Leila Zalokar

Girls Lunch

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An excerpt from the novel When I’m With You It’s Paradise…

…Leila was run down. After her trip east, as summer gave way to fall, she got sick again. And then, for a whole month, she didn’t get better, or she didn’t want to get better, which amounted to the same thing. She didn’t see friends, didn’t write, stopped going on walks. She spent the days, and the evenings, in bed. She saw a few clients, dizzy and ill in San Francisco hotel rooms. She looked at porn, edged for hours on end to fucked-up fantasies. She felt dysphoric (got off on her dysphoria), started looking at the blackpilled trans subreddits, felt herself getting uglier, or plateauing in her beauty, which amounted to the same thing. She made a lot of money from men by telling them to kill themselves, then she sent some of that to an online Domme in Canada, whose beauty and sexual power, whose body, whose pussy, hurt her in some supremely pleasurable way. Well past midnight, she took baths, and before bed she listened to the new Sally Rooney novel on audiobook (numbed with pleasure but dimly aware that all this bourgeois heterosexual drama, the drama of so-called human life in the twenty-first century, had nothing to do with her), with rain sounds on in the background, cups of rose tea she barely touched on her bedside table.

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Fly Me To You

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…The depressed whore wakes up for her flight before dawn. Nothing ever good comes from waking up this early, she thinks: funerals, surgeries, insomnia, and work. She slept in her makeup because fuck putting it on so early. Still, it’s important to look hot at the airport: a space of surveillance, commerce, vague intrigue. You never know who’s watching you, always traveling under an assumed, or fragmentary, or nightmarish identity. In the Lyft she subtracts the cost of the ride from what she’ll be earning, also the friend looking after her cat, the work she could have gotten staying at home, the unquantifiable toll on her physical and mental health, and yet to remain still is never an option, not anymore, in this world in which stillness equals paralysis, inanition.
…She’s going to a mid-sized, charmless city in the Deep South. She’s looked up things to do in the time she’ll have off, which really isn’t much, just a long afternoon before her return flight, but she knows she won’t step foot outside the hotel for her almost two-day stay, she’ll be swallowed up by that cold, bright glare (the glare that afflicts schizo-amnesiac killers in a David Lynch movie) that never leaves you even when you close your eyes at night. But it doesn’t matter. After a certain point every place, like every client, is the same.

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Last Hour of Every Angel

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I

…If you were a goddess, Xylea said, what goddess would you be? She paused to think for a second. If you were a goddess, you’d be the goddess of beauty and illusion…
…That haunted me, for some reason. The reason was that my life had, without my noticing, been drained of reality, or the pretense to reality. I was a celibate, anhedonic whore (let’s say a depressed whore). Sex itself meant nothing to me, having become mere performance, empty enchantment. I fell in love with ghosts, or people who soon became ghosts, whose names I no longer remembered shortly afterwards.

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Liebe Macht Frei

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…I walked by the Sacramento River the day before my thirty-eighth birthday, along the train tracks to an old rusted truss bridge. It was the first time I’d been alone, I mean alone in physical space, in a long time. I’d spent the Christmas holidays with Harvey, who had an excruciating toothache and no health insurance, and with Amber, this trans girl Harvey had just started seeing. Harvey never complained about the toothache, though. They wandered around their bedroom trying on different outfits, showing off their possessions, infinite sentimental relics, displaying their favorite dick pics on their phone (especially the cum vids), making jokes and asking surreal philosophical questions, while Amber fawned over them, which annoyed Harvey, though they kind of liked it, too. Harvey wanted to be seen, to be loved for their capacity to be seen, for their mere appearing in this world, epiphanic ephemera, the brute autistic weirdness of their creature-existence, but they didn’t really like being complimented, compliments made them uneasy, always seemed silly if not outright suspicious, and they liked being romanticized even less, though they knew it was this resistance to romance in themselves that invited it from others.

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Planet X

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..Still, there’s the desire to fuck.

..There’s morning cigarettes.

..There’s the sun, post-orgasmic, after the death of all superstructures and erections. The shade cum sliding down her thigh earth night secret smile sleep dark no dream

..Pearls and scars

..A few more good poems to read, fewer still to write.

..The collapse of empires, master races, meta narratives, ethical sadomasochisms, bourgeois psychology, teleology of hope.

..There’s no need to rebuild anything.

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Abyss (whatever the fuck that is…)

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Intifada

“They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.”

..A miserable day spent in bed: our dying intimacy, receding from one another in time until all that’s left is a kind of crackling: for me it’s a mute interstellar scream, for her it’s the exhaustion of having to intuit and care for that scream, its silence, though I try my best for it to go nowhere, absolutely nowhere…

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Night Within the Night

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[excerpts from Last Beauty of the Earth, a work in progress]

..One can be almost certain that the inflationary horniness among older millennials and Gen Xers, along with the constant mainstream jeremiads about the decline of sex, the inexorable draining of sexuality from the world (echoes of Hölderlin’s withdrawal of the gods), is revanchist, and prefigures either a fascist future of universal eugenics and Lebensborn programs, devoted to the sexual enslavement of the species, or a near-future, closer than one might expect, in which fucking has been abolished, or faded away, along with the money system, labor, the male sex, etc., all that shit Valerie Solanas wrote about. In the meantime, a spiritual disciple of Cronenberg, I carve my anima into my very flesh, I tattoo my name in Hebrew on my neck, Leila, לילה, daughter of the night, goddess of sex and the transmigration of souls, eternal flower and mirror, who is also the agent of the return to oblivion, to forgetfulness, to the unmaking of the flesh: time itself.

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The Death of the Aryan Race

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..A Verso article on the “downtown scene,” the fascist avant-garde, Yarvin and BAP, etc. I’ve been making “aesthetically alive art out of history’s flotsam” for years that takes in real brutality, not the overwrought racial/gendered disgust these people have at the symptoms of capitalism, but the mandarin left would rather talk about a bunch of liberal art school kids and failed models cosplaying fascism than look for anything genuinely new.

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Without Love

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(a short excerpt from something very long)

..Without love (the mirror of love), I feel that I’m already dead, already extinct. I am part of the geological layer of plastic microparticles that will be the only evidence our species ever existed, if complex life were to evolve again from the bacteria that remain a thousand years from now. I am part of no story (biotic or abiotic). I cannot shake the counterfactual despair, the flailing wish that I had transitioned, had written these books, five years earlier, when the world could have received me, received my art. But no, this woman, this writing, could only have emerged right now, at this specific point in history, or where history cracks up, smashes against its bio-spiritual limit.

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You Made Beauty a Monster to Me

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..I took the train to Sacramento. I thought about killers and about their victims, too. I thought about how I must be the only whore and the only romantic (which is to say, the only detective) on the entire train, or at least in my compartment. Did that mean the rest of the train was full of killers, or, at least, of accomplices? I was on my way to spend the weekend with Harvey. We had a small fight before I left, because my top surgery was coming up, and I said that if I couldn’t get the surgery I’d probably kill myself, and they said that was obsessive, they were worried about me, and I said but that’s why I’m getting the surgery, so I don’t have to kill myself, so I can be happy. It took me a long time to realize that I live, more than most people, entirely by instinct, in the murky sea of my instincts (my oceanic body), and that I never weigh the pros and cons of my actions, never think deductively, never imagine the forking paths my life could take, though in retrospect those paths, those labyrinths, become objects of dread and fascination (or is it that, instead of paths, life-in-retrospect becomes nothing but a series of crumbling, hallucinatory towers, a drowned dream, a womb that’s also a grave?) My reality is my body, and the other way around. When I was younger, I thought this meant I didn’t have dreams, since I didn’t have plans, bourgeois plans, but in fact it meant I was a consummate dreamer, that I dreamt with my eyes open. I became an alcoholic for twenty years entirely in an instant, without premeditation, just like I moved to South America for no real reason, or for entirely romantic reasons, just like I let Rebecca move in with me after our first date, just like one day I started taking hormones without thinking about it. I feel bad for people who aren’t like this, like me. I feel closer to a flower, a supernova, a subway schizophrenic, than to a res cogitans, a thinking thing. On the train, I read No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai and watched the sunset.

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Apocalypse

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..I went to a friend’s Eid party and left within five minutes, because the moment I got there I knew I was in no state to be there, to be around people, the truth is I’d been spiraling out for at least a week, one night I relapsed, went out drinking with Christian and tried to buy coke at three in the morning and asked him if he would ever fuck a trans woman, to which he said no, but Harvey told me that was a lie, or wasn’t true (something that’s not true and a lie are two different things), and the next day Xylea came over to take care of me, she brought over cute little Daiso items and a cactus and held me in my bed and told me I was a beautiful person, and I told her I was in love with her, to which she said nothing, or almost nothing, and then the next day, or the day after that, I burned our friendship to the ground,

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Men and Women

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“Men and women are Images, hanging ghosts in the air, faces painted on the wall, masks no face can enter, the rules of a game getting explained over and over again to everyone and getting explained by getting played. They are images, but they are not immaterial (nothing is immaterial): they determine who produces what, who lives what life, who is punished for breaking what rules, who can be raped with impunity, who can be beaten with impunity, who can be killed with impunity.”

..One time, Xylea said, a client was supposed to go down on me and cum on my feet, but he kept trying to fuck me, and so I started going on a long rant about Aileen Wuornos (the lore of Aileen Wuornos, the litany of her crimes, crimes like a Dadaist poem, a poem written in the flesh about the goddess Medusa and about men and about the abyss) and then when he tried to stick his dick in me I stabbed him, and he looked up at me like what the fuck, and I was like why do you think I was telling you about Aileen fucking Wuornos, retard?

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Leave Me Alone

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Pictures

..A series of drawings in a sketchbook. In the various pictures, Leila is drawn in blues and purples, while the girl she loves is drawn, usually, but not always, in reds and pinks. Sometimes the girl she loves looks a lot like Leila, but her (Leila’s) face is more angular, she’s a little taller, she’s got a femme fatale look to her while the girl she loves is more conventionally pretty, Leila has a heart tattoo on her right thigh while the girl she loves has a butterfly tattoo in the same place, Leila has big tits and the girl she loves has small tits, or medium-sized tits, usually they are both wearing a slutty little dress, both girls are haunted but Leila is undeniably more so. In the first few pictures, Leila is walking alone on the beach, smoking. In both pictures she’s smoking, actually, and in one she also holds a gun. Like some kind of femme Mersault, a thotty existentialist. She stares out at the horizon, and yet her gaze is rapt, as if she’s staring at nothing, or into the abyss. In these pictures, she is heartbreakingly alone, as if she’s arrived at the end of the world, like the girl in La Jetée.

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Berlin

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…Now, literally all I want is to be hot and famous. I want power. Not power over people, but the power to act, to provoke desire that expands my capacity to live. This is not the lesson I’m supposed to learn, but I’ve always learned everything, including my lessons, a little askew. If someone were to say, what has living your life like this gotten you so far?, haven’t you always been like this, even before your transition, in one way or another?, I could only say that it’s led me to dark and beautiful places. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something wrong with me on a spiritual level: for instance, don’t I need a little Hierophant in my life, an internal structure, a system even? But I’ve never been able to fit myself into a structure, a system. Maybe that’s the Capricorn in me. I don’t care about astrology, but I like any spiritual idea in which the universe is speaking about me, or in which I am speaking the universe.

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Happy Valentine’s Day

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[an excerpt from something new]

.. Yesterday, before heading over to Amal’s to get tattooed, I sent an email to Heidi that contained an email address, a password, and the contact info of three people: Benj (who’s been my editor at First of the Month since I started out as a writer), Mike, and Rebecca. I don’t mean to be morbid, I said, but I want you to have access to the account. It’s where I’m going to be sending my unpublished writing, the manuscript I’m working on, whatever I don’t release immediately into the world. If something happens to me, I want you to share the account details with these three people.
..It was one of those days where death seemed right around the corner, felt as certain as the ineluctable arrival of a new season (a secret winter within the heart of my summer), where everything felt like a prefiguration of death, a native language spoken by death, a whisper from somewhere else: from the void? Who the fuck knows?

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Days of Necrophilia

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…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.

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Nowhere Else to Go

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…The second-to-last night (the penultimate night on Earth), we were having dinner at their new place, the one we’d been trying to move into for months now. They showed me their books, their paintings (haunted self-portraits of a girl under water, or a girl lost in the dream of her own beauty, her own schizophrenia, an enclosed and infinite pain: but also they were no longer self-portraits, they were portraits of a dead girl, a girl who’d been dead for aeons, who’d escaped or gotten lost through a trapdoor in the basement of time, who’d…). They gave me jewelry to wear. I had a vision of the two of us, of future afternoons in the living room: languid afternoons, erotic afternoons in which nothing happens. They sang Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” for me (a prefiguration of their transition), serenading me, and afterwards they made me cum, fingering me vigorously and telling me what a whore I was, or am. This is all for my pleasure, they said. Your pleasure doesn’t matter. I moan. You’re just a fucktoy, a doll I bought at the store, you exist to be fucked, you’re pure sex and nothing else, you don’t have a soul, you don’t have a brain, you’re nothing but degraded lust, nothing but holes to be filled by so many cocks, a mouth to be used by so many pussies, a bimbo, a bitch, etc. They suck on my tits with a sexual hunger I’ve never seen before, and I explode.

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Twin Flames

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Em says they see everything in advance, by a year, or two. I lost them in 2020, but I knew in 2019. I woke up in the middle of the night and texted my mom, take dad to the hospital, he’s having a heart attack, and I saved his life. After the IPCC report in 2018, when everyone kept going on with their lives as normal, that’s when I began to experience prophecy, etc. I believe my delusions operate on this level, too, outside of linear time. At worst, delusion is only what is not-yet, but will one day come true, since everything that comes from the heart will one day come true, at the end of time, the end that approaches every day.

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A War Is Coming

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I

. A scream on the border of consciousness. I feel the desire to vomit. You only talk about yourself, they say. I want to say something tender, but something else comes out (desire, vomit). They hang up on me. That’s the first time they’ve done something like that. The time between us grows unbearable. I wonder how you can go, in a month, from ineffable love to even more ineffable estrangement. You feel an instant and incandescent recognition, and then: a slow heatdeath of the heart. I go to the bathroom, look at myself in the mirror, hit myself in the face until the room starts to spin, dry heave into the toilet, reapply my eyeliner.

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