flowers. Maybe it hadn’t been entirely ruined, after all, by my shrieking intervention? I thought I’d see Chastity and Ebullience wrapping themselves in swaths of Alice-blue cloth, tripping and falling on top of each other, or even Noah, picking the flowers, picking his fight with Reza—and then I was close enough to see what the video actually showed. And then, you see, I couldn’t help it: I lost my breath. I couldn’t breathe. My vision closed in like a tunnel, and then I couldn’t see anything at all.
The young assistant had to manhandle me, which was for us both a grave humiliation. He didn’t even bother speaking French—clearly my clothes, or my shape, my general New England sensibleness, screamed “USA”—and he kept saying, “Are you okay, madame? You are okay, madame. Are you okay?” He pulled his own chair out from behind the desk and had me sit in it. He gave me water. He suggested that I put my head between my knees. He proved more practical on all fronts than his aspect might have suggested, but I could also tell that he was annoyed by me, that I seemed to him like some stray off the streets, come in to foul his pristine temple to Sirena’s art. Heaven forbid that her temple should be fouled!
And yet this was what the video showed, for all the world to see: the fouling of Wonderland, by none other than myself. The fact that I was essentially supine in the images, and half undressed, and pretending (not that the viewer would know this) to be Edie Sedgwick, the fact that the etiolated youth could never have guessed that the zealous masturbator in the Wonderland video was the sensible Merrell-wearing Woman Upstairs who’d stolen his chair and spoiled his calm, didn’t make the facts less true.
Somehow, I had been filmed in that most private moment. Somehow, I had been seen; and could then be displayed, an object, like one of the artists in my own dioramas. I could be sacrificed. In the upper grades at school, you teach the kids ethics: you ask them, would they push a button that would kill an anonymous person in China, if they’d get a million dollars. Would they push the button if it made them famous. If nobody knew they’d pushed the button. If it meant the whole world would acclaim you as an artist. If it showed the world some genuine truth about what it was like to be a sad, lonely fucker. Would you?
Yes, it was true, if I thought about it, the cameras had already been set up, by then, for the kids—we’d set them up weeks ahead of time. I’d helped her do it. But how did she film me? She hadn’t been in the studio that day at all—had she? I couldn’t remember for sure. There must have been a motion-sensitive setting. She must have set the cameras to tape anytime anyone set foot in her Wonderland. Maybe she was taping herself? Maybe it wasn’t the plan to trap me, like a fish in a net; or maybe it was. Maybe she’d hoped she’d catch me there somehow—but she could never have anticipated such prize footage, such a perfect humiliation. When had she seen it? Had he seen it, too? And if he had, then suddenly his visit to the studio, his supposed seduction, became something completely different. It became something between them, something that had nothing to do with me. Something for which I was the unwitting scapegoat. She’d cared little enough to use the tape—to sell the tape—or else she’d been angry enough. But not angry enough to confront me; not angry enough (if she had known about Skandar and me) to think it merited discussion. I had been so discountable that she could do this to me, and claim to have remained my friend. What a year it had been: I’d been useful in so many ways.
There is what is imaginary and there is what is real. What is imaginary—how she taped me, why she taped me, whether she taped Skandar and me, when she decided to use the tape—these are things you cannot reach. Even if I asked her, I would never know the truth. What is imaginary—our friendships, my loves, these people, my inventions—is untouchable, if not inviolate. And then, there is reality: there is what happens, what you know, or think you know, with certainty. But maybe these two are ultimately one; maybe you can’t