Dreaming of Lashes

            I was sitting at the kitchen table and hand writing my journal. My mother in her 40s was standing before me, though not the blonde haired mother that I remember. She looked more like a version of Lucille Ball with jet black hair instead of red, and yet there was no doubt in my dream-mind that this was my mother. The really striking thing about this dream mother of mine was that she was wearing surreally long false eyelashes and very dark eye makeup to match. I looked at her and exclaimed, “Those are some really big eyelashes!” She responded, “I’m sorry that you don’t like my efforts to decorate myself!” I reassured her, “I didn’t say I didn’t like it, it’s just that those are some really big eyelashes!”

            It was actually snowing when I got up on Sunday morning and it continued for a couple of hours. Although it all melted as soon as it hit Queen Street, the tops of cars and buildings were frosted white. It stopped before I’d finished song practice and it turned into a pleasant and sunny day.

            I worked on my review of Shab-e She’r and I only had five pages of notes left to go through when I stopped to take a bike ride in the late afternoon. It was 11 degrees and I found that my hoody with the motorcycle jacket over it were the right combination for a comfortable ride.

I passed a guy on the Bloor Viaduct and then stopped at the Broadview light. When he came up behind me he asked how I liked my Blundstone boots. He explained that he was asking because he’d just gotten a pair and was wondering what to expect. I recounted how I’d had a laced pair before but when they broke down I got a new pair for free because of the lifetime warranty. He wanted to know if they were comfortable and whether I thought they’d be okay for the summer. I answered that they were comfy enough and that I might still wear them when it gets warmer, since I wore the old pair all summer long.

I went as far as the Greek Town arch and then turned back. I went south on Ossington, which has some really deep potholes since the winter. Just south of Bloor there was a box of stuff being thrown out, though mostly coat hangers and women’s shoes, which weren’t my size. I found half a large container of Vaseline, which I took, though I don’t know where it’s been.

That night I watched a weird sort of science fiction Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay. A woman wakes up in a hospital and after a quick impersonal examination is told to get up so they can take her home. The nurse gives her a drink but when she reaches for it she sees that her arm is enormous and faints.  The nurse calls the doctor and says, “Mother 417 is in shock!” Mother 417 wakes up and asks, “Who am I? There’s something terribly wrong!” Her body is grossly obese. “This can’t be me!” The doctor says, “Mother Orcis, don’t you worry! We’ll have you home in no time!” She sedates her and an ambulance is called. The attendants are all little women as the bus driver and the gatekeeper at the place where they take her. Mother Orcis doesn’t have the strength to lift her large body and so she has to be propped up by several of the small women. She is taken to a room containing two other very big women, who know her by name as Orcis. The little women put Orcis on the third bed. The matron explains to the other two big women that Mother Orcis just had four beautiful babies. “Babies? I seem to have lost my memory!” The little women bring in three gigantic meals on bed trays and the other two big women begin to eat with gusto but Orcis is not hungry. “I’d rather have something to read!” The matron asks, “What in the world would a mother want with knowing how to read?”  Mother Hazel, while shovelling whipped cream into her mouth asks, “What use is reading for a mother? That’s not gonna help her have better babies dear!” “I’m not a mother!” “Of course you’re a mother with three births registered. Twelve fine class A babies!” “I’ve got to get out of here!” But when she tries to lift her body from the bed she collapses back down. But then she smiles and says, “You can’t fool me anymore, I know who I am now!” “But Mother Orcis …” “I’m not a mother! I’m just a woman who had a husband and hoped one day to have his babies!” “What is a husband?” “When a woman loves a man …” “What’s a man?”

Later the matron comes in with a group of six little women and calls out, “Pleasure time!” Two little women each take go up to one mother and begin moving their prone bodies from side to side. The other two mothers giggle with delight but Orcis pushes them away, “Get away from me you little monsters!” The matron tells the little women to go and report themselves. Mother Hazel says, “I suppose it’ll make you feel better, giving them a beating!” “A beating?” “Pretty soon she’s gonna say that she’s forgotten that Servitors get beaten for upsetting the mothers!” The doctor comes in and asks what the problem is. The matron tells her, “She’s been upsetting the other mothers with some awful talk!” Mother Hazel adds, “And she’s been having delusions. She thinks she can read and write!” The doctor smiles with amusement and asks, “Do you?” “That shouldn’t be hard to settle. Give me some paper and a pencil.” The doctor gives her her pencil and pad. Orcis writes, “I know I have delusions and you are part of them.” After reading it the doctor asks, “What was the awful talk about?” “It was disgusting! It was about two human sexes, like animals!” “Get her to the sick bay!” A few minutes later, “Who told you this stuff about two human sexes?” “Oh, please doctor!” “We can make you talk you know, even if you are a mother!” “I am not a mother! I am an MD in the throes of a nightmare!” “You think you’re a doctor of medicine?” “After two years of internship at Brockton General Hospital I’m reasonably sure of it!” “You are delusional! It’s seldom we come across a post-partem breakdown.” “I’ve never had a baby in my life!” “You were brought up and developed to be a mother. Just look at you!” “Yes, just look at me! Now suppose you tell me what this place is and what’s going on!” “Better you first tell me all you remember, so we are not obliged to resort to other measures.” “That has a familiar nightmare ring about it! Hitler, Stalin …” The doctor begins to leave, presumably to call for extreme measures when Orcis calls, “No!” The doctor takes out her pad to write down what Orcis says. “ Jane Waterley. Maiden name, Sumner. I was in the hospital on duty the night that Donald Waterley was brought in for an acute appendix. I operated.” “You performed an appendectomy?” “It was just one of many, but the most important of my life. I became Donald’s wife. A year later he was killed in an accident.”
            Orcis is left alone in sickbay. She struggles out of bed but still can’t support herself to walk. The bed is on wheels and so uses it for support as she moves toward the door. She gets out into the hall and pulls herself along a railing to another door but she is grabbed by a Servitor before she can get through. The struggle but Orcis doesn’t have the strength and falls, immobile.

Later the police arrive to try to arrest Orcis of reactionism but the head doctor arrives and tells them they have no authority in her section. “A reactionist mother? What will you numbskulls think up next?” The cops leave. “Now Mother Orcis, let’s see if we can find out what’s happened to you. It will help us all if you’re quite frank.” “I have nothing to conceal! I want to find out just as much as you do!” “You spoke of a man, Donald Waterley, whom you think you married. Now will you tell us exactly what happened?” “Donald died. He was a test pilot and he was killed in a crash. We had been married for a year. “ “Your hallucination sounds very specific.” “This is the hallucination! This place and you and the shape I’m in!” “Tell us more about what you consider reality. You had a man and he died.” “I don’t remember very much after Donald was killed. The days came and went and then one day I woke up and knew I had to start work again.” “What work?” “I told you, I’m an MD!” “You seem to be consistent in your delusion!” “I went back to Brockton Hospital but the work didn’t seem the same anymore. Nothing was very important. And then one day Dr. Hellyer, who was in charge of Brockton, told me about a friend of his who had synthesized a narcotic.” “What was the name?” “Solodrin. Do you know it?” “I’ve heard of it.” “In it’s original state it comes from the leaves of a tree which grows in Venezuela. The Indians discovered it. They chew on the leaves until they go into a trance in which they believe their spirits are free to wander anywhere in time or space.” “You have actually taken this drug?” “The synthesized product.” “Why?” “I felt it was my chance to be useful. I had no ties and I didn’t care what happened to me so I volunteered to test it and see if the reports were true that it produced powerful mystical experiences. It seems to have produced a combination of the absurd and the grotesque!” “You are suggesting that we are all a product of your narcotic hallucination?” “What else?”

Much later the scene is a very Victorian looking drawing room and in it stands a very Victorian looking elderly woman. The doors open and two servitors help Orcis into the room. The old lady has a British accent. “Welcome my dear! Come and sit down.” They take Orcis to the couch. Her body is so used to lying down that it’s a struggle even to sit. “You’ll have tea dear?” “Yes, thank you, Mrs …” “Oh I haven’t introduced myself. Laura. Not Mrs. or miss, just Laura and you are Mother Orcis.” “So they tell me. I’m not insane, am I?” “The report from the home expresses the view that you are suffering from schizophrenic delusions, but the director also offers the possibility that you are a genuine case of projected perception. That is why they sent you to me, for my opinion. I am a historian.” “Projected perception! If that were possible …” “There is no doubt about the possibility my dear! There are three reliably documented cases and two of them are associated with the drug Solodrin.” “Where am I?” “When were you born?” “July 5^th, 1938.” “Ahhh, the second Roosevelt; Franklin Delano; the new deal; Pearl Harbour; the Second World War. Interesting period, typical of the male functioning in all his glory! Tell me my dear, what strikes you as the oddest feature in your experience so far, I mean apart from your appearance? Possibly because you haven’t seen a man?” “That among other things. Where are the men?” “There aren’t any. Not any more.” “But how is that possible? I mean, how can you …” “I know it would seem impossible to you, but it is so. In all my 80 years I have never seen a man, except in old pictures.” “I don’t doubt you and yet …”  “I understand a little how you must feel. When I was a little girl I used to listen a lot to my grandmother. She was as old as I am now. But when she spoke about the young man she was once engaged to the tears would roll down her cheeks, not just for him but for the world she’d known as a girl.” “Were you perhaps engaged once?” “I was married once for a little while.” “It must be very strange to be owned.” “Owned?” “Ruled by a husband.” “It wasn’t like that at all! It was … What happened to all the men?” “They fell sick and died.” “All of them? Everywhere?” “In a little more than a year they were all gone.” “How could this possibly happen?” “Just an accident, a piece of research that produced unexpected secondary results. Did you ever hear of a man named Perrigan?” “I don’t think so. It’s an uncommon name.” “It became very commonly known. Dr Perrigan was a biologist working on the extermination of the brown rat. He succeeded remarkable with a selective virus of great virulence. But somehow Perrigan’s virus mutated and the new strain spread with devastating speed among human beings. Fortunately the majority of women were immune. Men, like the rats were completely wiped out.” “But surely without men that would be the end of everything! Everything would collapse!” “It nearly did. There was chaos for a time and much starvation. Almost all the large organizations broke down entirely. You see, although all women outnumbered the men they had only been important as consumers and spenders of money. When the crisis came hardly any of them knew how to do things because they’d all been owned by men and been obliged to live as pets and parasites.” “That is simply not so!” “But it wasn’t their fault my dear! At the beginning of the 20^th Century women were beginning to have the chance to lead a useful and creative life. But that didn’t suit commerce. It needed women more as mass consumers than as producers. So romance was adopted to promote consumption. Women were induced to believe that being owned by some man and set down in a little brick box to buy all the things manufacturers wanted them to buy would be the highest form of bliss!” “I tell you it wasn’t like that at all! All right, some of what you say may be true, but that’s only the superficial part. It was my world, I know!” “There’s such a thing as being too close to make a proper evaluation. At a distance we are able to perceive your society for what it was, a heartless exploitation of the weaker willed minority!” “That is the most unrecognizably distorted view of my world I ever heard! Women were in all kinds of fields! They were doctors and writers and they had babies!” “What makes you think there’s anything creative about having babies? Would you call a pot creative because seeds grow in it?” “Is that all the mothers are? How awful!” “They are happy in their simple function.” “How without men?” “A species my dear, even ours has great will to survive. As you know, I’m sure, test tube life in simple form had been achieved for years before the crisis caused by Perrigan’s virus. The doctors pursued their research intensively along those lines. So through all the hunger and chaos, babies continued to be born. The girl babies lived and the boy babies died. This was distressing and wasteful too, so before long only girl babies were born. None of this is really remarkable as it seems at first sight. You know the locust will continue to produce female locusts without male assistance. The aphid too is able to go on breeding alone for many generations. So is it surprising that with our superior intelligence we are able to match the biological achievements of the insects?” “But what have you achieved?” “Survival. Man was only a means to an end. We needed him to have babies.” “Where are all the babies?” “The procedure is very simple. After the delivery the doctors examine the babies and allocate them suitably to different classes. After that of course it’s just a matter of seeing to their specialized feeding, glandular control and proper training in our rearing centres.” “The mothers never see them again, of course.” “They are much too busy having others. In any case they are quite incompetent to rear a child, even if they had the desire, which I assure you they don’t. We have evolved a four class system, offering security and fulfillment on all levels. The doctors- the educated class are in command; the mothers, the servitors and the worker …” “Ants! The ant nest! You’ve taken that for your model!” “And why not? It’s one of the most enduring patterns that nature has evolved. The selection of the system was inspired by a book that at that time was not prohibited: the Bible. There was a proverb that went something like, ‘Go to the ant thou sluggard. Consider her ways! Why are you crying my dear?” “I’m crying for all you’ve lost!”

Back at the hospital a doctor tells Orcis, “You present us with a problem. To others less stable than the mothers your influence might be a little more serious. We recognize that you could never adapt to the placid acceptance expected of a mother.” “I’d rather die!” “That, in a sense, is what we propose, but nothing painful or violent.” “What?” “An hypnotic treatment in depth that would remove all memory.” “Nothing painful? A slight case of suicide! That’s what you’re asking me to do! My mind is my memories! They are me!” “Exactly. They are alien and hostile to our society. They must go!” “Why don’t you just kill me? Without my memories I’d be as dead as if you did kill me!” “We prefer this method. You’re a good mother! Therefore you are valuable to society.” “Do you think I want to go on like this?” “Look Orcis, the hypnotic treatment would take your complete cooperation, but we are prepared to use other methods if we have to. Drug induced amnesia would simplify matters for us all!” The second doctor asks, “Now doctor?” “Yes!” She approaches Orcis with the needle. Odis screams but suddenly she is back in her own world and panicking in her own body. Dr Hellyer is there and restrains her until she realizes where she is. She says, “I have a terrible feeling that it really did happen. Or that it will happen.” Hellyer tells her she was under nearly two hours. “That synthesized stuff packs quite a wallop. It’s going to call for a very careful dosage.” “I hope it’s never used!” “Could you place your experience in time and space?” “No, but Laura is the one that told me about Dr Perrigan.” “Perrigan?” “Have you heard of him?” “No.” “Suppose there really were a biologist by the name of Perrigan. It would prove that it wasn’t just an hallucination.” Oh Jane!” “Do you have a Directory of American Scientists?” “Yes, right there on the desk.” Jane goes to look and finds, “Perrigan, Robert J., PHD, DSC, research professor of Biology. Rochester School of Medicine, associate professor of bacteriology and public health, research professor of virology, author ‘Pest Control and Public Health: New Aspects of Virology and Pest Control’”

Jane goes to see Perrigan at his lab. He shows her his rats and tells her, “What I’m doing is evolving new strains of Mixamatosis. It’s a tricky and unstable bug but very effective if you can control it. Brown rats outnumber humans in most cities.” “Suppose that in ridding society of a pest that it’s gotten along with for centuries you also destroyed society.” “Sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater!” “Or the operation was successful but the patient died!” “What exactly is your interest in this project?” “To have you abandon it! Has it ever occurred to you what would happen if your highly selected virus mutated? It occurs with other viruses all the time. I don’t see how you could ignore the virulence of mixamatosis after the way it killed the entire rabbit population of Australia, and England and then spread to wildlife all over Europe! Suppose it mutates and spread to man!” “Suppose the men at Los Alamos had quit for fear the chain reaction went out of control!” “It might have been better!” “What kind of nonsense is that? If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do!” “Are you sure you won’t reconsider abandoning this virus?” “I certainly will not! You must be out of your mind! Now get out!” Jane takes a gun from her purse and kills Perrigan. Then she sets fire to all of his research.

Jane is of course put on trial for murder. Her lawyer and Dr Hellyer want her to plead insanity but she refuses. “All I’ve got now of all that matters to me is a sort of integrity, the knowledge that what I did was right. That it had to be done! My experience was real and the proof is Dr Perrigan!” The lawyer asks, “Are you saying that what you experienced was some kind of preview of an inevitable predestined future?” “Inevitable? Obviously not! I believe that what is happening now determines our future! Therefore there must be a number of possible futures. I believe I saw one of those futures. I had a warning of what might have happened unless it was prevented. I prevented it and I’m glad. In killing Perrigan I achieved a purpose! And I’m prepared to pay for it with my life! Small price to pay!” “I have some doubt as to whether you achieved your purpose.” “What does that mean?” “Your Dr Perrigan had a son who was very interested in his father’s work and actually collaborated on the mixamatosis project. He has announced his determination that the achieved results shall not be wasted. He’s going to carry on with a few specimens saved from the fire. The son is a biologist and his name is Dr. Perrigan.”

The story teleplay was based on a 1956 novella by John Wyndham. His story explains a little better that it’s because the female doctors saved the single sex society by developing a means of reproduction that they became the rulers of the world. Another difference is that the drug is called chuinjuatin and that the doctors did not try to erase Jane’s memory but she rather requested to be given chuinjuatin again to send her back to her own time. Wyndham’s most famous novel was “The Day of the Triffids”.

That night before bed I got a message from someone who’d read my review of her performance at Shab-e She’r and wanted me to remove any references to her piece because she said I’d distorted her message in only written fragments that didn’t tell the whole story. This was the first time in all my years of writing reviews that someone had made such a request. The main problem had been that she’d stood facing away from the audience for half of her performance and hadn’t used a microphone and so it had been very difficult to hear her words. She explained that the character she had played turning away and being hard to hear had been an intentional metaphor. It made me wonder why she cared then if the written message got across or not if the main message was of a woman not allowing herself to be understood. I can certainly understand feeling misrepresented by someone else’s incomplete reproduction of I’ve said. It happened to me once when someone videotaped an interview with me once followed by some footage of me reading my poetry. When he edited the video it only showed me making negative comments in the interview, followed by me stumbling over a poem. I was very upset, called Brandon to complain, and though on an unconscious level I think he had deliberately edited the video that way, he was willing to add more footage to show me doing a complete poem. It’s always better to add footage or text in order to put oneself in focus rather than remove things and turn oneself into a silhouette. I told her I wouldn’t remove anything that I’d written but I’d be glad to add whatever text she thought would make her message clear. She agreed to that and told me what she wanted me to add, but didn’t say exactly where to put it in. I suggested that she send me a transcript of the whole piece so I could see where everything fit but she didn’t want to do that, saying something about wanting her privacy respected. I don’t understand how a work of art that is meant to be heard in public can also be something private. She gave me a general idea where to put in the additional text and so I did so.