Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  We weren’t ready to make something Real together. Nadezhda was controlling. Almost dictatorial in her distaste, she could list all these things our reality show shouldn’t be but offered no alternative vision. Meanwhile, Morgan froze. At our first and only photo shoot, I melted all the more in love with her. The branding agency had sent a photographer to the apartment. Before the camera, Morgan, who is Andreja Pejić–striking with big attentive eyes, jujube-plump lips, and a long straight nose, didn’t know how to hold her face. She looked as though she had mean gas, which she might’ve—we both get IBS when tense. I couldn’t stop laughing at her sweet impossibility. When we got the pictures back, no one looked like themselves. Nadezhda loaded a group shot in Photoshop and swapped everybody’s heads around so Max grinned above Miffany’s cleavage and Morgan farted on Alicia’s music-video-babe frame. Sharing it in our group chat, every room in the apartment laughed.

  I want to take my beautiful, brilliant friends’ pain away. I want to eat it like I do my feelings, slathered in nut butter, and then shit it in the form of writing. (Everything I write is shit—why do I think this?) I want my friends to breathe easy, to recognize their genius and not take it personally, to feel loved, not like they have the world to prove, and to nurture fearlessly—there’s this sense we’ll be exploited if we care too much, especially about men, so we other, blame, and rarely let our guards down. Most of all, I just want us to be able to hang out and make stuff without going into the trauma. We talk so much about what hurts.

  Language-free experiences are rare for me. I like to converse—it’s a big part of my social life and work—but I love love love feeling free of words even more! That’s my ultimate Real. When I’m spinning on news cycles (headlines stick like pop refrains), my mind often summons this visual: I’ll fold rooms full of pastel cashmere sweaters.

  I practice taming the voices daily by repeating mantras, stretching my heart above my head, painting, singing, meditating, and the bad habits: smoking, binge eating. I was a low-key sex addict for a while because sex was the first exercise I found that would shut the voices up. The voices, the voices. Sometimes they’re beautiful, but it can be too much! In New York, where I lived for almost four years, I heard e V e R y T h i N g. Police choppers, screaming, gossip, honking, put-downs, ads, and catcalls. Ass so fat you can see it from the front, Hey red, wanna ride on, So I texted then he texted then I texted then, Can I take your picture for a Japanese style blog? My agent says, It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What you do? You integrate it with cream—you make it weak, Next stop Canal Street, That’ll be $26.18. $454.14. $2.99. $106.66. $12.80. $9,000. I can feel your halo (halo) halo, I can see your halo (halo) halo, our tears!

  The loudest voices are real-world silent. Like inner bullying and my paranoia—sometimes I think I know what everyone’s thinking: the subtext of conversations, the motivations behind actions; these come through without my wanting them. People tell me shit—maybe that’s it. I hear it again and again: “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” or: “I’ve never told anyone this before.” Maybe I’m unconsciously asking for it. I don’t really say anything, but I listen.

  This is all to say that sometimes I become so full of voices, I’ve considered smashing my head on my apartment’s brick walls to make them stop. Or I’ll climb as high as I can go and scream because it’s not just voices, it’s The Words.

  Sitting on La Mariposa’s roof one afternoon, wanting to just be, my senses bounced all over on the scene naming: Azure, Queen palm, Jacaranda, Airplane Airplane Airplane, Streeeeeam, Mockingbird mocking car alarms, Roses, Thorns, Pricks, When roses are delivered, they shave off the pricks, Dicks, I Love, Gratuitous, Lascivious, Luscious, Limits, Cerulean, Fire ants, Sting, All wisdom is remembering. Shut Up!!

  Kissing Lucien, this all gets quiet, so I love him. I’m drawn into a trance from the way our tongues dance. When we hug, his breath gets long and loud, reminding me I have lungs too, and when he moans, it’s with repose, like how he tells stories, like he’s never worried about wasting someone else’s time. I’m practically mute in his presence; I don’t want to interrupt; the intel is too valuable; I’m routinely dumbstruck. God, how I love going out of my mind!

  Freud believed something like, Traumatized people don’t remember their trauma, they reenact it. I’m not sure what happened to me to make me so crazy. My crazy being: not being Real. I fake a lot. Lucien calls me phony when I don’t sound like myself. On the phone, he’ll say, “Can I talk to Fiona, please?” (Miles Davis said [or so the Internet says he said], “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”)

  I’ve had dreams of child molestation. Sometimes it’s my younger brother who I’ve failed to protect. Once it was me. I have no waking memory of this happening, but I have few memories of life before ten. I don’t know if it matters what happened. Past is past is fiction like future. While the now just is—if I meditate on that, I can get free. Suddenly, the channel will change. And I can just be. Often, though, I catch myself acting out scripts and plotting fantasies to fulfill. I write my reality. Desires manifest. This is cool when it’s conscious, but we have underworlds within. When you find yourself in the same situations and relationship dynamics again and again, that’s a sign!

  A few months ago, I ate an award-winning cannabis candy called Cheeba Chews. This was the only time in recent memory when, having none, I would yearn for words. Can a hallucination be guttural, sensational? This experience wasn’t visual, not beyond splotches of colors and a penis-like form. I was lying on Nadezhda’s shearling throw in the middle of a vacant Mariposa, unable to open my eyes. What I experienced had no setting or plot. Characters, yes—or a person, someone I know, but I’ll never tell who. The feeling: inescapable burning shame and a shamefully pubic turn-on. Suffocation. Familiarity. A disgusting, sticky, sick shame raged. The look was that of light coming through squeezed-shut eyelids, I later realized. Red, pink, and black light flickering obscurely. I couldn’t escape the feeling.

  Engulfed, I thought maybe it was a memory of Nadezhda’s. She experienced rape in young adulthood. Or maybe a collective consciousness of sexual trauma. It could be birth—the first sexual trauma. I let myself explore it. I wanted to be brave, to see if I could touch the truth. Does it matter if it really happened? Wasn’t this stoned summoning real enough? The feeling was of a child sexually used by an elder. I couldn’t move. Was it me? Was it a repressed—or could it be, a false—memory?

  I imagined my Jungian analyst’s cat-lined eyes lighting up, extra-compassionate, hearing about how I may have been sexually abused, as if she’d discovered a cracked black obsidian egg up my—

  But isn’t that what she’s trained to look for? Childhood sexual abuse is the story of trauma and healing. Have we been set up? Did Freud really reveal something common, or did he script it into our cultural consciousness? It also occurred to me, paralyzed on Nadezhda’s throw, that this could be a media memory. I’ve watched enough episodes of CSI and Law & Order: SVU, re-watched Mysterious Skin, and read Heather Lewis—maybe I’d confused those stories as my own, embellishing. My imagination is such that, last year at Joshua Tree, a Burner type was tightrope walking ten stories above me, and though I was sitting on the ground, I swear I could feel the wind on his skin.

  I called my friend Susan. She said, “It’s not real, you’re stoned.”

  Susan has this certainty about reality: Drug experiences are not real. Only sober, live, immediate, here, now, a priori experience seems to be “real” for her. She’s a performance artist. Up until then, I’d considered everything as real. Every hallucination, projection, dream, fantasy, and magazine story—all were part of my vision of reality. It’s multidimensional. REALms.

  A month after my bad Cheeba trip, Nadezhda invited over a boy she wanted to sleep with. Jordan’s the type who’s stoked for virtual reality; he said he’d happily trade in his body for programmatic freedom. Nadezhda wa
s twenty-one to his thirtysomething. It was late afternoon on a Sunday. I was in my bedroom as usual, when Nadezhda, feeling shy in her seduction, asked if I’d join their hang.

  We sat in the exact same place on Nadezhda’s floor where I’d gone under. Jordan offered to smoke us up. As he rolled a spliff, I explained my decline, omitting any real details: “I don’t want a bad trip again.”

  “Bad trips bring up stuff we need to work through,” Jordan suggested.

  “Of course,” I replied. “But I’m not ready . . .”

  Jordan smoked alone on our roof. When he came back down, Nadezhda showed us an iceberg graph of conspiracy theories she had found on the Internet that she thought we might like. On the triangle above the water it said: 9/11 was an inside job, The Illuminati, and The US elections were rigged. Underwater was: The Holocaust was faked, Michelle Obama has a dick, and The Earth is flat. Even lower: The Roman Empire still persists, Satan controls the Earth, and as deep as you could go was: Reality is Story.

  “That’s what I believe!” I exclaimed.

  Episode 04—“It’s a trap!!”

  THE BRANDING AGENCY’S OFFICE WAS in the East Village. Three floors of high rent. The company was founded by a bro, some early-thirties white son of money who wore streetwear and a Rolex. The company made its money creating “brand experiences” for other companies: fashion labels, boutique hotels, cosmetic conglomerates, and the occasional car thing. “Brand experiences” meaning parties, fashion films, social media ad campaigns, pop-up shops, and artist collaborations—the kind of insidious advertising that tries to pass as generous, artful, and authentic. For “creatives” by “creatives.” The work looked like popular art from the eighties, street style from the nineties, and Internet trends two years too late. Up to ten interns worked there at a time. One of their unpaid tasks was to troll social media for “inspiration.” They’d screengrab what cool kids were wearing and sharing, then present it as market research.

  When I first moved in to La Mariposa, my new friends were already being ripped off by this agency. I thought: might as well cash in.

  The agency had a “culture” front. They’d finance little not-ad projects to look like they cared, like an interactive whaling tour of Hawaii, a map of Bushwick delis, and our reality TV show. I’d worked with this agency before. I wrote their Books column when I lived in New York. Imagine fifty bucks for a four-hundred-word column (typical rate), and $1K in rent. At one point, it felt like buckets of words were being funneled down my throat. Letters have sharp edges! Choking hazard! And my intestinal tract—devastated.

  The first budget the agency offered us for the show was okay. Meager split between the six of us, but since we were all pretty much otherwise unemployed, the few thousand was exciting: something to work with. It kept getting cut, though. Then it was no Alexa, they wanted us to work with one of their commercial directors. Fuck no. We settled instead on doing it ourselves. Shooting on all our cell phones, we’d bring the footage together at the end, like a great Exquisite Corpse. A trial in intersubjectivity! Merging our Realities! MirrorrorriM MirrorrorriM on the screens, what does it mean to be seen? I loved the idea of a Real Life social experiment we’d then edit into TV.

  The unknown made the branding agency, and some of the Mariposa girls, nervous, though. Nadezhda was accustomed to preplanning all her selfies. Her commanding self-consciousness extended to public dialogues, in which she’d assert grand statements, masking the personal with conceptual knowledge, or she’d act mute, observing with obvious judgment. She spent half her childhood in Russia—she has trust issues. Morgan, meanwhile, was unaccustomed to being seen at all beyond the Real Real. She didn’t like to put her form on display or use the tools common to our age. No selfies. They freaked her out. “But maybe that’s a good thing,” she said. “Maybe that’s why I should do this?” The branding agency, of course, wanted the product in advance. That’s how advertising works: you pitch an existing idea, then execute it precisely.

  “Tell me,” Alexandre, my main contact at the branding agency, said at the outset of our first and last office meeting, “who are these girls?” (Everyone always forgot about Max.) “Who are these characters?”

  “They’re not characters!” I said. “They’re real people—infinite, ever-changing, composed of generations of genetics and the histories we’ve been taught, of every experience we’ve had, of our dreams—where do they come from? Why do they feel . . . so solid?”

  “Right,” Alexandre said. “But that doesn’t help us. We don’t know them. You have to introduce us to them. Here, let’s play a game—”

  He wrote down the names of all the residents of La Mariposa, one of them incorrectly, on a piece of scrap paper. He pointed to the first one.

  “Anastasia,” he said. “Who is she? In one word, describe Anastasia.”

  “Nadezhda. And no.”

  “Just try.”

  I closed my eyes and summoned Nadezhda. Her face is china-doll symmetrical, creaseless and refined, as if photoshopped. When she smiles, which is usually with a laugh, you get to see gums and crowded teeth, mischievous wrinkles burst on every side of her pale blue eyes. Her smile is gawky like how she dances, not like you’d expect, thin limbs noodling from elbows and knees, her solid core pogoing as her head cranks from side to side. Nadezhda can be mean, deliberately so it sometimes seems. She’ll ask you about your greatest insecurity as you’re walking out the door to a job interview, or she’ll bring up the similarities between your ex and your new lover in front of the new one. She’s a shit disturber, just like my dad used to call me. A punk. Nadezhda and I could be sisters. She threatens my prideful ego like one—repeatedly cutting me down to humility. But then she can be so compassionate and wise, offering better counsel than my Jungian psychotherapist ever has. Nadezhda diaries daily in eight-point font, likes trompe l’oeil clothing, hoards stationery supplies, throws temper tantrums, and learns fast. Growing up in Russia, the foundation of her English came from reading and writing rather than speech so she’ll sometimes pronounce words funny, like ka-veet for caveat. She was twenty when I first met her, and she’s fated, I’m certain, to make way more money and material-world difference than I ever will. Stubborn, willful, judgmental, and justly intentioned . . .

  “A force,” I said.

  “How so?”

  “Forceful, um . . . Dictatorial. Like the Brain in Pinky and the Brain.”

  “Great!” Alexandre wrote the Brain next to the name Anastasia.

  He had me do this for every “character.” Alicia was reduced to the Sphinx, Miffany to the Muse, and Morgan to the Hard Body. Alexandre’s list had the same aura as that group shot from our first photo shoot. A dysphoric almost-likeness: MirrOr mIrrOr.

  I felt like puking, and then Alexandre made a proposition: “What if,” he said, “we placed this brand-new very cool Australian ginger beer in a bunch of scenes in the show? We just signed with them. They’re . . .”

  I’d tuned out at “Australian.” It was so funny—I’d already seen this movie! It’s called Reality Bites, from 1994, directed by Ben Stiller. It’s one big ad for the Big Gulp. (“Why can’t you just be, Fi!?”)

  “You’re the devil!” I exclaimed. “This is pure evil!”

  Alexandre smiled. I liked him a lot. He had an education in neuroscience, a French wife, and a fat newborn. I thought for a minute. Evil is in devil, just as God is in good.

  “I would accept,” I pronounced in my bullshittiest voice, “a sponsorship from Bragg Premium Nutritional Yeast, or Vogue.”

  An hour later, Miffany walked into the Chinatown dumpling parlor I’d reserved for our interview. I’d been conducting one-on-one interviews with all the members of La Mariposa. This early research was designed to guide my role as the creator and host of our show. Miffany—who’d been in New York for two weeks, overeating in a dark apartment with a friend who, she said, was “really going through it”—was the last on my list. It was snowing outside and Miffany was wearing an XXL T-sh
irt over an XL hoodie with rave-wide corduroys and thin shimmery jewelry.

  “Aren’t you—”

  “Cold, yeah.”

  In Ottawa, Ontario—fall/winter 2001—I wore a uniform of JNCO raver jeans, cropped tank tops, and a faux-fur parka from Abercrombie & Fitch that didn’t cover my midriff. Every day, I’d arrive to computer class, first period, grade eight, with the bottom ten inches of my jeans frozen solid. They’d melt inside, soaking my Airwalks and socks. I was dressing for post-surf SoCal in minus-twenty-degree Canada. (That’s minus four Fahrenheit.) My parents called me a fashion victim, and I pouted back: “You just don’t understand!” They didn’t. They couldn’t remember that kids don’t feel the cold. My belly would be pink from exposure, and I didn’t feel it. I felt cool.

  I served Miffany hot tea and ordered Chinese broccoli. Since it was her bed I was subletting, I knew her the least well. Also, maybe because she was seemingly the most girly. Until recently, I’ve had a hard time connecting with girly girls, maybe because I’m often told I’m girly myself. I don’t feel it. Girly is vapid, frivolous, and dangerous, ripe for exploitation—or so I was raised to compute. I knew how girly girls were judged and dismissed, as if we hadn’t given this yawning world a good think, as if we were asking for it.

  What I am that might come across as girly—being gentle, dressing in ruffles with exposed lace lingerie, luxuriating in pastel, giggles, grooming, and gossip—is actually rooted in great wisdom. It comes from a recognition that the power games that pass for intellect, strength, and import in this world are rote, wasteful, and ouroboran in their chase. Lonely, oppressive. Seriousness. No thanks. Life is short! And beautiful. Water’s like liquid crystal. I wear a rose quartz egg up my pussy every few days to connect with my heart chakra. Tongue kissing vortexes me through the cosmos. Dry brushing your skin before showering enlivens the senses. Moisturizing too. And as the great spiritualist Jean Vanier knew: The closer we are to the body, the closer we are to spirit . . . relationship is hand-to-hand, eye-to-eye . . . the Word became flesh, God became flesh.