1
It all began with writing. One evening a pamphlet had found its way into the hands of a woman in Paris. The print of this pamphlet was smudged. Beneath the title was a fuzzily reproduced picture of a woman semi-naked in a bed – a notorious image of the woman now reading the pamphlet itself. Neither the copy nor the original image looked like her at all.
A pamphlet can be very small and elusive, like a piece of code. She looked at it for a long time, trying to understand it – for so long, in fact, that she was now late for a party. She didn’t know who had written this pamphlet or made the image on its cover or published it. It had been produced across the border. It was one of an emerging pornographic series, printed in avant-garde cities – in London and Antwerp and Geneva. It seemed to be an international project, something samizdat and 24-hour.
She threw the pamphlet away, then continued to stare at it in the garbage, among the newspapers and magazines and bills and cancelled cheques and messages. It was impossible to look away.
Centuries and centuries go by, but everything happens in the present moment.
Then she came to a new conclusion. She retrieved the pamphlet, and went out into the night.
2
Her name was Celine. For the last few months a series of anonymous fictions had appeared, attacking her sexual life, her habits and her politics – along with many similar pamphlets about other women she knew. But it was the pamphlets about Celine that, for reasons she never entirely understood, became modest bestsellers. Soon she was transformed into a sign, or character. People wanted to know what would happen next in the ongoing series.
Above everyone the sky was blue then pink, then pink then blue. It all seemed gentle. In the open windows of tea rooms appeared jasmine scents and lavender. On the outskirts of great cities grew deep forests and minute mushrooms. In the oceans octopi were disporting themselves underwater, letting their many arms/legs trail deliciously and gather information. All over the planet pirates traded with other pirates. And meanwhile many people believed they knew Celine without knowing her at all.
At first Celine had read every pamphlet as soon as it appeared but very soon the words upset her too much. She tried to explain her feelings to her friends. It was like everything was dirty or spilled, she said. She felt like the world was blurred. She didn’t exactly know what she meant by these phrases. When she was young she had thought that the world would be one large cosmos opening up to her in a sequence of exciting scenes, and it now turned out to be very narrow and dismal and impossible to move inside. She continued to go out to the parties but preferred to stay in her bedroom, with the curtains half drawn. Meanwhile she relied on her friends to give her little paraphrases of the texts that were written about her, that were now piled up in her house. The words emerged from nowhere, like insects. It was as if paper wanted to smother every surface – console tables and beds, the counters of bars and the refreshment areas of spas and saunas – and it was a very upsetting feeling. Her house was filled with the stink of paper – vanilla and dusty.
The girl in the stories about her was not a girl she knew.
Celine’s education had trained her to please other people. Her mother and father were from a small country across the border. She always disliked her parents’ immigrant nervousness and caution. They were intellectual but also anxiously conventional. She was often criticised by them, for her spelling or her arithmetic – in the same way, she presumed, all girls were criticised minutely. They taught her to enjoy the surfaces of things and she had never liked this kind of training, in fact she had tried to reject it. And now it was being argued in these pamphlets written by men that precisely because of this training she was superficial and even dangerous.
It seemed that the other women who found themselves written about in this way didn’t mind being public. They just assumed that this was normal or at least irreversible, as if the voices of their parents or the voices in their heads were now operating in the outside world as well, and this was a development anyone could have predicted. So that maybe it was only Celine who found the situation unjust or even terrifying – as if, she once tried to explain, she had suddenly realised that she was living in some story about monsters where it turned out that everything was scripted by the monsters themselves. The only form of resistance she had so far imagined, however, was to dress with an increased sense of alertness, her private idea of armour. She’d started to sew little slogans into the sleeves of her dresses – fragments like AS IF or IF YOU MUST – or to add extra folds and loops, multiplying a system of false openings.
In one of these punk outfits Celine now entered the party, and looked around for an ally.
3
Why didn’t Celine do more? she often thought. But it was a world, like many worlds, where your power seemed defined by your relations to other people. For a woman, this usually meant your husband. But Celine’s husband was Sasha, a minor but murderous fascist – the personal secretary to the chief minister.
She had married Sasha a year ago, when she was eighteen and he was forty-five, and before her wedding she had met him just once, accompanied by their parents and fifteen lawyers. But still, after these early meetings she believed that she loved him. His sense of humour in private was goofy. They both enjoyed playing draughts. But ever since the pamphlets began their conversations had become more difficult. They argued more often, little dialogues about money and sex and time. The more the pamphlets increased, the more separately they lived. Sasha started sleeping at his office. He ordered in food and crates of wine while he had his meetings discussing the ongoing international wars. There was a rumour that he slept with anyone.
In other words, her husband was an absence. And her parents were elsewhere, in the countryside. Her mother wrote her letters, saying how quiet it was and how they were all thinking of her while they did their sewing and their reading. Her father’s lectures at the university were being postponed for a semester. In her letters back to them Celine left the pamphlets unmentioned. She couldn’t see her parents as a little shelter, something to take with her in any weather. They were something she had left behind long ago. It was as if her loneliness were an object, or as if she had turned into an object and this object was called loneliness. The only constant presence near her was Cato. Cato was chubby, morose and fifteen. He had arrived in town a few months earlier with a diplomatic retinue from an Indian republic, and Celine had asked if he wanted to stay with her as a personal assistant. She had somehow given him the name Cato, and an extravagant salary. He had quickly developed his own way of speaking her language: a kind of patois of his own that mixed high art with unusual mismatches of register. At night Cato worked on his memoirs of the women he observed – notes which he safely left anywhere in the house because no one could read the script in which he wrote or understand the words themselves. And this was lucky, because the illegible words were little insults, questions of relative attractiveness, revolutionary philosophy …
Instead of a husband or family, Celine had her friends: Julia and Marta. They messaged each other every hour, small sentences and notes. It was a way of offering each other hope.
The universe disintegrates into a cloud of heat, it falls inevitably into a vortex of entropy, but within this irreversible process there may be areas of order, portions of existence that tend towards a form, in which it might be possible to discern a design – and one of these was this story of Celine and her friends.
4
Celine found Marta beside the ice-cream bar. She showed her a glimpse of the latest pamphlet, which she then concealed very fast in a hidden pocket.
– Oh: yeah, said Marta.
They went to hide behind an imported tropical plant, for private conversation.
Celine loved Marta because she was small and intense, her fingernails were often black with mud and paint and other dirt, she had a filthy sense of humour, she had features that were elongated and outsize but also magically alluring, and she smoked even more than Celine did.
This new pamphlet, said Marta, described a list of pornographic affairs between Celine and various celebrity women, government ministers and assorted minor characters. There was also a lot of politics, she continued, like bribery and extortion and a conspiracy against the government. And it ended with an agreement between Celine and several Jewish billionaires to negotiate with foreign powers and take control in America, which they then celebrated, added Marta, in a variety of truly barbaric sexual positions.
Celine thought she might be sick – not so much at any single detail of this picture but because there were so many more images of her in other people’s minds than she could bear.
– Don’t carry on, she said.
– I mean, that’s kind of everything, said Marta.
An empty moon was orbiting at a vast distance from their planet, the same way the conversations continued orbiting.
– I grew up among women, a man interrupted, speaking very close to Celine.
His breath smelled sourly of chocolate.
– I am hyperalert to conversations between women, he added.
– But you’ve never heard that kind of conversation, she said. – By definition.
– But I can try, he said.
Everyone loved pleasure. And perhaps the gruesome man talking to her was sincerely attentive in his feelings towards women, but Celine doubted it. Increasingly, to Celine and her friends, pleasure seemed complicated.
Celine escaped into a side room, which had a few vases arranged on the floor for women to piss in. She began to piss too. It was a difficult operation and some splashed on the rim, staining the edge of her dress.
Someone she loved once said to her: It looks like a party, it feels like a party, it smells like a party. But don’t get it twisted. This isn’t a party. This is power, baby.
Celine started to cry, then stopped herself. Then she went back into the room.
Copyright © 2023 by Adam Thirlwell