Assoula’s patronage of the arts was legendary, although
she privately admitted to the matrons of her inner circle that
it was simply the best way to immortalise her reputation. She
organised film festivals where the viewers wore glasses that
allowed them to insert themselves into each film as if they
themselves were playing one of the characters, thereby turning
a passive experience into an experiential one. She organised
exhibitions where the artworks materialised as speaking
hologrammatic entities and had conversations, even
arguments, with the audience about the nature and relevance
of their existence. She organised literature festivals where
writers, hooked up with temporary brain implants, took to
the stage to compose poems and stories. On the large screen
behind them, the audience saw not only their writing, but
also inside their imaginations to witness the thinking that
led to their acts of creation.
Assoula walked among the gathered designers and guests,
who all but curtsied and bowed in her presence. They had
all been knocking back shots of the life-enhancing snake
bile she liked to serve up at her events, sweetened by fine
crystals of sugar, which had been shipped in from the only
remaining sugar-cane farm in the known world. Everyone
relished the sweetness, which was so rare to experience, ever
since agriculture had declined along with the need for
humans to consume food.
Towering over the gathering, Assoula was at least 2ft taller
than her guests, due to the regenerative properties of spine
implants, which lengthened as she aged. Her natural skin
colour was turquoise, but for the ball she had gone transparent
and chosen an invisible dress to wear, detectable only by the
black thread at its hems. Not only was she transparent, but
she glowed from within with lights that illuminated all the
bones in her body. Her organs, on the other hand, were these
days more mechanic than organic.
She did not so much walk as waft like a surreal spectre
across the lawn, as she bestowed upon the visitors her
glamorous munificence.
When the competition was due to begin, a floodlit runway
unravelled itself out of a misty vapour on to the polka-dot
lawn, and chairs several rows deep materialised to seat the
visitors, including Assoula’s fellow grandees, for whom this
was the highlight of their social calendar.
Assoula, the sole judge of the competition, took her place
in the front row. When she was ready, she waved the mosaic
of bright bones inside her hand, signalling for proceedings
to begin. She was excited, as always, at what this year’s festival
of ideas would bring. She had dispensed with the idea of
mere clothes being worn in her fashion show a long time
ago. “It’s so passé and so déclassé,” she had announced. “What
fascinates me are concepts; concepts without the intermediary
of fabrics are the future,” she declared. “I want to see social
commentary,” she preached from the pulpit of her
philanthropic platforms. “I want to see innovation and
rebellion. I want to see new perspectives on history and
philosophy. I want to see a kind of new.”
The first designer to walk the runway wore the idea of war,
which exploded out of her in the form of images of weaponry
on battlefields. There were bombs, machine guns, rocket
launchers and land mines alongside the visceral gore of the
wounded, dying and dead who floated up to the skies. Assoula
found it crude, obvious and, to be quite honest, upsetting.
The second designer explored home, evoking, as he walked
the runway, images and smells of a roaring, wooden fireplace
of yore; of a small brick house with a young mother and
father with their two cute little children cuddling up togetheron a sofa singing nursery rhymes. To Assoula it was
nauseatingly old-fashioned and anti-progressive. The next
designer wore poverty, which was all well and good, but
Assoula found it quite misplaced and somehow accusatory.
The designer who explored science by wearing antiquated
scientific terms was boring. Who cared about thermodynamic
beta or viscous friction in polymer dynamics or the
stoichiometric coefficient? It was intellectual showing off
with no aesthetic value whatsoever. One designer wore politics
and sashayed down the runway with ruthless personal
ambition, class privilege and falsehoods spinning out of him
in a whirlwind of images. Entertaining – but insubstantial.
Another one also chose politics, and staggered down the
runway with a real knife quite literally stabbed in her back.
There was blood trickling down her naked skin. Powerful
but too simple and, frankly, self-harming. One designer ran
down the runway at supersonic speed, offering a completely
unoriginal perspective on sports. Likewise the one who
hobbled down on his knees while praying to different gods.
Assoula was about to give up hope when someone appeared
who blew everyone else out of the water with an unparalleled
execution of ideas and aesthetic sensibility. It really was quite
extraordinary to see this person progress slowly down the
runway while physically morphing from what appeared to
be one gender to another. First as a traditional woman, then
as a traditional man, then as someone who had the physical
traits of both, and finally as someone who seemed to be neither
male or female, nor something in between, but instead they
radiated a humanness out of an electrifying transmogrifying
presence. They appeared almost as a divinity who embodied
the essence of life without a physical body. It was so supremely,
breathtakingly strange and magical and beautiful that
everyone, including Assoula, sat awed and moved by the
spectacle before them. This was what it could mean to be
completely beyond human. This could be the future.
When the designer revealed her true self, she turned out to
be a plain and short purple-skinned woman, who wore simple
white clothes. She had spent many years working on her designs
away from the limelight. She had a modest manner and was
extremely grateful to be chosen. A worthy winner indeed.
By the end of the evening, the designers who had lost, had
lost themselves completely to snake bile, along with the entire
drunken congregation. All decorum was abandoned as they
extracted the most from being Madame Assoula’s guests and
had a rollickingly raucous time on the lawn. When the moon
rose, they slowly began to peel off to spend the night in a
pod that would expand upon entering.
Assoula retired early to her palace, alone, as always. The
fashion show was another enormous success and her visitors
were happy. She herself was incapable of getting drunk. The
alcohol just swished around inside her, and if she did not
open valves to release the liquid, her metallicised organs got
rusty and had to be replaced.
She headed straight for her sleeping chamber. She would
spend the night there, lying down in repose, with her eyes
closed, but not in sleep. She could no longer sleep and
missed it terribly. The ability to shut off her mind. She so
missed the bliss of it. Instead, she pondered on her decision
to finally become a mother. It was her next project. She had
waited nearly two hundred years and was feeling the need
for someone to continue her family bloodline of matriarchs- to continue their legacy. It was time for her to pass on all
that she knew, and when the girl was grown-up and
independent, Assoula would dismantle her own body.
It wasn’t right for anyone to live forever. n
She had
dispensed with
the idea of
mere clothes
being worn
in her fashion
show a long
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