V.H.S.

Spirituality

Leda is an excellent mother and a terrible mum.

Routine protects her from frustration, and faith gives her a reason to wait for death: like wine or orgasm. You wait, knowing you will obtain something better, something rarer.
Leda lives by this very principle.
Not her own principle, but Agathism’s: the cult of Agatha.
The first woman of the Neighbourhood: capable homemaker, fertile, visibly loving and, above all, silent. Agatha prefers smiles to words. Indeed, her sacred text, A Woman’s Truth, states: “A woman’s smile is worth more than a thousand words.”

And so, when the clock strikes six in the morning, Leda wakes. No electronic reminder. Both eyes open at once. No yawn. Her body is programmed to reach the bathroom. Leda does not sit on the toilet; she knows a good woman must make no noise. She crouches over the white porcelain and controls the stream with painful precision.

Then, after washing her hands, she arranges herself before the mirror. She combs her hair slowly; with one hand, she fishes a fistful of roller pins from the wicker basket. She twists her hair into a chignon while filling her mouth with little spikes of coloured plastic, then fixes the hairstyle to the back of her head with orderly calm. Next come make-up, backcombed fringe, hairspray, and a dress from the Bellas Hesse & Co catalogue: approved by Agatha.

Always punctual, the milkman arrives with breakfast at half past seven. Leda collects the prepared meal, spreads the cloth over the table, and unwraps the compostable cutlery.
She puts on the orange apron and ties its white ends behind her neck and around her waist. With orange-varnished hands, she checks the pockets and makes sure the notebook is in place: it is, in the left pocket; two Tokens and a cigarette in the right. She makes Edwards coffee because, as the advert says, it is:

“The new key to a man’s heart!”

She pours it into the cups on the table.

One for every member of the family except herself.

She does not sit with them, make conversation, or eat. She circles the table, distributes wet kisses over cheeks, then stands silent before the sink. In the small kitchen window she admires the neon reflection of the advertising signs: beautiful women waving vacuum cleaners or smiling at a bottle of Coca-Cola.

She sighs and cleans the clean sink, wipes it with a sponge, turns the tap on and off, hums, and waits. She waits until everyone has finished eating, accompanies them to the door, and waves slowly, smiling Coca-Cola.

Inside again, she tidies the kitchen, throwing everything away, tablecloth included. She carefully rinses the coffee pot and leaves it to dry on the ridged edge of the sink.

Drops of water run along the little concavities at the edges, then slide down the steel wall into the black drain. Leda watches them for a few minutes, then slaps her own cheek.
Every day, the same thought: those falling drops—where do they end up?

A slap, and her thoughts return to order with another stroke of the sponge across the already clean sink.

“Time to work!”

Leda’s voice is as bright as everything about her: from the over-backcombed carrot hair to the clicking of her slippers.

“I’m Leda, your suicide assistant.”

“Coca-Cola, the pause that refreshes!”

“The Neighbourhood remembers: Project Lazarus—be reborn as a new you!”

Leda works as a Voice of the Neighbourhood. Her timbre is versatile: she can move from sensual and beguiling to colder, more professional tones.

She handles every recording, from the Suicide Booths to radio announcements.

Leda aspired to billboards and television jingles, but her appearance does not match the Neighbourhood’s model, so she convinces herself that she likes her job.

It allows her to remain at home, Agatha’s symbolic place, and to guide and support every citizen of the Neighbourhood. As Agatha says: “A woman is like a lighthouse in the night: steady, bright, and always in her place.”

At lunchtime, she greets the milkman again and collects her prepared meal. She sets it on her usual tin snack-lap tray, her favourite: cappuccino-coloured, with cracked pastel dried flowers in the centre. Leda passes it off as her grandmother’s heirloom because, as Agatha says, “A home is made of objects, traditions and generations; better still when all three meet.” Like her great-grandmother’s apron: she still wears it so she will never forget who she was.

Leda has no grandmother, let alone a great-grandmother.

Before settling on the yellow settee, she takes a Token from her apron and inserts it into the small slot beside the television’s volume dial. The cathode-ray tube crackles. The screen fixes on blue, stained by a meagre list of white titles.

Only then does she sit, back straight against the sofa, arrange the tray on her knees, and select her favourite soap opera with the remote: The Neighbourhood Distillate.

She eats, smiles, and earns one Token to spend tomorrow, in the same way, at the same time.

In the evening, the breakfast scene repeats, but with meatloaf.

Then a silent family gathering around the television, and everyone to bed.

At night, Ois rocks his hips through lazy, panting sex. Fortunately, Leda thinks every night, Ois is like the advert for the new Gillette: “The blade your face cannot feel.”

And so every day, like a little girl playing with an enormous doll’s house.

Apart from holidays, anniversaries, and small Neighbourhood meetings, the only true deviation from Leda’s routine occurs once a month, on the first.

Along with the milkman comes Poe, the postman. The parcel is delivered directly to Leda. The bell rings; she click-clacks over in her slippers and opens the door with a three-Token smile.

The parcel is exclusive to citizens registered as followers of Agatha and Norm.

Leda feels especially important on the first of the month when the parcel arrives, although registering as a believer is far easier than marriage.

She knows this, but tells herself a lie each time: she replaces the memory of signing at the Office of Registrations and Contracts with an image of herself weeping before the Neighbourhood offices, bearing witness to her faith and her will to become a model citizen.

In the end it matters little: “Truth is a woman’s first secret.”

Leda trots towards the sitting room, pointed breasts resting against the cardboard square.

She sits on the sofa, slices the packing tape with a fingernail, and pulls out a videotape: black, two dirty white eyes, a streak of dust across the label, where cursive writing reads Citizen Archive 18041958.

Leda runs her thumb through the dust and notices a drawing beside the final digit of her citizen number, a tiny pen scribble that looks like a jester’s cap. A marketing trick, perhaps; they have been appearing more and more often. It hardly matters. It is time for the tape. She smiles, and the trill of her pager confirms the shiver of excitement.

No work today, no pass with the floor polisher, no soap opera.

On the first of every month, Leda receives her V.H.S. catalogue—Visual Homiletic System—containing the complete recording of the month she has just lived.

A kind of report, as she calls it. An essential instrument for every believer, because: “See yourself as others see you. Do not be the protagonist of your life; choose to direct it!”

She inserts the tape and settles on the settee, back straight, pressing her buttocks into the sofa’s polyester-polyamide blend, waiting for the white noise to vanish.

The screen slides from black to grey and divides into many small squares, each containing a corner or room of the house. Leda watches herself walking the corridors, passing from one square to another with her faithful floor polisher, or sitting neatly at her worktable.

She observes the recording in satisfied silence and takes notes. Sometimes she fast-forwards, skipping nights and empty moments, because only one thing interests her: error.

“I must keep my back straighter; there I kissed Ois without enough passion; those legs are hideous, I’ll reduce my diet; and that good morning—great Agatha, Leda, try to look interested!”

Meanwhile, her thighs rub together and her mouth wavers between smile and humility.

She suppresses emotion as if it were blasphemy.

She watches and rewatches herself, admires, judges, congratulates, and scolds herself. Leda enjoys this game of roles because she knows she can only improve. The path before her is bright and she is doing things correctly. Like when she spanks the children, fakes orgasms, holds back tears, resists temptation, and suppresses every desire for freedom that might stain her image as a good mother.

She does it well, smiling, back straight.

Meanwhile the magnetic tape grows warm. The clock strikes two in the afternoon and, precisely as always, Leda finishes watching. As procedure requires, she stands, turns her back to the television, and waits for the usual click of the reels rewinding. She will leave the sitting room, go into the kitchen, and prepare her customary belladonna infusion. By the time she has added a single spoonful of sugar, the tape will be rewound, ready to return to the postman the next morning.

Her hand is a spider on the doorknob.

She waits. No click.

She waits again, the spider of skin barely trembling. No click.

Leda turns. The wrinkles on her forehead draw a knotted labyrinth of veins.

The tape keeps running, the reels still turning. In the first frames, Leda leaves through the door and goes to the kitchen, follows her usual routine until evening, until bedtime; then the next day begins.

It must be a mistake, our good homemaker thinks. She ejects the tape, blows on the reels, inserts it again, and rewinds the recording by a few minutes.

The same images return. Time continues to move; days pass; the busy Leda on the screen belongs to the future.

The woman is hypnotised by these prophetic images.

Without taking her eyes from the screen, she picks up the remote and fixes herself like a pin before the CRT’s dirty light. She presses the back of the black plastic.

So deep is the hypnosis that she has not noticed the remote is upside down and cannot answer her commands.

She tightens her wrist and, for the first time, looks away, raising a hand to her mouth.

“It’s wrong. I can’t watch. It would be cheating, wouldn’t it?”

She whispers the words, tongue moving along her lips, while the images filtered through the cathode-ray tube seem trapped in a loop. The numbers at the top left—minutes, seconds, days and years—are the only sign that the tape is moving forward, showing something new. To our viewer, it is only present.

A present seasoned with small déjà vus.

Leda slips onto the coffee table, gaze seized by that carousel of twin images. Then her head jerks, her hands turn the remote around, and she presses stop.

A smile cuts across her face.

“It’s a sign. Agatha has chosen me!”

She plunges her hands into the apron and pulls out the notebook.

The remote presses play.

Hours pass. The neon’s heat melts the colours of the room, and Leda melts onto the floor. She lies there, bare feet curling and rubbing together, shoes and hair abandoned on the carpet. In the background, giggles and hums alternate like the purple-blue insect lamp on the porch.

Leda is drunk on herself. In her notebook, she records every tiny variation shown by the tape of the future: the children’s sick days, rainy days, visits to neighbours; which meals to request from the Neighbourhood according to what husband and children will prefer; what to talk about to appear brilliant at parties and Neighbourhood meetings; how to satisfy her husband’s lazy fantasies; what to wear and when; when she will earn Tokens and how to spend them; how to avoid crying; how never to be seen dishevelled or unprepared; future fashions; when to let her stomach out or hold it in…

The pen masturbates every white corner of the page. Her eyes dart from notebook to screen; the hand gripping the remote trembles with every manipulation of the infrared.

Her skin is taut, body hair electric, the whiskers of hormonal imbalance damp and cold.

Leda feels like a teenager before her first pornographic film: confused, excited, and damned terrified of reality.

A terror that nails her navel to the floor and her eyes to the screen, a sensual terror provoking itchy fantasies Leda cannot resist. She spends the entire day browsing, pausing, skipping, fast-forwarding, rewinding, and cataloguing her whole life. Refining every passage, every word; filing down every behaviour, every tiny bend or smear. When the clock strikes six, she notices through the window that the Neighbourhood’s darkness has deepened and the notebook is full: not one blank page remains.

The smile is tired but alive.

I must do something, she thinks. I need time. Agatha’s words come to her aid: “Rest is synonymous with failure, unless it serves a good cause.”

“Mine is a good cause!” Hysteria makes the vowels vibrate.

Leda leaps up, pauses the recording, throws open the door, runs to the kitchen, and lunges for the wall telephone.

She punches in 000 and bends her back, receiver pressed close to her mouth. Lipstick stains it.

“Switchboard, Muriel speaking. How may I help?”

Leda starts, as though the woman on the other end could know her plans.

“Office of Registrations and Contracts. Ois, citizen number 11041967.”

“I’ll connect you at once.”

With every beep, beep of the hold tone, Leda bites off another small piece of orange nail.

“Ois, would you take the children out for dinner?”

It is an order more than a question. Leda has forgotten darling and please, and for the first time it is not guilt weighing on her stomach but fear. The poise of Leda, Voice of the Neighbourhood, has vanished. Her tone is rough; sensuality has become obsession; the warmth she once radiated now burns with anxiety and tension.

Ois answers with a high, porcine yes. Leda thanks him and slams the receiver down.

The disordered silhouette runs through the darkness, flickers behind the sitting-room door, and lights up before the screen.

The remote is clenched between damp hands and jagged nails. Her thumb crushes fast-forward as if greater pressure could make the reels spin faster. Only an impression, but to Leda it is real.

There is no time…

Tomorrow she must return the tape, and one night is not enough to correct a life.

She scratches her dulled hair, red dandruff snowing over her face while a grimace of pain scores her lips. A thought skewers two wide, staring eyes into her face.

“Agatha wants me to see the end. She wants to reward my efforts and show me what comes after.”

The skin of her throat trembles, jaw muscles taut, locked in an expression of grotesque relief.

I must see the end…

Years and images race past like a black-and-white comedy.

Leda’s smile is pulled open by an invisible retractor: fixed, overbearing.

Then arrogance becomes doubt, doubt becomes certainty, and at last her mouth bends into a rainbow of wet red flesh. Tears line her cheeks, her chin crumples, her eyebrows nearly touch. Pain erupts across her face—not the physical pain of bruises, blood, and slaps, but an invisible phantom pain felt inside, with shivers, a pain that rapes her soul.

She slaps her wet cheek.

“STOP IT!” A deep breath swells her chest and straightens her back.

“Yours is a life worthy of what comes after. That is what matters!” Leda scolds herself with the same shame she reserves for her children.

White-and-pink eyes return to the screen.

At ludicrous speed, an old woman passes the floor polisher over the kitchen floor: backwards and forwards, one hand resting on the wooden table.

The small grey figure on the screen is identical to Leda, a faded, crumpled photograph that folds in rapid jerks of frames. One hand clutches her chest as if squeezing a lemon. Her back bends; the old woman leans against the wall and slides to the floor, chest rising and falling fast, eyes rolling behind the lids, mouth half-open, hand a fist closed over her heart. In the speed of the recording, the fluorescent light flickers and slices the lifeless body into shadows.

That Leda is dead. The living Leda holds both hands to her chest and grips her euphoria, eyes wide, waiting to see what comes after.

Her back bends forwards, her face inches from the screen, which suddenly goes out.

Black.

The tape runs steadily while darkness devours Leda and the sitting room.

The screen’s minutes pass. Reality’s minutes pass.

Then a scream shakes Leda’s shoulders, hair, and breasts. A high, frustrated scream, repeated again and again, as if between each cry she regained breath and consciousness.

Leda grabs the television, fingernails scratching crooked lines into the silver plastic.

“There’s nothing?! There’s nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing…” The chant continues, words repeating mechanically.

“Where is my FUCKING Paradise?”

Leda screams again, a breathless cry that leaves her gasping, coughing, shivering with a mixture of rage and desolation travelling along her nerves.

The tape clicks after a sob, and in the silence a ringing echoes.

The telephone is ringing. The receiver against the wall trembles violently, petulantly.

As if held by invisible strings, Leda rises, glides down the corridor, and leans beside the trembling kitchen wall. She looks at the receiver. She is tired and does not want to answer, but the ringing will not relent. She lifts it and brings it lazily to her ear.

“Good evening, V.H.S. customer service.”

The skin of her face tightens into a strained expression halfway between a smile and curiosity.

“Good evening,” Leda replies, trying to hide the high-pitched tones of the short circuit.

“Am I speaking with Leda, Citizen number 18041958?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“Forgive the late hour, Leda, but we wanted to inform you of a technical issue.”

“An issue?” Her voice intones a smile.

“Yes. May I ask a few questions about your V.H.S. system, to make sure everything is in order?”

“Of course.” Her head bobs up and down like the lucky cat in the restaurant.

“Did your tape contain the archive of the previous month?”

“Yes.”

“Were you able to view it, or were there cuts, black screens, or other interruptions?”

At black screen, Leda bites her lower lip, tears pushing furiously.

Hold on, Leda. Perhaps it was only a mistake.

She swallows the sob. “Yes. At the end, the screen stayed black longer than usual, as though there were an image underneath but it was hidden or dark.”

Liar. Leda feeds the operator each word, breaking another nail a little further with every syllable.

“That is normal, Leda. Did you encounter any other anomalies?”

Leda’s eyes fly open; her fingernails sink into her palm.

Normal, she repeats inside her head.

That is normal, but Leda cannot accept this normality. This reality in which she knows that only darkness awaits her: nothing, sameness, repetition. Like her life. She knows its movements by heart, its breaths, Ois’s jokes and caresses, always the same. And her children, the memento mori of her sex life.

Then there are friends, acquaintances, and, if a term more superficial existed for two people who know only each other’s name, Leda’s life would contain that too, filling nothingness. She is like potpourri: fragrant, decorative, but dead and dry.

“No. No other anomalies.”

“Perfect. We’ll leave you to your life. Good evening.”

The tortured hands slam down the receiver, then the fingers caress its back. Back and forth, like the floor polisher. After a few minutes, she turns and walks to the bathroom.

The street’s neon lights the mirror. Leda begins to comb her hair, arrange the strands, gather it into a neat chignon.

“It’s my fault.”

With her free hand, she gathers a fistful of roller pins from the little wicker basket.

“I haven’t done enough,” Leda explains, staring at the centre of her reflected chest. She fills her mouth with pins. “I can do more. I must do more.”

She mumbles as she violently pins the chignon to her head.

“I just have to be better.”

With one finger, she tucks the wandering strands behind her ear.

“It will be our secret, Agatha.”

After all, “Truth is a woman’s first secret.”