Inappropriation

by Lexi Freiman

  “Oh.” Ziggy can feel the heat returning to her body. “I just got a bit carried away with the semantics.”

  “Which ones?”

  Ziggy cringes. “It was meant to be transhuman.”

  “It is transhuman.”

  “But not queer . . . ?”

  “It could be queer . . .” Tim equivocates, and the yo-yo bounces from his gloved hand. “But I guess it could also be patriarchal.”

  Which is what she feared. Ziggy tries to move the discussion away from her camera. “What about your yo-yo?” she says. “Is that queer?”

  “Well, I use it for stress, but it’s an ancient Greek invention, so maybe.”

  “I thought Western things couldn’t be queer?”

  “No, they just can’t be privileged.”

  “I think the honey cake kind of threw me,” she says hotly. “And whether Sephardic Jews are people of color.”

  Tim looks pensive as a strobe light winks across his face. “That’s a very good point,” he says. “And very destabilizing.”

  “For the region?”

  “For my world view.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he says. “I’m not as orthodox as you probably think.” He twinkles the fingers on his silver glove. “Lots of queer people would disapprove of this.”

  “Because of Michael Jackson?”

  “Defending Michael Jackson’s aesthetics is really hard to do without offending someone.”

  Ziggy isn’t sure how Sufism and the King of Pop are complementary, but Tim is very cunning. She senses Michael’s egregiousness has something to do with Elizabeth Taylor. “You mean because he tried to make himself look like a white woman?” she tries.

  “That’s one way of seeing it,” says Tim, “but I think he was actually trying to transcend everything—race, age, gender, species.” He glances around cautiously. “You know the ‘Black or White’ video, where the faces all merge at the end and then the last person turns into a jaguar? And then ‘Remember the Time,’ where Michael dresses as an Egyptian and steals the queen from Eddie Murphy? You could never dress like an Arab now, even as a black person with a pigmentation disorder.”

  Ziggy feels lightheaded. Tim seems to be a secret detractor. “It’s like Michael was in child drag,” she says.

  Tim nods. “Yes, exactly.” He points at the stage where a man in an evening gown whips a Bentwood chair. “I just find some of this stuff lacks imagination.”

  “Yep,” says Ziggy, a little delirious with vindication. “My GoPro was meant to be about cyborgs but everyone thought it was a penis.”

  Tim shakes his head. “People literalize everything. It’s secular fundamentalism.”

  Ziggy nods emphatically, though the music is too loud and she isn’t sure whether Tim has said fundamentalism or one dimensionalism. Either way. Now he is smiling at her.

  “Maybe your camera is like the conscious witness.”

  Ziggy is vaguely familiar with this concept. And she has often felt the camera creates distance between herself and the rest of the world. “You mean like the silent observer?”

  “Who is observing the observer.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No,” Tim says sensibly, “consciousness is.”

  “Is what?”

  “Observing.”

  “Consciousness is observing the observer?”

  “Yes, who is consciousness.”

  “I don’t know!”

  “No, Ziggy! The observer is consciousness!”

  She takes a deep breath. “So consciousness is observing consciousness?”

  “Yes. Or being observed.”

  They watch the man on stage whip his chair for a few more moments. Beside Tim, Ziggy can feel her skin tingling. It isn’t an erotic thrill—more a sense of spiritual closeness. “So,” she yells over the loud distortions of noise music, “you’re kind of more into Oneness?”

  “Privately.” Tim blinks around, appearing both besieged and inwardly tortured. “Some people think Oneness means denying individual pain.”

  “What’s so good about individual pain?”

  Tim hasn’t heard her. Ziggy tries again, this time attracting the attention of two white women with cropped hair and large bones through their septums. They scowl at her.

  “Until we have universal equality,” Tim answers sagely, “it’s important to point out the different ways that people suffer.”

  “I totally agree that we need a call-out culture.” Ziggy feels herself leaning slyly toward him. “I guess I just prefer it when drag queens do it.”

  But Tim doesn’t like this. “Well, we can’t all be drag queens,” he says in a prickly voice, “especially not the psychic empaths.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means you can’t help feeling other people’s pain.”

  “That must make Oneness really difficult.”

  His look softens. “My psychotherapist says I’m more open to the concept of ‘no separation.’ Which is good for universal consciousness, but problematic for people with boundary issues. Anyway, I don’t want to offend anyone . . . because it’s just not nice.”

  Ziggy nods, chastised. It’s one thing to transcend social illusions as a rich celebrity, and another as a lower-middle-class queer Muslim schoolboy. But it is obvious that Tim desperately wants to. “Have you ever tried psychedelics?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Because of your religion?”

  “No, I’m secular,” he says. “I don’t take drugs because I’m too porous.” In Tim’s mouth this word is less annoying than in Ziggy’s mother’s. “If I take drugs,” he continues, “I may never return to reality.” Ziggy wants to explain that this is the whole point, but now Tim is nodding back at the stage. “Look,” he whispers, “there’s Mum.”

  Rowena stands onstage in a silver space suit, head lolling inside a huge moon-shaped helmet. The song starts and people hush. As she raises the helmet’s visor, Rowena lip-syncs the first line: “Ground Control to Major Tom . . .” She glides across the stage, zipping and unzipping her pockets and pressing buttons on an imaginary motherboard. From her breast pocket, she withdraws a small bottle marked with the female symbol, and pops a pill. When the countdown commences she drifts back to center stage, beginning, very gradually, to remove her headgear. As the guitar distorts and the strings soar, a full blond wig eclipses the helmet moon. Her curls glint in the light, and Rowena bounces them from side to side. The crowd roars.

  As the performance continues, Rowena sheds the pieces of her space suit, revealing a pink cone bra underneath and then the flossy tip of a tutu. Once she is fully female, Rowena floats serenely to the front of the stage. “And I think my spaceship knows which way to go. . . .” Ziggy watches with a hot lump in her throat. When Rowena starts to short-circuit, the performance gets slapsticky and Ziggy is relieved to laugh. She glances at Tim and he smiles back.

  “At least she was nonbinary until the last part.”

  When she finishes, Rowena bows, steps off the stage, and heads straight toward them.

  “Ziggy!” she trills. “Now I’ll have a showreel!”

  “That was even better than ‘Life on Mars,’” Ziggy gushes.

  “Well, it was more upbeat, anyway. Thank you for coming, sweethearts.”

  Rowena ushers them over to the bar, where they take the corner, hopping onto three sticky stools. Ziggy pops up between mother and son like a stubborn weed.

  “I did find it amusing at the end,” Tim says to Rowena, as if conceding an earlier point. “But also, Mum, you want to be careful about coming across as a malfunctioning robot. That can be an offensive trope to transgender women.”

  “Yes, Timmy.” Rowena’s voice drags with irritation. She gives Ziggy a beleaguered look. “Ziggy, you’re into blasphemy, what was that thing you said the other day?”

  Ziggy is mortified. “I’m sorry, I don’t normally call old people sluts.”

  Rowena giggles. “No, no
! Not your grandmother. That thing you were saying about the moral majority within . . .”

  Ziggy feels trapped. She doesn’t want to get into an argument with Tim. “That’s all I really remember.”

  But Rowena is insistent. “Or what about Shunyata?”

  Now Ziggy wants to run outside. “The polarities?” she says, feeling sick.

  “That’s more her early work,” says Rowena. “I mean the stuff on consciousness and humor.”

  “The Jet Skis?”

  “I think Shunyata is also saying that blasphemy can be liberating.”

  “What, like internet trolls?” sneers Tim.

  Rowena’s eyes go a glum gray. Ziggy can tell mother and son have covered similar ground before. She can feel Tim’s body burning at her side.

  “Didn’t Shunyata like to compare Hitler to the Catholic saints?” he says gruffly.

  Ziggy is aware of the controversial things Shuni has said of almost everyone deemed pious or sacrosanct. She has heard her mother repeat provocations like, “What are shelter dogs now, the new refugees?” But it is exactly this kind of blitzing irreverence that seems, to Ziggy, so culturally gay.

  “But isn’t humor like that sort of queer?”

  “Thank you, Ziggy!” cries Rowena. “It’s gay survival strategy!”

  Tim flusters. “Your generation was different, Mum! Drag queens were much more offensive back then. They called themselves trannies! Which I know was important for fighting the major battles, but now we’ve moved on to microaggressions.”

  Rowena smirks. “Which are no laughing matter.”

  “Jokes don’t emancipate people!” Tim is yelling. “They dilute the anger of the oppressed!”

  “All right, Timmy. Let’s just enjoy the show.”

  Rowena ruffles his hair and Tim seems to settle. The two of them turn back to the stage, where a performer in military fatigues has appeared before a microphone. Mother and son watch placidly, apparently resigned to their terminal disagreement. Ziggy leans against the bar, sliding into deep disappointment. She can’t imagine convincing Tim to be her formal date. Not when the word corsage is probably offensive; when the sight of little men in Armani suits will cause him so much suffering; when he won’t make fun of the pretty girls. How can he not see the link between Shuni’s “cosmic joke” and the one they are watching unfold right now about the buff soldier and the auto-tune transmuting his voice into the angelic soprano of a tween girl? Even in the earnest, listening faces of the audience Ziggy senses a big, benign chuckle. She also wants to laugh, but worries her explanation might be somehow insulting.

  WHEN SHE GETS HOME, Ziggy finds the lecture where Shuni talks about the Catholic martyrs. With headings like “Hitler Was a Religious Saint,” it is no surprise that these videos have received millions of views. Not from experienced devotees teetering on the brink of spiritual transformation, but rather every kind of ignorant, bigoted, bored layperson. It is the internet that has restyled the guru as a troll. Already, Ziggy feels warmer toward Shunyata. She clicks play.

  The guru sits in an armchair on a low stage beneath an epic marquee. The picture is grainy and there is an almost suspicious proliferation of ambient birdcall. “When you live a life of deprivation, focused on the hereafter, you become a type of Hitler.” The guru gazes at her maroon audience. “True godliness is about inhabiting the present, not concerning yourself with future or past. That is for the ego. Abstinence is for the ego. Aspiration and holiness are both for the ego. Hitler was a vegetarian. He was never satisfied with the present, always trying to make improvements. Always in the future or the past, always in Mein Kampfort zone. You see? The mental struggle is where most people feel at home.”

  Normally, Nazi analogies arouse in Ziggy a tough nub of indignation. But not tonight. She finds the guru funny. When Ziggy laughs it has a deep, pacifying quality. Like the beingness she experienced at the bottom of Cate Lansell-Jones’s swimming pool. The conscious witness observing consciousness.

  “The self keeps us separate. Equality and identity cannot coexist. Or only to sell Coca-Cola.” She smiles. “Coca-Cola would have told Hitler to be himself. A bad artist, a genocidal maniac. Coca-Cola is a Hitler machine.” The maroon sea agrees in rapturous shimmies. “If you want to dismantle the system, dismantle the self. Live and love freely but no more identifying. Self-identification is the greatest source of human incarceration.”

  As Ziggy listens, an oozy warmth fills her body. For a few minutes, it seems to nuke all negative thoughts; dissolving them in an orange haze. Only Hitler Youth resist. They argue that the past is real because look: here it is. Ziggy tries to stay present, calmly witnessing the Nazis accelerate into a tirade of insults. Some of them make her giggle. When they tell her that listening to Shuni makes Ziggy an anti-Semite, she even guffaws—dispersing the mental tension into a fine mist. Ziggy observes herself observing herself, then something goes wrong and she is suddenly self-conscious. It might feel good to be an egoless being but she can imagine how stupid it looks. And if nothing means anything and everything is just concepts disintegrating with the self, what are you supposed to talk about? And more importantly, who is going to want to be your friend? Ziggy understands that all selves are phantoms but she feels too young to be this alienated. Though, Tim also seems tormented by the paradox of being and self-consciousness. Ziggy pastes the URL into a private message.

  I’m glad you sent this—it’s just standard eastern philosophy. She’s simply removed the ideas from their original context.

  Ziggy’s heart sinks.

  You mean appropriated?

  Yes, but she’s Indian so it’s okay.

  You don’t mind the Coca-Cola Hitler thing?

  She’s speaking to Westerners so it’s only about as offensive as the Chai Latte.

  And what about non-identification and how she thinks people shouldn’t be themselves because there are no selves to be?

  Unity consciousness isn’t very practical but if we could end patriarchy and all just wear white I would be gay without the flags.

  And so it is confirmed that Tim likes boys. Which comes as a relief. Now Ziggy really wants to take him to the formal. Even though she is at best bisexual, they could still be one another’s queer complementary opposite, complete with camera and mesh-glove transcendent transhumanist augmentation. Beyond identity. She ventures a practical question.

  Can you be a conscious witness at a year-ten formal?

  The three rippling dots of Tim’s reply appear and disappear five times before he answers simply:

  Probably not.

  Ziggy tries to just observe the disappointment spilling through her chest like an icy drink. Fun and being have never really seemed compatible. A moment later, Tim is apologizing for something.

  Forgive me, Ziggy, I didn’t mean to compare Shunyata to chai tea because she’s Indian.

  I think offensive jokes are part of the emancipation process.

  So no sacred cows? Lol. Sorry. Lol.

  It seems Tim is at least getting a sense of humor.

  ZIGGY WALKS AROUND WITH a tranquil inner atmosphere. As an egoless being, she feels both at ease in the world and pitying of all its denizens. People have suddenly taken on a garish, greedy quality. They hunch over insect-like, egos pouring into their phones or supping from the screen’s bluish glow. Everywhere she looks, egos wink out from complex networks of fashion accessories. Girls with facial piercings no longer project the same arcane ferocity. They just look exposed and vulnerable, the silver balls in their skin like plugs for a seeping black pain. Ziggy is letting go of the unreality of other people. It’s not very social, but at least the Nazis are quiet.

  Being egoless is less easily practiced at school. Ziggy sits on the common room’s sectional sofa and tries to let her thoughts flit past with the streaming of girls. But their formal mania proves distracting; the impending eyebrow tints and laser hair removal and self-generated quizzes for “What’s Your Limo Style?” Having renounced her identity,
attending the formal seems pointless to Ziggy. And Tim is clearly not the type to stand beside her, laughing like happy Buddhas at all the earthly suffering. There is nothing she could do there to impress her old friends, and besides, good impressions are themselves the devil’s hair extensions. Enlightenment should, technically, be more than enough.

  Now an even greater challenge to Ziggy’s mindfulness appears in the doorway. Cate Lansell-Jones bursts into the room yelling, “This place smells like fat people,” and “Stephanides! Out of my recliner!” As the four Cates rush out onto the deck, a deluge of negative emotion crashes through Ziggy’s fragile peace. She watches them colonize the outdoor furniture—sunning their cleavage and snapping erotic selfies. Fliss squints anxiously at the neighboring roof garden. “Have you guys ever noticed how poinsettias look like builders in safety vests?” The others mumble their agreement but remain unbuttoned down to their breastbones. Ziggy reminds herself that the girls are suffering. Of course they are. Stuck in Time, deluded by concepts like “formal-appropriate” and “classy tiara.” Ziggy’s anger settles; her serenity swims back in. She drifts in and out of listening as she watches the white sails switch on the harbor. The broccoli head of Shark Island blobs frumpy and unfazed. If she defocuses her eyes she can almost merge with the sparkling essence of the natural world. For the first time since she came to Kandara, Ziggy enjoys the view with sincere gratitude and thinks, jarringly, that hers is a really good school.

  When the bell goes, the Cates groan and drag themselves up. They clutch their iced coffees close to their chests and begin their mournful procession to class. Reaching the door, Kate pauses, and tells Lex to pose against it.

  “Wrap your leg around it like a pole,” she instructs.

  Lex makes a shy hoist of her leg and touches her chest to the glass. Kate snaps a couple of photos and then raises the phone aloft.

  “Sending to Lance!” she teases, and Lex tackles her down to the floor with a rough affection that Ziggy finds painful to watch. It takes a moment for any meaning to inhabit the boy’s name. Then a cool sweat furs across Ziggy’s upper lip. Her eczema feels almost immediate. Since her first sighting that day outside Suze’s store, Ziggy has often observed Kate’s brother buying face cream or boat shoes at the mall. He has a pristine flop of blond fringe and wears pastel shirts with chinos in impersonation of a cupcake or father figure envisioned by a five-year-old girl. Realizing that Lance Fairfax is in a relationship with Lex Cameron, the two concepts, side by side, have the reality-shattering effect of a koan.