Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  There’s an obvious paradox here, for all three women: their fantasy of disappearance reinscribes the dazzling force and vision of their intellectual presence. It’s a “profoundly tricky spiritual fact,” Carson writes. “I cannot go toward God in love without bringing myself along.” Being a writer compounds the dilemma: to articulate this desire to vanish is always to reiterate the self once again. Greener, not paler. Porete calmly burning in Paris. Weil willing herself, starving and brilliant, toward her end.

  Later in Carson’s book, in a three-part libretto, the poet imagines Weil in a hospital bed, as “the Chorus of the Void tap-dance around her.” Carson’s Weil says, in a line that makes me shiver: “I was afraid this might not happen to me.” She expires in the white space that follows the libretto, reaching the logical endpoint of her philosophy of devotion: reaching toward ecstasy in this way is not so different from reaching toward death. “Our existence is made up only of his waiting for our acceptance not to exist,” Weil writes in Gravity and Grace. “He is perpetually begging from us that existence which he gives. He gives it to us in order to beg it from us.” To grasp at the type of self-erasure that Carson’s three women become fixated upon is to approach a cognitive limit, a place of instinct and unconsciousness, a total annihilation that can be achieved only once. I have wondered if this is part of the reason that evangelical Christians often seem so eager for the Rapture, the prophesied end-of-days event in which they’ll depart the earth and ascend to heaven. When you love something so much that you dream of emptying yourself out for it, you’d be forgiven for wanting to let your love finish the job.

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  The last time I participated in anything on my old church campus was high school graduation. I was wearing a white flowered sundress under a royal-blue robe, and I was onstage at the Worship Center, looking up at the bright lights, toward the empty balconies, giving the salutatorian’s speech. I had turned in a different speech for approval than what I delivered. I barely remember what I ended up saying—I know I made at least one joke about the Repentagon. My classmates whooped, but, as I crossed the stage to accept my diploma, an administrator hissed his disapproval. The distance between the place that formed me and the form I had taken was out in the open, and widening. The next Christmas, when I came home from college, my church held a holiday service at the Toyota Center, the huge downtown arena where the Houston Rockets play. I spent much of the afternoon getting stoned with a friend, and, in the middle of the spectacle, I started to lose it. The country star Clay Walker was singing, his face looming huge on the jumbotron. I left my parents, edging my way out of the stadium seating. Outside, on the perimeter of our church service, vendors were selling popcorn and brisket sandwiches and thirty-two-ounce Cokes. I went to the bathroom, overwhelmed, and cried.

  I wonder if I would have stayed religious if I had grown up in a place other than Houston and a time other than now. I wonder how different I would be if I had cleaved to this feeling of devoted self-destruction—or even of solitude and striving, or writing, in the manner of Carson’s three women—and only been able to find it through God. I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe, after all of this, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all.

  I wonder, sometimes, if I have continued to do drugs because they make me feel the way I did when I was little, an uncomplicated creation, vulnerable to guilt and benevolence. The first time I did mushrooms, I felt perfect and convicted and rescued, like someone had just told me I was going to heaven. I walked down a beach and everything coalesced with the cheesy, psychotic logic of “Footprints in the Sand.” The first time I did acid, I saw God again immediately—the trees and clouds around me blazing with presence, like Moses’s burning bush. Completely out of my mind, I wrote on a napkin, “I can process nothing right now that does not terminate in God’s presence—this revelation I seem ready to have forever in degraded forms.”

  Recently, I found myself doing this again—this time in the desert, that perennial seat of madness and punishment and epiphany, in a house at the top of a hill in a canyon where the sun and wind were incandescent, white-hot, merciless, streaking and scintillating across the bright blue sky. I left the house and walked down in the valley, and started to feel the drugs kick in when I was wandering in the scrub. The dry bushes became brilliant—greener—and a hummingbird torpedoed past me so quickly that I froze. I experienced, for the first time, Weil’s precise fantasy of disappearance. Each breath I took felt like it was echoing clangorously, an impure reverberation. I wanted to see the landscape as it was when I wasn’t there. I had tugged on some fabric and everything was rippling. I had come to that knife-edge of disappearance. For hours I watched the blinding swirl of light and cloud move west and I repented. At sunset, the sky billowed into mile-wide peonies, hardly an arm’s length above me, and it felt like a visitation, like God was replacing the breath in my lungs. I sobbed—battered by a love I knew would fall away from me, ashamed for all the ways I had tried to bring myself to this, humiliated by the grace of encountering it now. I dragged myself inside, finally, and looked at the mirror. My eyes were smeared with black makeup, my face was red, my lips were swollen; a thick whitish substance clung stubbornly around my mouth. I looked like a junkie. I found a piece of paper and wrote on it, after attentively noting that the ink seemed to be breathing: “The situations in my life when I have been sympathetic to desperation are the situations when I have felt sure I was encountering God.”

  I don’t know if I’m after truth or hanging on to its dwindling half-life. I might only be hoping to remember that my ecstatic disposition is the source of the good in me—spontaneity, devotion, sweetness—and the worst things, too: heedlessness, blankness, equivocation. Sunday in church isn’t the same as Sunday on the radio. I’m trying to rid myself of the delusion that either type belongs to me. The sense of something is not its substance. It isn’t love, trying to make two things interchangeable, when they are not. In Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich describes sin as “behovely,” which translates as “advantageous,” even “expedient.” “It is no shame to them that they have sinned,” she wrote, “any more than it is in the bliss of heaven, for there, the badge of their sin is changed into glory.” But then, at the end of the book, she warns the reader that her work “must not remain with anyone that is in thrall to sin and the devil. And beware that you do not take one thing according to your taste and fancy and leave another, for that is what heretics do.”

  In the fall of 2000, DJ Screw was found dead, fully dressed, on the bathroom floor at his studio. He was twenty-nine. He had an ice-cream wrapper in his hand. In the autopsy, coroners found that his body was full of codeine; his blood flowed with Valium and PCP. His heart was engorged, enormous. At his funeral in Smithville, writes Michael Hall in Texas Monthly, the old folks sang gospel and the rappers nodded quietly along with the hymns. People lined up outside the church the way they’d done outside Screw’s house to pick up their tapes, mourning the man the way they had always gotten his music—that sound he’d created that approximated the feel of a drug binge, no matter what Screw told reporters; the sound that mimicked the flow of all these substances, darkening the wide, anonymous, looping highways, a secret and sublime desecration that seeped through the heart and the veins of a city, that set the pace and the rhythm of its people slipping past one another in their cars.

  The year of Screw’s death, I got on a bus and drove east toward Alabama with a thousand other kids. On a middle-of-nowhere beach, we participated in mass baptisms, put our hands up in huge services where everyone cried in the darkness. We groped one another on the bus afterward and talked all day about being saved. Later on, it was one of the boys from that trip who chopped lines on my friend’s kitchen table as I waded through her pool, drunk on sweet syrup, staring at the stars. There are some institutions—drugs, church, and mone
y—that aligned the superstructure of white wealth in Houston with the heart of black and brown culture beneath it. There are feelings, like ecstasy, that provide an unbreakable link between virtue and vice. You don’t have to believe a revelation to hold on to it, to remember certain overpasses, sudden angles above and under the cold and heartless curves of that industrial landscape, a slow river of lights blinking white and red into the distance, and the debauched sky gleaming over the houses and hospitals and stadium churches, and your blood thrumming with drugs or music or sanctity. It can all feel like a mirage of wholeness: the ten thousand square miles around you teeming with millions of people who do the same things, drive under the same influences, respect the same Sundays, with the music that sounds like their version of religion. “Our life is impossibility, absurdity,” wrote Simone Weil. “Everything we want contradicts the conditions or the consequences attached to it….It is because we are a contradiction—being creatures—being God and infinitely other than God.”

  The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams

  Billy McFarland started scamming at the age of twenty-two. Born in 1991, to parents who were real estate developers, he spent nine months at Bucknell before getting accepted to a startup accelerator and then dropping out to found a nonsense company called Spling. (Crunchbase describes it as a “tech-driven ad platform helping brands increase media engagement and marketing revenue by optimizing their content presentation.” This was 2011, when it was still possible to say that sort of thing straight-faced; it was the year that Peter Thiel, the libertarian venture capitalist and Facebook founding board member who once wrote that women’s suffrage had compromised democracy, started offering $100,000 fellowships to dropout entrepreneurs.) In 2013, McFarland founded Magnises, a company that charged upwardly mobile millennials a suspiciously modest $250 a year for VIP event tickets and access to a clubhouse. Magnises gave members a “signature” black card, which duplicated the magnetic strip of an existing credit card but held no other advantages: like the company itself, the card was just for show.

  Magnises (“Latin for absolutely nothing,” McFarland said) attracted breathless press and a growing membership culled from the boundless cohort of young New Yorkers who are interested in projecting an aura of exclusive cool. “Billy McFarland wants to help you build the perfect network,” Business Insider wrote, describing Magnises as a “club for elite millennials where everyone gets a black card and parties in a New York City penthouse.” The golden phase lasted less than a year. Members purchased expensive theater and concert tickets that would become mysteriously invalid on the day of the show. McFarland text-spammed them with try-hard offers: a “private networking dinner” for $275 per person, hoverboards delivered by courier. “Also, have the Maserati w/ a driver available this weekend. LMK if you’re in.” Sometimes, oddly, his offers involved the rapper Ja Rule. On New Year’s Day in 2016, he texted: “Happy New Year! Ja Rule is working on a new song and can mention your name, nickname, company name, etc in the upcoming hit single for $450. 5 Spots. LMK!” Later on, in the dueling, ethically dubious documentaries about McFarland’s demise that were released near-simultaneously by Hulu and Netflix—I appeared in the Hulu one, although I, unlike McFarland, was not paid an enormous sum to do so—former Magnises employees explained the fraudulent pattern of the business: McFarland would make offers he couldn’t fulfill, then go into debt while half-trying to fulfill them, and then make more bogus offers to pay off that debt, and on and on.

  That January, Magnises settled a $100,000 lawsuit filed by its landlord in the West Village, who complained that McFarland was using a residential space to conduct commercial business, and also that he had trashed the place. No problem. McFarland moved Magnises to the penthouse of the Hotel on Rivington on the Lower East Side. By that point, the company had raised at least $3 million in venture capital, but its customers were getting frustrated. “If you change a couple of words you can define Magnises in a very similar fashion to how one would define a Ponzi scheme,” reads one Yelp review of the Magnises Townhouse from 2016. Another: “I implore you to avoid doing business with this company on any level and am completely embarrassed to have been swindled by this myself.”

  Magnises chugged along in public, but in private, it was collapsing. McFarland boasted that there were 100,000 members; in reality, fewer than 5,000 people had signed up. He pivoted to a new venture, Fyre Media, which he envisioned as a platform where rich people could bid on celebrity appearances for private events. Ja Rule was involved. Their friendship had blossomed over a “mutual interest in technology, the ocean, and rap music,” he would later tell reporters. They raised money for Fyre Media together. And then, as 2016 drew to a close, McFarland got one of the most ill-fated ideas in the history of American scamship. He would promote his company through a luxury festival in the Bahamas. The first annual Fyre Festival, he decided, would be held in April 2017.

  It would be difficult to plan a medium-size wedding on four months’ notice: this was an objectively impossible timeline for an all-inclusive music festival for ten thousand people on a remote beach. McFarland would have likely understood this without a second thought if he’d ever, for example, had a job performing actual services of any kind, if he’d ever waited tables or earned minimum wage working a concession stand—or if he’d ever even been to a music festival, which, astoundingly, he had not. Instead, the twenty-five-year-old had been busy building a career on the principle that a person could front his way into any desired reality, and he’d also tapped into a deep vein of customers who were eager to believe the same. McFarland put up a website and started selling tickets to a once-in-a-lifetime festival on “Fyre Cay,” which he described as a private island formerly owned by the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Fyre Festival advertised a slate of major musical acts, a highly Instagrammable party, and super-deluxe accommodations. Attendees could choose between tiers of fancy housing options—the most expensive of which, the “Artist’s Palace,” cost $400,000 for four beds in a bespoke, stand-alone beach house, plus eight VIP tickets and dinner with a performer.

  There was never a plan to actually construct these Artist’s Palaces. Also, there was no Fyre Cay. (Carlos Lehder, another Medellín kingpin, had briefly taken over a tiny Bahamian island called Norman’s Cay, but McFarland’s Escobar story was fake.) Early in 2017, McFarland took a private jet to the Bahamas to film an expensive promotional video for Fyre Fest, which featured models frolicking in blue waves and glittering sand. He paid, along with hundreds of other “influencers,” the models Emily Ratajkowski, Kendall Jenner, and Bella Hadid to promote the event on Instagram; Jenner received $250,000 for a single post. But he didn’t pick an actual site until two months before the festival, selecting a bleak gravel lot next to a Sandals resort on the non-private island of Great Exuma. (The obvious Hail Mary would have been to just try to book all the attendees into the Sandals. That’s what happened, at least, at Bacardi Triangle, which was the weekend in 2016 when Bacardi inexplicably flew thousands of people to the Bermuda Triangle to see Calvin Harris and Kendrick Lamar perform on the beach. They put us up—I was there, of course—in a sprawling resort in Puerto Rico and gave us three days of open bar. It was just like Fyre Fest, except it worked, and also we were the ones scamming Bacardi. Anyway, it’s hard to account for a single part of McFarland’s reasoning, as he had chosen a festival date that coincided with the annual George Town Regatta, for which most island hotels had already hit capacity.)

  In March, with Blink-182, Major Lazer, and Disclosure set to headline Fyre Fest, a production team was flown down to the site. Chloe Gordon, a talent producer, was a member of the team. “Before we arrived, we were led to believe things had been in motion for awhile,” she wrote at The Cut later on. “But nothing had been done. Festival vendors weren’t in place, no stage had been rented, transportation had not been arranged.” Toilets, showers, and housing had not been arranged, either. On site, Bahamian day laborers were dumping sand on th
e concrete; McFarland was forging wire transfer receipts and telling unpaid contractors that the money was on its way. Gordon quit after realizing that Fyre Media was planning on stiffing the bands. Before she left the Bahamas, she attended a meeting at which the “bros” in charge were advised to roll everyone’s tickets over to 2018 and start over. They rejected that idea. One of the marketing employees, Gordon wrote, said, “Let’s just do it and be legends, man.”

  In the end, of course, Fyre Fest did become legendary. It was the most gleefully covered disaster of 2017. McFarland had continued to push forward with his obviously doomed operation until the very last minute. FuckJerry, the company that handled Fyre Fest’s marketing and later produced the Netflix Fyre documentary, mass-deleted Instagram comments from people who wanted to know why they hadn’t gotten any flight information and what the tents actually looked like. The week before the festival, when McFarland once again ran out of money, attendees received emails and calls asking them to preload thousands of dollars on wristbands that they would be required to use at Fyre Fest in lieu of cash. But none of the bands got paid, and all of them pulled out just before the festival started. In Miami, charter flights failed to materialize for the attendees. Some festivalgoers made it to the Bahamas, where they were plied with alcohol and then taken to the untransformed site, which featured UNICEF-style disaster-relief tents, loose mattresses that had been soaked in a rainstorm, folding chairs, and shipping containers overflowing with junk. At the empty concierge desks, scraps of branded canvas flapped in the breeze. Instead of gourmet dining, attendees got Styrofoam to-go boxes and infamously sad sandwiches of wilted lettuce and American cheese. The crowd started to panic—and to tweet photos of their gulag Coachella. Chaos ensued. People started hoarding mattresses and toilet paper. McFarland threw his hands up and told everyone to sleep in the first open tent they found. Several dozen people were locked into a room at the Bahamian airport after begging locals to give them rides off the site. The internet snorted each dispatch from Great Exuma like a line of medical-grade schadenfreude.