Somebody Somewhere (35 page)

Olivier remembered his father as sadistic and abusive. “I'm like this because of my father,” said Olivier. It hadn't occurred to him that this may have been coincidence rather than cause.

Olivier had never read my book, and we hadn't discussed it, either. He hardly read at all in English. “There's something I want you to see,” I said, and handed him the German translation of my book. Nervously he took it and I went to my room.

A few days later I received a letter. It was signed, “Your friend and mirror…Olivier.”

I could hardly bear to see Olivier after I received the letter. He smiled and I understood his smile. It touched me. I shook from head to toe as we sat in the hotel foyer, me in my long black coat and him in his black suit. He shook, too.

Olivier loved his emotions. He loved his “happy,” he loved his “sad,” he loved his “afraid,” and he sat there being washed over by ocean waves. “How can you stand it?” I asked him. It was clear that his emotions were as intense as mine. “I fear far more feeling nothing,”
he said. “Sometimes I can't find any feelings at all.” Just as I was unable to know I needed to go to the toilet or eat until I was ready to wet myself or faint, Olivier was emotion-deaf to anything but the most intense levels of his emotions. Below overwhelming, they just didn't connect or register. All the in-between levels left him as lost as the concept of color to someone blind from birth. When he felt emotions he knew he was alive.

I had faith in my mind but had feared my emotions terribly. Olivier feared the sense of self he found in having a mind but could go willingly into the arms of emotions so intense that he lost his bearings.

“I lost my legs today,” said Olivier excitedly. “I had no sense of my body from my waist down. I felt like I was flying. It was wonderful.” It was strange to hear him so excited to experience the same things that frightened me. I liked to “disappear” but I hated to feel “dead.”

Olivier made sense to me. For both of us, functioning was a sharing of scarce resources within a person who can only function on a few tracks at a time. We probably couldn't consistently experience things with the same level of integration as others could but our experiences seemed all the more intense for being unintegrated and single-tracked.

“I got lost in my reflection today,” said Olivier. It was an obsession we shared. “I was lost in my eyes and by the time I ‘woke up' it was several hours later. What was so crazy, though, was that I was so far ‘asleep' that at first I couldn't tell which side of the mirror I was on until I moved.”

Olivier had made it into “Carol's world” (the mirror-world part of “my world”) and back, again and again, and survived. One cannot fly with a physical body they say. Nor can one walk into a mirror. There were, however, perceptual boundaries beyond which lay something like a twilight zone. Olivier was sane. He had no hallucinations or delusions and yet he could cross those lines almost at will (the will to tune out, not the will to tune in). They were illusions, not delusions.
If you had asked him if people can fly, he would have told you straight, no.

Olivier had made his first friend when he was in his teens and it was around this time that he developed his version of Carol, named Bettina.

Bettina was an alternate personality modeled initially on Boy George. Boy George was a tried and tested personality that came with guarantees of popularity. Through being Boy George, Olivier could escape his own undeveloped and inexpressible true personality. Talking about Boy George, he finally had a “the world” topic he could use to talk through and make friends. Underneath makeup and outrageous clothes he could overcome his fear of unfamiliar places and people. All energy focused into being Bettina, he could be anyone as long as he wasn't himself. Placidly he could accept people touching him, because he was not there.

Bettina was the embodiment of a fear mechanism rather than a true personality. All of her moves, likes, dislikes, wants, and mental emotions were mirrored responses to what others did or appeared to want. Olivier became Boy George and Boy George left the little village, hit Paris, and got swept up in the tide of the gay scene. In Paris, Boy George got the nickname Bettina and popularity was to entail being used for sex. Olivier's sanctuary became his prison.

Bettina had verbal expression at the cost of Olivier's self-expression. She had involvement at the cost of him having a self to be involved. She had acceptance at the cost of his emotions being able to gain much from it. Bettina gave him an identity and a system of beliefs that he carried about like baggage, waiting for his own to show up one day.

Olivier's other character was male. His intellectual self, the storage compartment for all things practical, logical, responsible, and learned by rote rather than experience he had named the Manager.

N
ight after night Olivier and I brought things for each other to experience. We were communicating, “touching,” and being moved through the medium of sharing objects. Olivier had collections of sequins and beads and spent hours and hours sewing them into intricate patterns. I left him flowers and he would talk to me through them. I did not need to explain to him that objects stood for or symbolized people. Olivier already used this system.

Olivier and I spoke silently and indirectly through the music we shared. We stepped into the night armed with Walkmans.

We were able to “simply be” within company. We picked leaves and gave them to each other, velvety ones to feel and dead ones to hear as they crackled. We snapped twigs near each other's ears and were tickled by the sound. We picked grass and snowed it over one another and laughed as we let it drift into the wind. We looked at the way light played upon things and sometimes laughed if we noticed the inexplicable strange reactions of people who stood so clearly “out there” in “the world.”

Olivier looked at me with a deep sadness. “Why isn't the rest of the world like this?” he said. “They only know cheap thrills, nightclubs, blah-blah-blah. They only want to own you and have sex with your body.”

Olivier had two tapes of the Boy George song “Victims.” “This song tells my life,” he said, handing me a copy to listen to in my Walkman. Together we played this song again and again. We laughed to ourselves on the underground tube, “the world” held playfully at bay.

Every night we went out to walk around the streets. Vlodamir was an old Ukrainian statue I had to greet each time we passed him. We stopped to touch the shiny marble stone upon which he stood. It was like a religious ritual. We entered the street he seemed to be guarding in silence.

This street branched off into a winding path. The cobblestone path spiraled off into the darkness, ending in an archway down at the bottom. It stood for the depth of our own emotions; a bottomless pit,
so much more frightening because of our not knowing where it ended, or if one could survive the fall and the total abandonment of self-control the fall entailed.

The tall terrace houses loomed over us in this eerie yet beautiful street that we had come to call “the tunnel.” The night sky enclosed us with stars and a gentle play of violet and blue hues surrounded the moon, which haunted us with echoes of our own enforced inner solitude.

There were cobblestones beneath our feet. Olivier was in rapture over the
clack, clack, clack
as we walked along. Without explanation, he had sent me his special crystal in a letter. I held on to it, thrilled by the mere thought of its fiery colors and the
grrrrr
it made when run along its chain.

We put on earphones and loaded our Walkmans, ready to play “Victims.” We looked wildly at each other and then without a word we ran in silence along the length of our tunnel to the light at the other end.

Running through the arch together we finally reached that other side. We sat on the other side of our tunnel. From what was now the safety of the other side, we looked back on where we had been. “You and me will never be victims again,” I said out loud to the night and collapsed in an exhausted heap.

T
he publicity tour of Europe was over for the next six months. I was on my way back to Australia. My bags were packed and had been sent off with a shipping company. Olivier's heart was heavy and so was mine.

We had discussed my going and we both knew our friendship would survive it. “You will always be with me wherever you go,” said Olivier. “You are my mirror.” But the days leading up to my departure were like a countdown.

I picked up Moggin, the black cat puppet I had made during one teaching round. There had been an ocean of tears cried over him.
Silently I gave him to Olivier as a way of leaving a part of me behind even though I was going away. I left for the countryside to think.

I was due to leave in two days. My luggage had sailed. I had many reasons to go back. I had even more reasons to stay. A friend sat with me and we lined up matches to stand for all of the “fors” and “againsts.”

Back at the hotel, Olivier's eyes were full of goodbye. “I've canceled my ticket,” I said. “I'm not going.” His face lit up like a chandelier.