Inappropriation

by Lexi Freiman

  ONCE AGAIN, ZIGGY’S FRIEND has shocked her beyond any hope of compassionate understanding. Lance Fairfax is a one-man social injustice who makes it unthinkable to sit in Lotus as the world passes by. In other words, Ziggy finds it impossible not to spy on the new couple at Bondi Junction. Discreetly, she films the pair parading around the mall. On her phone she can magnify her footage and loosely decode their conversations. When Lex turns down a cold-pressed juice for a milk shake, Lance casually informs her that he would sue any girl who gave him HPV. When Lex assures him she’s been vaccinated, Lance rewards her with one of his headphones. “Let’s listen to a podcast on the fall of Rome,” he suggests. Lex’s eyes go dewy as she ruffles his floppy fringe and fingers the buttons of his Oxford. Ziggy can see that there is something about Lance. He is both bland and fascinating. Like a film set. Like America.

  Ziggy spends her evenings scouring Lance’s social media profiles. His Facebook cover photo is a famous marble bust of Caligula, and his posts reveal a philosophical affinity for Nietzsche and Darwin and the racist lesser work of several midcentury American authors. There are photos of the Fairfaxes sitting in lush gardens at long tables cluttered with complicated salads and quiches and many, many bottles of wine. Everyone in white, smiling behind expensive sunglasses, including the golden retrievers. From Instagram, Ziggy learns about Lance’s love of watches. His collection includes priceless family heirlooms, classic design pieces, and inexpensive scuba-friendly junk, purchased “in case it falls off in the water or a local rips it from my wrist.” Some of the watches are so old, they only keep “metaphorical time.” Lance appears to harken from a bygone era when men aspired to empire and owning only tailor-made suits. The young scion may have made it through puberty, but he is not, according to Ziggy, coming of age. Lance is still stuck on monogrammed pocket squares, princesses in towers, and kings whose confidantes are cross-dressing dwarves. He quite seriously wants a castle with a moat. His political leanings suggest that Lance is frightened of boat people—in fact, he fears many aspects of the ocean. Lance claims to have dived fifty meters below sea level, but his Tumblr is a horror reel of gaping great whites and monster waves. And if Lance is scared of the sea, then Woman must be the ocean. Pictures of his voluptuous Sports Illustrated cover girls get a “Kit Kat Diet” caption from Lance. Otherness is something it seems he can handle only in neat doses (he sees Lex solely on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday evenings). Lance is the kind of misogynist who kisses his lipsticked mouth in the mirror and doesn’t think to worry he’s gay. Lance is a Roman. A stunted soul, a runt of history. The dimple in his left cheek somehow confirms this. Despite herself, Ziggy finds him extremely cute.

  It isn’t clear to Ziggy why she feels she must monitor the banal movements of her spiritual enemy. Especially when she knows he is suffering, Lex is suffering, and eventually both of them will hurt each other’s feelings far more than she ever could. But their mystifying romance calls to her from the tyrannical glamor of that late-November night. Her whole being leans lustily toward it. Or this might just be the weather. The spring days are getting longer and the evening skies are now a warm, flossy pink. Ziggy can feel the future waiting, a bright thing swirling in shadow on the season’s other side, in the placid heat of early summer, just after the formal. Ziggy wants to attend. She knows fantasies create suffering, but Ziggy can’t help it; she needs something to look forward to after mindfulness meditation. Being is boring when your only friend exists either on the internet or the equally uneventful spiritual plane. Ziggy knows something will happen at the formal, something even more transformative than the present moment.

  Chapter 12

  All November, Ziggy throws herself into disciplehood. On the internet, she reads about the inner workings of Shunyata’s old ashram. The fleet of female, Ivy-educated Indian émigrés who managed the cult’s geographical expansion: drugging homeless people then busing them in from Mumbai to elect Shuni onto their county’s council; women who poisoned water reservoirs to sway the rural opposition; women who armed long-haired Aryan men with assault rifles to stand guard while they rode stallions through a poppy field. Despite the matriarchal structure of the ashram, Shuni talks very little about women. There is nothing in the lectures about Woman being the elemental substance of eternity. In fact, gender barely features at all. Some nights, Ziggy shares her findings with Tim. Some nights, he sends her videos of his own gurus. Shriveled men in white pajamas with liquid, bovine eyes. They all say similar things; Shuni just has the best sense of humor. One night, Ziggy sends Tim a clip where Shunyata instructs an acolyte to stand, burping at the crowd for a full two minutes. Tim lols and then, touchingly, he opens up.

  It’s not that I’m necessarily opposed to blasphemy, my whole life is blasphemous . . .

  You mean because you’re not a good Muslim?

  I’m a gay Muslim.

  Ziggy thinks she understands.

  I hear Nazis telling me I’m bad . . .

  I have an imam in my head and a transgender woman and they argue about everything.

  Knowing it is not just cuisine, Ziggy’s heart pangs for her friend. She is sure that Shuni’s teachings can help him.

  I know it’s hard to consider Muslim immigrants or transgender women a moral majority, but I think that’s what those voices are.

  What are your Nazis?

  Probably religious Jews.

  So your grandmother is a Holocaust survivor and you still find Jewish jokes funny?

  Only good ones.

  Maybe I’m just more identified with my family?

  I doubt it.

  Sometimes being queer feels like applying for Australian citizenship.

  Moved, Ziggy checks the ashram’s old website. She has visited before and been disappointed with the offerings. The site has devolved into a virtual noticeboard for Shuni’s disciples, advertising seminars allegedly related to the master’s teachings—everything from canine meditation to something called LaughterLates. Ziggy has previously found nothing of interest on the site, but now she returns, determined to scan thoroughly for a workshop that might resemble the satsangs she has heard Shuni give on YouTube. But she doesn’t have to look far. At the top of the homepage, Ziggy sees the guru’s smiling face behind her trademark electric-blue aviators. A speech bubble floats up from her mouth, and inside it Ziggy reads an invitation to join the guru for a constellation workshop this spring. In Sydney, in two weeks’ time. Ziggy can’t believe it. She knew Shuni now lived in a remote valley in the Blue Mountains but had no idea that she was still a practicing guru. Ziggy is nervous to send Tim the link; she knows how these things can sound. Ziggy has read her mother’s pamphlets aloud to a nearly hyperventilating Tessa and Lex. And she has filmed Ruth’s workshops then given all the women crocodile jaws for the enjoyment of the Red Pill. Ziggy has replaced their primal screaming pillows with turd emojis and pasted all their feathered effigies inside an animated ring of rising flames. But Ziggy has also witnessed healing in her living room. Even when they are crying, the women speak through their tears with powerful gravitas; they make group eye contact with radiant self-possession; and one of them recently left a sad marriage for her alpha-male personal trainer. Ziggy knows these therapies work, and that Shuni’s castrating sense of humor probably eliminates the gendering parts. If Ziggy can get Tim to attend, she is sure the guru’s workshop will be transformational.

  Ziggy forwards the link and Tim responds right away that he would do it if it weren’t two hundred dollars. Ziggy stares prayerfully into Shuni’s electric-blue gaze, and then as if the guru has answered her, a haggle springs to mind: maybe her mother can get them a discount. Ziggy tells Tim to wait. She jogs downstairs to where Ruth is sitting at the kitchen table, painting a gourd into a fertility figure. Seeing Ruth slumped over the dried legume, Ziggy wants to laugh. The Magnetic Poles are just another ego-trap, like the formal—that primitive pageant that costs seven hundred dollars per couple. If she doesn’t pay the formal’s outstanding five hu
ndred and twenty dollars, Ziggy could cover both her and Tim’s workshop fees plus lunch and taxis. At last the choice is clear: it’s consciousness or a school dance. Ziggy walks resolutely to her mother’s side.

  “If I don’t go to the formal, can I use that money for a spiritual workshop?”

  Ruth’s eyes stay fixed on the gourd. “Depends on the workshop.”

  Ziggy considers lying and then decides she can handle her mother’s arrogance if the truth will strengthen her case. “It’s one of Shuni’s.”

  “Next weekend?”

  Her mother’s intel is unnerving. “Yes . . .”

  Ruth places her paintbrush on the table. “No,” she says, smirking. “You can’t do that one.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because your dad and I already paid our deposits.”

  Ziggy’s chest squeezes. It suddenly feels like there isn’t enough enlightenment to go around. Her mother is sucking up all the beauty and truth in the cosmos. “Since when do you do Shuni’s workshops? She hates gender!”

  “I thought you were done with all that stuff?”

  “With what, the ego?”

  Ruth rolls her shoulders back with melodramatic fatigue. “How does Shuni hate gender?”

  “She hates identity! The Magnetic Poles are all about identity!”

  “The polarities is her idea; I just appropriated it.”

  “The polarities is nowhere on the internet.”

  “This may come as a shock to you, but not everything is on the internet.”

  Ziggy knows her mother is wrong. “How can Woman be the Source when Shuni says there’s no such thing as separation?”

  Ruth smiles. “It’s actually a shame you can’t come on Saturday.”

  “Then let me!”

  “I’m sorry, Zigs.” Her mother eyes the gourd solemnly. “Your father and I need it more.”

  Conjuring her loveless marriage, Ruth has dampened Ziggy’s indignation. She trudges back upstairs. Ziggy recognizes that the only person who can disabuse her parents of their overidentification with gender, potentially saving their relationship, is Shuni. Her mother’s sexy Halloween version of an indigenous tribal elder will not go unconstellated; and she can hear the guru mocking Jeff’s sleeveless gym shirt in that cutting Indian singsong. Ziggy imagines her parents’ public humiliation and wishes even more desperately to be there.

  Back at the computer, she scrolls over the seminar’s venue. The Happy Lotus sounds uncannily familiar. She can even picture the sidewalk sign: HAPPY LOTUS, LEVEL 3, with its green arrow pointing left. Now she can visualize the building. It is one of several Lex used to gaze at longingly for its authentic American fire escape. Ziggy imagines herself crouched on the fourth-floor landing, angling her tripod down through the bars above the yoga studio’s window. At first it seems crazy, and then Ziggy lets the word crazy float detached and fascinating in her mental field of view. Spying on the workshop isn’t crazy. Staying home and checking Instagram and trying to “be” somebody is crazy. Not watching the spiritual master annihilate her parents’ identities denies every instinct in Ziggy’s body.

  She lays her plan out to Tim. Aside from her motives, he has many concerns. His first: How will they climb up onto the fire escape? Ziggy has vaguely considered this. She thinks they could probably get a boost-up from one of the local meth-heads or just stack some empty milk crates under the suspended ladder. Tim finds this deeply impractical.

  I think you’re romanticizing urban suffering—a pile of milk crates will just tip over.

  So Ziggy hands the logistics over to him. As expected, Tim shines in this role. Within ten minutes he has devised a plan to get them in through the dance studio on level two, where they can sign up for Hip-Hop Intermediate at ten A.M. From here they hoist the windows for some ventilation, slip out onto the fire escape, and ascend to their observation deck on level four. When that is settled, Tim asks her again if she is sure she wants to spy on her parents.

  As someone whose mother is Rowena, I have experience with oversharing.

  But Ziggy does too. She has seen her mother striptease, watched her father do a misogynistic karaoke drag show. Ziggy knows more about her parents’ sex life than anyone’s her own age and that Shuni’s workshop will destroy Ruth’s gender theory and Jeff’s weak counterargument.

  I just think it will be funny.

  Tim accepts this. Spying is not a bad option. They get to watch Shuni at work, maybe get a little enlightened, and feel affirmed about the spurious gender binary. Shuni’s workshop is the Saturday morning before the formal on Sunday evening. Ziggy knows the Future is a mental sickness, but it still feels good to have something to look forward to.

  THE MORNING OF THE WORKSHOP, Tim and Ziggy watch her parents ready themselves in frantic hostility all across the house. Ziggy can tell her father is irritated to be spending Saturday with his wife. All the windsurfing and ocean-swimming and life-affirming mateship he is missing out on. He irons a shirt Ruth said looked too tight on him. Then he irons her shirt too.

  “Your parents have an interesting dynamic,” Tim observes.

  “I know,” says Ziggy, eyeing her mother’s passive-aggressive application of hand cream. “It can be hard to know which one of them is being subordinated.”

  Now Ruth is yelling from the entrance. “I’m standing at the front door!”

  Jeff nods to Tim and Ziggy, then hurries away down the stairs. From the window, they watch her parents seethe and snap their way up to the garage. As the car spins out onto the road, Ziggy is certain she hears the words, “being a serious cunt, Ruth.” Her parents’ day has begun at a high level of mutual castration, and Ziggy feels optimistic about an explosive workshop. And then she feels afraid. Realizing that this might involve the destruction of more than just their egos.

  TIM AND ZIGGY’S INFILTRATION OF the Hip-Hop intermediate dance class goes less smoothly than anticipated. They have to fill out insurance forms and endure the cross-examination of a suspicious female teacher who also makes them remove their shoes. The large olive-skinned woman keeps looking at Tim’s crescent-star bracelet. She tugs on a giant hoop earring as she speaks. “So you’ve never done hip-hop but you wanna take intermediate?”

  Tim nods. “Correct. I’m a very fast learner and have a photographic memory.”

  The woman raises one large, painted slug of eyebrow. “Have you ever taken a dance class before?”

  “I once did a workshop with a world-famous Whirling Dervish.”

  “What’s a Whirling Dervish?” The woman chews on the words like she is trying to smear lipstick from her front teeth. Ziggy eyes the clock anxiously. She knows Tim’s explanation will be a long circuitous Wikipedia entry, so she answers for him.

  “It’s a kind of mystical dance that Sufis do.”

  The woman nods, appeased by the word mystical. “I had a Malaysian boy come in once asking about break-dance classes, but you’re the first Muslim guy who’s ever wanted to do hip-hop.”

  Tim squints, baffled by the ethnic comparison. The woman rises and makes a posterior adjustment to her booty shorts. Her body is a miracle of ledged curvature accentuated by the sheerest Lycra. What Ziggy’s father would describe as callipygous.

  “It’s a shame more of you don’t dance,” the woman continues. “Where I live, out west, the boys just sit around all day catcalling from their shit cars.”

  Mercifully, the door flies open and three girls come kicking violent choreography into the room. The teacher lowers her voice. “I gotta warn you though—most of the girls here only wear sports bras, and the moves can get pretty nasty.”

  Ziggy cringes, but Tim seems to have recovered and reaccessed his strong inner core.

  “I’m gay,” he says pleasantly. “So I stopped being obsessed with breasts at age two. And I would never catcall a woman whether I was inside a car or a dance studio. I actually get catcalled a lot myself.”

  Ziggy feels a twinge of jealousy. She has yet to be verbally catcalled but lo
oks forward to making up her own mind about it.

  “Oh, honey, I’m so glad you’re gay,” the woman says with magnanimous, maternal warmth. “I teach a super-booby class.”

  As the teacher signs in her new arrivals, Ziggy watches the girls removing their sweatshirts and tying their hair back into tight, eye-slanting ponytails. She thinks of Tessa at her dance academy with all the public school girls. How insecure she must have felt as a private school virgin trying to be an existentialist cyborg movie star. It does seem just easier to get a boyfriend. Ziggy has noticed both Tessa’s and Lex’s boyfriended transformations: their fervor now dulled, their bodies soft and blurry in the halls. The girls have lost the hard-ons they once had for themselves. That private, autoerotic drive that Ziggy knows so well.

  “You guys coming in?” The teacher pauses in the doorway.

  Tim and Ziggy nod and then make awkward gestures toward taking off more of their clothes. The waiting room quickly empties, and from inside the studio a thunderous dance track starts shaking the walls. The two friends pocket their forms, grab their shoes, and hurry to the fire escape.

  WHEN THEY REACH THE LEVEL above the Happy Lotus, Ziggy attaches the GoPro to its tripod and maneuvers it down through the bars. She watches the image on her phone as she angles the camera into the top right corner of the studio’s tall window. When the GoPro has captured a full, sweeping aerial of the studio, Ziggy secures the tripod to the railing. Now they connect the camera to Jeff’s iPad and prop the larger screen against the stairwell’s inner pole. Then they sit back along the wall and watch the yoga studio pixelate to life.