I put down the phone and retreated to the living room. My girlfriend asked me if I wanted to watch a movie called High School Fake Diary by an artist named Araki. “Sure,” I said. We slipped the video into the VCR. The credits rolled, but soon thereafter the tape got all jumbled up in the machine and made gurgling sounds. I jumped up and killed it. Luckily we had a DVD player too, so we decided to watch another movie called In the Realm of the Senses. We heard it had been banned in the seventies, too much sex and violence, so naturally we thought it was our duty to watch. We got to the part where Sada cut off Ishida’s penis and balls with a knife and was carrying them around with her in a sack before my anxiety started kicking in.
“I can’t watch anymore,” I said, getting up and rubbing my temples.
“Why not. It was just getting good.”
“I have to figure this thing out.”
“What thing?”
“The Red Kool-Aid Professor thing. There’s something I must be missing.”
“I really don’t care about that. Can’t we just watch the movie?”
She didn’t care about Kent Johnson or Yasusada Araki or Pessoa or Andy Kauffman or anything; in her eyes the Araki dust-up was just an impotent book of fake translations fobbed off on a gullible group of literati. She might be right. But I wanted to know something else entirely. Were hoaxes always cynical and self-serving, or did they sometimes change the discourse entirely by making us re-evaluate our conventions, our pre-conceived notions of what an author or art or anything named really was?
I stomped around the apartment muttering to myself. Was I myself holding on to an outmoded conception of the author by even trying to write a review? Deep down did I fear the breaking up of the hegemony of self, of the singular, unconnected author, toiling with pen and paper in some quiet, book-lined office? “What was I so afraid of?” I yelled into the other room.
My girlfriend came out with a packed gym bag. She said she was leaving for a couple of days to let me sort things out on my own. Just as well. I’m not very fun to be around during these times. As soon as she left, I went out and bought a bottle of Suntory whiskey and the Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler. I felt I could use some detective work help.
When she came back two days later we had both gained some perspective. She told me that she was going to start taking gardening lessons. Turns out she met this old guy who agreed to teach her how to grow orchids and other neat stuff for only 500 yen a class. “That’s cheap!” I said.
“Did you know that doubled flowers can’t reproduce because they have no sexual organs?” she asked me.
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said. “There are a lot of things I don’t know.”
“It’s true. My gardener friend told me.”
“Have you had any Kool-Aid Professor dreams lately?” I asked.
“No, but I did have a different kind of dream last night. I was on the edge of an enormous funnel, sitting there, my feet dangling off into space, terrified. From behind me I could feel someone coming, getting closer and closer, though I wasn’t able to turn around. Before long I could smell his red hot breath on my ears. He spoke, saying:
Feel the wind of it, smell the dust of it?
The spirits of the air live on the smells
Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance
And shriek till all the smells of blood they stretch their
bony wings—
And with that I let go and hurled myself into the funnel. Oddly enough, I landed on my feet. The funnel was somehow flat. Before me was a vast grey waste land. I started walking. Policemen kept coming up to me asking me questions. There were no books anywhere, but an announcement played over and over: THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT BORDERS / WE WILL BE CLOSING IN FIFTEEN MINUTES. I kept walking. I came to a city with a wall. I was let inside by a gatekeeper. Someone was talking to me about catching a ferry somewhere, and for some reason they thought my name was Amber. Every time we turned around to look for a train or ferry or ricksha, unicorns passed behind us, I know they did.”
“What color were the unicorns?”
“Yellow, of course, but they’d soon turn white. Did I tell you I loved unicorns when I was young?”
“No, you never did.”
“Anyway, ‘I know how you feel about dream narratives. Nevertheless’, I could start to see the sides of the funnel to my right and left. People were streaming past me, heading the other way. There was a lot of talk about Feuerbach — whoever that is — and French cosmetics and philosophy, and I knew I just had to get out. Luckily I bumped into a mad color scientist named Mary who told me to follow the marching band out through the opening and everything would be fine. ‘I emerged and saw red, saw yellow, saw blue. After I emerged I saw green. I saw purple and orange and gray.’”
“Another waste land?”
“Another waste land.”
I sent this much to my editor. As soon as he got it, he called me. “This was supposed to be a review of a book of poems called The Waste Land and Other Poems by John Beer.”
