Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  In the midst of this, I started noticing my Kundalini instructor, Guru Mitar, repeat: “We can’t overcome real problems head-on. We have to go about them sideways. That’s why we lift our arms up to sixty degrees.”

  Movies have made my consciousness impatient for change. I expect challenging transformations to occur over the course of one song as a montage. Not jumping into freeway traffic cut tearful praying at a bus stop cut leaving the library with teetering stacks of books cut underlining passages like a maniac cut looking like I had an epiphany cut dancing in my bedroom fade dancing in the club cut laughing with friends over cocktails cut cutting my own hair cut looking amazing with my new haircut at a business meeting cut shaking hands cut bank balance over a hundred—no—over a thousand dollars cut buying myself flowers, driving a convertible into the sunset, cut cut cut.

  Ha ha ha. A vortex of change did hit me, actually. But it was nothing like that.

  Ariana, a poet, artist, and astrologer whose work I revered, had told me this was coming. During a natal chart reading the month I moved back into Mariposa, she said, “Between January and May, you won’t feel like yourself.” I’d forgotten she told me this until February, when—depressed and desperate for counsel—I decided to re-listen to the audio recording of her reading. There it was, her prediction: “Barren, confusing, you won’t be able to delight in others as usual. Perhaps a time of more reading and writing.”

  I told Nadezhda it felt like a spiritual puberty. Like changes were happening that were beyond my control; mysterious, awkward, uncertain. Nadezhda had been spritely lately—twenty-two, in love, and adventuring. This kept me going. Everything is always happening at once: birth, death, love, loss. If I could just focus on this—the all—I wouldn’t self-destruct in my individualized WTF. The thing was, most people in my world were suffering. Simone was exhausted, working overtime in the slog of cold-winter Canada. Misty was uncharacteristically anxious on a residency in Athens. Alicia was burned out on bad flames in Brooklyn. And Lucien kept threatening suicide on the phone from Taos. Trump had just taken office. They say your Zen practice only really starts when the going gets rough. It’s easy to be breezy when love’s abundant—in that yellow room, meditating on bliss.

  “Sometimes I wonder,” Alicia once mused, “if this realm isn’t a forced labor camp for the expansion of universal consciousness, like if our working through suffering isn’t somehow energy building. We’re God’s slaves.”

  Another theory of the Universe we shared is that we’re transitioning into the Age of Aquarius. We figured ourselves as early Aquarian heroines, tasked with bringing about the New Age and its promised dissolution of imperialist Western supremacist capitalist patriarchy. We’re in the midst of a paradigm shift. Gender flux, collective consciousness, interconnectivity, respect—this is all dawning, but just. We may not see the clearing in our lifetime. Next time I’m coming back as a cat, or a tree. Human beings are exhausting.

  I missed Alicia. It seemed like everyone was always coming and going and coming and going. The twenty-first-century way. We moved through cities, gigs, and trends like we flipped channels as kids. I knew I had friends all over the world—I watched them online—but none were here for me now, or I couldn’t be Real around those who were, “Because I’m an alien!!” (My version of Morgan’s aquarium.)

  My alienation was unlike anything I’d experienced before. I knew unruly states. I used to get so furious with desire, I’d want to set fire to Pasadena family homes, put cigarettes out on my forearms, smash in windshields, and bind my throat in stems of thorns. I knew envy’s venom, and the spiky thrill of cynical intellection conquering disappointment, and I knew the hollowness that followed. I knew demoralization, and self-pity, and anxiety. But this? This was a feeling like antigravity, but with no emotional levity. My mind felt like a bowl of jelly that had been slurped by some unknown force until all that was left were a few quivering scraps in my skull. Even the baby idea, my umbilical cord to the world, had started to seem ridiculous.

  This is the part of the book where readers complain I’ve lost them.

  “The narrator disappears,” they say. “My attention waned . . . I couldn’t connect to anything.”

  Amen.

  This was a part of my life when, if you were to figure it cinematically, you’d set everything including the soundtrack to slooow-moootioon and add some gooey g1itC#hy% FULL-SCREEN distortion.

  I called it being an alien, because I had no human reference for what was happening. I tried describing my new phenomenology to friends, but when I did, they looked in my direction as if I wasn’t there, just as I blanked out whenever they started talking about restaurants, movies, or a package they had lost in the mail, you know, “the real world”—it was utterly unrelatable.

  I walked LA now nauseated by its smells, like piss, fast food, and gasoline. I watched office buildings bend on the face of other office buildings, reflections in windows wavering as I walked by over and over again, transfixed by the curves. I walked into twelve guns, police pistols pointed at a black man on 8th in Koreatown. I took my phone out to film it. Most citizens walked right on by. Everyday life in our crumbling empire—maybe my dad was right.

  The latest trends in the high fashion I followed were clowns and cowboys. Whiteface makeup on models in high-end designs mirroring the grotesquerie of white supremacy, its renewed visibility in our political climate. On a similar tip, Alicia said she was suddenly drawn, and she wasn’t the only one, to Wild West styles—the hats, boots, and chaps in dusty leathers and suede: “As a way to assert my Americanness at the same time it’s being denied.”

  “The flag”—I overheard a homeless person scream—“looks like sheriff badges and blood!”

  It was windy season in Los Angeles, so the national flags, which usually hung just out of my short-statured, self-involved line of sight, were suddenly thwapping louder than choppers, unignorable and everywhere, I realized.

  A man was murdered in our building. His lover, a young woman, who I’d met for the first time in our lobby that very morning (she looked like Beyoncé and had a baby; we talked about worn T-shirts and my mom) had stabbed him. Self-defense. I tried following up on her case through neighbors, police, journalists, and our landlord. No word.

  Life was all dead ends and detours: nausea, stasis, sleep. It had to be some kind of puberty because I was angst-ridden with shame about my new reality, and sleeping nine, ten, twelve hours a night, as if I was growing. My waking hours were occupied by books, including this one. It was then: cornered in the east wing of La Mariposa, only enough money saved for rent, and jobless—no assignments, all my pitches and applications denied—that I started writing for myself again. Episode 02—in which we meet Noo.

  One of the purposes of our Saturn Returns, I read, is to empower us to become authors of our own lives. Reclaiming your authority, I read on a blog, means taking responsibility for whatever is happening in your life.

  I used to give so much of myself away. In my teens and early twenties, in the name of experimentation, I flowed. I tried on belief systems and friends like I did clothes. Near the end of my third decade, this started to feel scary. Like repercussions were real, consequences could be lasting. My mind started sorting inventories of everything I’d done and how it’d played out; where I’d fucked up, been cruel or neglectful, what I’d loved and lost. It seemed suddenly like I’d mistaken bending to others’ wills with going with the flow, like I’d been all too organized by my parents, schools, media, peers, and history.

  Is this who I want to be? What is an “I”?

  For years, I’ve been studying the violence inflicted through language. Bullying, insults, property contracts, religious dogma, binary opposition, and propaganda. When I first met La Mariposa, convinced our alphabet wrought more evil than good, I started fantasizing about a Tower of Babel: The Sequel.

  In this twenty-first-century version of the story, humankind—who are going mad talking and typing, telling and [unintell
igibly yelling]—would be struck mute. All of us! We’d all get severe aphasia. We’d still be able to hear: breath, moans, sighs, the sounds of words and surrounding nature, but their signification would be lost to us. Or their denotation? Yeah, that, because we’ll still be able to hear pitch, tone, and the musicality and feeling of speech. We won’t be able to read either. We’ll see letters and words as nothing but shapes!

  Now if this were to happen, what I believe we’d learn is that some of us are subtly psychic. Or, said another way, there are many ways to communicate, and some of us are more attuned to those than others. Body language, intuition, empathy. We who are lit like that would become superheroes. Persecuted, probably, like the X-Men. Or like we already are.

  “The goal is to invent a language without othering,” says my friend Jac, a trans woman who’s been diagnosed as schizophrenic and so can’t get legit gender-reassignment help. She has a hard time getting by, making rent or non-Internet friends, and this is why I don’t get our world—I think she’s right about almost everything, and yet she’s so afraid she can barely leave her state-assisted bare-bones housing.

  I didn’t trust my use of language—that’s why I quit writing for a spell. I realized I’d been using it to get things, like attention. I relied on ready-made linguistic transactions to survive. I wrote press for a living, and I always regretted it: hackneyed phrasing, stereotyping. Nothing hurts me more than saying what I don’t mean or saying mean things. I’ve been beaten up, bones broken, covered in tattoos, but none of that hurt compares with the pain of betraying the truth we all hold, the better we know to do. This is why I quit writing, but that’s a lie! I’m always writing. I can’t stop. This fucking mind. I quit publishing because language organizes lives, and my language, I realized, was corrupt and corrupting. I’d learned it from mass media, duh, from commerce. Lies lies lies.

  I’m serious about saving us. Every time I say it, I get goose bumps. It’s like my third-favorite astrologer Kelley Rosano insists: We don’t get what we need, we get what we believe.

  I’ve started to believe that writing is magic. Check it: s-p-e-l-l-s.

  William S. Burroughs, one of my philosophical heroes, who occasionally communicated misogyny and who lived on an allowance from Mommy into his fifties, is often quoted as having said: Language is a virus from outer space. I think because it’s mysterious. It infects us. Has side effects. Evil thoughts and utterances will manifest in physical dis-ease and other gnarly realities. Ditto banality. And godliness.

  When I moved to LA, I’d just started to consciously try to wield what Burroughs called “the Wishing Machine.” This is the idea that there’s some sort of universal mechanism wherein what we ask for will be delivered, but of course its timing and totality may be unexpected. Be careful what you wish for.

  I’ve manifested boyfriends. Before the comic book boy, I said, “I need to learn about health and nutrition,” and there he was: a young man with a chronic illness he managed via holistic means. Before Lucien: “I want to learn about the esoteric arts, magic, spirit, and acting. I want to act.” Welcome: my devious actor lover, a prince of darkness, and Jesus freak. (I used to use boyfriends as a secondary education. It’s like my friend Misty once said, “Ever notice how men have so much . . . information?”)

  When I told Morgan I would write a book to save myself and her and all the girls, I believed it, because I’m desperate. I never want to play dead again. I never want to disappear so far into myself that people I’ve known for years cease to recognize me in person. (This happened in my anxious New York years, and when my old friends finally understood—“Oh, you’re Fiona, Fiona”—it was with a look of horror I’ll never forget.) I mean it because I need you. I need my fellow travelers, co-conspirators, playmates, wizards. But seriously! Who else will I hang out with in heaven? There are heavens on Earth. Don’t kill yourself yet, Simone! Don’t drown in self-hate, Morgan! It’s inevitable, we’ll die eventually, so until then, can we please have some fun? I know it’s tempting to go in, to fall out of the Real—fear is ready-made, marketed to us—I fall for it too, but when you do: I miss you.

  Amalia lately is distracted, frustrated, and tired, cursing the art world, which is disinterested in her latest, most novel work, which in a decade, when it’s less politically relevant, you know they’ll be mad for. Meanwhile Simone, savior mother sweet, keeps sending me pictures of the rashes that are exploding all over her body, as her beloved nonna is dying, her career is sputtering before starting, and she’s being kicked out of another apartment building (this one’s been bought out by a bro-y tech start-up). I can’t get through to Mo. Or, we talk, and I know she’s hearing me, registering it all, but her fear is louder, and fucking with her. I have a sense this fear was ignited by the house fire and the boyfriend she got with thereafter who was into gagging blow jobs. His kink was making the girl puke, which Mo did once (she’s always been good-giving-game), and she said she felt disgusting after (“humiliated, ashamed”). Worse still, this boy, who should’ve been a man (he’s thirty-four), confessed he was still in love with his ex-girlfriend the whole year he and Mo were dating. Stop wasting our time!

  I know the Wishing Machine is Real because I’ve started paying attention. As my articulated desires become clearer and more heartfelt, they manifest faster and more obviously, with less corrupt by-products. When I broke the reality show contract, my practice was still clumsy.

  I remember walking around Ktown one evening, probably PMSing, feeling out of sorts, furious and in mourning. Pulse, the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, had just been shot up by a man in the midst of his Saturn Return. When I saw the picture of the perpetrator, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old security guard, I said: “He’s gay.” I just knew. Eventually, it was reported that various witnesses recognized Mateen from Pulse and gay dating apps. The FBI claimed that wasn’t what was up, and blamed the motive on “terrorism,” the Islamic State. But self-denial, feeling Other and apart, ashamed, confused, and repressed in your desires—I don’t know anything more motivating to violence.

  I, too, have wanted to hurt what I most desired, that which I was and wasn’t. I hated my high school crush Ashley Anne Cooper. I hated luscious girly girls who could just! have! fun! I hated the boys I loved because I wanted to be loved like them. I wanted to destroy everything I wanted to be or be with but felt I couldn’t or wasn’t allowed.

  On this heated evening in Ktown, I was on my fucking phone again, talking into its Voice Memos app:

  the psychology that leads to such fantastic violence,

  the reality bleed,

  impotence, disbelief, screen-addled everything and nothing,

  the vigor of destruction

  it’s easier to destroy than to create,

  destruction is seductive, and

  —lazy, common, fear based—

  it’s scary to try and actually make a difference

  to change

  Just then, I saw a group of girls in a car. Young women playing loud music, filling up their gas tank. I melted—

  That’s never been me.

  I want that.

  I want to just be with girlfriends,

  to go on an adventure,

  in a car.

  I was precise. I cried.

  (I barely cried for a decade. My phony years. Stuck up. Now I cry daily. “Me too,” Clara says. “I think of it like sweating. You gotta do it all the time. Let the toxins out.”)

  The next week, I found myself at Manhattan Beach with Alicia, Clara, and Nadezhda. Clara and I had taken a touch of acid, drinking it from a shared glass of water in that yellow room, and then we piled into Alicia’s car to drive to the beach. As soon as we parked, Clara leaned out of her passenger-side door and pissed onto hot concrete. I almost peed my pants laughing.

  At the beach, we cuddled on a blanket and waded into the ocean. Clara delighted in the water; she looks so much like Laura Dern when she smiles. The acid was mild, all it added was some rainbow brights to th
e sea-foam. A group of dudes tried making lame moves on Alicia. She says this happens everywhere she goes, that it’s incessant and physical. “Sometimes men think they can pick me the fuck up.” She’s like one hundred pounds, five foot two? Alicia was discomfited by the attention. We gossiped until the sun clouded over, then packed up, and drove the long way home, singing along (“I love this song!”) with Rihanna and Lil Wayne.

  We had to stop for gas along the way. As I watched petite Alicia pumping fuel into her car, I, too, got filled up with what I privately call God. A warmth of stillness in gratitude. When you recognize your wishes fulfilled, don’t forget to say thank you.

  Episode 11—“All the Real girls”

  IF YOU’RE IN AN ABUSIVE relationship, it’s likely you believe people can change. Or you’re intimate with their pain. It’s textured like yours, or like your little brother’s, who you wished you could heal but never could. Sex is a salve you can deliver now. Or maybe you grew up starved for attention, so this possessiveness feels like what you missed.

  Maybe you love seeing what will happen next. Being with them was like playing roulette at first. You’d either get nothing or a prize, but then triggers were introduced, and now it’s more like Russian roulette: same game of chance, higher stakes.

  You’re accustomed to being on high alert. To living in a home wherein one wrong spill or sentence could incite a fight. And you love them. And you want to believe. I love you I love you I love you, they say, dragging you by the feet. You’re ashamed for wanting to believe, you should know better. Or maybe you’re scared of your own rage, so you use theirs to access it. What do you know? You’ve never been alone long enough to hear your interior.

  They are your only mirror. You have no friends, no family, no money—or you think you don’t—and you can’t make it without them. You’ve been bullied into insecurity. Or you’re proud, so you believe: You can’t hurt me. And you’re definitely raunchy, horny, a devious slut, and no one else lets this vital side of you out.