Burn by Michael Perkins

Author:Michael Perkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472106032
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

23

DEEPER INTO THE NIGHTMARE

THE BIZARRE IMAGES in the brief video I watched unfolded with the ineluctable logic of a nightmare. There is a famous Surrealist film by Dali and Bunuel in which we see a woman’s breasts being squeezed, followed by a razor slicing open her eyeball, and then a cloud scudding across the moon. The cruelty of these images, so convincing and terrifying, had long ago lost much of their shocking impact in a century of horrors; but this video hit me as Un Chien Andalou must have hit viewers in 1928.

Or perhaps it was just the emotional impact of seeing Rose Selavy alive again, doing impossibly bizarre things to people—the collisions of the oh yes! of wish fulfillment with the oh no! of fear and disapproval. She was alive, up there on the monitor, but look what she was doing.

Just look: She wore masks and costumes and cracked a whip: Screams. Then she was naked, bending over a man who was a quivering, bloody mess. When she turned to the camera, she looked like a lioness feasting. Or—even more horrible—like a child who’s smeared her face while picking berries. Over her stood a tall older woman wearing a long black cloak. She reached out to pat Rose on the head and her fingernails looked three inches long. Lionesses with prey.

If you have chosen the illusion that you live a normal life, then you may believe that you can escape a nightmare by waking up. Your forehead may be beaded with cold sweat, and your heart beating at a gallop, but you’re back in the real world. So you believe.

But there is no real world.

The video came to an abrupt stop on the monitor, yet it continued in my head. The images excited me in a way that I had never experienced before. I wanted to follow Rose into the nightmare.

My eye had been sliced open.

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