I
ego

(continued)

The sound system is up and running fine. D'Arcy pushes his way through the crowd to his studio and knocks on the door.

"Ready when you are."

No answer. He knocks again, louder. "Yo, Madam!" he shouts, fishing his keys from his pocket. "Beverley? ... Casa Loma?! ... Showtime!"

He unlocks the door and enters the soft, dark studio. Out of the noise and into the realm of madness.

*

Anticipation. It spreads like a spilled drink. Something has happened. Is happening. Is about to happen. A surge toward the central gallery space empties the lounge. Nelson, despite the clamour of protestation, closes down the bar. He can't see anything from the bar.

Adelaide and Emily, determined to avoid Leonard and his yobbos in the back corridor, slip through the wet-room to get back to the main gallery, a shortcut known only to the initiated few and available only to those with keys. It is dark in the wet-room. The smell of cleaning fluids and drying-out mops. It is an eerie no man's land; they can hear the chatter of the crowd on the other side of the drywall. Emily catches her heels in the duckboard by the shower and takes a few extra, fumbling seconds to find the door handle. When they emerge from the wet-room they find themselves breaking through a marijuana circle just as the joint is being passed around. They extricate themselves to the best of their respective abilities and start looking for a vantage point from which to view the performance. The catwalk seems the best bet, although it's pretty rickety on the uneven concrete floor. The higher part is reserved for part of the show, but the lower part has a couple of vacant spots; sitting down would be very nice, even if it is only on a plank of wood slung across a scaffolding.

The music is industrial. D'Arcy's music is always industrial, but he calls it Sound Sculpture. This is the overture to the performance: sounds of water and machinery, and a heavy, crushing beat. One layer of sound is actually recordings of people in the washroom, in the wet-room and in the shower stall, sampled over the past two weeks: toilets flushing, faucets running, mops being wrung out, groaning, singing, and the occasional argument. Most of it is impossible to identify, but for those in the know, some of it is recognizable. Adelaide leans over to Emily, her ear cocked towards the speakers.

"... I don't give a flying squirrel ... get out of here! ... fuck you, bitch ..."

Emily nods her head in recognition. The soundtrack suddenly cuts out. The overture is over.

"Wasn't that from the time Beverley found Leonard in the women's washroom?"

"Shhh! It's starting."

*

Back in the sound booth, D'Arcy pushes back his errant dreadlocks and perches himself on a drum stool. He fades the lights in the gallery and brings up the lights on the Installation. Beat. Beat. The chatter fades to a murmur. There is a screech of laughter from a group of velvet hats pushing its way to the front. The crowd surges, wavers, and redistributes itself to get The Perfect View. Someone knocks over a drink and the tumbler rolls around the concrete floor. D'Arcy takes a sip from his flask, checks the cassettes for the performance, snaps out the lights on the Installation, counts to five and brings up the light on the catwalk on the other side of the gallery.

Where there was No on before, now there is Someone. Miraculously, a figure has appeared on the catwalk, formed out of thin air, the trickery of misdirection and the Magician's bag of chicanery. Zero to one is the biggest step of all.

She is dressed in shimmering blue robes. A headdress of a thousand tin stars, snipped and twisted like a crown of thorns, causes constant flashings of reflection, blurring focus. Sticks of incense burn in her hair. Her skin is white, a thick, daubed, inconsistant white with blurred edges around her lips and eyes. She approaches the microphone as if it were a monument, takes a moment to adjust the height, then stands for a second, mute. Her eyes roll back into their sockets, showing only the whites.

Her hand slowly grasps the microphone and continues on to her neck. She holds the microphone there for a moment, against her collarbone. An amplified gurgle sputters through the speakers. A low growl, strangled before it reaches maturity, dies in her throat. A pause. General shuffling of feet.

Out of nowhere, she screams -- a piercing wail which takes everyone by shock. D'Arcy scrambles to turn the volume down at least four notches, wincing with the pain of the sudden sound. All around the gallery mouths stretch open, eyes screw up, and eardrums try to disassociate themselves from brains. What was that?

"The Time Has Come!" intones Beverley to her audience. "For Change!"

The second scream is less effective than the first -- primarily because the sound has been turned down -- but it still reaches far into the nasal cavities. Those near the speakers edge away with sour faces.

"Casa Loma! I am Casa Loma! Wielder of the Great Sword of Woman!"

She snatches up the microphone stand and whirls it twice around her head. Since the cable is still attached, it chases after the makeshift Excalibur like a snake trying to swallow its own tail. Amazingly, she steps deftly out of her own vortex, emerging untangled, victorious. Someone applauds, whether out of mockery or not is hard to tell. Casa Loma bows to acknowledge her adoring fans before suddenly bolting straight up again and screaming as loud as her make-up will allow.

"Wooooommmaaannn!!"

There are a few faint responses of "Right on, sister," and "You tell 'em, girl," but none is truly heartfelt.

"Baaaathroooooooooms!"

This time there is laughter. Real laughter welling up from the root of the absurdity. And then, suddenly, soft supermarket Muzak (Peruvian Classics, Volume II) cuts in. Casa Loma's voice comes down to an acceptable level.

"That's right, friends: Bathrooms. You want 'em, we got 'em. Bathrooms are the windows to our private selves, aren't they? We expose ourselves to them, we cleanse ourselves in them, we give them our dirt!"

More laughter. She has them on her side now. They think she's great. Funny. Ha ha ha. Like a stand-up comedian, she appeals to the crowd with a smirk and a raised eyebrow.

"Let's visit the bathroom right now, shall we? Shall we go to the bathroom right now? Who wants to go to the bathroom?"

Hands rise up from the sea of the audience. Pick me. Pick me. She turns on them, righteous and indignant. The overbearing mother of a collective childhood.

"Not until you've finished your vegetables!!"

D'Arcy sighs and rubs his shoulder. The next sound cue is ready to roll. There is nothing to be done except to watch. There is nothing to be done except to listen. And to pray.

Casa Loma clambers down from the catwalk and into the crowd, making her way toward the Installation at the centre of the gallery. In a silvery voice, she gives them the journey to the bathroom as a little girl. She pleads with them to let her go. She kisses someone on the cheek, leaving a great white smirch. She sings a skipping song into the microphone as she clutches her abdomen with her free hand.

"My mother told me I never should
Go to the bathroom in the woods!"

And now she's at the moat. Ready to transverse the waters to climb the Installation that rises like an island from the sea. Handing the microphone to an innocent observer, she tumbles gracelessly into the water. A wave ripples round the island, slooshing over the edge onto the pink rubber mat. The Lady is in the Lake.

A Tibetan monks' chant fades in. The Lady has religion. D'Arcy is right on cue.

"Om mani padme hum ..."

Her robe clings wet around her shoulders and splays out on the surface of the water. She wades to the centre, chanting to the soundtrack. She climbs. She babbles. The chant increases in volume and speed. Unintelligible. She cries, she whines, she mounts the dolphin tower and crawls over a crest of frogs. And now she's at the top. She's made it! She stands by the bathtub, the magic crystal bathtub, the salvaged-from-a-chemical-warehouse, filled-to-the-brim-with-water bathtub.

Feeling the moment, she lets out a wavering operatic note of indescribable pitch and volume and lets her robe drop to the floor. Nelson wins three thousand dollars and the crowd re-evaluates its opinion of her. D'Arcy shakes his head sadly and takes another sip from his flask. He hadn't expected this.

Casa Loma has a phallus. A sausage dangling from a strap around her waist. Realistic enough, because her body has been painted in the same mottled white as her face. As has the sausage. The paint runs down in dirty, chalky streams. There is only one possible reaction, only one thing to do: applaud.

Basking in the effect she has created, Casa Loma turns coyly to the crowd.

"You wouldn't understand. It's a woman's thing!"

All the confused women in the audience cheer encouragement. The others take a step backward in their brains, but they all applaud. And they all watch.

Now comes the sprinkling ceremony. Casa Loma flips a switch and a dozen or so aquatechnical nightmares spring to life -- some more successfully than others. One particularly ambitious dolphin spurts almost as high as the sprinklers in the ceiling, while a turtle dribbles miserably into the moat. Reaching into one of the open containers on the table beside the bathtub, the hermaphroditic Casa Loma tosses green salts into the transparent bathtub, where they blossom into green fluffy clouds, like fireworks in a liquid sky. Oooooh! Aaaaah! ("Why is that woman wearing a sausage?") Another explosion of green, and then a blue one. She reaches into a dirty yellow plastic bucket and produces a handful of purple crystals. She lobs the crystals into the aqua water. Purple will make an artistically pleasing addition, yes? But two seconds after the crystals hit the water, they turn blood red. A chemical change is taking place. Oooooh ... Aaaaah ...