…The first time we talked on the phone, they said they wanted to lend me a book, the most precious book in their collection. I imagine myself as a wandering librarian in a traveling circus, they said, a dealer in literary esoterica, a peddler of the insanity of the written word. I used to deal drugs for the Hell’s Angels: this is a step up. Though when you’re a girl from Chico with a Nazi dad and a hippie sex worker mom, forced to deal acid outside the high school instead of actually going to the high school, pretty much everything is a step up. If you start in hell, then everything is possibility, a kind of miracle. You learn to read the world as a Gnostic book that hasn’t written you into the text yet, or that wrote you in a long time ago but in a way you can’t recognize, in a way you may never understand.
…They described the book they wanted to lend me as a kind of demonic confession, the spiritual system of a serial necrophiliac, containing a very personal numerology and also a litany of sex acts that can be performed on a corpse. He had given them the book personally: it was written by hand. they’d had to surrender the original over to the police, but they kept a xerox copy for themself. This copy might be the only remaining copy on Earth, they said. They told me that I should read the book carefully, but not too carefully, because it’s the kind of book that can change you forever, in ways you never consented to be changed. They said that when I was done with the book, I should put it a corner in the closet and try my best to forget everything I’d read. The book, they said, contains a mirror of the extreme edge of spiritual psychosis. It shows you that there is no line between truth, the inward truth, and pure madness, and that the secret of concentration, of mystical contemplation, is also the secret of evil.
…They asked me if I had any weed before they came over. I said no, I don’t smoke. It’s okay, they said, I’ll buy some from the crackheads down the street. They lived in an SRO in the Tenderloin. Before that they’d been homeless off and on.
…We sat drinking tea in my kitchen. I realized I hadn’t really been in the kitchen, or the living room, in months. I’ve been sick, I said. I guess I just went to my bedroom one day and fell into a kind of abject dream, an autumnal dream, a dream of illness and also of lost love (as if there’s any other kind). Now I feel that I’m emerging from something, though I don’t know from what exactly, and you’re the first one to see me in a long time. they took all this in with them eyes wide open. I’d never seen someone look at me like that, as if I had just arrived as a time-traveler into their world, a traveler from another dimension. We showed each other our tattoos. They looked like a heroin chic 90s model and I looked like a semi-glamorous whore from some Slavic country no one’s ever heard of before, or they’ve heard of it but they always mangle the name. We talked about MKULTRA, Operation Paperclip, the medical experiments of Unit 731, who Jim Jones really was. We talked about the Roma, for some reason, and about Jews, about scapegoated peoples, about Transylvania, about vampires, naturally, about the atrocities and occult rites of the Iron Guard. I tried to explain why the Jews of Bucharest in large part survived while those of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria in large part did not (I talked about about the nightmare of maps, about rivers as if they were the arteries of fate). They talked about Christianity as a Jewish religion, and also as a Dionysian mystery cult. They said that a religion was an energy system, that it begins as psychosis, but when enough people start believing it, they attract a vortex to that psychosis, and then the vortex takes on a reality of its own. But what reality is at heart, they said, is a hallucination, and we are that hallucination. But also we’re like vultures in the desert, starving for sex and meaning, circling. They talked about the martial homosexuality of the Spartans, the most effective form imperialism can take (until the women and the slaves revolt), and about Athenian law as the origin of a theocratic fetish of the state, about the meaning of Socrates’ suicide. They said Stanley Kubrick had been killed for revealing the sex cult that is Hollywood (the ruling class, in general) and that’s why Eyes Wide Shut had never been finished. They spoke really fast, in a way I liked. They did most of the talking, which is something I was getting used to, since it was getting harder and harder to gather my thoughts. I explained that I had periods of disassociation and also was suffering from bouts of amnesia, that basically my brain was sick. They’re very beautiful, I thought while they took a rip from their bong, but not too long ago they were a child, and so I’m not going to sleep with them, even though they sleep with people my age, and older. I thought about how easy it is to be one kind of person or another, how it all depends on certain actions, certain moves in a game. I thought about the necrophiliac before he’d fucked his first corpse, when he was just a writer with a hard-on, a dark dreamer. I thought about what it meant to be a good person, and how there’s not much difference between a good person and a bad person, and how it doesn’t matter all that much, but it’s still better to be a good person, because good people never really lose sight of evil, but bad people lose sight of the good. I thought about how evil is just another word for entropy, but how entropy is neither good nor evil, it just is.
…We moved to the couch. The conversation became more personal. We talked about our childhoods and the kind of sex we like, the violent and degrading kind that haunts our desires like a nocturnal sun, or like a sentence that won’t come to an end. The Hell’s Angels protected me, in a way, they said. But the protection they offered was the kind of protection the SS guards offered the Jewish kapos of the camps. Certain unspeakable acts were not allowed to be committed against me, as if I had papers exempting me from certain crimes. The master race stuff, the holy religion of hate, that came later, gradually, in little poisonous drips. I got out at the first whiff of it, or the second, or maybe the third. At first you can easily mistake those Nazis for hippies living in a bucolic northern California fantasy. Even my dad started out as a leftist punk, but who knows if that was really the left, or if it was just another disguise or trapdoor. They told me about the love of their life, a sociopathic junkie whom they taught how to love, who had to constantly return to them for lessons, because he was a poor or inattentive student. He was the heir to a Chicago banking fortune, but it was fifty-fifty if he was going to get it, with the way he was living his life. He was an emaciated ghoul, also straight out of the camps, a Hunter Biden doppelgänger going from traphouse to traphouse, and every woman wanted to sleep with him. That’s why he told most of them he’s gay. They told me about a party they went to with a date, an older guy, and how everything seemed normal and kind of elegant at the party, and then they stumbled into a room where everyone was having sex. But it wasn’t a sex party, it was just a normal party, with a room for sex. The guy they was with immediately started getting his dick sucked by one woman, while he started eating out another. Then he grabbed their hand. They thought he was going to want them to join in somehow, but all he wanted was to hold their hand. I felt like I was holding the hand of a child, they said, my child, with his dick in someone’s mouth and a pussy in his face. I left him to his fun, and never talked to him again.
…We went to my bed. They snuggled up close to me. I held them. I’d never met anyone with a zeal to be held like that, as if my letting go would mean they’d be swept out to sea. For the first time I felt like Mommy. But I’m not ready to be Mommy just yet, I thought. I’m still the baby girl, the slut, the nympho orphan. They ground their teeth throughout the night. At some point I woke up crying. This whole world is going down in flames, I thought, flames and shit. I cried for my broken body, I cried for relationships that had gone bad, I cried for this little scene out of Tristessa, this poignant and absurd scene that made no fucking sense. In the morning they sat topless in my kitchen eating cold pizza left out from the night before. They read me one of their poems. It was a poem about love, a love that felt very familiar to me: love that feels like a drug until it feels like being narcaned, love like sludge, or like microplastics accumulating in the bloodstream and in the Arctic snow…