Girls Against God

room. At this point it could be any room. It’s still without depth, width, length or any sense of time … It might have other dimensions, ones we don’t yet know about, dimensions that don’t have names. Perhaps we’re in a room with a closed centre. There, at its core, it reserves space for something else. Everything else. Maybe a room without us has room for the connections between us.
From a distance we hear voices belonging to a class of teenage girls. The murmur comes from a cold classroom at the end of the hall. We glide between the girls into the classroom, invisible, like a video camera, while they recite their names one by one. They seem to have short and simple names, but we can’t hear them, only an indistinct hum. It sounds as if we’re outside the room, or as if we’ve stopped our ears with cotton and can only hear the drone from our own heads. We have to read their lips to understand what they’re saying. A girl fills the frame and introduces herself in two syllables. We can only see her lips. Maybe her name is Venke. As she says her name, icy mist escapes the corners of her mouth. Threads and bubbles of spit knot her lips together as she opens and closes them around two syllables. A weak shimmer that resembles a muted laptop gleam is coming from deep down in the girl’s throat. The light escapes her mouth, filtered by her tongue and the different constellations of her teeth.
There are no windows, no bookshelves, no books, no coat racks or chalkboards around the girls. Instead, images are projected onto the spotless white concrete walls as if they were a canvas. Images of windows are projected onto the walls, with trees swaying in the wind, and images of bookshelves full of books on maths, geography, history, chemistry, Norwegian and Christianity. If it weren’t for the concrete’s rough surface, it might look almost real. Their school uniforms look almost real, too. They are wearing black, slightly stiff-looking jackets with shoulder pads, and matching pleated skirts, but with yellow neon stripes on their sleeves and trainers. They look like a futurist marching band.
A teacher takes attendance from behind a desk at the far end of the room. She is wearing a fitted black suit with stripes that gradually shade from red to purple to blue. She yawns a little. Each time a girl says her name, this teacher taps a screen with her right index finger. As she takes their names she also sticks each finger of her left hand into a small machine that resembles an automatic pencil sharpener. The machine sands her nails neatly and paints them a gorgeous bright pink.
We continue to watch the girls’ lips move. The murmur of voices and the hum from the air conditioning make it impossible to discern individual words, but the conversation seems academic. Some lips are more energetic, they expel longer words from their mouths, working harder and producing more saliva. Other lips are softer and more questioning. Eyeshadow glitter falls on a shoulder, someone’s chest, a desk; the glitter intermingles with the glare from the overhead lights.
There’s a girl seated at the back of the classroom who’s not quite paying attention. Everything she’s wearing that isn’t part of her uniform – her socks, undershirt, pants, bra – is black. She looks up from her writing. At first glance she seems to be writing in a notebook, but it’s soon revealed to be a tablet. A small projector shaped like a gaping goat’s head is attached to it. Light spills from the goat’s mouth as if from a fountain and projects a 3D drawing of lines, text, and images onto the surface of the tablet.
The girl uses a pen to write in her book, then pushes the pen against the projection: the text disappears. She continues to think.
The girl is me, obviously. She represents my wet dream of writing myself into a story, and that includes you too, reading this. Perhaps she’s me in 2002, hating God at university, spending hours attempting to make Microsoft Word occult by inverting the colours so I can write in white on a black document. I’m seething. How is this so hard? Why do we have to chisel black ink into an empty canvas? Why does white mean innocence, beginnings; why is it the colour of indexes, emptiness and poetry? Why do I have to bang my forehead against white walls and stare glassy-eyed at white forever? The only thing I want is to be able to brainstorm with colours reversed, to write with white hope on black hatred. I want to be able to begin with hate.
We return to the room. The girl in the classroom isn’t a character; she’s made herself invisible to the others. She’s the camera in this film, a camera that also has her own feelings and thoughts. She introduces herself with her mouth, as Terese, Terese after Theresa Russell, the actor who plays Almost-Marilyn in Insignificance. Terese records negative film, with colours inverted: black is white, white is black. She’s not a subject, she’s the eye, a thing, an object, that sees, feels, zooms, inverts. She could be you. She’s a thing that hates.
Terese has always made herself invisible in this way. Pretended that she’s a camera. She hasn’t seen black metal videos or hung out with corpse-paint boys, but she’s spent half her childhood squinting at trees and the sun, making treetops and sky swirl and darken. She spent her youth on the internet, sent information bundles of text and image back and forth over mIRC. She felt herself disappear a little more each time, as if her body no longer had a visible surface. She identified with Ally Sheedy’s character in The Breakfast Club, the black-clad nerd who shakes her hair over her desk to make dandruff drizzle like snow. I always thought of that scene as an adolescent witch