SVBCVLTVRE, part two

1st person extrusion

(Go back and read SVBCVLTVRE part one a few months ago…)

SVBCVLTVRE (1st person extrusion)

How am I put onto your trail again? Do I spot you out of nowhere as a gesturing woman in an art video, placing objects in an arcane pattern on a gallery floor? And I seize the artist demanding to know who that woman is? It’s partially that, but that leads to a dead end. Mostly it’s that someone casually tells me they saw you. Tony Vader says he saw you at an outdoor marketplace. I thought you had gone back to Montreal. It emerges at a show. Industrial music. What does your vampire brother have to do with it. He kidnapped you, maybe. Is he like the villain. Does there need to be a villain all the time. The genre trappings push one character into assuming the villain-mantle. Trappings. Interesting word. Multiple instances of a trap. Or are you, the lost woman, the villain instead. What’s villainous is disappearing without saying goodbye while I was in a coffin playing a game for you. Of course I’m worried about you. But you’re the one who did the crime in this mystery. If you’re still in Cleveland you could reveal yourself to me at any time. Instead of making me sift through the dark sand. Your hair was white. You were pale. You could be tan now for all I know. And your hair black. Maybe you were in the balcony at that cold wave concert, watching me down on the floor among the dark shapes, scuttling life forms on the ocean floor. You strike me as the voyeuristic type who would return to the scene of the crime to witness the void you left behind in people’s lives. With a special interest in those you loved, those who fucked you. It’s part of the pain you liked inflicting. But this time the person offering no feedback loop of exquisite sadism which you craved. You have to scrabble for those morsels of my evident discomfort, those tiny globes of blood surfacing from your scratches. 

I’m not paranoid: I don’t see you around corners or in coffee shop windows. 

I remember the metallic gear you wore around your wrist as a bracelet. The machine was penetrated by you. The teeth caught my leather jacket sleeve sometimes. You lived, you thrived within the zone where the machine coalesced with the living delicate thing to make something beautiful. You liked chains and thorns and barbed wire. I think sometimes you would have liked sitting on wrought iron fences, stabbed upward into your ass. You wanted to sleep on a bed of nails, but not a lot of nails, so the weight is evenly distributed, only four or five big nails. That way you have to work your way up in discipline to get the spots in your back tough enough, calloused enough, so the sharp nails don’t break through and you are impaled. You want to be calloused enough. You talked me into sleeping in coffins for a week. You want someone to sleep in death with you. You might be dead now. And your ghost might be looking for me begging me to find you.

I’m Luca Belliotti. I was a freak, a crow stalking the sidewalks with you for something like seven or eight months in some year in the mid 1980s before you left, a wasteland. We went to a thousand packed rooms full of seas of twisted, asphyxiating music. I still have tinnitus from being around you. You told me suicidal ideation was like tinnitus: you just had to find ways to live around it. There were a lot of black candles and ankhs everywhere that year. Everyone wore black except for you, you wore mummy-white fabric. You. Heléne Grisee. Your voice was high-pitched, like a child’s voice from another dimension. Where everything is flipped. You had a bag you carried around everywhere that was a picture of Snow White reversed as if in a photographic negative. She was jet black with blue lips and white hair. It looked like death which was right up your alley. I saw you with that face on your arm coming down the spiral staircase at some building at the Cleveland Institute for the Arts, I was going up, you were coming down. That’s our whole story. It was just a few steps we shared. I could smell your perfume. It smelled like something from the earth that would smell sweet while it had it’s time before rotting. Like moss. You kept descending. I kept going up. And now I’m waiting for you to come down those stairs again.

The only clue I was given was that Tony Vader saw you at an outdoor marketplace getting your picture drawn by one of those caricaturists who do drawings outdoors for money. You were sitting with someone else. Tony didn’t know who it was and I lacked the energy to show him the video you left in the camera that last time of you with your vampire brother, to compare. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

I quizzed all the caricature artists who frequented those outdoor marketplaces and fairs around Cleveland. I had a photo of Heléne and myself, she was smoking a cigarette and I was doing a gargoyle face.

“Have you ever seen this woman? Or I should say, drawn this woman?”

I talked to seven or eight and was beginning to think I’d exhausted all the caricaturists in Cleveland until one of them said yes. He was an elderly Italian man named Giovanni. I had some feeling like I should have spoken the language of the old world to him but I didn’t really know enough. Giovanni had books and books of photos with him, pictures he’d taken of his subjects to put with photos of his caricatures to show off later. I imagine no one had ever asked him to look at these old photos before.

It took him a few minutes but the eagle eyed old man found it. There it was: a photo of Heléne next to the man from the video, her brother Claude with the diabolical flowing black hair and the receding hairline. She was putting on an exaggerated scowl which in Giovanni’s caricature was all eyebrows and sharp nose. Claude was grinning and the old Italian had captured the brother’s skeletal face perfectly. Giovanni had written the date on the drawing before he took a picture of it: 10/31/1986, Halloween. That was just two weeks ago. He’d also written the names but they were wrong, instead of Heléne and Claude it read Beatrice and Dante, a joke. To throw me off the trail. But at least I knew that as of Halloween they were still in Cleveland. They were still skulking around. And if they were around I was bound to cross paths with them again.