Afterlife

…Leila, do you believe in an afterlife?, Heidi asked. Leila was on mushrooms, lying in a bed of roses. The way Heidi asked the question made her think of a spring day on a planet where it snows all the time (after the last snow on Earth). She closed her eyes. Everything passed too much like a dream. I don’t know anymore, she said, truthfully. There had been a time when she had seen certain things, known them, well after the atheism of her adolescence. But seeing, knowing, passes away too, into the void. What about you?, she asked. Heidi said she didn’t know either, but she’d started to notice her views on it, her sense of it, gradually change as she got older, where the persistence of something of us, some energetic field that merges with others, seemed more and more likely. But I’d be fine if it was just blackness, too, she said. Right?, Leila said, like who gives a fuck, really? Heidi talked about the maps scientists were drawing of this other world that people who take DMT experience, a kind of coherent cartography, visions that verify each other. Who’s that stupid rapper with the big purple pants?, Leila asked. MC Hammer,Heidi said? Yeah him, she said. Why do I always see him on mushrooms? Heidi laughed. Maybe MC Hammer is a universal archetype, she said. Apparently he was a violent psychopath, she added. Death to me is like the legend of the pied piper, where all the kids follow him except this one little girl who breaks her ankle, her fucking ankle, and she sees her friends one by one disappear into this little crack in the universe. One of Heidi’s best friends, a trans man, had just taken his own life, a few weeks back. Leila asked her about him. The only reason I’m okay with it is I know he was just in too much pain, she said, sometimes we get dealt a bad deck of cards, there’s no hand to play, etc. Leila reached out and touched her shoulder. In therapy she didn’t do this, but when they were doing the mushrooms trips Heidi talked a lot about Bible stories, which she reinterpreted from the perspective of the almost epiphenomenal women, and fairy tales. She said looking at the past for too long, for a woman, was like turning into salt, and that illness (her illness, Leila’s illness) reminded her of the original Danish version of the Little Mermaid story, about how she wishes to be able to walk on land, her wish is granted but for the rest of her life it feels like she’s walking on knives or shards of glass. That’s the price I had to pay for becoming a beautiful woman, Leila said. She closed her eyes again and said these days no one understands what being a transsexual really is, with all this postmodern bullshit, it’s literally a sacred transformation and also a biological one, I had to pass through the male in order to become the female, I was inside a prison, a humiliation, a wrong incarnation, but I changed my sex. In all my past incarnations I was a female, she went on, though not always a human, for instance I see now that once, in some primeval time, I was a crab. But anyway, gender feels very binary to me, you know. I probably shouldn’t say this, Heidi started. When she was about to say something she “shouldn’t say,” she would smile and crunch up her face in a way Leila found cute. But I think it’s binary, too. Otherwise, how could androgyny exist? Exactly, Leila said. Androgyny used to be hot, a mix or pastiche of the male and female, but now we just have “non-binary,” a kind of grayzone of fear, indeterminacy, social and aesthetic ineptitude. She asked Leila about the places she’d visited as a kid. We went to England, Leila said, when I was six, all over up to Scotland, saw all the castles, and my dad could name all the English kings, all the Edwards, going back to the beginning. I was impressed, I thought he was the smartest man in the world. She named some other countries. Once we went out to the Western states, I remember how unhappy I was on that trip, a difficult time for me, but we stopped in Durango, Colorado and saw the rodeo, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, I made my parents take me back three nights in a row. Oh my God, Heidi said, you went to my hometown. She’d grown up in a kind of millenarian Christian cult filled with German-speaking lunatics, dirtbag men who broke every one of their own rules, fucked everything they could get their hands on, women who made themselves appear as drab and ugly as possible so as to appear Godly, which is why she always wanted to be beautiful, beautiful and shallow, when she was a kid she wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn and thought you could look like however you wanted, you just had to close your eyes over and over and will it, and one day when she was about twelve she realized that wasn’t the case, your looks were largely determined from birth, and she fell into a depression for weeks. All the girls were getting necklaces with their names on it, so I got one that said “Shallow,” because that’s what I wanted to be most of all, but it kept falling off. They’d already talked about their lifelong sexual attraction to vacuity, female vapidity. Ugh, Leila said, shivering with the overwhelming nature of that desire. A mirage that can never be attained, a dual face within the long heterosexual prison of history, but also then this gnostic other reality, elusive, art for art’s sake, a love of mirrors and doubles, attraction to simulacra, I’m in love with the utopia of women, of femininity, but also it’s brutal ugly truth, Hunter Schafer discovering she was a woman by getting off to rape and degradation fantasies, the worse the better, the meta attraction to the abject attraction straight women have for men, a retarded hormonal compulsion, even more abject in its reflection, the hatred men have for women hot but not as hot as the hatred women have for themselves, for ourselves, talking to my beautiful trans friend Angelica, a true tragic New York diva, who said my longing is double, whereas she’s saddled with the burden of only being attracted to men, and it is a burden, never free from the gaze, which ultimately holds power and sway, power yes, but also gravity, I said, because at times being a lesbian feels like being a planet without an orbit, a wandering body, some star you’ve only ever read about in books, theoretical, maybe. Speaking of this carcinogenic planet, Leila said, what are we going to do with the garbage heap we’ve made, this too physical hell-on-Earth? I don’t know, Heidi said. I just think, what if we found an uninhabited planet, one with no nearby sun, and I meanreally uninhabited, like we conducted microscopic soil analyses for years, decades, until we were certain, absolutely certain, that no life could ever exist there, and we took all the toxic shit, the toxic legacy of the last centuries, working together to collect it, and shot it into space in the direction of this planet? We could only do this once, because otherwise we’d just start the nightmarish cycle all over again, and we have to know it has no conditions for life, because we’ve already done enough colonialism, enough Manifest Destiny, we can’t just pass it on to another planet. We could do a big ritual, a species ritual, of atonement but also of celebration, of catharsis, as we launched the rockets. And then we’d be free?, Leila asked, suddenly childish. There’d be no more exploitation, no more poisoning of the Earth and ourselves. But what are we going to do about men?, she asked. Isn’t there something in the testosterone molecule itself, or in men as a species in themselves, that leads to all this hell? I don’t know, Heidi said. Can you believe that there’s a whole world of global child self-trafficking just because men want to stick their dicks in something?, she asked. I think we’d have to have a slime area, an area of ooze, and whenever a man committed a sex crime he’d be banished to the slime for the rest of his life, forced to fuck the slime. And we’d still have war, but it wouldn’t be fought over territory, with the bodies and lives of the children of the mothers who created them, it would all be done through video games, and every teenage male would be conscripted for two years to go fight in this total simulation, and when they came back we’d pretend to care, oooh good for you, big heroes, you won the big war. I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife, Heidi, Leila said. I think, whatever it is, after death, if there is anything, it’s that we go to be with the mothers, all the mothers, because all mothers are the same mother, I think, I can feel that in my heart, which is where I keep the presence of the mothers burning. It’s why I have such big titties, to keep them warm. Heidi, Leila said, I really love Eva. I love the sweetness we’ve created, how totally freaky and depraved we are together, going out in public together looking so hot with such a glaring age gap and such an obvious kind of Mommy-daughter kink dynamic. I don’t care what people say about the age gap, either, by the way, you know like my friends. You know, Heidi said, we lost so much when we assimilated into straight society. Relationships like that used to be so normal, because so many of us were on our own from a young age. We didn’t have the same hangups as straight people. Then she smiled, that same sweet, sinful smile from before. When I was very young, she said, I actually dated a much older woman, this beautiful Transylvanian Jewish woman, and we were just like you described yourself with Eva, I’d be in the grocery store and wanting to buy a treat and I’d be like Mommy, can I have this?, it was so fucking hot. I love that so much, Leila said. Again closing her eyes, she saw herself in this long erotic chain of Mommy-daughter relationships, a hall of mirrors of Mommys. Well no she was the beautiful Transylvanian Jewish woman, and Eva was Heidi then. Maybe Heidi was Mommy to someone else, who knows? How old are you, Heidi?, Leila asked. She laughed. I don’t think I’ve ever told you my age. The thing is I look so much younger than I actually am, it’s the one good thing about the condition I have, it’s a collagen disorder, so I’m constantly in pain but I never age. She said a number that instantly vanished into unimportance. Damn, Leila said. Well you look fine. We’re both ageless, we both look fifteen to twenty years younger than we are. It’s the mermaids again, she said. The fucking mermaids!, Leila said. Leila, Heidi said, let’s go to Dubai. I’d love that, Leila said. I’ve always wanted to go. I’d get even bigger titties, become totally plastic, so beautiful it’s inhuman, publish one book and disappear. Fuck being therapist-client, let’s be Instagram baddie prostitutes in Dubai. Oh my God, Heidi said, the Arab men would worship you. I know they would, Leila said, because when I go home (I told you where I was from, the town by the CIA all those Saudi princes and their families fled from in the middle of the night on 9/11), I go to the mall and I see those rich Arab men walking with the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, their wives, in these ultra-glamorous hijabi, and yet their jaws are on the floor, they turn their heads like 360 degrees to look at me. Can we really go to Dubai?, Leila asked. Not in another lifetime, in this one. Wouldn’t it be funny, Heidi said, if you could put a pause on the therapeutic relationship and go to Dubai, like I might have to fill out some paperwork or something. I’ve always wanted to go, too. I’m just so fascinated by that city in the middle of the desert, if the electricity went off everyone would fry. That’s true, Leila said, but the girls are so fucking hot there. They really are, Heidi said. She said every time she’d been to an Arab country she understood the magical appeal of the veil, which blocks out the world of men, behind which the world of women begins, the hallucinatory world of women…