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The Seduction of Bill Clinton:
Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar

Introduction:

This is the story that will write itself, the story of X and of X's. This story will be implicit within the story Z is about to tell you, the story of Y and Z. Y and Z will be the same person, two separate identities co-identified by similar circumstances. They will not be the same person; they will only share similar experience. And since this is the story of an epic, an epic adventure that became a tale of woe, of remembering all that was forgotten, X. And since this is the story of proportions beyond epic capacity, Z, Y, will begin by telling you, Z, that X is only talking to Himself. Here is the story of X:

Time: Turn of the century France.

Place: 1896

Event: It is the beginning of the twentieth century. 1999 being the year of the party, the year of our lord, is being fulfilled. Social commentary can only come through major department stores (Y, will not 1984 this epic tale of woe). It is the beginning of our story.

This is a letter found in the journals of Z. It is a letter penned in French, but translated here into English:

Y, who cannot remember even what X remembers, can only remember the past as if it were somebody else. Her body, the body of Y, remembers itself like burning, fire between Her legs, on her body--all around the torso. It is not intense, like the loneliness of her unfulfilled sexual desire, but it is insane. As much as she knows about herself and the world, she, Y, still has yet to embrace her own suffering. She suffers in order to forget. She has not yet suffered. She suffers in order to heal. She has not yet suffered. She suffers in order to hide. She has not yet suffered. She suffers in order to suffocate herself from herself is not herself is another person. She has not yet suffered. Y, when all is said and done, tells his story backwards. Z will take it from here.

Sincerely,
X

Here is the Narrative as it was told in French, translated, once again, into English:

Z:
I remember it. I remember it well. I cannot feel. I am afraid. I remember what it felt like. I don't remember. I am too tired of trying to remember to forget to remember that I cannot embrace the healing of time. I am cutting away at the strings, like tendons to bones, to muscles, which pull the past up and out, compound fracture, through the skin and into exposure, the wind hitting the chilled face like a slap of terror in the pit of my stomach. I remember.

Y:
I left you today, another step towards my independence. I do not know what tomorrow will bring. I am taking a risk. I am afraid that everything will go wrong, my worst fear being theft, I have been taken from myself like a child from a crib, my baby is gone and has been gone for a long time, the longest while. I am afraid that the mistake I made in being born was what you taught me. I will no longer be responsible for my suffering (I have not yet suffered).

Z:
I cannot step outside of myself long enough to take a deep breath and then exhale. I feel the bile of sleep in the back of my throat because I am tired. I am tired.

Y:
This is how I remember it (Remember who I am). I remember it like a dream (all I have are nightmares). I remember it like it was yesterday (all I know is time). I am living in the aftermath (I cannot remember). And when you left me, I remember that night well. I took this legacy of pain and wove it, like a spinster sister of three, into the fabric of waiting, this time that I am aware of and only capable of remembering. I took this grief, this shame, this anger (I cannot feel what I don't know that I am) and made it into my ambush. This is another me. I am another you. When I tell you that I cannot remember who I am it is only because I have lost myself in grief. I have not yet suffered. There is no remembering that is yet complete because and I see your face.

X and Y talk about Z in their sleep in the same bed:

This is the middle of the story, Sleep:

I look into your eyes, I am not a victim, and you tell me that I ask for this, that I opened myself, like a pair of inner-thighs, up to this. That I want you to do this to me, that it is only natural for you to do what you do to me because I am asking you to do it, begin you to, pleading with you to do it. And I walk around believing you, begging myself to know that it is true. I am naive; after all--I am only a child, at best. I believe that I ask you to do these things to me, tell me that I am dirty unless my flesh is yielding, giving, taken away. I believe you. I want you to do this to me, I want you to take my sex away from me because it is bad because I am not worthy of pleasure because it is shameful because I believe myself to be not worthy of love because I am better than you are.

Dream:
I am on top because I cannot, due to everything must be perfect, let you see what a mess I am, what a fool I've been, how horrible I am, how terrible it is that I am a victim. I cannot share this with you because I ask you to do this to me--I tell the world that I am a victim and they believe me because I have told them all that it is something that I like to do, play the victim because you told me that I was the one responsible for you. I got mad at someone today because they used my own sex, my own sexuality, without even being aware that they were doing it, they knew what they were doing and when I tore it, ripped off the secret, they tried to tell me that it was my fault, that I was doing this to myself, that I deserved this because they didn't mean any harm. I was angry. I am angry and therefore my anger is because anger has blame in its core.

A Voice that belongs to no one:
If I am angry then I must be at fault and you are to blame because I am angry. You will tell me that my anger is my own and you are not responsible for my anger and it is my fault and then I will become confused because my anger is my own and you have told me that it is nobodies fault except my own. I ask for this. The anger is only my response to your behavior, which is your behavior which is making me angry and I have told you that you have made me angry and that I wish you to stop doing to me what made me angry, what makes me angry and you tell me that you have done nothing that my interpretation of what you have done is what is wrong. But I am better than you are because my only motive is to sabotage what I feel with ulterior motives--I am willing to destroy myself with fantasies of hurting you with lies and deception when in reality, all I really want is to be loved. But my motives are incorrect because love, as you have taught me, is pain and pain is only abuse that I can carry because I am a martyr and will die here on this cross of art which is not myself is me. I am Y. This is my story.

Y and Z talk about what it is like to be the same person but not live in the same body but only in the same bed:

This is the story of Sleep:
I look, again, into your face [I am not a victim] and I feel the terror that makes me want to cry. I have not yet figured out why I am so afraid. I look, again, into your face and I feel the horror of how dirty I feel. I know that I am a worthwhile human being because I want to believe that it is true. I think, even at the most conscious of unconscious levels, I am too busy hating myself for what someone else has done to me. I am not a victim. I took over this job a long time ago and I am no longer busy pretending that somebody else hurt me. I am the one who is at fault. I am to blame. I will die a martyr in the name of this memory that haunts me, even now, in the shadow of your face. I look, again, into your face and I do not trust what is there. I do not understand what I see because what I see is not what I believe to be there. I am dirty.

Dream:
I am alone. I am nothing. I look, again, into your face and I do not want the responsibility of what is there. It is my fault; I know that all ready--I am to blame for even wars, which are fought in places I have never been [my heart is a lonely hunter, a battle ground for despair]. I look, again, into your face and I want everything that I see there. Hate me--don't you fucking hate me. Touch me--don't you fucking, death should be so kind. And there is a terror, so rich and unfulfilled behind this mask, this poor me I am blind and cannot see mask that even to touch it would mean to end.

A Voice that doesn‘t belong in this story:
I would become what I already, knowingly false, think I am--dirty and nothing and shameful and I ask for this kind of abuse to be given to me because I have told you a thousand times before I am alone and will always be alone because I deny responsibility for the world I am creating because anything good that happens, happens only in not my own is merely a shadow, like this world of me am I of him. This is all--bridges and tunnels and coward that I am.

XYZ have differentiated into personae. The plural of which is only the singular of the generative case of I, which speaks the voice of X or Y or Z herself in the reflexive tense. It are these cause and effect that brings us here to this which is already done because the world, this.

The Sabotage of X:
Another letter in French

Dirty. I feel the burn of filth resonating on my flesh. And the event is gone, no longer there, was not there to begin with, I don't know. You know, I don't know, you know what I mean? It's like, I don't know...It's like, well...It's like, I don't know. I mean, I just don't want to, you know. I just don't want to make that kind of commitment. Like, what if I'm wrong? I mean, it's like, I don't know. It's like, well...It's like, I’m not...Like I’m not, you know? I don't know.

As Always,
Y

Z has that dream again:
A disembodied voice sings

I have nothing but nightmares. My life is composed and lived through visions of horror--visions of exposure. I dreamt that I was in a place; it was a public place, a place of humiliation and shame. It was a place that told me; over and over I am weak.

I had that dream again last night. I have nightmare after nightmare in the same manner that you, X, have touched me. I let you; because I love you and want to be close with you, sleep in my bed with me, inviting you to be sexual with me--because I love you. Because I want to be near you. I will take your sexuality, myself, and love what I can because I cannot love you because I never asked you to. I didn't know. Go because I loved you and this was our time together, our space, our closeness, I want to be near you and here, thank to X, and I must never forget that I am, indeed, unworthy of this gift. I am better than you, this world that I now speak of, I am better than.

A face is given to the voice in the form of language:

You have destroyed me. I am but a small dot in the cycle of continuum. And you have destroyed me. You have destroyed what I set out to become, sex/myself. I am merely opening the flower of myself is not myself because of its death. This is that nearness of you that asked you to because I didn’t know. Go. Now. Imperative.

Conclusion:

X had only Z that X never knew. X knew only of Z through X's memory. X wanted to forget Z. X was afraid of anger. X gave this fear away to the world, to Z. X never understood what X was doing, X only did what X did because X had Z that X never knew of being as angry as Z of X was. This Z of X was the Z of us all, XYZ. Z of X was the reason, the reason for living and dying--for endurance. X's only memory was the only reason that love was a matter best left unsaid. Z was the reason that the world, XYZ, no longer belonged to itself.

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