Think of me as your balloon, I would tell my troubled young people, I’m always next to you or hovering right above you. After I said that, I noticed some of them didn’t seem to know what a balloon was, they looked at me so confusedly, I was compelled to assume they had never even seen a fucking balloon. So one bright afternoon a few months ago, I drank a few gin-and-tonics before work, which I do not often do, and then I forced them to watch a DVD of The Red Balloon at our after-school facility. We were not allowed to sit alone in darkened rooms with the troubled young people, all of the overhead lights were on, making it difficult to see the screen. My face was bright red, like the balloon, which one of them observed astutely. I told them to focus on the beautiful film I was screening for their viewing pleasure and to stop looking at me. Then I broke the rules and turned off the lights. I spent the next five minutes or so pointing out for them how each scene was so artfully composed, it was almost like watching a painting come alive.
It’s a painting come alive, children, do you see it? I said with excitement.
Halfway through the film, I felt nauseous, ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and threw up for almost an hour. When I came out, the lights were on, the movie shut off, and they sat there in silence, staring at me with their mouths opened. I must have been making really loud retching sounds.
The point is I always knew my talents would be useful one day, I said to the coworker who asked me what I was doing showing a group of at-risk Latino and African American teenage boys The Red Balloon. Then I employed a strategy I have honed throughout my life when asked a difficult question: to respond with a question of my own. I asked my coworker pointedly what the troubled people’s race had to do with it, couldn’t Latino and African American people watch and enjoy The Red Balloon? And what I said previously was true: I always knew my talents would be helpful to someone, someday.
It took me the entire day after the phone call with Uncle Geoff to begin to clear my head. I wasn’t feeling well in the first place; I had called in sick to work earlier that morning. I spent the rest of the day in bed sobbing, coughing, and toying with the idea of calling my adoptive parents. Surely they would call me, I thought. A call never came. My roommate Julie texted me to ask what the couch looked like, did it look good, could I take a picture of it for her as she would be spending the night at her boyfriend’s place and wouldn’t see it until tomorrow. And what was I supposed to say to that?
That night, somewhere in between my sobbing, somewhere in the middle of my hysteria, the seeds of a plan had germinated. I calmed and composed myself. I have always been a rational and relational person; I didn’t recognize this hysterical, sobbing woman. No. I took care of my peace, I kept it in spotless condition. As the plan germinated, I pictured the funeral, that great spectacle of mourning. I saw strangers standing around taking part in a superficial grief performance ostensibly to both celebrate and mourn a dead person they never bothered to know when he was alive. The next morning, I woke up and saw without question what needed to be done. It was necessary that I attend the funeral, because I was the only one, perhaps, who once knew and understood him.
I stared at the white wall on my side of the studio apartment. A few days ago, when he was alive, I had wiped down all of the walls of my shared studio apartment with a can of cleaning disinfectant, then a rag soaked in lemon oil. Overnight, everything changed, temporally. Everything was now before and after his suicide. I was located in the after-phase.
It was my very observational acumen combined with a genius for ethical practices that compelled me to stuff my canvas suitcase with all of my clothes and to book a same-day plane ticket to my childhood home. Before I put the flight on my credit card, I spent an hour looking online at sweaters on sale, because I had nothing black to wear to the funeral. It took me a long time because there were so many different types of sweaters. Why were there so many different types of sweaters? Fluffy sweaters and mohair sweaters and fisherman sweaters and boyfriend sweaters. Which sweater should I order? I wondered. Finally, I chose a black turtleneck sweater, ribbed, half off. I was always thinking ahead and strategically planning. After I pressed CONFIRM SALE, I smacked my forehead. I should have had it delivered to my adoptive parents’ address! It took a half hour on the phone waiting to speak to customer service to get the sweater sent to the right address. During this time of waiting, it began to dawn upon me that in fact this family tragedy had come at the worst possible time for me, as my work status was currently under probation, even so, there was no question as to whether I would go home or not. Once I reached an actual human, the sweater situation was straightened out almost immediately, but not before I explained to the customer-service agent the special purpose of the sweater: a funeral sweater for a suicide. She understood, and waived the cost for shipping. I hung up the phone and went back to my computer.
I booked the one-way plane ticket to Milwaukee, then began to compose an email to my supervisor. The subject line was A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (NOT THE BOOK). I wrote to him that there had been a death in my adoptive family. My adoptive family was reduced to ashes. Supervisor, you can’t see me now, I typed, but I’m crying. It’s like a sibling Hiroshima. One minute he was there, the next he’s a shadow.
My leaving would be frowned upon, I knew. A few months ago, I was astonished to learn I was the subject of an internal investigation, which I snorted at with laughter because I was the most ethical person in the history of the organization, I let it be known regularly how upright my behavior was especially in contrast to my own supervisor, some kind of Adolf Eichmann type. He doesn’t do anything except what he’s told, I told anyone who would listen, he carries out his orders without thinking about the conditions of the troubled young people.
It’s all about the bottom line with him, I said to anyone with ears, it’s all about living on less and less. Less than gossamer and floss! I once said, only to realize I had been shouting.
Everyone needs toilet paper and tissues, I would say calmly as I put in my weekly orders, everyone needs paper towels and moist towelettes.
He could respond only with numbers and financial feasibility and so-called facts.
What are they supposed to do? I screamed at him a week ago. Wipe the shit off with the back of their hands? Then the shit gets spread all around and everything they touch has shit-traces!
There were a few exceptions to this tense relationality. Some of my troubled young people saw me as I really was, and eventually I went on to befriend them even after they left my supervision. I gave them my personal telephone number and home address in case they wanted to reach me outside of the facility, in case they wanted to grab lunch or go see a movie. And how was it that I was the only one who listened to the troubled people and treated them as peers instead of minions? And what would my troubled young people do while I was away in Milwaukee attending to my adoptive parents? I wondered. They would face hardship after hardship, certainly, especially without their cigarettes or their candy. Some of them would go through withdrawal and cravings. Absolutely they would suffer during my time away. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time, I said to myself as I printed out a plane ticket on my roommate Julie’s printer. In fact it’s audacious to leave at a time like this, especially when my work is under such intense scrutiny, but my adoptive family has left me with no choice. When faced with a crisis one is compelled to act in an ethical manner. And it cannot be ignored that this would be an excellent time to showcase my talents.
I’m the only one left, I typed to my supervisor, I’m buying a one-way ticket and I’m not sure when I will return. Sincerely, Sister Reliability, I signed it, because even though my supervisor did not call me Sister Reliability, even though he refused to call me Sister Reliability, the troubled young people certainly did, and it was mostly for their sake I was writing at all.
3
After I proofread my email for spelling and grammatical errors, I pressed send. Everyone loves to press send, I thought as I pictured the email swoop
ing into my supervisor’s inbox. Then I imagined myself swooping confidently into the Midwest as fierce as a swan to assist my adoptive parents. Time passed quickly or maybe it dissolved. Perhaps it shattered! I finished packing my canvas suitcase. I called a car. When tragedies occur, time slows down or speeds up. I could put forth theories about time to entertain myself, most of them superficial. That’s the truth. I only knew time existed because as the years went on, my flesh slackened and my muscles ached. It was as if my bones were wearing some kind of flesh muumuu. Time itself is nothing but a construction to organize and measure flesh decay.
October 1st, somewhere between 24 and 48 hours after his death, approximately an hour before I boarded a direct, nonstop flight to Milwaukee, I drank six shots of espresso. The airport barista didn’t want to give me six shots, she said it would make me sick, but I insisted. To make her feel better, I told her I would spit out some of it, and I did, I spit it out into a garbage can. My flight was on time, which made me feel calm and generous and philosophical, considering the wretched circumstances. I settled down into my assigned window seat and took out my traveler kit from the canvas suitcase, which I refused to check, and I swallowed a pill for sinus-pressure relief. After I stowed everything neatly under the seat in front of me, something inside me rumbled; it took me a minute to come to the realization that I needed to take a monstrous shit. I flew at once out of my seat, squeezed by all of the people crowding the aisle with their duffel bags and children, and shoved myself into the tiny bathroom, cramming my elbows into my stomach, hunched over, as the shit started to come out. For no reason at all, I thought of a horse and an apple cart, the horse pulling the little cart of bright red apples up a partially shaded gray hill. They had to knock on the door to get me to come out, the shit was so large and dense, it must have taken almost fifteen minutes to evacuate.
A stewardess roved up and down the aisle and made sure people’s seatbelts were fastened. I slid the side of my ass against the knees of the two men sitting in my row. I sat down again. They did the yellow-cup mask demonstration, then the plane took off. I lifted the window shade and turned my attention to the view of the soot-covered buildings and assorted filth. I had succeeded in calming myself. For no reason, I began to feel better, I began to feel like a human again. When we reached the altitude of clouds, I distracted myself from my woeful and calamitous situation by reading a book, an LGBT novel about a man who transitions into a woman and then decides to go back to being a man. I liked stories about people changing their minds and undoing themselves, although in the case of de-transitioning, it’s most likely a rare occurrence, and I had to question the writer’s motives in portraying it. Setting aside the problematic parts of the book, I related deeply to the main character’s challenges when it came to friendship. Because he had made trans-friendly allies during his transition, when he transitioned back into a cis-gendered man, he lost all of his friends. Stunned, I put the book down. There was an odd and haunting parallel to my own life and experiences. I always related any given situation back to myself, another one of my great talents, and I remembered how much difficulty I had leaving Milwaukee and all the troubled relations I left behind. Like the protagonist in the LGBT novel, I had once lost all my friends, in the year 2008. Friendship itself had always been difficult, as difficult as it is for anyone, I thought sitting on the plane. About five years ago, I was semi-famous in Milwaukee for a brief moment, I even received attention in the local newspaper. I referred to myself as an emerging artist, I made crumbling assemblages out of found objects, and innovative performance artists and sculptors and writers and independent film directors and producers surrounded me, and there was an art critic for the local weekly who could not stop writing about all of us. It was a beautiful time, people had art galleries in their attics, and every weekend there was a show to go to, or some kind of absurdist performance theater, where women took off their clothes, even ugly women with misshapen bodies like myself, and men swung around their erections like police batons, my once-friends! Afterward, all of these fashionable and intellectually advanced people, even the ugly ones, went to a bar with a two-lane bowling alley in the basement. No one seemed to care that anyone was ugly, it was beside the point. My fame was very limited to a specific group of people who lived downtown, no one in the suburbs cared about us. Not even my adoptive family knew about it, partially because they never read the weekly newspaper and partially because it was for such a brief time. For a time as brief as candles, people were drawn to me, people searched me out, they asked where I was if I wasn’t there, some people even said I was mildly beautiful. Or perhaps they said I was beautifully mild. Either way. I was always very plain and somewhat shabby, no matter, there must have been an aura of artistic intensity around me, even though I didn’t go to college for art, I went to college for a practical degree in English, you can do anything with an English degree, a guidance counselor told me. I fashioned myself as an artistic person, artistic in my way of living, artistic in my choice of clothing. My favorite shirt at the time was found in a garbage can at the intersection of Farwell and Pleasant, a turquoise sweatshirt with an appliqué of a dog and rabbit in a hot air balloon basket. The hot air balloon itself was pink suede. So it was no surprise that once, a very long time ago, some people gravitated toward me.
Then something went wrong, someone turned against me, perhaps out of jealousy, I’ll never know, and he or she circulated a rumor that I was an artistic hack and called into question the originality of my work. It was said that my assemblages of found objects and texts owed too much to the work of Joseph Cornell and Henry Darger. A few weeks later an article appeared in the weekly newspaper with a photo of me and my work captioned: Appropriation or theft: the failed work of Milwaukee’s Helen Moran. It was an ugly scene; everywhere I went people whispered that I was a plagiarist and a fraud. A side-by-side comparison of my work to the works of Cornell and Darger showed certain similar technical flourishes and extensions, and although it was easy to see an unabashed and perhaps uncritical admiration, my found texts and assemblages were not exact copies, my intention had been to participate in the conversation, not to reproduce what had already been produced. At first I was hurt, embarrassed, ashamed, then I went to the library, looked at The History of Art by H.W. Janson and realized that in the art world there are no new, fresh images. Everything is a palimpsest, and behind that, another palimpsest. Even so, these rumors and words wormed into people’s brains and poisoned my reputation, right as the artistic group began to gain national attention in Chicago and Minneapolis; I no longer received invitations to basement bowling alleys or damp attics or absurdist theater performances or group shows or Biennales, over the course of a summer I was expelled from the artistic group, I was driven out like a leper. I wanted to shake people’s shoulders and scream, everything in the world is a palimpsest, motherfuckers! But no one would meet with me; no one returned my calls. I retreated to my hovel, a disgusting basement apartment in a decrepit part of town not even multi-billionaire international investors were able to rescue. I stopped getting dressed or going anywhere, which was a convenient time to do that, since my adult acne had flared up. Life was taking revenge on me.2 For a month or so, I sat in a basement room with dim light and hatched a plan to escape. In the end I had transformed my mildly beautiful self into a functioning hermit with a sour taste in her mouth. I no longer carried myself with an artistic aura. I started to hunch over if I went anywhere, which was seldom. I used to be a relational person, I thought, until people decided they wanted nothing to do with me.
How is someone supposed to live like that?
I decided to start over. I moved to New York City, a city that no one from Milwaukee imagined moving to a) because no one who lived in Milwaukee ever dreamt of leaving in the first place and b) because the cost of living in New York City is expensive, astronomically so. But I lived cheaply there on quinoa and rice. Or perhaps the word is frugally. I was sane in that astronomically expensive city living life frug
ally like an urban peasant. It took me years to find a stable living situation, yet I was saner than I had ever been in my entire adult life. Helen Moran, a sane and functioning adult in New York City: how? How is it possible to keep your sanity and exist on crumbs in the drawer?
You’ll see, I said to no one. I’ll show you. Someone will pay me one day to divulge how I lived so frugally, elegantly, and sanely in that glittering, amorally rich, and enormous hellhole.
4
As I woke up from a dream, the stewardesses collected trash. In my dream I was two women instead of one. We had been awarded a grant from a top-tier research-driven university to write a report on turtles nearing extinction on a remote and uninhabited island. Turtles: peaceful, monumental, stone-like creatures. When not dutifully writing our report, we were to be in charge of their feedings. We fed the turtles large, leafy plants the size of old gray desktop computers from the ’90s. It was fun having a friend; we wore thick rubber gloves fitted over our hands that made it impossible to type out our report. A turtle bit us through the gloves and it felt like getting your fingers snapped in a mousetrap. The dream became a nightmare when we found ourselves in a morgue, standing before my adoptive brother’s dead body spread out on an examination table, about to watch a man perform an autopsy as he rolled on his rubber gloves. We started crying, then one of us walked away, and I was alone again.
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace Page 2