I
ego

(continued)

Of all the people in the gallery, D'Arcy is the most put out at having been delayed for three hours. Timing is crucial just before an opening, and he had been counting on that time to do the final electrical work on Beverley's Folly. As it turned out, he has had to be everywhere at once: swinging from the catwalk, running all over the gallery, fixing this, wiring that, and only now, at ten past midnight, is he finally getting the microphone set up. All he has to do now is repatch the sound system.

He is on his hands and knees in the sound booth, tracing the maze of wires that writhe around the amplifier. The electricity in the fugu gallery was never designed to accommodate anything more powerful than a toaster-oven, but with a touch of ingenuity and a discreet splice into the powerline of the body shop next door, that problem has been overcome. Temporarily.

For tonight, at any rate.

An overloaded power bar hums and a three-pronged plug that has been reluctantly forced into a two-holed extension cord crackles sporadically. Trusting to luck, D'Arcy exchanges two of the plugs. A siren chorus of female wails rises from the direction of the washrooms. He tries again, taking time to signal across the crowds to Alvin, who stands far away on the catwalk, languidly tapping a microphone. Strange stuff, electricity.

The sound system establishes itself with a sonic pop and Alvin's amplified fingerwork bolts through the speakers. There is an ear-piercing squeal of feedback and the system dies. A few heads turn in protest. Most don't. D'Arcy tries again, yanking haphazardly at wires, knocking cassettes to the floor with hollow, plastic applause as he twists the amplifier around to get a better view of the back. He tugs, he plugs, he prays, he throws a switch, and a pillar of water some five feet high explodes through the back of a turtle in the Installation. Damn Beverley and her water pumps. Damn Beverley and her Installation, damn her performance and the month of nightmares. Damn, damn, damn.

Damn the hit of acid Beverley took a month ago. Fine, sure, great. Take the acid, have a trip, come down, get on with life. Game Over. But in this instance, the game is still going on. For some strange reason or another, or whatever, Beverley takes the acid, gets high, and doesn't come down. She gets lost.

And she doesn't just lose herself, she throws herself full force into a quagmire of personal psychoses, staying awake for twelve days and twelve nights straight, taking baths with her clothes on (and drinking the bath- water), boiling kettles, boiling kettles, boiling kettles and turning the pages of books under the dark cover of her grandmother's comforter, laughing, laughing, laughing until she cried at the carpet.

Twelve days. Twelve nights. Two hundred and eighty-eight hours. Longer.

They had been to see a specialist, a staunch, nylon tea bag of a psychoanalyst, who had taken one look at Beverley and incarcerated her for over a week in the Queen's Quay Mental Health Facility just down the road. Beverley's condition, according to this doctor, was by no means an ordinary occurrence. The acid had acted as a trigger to deep-seated problems and how much did D'Arcy know about Beverley's childhood?

Not much. He knows about the mother who committed suicide and the father who is in jail. He knows about the string of foster homes, the abuses, the scars (both emotional and physical), and he doesn't want to know more. He knows enough to understand how Beverley was set up so that when she got high one day, a door flung itself open in her brain and she couldn't get it shut again.

When Beverley got back from the hospital she was a changed woman. No longer a frail and helpless Ophelia drowning in her sorrows, she had become a dynamic, efficient machine of Art and Love who could run the gallery single-handed with one leg tied behind her neck while having raging affairs with any two-legged creature that walked through the door. A miracle cure! The nights she deigned to spend with him she was impossible to sleep with, so he moved his bed to couch cushions spread out on the floor of the studio.

The weeks leading up to the opening tonight were hell on earth. There had been that business with the anonymous telephone calls for one thing. The Phantom. Everyone thought it was all in Beverley's head until D'Arcy heard it for himself one day when he picked up the phone and was assaulted by an electronic laughter squeaking in his ear. They reported it to the police with absolutely no results for two whole weeks, during which time every other person in the gallery got an opportunity to hear the proof of Beverley's persecution. Then suddenly, two weeks ago, the crank calls stopped. The Phantom vanished. And Beverley started drinking her bathwater again.

Now there's this Casa Loma performance artist nonsense. Casa Loma: Wielder of the Great Sword of Woman. That's scary, Beverley.

Beverley? D'Arcy can't remember who that is any more. Somewhere in-between, beneath, and/or around her alter ego manifestations is the real Beverley. Maybe. Occasional glimpses through chinks in the armour of multiple personality occur often enough to encourage him not to give up hope, but hope is wearing thin. He is tired of carrying the gallery on his shoulders, tired of carrying the ball, cleaning up, fixing up, patching up and looking the other way. Exhausted. Spent. He wants Beverley back as he knew her, knows that to be an impossibility and the best he can expect is a sickening compromise between invalid and chaos. He would leave but for his pride. Oh proud young man, how terrible is circumstance! Take breath. Restore. Courage.