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. Some kind of nuclear holocaust has undoubtedly taken place, some ineffable crime against the species. One has the impression, and almost the certainty, that she’s not going to turn the gun against herself. We are dealing with someone whose melancholia has gone far beyond suicide, who has seen the other side of death, or who can no longer distinguish between life and death, like someone who’s contemplated a mystical symbol of insanity for far too long. The only certainty here, in these first pictures, is solitude. The girl she loves first appears alone, also smoking, sitting on a wall on the roof of some building, a hallucinatory city behind her. The girl is sad, but her sadness seems more put together, more like the product of aesthetic deliberation. In the next drawing, the two of them are in bed together. Leila is wearing nothing but thigh high boots and the girl she loves is naked. She’s fingering the girl from behind. A profoundly erotic ennui pervades the scene. One has the sense that the two lovers have grown distant, estranged from one another, and that what keeps them together is sex, the sordid glamor of sex when it reaches a climax of despair. They both look off at an unseen wall, staring vacantly into space. In the next picture, Leila is sitting alone beneath a tree at night, by a lake in the mountains. A full moon is shining. Leila holds one hand up to her head, as if she’s wiping away tears, but she’s not wiping away tears. Then Leila is walking in the rain down a deserted city street, smoking. She looks especially like a whore in this picture. In the next, she’s on stage at a strip club, looking downcast, wearing only a g-string, by the pole. This may be her job site or may be her paracosm, the place she goes to when she’s nowhere at all. Then we have Leila standing naked and fingering herself while the girl she loves bends down beneath her, looking like she’s about to eat her out. In the next picture, Leila walks with a friend, a doppelgänger, with whom she appears to be having a pleasant, though slightly world-weary, conversation. In the next picture, Leila is lying askew in bed in her underwear, her feet hanging off the bed. The girl she loves is standing, and it looks like she is about to walk out the door. There are things that aren’t often discussed in so-called sapphic relationships, like that maybe the girl she loves is in love with a man, or has woken up one day to find herself attracted to men in a way she didn’t anticipate, didn’t ask for, but that’s life, that’s hormones, that’s how the species reproduces itself. In the final picture, the girl she loves is walking along the shore of a river, absorbed in her own thoughts, while Leila sits on a rock, gazing at the girl. In this picture, one gets the sense that Leila knows it’s over, and so does the girl, but that Leila is the one who’s heartbroken, visibly heartbroken, while the other girl has determined not to feel whatever it is that she feels about the situation. From these pictures, certain facts can be, if not quite deduced, then guessed at. For instance, Leila realizes that she made the fatal mistake of making herself invulnerable, and now she has to let herself go to pieces, become porous, covered in grime, weak. She will let others see the pain she’s in, she will show them the beauty of her/their nightmares. The girl she loves wants a career, or some stability, she still believes she has a place in this world, wants to make a difference, etc. Leila wants to say to her, can’t you see that the world ended a long time ago, that we are its last survivors, revenants from the graveyard of fascism and revolution, parallel lines that intersect in an eternal night? The girl she loves is leaving her, will leave her. She’s accepted this eventuality. Catastrophe is a thing of the past. One cannot choose what one desires, Leila thinks, nor whether one desires at all. Two quotes come to mind: “love = sex + sentimentality,” and “sex = an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom,” violence on the level of our souls, a planet where no one dies because they only fight for love. Once, in a foreign country, a country in South America, Leila picked up a molotov cocktail and hurled it at a tank belonging to the federal police. She didn’t think before she did it, she just got caught up in the moment. Afterward she ran happily through the streets of the capital city, dizzy from the tear gas, the particularly nasty kind they use in Third World countries. When she got back to the apartment where she was living, her girlfriend-at-the-time was there with another girl, a militant South American dyke, who said, baby, you need to suck on a lemon, and when she did she felt better. In the same country, at a hostel in a small beach town one night, she met a hippie couple, beautiful and amoral, who got her drunk on red wine. Then the three of them wandered down to the beach, and immediately the guy was all over her, she let him, she wanted the other girl to join in but the girl just sat there and masturbated, Leila looked into her eyes the entire time the guy was fucking her. She thought about the time in high school when she was raped by a Nazi punk at a party and how a week later, when she knew he’d be on a camping trip, she followed him to the woods and tied him up, gave him LSD, beat the shit out of him with a baseball bat, and left him there, naked and half-dead. She didn’t rape him, though, because that would have made her sink to his level, that kind of intimacy with evil, with men, is something she never wanted to experience, not even once (this could have happened in a nineties rape revenge flic, but as it happens, that’s not how it happened). She never really believed, deep down, that women could be attracted to men, and yet she knew they were, and that itself was enough for her to conclude that life, this life, was absurd and irredeemably fucked up.
Last Time at the Beach
..Gray skies, the sun is shining weakly. Leila sits against a tree and looks at the girl, who’s sitting nearby on a towel, but she turns away. On their first date the girl said we can go to Point Reyes in my car, and Leila thought that’s where I’m going to ask her to marry me, one year after the first time. What do you want to happen to your body when you die?, the girl asked, in the cemetery.
When she dies
..When she dies, Leila wants her ashes to be scattered in the sea. What sea? Any sea, it’s all the same sea.
A Country in South America
..There’s a country in South America that’s very long (the longest country in the world, they say) and very narrow, like a corridor of dreams. Of nightmares? Those, too. To the east, the country is closed off, like a tomb or again, like a dream, by a mountain range that traverses a continent, seems infinite, though it isn’t infinite (nothing terrestrial is). To the west one finds, naturally, the sea. To the north is a desert, a desert of lithium deposits, the lost bones of leftists, shimmering mirages, flamingos: a desert of stars. To the south one finds ice: another sea, a sea of ice amidst which one finds little islands called, collectively, “the land of fire,” and a race of supposed giants who painted their bodies in intricate black and white stripes, who were never absorbed into any Empire, any country. In the south, too, one finds indigenous skinhead neo-Nazis who worship a mystical crank, ambassador and man of letters, who wrote book after book on “spiritual Hitlerism,” believed Hitler had survived, or at least Hitler’s final incarnation, in a bunker on the South Pole. In this country, in the rainy south, two friends, a couple, await her return with a glass of vino tinto, though she doesn’t drink anymore. In this country, she was happy, or as happy as it’s possible to be when you’re on the run from the map of the future, from every past.
Post-Apocalyptic Patriarchal Cannibals
..On an episode of a television show, a young girl is being stalked and attacked by a group of post-apocalyptic patriarchal cannibals. In one scene, the leader of the cannibals reaches his hand through the cage and offers her a father, the dismal safety of a primal incest. She holds his hand for an instant, with ambiguous tenderness, and then breaks his fingers. Now that’s the last straw, now they’re going to kill her. But she kills one man, the second-in-command, and runs away. Then she finds herself in a room with the last man, the Ur-Daddy. She lights the room on fire. A chase ensues. In the end, the girl kills the man, but even after he’s dead, she loses herself in a rapture of rage, she keeps stabbing the dead body of the post-apocalyptic patriarchal cannibal, she doesn’t know where she is anymore, or who she is, she’s lost herself, not in a so-called “cycle of violence,” but in something dark and primordial, from which she may never return (maybe she was the darkness all along).
So-Called Paradox
..The more we pursue romantic love, the more we end up alone. But that, from the chivalric poets to the psychoanalysts (not to mention the faggot Romantics), is precisely the point.
Before Love
..Before “love,” love was reserved for God alone. Leila doesn’t know why, but she doesn’t believe in God. It could just as easily be the other way, it would be just as easy to believe, but she doesn’t, just like she doesn’t like the taste of cucumbers or like how she masturbates with her left, not her right, hand. She believes in love, though, in spite of herself. Probably because, without love (romantic love: not the empty spiritual agape leftists and tenderqueers talk about, not the love of “humanity” or one’s polycule), she would probably kill herself. Would she really kill herself? Yes, probably.
Fucking Someone Else
..She doesn’t know how she knows (intuition? probability?) but the girl who left her has already fucked someone else, just as every girl who left her fucked many someone elses after her. Well, except for the two girls who became celibate after they broke up (one professed her undying love, the other her undying hatred), which was creepy but felt, still, like an incredibly romantic gesture.
Under the Eyelids
..Her mind wanders back, again and again, to the cemetery. Her life appears to her as a series of atemporal images, classical Chinese poems, whispers, mirrors. The Wong Kar Wai streets of San Telmo in the evening, dinosaur bones in Patagonia, her grandparents’ house by the beach in San Diego, fresh raspberries, strange cacti, her grandfather drinking his Slovenian brandy in the afternoon, Fernet cokes in outdoor bars with Rebecca, beers in glass bottles with Mario in random plazas, broken glass, brawls, discussions of Surrealism, a beautiful poet from Catalonia named Carlota, a mysterious suicide, the year they started to have the same dreams, Rebecca’s body covered head-to-toe in flea bites, the week Rebecca almost went blind, the ghost of a body she slept next to every night for eight years, airplane turbulence, sunburn fevers, the afternoon at the bayou, the house in Somerville, the secret unfaithful kiss outside the divebar on a winter night, the sound of her pissing after sex, wanting to fuck again and again, the apparition of the girl sunbathing on the Amalfi coast when she was twelve, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela, Mrs Edie, the old lady who lived across the street with the candy bowl of antediluvian caramels who remembered the Confederacy, the chiming of antique clocks in her other grandparents’ house in Cincinnati, the sound of rain on the screen porch with her eyes closed as a little girl, summer fireflies, the motel in Tucson drinking tequila by the pool at noon out of those little plastic water cups, cigarettes, ashes, condoms, cum, blood-stained underwear, all those years she wrote, words and years lost among the stars.
Terminal Illness
..Everyone thinks Leila is a witch. Girls flirt with her by talking about magic spells, incantations, full-moon rituals, Chinese numerology, Tarot, working with sex, with death. But the truth is, she’s not particularly esoteric. She only happens to see a little further sometimes, glimpses into the land of nightmares and desire. If she knew how to heal the world, or herself, she would. But what all these woo people fail to consider is that maybe the world itself is an illness, a terminal illness from beginning to end.
Gooned-Out Goth GF
..With the girl in Colorado, she talks about a life of pure sex, the extension of the body into the realm of porno-reality. The girl in Colorado talks about buying a plane ticket to Oakland and staying with her for a while. Could one really live this way, if not forever, then indefinitely? Can life be sustained by sexual desire alone?
Murmur
..She stops dreaming about the girl for a while, but then the girl comes back. She prefers to dream of her than not, no matter how heartbroken she is in the morning. Certain images never really leave us: her eyes, the murmuring sea…
Adore
..Her friend says, when I’m with you, I can sense your self-adoration very strongly, the limitless beauty you permit yourself. Astrologically, you can’t fall in love without becoming obsessed, and that’s why it’s good that right now you’re in love with yourself.
Myth
..She awakens from a strange dream she immediately forgets and thinks, of course you couldn’t let her go, after all these years. She was the love of your life. On some subterranean level, she still is. The incidents of our lives, of history, hardly touch us, in our core: the land of myth.
Monsters
..The way some people reveal their true, monstrous faces in time (one a tinny narcissist, a second a weak-willed coward, a third who cannot love). But maybe in time we are all monsters.
Flame
..Those who remain faithful throughout the years are beautiful. They carry a flame, their own flame.
What Was Lost
..The clocks in her grandparents’ house. The cancer in her mother’s womb. Letters from Poland that one day stopped arriving. Her great-great-grandfather who read newspapers in six languages. The emerald waterfalls of the Plitvice lakes. The monarchy of his boyhood. The summer he almost lost his sight in Ljubljana and became his mother’s darling (he spent the summer in bed while she read him English adventure novels). The Jewish girlfriend he had in Geneva during the war. The ancestral illness Julia carried. The one-armed ex-Confederate soldier, a drunk who owned various newspapers in Oklahoma. They left Petersburg after the revolution. The time he laughed in Padre Pio’s face. Certain pogroms. While he was in Dachau, his grandmother, a Germanophile, was living in Stockholm, a staunch supporter of Hitler to the very end. The image of the Goddess. The forest that became their graves. So much was lost before we were born.
Conversations with the Void
..Xylea said queers, or queerness, were not hated until the mid-nineteenth century. An authoritarian society in which all sexuality is repressed, like Victorian England, or in which sexuality is a pure expression of the appetites of power (the pedophilic Roman Empire, Pasolini’s nightmare sadico-fascist Salo), does not need to hate queer people because in those cases the authoritarian structure of society, and its atomic biological unit, the nuclear family, are not threatened by queer sex, by non-heterosexual sex. We’re in a dangerous middle ground, they said, the middle ground of freedom, in which our lives become a matter of loathing and debate. The trick is not to bring morality into the debate at all. Paraphilias, you could say, are biologically unnatural: pedophilia, which is neither straight nor queer because children are not sexually developed, necrophilia, somnophilia, the desire to fuck the inanimate or the semi-animate or that which cannot truly be conscious of sex. I don’t know, Leila said. Maybe I’m naive, but I think there are just two different moralities, or there’s morality and there’s pseudo-morality, there’s the morality of autonomy and experience, of beauty and difference, and there’s the pseudo-morality of fascism, of European humanism, which hates everything that can’t be incorporated into the unit of reproduction, the tautological unit of endless growth and replication, the chronotope of Empire, of beginning again at the beginning. Misogyny, anti-queerness, eugenics, anxieties about masculine and racial hygiene, she went on, all begin where you said they began, with the hatred of freedom and the instability of power. Well then what about the older man who took me in when I was a homeless fifteen year-old girl, Xylea said, fucked me, abused me, but not in the worst way I’ve ever been abused, but gave me shelter, saved my life? Was that moral or immoral? I think that’s for you to decide, Leila said. Maybe it was moral when you were sick and starving and on the streets, and immoral now, from the perspective of the you that survived, that’s grown strong. Then he may have been your savior, now you might be justified in killing him. Morality never captures the entirety of reality, nor is it supposed to. And what about the client who pays me to torture his balls, Xylea said, but sometimes I go too far, or one day I will, and I’ll hurt him, cause permanent damage, out of carelessness or latent sadism? Maybe he has to pay the price for the sins of his ancestors, of other men, Leila said. When I’m doing a scene with men, men who are paying me, I follow consent guidelines and what would be safe for me. But what happens to them doesn’t really concern me, though it probably should. It’s impossible to feel everything, feel for everyone, Xylea said. The number of victims of sex, of desire, Leila said, is incalculable, a series extending into infinity, and so the ones who become victims of their own desire, as opposed to the desire of another, of another who’s stronger, who can impose their will, are really hard to care for, in the grand scheme of things. Xylea talked about a man, a client famous among sex workers, who pays women to swim around in their septic tanks: somehow he knows how to get into them, I don’t know how. It’s easy work, they said. Leila told them she had to go, she had a migraine. The septic tank story is too much, Xylea said. I get it, I’m annoying. No, you’re not annoying at all, you’re my favorite person to talk to, I just get sick sometimes, not from you, not from the chronicles of depravity and evil in this world, not even from shit, but from my own body, which registers everything, everything I’ve experienced and will experience, and those things, too, carried in the molecular memory of my cells, things like the eternal Roman Empire, like the inexhaustible libidinal violence of men, like the sensation of being the constant object of ultra-desire, an ultra gaze, a loving gaze that masquerades as hate, as if the entire world is constantly chattering about you, a Jew, a trans woman, the sense that they will never be satisfied with your body until it burns up in smoke, the eroticism of the concentration camp, as if I could starve myself into being the body they hated so much they finally would admit they longed for it, and then reject them, in favor of my own image, of other freaks, an urn of silence.
..With Envy. They talk about Los Angeles, about losing one’s mother, about a keyboard Nazi brother, exes (exes who broke their hearts, exes who subscribe and unsubscribe to their OnlyFans), the origins and gentrification of bimbofication, when the revolution will come, when fascism will come, when the collapse will come, when the raids on the grocery stores and the assassinations of bankers and politicians will begin, hormones, the East Coast, the insufferable fate of tenderqueers, the mystic visions of cats, how to have a conversation with a cat, being a pure sub/bottom, Jewish trauma, witchy Jewish magic, girldicks and clitdicks, Bollywood and the 1920s uprising against the British Raj, bimbos who like pink (Envy) and bimbos who like black (Leila), tattoo artists, loneliness, etc.
Astrology
..When her friend read her astrological chart, towards the end, Leila looked up and saw that her friend had broken down in tears.
Leave Me Alone
..In the end, as we all do, she only wants to be left alone. We write our own lives, including, in a way, the actions of others. The girl left because in the dream of her life the girl was the girl who left, the kind of girl who left. It couldn’t have been any other way. Our deepest fears come true, in order to teach us that there’s nothing to fear. Or rather, there are plenty of things to fear, but not the things we think we should fear. What should we fear? Never having loved, never having lost everything, including your heart, especially your heart. What shouldn’t we fear? The cold, the night, the passing of time, the death we’re dreaming. But even to fear the wrong things, like desiring the wrong things, is okay, too.