The Raving of a Mad Woman
An electric bolt seems a cold thing, yet a stroke of lightning will consume more at one flash than an ordinary fire would consume in an hour.
– Francis Grierson, 1911
Sasha called me as soon as his parents passed on the message. All came spilling out. I think I started sobbing even before he managed to say much of anything. His voice, the gentleness, the soulfulness. It has been ten years, hasn’t it?
I didn’t intend to tell him much of anything. Just thought we could meet up at the gallery and then I’d spill. But he knew me and he knew people, well too well, so then I started telling him everything.
[…] I said to Henry today: “You know if I didn’t have such an active imagination, none of this would have worked on me.” But this is what they do. Strategic ambiguity, psychological warfare, and as I’ve written before: “standard operating psychological mindfuck procedure.” And they knew me for years. Or he did. And so it worked. Of course it would work. What chance do I have? The relentlessness of it, the alternation between threat and cruelty and affection and relief, the opacity and deniability and constant guessworks, the escalation to intimacy (sexual subjugation) and the withholding of the continuation of it. And of course, the intellectual and creative seduction techniques. Carrot in the mouth or stick up your ass and on and on it goes. I said to Sasha […]: “I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.”
I woke up this morning and I knew it was all over. I could feel it already yesterday after the evening call with Sasha. One would expect reprieve and even reprisal to come out of such a therapeutic, emotional bloodletting, but it has exactly the opposite effects. I don’t know why exactly. Perhaps it was when Sasha said at the beginning of our call even before I started telling him anything that he was not entirely surprised that he’d get a call from me, that something coincidental had happened earlier in the morning, but insisted that it “has absolutely no meaning or connection with this whatsover.” I started panicking and said I wouldn’t be so sure. Then I started grilling him on this isolated coincidence – or two isolated incidents. Then I started thinking about the Ukrainian scientist cold emailing Henry just a day or two after I told him. […] Did I detect gloating in his voice? Did he plan all this? Did he know, even before I knew it myself, that I would contact Sasha again […] Did I actually reach out to Sasha because of the reason I thought I did? “If I don’t make it out of this alive, you could at least write about it. It could be your masterpiece.” I said to Henry this could very well turn into a roman à clef in 5 or 10 or 20 years when we’d all be dead and he’d perhaps even win a Nobel Prize for it. […] Sasha said to me in his usual soothing voice, “It’s okay, Salisa. I’m involved now.” I said to him that I was beginning to suspect that my re-establishing contact with him had been anticipated and perhaps even welcomed […]. I knew this and yet a bout of fear – the fear of tragedy and insanity and death – overrides all cognitive and emotional controls.
I said I’ve been reading papers […] and I understand the psychology behind all of it […], but none of it helps. Knowing these things doesn’t help whatsoever. What is the point of having an intellectual armour when your biological brain can be so easily hijacked? […]
It took him 9 days to send me spiraling into absolute terror and another 9 days to break through the rest of the barriers. June 1st was the first escalation. Three pressure points all set off at once – the birthday exhibition, the Shostakovich concert (I’m now more and more convinced that my drink was in fact spiked with an aphrosidiac and having felt physically compromised, I rushed out the door as soon as the concert ended), and then the break-in. June 9th was our first call. June 18th which is today […] It’s over. Nine days of Zugzwang and nine days of Mattnetz. Eighteen days and eighteen nights. That’s all it takes. And months and months of planning of course. If not much longer.
I said to Sasha he could “chronicle my descending into madness and complete psychological breakdown.” It might be too late it seems. Perhaps deep down he knew that as well. He said towards the end – encouragingly but not entirely convincingly – that I was still making jokes about it so I wasn’t at that absolute point of sheer despair yet. […] I think if I were to speak with him, say, three days earlier then there would be some fighting chance. If the intervention had come at the right time by the right people, I would perhaps pull through. Though still highly unlikely in any case. But the thought gave me hope.
It started with a Zugzwang on June 1st. But that timed stunt with Kirk that night on his doorsteps? The little outburst and ineffectual power-trip I had the next night and his perhaps feigned tremors and traces of vulnerability: “What do you want me to say? What do you want to hear? That I am deeply in love with you?”. Planting the seed of ideas of his invisible reach to Henry and Sasha. Perhaps even anticipating my re-contact with Sasha. All in the span of three days? That’s Schachmatt. Or even more accurately so, that’s Zwangsmatt. Well-played.
I emailed Henry this morning: “More figurative than realist. I doubt he’d render me as a Zuleika Dobson (the shithead sexist, racist Brits)”. Harking back to that “intimate” reference of 2018. It’s truly over. Whatever game that comes next can be figured as a mere defensive play. The match has been lost. The combined, well-timed assault alternating with seduction in the physical, psychological, intellectual, erotic, and emotional spheres – all carried out with such relentlessness and ruthlessness and with much sophistication and precision and planning and control. […] from a narrative point of view, it would definitely appeal to a gifted mind like Sasha and he could really play around with the idea: is Scarpia a mere character, an actor, a frontman – or is he in fact real? As real and terrifying as the mind’s eye and the mind’s ear would have it.
I remember him saying in a rather upset tone two nights ago: “Why does it have to be one way or another? Why do you have to think that way?”. I think that’s a tell-tale. It’s not one or the other. It’s both. Or rather it’s various. And that’s what’s remarkable and total about it. I can see it now. I can see the brilliancy of it.
But then again, what if it’s not both? And it’s not various? What if it’s singular and consuming and consummate? Remember what Alec Baldwin said to James Gandolfini towards the end of the 1996 film The Juror? […] And what is that saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same? And am I that naive still to think that whatever comes next being figured as a defensive play only applies to what is yet to come and not to what has already come before? And how far back is before? Four months? Five years? Seven years? As Churchill wrote: “the farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” And that makes it all the more horrifying.
Salisa lohavittayavikant 