arms and go see if we can locate the dead center of nighttime. — I’d like to strip that given, for kix.”
My friends share a laugh and draw nigh unto me again, and I drape my arms over each of them. Then, with Jacques Rivette walking one side of me, and Luis Buñuel close-walking the other side of me, I (having rebecome you, the reader) in the middle of my companions, clutching their shoulders affectionately, stroll forth into the hiding receiving night.
We walk till we reach the absolute center of nighttime. “You’re very reticent this evening,” I shout to the atmosphere. My words don’t echo back, but there’s a cathedral reverb that indicates how large this place is. Now I paraphrase some lines from the end of the seventh section of “Song of Myself”:
“Undrape!” I shout, “you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded. I see through your broadcloth and gingham; and I won’t be discouraged. My friends and I are here to lure you to play. We wish to buy what you are selling; and you might as well accede, for you will not find a better offer. We wish to direct you respectively. Our scenes can end up as a painter with his model; or a pianist at her instrument...”
Suddenly nighttime’s Real Self shyly emerges from its own darkness in the form of the trio of goddesses that cat-fought over the Apple of Discord — the golden one, from the story of the Judgement of Paris — yet my friends and I refrain from choosing a favorite, preferring instead to accept all three. We then proceed to conjure up marvelous feature films and featurettes, even co-directing many of the sequences. And when these films are released into the theaters, they break every box-office record, once and for all. More importantly, however, they cure cinema from whatever current addiction it was suffering under (horror fatigue and superhero disorder, among sundry sordid ailments) — for these works of ours, which earn the byword erotic blockbusters, end up permanently changing what it means to make a good movie.
Such questions as “Is it a single work or a series?” get proven meltable, because, instead of voicing them, people choose to heat them till they liquify; then drink them and join the mass caressings with the rest of us. And that word “us” includes all theatergoers plus ourselves, the directors of these pictures; for Jacques Rivette, Luis Buñuel, and I enjoy attending our own creations.
You, as well, can enter the screen. The goddesses welcome you.
§
So, after successfully filming the darkness undressing and blissing, the three of us comrades decide to disguise ourselves as nuns and go ride public transportation. This was Buñuel’s idea, but Rivette and I take to it like a harlot engaging in yet another white wedding. We visit many places and change modes frequently:
Starting out on a bus, we then get off on Highway 78 in Alabama. We walk afoot to Alchemy Tavern, where we buy a round of drinks for the house, and everyone is surprised to see three placid nuns slamming shots. (They’re actually not as surprised as you’d expect they’d be, tho — probably cuz they’ve seen too many biblical events.) Then we take the light rail to the place where it intersects with the subway in New York City:
We ride the subway for a while. Eventually we decide to get off at Christopher Street station, because we’re told that it has the absolute worst quality of air, which boasts the highest levels of pollutants. So we stand in the station and inhale deeply for several days. (This is more fun than it sounds.)
Then we climb a ladder to reach ground level and board a commuter train. We take that to a streetcar; then leap from the streetcar and land on a trolley. Immediately a stern guard comes by to stamp our tickets, and we admit that we didn’t buy tickets: we just hopped a ride for free.
“How did you get on?” the guard is genuinely surprised, because we look like nuns.
“We leapt from the top of a streetcar at the point where each vehicle’s paths of travel intersected,” Jacques Rivette and Luis Buñuel explain in unison to the trolley guard, speaking a mixture of Spanish and French, while I myself stand silently.
“Oh, I see!” the guard is visibly impressed. He allows us to stowaway unmolested, in return for signed autographs.
Then we get off in Scandinavia. We meet a street vendor selling hotdogs, so we stop and eat. Then we catch a cable car and take that to a vanpool service. From there, while still moving, we hail three ferries that agree to take us to three water-taxis, which we ride to the end of the line. The river that we’re traveling trickles down and dissolves into the dirt before the roots of a bush, so our water-taxis come to a halt. Thus we climb out and take a bush airplane back to the bus, which conveys us to a standard railway.
The railway leads to an aerial tramway, which drops us off at a gondola lift. Then we dive out and climb aboard a passenger ship that happens to be descending into a whirlpool. From there we end up on a guided bus, which takes us to a public light bus and then a shuttle bus; at which point a transit bus speeds past and, using its plow blade, accidentally catapults us into a very pleasant charabanc.
We then crash into an express bus and are thrown bodily into an open-top bus (not to be confused with a topless bus, which is frankly more edifying); and this soon crashes into a rubber-tyred metro.
All three of us, still in nun-garb, run down the street and catch the funicular — this is the same funicular that appears in the film Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), so Rivette keeps whispering to me and Buñuel: “I think I’ve been here before!” as we slowly ascend. Then we take a tram, and some of the people ask our names, so we give them fake names.
Next we take a horsecar to a medium-capacity hovercraft, which explodes, thus tossing us into the air until we smash thru the window of a passing monorail, which likewise explodes, so we end up umbrella-ing onto a hydrofoil:
I seize the controls and purposely crash us into an ocean liner, whose lifeboat we steal; and, after installing an outboard motor to the back of the thing, we employ this vessel to menace our earlier selves, who we encounter riding a triple-decker water-taxi. We run them right off the river-road.
Ultimately we end up at the convent that features prominently in Bryan the Tyger. (That’s another fake novel that I composed.) So Mother Lilith and Sisters Sophia and Maria meet Jacques Rivette and Luis Buñuel and me. At first they assume that we are just three mischievous damsels, but then when they get us alone and the habits come off, they are pleased to feel (yes, feel; not see, mind you — for we are in pitch darkness, and our hearts are beating rapidly) that our anatomy is not altogether feminine.
I and my comrades Jacques Rivette and Luis Buñuel enjoy bunking with older women, so we are glad that we get to sleep with these nuns in their beds.
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