You see, he’s a man, and they’re a person, and she’s walking through white doors. She’s sober. She hasn’t taken any drugs, aside from food and water. Behind they’re taking drugs and partying into the morning and blasting their minds and missing the purity that’s simple joy.
“It’s funny,” she says.
Life’s funny for everyone. Behind, inside, outside elsewhere they’re boom-crashing between decorated walls, banging their heads, opening their minds by simultaneously closing their minds. And she was one of them—she’ll always be one of them—but now she’s she. She’s free. She’s…
“Rhondelle.”
Visionary she opens the white door and inside there’s an unfolding diverging fiery glare. Light bulges its eyes, heat flares its nostrils, fire tenses its jaw and flames flush its face. It opens out and crosses over and gentle Rhondelle feels her blood rise, she feels her skin sweat. Crackles and sniffles line the white walls as the divergent flames converge and open out and the glare intensifies—its eyes pop forth, its teeth unleash, it screams, and she charges through the crimson and fluorescent yellow to the white door as the glare explodes into an inferno, meaner, a goddamn firestorm of straight fury, and she’s overwhelmed. Onward she flies like an aeroplane to its city which is jouissance exactly as Cixous knows it, toward the city of jouissance, toward. She opens the white door and feels her fingers melt at its handle.
Through white hallways, upward she falls, downward she climbs into the neverending effervescence of above, which appears as though in a dream before poor Rhondelle feels it all sink and her senses open out so that she’s closed up for openness. It all makes impeccable nonsense as that’s all we ever will ever have, just as decreasing, decreasing, sinking, darkening, opening forward eternally, as behind Max and Dervla and her friends and her enemies party on, bop to music, bounce to beat, sing out and across sideways their dear friend, she, uncaged and untouchable can beat the darkness that lies below which as we all know wins always and claims its victims for ravenous consumption and subsequent digestion. Below the hallway through which she glides, below down somewhere, she doesn’t want to think on that hard-hitting manic drug-fuelled turpitude that charges all her friends and acquaintances and—
“Well not all of them.”
True, not all of them but you know how it opens out and all crosses over in the end and sweeps through and across because freedom and repetition show her struggling now to keep on along the darkening hallway of the party she’s left. In her pure open mind she’s left the party but in her environment it’s clear she hasn’t—no, she must be lost, deep in the depths of the mansion hosting the party she’d attended and partied at and moved through so that she could be forward from all of it.
Presently she struggles—
“No!”
—as her clean closed mind tells her it’s all okay but that of course it’s not because it all opens out and the dark dark darkening threatens and attacks and howls with unrestrained laughter which she hears now, somewhere outside, Tide cleaning, distant muffled by walls which were white but which now are so fucking black it’s sad.
Yet despairing she knows it’s all ahead. All of it and everything else. She knows there’s so much more, always more before she dies, which she’s never feared, which she’s always accepted, which she loves even.
“No.”
She disagrees but agrees because you know, stepping forward still, somehow, never stopping, never stop—for within without she streams as nature blossoming and realises and upends herself as flowing knowledge that it was all always psychological construction streaks forth and she agrees and smiles. Theories of psychological construction suggesting her emotion lies always within her mind, emotions lie always within all of our minds, emotion is understood only in its context and is invented by us perhaps to serve practical purposes like moving on forward through the depths of the party and out and, you know, survival and things like that—showing emotion’s complex and varied and exists innately yet only in our minds which are the be all and end all of what we call real but no!
Because reality exists independent of us, we are simply part of it, she knows this as for just a second she remembers her friends Max and Dervla, remembering them, praying for them, knowing they’ll be okay as she pushes them out of her mind to expel upward for the transcendent state representing freedom from linearities toward pure open mind that’s joy for she and jouissance for you, and everything else and all the rest as it closes down and’s ready for nothing. She’s past the perc-and-molly-charged party, the coke and the acid-infused weed haze she thinks of no longer—she’s past the fiery infernal stare of brutal rage and the endless slamming darkness that brings her down forever no longer. She seeks sexual enlightenment, complete and utter release as well as sheer unchaining from Freud’s bullshit and Max’s trash and the idiots and the dumbasses and the lovely boys she’ll probably talk to again sometime but not soon probably never. This is all behind and she’s sane as a rock as she walks through another nice white door to the people beyond.
“What—”
The guys turn around as Rhondelle notices their white butts pulse. Rapists.
“Get off her!”
“Ohh, ohh,” goes the tall one as his latissimus dorsi undulates. “Shit.”
A girl howls between the legs of the young men. Struggling to breathe, Rhondelle dives for the tall one’s ankles.
“Oh shit!” he says as his semen hits the girl’s torn mouth.
“Come with me!” wails Rhondelle and takes the girl below her limp arms.
“Damn,” says the short rapist.
“Get out of here and never come back.” Rhondelle’s firm.
“Sorry, fuck, I’m sorry.”
“Are you okay?”
The girl can only cry.
“Come with me.”
Now she takes the girl, who clings to her, and spurns the stunned rapists. She walks the girl on her journey through further successive white doors.
The young girl shudders.
“Sorry?” Rhondelle leans closer.
“Where are you taking me?” the naked young girl shudders under Rhondelle’s non-melted left hand.
“To the hospital.”
“You saved me.”
“No I didn’t.”
“But you saved me.”
Rhondelle thinks of the rapists, all of the world’s disgust propensity-eliciting degenerate rapists, who will never cease to rape but who must closer to the end of all time of course cease to rape, to hurt fellow humans simply for the sake of their orgasms. She knows the girl’s right but she knows the girl’s wrong and she answers:
“You’re welcome.”
She looks at her melted right hand but knows already it’s fine and normal, for her mind’s clear and she perceives correctly. She opens a dresser and finds jeans and a button-down shirt. Men’s clothes, of course. They’ll have to do.
“Put these on.”
She looks at the defiled wailing girl, who takes a while before moving the mile with her saviour Rhondelle in the Uber to the hospital that’s shut down at this hour. She’d thought the sky’d be lighter.
“I wanna go home,” says the girl, eyes wet. She can’t fully open her mouth.
Rhondelle realises how young the girl is. Softly she kisses her on the side of her face not covered in blood. Rhondelle cognises her hate for the men that would never be men that did what they did to the girl and doubtlessly to countlessly more.
She checks her phone. It’s 3:25am.
“It’s probably better if I just take you home.”
Now the dim electric lights of the emergency building shoot past as Rhondelle and the girl take another Uber to the girl’s home. It’s small and dark, in an avenue full of houses that all look the same. The front door’s white.
They walk through. Rhondelle stands in the black entranceway as the girl vanishes into the bathroom. So strange. But she has a job to do.
The girl emerges from the bathroom, clean, dressed in her own clothes, as though nothing’d happened to her—except that her lips are torn.
“Are your parents here?”
“Yes,” whispers the girl. “Thanks for taking me home.”
“I should tell your parents what happened.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“They need to know what happened to their daughter.”
“I’ll tell them tomorrow. Thanks for taking me home. I really mean it!”
In the dark house Rhondelle stands and stares. How can the girl’s parents not know?
“They’re asleep right now. I don’t want to bother them.”
“Tell them when they—”
“I will.”
“Give me your number. I want you to text me tomorrow. Please?”
“Okay, sure.”
The sighing girl tells her her number as Rhondelle types it into her phone.
“What’s your name?”
“Keishani.”
“How do you spell that?”
The girl spells it out and Rhondelle types it and saves. And like that, she’s through the white door, out in the cold, alone, wondering whether she’d done the right thing.
She’s telling an Uber driver the mansion’s address for her friends are still at the party. Her mind’s clear because she doesn’t drink, she doesn’t smoke, she doesn’t take drugs—she barely even takes caffeine. But tonight she’s opening her mind, and things are a little crazy and’ll probably continue so.
After thanking her driver, she walks through the giant white door of the mansion to find it quiet inside. She checks her phone. It’s 5:11am.
“What the...”
She calls Dervla.
“Hey babe. Where are you?”
“We’re downstairs. Where’ve you been?” Dervla’s words come slowly.
“Oh, something happened. I need to tell you.”
“We’re just downstairs in the basement.”
“I’ll be there in a sec. Love you.”
“Love you too Rhondelle.”
She feels a warm flush as she remembers her friend.
Downstairs red lights are on. Friends and enemies lie around. Dervla’s with ten others in a corner. Her dreads are out silver and she smiles when she sees Rhondelle.
“Where were you?” slurs Dervla.
“I’ve been everywhere. I walked in on someone being raped.”
A few heads rotate before collapsing back onto chests and walls. Dervla’s stays up.
“What?”
“Someone got raped, Dervla.”
“Someone got raped?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t handle this,” and Dervla’s head falls back onto someone’s shoulder.
Now Rhondelle heaves Dervla out of the pile of junkies.
“We’re leaving this party. Where’s Max?”
“Fuck. He already left. Why do you have to do this?”
“Someone was raped!”
“Someone was raped?”
She takes Dervla to the basement’s white door but Dervla’s turning to one of the junkies. They’re joking about something and dry-heaving. Rhondelle waits patiently. Someone stares at Rhondelle, mouth circular, eyes circular, eyebrows raised. Someone else turns the corners of their lips up at each end. Briefly Rhondelle smiles back, before asking:
“Ready to go, Dervla?”
“Um, yep.”
They exit the basement and ascend several staircases, passing old paintings, then cavernous lounges filled with Art Deco furniture. She hears a deep growling from behind a wooden table. Turning, Rhondelle sees something alive behind there—it’s so dark and nearly impossible to see, but she’s sure. Quivering, she takes Dervla by the wrist and dashes to the house’s exit. They’re outside in the fresh air and it’s lightening.
“Max is home right?”
“Max?” mumbles Dervla. “He’s gone.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t fucking know.”
“Dervla! Is he safe?”
“…yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
“Max is all good.”
Rhondelle closes her eyes and inhales the morning air. She exhales, and opens her eyes.
“Let’s go home.”
“That was such a good party.”
“I mean, someone got raped there Dervla.”
“Someone got raped there?!”
“Jeez. Yes.”
“That’s bad,” says Dervla.
“And I saw a mean face, and I think I got lost, and I saw a monster behind a table.”
“Can I crash at yours?”
Rhondelle sighs.
“Sure.”
They’re in an Uber. They’re driving to Rhondelle’s apartment. Beat but gentle and psychologically open forever, she unlocks the front door which’s white and behind Dervla collapses silver onto the sofa.
“Love you Rhondelle.”
“You gotta stop taking that stuff.”
“I will. Love you.”
“Love you too. Goodnight.”
She checks the front door’s locked. She checks again. Satisfied, she takes the thin blanket and places it over Dervla’s body. She turns on the apartment heating. She moves to the shower. She washes, hair dry safely under her patterned cap. She tastes morning and her mind’s collapsing in the worst possible way. She thinks of the girl and, after drying, makes a reminder on her phone for 6pm tomorrow: “Text the girl”. She puts on her pyjamas. She rolls into bed and feels so warm as tears fill her eyes. She opens her mind and falls asleep.
And so she’s walking through white doors toward the pure joy in all things. She’s falling down and her chest’s heavy and perfect and sleep sleep sleep pulls her down into sad euphoria. It’s all opening out and closing in and the white door takes Rhondelle forth into floating dreams that let go and carry her sexually into something better than the horrible things she’d seen earlier that night-day in her real life. Another white door takes her to a highly decorated refrigerator in the rich house she’d left and she jerks awake.
“Not there.”
She tastes morning in her mouth and trembles into a lower and forthcoming wave of sleep. Waves and waves and sea and sea wash over her but it’s okay because she can breathe underwater—she thinks not at all but always in some way and her consciousness ceases to exist because she’s asleep but not really because she’s alive. Her circadian rhythm takes its toll and she recycles and replenishes her tortured torturous mind without having to do a thing but of course she’s doing it all as it’s she, Rhondelle the mild, and her mind splits open underwater so that flowing, sinking, swimming down and up and breathing at the surface and diving down again toward relaxed wakefulness and slow eye movement and the theta wave and deeper down below the waves into the harder waters where her eyes are still and her sleep spindles and K-complexes abound and taking a deep breath for in her dream she breathes water dives deeper down again into deep sleep delta waves and clarity of sense, of surrounding, of being, of existing within the ocean of her dream. There’s a white door at the bottom of the ocean so she swims for it, down towards the door, and but she remembers she can’t breathe underwater and swims harder and harder for the door but it’s so far away and her air runs out and out and out and her eyes stream. She swims on. Down and down. Harder and harder, pushing, forcing, she reaches out and the door’s at her hand and she’s through the last white door.
And there’s free air and she ascends a perfect white staircase and up there there’s whiteness. Pure whiteness. Not the white that’s whiter than light, but the white that’s limitlessly lighter than white and inexpressibly whiter than white. Her mind’s open and jouissance is above and tracking trekking surely in she sees shimmering. It’s a waterfall but it’s lighter, brighter. It’s all of it and everything else and of course it still crosses over and wins and loses and breaks open upon the solid foundation upon which it’s built—and that’s it so she connects with it and knows it’s Dervla and the poor girl and flowing, rolling, wet like deliquescent hydrogen hydrogen and oxygen liquid but shining like our old and faithful faultless and unwaveringly chemically and physically sustaining star, which continuing and perpetually providing crosses over as all else and’ll be there always forever even when long after we’re dead it’ll die yet continue on for everything dies which is the only way things live so that eternity’s the only thing real, the cascading light upends for it’s already upended and there’s no direction down here or anywhere, only eternity, and falls agreeing with its essence as a waterfall but rises upholding its process of evaporation and its very existence as being a part of all of it and everything else, as it connects with her as human to human and rises like joy and laughs and sprouts up as water springs to its gravitational centre which is down, but which, of course, is up on the opposite side of the globe, and glitters, winking, twinkling. The cascading light that is all people and all things including most of all Dervla, the rape victim, and she, flips out cracks through and takes her onward and up to jouissance and joy and the furtherance and skywardness of her dream.
The sweet singing of the cascading light and sexual eternity continues to be nothing less than hilarious and she laughs calmly and meekly as she laughs and it all makes plentiful sense up here in the caverns of low-voltage desynchronised brain waves abundance of acetylcholine atonia and suspension of homeostasis just as it does always and forever in the regular day-to-day human experience anyway for her mind’s pure and open always and unchangingly for it all crosses out and flips across and expresses and’s real. And it all comes she feels unstoppable from a bloom, from the opening calyx and unspeakably polychromous blooming corolla of a lotus whose wonderful electromagnetic radiation’s moved through and on and always by undying brilliant ceaseless wave function collapse magic from the place the horror she’d witnessed had wanted to come from as the writer writes liquid and you read solid and this continues on into forever forever she simply laughs because she knows Dervla one day will quit heroin and the young girl with her bloodied face sullied by her rapist’s cum will tell her parents what happened to her and will live a tarnished tattered life that will in the end of all things be okay and joyous and laughable and light just as in the end of all things all of our lives will love everything and be okay and joyous and laughable and lighter than the cascading light and sexual eternity that carries Rhondelle into infinity and beyond. And her cognition’s asleep and her development’s developed and her problems destroy her and hold her back and keep her sick but’ll be treated and ultimately cured and her emotions are happy and her trait openness is stifled and closed yet open forever because she’s totally sober as she’s essentially always been for she’s a sweet young woman untouched by any of that, of course she is, every day is a new day and tomorrow is another day and it’s never black and white but of course she’s as sober and everything-loving and clear-headed as anyone can be in her dream and outside it and it’s all what it is. And we all take drugs and of course that’s untrue yet true yet totally untrue yet Rhondelle’s always totally drugless, that’s her nature, that’s her baseline, that’s her. And the light cascades and the eternity has sex and it’s all love, beauty, and most of all, jouissance for she and joy for all of you and a bit of a giggle.
“Haha.”
And lying in her bed she sleep-laughs.
Cameron Dusting is a writer from Melbourne, Australia. Keep up-to-date at camerondusting.wordpress.com.
