Book Two, Chapter Three
“Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament”
This story is practically lousy with insight.
Jacqueline told me lies at that first meeting….I suppose she could have told me the truth then and there, and I would have lapped it up–I believe I was utterly devoted from the beginning. But it’s difficult to remember quite how and when interest in another human being flares into something more committed, more passionate. It may be that I am inventing the impact she had on me at that first meeting, simply re-inventing history to justify my later excesses. I’m not sure.
More.
If one has given oneself utterly, watching the beloved sleep can be a vile experience. Perhaps some of you have known that paralysis, staring down at features closed to your enquiry, locked away from you where you can never, ever go, into the other’s mind. As I say, for us who have given ourselves, that is a horror. One knows, in those moments, that one does not exist, except in relation to that face, that personality. Therefore, when that face is closed down, that personality is lost in its own unknowable world, one feels completely without purpose. A planet without a sun, revolving in darkness.
More.
It wasn’t that she was feeding on me. I want to be clear about that. She was no lamia, no succubus. What happened to me, my fall from grace with ordinary life if you like, was of my own making. She didn’t bewitch me; that’s a romantic lie to excuse rape. She was a sea: and I had to swim in her. Does that make any sense? I’d lived my life on the shore, in the solid world of law, and I was tired of it. She was liquid; a boundless sea in a single body, a deluge in a small room, and I will gladly drown in her, if she grants me the chance. But that was my decision. Understand that. This has always been my decision.
More.
It’s not a small world, when there’s only one face in it you can bear to look upon, and that face is lost somewhere in a maelstrom. It’s not a small world when the few, vital memories of your object of affection are in danger of being trampled out by the thousands of moments that assail you every day, like children tugging at you, demanding your sole attention.
There’s a lot more where that came from in this, one of Barker’s finest short stories. I didn’t really remember just how good it was until I reread it, actually.
It starts off with a sort of traditional fable/fairy-tale structure, extraordinary things happening with minimal explanation or justification. In this way the main character’s name echoes not only that of another mysterious and captivating woman, Jackie O, but of another character whose bizarre story illustrates the absurd horrors of the human heart, Josef K.
We then switch over to the first-person “testimony” excerpted above, by that of one Oliver Vassi, Jacqueline’s doomed lover. (That’s pretty much all she has.) It’s a switchover that shouldn’t work but does, even as the POV is switched back and forth several more times. Barker makes the most of the point-counterpoint through his prose–just by way of a for instance, as our male interlocutors shower Jacqueline with worship and fear, we barely notice that her habitual internal exclamations of “My God, this can’t be,” internalized supplications to the great Pater, gradually disappear from her mental vocabulary, until in her final triumph they are nowhere to be found.
It’s a story about gender and power, and the relationship between the two. As Oliver says,
I was convinced that something in her system was awry…On reflection, of course, that seems laughably naive. To think she wouldn’t have known that she contained such a power. But it was easier for me to picture her as prey to such skill, than mistress of it. That’s a man speaking of a woman; not just me, Oliver Vassi, of her, Jacqueline Ess. We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That’s what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are.
Students of the superhero genre will doubtless be interested to learn that Jacqueline’s powers fall into that traditionally female domain–the fluid powers of the telekinetic. The argument often goes that such powers, along with invisibility, telepathy, intangibility and so forth, are to be seen as inferior through their constant association with femaleness. But “Jacqueline Ess” is maybe the greatest act of reclamation for telekinesis ever, and I’m not even talking about the beautiful passages in which the resting Jacqueline’s flesh ripples and flows like a lake, or when her genitals pulse and throb like a sentient flower: Simply put, this is one of the most gruesomely violent stories I’ve ever read, and that really is saying something. When Jacqueline kills somebody, you know they’ve been killed. When I first read this story back in high school, I got about a sentence into the part where Barker describes the way the taut flesh of a man’s forehead and nose splits down the center as Jacqueline mentally flays him alive before I grunted in disgust and literally put the book down. I’d never done that before and I don’t think I’ve ever done it since. Barker really pushes body horror to its limits here, in the same way that he’ll push his phanatsmagorical bestiary/physiology to its limits in the next story.
There are many other moments to savor–the humor (Jacqueline’s patronizing shrink is named Dr. Blandish), the sex (telekinetically enhanced and super, super hot), the turns of phrase (the gorgeous iambic pentameter of “my fall from grace with ordinary life,” echoing “In the Hills, the Cities”‘s concluding “He interrupted neither with his name”), the bracingly direct graffiti shrine to Jacqueline, the Klaus Nomi-esque pimp she enslaves toward the story’s end, the punning use of “Her Will” in the title, and especially the last paragraphs, as transcendent as those of “In the Hills,” in my opinion. A greatest hit, without question.