Rise
Dolly and Dare are, that is, were, twins. You've gathered that. On a cool damp night, not like this one, Zippy melted the pool, the ice, and they rose to the surface with heads full of visions sent out by the slick, wired house. They moved out of the water, onto the chilled concrete. The sky began to filter light. The still, the cool, the humid breathed over them. And the house gleamed over them. When they slipped over concrete and into the house; it gave off a sigh that quivered against the crepuscular drench.
Endless rooms on endless rooms. Dare could feel Dolly slipping away. You know what they looked like; you have some idea. Fat mouths and dark, silky hair and ripe, contained bodies. The shoes were different though, different from the girls'. Dolly wasn't in to heels, or any shoes. Dare used them though.
Dolly went right for the dolls. She was really Zippy's daughter. He named her. He made the dolls. Dolls with electronic eyes, with dead eyes, with blinking eyes, even eyes with emotion, maybe vision. Boy dolls and girl dolls. Also mannequins with badly painted faces, fresh lipstick smeared on plastic doll lips, chipped, yellowing doll skin, cracked porcelain, melted plastic hair, marbleized, grimacing life-sized dolls wearing rags, some blindfolded, gagged, some of them bound. In some rooms twitchy dolls covered beds and Dolly could fall into them. And Dare was scanning for just one good doll. But she knew it wasn't really about her.
One day Dare stood on a high floor, looking out on the street, black concrete, slick with rain.
And then Dolly screamed funny. Dare turned to watch as Dolly, clinging to a rotting boy doll, opened her mouth, and the boy doll opened his, and something like a dense, jade green force was jetting out of it, and Dolly was still sucking it inside her when Dare passed out.
Wish
Dolly could make all the dolls move now. She could pull sunshine through the roof, the walls. She caught moonshine and projected it.
One night, hot like tonight, Dare took a doll out of Dolly's arms, threw it against a white tile wall and watched it blow up into a red energy that left a stain.
Dolly freaked out. Fever pitch. Narcotic sweeps. She felt Dare hit the expanding night, suck in the electric heat. She felt Dare wish, and when she closed her eyes she felt Dare close hers also, and when eyes were open again Dare was easing out the anguish, easing out the pain, running her hands through my hair, licking my lips, locked and grinding herself against me, like grinding into another world, and for all three of us everything else was just so far away.
Watch
See, we were watching. We were all there in the house too. Me, Dreena, the other boys.
Dolly and Dare were born in the house. Zippy built it.
Dreena was a dancer at The All the Way Motel when it was something better, before Zippy bought it from Johnny Vance. He didn't know Dreena was part of the deal. He was in it for Delana Vance, Johnny's sister. But they left Island after the sale, and Dreena distracted him from going after them.
His looks didn't do much for her then. Too thin, too many angles. She wasn't even that hooked on the sex even though he could go for hours. If he hadn't bought the place, she would have never tried with him. Soon she started noticing something in the quality of his breathing when he screwed her, something in his absorption that got her. A smell like lemons and eucalyptus came off of him in bed. And she really did begin to appreciate the enormity of his prick. She didn't think most girls could take a prick like that long enough to get used to it. And one day (it was a rainy day) he lost a little control and instead of coming on her belly or in her mouth or wherever, he came on her pussy where he'd been rubbing his prick, and she found a spermy hair in her bed later and she had one of the guys from the hotel put a program in it.
After that she didn't dance at the motel anymore. Just for Zippy. He built her the house. He made dolls.
But it wasn't enough for either of them. Things didn't quite adhere. But she's still hooked on the memories, memories of what could have been. She's okay when it's not raining. She only thinks about him when it rains. She can do without the rain.
One day she asked Zippy for a baby. "The experience of that bondage," he told her, "will diminish me. It will not happen. Sweetheart. I have all the babies I need." And then he fucked her for like three seconds. For that, and because she was bored, she kept the condom and managed to get hold of a program that sent the sperm inside her, and then she was pregnant with Dolly and Dare.
Zippy responded by locking her in the house and moving himself into the motel for good. He left Dreena with the dolls while he holed up in the motel, "reserving himself." He refused to come near her.
He showed up when the girls were born. He slid them into the pool behind the house, and set the water to freeze.
Zippy unlocked the house, and anyone could get in at first. That's how we got in. Kids with nowhere to go. We would try anything. And then she used us to keep some people out, and some in. She used us to make the soundtracks. We all knew there was something funny with the pool and something funny with Dreena whenever it rained. And when Zippy turned off the freeze on the pool...
We watched everything in Dreena's screens. She wanted us to, and we liked it. And that night when Dare slipped away, I followed her. Of course Dreena knew. Everybody knew; everybody was watching.
Mad
When Dare came in that night she found Dolly asleep wrapped in the arms of another boy doll fixed with a program. We brought that to the deal too: programs. We mutated pieces of salvaged technology. Dare crawled in with them and dreamed of me while the doll whispered in Dolly's ear all night. The doll stuck by her after that. Its whispers blended with the mad chorus of whispers in her head. (She was destined for madness," I tell Lustra, "really made for it.") She was seduced by just the idea of madness and would chant: mad madder maddest mad madder maddest mad madder maddest. Ahhh. Madness. She caught a glimpse of it ,then deduced the rest. Enveloped by its fluctuations of brightness and clarity. Lucidity. Fluidizing, nebulizing, coming and going like rain, it acted on her until everything was too shallow, too deep, until the bugs began, horny, clawed, oozing and undulating, feeding on too many surfaces. She thought the gurgling, thick stench was coming from her flesh that seemed to her to be turning black and rotting.
Sometimes the bugs would fly at her in storms that covered her face.
Sometimes sleep would hit her, and then she would be there: gazing into a deep mirror, teetering on the brink from hard use, the taste of blood ripping through her as the mirror showed her (with rotten stinking flesh) ripping (with claws she'd grown) the fat bodies of engorged winged babies who taunted her while she tasted their flesh. We saw what she saw but we knew we weren't really seeing it.
She didn't even think about Dare anymore. And neither really did I. Dare, with mixed feelings, watched Dolly grow pale and serene, watched her reaching out to some frosted glinting surface. And when she touched it Dare knew that Dolly was falling into something bad. So bad that Dolly pulled out all of her glossy, shiny hair for days. For days, because it wouldn't stop growing back. And then she stopped and ran screaming from the house.
She screamed and thrashed in the street until Dreena called someone to take her to the madhouse.
Mad Love
With padded hands, Dolly was chained for some time but soon they let her wander around the madhouse.
Most of the kids in there were mad from violent love. Dolly first heard the word love and some of what it might mean from them. And that's where we heard it too. Watching her in there. What she learned about love eased her own kind of madness and left her with a fluttering quickness of hearing (she could hear what you'd said before you'd said it). Her ears were always singing and ringing with floating laughter and metallic implications. She thought about Dare. Sometimes she thought about the dolls. But mostly she wanted to feel the violent love the mad felt.
She monitored herself for any symptoms the mad exhibited or described to her: lost appetite, hollowed eyes with tumbled lids full of pleasure, sighs grown deeper, proneness to long watchings, affected tremors, escaped moans, lightness of feeling, tender aches.
Shelley was the first one to talk to her. He was about my height, thin like me, and was always dressed in a navy, pinstripe suit and crisp, white shirt and polished, black shoes. He kept his blue-black hair spiked up in jagged tufts. That first time, he came up behind her, spun her, pushed her against the wall with his body.
"I could love you," he said in her ear. "But it wouldn't be good for either of us." He stepped back from her.
"What do you mean, love, and why wouldn't it be good?" she asked, training on the scars and slashes that gave his long, hollow face crazy slants in the dim hall.
"Love is your heart and your body trying to explode your mind. Not good because I try to only love boys because its crazier that way and if we try to love each other you might never get to crazy and I might be cured and that's something I really don't want." A little crowd of pale kids had gathered around them, faces expectant and scarred, hand wringers, hair tearers, self-slashers.
"Why are you here?" she asked Shelley.
"Here because I want to be. I need to help the other guys here cultivate the art. The art of violent love. Of mad love. The boys I love hardly ever visit me."
"Is that why I'm here? Mad love? Is everybody here for that?"
"No, no, no, no. You because they didn't have anywhere else to put you. You didn't even know the word, so how could you be here for that? But the others, yes. All of them here for pretending to try to off themselves, or some other symptom. But there are phobics here too and other ones like you who they didn't know where else to put and who aren't old."
"So how do you do it? How do you do the love?"
"Chase me," he said, grabbing her wrist, "and we'll try to teach you some of it." He pulled her along the hallway, the others following, quiet and bright. None of their feet seemed to touch the ground. They ran like that, and were all dizzy, and then Shelley pulled Dolly into a room, and the others followed and the door closed behind them. The room was dark. But we could see them.
"Some of us hear about it and others are born wanting it and others it just happens to."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Just listen. You'll get it. We mean that it's not just a gift not a natural talent you can be born with or you can make happen."
"It can be cultivated," somebody put in."
"And can it be with someone just like you?"
"Like me?" some of them asked, in unison.
"No. Like me."
"Oh, yes," somebody said. "It's fun when we do it to each other here. So we can hide from each other and cut each other's names in our skin."
"But I don't do that," said Shelley. "It's more pure and makes a madder deeper pain if the object is outside and not mad too."
"No, no – I mean say I want to love (she said the word slow, trying it out, not sure she liked the sound it was making, the way it slid off her tongue into the black room) "someone just like me, someone that looks like me, that almost is me."
There was some murmured approval and some gasping in feigned shock.
"Good question, little girl," said Shelley. "And the answer might be no. For it to work there has to be an object, and what you're talking about could go on without one if the object is too much like you you might not even notice when it's gone and that might be madness but not mad violent love because you can't be the object yourself. See?"
"Oh," she said, and was a little sad.
"But it's okay if that's what works for her, right Shell?" a little girl drawled, dreamy. "Maybe she just isn't right for what we've got."
"That's right, Penny." Shelley's voice sounded tender in the dark, and Dolly felt herself leaning to its sound.
"And does it still work if they love you back?"
"Yes, but only if lots of obstacles keep you apart. Like nobody wants you to be together, or there have to be Dire Consequences if you are—"
"Like plague?"
"Yes Dolly, like plague. But how could you know about plague? Who else have you been talking to? Never mind. Don't answer that. We don't want to know."
"So it's better if they don't want you at all?"
"It's good that way and better if they wanted you before but not anymore. Or also good if they want you some but want other people much more."
"And what if they both just want each other so much?"
"Dolly, if that happens you won't get to be in a place like this. And once you've been in a place like this, that will probably never happen. That kind of so-called love can't make you go mad until you die, unless it's suicide, and then, then that's something else, because nobody ever stops loving as much as somebody else and so it doesn't count. But, you can have it like that and things like jealousy can come and cheating and then the madness has a chance to grow like some flowers that need rain. And I tell you Dolly, the mad love is better and better means deeper and anything deeper is better than anything not. Just ask around."
"And what do you get. What does it really do to you?"
"Sometime, Dolly, sometimes The Sea of Love comes into you and fills you up, fills up your head."
"The Sea of Love?"
"The Sea of Love. It all started with a drop. I shouldn't even be telling you this. Shh. No more questions."
"So what if there's nobody?"
"It doesn't matter. You can pretend. And just act like we tell you. You just need to add your own twists. But if you act it you can feel a little of it without even any object and eventually, with a lot of hard work, an object will come will be pulled will be unable to resist. Madness isn't that hard to get. But to have a certain kind does take some work and take it from us this is good stuff. It will keep you busy the whole of your life. And sometimes you will have what you think is relief when you see the object and it reciprocates. And then everything will be sweet. But it can't last and that's the beauty of it. Take it from us."
Dare was with us then. She watched with us. Dreena sent Dare to the madhouse one day. We watched Dolly wake up to find Dare in the cell with her. Perfume. Lipstick. Hair swept up and pinned at the nape. Form fitting black dress, showing the fine knee, the sweet feet, straps and heels.
"Dare." Sitting up in bed. "I hoped you would come. I thought maybe you were the one."
"I know all about what you've been hoping for and it's ridiculous. Even you know it." Striding the lengths of the cell. Heels and straps.
"Wouldn't you like to meet my friends, sissy?"
Dare sat on the bed. Curled her legs behind her. Dolly mirrored the pose. Dare leaned in. Dolly wearing a little sheer slip. Bare feet. Lots of leg in the room. Dare put her face closer to her sister's. "Look here, baby. You've gotta get out of here. I really need you, doll baby."
"I'm not bad. I'll be even better soon. I'm better already just seeing you. Not that I've been bad, or stupid, or anything like that. You'll understand when you meet my friends."
Dare slapped her. Legs and legs and a tight little slap. A tight little spreading mark on a friendly ripe cheek. "I can't meet anybody. How can I meet anybody when I'm like this? Don't you get it, sissy? You tell anybody about me, and I'll be gone forever. Forever, Dolly and by then I'll be gone for good. I need you out."
"I don't understand you." Tears against a mark. "You don't say what you mean. You don't say what you're supposed to say."
Dare lit a cigarette and let a tear roll down her cheek. Low, quiet voice. "They won't see me. Nobody will see me anymore. I'm gone, dead, invisible. You killed me when you went away. I'm washed away without you. I can't do what we have to do with you in here playing crazy with the other crazies. We can be in a show Dolly! A big show. They only want me if both of us do it. Please Dolly. Please don't tell." A kiss. Heels clicking. Gone.
The night was inky with clouds and a big moon when I went to see Dolly in the madhouse.
I slipped in and found her cell.
Dolly was at the barred window looking out, reveling in the mooncast patterns churning on the sea, the high wind shaking the reflections. She turned and saw me there in the moonshaded cell and didn't seem surprised.
She let me stroke her hair, pull it a little, sing to her. But when I asked her questions, she said things like: How can I talk on a night like this? With everything so much more beautiful than before? And: How can I talk with you here with me in the madhouse with everything singing and ringing?
So for so many nights I was creeping into the madhouse, and maybe I was happy, and she could feel herself going mad for me or convincing herself that she was, and she spent her days sleeping to dream about fantasizing about me touching her.
And then I convinced them to let me take her out of the madhouse.
We found a little room and lived in it. Dreena didn't mind. It was something new to watch. But Dolly wanted to go back to the house. So I took her.
The house was wired with new programs; I could feel them but didn't understand. I just wanted to go back to our little room. Dolly sensed the programs too, but mistook them for the preserved, ripe reek of her own madness, and was hit with fear like black lightning. She was screaming at me to go away, pushing me away from her, holding her ears at the sound of my voice, biting, and scratching me when I tried to carry her away. I didn't want to go back with the others and watch. Was disgusted that they were watching. So I left her there, and when I was gone she was quiet and sad.
I couldn't really stay away long. I gave her a little time to cool off and then went back. She was braided and barefoot and wandering the house whispering "Dare, Dare, Dare." She cried when she saw me, liquid salt spilling into our best kiss ever. She went from Dare, Dare, Dare to kiss me, kiss me, kiss me... And we fucked for the first time, fucked hard beneath the crumbling cursing walls, and neither of us felt the little shift of new life; I only wanted to stoke her hair (undone) and stay after.
But she drove me away again instead.
I strolled edgy through the dripping, heated night. Clouds were gathered and piled thick. I though of The Sea of Love and what its waters must look like, and of my mad girl, Dolly. After some time I saw a girl posing in the yellow glare of a streetlight. She was all done up in red straps, all bound and painted and leering. I stopped. The harsh light played on my nerves. "Don't you recognize me, baby? You didn't think I'd just give you up to the streets, on a night like this? You can talk to me." Dolly! (It had to be Dare, was Dare.) And then she was pulling me into the darkness of an alley, out of the light. Thunder rolled; the sky was blinking. "Call me Dare, just for tonight. It will make things easier, if you just say it over and over." She was whispering Dare Dare Dare and pushing my hand there, just so, between her legs, up under her dress, just there, spreading my fingers, forming my hand to cup her, grinding in it. "It's too hot to say no," she purred. And when she said it her eyes flashed yellow in the darkness, and I knew it then, knew this could never be quite my Dolly, but always quite something else. I broke away and ran.
"You're not the only one," she screamed after me.
Trying to put things in place, I fled to the beach and went into the sea, fast. The sweetness of the water tingled away some of Island's hold on me, but also instilled a peaceful hunger that even salt couldn't scrub. The water was active that night, churning to bring on a storm, but not yet still to receive it. I swam hard and then got out, and pacing the wet sand, looking up at the swollen flashing sky, felt the blown surf and the wind. Could such elements hold some honesty, in their crashings and breakings and receptions?
Dolly is worse off than I though. Grasp the obvious. Dare, Dare, Dare – swollen echo of a word rushing my bloodstream. Echoed warnings in my head. Was I wrong to bring her out? Maybe she isn't safe out here. Maybe I can't protect her. Obviously I can't protect her. Maybe I should think some more about why she was in there in the first place. Maybe I'm not safe from her.
I craved her suddenly, like a sudden awareness of breathing. She was asleep when I got there, she and Dare, sleeping next to each other, scrubbed free of paint and deception. Breathing in unison, they dreamed the same dream. Dolly and Dare.
Dolly opened her eyes (I think it was Dolly) and gazed at me so sleepy and sweet. "We can't even tell the difference between ourselves sometimes." A darling sleepy murmur and then out again.
I kissed them both because I didn't know who was who or what was what and because I wanted to. And then I left.
This is a bad wave, a very bad wave that won't throw me off, won't plunge me under its force.
I went back to my (our) room. Weary. Locked in. The storm broke and hit the roof all night, cooling my sleep. I dreamed of Dolly and Dare. They held hands. Held hands to ease the pain. We can't tell the difference between ourselves anymore. Between. Ourselves. Singing and giggling to a rainy soundtrack. I dreamed the rain could help, if only I could grasp it.
Plunge
Dreena was zooming in, gaining power with each passing tick, watching in her screens as the vines tangled, as the vines bewrayed.
She sent Dare a dream that moved her from bed but not from sleep. Dare went to the mirror to paint herself again, to put on again the leather strappy whore clothes, to slip again into the wet night, to smash her fists against my door. Never waking, she screamed my name.
I woke up and let her in. Oh wet baby. Paint streaking her face. Eyes bright and glazed. On the ground. Rough. And then she was pregnant too.
Leaving. Go away. Get away. Forget both of them. Go look for The Sea of Love. Keep looking forever. Bad waves all around me rushing into me trying to absorb into me. I tried to sing them out but couldn't make any music. No good. Gone.
Dolly wouldn't leave my mind. The sweetness of her. But which one was she? Which one did I think I loved? I wanted her more somehow. More than ever. But more than leaving? Was it right to leave her (them), just like that? Bad waves. Just. Keep. Going. Gone. Turn around. No. So sweet. No. Kiss me kiss me kiss me. Try. Just try.
I drew breath, tried to gain some calm, to inspire some strength, despite the rushing of bad waves. I turned around.
Dreena was there. When I saw her it felt like oh home, and I thought for a minute that she loved me, had come to save me. She smiled at me and projected a screen and projected on that an image:
Deep, wide water swirling so pretty there, just for me, lost and rolling, all the colors, oh! The Sea of Love! Someone, something called to me from inside the swirling water. Almost Dolly's voice, good enough for me. A whispered pant. Growing stronger. Swim with meeeee.
I plunged myself in.
"Drown in it," Dreena said calmly.
She swirled the screen into a ball, with me inside. "Your part in this is just about over now. Soon all you'll be able to do is watch."
And suspended there, I could see everything.
Run
Back in the house Dreena stood at the bottom of a programmed staircase (expectant then, the staircase — wired and ready for action). Wake up, girls, she called calmly.
They opened their eyes at the same time. Dare took Dolly's hand and said: "she's my only friend." And Dolly knew that Dare knew that it was a lie. But it was too late. Things had taken turns for the worse.
Pulled, they moved to the top of the staircase and stood looking at their mother.
They were so quiet, mesmerized, watching her, watching as she pushed buttons on the little control in her hands, and soon they felt something big and small dislodge inside themselves as Dreena transferred our unborn babies from their wombs into her own.
The dislodgement created within their wombs sparks of possessed despair that grew quickly into electric bursts that flashed both girls to instant ashes, which floated down the stairs and converged around the screen ball in which I was trapped.
The ball blew when the ashes touched it, and so did my wild eye, the eye that has seen too much. Free, I ran.
The beach. Knees in the sand. Dead to the sweet of the crashing surf. The wild eye replaying all its sordid recorded sights and visions. Not understanding, A feast of lies and misunderstanding? Did I lose love? Or did this having nothing to do with that? With love? I prayed for madness. Prayed for an end. As the sky broke I heard the crazy beats of The Truth.
