Why the remission--so that we can trace her progress into the sleepiest categories of a hostile nature, cooking and gardening, scraping by on my efforts to conceal her--the remainder, what she knew was beyond capture, was the surplus. As if she was ever grateful that I could never put all of her in here--so grateful that she raised the stakes by interrupting, mocking, to see the balance tipped towards a postmodern narrative--threatening always to make me seem too intentional! Her plays were marked by a freshness and curtness, by a chill continuously engulfed by laughter, like the salving punishment of Steppenwolf after his dower sobriety is raised out and above him like an ax. The executioner is also the jester, so what we have is a stuck philosopher going to shambles with the popular decree, the jury's sudden rupture, the frivolity engaged for his redemption--cruel, but refreshing. This was the elemental fury undergirding the dolorous show--and once I'd been cast a role that could scarcely be denied, her career terminated itself because she suspected I'd know too much of the back-story--which is true, but as it is also fiction once it is represented, she has plainly overestimated me, leaving me with a burden I was not born to bear.
It is her own, and her cowardice even in taking the final plunge is transmuted into my responsibility, as if the project was mine all along! She wants me to admit I've always been metaphysical while possessed of the fantastic, but the truth is I've had to conduct my most laborious study in her favor.
It was a single episode that hooked her on the idea of my being some sort of prophet, a rustic mystagogue--just one afternoon in an abandoned house where I told the short tale of an alien to an empty kid's bedroom. I've had to revamp that story to make it interesting to the reader--it falls in the next chapter--for at the time, who knows what I said. It was the directness of my approach to this imaginary audience, as if even Dolores were vaporized incidentally into it, impregnated with the idea that I was some father of philosophy and poetry and all I'd require for a repeat episode was a stage, the right lack of clarity and the fulsomeness of surrounding characters that evokes the best declarative stance: here, listen, all you empties, to the tale that I'll tell.
But even this requires a direct quote--as it happens, the Violent Femmes--"You wanna know how to take a short trip to hell--it's guaranteed to get your own place in hell."
In that song a child is thrown into a well; in my seminal performance the children had long since disappeared; in her rendering the audience took the blame for every emptiness! Despite the Ann Arborite's avant-gardism, the pit was unfavorable, it reached up and grappled with the implications to prove that its hollowness was only a conceit inverted against the author, in turn pulling them down in it and releasing only when the playwright's been sufficiently flattered. For it was now.
Not that the reviews of her play about me were negative. Dolores suffered at the hand she dealt of chagrin as a member of the audience--not an unusual situation, except that in this space, the spectator was an uncomfortable role for her to put on--she was the original spectator now trying to capture me!
And I'm trying to establish she's got a list of prerequisite flattery.
I brought her back to Alterity and have kept her there. I am her author; she is not mine.
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