The Mere Future

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Book: Read The Mere Future for Free Online
Authors: Sarah Schulman
Tags: General Fiction, Ebook, book
had white paint smears. There was paint in her hair, and it had always been there. Her walls were one big abstract smudge.
    I checked my notes.
    “What do we owe you?” My first question.
    “You owe me …” Glick fell out of contact. She hadn’t thought about compensation in so long, her fantasy had expired from lack of use.
    “What do WE owe YOU?” I tried to emphasize, snap her into it.
    Glick looked up, her pale grey eyes clouded swamps. Her skin, sagging and pasty, her nails bitten, her hair like abandoned steel wool. Her veins, her ragged forgotten nails. “You owe me …” And again she faltered.
    “What?” I shouted “What?” I got much closer, tried to move energetically, smile, and sparkle—anything to wake her up. “What do WE owe YOU?”
    “You owe me …” She coughed phlegm into a crusty old brush cloth. “You owe me radical heterosexuality .”
    “What is radical heterosexuality ?” It sounded vaguely familiar, yet meaningless. Like People’s Court.
    Invigorated by the elixir of someone paying attention, her eyes boinked open. Attention was the tin man’s oil can, fresh raw meat on a rusty soul.
    “You owe me … THE VULVA !” She yelled, and its propulsion knocked over her chair. Glick sat on the oilcloth covered floor now, her legs out before her, her bottom dangerously near a pool of turpentine. “You owe me … REPRESENTATION . You owe me …” She fell back on the floor. Exhausted. And then suddenly popped up again, fully revived. “ YOU OWE ME A LIVING !”
    Shocked, Glick blinked. Then, robotically, she dragged out some old scrapbooks and showed me photographs from her distant past. They seemed like more primitive versions of the kind of pseudo-neo-arty advertisements designed by graphics students who had studied Nan Goldin and Audrey Hepburn, and then photoshopped them both on the same day. These pictures were quaint. They were naturally distressed, cockeyed, and overexposed. As if by accident. There were young people looking old, instead of the other way around. These authentically young adults all wore some strange version of Gap clothes, but each one’s outfit was slightly different, off-kilter. Like the photographs. There was a feeling about these photographs that was very strange to see, it tingled in the back of my neck, and then I recognized it from some very ancient memory. These people were … ugh ... sincere.
    “It’s all here,” she said, pointing at her heart. “That which I was. That which I did.”
    Next she showed me photographs of happenings, performances, and plays from the past. Live people being watched without screens or projections. Just standing there. I guess they were Art Shows. Frankly, they looked like jokes. Like parodies of Political Correctness, that sort of thing. I was seeing the originals of some phenomena that had only been satirized, but never preserved. It was impossible to look at it without irony. The soul of this memory could not be engaged with a straight face. It was like bell-bottoms, or Peace.
    “Excessive form and suggestive content,” she muttered. Then Glick turned off the lights and hauled out a loud and creaky old movie projector, the kind that only turns up these days as a reconstituted planter. She actually projected a Super-8 film onto her smudgy walls. It was weird. I had never seen anything projected with a light coming from behind me before. With monitor screens, the light comes right at you. It’s an entirely other engagement. With a film, you have to want to watch it. There is a way out, not a monitor standing directly in your path. It’s a choice. Weird.
    This particular one looked like a video clip except that it was out of focus. It had these painstakingly slow renditions of effects that nowadays are achievable in less than a second with a computer. But I think she had to spend weird laborious lonely hours achieving them in airless isolation with dangerous chemicals and creaky machines.
    “I have a quiet

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