Repetition Island

LW: I was wondering about the place of The Hypnotic Show on Repetition Island. I understand that hypnosis works through techniques of verbal repetition and also that a lot of people attended quite a few of the shows - so in that way there was this kind of short-term and long-term repetitive hypnosis going on. Regarding this what effect do you think that the format of Repetition Island had, that would not have occurred with a one-time show type of situation?

ML: The hypnotic show was perfectly suited to Repetition Island.  Apart from mirroring, as you say, the repetitive nature of inductions that work by stacking suggestions on top of each other, being able to repeat the show for 6 days in a row allowed us to investigate the different aspects of the ‘Hypnotic Show’, which we had not been able to achieve during the one off performances in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam and at the Kadist Foundation in Paris.  We also had the advantage of working with some of the same volunteers, which enabled us to deepen the trance state from one day to the next because the subjects had more of a predisposition to access their unconscious minds after the first session.  This was especially true in the case of Christian who I placed in a cataleptic trance on the fourth night, as on the third night he proved to already be a deep trance subject.

The results of a deepening trance on repeated nights gave the volunteers a more involved exposure to the ‘exhibitions’ we were presenting to them in a trance state.  This was expressed as a growing connection in neural pathways of overlapping senses of smell, taste, touch, etc. This reminds one somewhat of the 19th century poets and writers such as Rimbaud and Baudelaire who investigated the confluence of sensorial inputs such as sound and colour, and especially how sensations of light could be stimulated through hearing.

This deepening of sensations was particularly apparent with Carey Young’s Hypnotic Spiral exhibit, as by the third night, sensations were embodied and there was a growing sense of ‘becoming’ what was being suggested, such as the subject feeling himself to be butter or blue cake icing.  Christian, the volunteer on the third night had an exhilarating sensation that he likened to riding his bike at full speed. 

Another advantage of working over several evenings was that the general process seemed to take on a momentum of its own, whereby the idea of some kind of hypnotic spectacle wore off and was replaced by more of an objective examination of the unconscious as it relates to the implanting of art within the mind.

LW: Have you ever experienced a hypnotic exhibition? What was it like?

ML: No I have not really been at the full receiving end of a hypnotic exhibition, though early on I had a home implanted in me  very convincingly….I have always ‘ridden down’ with those I hypnotise, descending into a sympathetic trance, so I can better guide those in a hypnotic state.  There was a moment on the third night when I almost fell off the stage as I began to lose my sense of balance and orientation within the conscious world.

LW: How would you describe the feeling of creating these exhibitions? Do you experience them as well? Is it like being a docent in a museum where you know things and can see things that regular visitors don’t?

ML: The exhibitions ‘content’ is actually derived from artist scripts of the exhibitions that they would like to have implanted.  The scripts were submitted to Raimundas and then he and I decided upon the exhibiting strategy:

These are the shows in which  ’exhibited’ the following submissions:

Night 1:  Deric Carner , Joachim Koester, Carey Young

Night 2: Carey Young (focusing more on the spiral show)

Night 3: Carey Young 

Night 3; Carey Young 

Night 4: Carey Young (extreme catalepsy induction) Also Induction in Exhibit Hall of Etienne Martin’s work.

Night 5: Carey Young (deja vu)  

Night 6: Raphael Siboni

I feel that the exhibitions are a construct that already exists and I am guiding people through something that is already there and perhaps has been there for a long while.  However, thanks to being able to repeat the process several times, I myself also discovered many new things about the exhibition that I would otherwise not have known about. The exhibits became much more multi-sensorial with each visit.  I think the division between curator, artist, docent, visitor gets completely blurred as the exhibit is projected into a kind of collectively experienced place within a subliminal state.  Certainly some of the ‘visitors’ in trance saw things that I was not aware of and this fed its way back into the next day’s hypnosis.

Constantin “Mardi” Mardisen, Experimental Psychologist and “Psychic Explorer”, Dies at 99

Constantin “Mardi” Mardisen, an experimental psychologist who studied the dream life of the Yanomami and wrote the best-selling book Repetitions, died Tuesday at his home in North Haven, Conn. He was 99.

His family did not give a cause of death, but according to articles published by Mr. Mardisen, in recent years he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Mardisen gained prominence as a psychologist, but in his long and extravagant career his controversial research embraced disciplines as far-flung as anthropology, parapsychology, pre-Columbian history, sexology, chemistry and poetry. His often bizarre and academically marginal research took him to every continent and to the floors of several seas. Although his non-poetic work was written in dense academic prose, Mr. Mardisen insisted his work was best understood as autobiography, stating in a 1972 interview with Michel Leiris, “Everything I have written is, ultimately, memoir.”

Born in 1911 to a wealthy Danish family, Mr. Mardisen, or “Mardi” as his friends and colleagues called him, was a precocious student and a gifted child. After his family immigrated to the US in 1915, he attended Harvard University at age 16, eventually majoring in psychology. During his studies, Mr. Mardisen began a letter correspondence with fellow Harvard graduate Alfred Kinsey. The letters, later published by Harvard University Press, show the two men’s interest in biology and contain hints of their future researches in sexology. Mr. Mardisen went on to receive his doctorate from Harvard, and his unorthodox and groundbreaking thesis, The Dream Life of the Yanomami, transformed multiple disciplines, including anthropology and psychoanalysis. The following year Harvard hired him as an Assistant Professor of Psychology.

During his brief time in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, Mr. Mardisen began using himself as a research subject to a greater and greater degree. He began studying esoteric and occult practices globally, which resulted in a series of articles on bilocation, or the supposed ability some mystics have of being in more than one place at a time. The research also led to his first volume of poetry, Divided Songs, a slim volume containing verses dictated by bilocating shamans.

Mr. Mardisen’s use of himself as a test subject divided his field as well, causing fierce debates concerning his research’s objectivity. His 1947 book on addiction, Routine Pleasures, was based on Mr. Mardisen’s addictions to heroin and cocaine, dependencies he created for the sole purposes of writing the book. A reviewer from the New York Times called the book “a work of monumental irresponsibility and self-loathing,” and called for the revocation of Mr. Mardisen’s tenure. Scandalized by the book’s frank admissions of drug use, Harvard University dismissed Mr. Mardisen, a move some would say foreshadowed Timothy Leary’s dismissal almost two decades later.

Leaving academia, Mr. Mardisen adopted the moniker “psychic explorer” and set about, as he put it to Mr. Leiris, “spelunking the caverns of human desire.” His rhetoric was often grandiose, and many psychologists accused Mr. Mardisen of writing books that were little more than sensationalist pornography. His 37 books published in the next half-century explored fetishism, addiction, violence, primitivism, and perversion – subjects that brought Mr. Mardisen an improbably large audience.

Many times over Mr. Mardisen’s career, he claimed all his books were variations on one theme: repetition as the fundamental quality of life. As he wrote in his introduction to Repetitions: Fetishism and Desire, “The pleasure of life is its repetition. Repetition gives life its form and its dependability. The problem is, of course, that repetition is also the source of life’s terror.”

Mr. Mardisen’s personal life was extremely eccentric. According to his first wife, Elizabeth Doren, he kept a record of every orgasm he experienced, noting both the orgasm’s qualities and intensity. After divorcing Ms. Doren, he lived ménage à trios with the modern dancers Karen Hildengaard and Doris Haalen, both of whom later left Mr. Mardisen. They claimed that his personality “befitted more a cult leader than a husband.” In her memoir, Living with Mardi, Mr. Haalen described that everything he did was “a kind of experiment,” and that he kept notebooks detailing everything he ate, thought and encountered.

During the last decade of his life, Mr. Mardisen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. As he did throughout his career, he took his illness as an opportunity to continue his research. He immediately left his home in Connecticut for Robison Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile. He lived with a nurse and kept notes on his approaching forgetfulness. Excerpts of these writings were published in both academic journals and online in Mr. Mardisen’s blog. When he was too sick to continue writing, his family had him moved to his former home in Connecticut. His final blog entry states, “Forgetting is not death. It is the beginning of life.”

The collected writings from Robison Crusoe Island will be published in the fall by the University of Chicago Press.

The man had been told that he needed a travel document in order to leave and return. After many months wait, the appointment notice arrived. The last digit of his postal code had been blurred and, and, as a result, on receiving the notice it was already overdue. He would have to obtain a new appointment. The notice contained no return address but in fine print on the bottom of the page a telephone number was listed with the proviso: “We will provide information. It will not be free of charge.” The cost-per-minute for the information was not specified but it would be automatically billed on his next telephone statement. He made the call. After many prompts, an automated recording advised that it would be up to the discretion of the appropriate office to accommodate his request. He pressed “2” for more information and learned that, due to security measures, the contact information for this office had been de-listed. He would have to present himself in person at Central Office in the capital. He arrived at Central Office early on a Tuesday morning. Years have now passed and he no longer recalls the nature of his original request. In turn, the officers of the central office hold no information as to his identity. Internally, they have taken to calling the man Mardi based on the record of his arrival in the queue. The line is in the form of a giant Moebius strip and every time the man thinks he might be at the head of it, he finds himself once again at the end. He now calls this endless queue his home, and lovingly refers to it as Repetition Island, for the queue itself is now the only recognizable pattern to his life.

(Maybe she saw me first.) We passed – she and I – and rather than walk on, I stopped to see what had made her smile that made me stop: the paths, bordered by the cobbles where they met the embankment – hugged in place by a waterlogged bulge of roots – above ground, nor piped straight back up by bark, but in the mean of directions water will go of its own accord (with the help of gravity) – in a forty-five degree skirt, worn, smoothed and sanded–down to a deep mono-root by streams, seeping furrowing and collecting here and there in worn navels and caves on this slate-green-grey wood cliffside. (Perhaps it was the yellow snail).

Yesterday, Mardi was insatiable. First, there were the strawberries stacked on the corner. She could have devoured the red flats. And after the fruit? Mardi eyes the peonies and the woman selling them.

Now, she is perched on the stool, feet dangling in the bare room. There is only the stool, table, floorboards, lamp. And there is the cake iced pink. She remembers her hunger from yesterday. Here it is again, the most obvious desire. The ache consumes her. Countless mortifying desires pile up and she wants to run towards the need. The distance she will travel is measured in light years.

Hair curls across her forehead and it’s shadow falls across her check. The cake is perfect. There is the hunger. There is the table, floorboards, lamp, the curl and the shadow. There is Mardi on the stool.

The day it was decided to call “Mardi” the closing day.

He was always late. So late. It was sometimes hard to work with him. For exhibition, he was always one day late. Maybe it was in fact one week and a day late or one month and a day late or even one year and a day late but the result was at the end he always have a day late. On opening days, shows were always empty and full the day after. Once he had an important exhibition. As everyone was stressed, they tricked him. When they printed the invitation card, they made a single false one. Just for him. It was written on it that the opening was Tuesday. People came finally Wednesday and the show was finished. But no one will ever do him this trick again. I looked at his face, the day before, he was so sad, waiting for visitors on his empty and unfinished exhibition.

Mardi possessed a valid and real transcendence of the alienated world of man. In response to the intellectual harassments of others, who failed to comprehend the internal progression of the self, Mardi deflected attacks with compassion and patience, and then, when called for, with wry wit and idiosyncratic irony. This is due to Mardi’s deep understanding of the abundant forms of mediocrity and the significant space it occupies within the dimensions of human history. Mardi went as far as to conceive a formula that explains this human condition and settled it as such: M = mc².  However, since our concern rests mainly with Mardi’s crass humor, we should look closer at how Mardi abstains from insults and then only delivers them as a penult indication before the violence. This perhaps should give us an idea as to what kind of realist Mardi is and how Mardi constantly responds to the frustration of discourse with intolerant dissatisfaction. So as to not deride the ignorance of others in regards to Mardi, we can easily look at the benign academic warnings preceding the timeless crassness of our favorite person:

“Please, write constructive comments here, keep it clean” or “this is an organic dialog please, respect the topic”. 

One would assume that this generous individual would be the best conflict mediation professional that the cultural left could find to arbiter its most inflammatory debates.

Yet, from time to time, when any given individual disrupts the pace of discussion with unmitigated venom in unwelcomed comments (usually ad hominem attacks in such forums as blogs or chat rooms) that annoy the shit out of Mardi;, such attacks provoke an outpouring of mirthful contempt embodied in the most excruciating deliverances. For example:

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Mardi’s life is said to be characterized by repetition but it still involves patterns of change, since repetition also follows a range of tempos. Take the birds, for example. Every morning the same birds occupy the same places and sing the same songs. The male Indigo Bunting, a small bright blue finch-like bird that could fit comfortably inside the gently closed palm of a small hand, will sit on the cyclone fence of the abandoned zoo for a few minutes, riffing through its distinct tweet-sweet chew-chew tweet-sweet song. Then it zips off to the tall pine in the empty lion’s pen and renders the song again. And again from a branch in the dense thicket of trees to the side of the pine. Tweet-sweet chew-chew tweet-sweet. It could follow this routine for hours each day. The same is true of the Goldfinches and the Orioles, even if these spend shorter moments at their favorite places. And the tiny Warbling Vireo, who seems to have more places and zips around faster between them, and though smaller sings even louder than the other birds. Then all of a sudden the birds are gone; as if they had received a call from some other place and left for there. But months later, at another point in the slow spectral change of the seasons, they are all back again. Back at the same posts and fluting away with their same songs. The Indigo Bunting must constantly think of that perfect spot to nest and raise another small family, thought Mardi, around the same time every year at about the same place on a walk through the dark woods of the beautiful island.

There was a proposal to ban Mondays. It passed, overwhelmingly. Mondays are terrible days, nothing good ever happens on a Monday, even old ladies of the sort who carry large plastic bags and pick at knots in their hair agreed that they would be measurably better off without the Monday. The campaign for “The Reform of the Living Week” was a success. Monday disemboweled himself in a fit of despair. “It is not true,” he said before committing the deed. “They only hate me because I am first.”

The law had passed, Monday was gone, they cremated his body and spread the ashes in the river. There was an ingenious solution to safeguard the numerical integrity of the calendar: in place of the banned Monday there was now an additional Sunday (the Church liked that!). The new progression of the week thus went as follows: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Sunday. And what happened to Mardi? It’s not a pleasant story. Mardi liked where he was before, “why move?,” he thought, and he never really got along with his twice-as-long neighbor. His habits started to change. He woke up earlier, drank a triple dose of coffee, couldn’t buy fresh fish, stopped eating at restaurants. Sometimes I think I hardly know him anymore. There’s talk of replacing him, with a third Sunday.

Mardi Goodnight stood at the gilt mirror, studying her reflection and bracing herself for another evening on Repetition Island. She adjusted her tasteful jade silk gown, clipped back her gleaming waves of burnt copper hair, applied a slash of coral lipstick, and emptied her face of all emotion. Tonight, of all nights, she could show no visible trace of regret for taking up with Dr. Snow. She had considered herself a patriot at the time, but her year on this stealth, floating barge of an island, despite all the luxuries it offered (luxuries she would have never known without him), had brought her to her senses. Snow, whom she once thought a visionary, was slowly but surely going mad.

They were moored near an archipelago in the South Pacific. Snow had opened Repetition Island up for one of his occasional, very selective public relations junkets. Top journalists, business people, and heads of state had flown in from all over the world. ‘I am an open book,’ Dr Snow frequently quipped, ‘and every page is as white as…Snow!’

To demonstrate his goodwill, and for the purposes of the junket, Snow had deactivated the ship’s invisibility shield (while keeping all weapons on maximum alert). The existence of Repetition Island was no secret, and many of its technologies were legal under the Global Seas Trade Agreements, thanks to the clever manipulation of loopholes. Snow’s extraordinary philanthropy turned blind eyes to the rest.

Nobody but Snow’s inner circle knew the destructive power of that island.

Snow had recruited Mardi straight from the intelligence and engineering degrees she had aced, against everyone’s expectations. She became Snow’s protégé, his private helicopter pilot, and soon after his lover. But, for Snow, the pleasures of the flesh paled in comparison with the frisson that grew as his vision of world domination was about to be realized. There was still affection between them, but she knew that he was suspicious of her, and that he would brutally eliminate her the moment he sensed betrayal.

And Mardi Goodnight was quietly plotting a betrayal.

Once Mardi arrived on deck, she circulated between the guests with her customary charm. Her photographic memory served her well on these rare public occasions—each guest felt they were given special treatment when she greeted them by name. She approached Snow, who was having a lively, private conversation with the local Foreign Secretary. She kissed Snow’s tanned cheek and shook hands with the Foreign Secretary, who coolly appraised her. ‘You look beautiful, my dear. Now, be a pet, and entertain our guests,’ Snow said. She was dismissed. He was hiding things from her.

The sun was starting to set and the salt air felt against her luminous skin. The surface of the sea was smooth like glass. She noted there were a few guests she did not recognize. In an effort to make the best of things, she walked over to the bar for a flute of champagne, sipped the icy liquid, and smiled her winning smile at the impeccably dressed stranger nearest to her. ‘Mardi Goodnight,’ she offered, her green eyes twinkling, her hand extended. He took her hand in his. ‘Good evening Goodnight,’ he said. ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond.’

It started when I noticed a girl with red hair and anachronistic post-punk look in a bird shop after Hitchcock’s cameo (I always watch Hitchcock after bad sex). I thought I saw the note “Marnie” on her T-shirt, so I decided to watch a film of that very same name to solve this strange secret. This time I saw the redhead girl in a corridor of a hotel and I realized the note on her T-shirt wasn’t „Marnie“ at all.

It was „Mardi“.

I called my friend, American film studies professor, but he said I’m hallucinating and shouldn’t bother him if it’s not for sex. However, I re-watched dozens of Hitchcock’s appearances and what I saw, shocked me: he was always accompanied by Mardi.

The real meeting happened when she went out of the screen. I asked her why is she repeatedly showing up in Hithcock’s films, and she said: „It’s a Hitchcockean trauma“. It didn’t convince me: „There must be something else.“ Then Mardi revealed her secret.

She was a Russian spy.

I was starting to become afraid when she said the reason why she appeared to me was that she loves me. Naturally, I had to stop her and tell her I’m gay. Then Mardi got furious, took out her gun and shot me.

I feel vertiginous… I hear the birds… My skin becomes the dress of my mother, covering my skeleton… Red pulsates in my eyes… Is this the death?..

The answer appeared in a body of Godardian intertitle.

GODARDIAN INTERTITLE
Death is what you believe it is.

I quickly understood the logic and started to shout: „Well then I don’t! I don’t believe in it!“. Unfortunately, Godardian style wasn’t that coherent. As I was feeling weaker and weaker, the second intertitle appeared:

GODARDIAN INTERTITLE
Mardi. Poor girl. Was in love.
With a boy. Who didn’t. Love her.
She killed him. It traumatized her.
That’s why. She repeatedly. Shows up.
In Hitchcock’s. Masterpieces.


This was scandalous interpretation of facts… Near to the death, I shouted:

ME
It’s not true! I’m not the reason of her trauma!
I am the VICTIM of it! When I met her she was
already repeating herself!


GODARDIAN INTERTITLE
T I M E  H A S  I T ’ S  M Y S T E R I E S

Some time ago, on an occasion lost to memory, Mardi read an old caravanner’s chronicle that recorded the details of a daily regimen recommended by a long-dead sect of ascetics, and later favored by warrior shahs who sought special clarity when deliberating on great matters of state. The regimen consisted of a cold bath each morning (by preference in a mountain stream, far removed from the distractions of social intercourse), following which the devotees would meticulously review the entire surface of their bodies. With a sharp blade they would shave themselves from head to toe, trim their nails, and excise anything that blemished the smoothness of their skin. According to the caravanner’s report, the ascetics of antiquity would then ingest these excrescences and imbibe a mixture of their own sweat and urine. Afterward they would fast until the following morning, when they would repeat the process, convinced that with this ritual their bodies would enter a period of total homeostasis, thereby freeing their minds from the bondage of the material world.

After several days of a precipitous decline in health, punctuated only by nightly terrors, Mardi began to feel the world slipping palpably away. At first Mardi believed that the agonies gripping from within could only harbinger mortality. But even Mardi’s grim visions – brittle nail clippings scraping the raw tenderness of Mardi’s gullet, hair amassing into little nets that Mardi would cough up in the heat of the afternoon – were not without their comforts. Eventually, though, the sour taste of bile receded from Mardi’s mouth. The world became brighter than Mardi remembered, and sharper. The air seemed to penetrate Mardi more profoundly. And it was in this state that Mardi discovered, in the mad mixture of scents carried on the wind from across the sea, what waited beyond the shores of the island.

Between kicks, the wood pigeons biff and body check until, with a stifled coo, they tumble through the window left ajar. Wings jab the linen curtain, bodies soon sheathed in fibers, feathers brush over nubs. She waits for a sound, but hears nothing. She can only see the muddled forms. It must be quieter than the aerial sounds of ravens and eagles, but at least as loud as a paperbound book. A silence has installed. She flips through the yellow pages, looking for a practice open on Saturdays.

Peddling through empty streets, she remembers the view of her mother’s back from her bicycle chair. Once again amongst the finger paint, she glances at the scale perfect for bread loaves, the animals on the eye chart. Your ears are lovely, Mardi. Now open your mouth, open it wide. Drink this. Open wide again. We’ll do a test right now. Let me take a swab.

When the Waldeyer ring swells, it kisses each sense, pressuring the eye, inflating the ears. An enlarged pharynx hinders all passageways. An internal sphinx, Streptococcus imitates a laryngeal injury. Try not to talk much today, Mardi.

His sister scowled at him “250.000 Euros! Just say that’s what you want!” He hesitated for a moment, he didn’t want to lose the job by requesting an unusually high sum for a cultural worker, he thought. “Fuck it.” 250.000 Euros. Click. Send. He didn’t want to hold up his sister’s drinking party downstairs. The next morning, Mardi was offered the job of his dreams. That same morning, Mardi work up with the worst hangover he could ever imagine.

***

“Sweetie, I am allowed two bags cross Atlantic! And I most certainly don’t need a Schengen visa to transit for 40 minutes in Rome. For God’s sake,” he muttered “it’s less than an hour!” The pretty girl from the Bronx wouldn’t take his patronizing tone. “Sweetie – humph!” she thought, eyeing Mardi curiously from the waist up as she called her supervisor. A woman, who looked like his mother walked up to him, in uniform. “I ‘ave a solucion: we’ll geet you in a wheelchair – dat way you can caaary one of your bags on your laaap while we whiz you through securité.” “But I don’t need – ” his mother’s look alike, with a foreign accent he couldn’t place, wouldn’t take it. A second later he was being wheeled through security checkpoints up until the boarding gate. “Sir,” a flight stewardess with uneven lipstick announced leaning over towards him slightly “you have been upgraded to seat 1E.” Mardi flew first class for the first time, enjoying complimentary (very palatable, he thought) champagne all the way. He arrived in Rome with a hangover.

***

He stayed up all night, carousing with people he imagined he wanted to be. The spectacle of art in an English lounge, the curator as object of contemplation, he thought to himself for an instant, drowsy-drunk but happy. What was it again? Yes. The curator. Being a curator. A vocational flâneur. He sunk in the depth of brown leather armchairs, lifting his left sole to meet the edge of the mahogany table – at once casual, but classy he thought. Unfocused, trying to get a glimpse of the tip of his boot. He couldn’t remember which pair he had worn. He hoped to not be wearing faux-leather (but of course he was). A beautiful woman, articulate and funny, leaned over, accidentally brushed his hand and continued to flirt with him all evening. Stray thoughts with undercurrents of sexual tension and play teased him throughout the night. A proclamation of a love of sorts was made. Perhaps, he thought to himself, she was “the One”. Promises of catching the 9AM train down to Amsterdam the next morning were made. Mardi woke up with a furry mouth and a taste of satisfaction and fulfillment. He fondled his phone for a moment only to realize that the snooze button flickered 11:18 and his head was pounding. He had missed the train and a go at love – or something similar. He caught the noon train, alone, the most miserable he had ever been, hung over, cursing good fortunes that materialized for everybody else but him.

Day Sleeper. That’s what the sign on the door said. It meant Mardi worked nights. Slept days, worked nights. The sun goes down and she enters El Cerrito. The sun comes up and she’s back in her room, the secret place of the stairs, the green bed, cedar beams, the roar of the passing trucks on the highway outside.

When all was said and done there was nothing new under the California sun. Beckett said that and somebody else. Wasn’t it a song too? Mardi read a lot at dawn and in the evening before setting out. She worked as a projectionist at the Cerrito Theatre on San Pablo Avenue and after screenings she did extra shifts serving food and beer until the place shut for the night. It’s true she was home by 3 am but she was still wired and too awake for sleep. Spikenard oil helped a little with that. She’d rub some on her chest and swore her heart was slowing down as it seeped through the skin.

The best thing was watching the movies, though, over and over. Last week, it was the remake of Breathless. Richard Gere as Belmondo, in blinding tartan trousers pursuing a wild Jerry Lee Lewis kind of west coast revolution. Destiny and tragedy. He died at midnight, every night, and it was a beautiful, inevitable thing. She played the Byrd’s Turn, Turn Turn, over the pa when the lights came up and she was sure the patrons got it.

The almond tree and the grasshopper, thought Mardi. Ever the silver cord be loosed….