Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  Still, now, when I think of Max, I think of how little I know about him. Most of what I know has come through Nadezhda, whose room he shared. She called him her husband or wife, primary partner, roommate, boyfriend, friend. They met on a dating app in December 2014 when they were both nineteen. Max had been bumming around America: Alaska, New England, New York, Montana. He was passing through LA when he and Nadezhda matched. They went on a few dates, she says, “then he left, kind of into the void.” Come summer he came back, and, “I told him he should move to LA, find some roots.” He stayed in her room for five months, including the first three weeks I was there.

  Maxime Flowers. Given name: Saoirse. His Instagram may be my favorite. It’s all black and white, filled with cats, graphs, biblical snakes, requests for soup delivery, and poetry. Once I watched him edit a post. In under six seconds, with a single nimble finger, he edited a selfie unrecognizable except that it was in his signature degenerate grayscale. In person, Max speaks casually of rockets propelling him and time as an abyss. He has many twelfth-house placements. I’ve seen him wear a face of gold dust to a party. Topless under a fur coat, tight leather pants, foulards. His daytime look, when we lived together, was like Hunky Dory David Bowie.

  During our only real one-to-one convo, Max informed me of a 1973 futurist text called Up-Wingers. It came up because we were talking transience, the nomadism La Mariposa supported.

  “Up-Wingers is about a new living structure, the mobilia, based off jet-set, or hostel, travelers,” Max explained. “It’s a manifesto—” He paused. “I don’t care much for manifestos.” Still, he recommended this one. “If only because it’s interesting,” Max said, “to read what predictions for the future have come to pass. I find, for the most part, we overestimate our capacity for progress or velocity. We move a lot slower than anyone really hopes for.”

  Within a month of moving in, I had a contract drawn up for a “multimedia documentary exposé” on my brand-new beloveds and their communal home in Koreatown, Los Angeles. It would be Reality Bites meets Tumblr, The Virgin Suicides but healthful. Young-Girl, art world, recession America, Survivor! A real Real World. The IRL World. We would co-create it, social-mediate it. A trial in intersubjectivity. A critique of youth as commodity. A vision of zeitgeist really embodied. It would be truthful, lifelike, amazing.

  “Why?” Nadezhda, the youngest beloved, asked shortly after I signed the contract. I took another toke and felt my ego disassemble.

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  Later, I would claim, “I just wanted to do what I always try to do, to share what I find beautiful.”

  Later still, I would bawl over my “sellout” “exhibitionist” “opportunistic” “incapable of real love” “fearful capitalist” animal instincts.

  Why?

  Why did I think to frame and display this place, these people, their privacy, for the whole world to see? Why was my first instinct to turn new relationships into paid labor? It was like the Hollywood hippie I called heartbreaker said: “Why can’t you just be, Fi?”

  It was in Morgan’s underutilized bed that it dawned on me how truly fucked this reality show of mine might be. I woke up from an afternoon nap, midweek no doubt, still stoned, and saw her room for what it was: Real. The ceiling, the sunshine, the boxes of Pukka tea, the stacks of unwrapped chocolate, the crumpled hoodies, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity—everything in there was Real.

  This is difficult for me to explain.

  I didn’t use to believe in “the Real.” Like in the Lacanian sense, or how Franco “Bifo” Berardi or Slavoj Žižek refer to it. Beyond the symbolic. I’d even published essays countering it. Fantasy is Real, I insisted. Fake tits are as real at being fake as natural fat sacs are . . . Which is true. But there’s also: the Real. It’s real. Indisputably now, I know. The Real is a mode of perception that makes all others seem like altered states. It’s a mode I’ve been practicing living in. Microdosing psilocybin helps get me there, ditto a top-shelf indica, a hard-earned Savasana, the ocean, trees, and being with Amalia, Lucien, or Simone. The Real is like pure presence. Resistance-free. It feels like a shift to lucidity within the dream of waking life. It can look like a shift from 3- to 4-D. Space surpasses time as your prime dimension. Perhaps the defining characteristic of the Real is not trying. Like athletes and musicians say, it’s when you’re in the flow.

  I know when I’m in and when I’m out of it—that’s the most I can really say of the Real. Now I’m still more out than in. Mostly I’m in this in-between, knowing at least that I’m out, which is better than being wholly unconscious, which I’ve been—how embarrassing.

  So I woke to the Real in Morgan’s bed. It was a queasy awakening (first times tend to be). Truth rushed in like, Hello, Nowness! My real eyes realized “I” had been showboating. Seasick. Mental. I’d been projecting a Hermie Island sequel, this spin-off sitcom. Californication, 90210, La Mariposa, Friends. Situation comedies!? Bad girl, Fifi! It’s the Situationist International you revere, remember? Visibility is a trap. The revolution will not be televised. Hollywood gobbled, I’d been scripted. Damn, girl. LA. Hell A. It hit me—

  Why can’t I just be?

  Episode 02—“It’s a trap!”

  I BROKE THREE CONTRACTS IN 2016. The first was verbal, a monogamy clause. But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody is psychic; I’d just become attuned to it. The second was an NDA. A man who gave me money asked me to sign it when we first met at the Hyatt near LAX. But he got my name wrong, took my Twitter handle for the real thing, so I signed smiling. The third and last was this reality show deal. Making a documentary about my new, younger friends and their home in Koreatown.

  It’s been one year since I signed my friends’ lives away during my temporary stay, and two months since I officially joined their lease. As is the nature of La Mariposa, most of them have since flown the co-op. Morgan is living with her parents in the Bay. Alicia is in New York. Miffany’s been all over. Ditto Max. I can’t keep up. The only one left is Nadezhda, the one who initially brought me in.

  Our relationship is sisterly. I never had one. She keeps asking me if I’m going to do something with this writing. I was sharing it with her and the other girls as it came to me, checking my mirror, so to speak. They consented yes, always. I was told I was trusted, which is a large part of why I knew I had to break our contract—I didn’t want to risk compromising that.

  In many ways, I feel even more than a year older now. I have been Saturn Returning, which is an astrological concept I’m no longer sure I believe in. I’ve spent much of the last two years trying to determine how belief determines reality and how much. Just last week a Kundalini instructor in Santa Monica speculated that one’s beliefs manifest as event and circumstance. She was raised by a Vietnam-born mother, she said, who followed the Chinese zodiac. Her mother believed that those years forecast to be bad for her astrological sign would be. She feared them. And they turned out to be fearsome. “Looking back,” the Kundalini instructor said, “you can see a pattern. The years my mother thought would be bad were—stress, calamity, loss. But I never believed. I don’t know why, I always thought the idea was silly, that the Year of the Goat could be bad for me. I don’t have bad years. My mother has retrospective proof of her belief. As do I. What’s true? Maybe we make it up.”

  That’s what my comic book artist ex-boyfriend thought of the afterlife: that what we believe it to be will be. Fire and brimstone? Heaven is a place on Earth? Gold-gated clouds? Absolute nothingness? Anything you want, you got it. I think he read it in a book.

  Saturn is said to “return” when a person is between twenty-seven and a half and thirty years old. It happens again after another twenty-seven and a half to thirty years—for me, if I’m lucky enough to live that long. Western astrology is based on the belief that individuals, at birth, are imprinted with a set of influences emanating from the planets, stars, and other stellar bodies, which act upon one’s character a
nd destiny, determining stuff like how you communicate and experience beauty, your relationship to power, order, flora, fathers, and mothers. The planet Saturn is said to be Father Time, Kronos, dominating, reality-checking. He’s cold, impersonal, and wise. And when he returns to the place in the sky where he was when you entered the world, he bullies you into your next life stage. Some don’t make it out alive.

  It’s a fun game—asking elders what happened to them between ages twenty-seven and thirty. The stories tend to be epic: sudden career changes, international moves, surprise inheritances, marriages, divorces, deaths, births, travel, great works made and lost. So far I’m halfway through, and my changes have been mostly internal. Despite great effort on my part to shift my material circumstances, I am still chasing nominal freelance checks to pay rent, still loving boyish beings with suicidal tendencies, still plotting revenge on the capitalist patriarchy, and still fantasizing about never writing again.

  Nothing has changed, and everything has. That’s what happens when you come to believe in God. When you learn to be grateful to just be, every conscious moment in this realm, even loss and debt, feels like a gift. You sense, at least, that you’re no longer afraid of death. Chronic time becomes illusive, a joke. The body is alien, an avatar, borrowed. The simplest actions bring pleasure. Walking. Cutting carrots. Sweeping cat litter. The sky is my favorite movie. This whole trip, though, is filmic. A play of shadow and light. Moment to moment to moment is Now. Forms change and there are essences that remain.

  I call this living the Real. The more in it I am, the more like-minded lifers I attract. For a minute, I thought our reality show could be about that—about Millennials or Digital Natives or whatever you want to call us in our struggle to be Real. It’s endemic in America.

  Our apartment looks like a stage set. Something about its height and the light in LA. We’re on the top floor overlooking parking garages and a cluster of high-rises. Beyond that are palm trees and the hills. Built on a slight incline, our apartment seems tilted forward from the entrance, threatening to descend into the concrete below. The place is painted pale institutional avocado and lime green, and decorated with the kind of cheap fixtures that look fake. Our ceilings are tall enough for a camera rig. Nadezhda now lives in what would be the living room were we not the kind of girls who tape posters to our walls declaring, WHAT DO WE WANT? NO JOBS! WHEN DO WE WANT THEM? NEVER!

  As of today, we are three broke girls and a cat, Noo, a rescue who self-harms or self-soothes (maybe one and the same) by licking her ginger mane away. Her preferred haircut involves a shaved tail. Sometimes she’ll follow that fade up her spine. The resulting look is like a reverse mohawk. Before I adopted her, Noo would hit skin and not stop. Now when I catch my cat manically licking, we play. I pet her and whisper, You’re so beautiful, you’re so lovely, I love you, I will protect you, I promise you, you sweet divine, regal, beautiful creature. A cat whisperer once told me to do this. “Cats are very vain,” she said. (They are, epigenetically, royalty.)

  I probably would’ve risked the reality show had the budget been better. But the youth culture industry relies on our selling ourselves short, on lit kids trading in their creativity, vitality, and taut-skinned desirability for a good party, tenuous social validation, and the false promise that cultural capital may translate in time to a source of real income. Many of us are happy to take the onetime check. A Calvin Klein campaign. Why not? Or maybe I’m a poor negotiator. My Saturn is afflicted in the second house of resources—money’s the most mysterious thing to me.

  Alexa K. was set to direct. The girls and I were stoked. Alexa is a real artist, market-vigilant or German-like, her cynicism services a sublime idealism. The branding agency said they couldn’t afford her, though, even when Alexa said she’d do it for free.

  At the time, I had been smoking so much weed my veins turned green. I had also been compulsively taking Voice Memos on my iPhone. Existential epiphanies, creative plots, intersubjective dialogues, and jokes—I felt the need to document it all. In one recording, I went off on what I was then calling The Real Real World, or The IRL World.

  “Our show,” I go, “it’s about—”

  How much of what I think I know was learned from media or other people versus from firsthand experience?

  How many single images do I consume in a day?

  Where do our beliefs come from and how do they organize our lives? Actions? Consequences?

  If we were to watch what was going on in most offices, bedrooms, and homes, what would we see? What are we seeing?

  Like, today I saw all over the world and back and forth in time. I was with friends in several countries. This is so cool, but what happens to the body when it thinks it’s experiencing all of these adventures, romances, and horrors, but really it’s sitting still?

  It feels like we get flooded with the appropriate response stimuli to like, a physical threat or the wish to make love, but then . . .

  What are we doing with that energy?

  If we could afford to adventure more offline, what would we do?

  How would we feel?

  Why are we poor? There’s so much abundance about. Why are we pouring money into VR? Who cares.

  WE ALREADY LIVE IN VIRTUAL REALITY.

  We know so little of the machinations and magic of this realm. What is consciousness? The Real. Who said it . . . that quote . . .

  [Thumbs through iPhone.]

  Few women ever experience themselves as real. —Andrea Dworkin

  Oh brother.

  But really—why don’t I feel real? What makes me feel real? Mass shooters don’t feel real. We want to have influence. We seek to test reality. Ripple. Ripple.

  Actions have consequences.

  I feel Real when I talk about the Real with other people. Sometimes.

  You can’t look more than one person in the eyes at the same time.

  Why is there so much suffering? When it could be so simple. IT IS

  SO SIMPLE.

  I have all these beautiful, brilliant friends and family. WE’RE HERE.

  Right now. Alive.

  Yet we’re stressed and depressed and some say lonely or lost.

  Why do all these kids write to me saying they’re lost?

  The show is for them. What if we collected them? In one place where we could learn to recognize each other. Learn to Be. Truthfully. Mirror mirror. The world is a mirror. Don’t you see?

  I had been walking around Koreatown alone taking these oral notes. It was late. My period had just come on and she was wavy. A mournful orchestra of milky, knotted energy was rising from my pelvis, its notes culminating meters beyond my body. I sat on an apartment stoop on South Harvard Boulevard to finish my monologue. Becoming conscious of where I was and what I was doing, I started to describe the scene around me: the full moon, the oceanic traffic sounds, a nearby Dr. Seussian garden, and all the passersby who looked oblivious to my madness. (Few of us out here allow ourselves to really recognize one another.) As my tearful in-breaths became laughter, I felt the same channel-change as in Morgan’s bedroom. It was as if my eyes widened, letting in more light. Depth chiseled the edges of my vision. The movie clunked into 4-D. I’d gotten there. To this blessed realm that my friend Clara, who we’ll come back to later, had been breaching too. Once, at a farmers market, Clara and I got there together. I remember Clara turning to me and saying, “Some people live here!” The Real. “It’s really real!”

  When I first moved into La Mariposa, among its six residents, including myself, our three-room apartment housed twelve different kinds of eating disorders, stacks of unopened letters from debt collectors, racks’ worth of Goodwill treasures, and drawers full of stolen Sephora. We had addictions: to fuckboy drama, selfies and likes, deli wine, cardio, and anything oral. We shared desires: for True Love and Universal Basic Income. Our traumas: the psychic schism of routine objectification (body dysmorphia, surveillance paranoia); over-media-ation (mercury poisoning and ADHD); date rape (dissociation,
anorgasmia); debt and joblessness (insecurity, anxiety, and shame); and parental migrations, depressions, deaths, addictions, and divorce (attachment and abandonment issues). This was all out there. Talked about. Art was made about it. It decorated our floors and walls. After living in New York for four years, where the “artists” I met were so professional—rich kids, groomed to continue to profit—I was refreshed by the candor, idealism, diversity, and genuine artistic talent I witnessed in this Los Angeles home.

  I met the residents of La Mariposa at that age where differences of class and related values start to show themselves. When you’re young, in your teens and early twenties, in an arts scene, you can all seem the same. Everyone spends everything they have. Living in a dump is just like, you party a lot and don’t care to clean. You can process crap food, drugs, and alcohol, and still have radiant skin. You look cute in everything. As you age, this begins to change. Around twenty-seven, I started to notice who could afford to have babies, buy houses, and invest in their careers, who had the start-up capital and contacts to launch a small business, buy canvas, hire assistants, and travel. And who couldn’t—who got sick and disappeared. I realized all these kids I’d hung around with at parties in New York City came from low-key dynasties. Politicians’ kids, CEOs’ kids, famous artists’ kids.

  I wanted to belong. Before I knew what was going on, I thought it was possible. I remember being out to dinner—I was twenty-four and had just moved to New York—with some new friends in a neighborhood called NoLIta, where rent on studio apartments was $2.5K easy, and every other shop was staffed by Australian fitness models. I was always tense at these things, choosing the cheapest wine and saying I wasn’t hungry, when really I just couldn’t afford the steak my anemic body craved; I ate from the bread baskets others ignored. I didn’t understand how everyone could go out all the time, and live where they did, and look as they did. Radiant! At this dinner, I remember, a typical NoLIta clique walked by, models and girls who trained to look like models, and I said, “Everyone is so beautiful here!” And my friend Susan, who was always right, replied, “No. They’re just rich.”