Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

Oscar Wilde once said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” I played Harriet Burden’s mask briefly, and I do not regret it for a second. From behind my nearsighted, mulatto, queer self she was able to tell a truth. In the gay world, disguise has a long history, which has never been simple, so when Harry asked me to beard for her, it felt as if I were merely tying an extra knot in a very old rope. I am a performer, and I know that my face onstage can often be more intimate and more honest than the one I wear in the wings. But I have also had two identities offstage. In 1995, I slithered out of my first persona, the one I was born with, to become my second self: Phineas Q. Eldridge. The person who preceded P.Q.E., John Whittier, was a good boy, well behaved if a little dreamy, kind to animals, girls, and poor people (in that order), easily frightened, and, to use my mother’s word, “delicate.” I had my first seizure when I was four years old and my last one when I was thirteen. The doctors said I “outgrew” them. They belonged to my earlier, shorter, prepubescent body, the one we all shed, along with small jackets and pants and shirts and shoes that once fit it perfectly. The tremors came mostly at night, and not often, but the odors I sometimes smelled and the crawling sensations I felt and the tinglings and face-twitching and the drools and the blanks and the bed-wetting every night for years surely shaped my sentimental education.

When I think back on that four-eyed, interracial, epileptic kid dancing the tango with his little sister, Letty, in the recreation room of a split-level, solidly middle-class house outside Richmond, Virginia, I don’t find it at all surprising that he took to God even before his mama was reborn. At school I was a pariah, who had never lived down the full-body seizure that took place beside the slide on the playground in the third grade, but at church I shone, a pious little angel with a sacred affliction. Hadn’t St. Paul, father of Christianity itself, fallen down on the road to Damascus in a fit just like the ones I sometimes had? Harry was fascinated by the delicate, skinny, freckle-faced John with his black mother and white father who read a lot of books, watched movies on TV, and made up his own world called Baaltamar, a name plucked from the Bible (Judges), but which, in its first incarnation, looked like a Hollywood stage lot. In Baaltamar, overdressed villains with supernatural powers tangled with one angelic hero, my alter ego, Levolor (named after the window blind company because Levolor has such a pleasing lilt). I spent a lot of time in that magical country, just as Harry had spent a lot of time in her own head with an imaginary companion and a busload of anxieties. She, however, grew up godless.

It was painful to feel God looking in on me every minute, judging my secret thoughts and rambunctious longings as I lay in my bed dreaming I was Levolor, who had taken up singing and dancing and lived in a big pink movie mansion with ten servants. Fans came by the hundreds of thousands to watch me wail out songs and shake my tail feathers and do slides, stomps, and brushes. I used to close my eyes and listen to the crowd thunder its adoration, and then, because it was a selfish, unholy fantasy, I would shift its direction, turning Levolor into a Jesus character who walked around Tinsel Town laying hands on the sick, raising the dead, and magically multiplying crackers and soup for tragically poor people in tattered clothes and shoes with holes in their bottoms. This fantasy, too, had its problems because it wasn’t right to feel too good about being good, and I knew I felt awfully good about my goodness.

Mama’s religion has cooled down considerably, and she’s way too soft a person ever to have been a self-righteous holy roller, but there was a time when she went at her worship with a lot of zeal. My parents separated when I was three and Letty was one. We had a daddy on weekends. My earliest memories are of sitting on his shoulders and looking way down at the grass, a rabbit named Buster who lived in a cage in Daddy’s backyard, the shiny silver watch he let me wear high up on my arm, and pancakes sitting on a blue plate that looked different from Mama’s. I remember that his house smelled funny, and I used to dread he’d pick up the football and suggest a little back-and-forth. When the ball came flying toward my head, I’d duck before I knew what I was doing. The hard, whirring ball frightened me. Later, I trained myself to remain upright and worked hard to catch that damned thing and run like mad. I used to pray to God to help me succeed in my efforts to please my father, to become the coordinated, hearty, real boy he wanted. No doubt I was a disappointment to him. I was not made in his image, but I also think I scared him a little or maybe the epilepsy scared him or the idea that something might happen to me when Mama wasn’t around. He never scolded or harangued me about my athletic shortcomings. I just felt he would have liked a different kind of boy. And yet, when Letty and I spent the night, he used to come into the room, sit beside me, and stare at me while I pretended to sleep. He must have known I was awake, but he never let on that he knew, and all he did was sit there and watch.

Then one day in the spring after I turned eight, my father had a brain aneurysm. The balloon burst, and he died on his sofa alone. He was thirty-one years old. Even though Mama didn’t want him anymore for a husband, his death seemed to paralyze her for a while until the Pentecostal religion of her youth stepped in to take over the blank spot Daddy had created. We changed churches.

They dunked Mama in the baptism pool, and after that she was filled with the Holy Spirit. “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Acts, Chapter 2, Verse 4. I know that for outsiders such doings fall into the remote regions of crackpot religiosity, but I loved the hymns and the “Amens” and “You tell ’em, brothers and sisters” during the preaching, and the tongues and the interpretations and the testimonies. Letty and I liked to play church at home because we could bounce and skip and rush around like wild animals hollering out nonsense. All I can say is that the people who were suddenly hit by the Holy Ghost and fell to their knees or collapsed onto the floor and began to speak weren’t fakers, although I did wonder about Sister Eleanor at times, who often seemed overly uplifted, and the language that ran out of her sounded vaguely like pig Latin.

I prayed harder and harder and wondered why God had done it, taken my father, and why my mother had sent him away before he died, and whether his sadness had something to do with the bubble in his brain, because he had seemed sad, especially when he sat by my bed — a heavy gloom moved from him to me and settled in my chest like guilt. Mama used the word incompatible . They hadn’t fit together somehow. After my father’s death, Baaltamar became more elaborate, more violent, and more secret. Slavery emerged as a theme. Levolor led armies against Prince Hadar to free the slaves, who were a combination of black Americans and the Israelites, and I began to draw up battle plans in an imaginary geography. When I close my eyes, I can still see Lake Ashtarot and the river Jeshmoth and a mountain range I named Mizlah. After a time, the populace of Baaltamar discovered sex and went at with biblical abandon. Hadar’s followers often stripped naked and danced to wild music to tantalize Levolor, who had a lot of fun looking on while he nobly resisted their advances. It was inevitable that my hero would give in to temptation, to the sweet jerks and hard rubs under the blanket with a washcloth and the God guilt and the wet wonder and the poetry of it all.