“It’s not as though TK Ltd. is a wax museum. These are testimonies. These are not substitutes for actual people. You cannot touch them or hug them or fail to be hugged back.”
I struggled to focus my attention, finding it difficult to hear the panelists speaking over the voices of the vanished people, their testimonies echo-calling to one another in my head, their individual explanations weaving together to form a suffocating textile through which I found it hard to breathe. A sharpness, like an exercise cramp, cinched the underside of my diaphragm. Would you rather your mother be dead than alive and living somewhere else?
My answer was ugly and unequivocal. Given the choice, I’d prefer her dead. To kill yourself was to say to your family members, I can no longer live with myself . To vanish was to say, I can no longer live with you .
“But you can’t deny,” Cyndi Lauper said, “that a wax museum carries a heavy death implication due to the embalmed quality attending even the best reproductions. Did you know that many so-called wax artists learn their tricks by apprenticing for morticians?”
The mention of “morticians” elicited a mousy sob from a woman on the bed.
Possibly-Lydia checked her bracelet watch—its loose chain necessitated a few staccato wrist rolls to bring the face into view—and said it was time to take questions from the audience.
“I found it interesting that you should raise the topic of wax museums,” said a man in suede. “Scarcity could be viewed as aromantic way to refer to manufactured celebrity. We can’t care about a person unless they’re famous. So you could accuse the people who made these films, and the people who control their distribution, of manufacturing fame for profit.”
“Not to mention emotional profit,” said a woman in a head kerchief. “All those traumatized ‘survivors.’ The collateral gains reaped by the psychiatric industry shouldn’t be underestimated.”
“I don’t understand,” said the hippie panelist. “Are you implying that the psychiatric industry is in cahoots with TK Ltd.?”
“The world of commerce is a web of interconnected extortionists,” the kerchief woman said.
A woman wearing an ethnic sweater-coat asked a question about something called “re-performance”; a theater group had secured the rights, from TK Ltd., to “re-perform” a handful of vanishing films. This had led to quite a bit of heated arguing at an earlier panel, said the sweater-coat woman.
“I was Vito Acconci’s studio assistant in the seventies,” she said. “When asked to re-perform Seed Bed , he responded, ‘If a performance is teachable and repeatable, how does it differ from theater? How are the participants not actors?’ ”
“You raise an interesting point about acting our own memories out of existence,” said Possibly-Lydia.
“It’s been estimated,” said the hippie panelist, “that seventy-five percent of the people who vanish suffer from Acquired Situational Narcissism, a syndrome that afflicts ninety-two percent of real celebrities.”
“But what kind of celebrity are we talking about here?” asked Cyndi Lauper. “How many people see these films? The more films that exist, meaning the more successful a venture TK Ltd. is, the greater the chance that a film will remain unwatched—assuming it’s not ‘re-performed’ by some low-rent theater company. Is that fame, or is that the cruelest definition of obscurity?”
“It makes me think,” said the woman who’d been crying on the bed, “of library books. I always look at the due dates stamped on the back. Sometimes, between readers, whole decades pass.”
The woman in the sweater-coat asked if TK Ltd. had anything to do with the recent rash of “surgical impersonations” she’d read about in the papers.
“People who died tragically and often young,” she explained to the room at large, “and suddenly a stranger shows up at the family’s house, a stranger who’s
I struggled to focus my attention, finding it difficult to hear the panelists speaking over the voices of the vanished people, their testimonies echo-calling to one another in my head, their individual explanations weaving together to form a suffocating textile through which I found it hard to breathe. A sharpness, like an exercise cramp, cinched the underside of my diaphragm. Would you rather your mother be dead than alive and living somewhere else?
My answer was ugly and unequivocal. Given the choice, I’d prefer her dead. To kill yourself was to say to your family members, I can no longer live with myself . To vanish was to say, I can no longer live with you .
“But you can’t deny,” Cyndi Lauper said, “that a wax museum carries a heavy death implication due to the embalmed quality attending even the best reproductions. Did you know that many so-called wax artists learn their tricks by apprenticing for morticians?”
The mention of “morticians” elicited a mousy sob from a woman on the bed.
Possibly-Lydia checked her bracelet watch—its loose chain necessitated a few staccato wrist rolls to bring the face into view—and said it was time to take questions from the audience.
“I found it interesting that you should raise the topic of wax museums,” said a man in suede. “Scarcity could be viewed as aromantic way to refer to manufactured celebrity. We can’t care about a person unless they’re famous. So you could accuse the people who made these films, and the people who control their distribution, of manufacturing fame for profit.”
“Not to mention emotional profit,” said a woman in a head kerchief. “All those traumatized ‘survivors.’ The collateral gains reaped by the psychiatric industry shouldn’t be underestimated.”
“I don’t understand,” said the hippie panelist. “Are you implying that the psychiatric industry is in cahoots with TK Ltd.?”
“The world of commerce is a web of interconnected extortionists,” the kerchief woman said.
A woman wearing an ethnic sweater-coat asked a question about something called “re-performance”; a theater group had secured the rights, from TK Ltd., to “re-perform” a handful of vanishing films. This had led to quite a bit of heated arguing at an earlier panel, said the sweater-coat woman.
“I was Vito Acconci’s studio assistant in the seventies,” she said. “When asked to re-perform Seed Bed , he responded, ‘If a performance is teachable and repeatable, how does it differ from theater? How are the participants not actors?’ ”
“You raise an interesting point about acting our own memories out of existence,” said Possibly-Lydia.
“It’s been estimated,” said the hippie panelist, “that seventy-five percent of the people who vanish suffer from Acquired Situational Narcissism, a syndrome that afflicts ninety-two percent of real celebrities.”
“But what kind of celebrity are we talking about here?” asked Cyndi Lauper. “How many people see these films? The more films that exist, meaning the more successful a venture TK Ltd. is, the greater the chance that a film will remain unwatched—assuming it’s not ‘re-performed’ by some low-rent theater company. Is that fame, or is that the cruelest definition of obscurity?”
“It makes me think,” said the woman who’d been crying on the bed, “of library books. I always look at the due dates stamped on the back. Sometimes, between readers, whole decades pass.”
The woman in the sweater-coat asked if TK Ltd. had anything to do with the recent rash of “surgical impersonations” she’d read about in the papers.
“People who died tragically and often young,” she explained to the room at large, “and suddenly a stranger shows up at the family’s house, a stranger who’s
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