Becoming (stage one)

Paul Collard made his fame by playing the vampire in a play that originally evolved out of a creative collaboration with the grunge queen Nikita Virginblood. Virginblood was a writer and playwright known only to a few readers of the Gothic Daily. She preferred the darkness and the privacy of the wardrobe and the few times she ventured out into open spaces, she was accompanied by an entire cast of witches and blood-striped tigers, dancing bears and one-eyed eagles, androgynous vampires and multiplying spiders, talkative carcasses and decaying princesses – figments of her imagination which she wore like a heavy robe over her shoulders. Some thought that Virginblood and Paul Collard were brothers and sisters, others that they were lovers. Indeed, it was hard to imagine Virginblood form any ties with anyone other than those enforced through blood, but it was equally difficult to place Collard in a relationship that wasn't sexual.
Virginblood had originally written The Vampire as a series of encounters between a vampire and his victims of both sexes, but when it was time for Collard to find the budget for the project, it became clear that some essential rewritings had to be done, the crucial reason being that he hadn't been able to find any male actors who were willing to work for free. While the men were less charmed by this sorcerer, he had managed to seduce enough women into volunteering their services due to an abundance of charm and sex appeal. There was nothing else for Virginblood to do but to rewrite the script for an all female cast and so she grudgingly returned to the wardrobe to do her chore. The result of her work saw each scene graphically detailing Collard's seduction and destruction of a woman. After a series of bloody conquests, the vampire falls in the hands of a strong-minded journalist who sucks him dry as much as any vampire. Their encounter culminates in an electrifying moment of truth or dare as illustrated in the following dialogue:

The vampire: If you really want to know who I am you must do more than ask questions.
The journalist: I ask because that is what I do. My job is to ask questions. It's for others to give answers.
The vampire: To get something you must give something in return. That is the law.
The journalist: Is it right for me to assume that you have no answers?
The vampire: The answers are here. Right here. The vampire points to his own chest and the journalist draws closer to him. If you want to know, you have to become me.
The journalist: Gasp!

After the immediate success with The Vampire, Collard was only offered roles from the Gothic repertoire. While he began to tour around the world with his show "Collard the Fangs," Virginblood stubbornly refused to face the limelight. After a couple of years of playing various creatures of the Dark involving much blood splatter and many sets of false teeth, Collard had also had enough and decided to go subterranean, which is how he ended up in the North. Plenty of people worn out from the pressures of life come to the North to rest and the winter season, especially, is ideal for a retired vampire with its twenty hours of daily darkness and its closeted lifestyle. Collard, however, wasn't the kind of person who felt comfortable unless he was overworked. Within only a couple of weeks he grew listless and longed for a schedule beyond making it to the shop before its six o'clock closing time.

Our paths crossed when I instead of walking through the forest took the detour through the town. I was wearing a green velvet skirt, a white synthetic fur jacket, the red turban wrapped around my head that had become something of a trademark for me, as well as green sneakers and striped leg warmers. I still thought of myself as someone who had only recently returned home when in truth I had already been back for nine months. Collard rolled down the window to ask if I was interested in taking part of his amateur theatre group. We drove a couple of blocks to the local community centre and by the time I got out of the van I was convinced that my true calling in life was to become an actress.
"There's something about you. You have a very strong personality, but at the same time there's something indeterminate about you. It's not just that you're young, although that's part of it. That's definitely part of it," Collard closed the door from his assistant.
His assistant was a black-eyed girl in her mid-twenties called Mimi. She was also his fiancée. She had wavy dark hair with a fringe that had grown to her bushy eyebrows. Since most of her face was covered with hair, she had the appearance of a troll hiding in the moss. Her softness made you want to stroke her, but if you got closer and saw her smile you would invariably change your mind. She was so eager to give a pleasant impression that when she smiled her face was contorted as if she was about to have an epileptic fit. Apparently Collard had picked her up on his fangs tour. Like thousands of Goth chicks before her, she had gone backstage to let him sink his teeth in her pale neck, but at sunrise she had not whimpered away and subjected herself to the humiliating glare and rude comments of the stage guys – that was as close as they got to groupies. Instead, Collard had carried Mimi out on his shoulders like a trophy and indicated to the guys who were loading the trucks that they better make room for another passenger. What she had done to catch him in her web nobody knows. Some said she had used a love potion, others that her fangs were simply bigger than his, but what is sure is that from that moment she followed Collard wherever he went.
"I've never done any theatre before," I admitted.
"It's not about that. You have a different mask for every person you meet. Take right now, you're playing a role. That is theatre. You needn't know more. In fact, the less you know the better. Natural. I want natural."
"I have a friend, Mari," I volunteered, "she's an actress."
Collard had turned his back to me and was pulling his earring with one hand and lighting a cigarette with the other. He turned around and stood about a millimetre away from me, blowing smoke through his nostrils.
"You don't know who you are yet," he groaned miserably not able to contain himself anymore at my innocence. He took one deep puff from his cigarette before he threw it on the ground and crushed it with his heel. "You!" he thundered, "don't know where you belong! You think you are one person. You think you have one country. One friend. One boyfriend, one father, one mother – this is not true."
I stared at him thinking the best thing I could do was to run away from there after telling him to go to hell, but I was unable to move.
"The whole world belongs to you," he put his arm around my shoulder and kissed my forehead. "And you can be anything you want," he added.

Collard and Mimi were whispering to each other. It was the first meeting of the Amateur Theatre Company as we were called. I studied the people who came through the door, of which Esmer, a man in his late thirties going prematurely bald, was one. It turned out he was already a member of the Green Fingers, the Senior Ballroom Dancers, the Save the Cathedral Activists, and the University Film Buffs. Then there was Maria, a housewife with asthma. She had joined the group hoping to lose weight. Louisa was paralysed from the waist down and suffered from a speech defect. Martin seemed quite ordinary, apart from the fact that he would never shut up, and Ruth was only a kid. She had had her head pushed into the lavatories by the bullies at school. Linda was a girl my age and the one who aspired most of all to make it to Hollywood.
"For me," began Collard, "amateur theatre is where theatre is really at."
Mimi nodded seriously. Esmer took notes and Linda hung at every word that came out of Collard's mouth.
"I want it simple," Collard continued. "No costumes, no make-up, no props and, heaven forbid, no professional actors."
At this we all laughed self-consciously.
"You've come to the right place," said Martin the talker, "I don't think you're going to find a single professional actor in this part of the world. It's too cold to act."
"There's always the telly," said Maria and took a snort from her inhaler.
"Where are you from Mr Collard?" Linda dared to ask.
"I'm a descendent from a Walloon family in Central Europe, but I've been on the move ever since I can remember. I'm from everywhere," he said and looked at me with light blue eyes that shot out of his pale complexion like discuses. "Theatre is not about pretending," he continued. "No one will believe that you are really a tree when you stand with your arms protruding in strange directions dressed in brown and green felt – not even a kid will buy that. Costume is vulgar. You might as well be wearing a ballerina skirt with fairy wings on your back." He paused and then turned hastily around, pointing his finger at Esmer. "How would you be a tree?" he asked him.
"I would stand still and try not to move my eyes or anything," Esmer said.
"And you?" he pointed to Maria.
"Oh, I don't know. I never played a tree. I'd just breathe in I suppose," said Maria.
"What about you," he asked Ruth who looked petrified at him. She hadn't made a sound since the beginning of the meeting.
"I would disappear into the background," she whispered after a moment's silence.
"What about you Louisa?" Collard turned to the girl in the wheelchair.
"I couldn't be a tree because I am confined to this chair so I think I would have to play a bush perhaps a what are they called a rosebush or something," said Louisa.
Collard sat down on a chair with its back against his chest. He bared his crotch and the torn patches of his jeans. He looked at all of us individually. At last he spoke. "Have you noticed that all of you speak about the tree as if you're looking from the outside? You are looking at the world in a way that makes an object out of everything. As an actor you have to go inside the tree, you have to be it."
"Sir, you just said that wasn't possible," said Martin.
"I said it wasn't possible to pretend."
"But with all respect, sir, it's not possible to simply transform yourself into an inanimate object," objected Martin.
"It's no more difficult to be a tree than to be King Lear," said Collard. "But you have to believe and you have to show humility and respect. With belief, humility and respect you can be anyone and anything you want. Remember that!"

The theatre was a way of being in many places at once, and this it why it appealed to me. It was an extension of my letter writing but instead of being the writer of letters I was suddenly the postman. Words passed through me. Words that weren't mine, that only stayed with me for a short time until I delivered my lines. And then they were gone again. Words flowed through me.
I found a copy of The Vampire in the university library and began to carry it with me in the hope of finding the key to Collard's world within those lines. The vampire says that the only way to find out who someone is is by becoming that person. I read his urgent invitation to the journalist become me, become me over and over until it became my own private mantra. It became clear to me then and there that the reason why I wouldn't pay attention to the professors at university was not just because I thought I had heard it all before, but because they spoke of knowledge without experience. How would it be, I wondered, if the teacher in literature had lived a scene from Balzac or if the teacher in philosophy believed in Kant? How would it be if they instead of dividing thought and experience were to bring them together? Why this insistence on keeping two sources of knowledge separate from one another? I wanted to find a way to live a thousand years or more. To learn about men and women, old and young, and the attraction and repulsion that bring us together and pull us apart like the tide and the moon. I wanted to live and learn, to watch, love and hate. I wanted no stone to be left unturned. I wanted to be what I found, be that worm, feel the earth and breathe the light. I wanted to swim in a jar of cream until it turned to butter. I wanted to cross every ocean until I grew fins. I wanted to absorb every murmur, every whisper and the passing of time until I became time. And for those who wished to hear my song they had only to press their ear against my rock belly.

Linda and I were the most pious devotees of Paul Collard and although we never viewed the others in the group as serious competition for his attention, we were somewhat put off by the presence of Mimi. She was always nearby, quick to give Collard a hand or to soothe him whenever he threw a fit. Her love for him was utterly unselfish. She loved him unconditionally for what he was and she didn't expect anything in return. At times he roared at her as he did to everyone else, but she just smiled and went to fetch his cigarettes or made him a coffee. It was infuriating to observe. If only she had been not right for him or not good enough, not appreciative enough – how much easier it would then have been to hate her out of sight. As it were, we were forced to tolerate her existence while bitching about her foolish devotion to the man, her obvious lack of independence and her sickening willingness to be his servant – without getting the irony of what we were saying.
Linda and I saw a lot of each other over the weeks, but I held something back from her (I was always holding something back in those times, even when I was open and giving). At least I was a good listener, though, and I didn't give secrets away. When Linda spoke to me about how she would quit her secretarial job and follow Collard around the world, I fed her fantasises with bizarre and fantastical tales about changing destiny and beginning a new life. When she told me that Collard would transform her into a great actress, I spoke back to her in riddles and metaphors. I wasn't her friend, I was her storyteller. Although (or because) my language was like hieroglyphics to her, she loved to listen and weave her own dull life into the fabric of endless possibilities and good fortune. In short, although the stories were told by me, they became hers because she interpreted them whichever way suited her best. After a while I got so good at reading her mind that everything I said sounded like it was coming from deep within her self and she didn't even have to interpret anymore. I wrote a fairy tale about a shell that was found on a beach like that in El Capitan. It was a shell that reverberated with the sounds the listener most wanted to hear. Dona Selsa heard the sound of her son's voice, Mari the sound of her mother with the Finnish cheek bones, and Linda the promise of Collard's devotion. That's what I had become – her magic shell! And all the time I managed to conceal my own infatuation with Collard.