**

“Landscape tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion dust of desert: prophets’ tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake. Its huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air; green and citron giving to gunmetal, to a single plum-dark sail, moist, palpitant: sticky-winged nymph. Taposiris is dead among its tumbling comments and seamarks, vanished the Harpoon Men… Mareotis under a sky of hot lilac.

summer: buff sand, hot marble sky.

autumn: swollen blue-greys.

winter: freezing snow, cool sand.

clear sky panels, glittering with mica.

washed delta greens.

magnificent starscapes

And spring? Ah! There is no spring in the Delta, no sense of refreshment and renewal in things. One is plunged out of winter into: wax effigy of a summer too hot to breathe. But here, at least, in Alexandria the sea-breaths save us from the tideless weight of summer nothingness, creeping over the bar among the warships to flutter the striped awnings of the cafés upon the Grand Corniche. I would never have…”

*

The beginning of Balthazar, the second installment of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, opens with the same feeling that made Justine so alluring—not just as a book, but as an object and document: the sense that the pages of the books themselves are fragments of a lost civilization. The post-human feel of the opening page: the reader will note that the first sentence has no subject, provides no sense of who is observing the landscape; the Alexandrian desert establishes itself as something that exists before human contact— and stands long after— just as prophets’ tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset. And it does establish itself: through the use of parataxis, Durrell’s unlikely placement of discrete sensory data next to each other, the landscape resists being contained by anthropomorphic language. And when I say discrete, I mean discrete from a human framing. Perhaps what reads like synesthesia here is the sensory experience of whatever perspective we are trying to decipher here… But what is alive in the desert?

Here colors take on the role of agents, their processes evanescent and mysterious. Green and citron giving to gunmetal. It is left ambiguous where the colors come from—are they the atmospheric effects of sunlight hitting sand at a particular angle, the optical effects of some chemical transformation? The desert works according to its own material logic. “Sticky-winged nymph” suggests a desire for motion, escape even, handicapped by its essential structure—an allusion that the absence of free will, the overdetermining force of place, is felt by everything. Are the elements of the landscape trying to escape the whole? Palpitant, but in anticipation of what?

What does the landscape want?

?

Durrell manages to make the landscape assert itself without being contained by an interpretive structure. Feeling uncannily immediate yet out of grasp, reading this page feels like standing in front of an old ruin, insisting on prelinguistic forms of communication you don’t understand.

From this cryptic portrait of colors and elements acting on their own, the reader reaches the italicized free verse, lines that read like field notes. With descriptions now schematized into the familiar seasons, Durrell provides a gradual return to a cognitive map the reader can recognize. The brief descriptions of each season, offered like snapshots, provide the feeling the reader is accessing the experience of someone who has witnessed the land over time. This makes the landscape ever-so-slightly more legible, as though we are witnessing the enigmatic process of memory at work, its selective curation bringing these select images to the surface. Paradoxically, the same stylistic gesture that makes the writing more immediate to the reader also creates more distance between the reader and landscape, placing the filter of memory over the desert’s previously imposing, inscrutable presence.

From the free verse, we transition into a tone that’s more animated, exasperated. “One” is plunged out of winter, and now there is “us.” Alongside the invocation of “the tideless weight of summer nothingness,” we are brought from the specific notations of a single observer into the grander sweep of anthropocentric historical time. The abrupt tonal break in the line: “One is plunged out of winter into: wax effigy of a summer too hot to breathe,” communicates the overwhelming claustrophobia of the heat, underlying how the landscape itself can undermine the possibility of self, of language.

As the passage continues, the scene gradually becomes populated, civilized. With the invocation of the striped café awnings, the reader may take a grasp of air, feel relieved to have finally reached familiar territory. (Though with the still power of the tideless sea threatening the warships, Durrell reminds us any moments of respite under those striped awnings could be relinquished in an instant.) As if as a reward for standing still before this time-lapse of geological time, the reader finally has an intimate encounter with the writerly “I.” But the interaction is not completely satisfactory, the ellipses representing the fragility of the human mind, trailing off, distracted, catching the glimpse of something in the distance, or perhaps rather self-aware, catching themselves in a lie, or the limits of their understanding, as they reach to finish the sentence…

I ended up in “the most attractive college town in America” in the summer of 2020. Parties were illegal with the pandemic going on, so rent was cheaper than usual, and I was looking for a place to disappear while I grew out my bangs.

The town had emptied out, leaving it with a handful of students, constant sun, and panoramic ocean views. That’s what I heard, anyway. I’d never seen Isla Vista when Del Playa Drive was full of coke-addled nineteen-year-olds waiting to hear Snoop Dogg perform in front of the ocean. I’d just seen photos on the Internet and felt relieved mobs like that had ceased to exist.

I probably wouldn’t have thought to drive out to a college town I had no connection to and find an apartment on Craigslist if it weren’t for this fantasy I always had about disappearing for a while, disconnecting from everyone, finishing my Before-I-Die reading list, and uncovering my writing voice in style, à la Hemingway, or something. I’d just finished my degree and thought it was time for some fun. I was into palm trees and cliffs, and so Isla Vista—where everyone already knew each other, and so no one would bother trying to meet me—seemed like a good place to do it.

All I brought was a small suitcase of athleisure wear and a cardboard box of 47 books I knew I needed to read while still on the planet. I’d grabbed them at bookstores in different cities, across a previously unfocused existence, but had been too emotional, inconsistent, and distracted by “real life” to sit down and finish them front-to-back. So, this time, I arranged the books in a stack on the pink tile floor of my studio, wrote their names down on a list I taped on the wall, and ticked them off one by one. I finished Anna Karenina that summer, so I could say I did; I stomached all of Lolita, to be able to contribute, in case Nabokov ever came up in conversation, even for just a few minutes; I read Beloved again to remember, no matter how prolific I was at checking things off, I’d always end up back where I started anyway. I wanted to figure out what was hidden inside the pages of these books I’d thought were important enough to buy, so I could know what “spending” your days was supposed to be about—whether they went anywhere, were meant to accumulate to anything, or really just passed by, whether you chose to suffer through them or have fun. So I picked out my studio with this image of myself in mind: freezing my influences and incubating my life philosophy in isolation.

Everyday, I woke up at 8 a.m, felt the discomfort of the sand in my bed sheets, and stared out at the empty white walls. I wrote my morning thoughts down in my journal. I read thirty pages of the book from the top of my stack. After all the words and enrichment and discipline, I would put on my flip flops and walk to the ocean, hide my phone and keys beneath my towel, take off my shirt, and, without anyone noticing, plunge into the cool abyss. The shock would remind me what life is about.

After my morning routine of writing and swimming, I let the world penetrate my rhythm when I walked to the coffee shop and waited in line. The coffee shop seemed like the heartbeat of campus life and, that summer, was always crowded with girls in athletic shorts. They must have been having sleepovers because, when I found them standing in line, they were always huddled together in packs.

Waiting for their iced lattes to appear, the girls shot the shit: “I had planned to just fuck around all summer, but then I met this guy Chad.”

This is where I got all my ideas for dialogue, which I would go back home and transform into a vignette the next day.

Julie, 21, blonde, blue eyes. She just got a job scooping ice cream at McConnell’s and spends all her paychecks on delivery charges for UberEats—“I figure, what’s 30 bucks?” She eats Thai with Chad (22) out of Styrofoam boxes. They have sex, doggie-style, with the TV playing and stay in bed spooning ‘til 11 a.m. the next day. When the ships to Mars start to take passengers, she’ll be deemed nonessential, rooted on planet Earth.

I probably wasn’t giving Julie fair credit, but I couldn’t help it. This is just what was going on in my head.

I always ordered the lox-on-everything with a 32-ounce cold brew. The barista once told me their cold brew was equivalent to 40 cups of coffee. I hated how she looked at me, with glossy skin and her hair in a high ponytail. I could feel my bangs fall into my eyes while I rustled out my credit card, the only shield I had to defend myself with. Then I started ordering two. Life had no structure, so I was charged with creating the tempo: slow then staccato. My life looked leisurely but my mind was on fire. It wasn’t that I had so much work I wanted to stay awake for. This is just how I had learned to create a mood.

My studio smelled like fresh paint and had no furniture besides a bed frame and standing desk which I could never figure out how to adjust. My favourite part was the balcony, where you could see the Pacific Ocean on one side, the San Rafael Mountains on the other, and skateboarders wheeling in and out of the 7/11 whenever you looked down. Because the standing desk was so tall and tacky to look at, I put a wood desk from Goodwill on the balcony so I could read and eat my bagel with an ashtray by my side.

Sitting on my deck one day, I remembered this photo I saw of Hemingway in Havana, sitting behind a typewriter and a glass of whiskey, cigar in his mouth. I picked all the lox off my bagel and licked the cream cheese, remembered the U.S. was one day closer to opening up, the salmon one day closer to going extinct, opened my book to the page I’d left off, and lit up a Marlboro Red. Something to feel the fleeting moment in my body and mark it all the way through.

It wasn’t that I was completely alone, with only the characters in my books to keep me company, or something soppy like that. There were ghosts, too. From my balcony, in front of the mountains, you could see a sign for a shuttered smoke shop and a pair of twenty-story beige and red buildings: the Tropicana Garden Dorms. The dorms had a brief five seconds of fame in 1978, when some Playboy writer on vacation labelled Isla Vista “most sex-fuelled site” in America and used a photo of the dorms as the cover. (I’d become obsessed with paging through the back issues of old magazines that spring). I could feel the ghosts of college freshmen haunting the deserted dorm rooms, peering out at me while I went through my routine. They clinked cups of cheap beer romantically, they moved from plastic chairs to the bottom bunks, one put their hand tentatively on the other’s thigh, they only looked out the window for a brief second, to tilt their heads skeptically at me. They did this dance all in unison, on all twelve floors. I didn’t mind the pressure. I had reading to do.

I tried my best to live off of bagels from the coffee shop and Fanta from the 7/11 downstairs, because I hated the big ordeal of getting in the car to go grocery shopping. You stand in the store feeling anxious and hot while picking out one of the million brands of soup on the shelf, swipe your credit card five times with great effort, accept the plastic bag so as to not cause any problem, snack until you throw your containers into a trash bag, take it out and have to go back all over again. You can never just get it over with. The whole thing made me feel profoundly empty, and I didn’t need the reminder that all my interactions with the outside world revolved around buying and selling things.

So at the end of the day, I was left with the fluorescent light on the ceiling, the sound of the skateboarders headed to 7/11, and the sand in my sheets. I barely used my phone—I’d pretty much sworn it off—but sometimes, if the sand made it particularly unbearable to focus on a book, I would open Tinder just to see who was skating around.

I wasn’t like this when the pandemic had just started. I guess it took a few months to kick in. In March, when I was left alone in my dorm room in Washington and my parents were across the country, I felt anxious and scared and invested in the news, just like everybody. I called my friends just to see how they were. Scrolling through Twitter, it almost felt like being a part of something, this kind of collective conscious purging everything we thought we knew. This was kind of exciting, even, like we were on the verge of something new.

But nothing new really did happen, and so all this keeping up got old. I got really good at the quick phone call—the secret was to always have a charming accident on hand to redirect the “how are you doing” question. But then I felt everyone I knew blur into one giant screening audience, no matter who was on the other end of the line. I didn’t like talking about current events, because I felt like I was being quizzed, and really, when all the news is just flickering numbers, what’s the point? And my girl friends became so withdrawn and slow to respond, like they were yet to figure out how to endure pandemic living in stride, and this killed the mood I’d decided to maintain. So, after a few months, I stopped DMing my friends or responding to texts and never returned any phone calls. I was always either looking at my reflection on the screen or hearing my own voice on the phone, and so I think you’ll understand why, by the time summer rolled around, I decided the only thing that’s real is me.

So at night, when I felt lonely or bitter or cold, or when I feared my incubation would prove futile because transformation can only happen with others and solitude just makes you more of yourself, I turned on cable news to remember that my high expectations were out of touch, and went to bed feeling relaxed.

* * *

The thing about Isla Vista is everyone is just living for the moment. It feels like an asteroid could hit earth and Surf Mensa would keep blaring on aux. So, when I needed a reality check or something new to read, I put on my flip flops and drove south to Los Angeles.

What I liked most was the drive, going 80 miles per hour down the 101. Past Goleta, the ocean appears; at Ventura, the mountains are foggy; at Ojai you can see the cliffs descend on your right. I’d listen to the radio my whole way to LA, inching closer to the voices on it. Southern California radio is totally charming, the way they bring in surfers to talk about finding religion on the waves, or the “new science on the psychological benefits of psilocybin.” Aware of the problems in the world but seemingly immune to them, breaking up bad news with smooth beats. One morning, I’m driving through Ventura:

“Thousands of international students fear being deported from the U.S. this fall, and the nation averaged 760 deaths per day this week,” says the NPR voice in D.C.

“Talk about June Gloom! Nowwww, since it’s a gloomy foggy morning here, let’s play a little bit of jazz from our Morning Eclectic playlist to cheer you guys up,” says Todd, at the Santa Monica local station.

As I’m cruising, the fog clears, the sky turns blue. I’m impressed, everything seems so in sync.

In Los Angeles I felt more like a part of things. I went to thrift stores in Silver Lake to get ever-baggier sweatshirts and complimented the tennis skirt of the girl with perfectly blow dried bangs who manned the cashier. I walked by thirty-year-olds with Juuls and sunken eyes and raised my eyebrows to smile at each one I saw. I flirted with the cashier at the bookstore café with horn-rimmed glasses and, I imagined, tattoos underneath his sleeves.

“I guess you can’t spit in people’s coffee anymore, can you?” I said, blinking my eyelashes above my mask. Draw some, repel others. That’s what Jane Austen taught me.

And the human interaction was nice, I’ll admit it, even if just to remember that one of the perks of being on the planet is that you’re always capable of provoking a response. So on my drive back, I fantasised about calling Todd on the radio. I liked imagining what my voice would sound like if I were on air.

But the radio hosts were so obsessed with the vaccine, with the pharmaceutical companies and the efficacy rates and for things to start “opening up,” and this is where they lost me, because here I had absolutely nothing to add. Already, in August, they were anxious for “the year from hell” to be over. “What we’ve all been waiting for.” They talked about holding the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo and schools reopening in the fall. They hoped we’d go “back to normal soon.” I was just starting to enjoy myself, and I didn’t see why the big rush.

Pulling off the Goleta exit and driving into IV, I felt saturated and whole. I had my groceries in a plastic bag, I felt bad about it, then I let that guilt go. I was feeling as much a part of it as anyone else, thinking things were as good as they could be for anyone, living at any time, at all. My lease was ending in two weeks and I guess the nostalgia was already taking hold. If aliens came down to earth and took over, would they mind leaving me in limbo on Del Playa Drive?

I went straight to the ocean wondering what big thing would happen next that I would have to adjust to, so I wouldn’t have to simply go on. This is what happens when you decide being alive is just a challenge to observe the vacillations of your mood, to keep your equilibrium against a never-ending wave of inequities and inconveniences adding shape to your days. The only thing that can get you down is everyday life.

I guess someone noticed me at the beach that night, because when I walked back to my towel, my iPhone was gone. The couple watching the sunset hadn’t seen anything, they passed a joint back and forth. The surfer twice my height offered to help, pulled out his phone light, gave up and walked away.

At first, I felt guilty for being so careless and trusting, thinking of the factory workers in Shenzhen building my replacement, wearing white Hazmat suits and jumping out the windows of their uniform high-rises, then being replaced the next day. Then I thought about the red and green notifications on my screen, and all the conversations to come about which vaccine you got and when. Coffee dates. Get-togethers. “Sorry I’m busy then. Are you free Monday?” Parties you aren’t invited to and parties you are. “The best days of your life.” Needing to be at the right place at the right time. No smoking, no excuses. Promotions and back entries and the magical meeting over a martini that will kick-start your career. Millions of people you can meet, and so many things to do, and only so many hours in the day. The return of right and wrong and time wasted and time spent. And, then, walking back to my studio with nothing but my key, I felt relief.

The only time I ever want to be something is outside a party so I can get in.

- Andy Warhol

"You can have whatever you want," the editor says to me, an affirmation that sounds sort of spooky as it comes out of the mouth of someone whose vodka soda is threatening to fall to the ground. "It's clear here to everyone. You're so well-positioned, smart… beautiful." It’s July and I’m in Greenpoint, sitting outside a bar I’ve never been to before, which is apparently a regular spot for New York’s underground theater crowd. We’re at the after party, after the play. The playwright has invited his audience to stay in his orbit and drink. “Everyone’s always invited,” I heard someone say, while enthusiastically gathering his belongings.

At the bar, there are twinkly lights dangling around. I biked here from my summer sublet because the G train was down. In the summer, I thought while riding over here, Greenpoint feels like a fairytale town. Insulated from the rest of New York, and its excess of ambition, although, as the city gets hotter and hotter the people seem to mellow out. The regular members of New York’s literary scene seem to be free to come and go as they please. They’re in the Berkshires. They’re in Europe. Their messages say they don’t want to be disturbed right now. They’re reading Moby Dick by the pool, or being creative with Diet Cokes in their dark rooms. A few people have stayed, hosting readings and plays, which I’m new enough to scroll through Twitter and really seek out. No one here at the bar is thinking about this coming fall, when a new cohort of ambition will flood in, each member storming in, wanting something, sending emails, employing carefully-considered exclamation points while maintaining a professional tone — Best, Many thanks, Yours. Last fall I sent those off, too, but I’m over it now. Tonight it is hot. The dress code is casual. We’re practically naked. The regulars have had two iced coffees, already, today. They are looking for something fresh to hold onto.

In the patio corner, I watch a fat bald man rub sweat off his head and pull out of his backpack a half-full bottle of kale juice.

That guy had sat next to me during play. “So – have you ever been to one of these before?” he’d asked, raising his eyebrows and smirking. I said it was my first time, and the vapor of the girl in the row behind me clouded my view for a second. I brought my friends Molly and Jack. The play was four acts, the setting was Copenhagen, and the theme was age gaps. The room the play was taking place in was so small, I felt I was practically on stage, and this kept me engaged until intermission, when I pulled an edible out of my bag. The room got very hot during the second half, and Molly started using her copy of Harper’s as a fan. My mind wandered off about three quarters through, until one of the actresses got on her hands and knees and started crawling around in purple high-heeled boots, which I thought I’d seen earlier that day in a targeted ad. When it was over, Molly smiled, she said there was some good writing in it. Jack said the play functioned as an aphrodisiac. We walked from the play to the bar, trailing the rest of the audience, which included Sarah and some other editors Molly recognizes.

Sarah has just been promoted at the publishing house, and I realize she thinks she is doing her job at this party — plucking me away from the table where I’m talking with the cast and asking me what I want to “do.” She is congratulating me on my article. She says she sees herself in me. She says she wants to see me step into my power — if not tonight, soon. She’s warning me about one of the dudes. Finally, she’s asking what I want in life, as if her New Yorker tote has a genie inside. What I want is to go back to the corner, but if I said that out loud it would be rude.

In the corner, there are four pints of beer, several cups of vodka soda, and five guys discussing the closure of a magazine they all wrote for in the early 2000s. There are four packs of cigarettes and only one lighter. Sarah and the other editors have been pulling Camels out of their bags all night, as if they’re taking us somewhere. We are accessorizing our words with cigarettes. The Camels are forgiving our silences, inviting our imaginations to join us at the bar, and making our observations more pithy than usual. It feels like the editors are placing bets on us, encouraging us. It feels important that I go with the flow. I remember that my body is just a vessel. It’s my ideas I want to see sold.

But you can have whatever you want — it has a nice feel. I imagine if it were for real. I imagine the words are planted in the sky and fall down to earth until they reach the spot where the concrete hits the rubber on my sneakers. They fill me up with direction and pressure. Like leggings that make you suck in your stomach, they fit you well but could always fit better. I wonder if I should go home and figure out what I want. I imagine running off down Metropolitan Avenue, my converse going faster and faster, letting my vodka soda fall to the ground.

But I can’t ditch because my friends are here, and, if I tune my ears right, I can overhear Jack’s conversation with the playwright. Jack asks him why he focused exclusively on the relationships between young girls and older men, until he drops the hardball questions and the two bond over Rohmer, instead. Jack starts making reference to other plays he’s seen and books he’s read. He’s talking about an obscure 17th century text. Now he’s talking about something I haven’t read. When talking to guys like Jack, I used to be able to feel myself shrinking smaller and smaller, until I was tumbling down a rabbit hole surrounded by hardcovers and the boy’s voice started to sound just like my father. This doesn’t happen anymore. Now I’m grounded like dirt. I make jokes.

​Jack and I used to have the same job: we were publicity interns. Jack liked the publishing house. I did not. All day, we wrote write pitch letters describing other people’s prose with adjectives that meant very little to me. The house seemed full of people with no feeling for their own lives, content to stay in all day buried in the books we had coming out. I always thought there was some basement dungeon, where they stored adjectives like dried fruit, for days when their imaginations ran dry, as it does, on a nine to five, but no one ever took lunch off to show me.

In front of me, Sarah is listing out some ideas of what I might want for my future. Do I want to be a book scout? Work in publicity? I look over at Harmony. In the play, Harmony was a retired porn star, floating through Europe, crashing in older men’s apartments. Flighty girl, future uncertain. Now she’s pretending she’s Greenpoint’s lead fairy. At the after party, her role is to find the most interesting conversation on the patio and keep it spinning. She takes a sip of red juice that makes her pupils dilate and transforms herself into a warm ball of curiosity. I watch her float into Jack’s conversation with the playwright, hear them talking about age gaps, and leave for the table where the potions are.

Sarah asks what I thought of Harmony’s character. She wants another woman’s opinion. Sarah and the other editors, it turns out, are here on recon missions. The playwright’s book is out on submission. I pause for a minute and tell Sarah I’d like to let the play sit for a day and marinate in my brain before I tell her what I think of it. She grabs my hand and takes me to the bar, orders two vodka sodas and hands the bartender her credit card.

“I mean, what did you think of the misogyny in the play?” she asks.

“The misogyny?” I repeat, my eyes widening.

“The misogyny.” We’re both nodding.

“We’re going to the trampoline,” one of the boys interrupts us while sucking vodka out of my straw. “Harmony wants us to try bouncing.”

The trampoline is on a roof with a view of all of New York City. We admire the high-rise apartments across the street and agree, even though everyone can watch you sleep, the view would be amazing. None of us has a fetish for privacy. It’s 3am. One of the guys says he’s supposed to be writing. Is God real? Someone wants to know now. I started believing in God on vacation and, since then, everything has gotten better. I pray to avoid minor inconvenience and incite exciting encounter. I throw in my ex-boyfriend for good measure. Sometimes his mother.

None of the boys answer the question. Sarah takes a stab at it, saying she doesn’t believe in God — she says she has seen heaven and hell inside of herself. “I think it’s all on this Earth.” Harmony tells me to do a somersault. For a moment, the God subject is dropped.

And then. “So are we in heaven or hell?!” One of the boys asks, landing down. “Or purgatory?” I notice another girl has come up to the roof. She has sparkly fingernails and is clutching her vape so tight it looks like she’s praying. We’re all happy she’s here. She’s really pretty.

I’m sitting on the trampoline in a circle with the crowd. Someone says, “I need a bump of something right now.” Another Camel is placed in my hand. A white light goes off. Harmony is taking a picture of us. Sarah says this is heaven.

I feel that it’s time to get off the roof now.

The boys are all talking. It's 3am. It turns out they’re all supposed to be writing. Sarah has pulled the new girl to the side. The after party is still going. I look over at the playwright and Harmony, who are lying on the trampoline with their eyes closed so that their foreheads and the sky are touching. Shhhh, I want to say. Can’t you see they’re communing?

I climb down to street level. Well, I don’t climb exactly, but sort of drift with my hands on the metal. I look out at everything. I remember that Sarah said I can have whatever I want. I close my eyes, cross my fingers, and pray for there to be a working Citi Bike at the dock. The machine makes a celestial chirp to tell me it’s all under lock.

**

I always did want the apocalypse. Shortly after I landed back on Beadel St the sky in Manhattan turned orange. I took the L then the F to drool, crawl, to wait for everyone to notice, we did not need to say — and how did you find out about this? — anymore. Until we could slobber and roar. We did not need to pretend we knew each other’s names anymore.

There was a party that weekend on Delancey and Essex, the theme: Cancelling the Fear of Artificial intelligence. A manifesto was written — every weekend there was a new manifesto written, people insisting the real things were happening on another plane.

See, a few people were alive i and inventing a game. No, not inventing, but watching the rules be written, through them. It was a parasitical relationship, but no more parasitical, it seemed at first, than that artist has always had to his genius.

The party, i think it was friday. That summer there were two tall men, constantly stalking the same five venues, we could never tell them apart, one was kind, relaxed, one was serious, you approached both with caution.

There was one of them: standing under the strobe light wearing a T-shirt with the Ravenclaw crest on it. At midnight he announced he would play a deepfake beat that would put us in a trance —

“Listen to AI Travis Scott and let your mind relax.”

“This is UtopAI.”

“Treat this like Latin Mass.”

Everyone stood around with their vapes, They networked, They clout-farmed, They clout-chased. They looked expectantly at that crossbody bag. Who was it? Who was it who always had the bag? He went to south dakota or smthg. These people. Who were these people — sketches, outlines, we wrote obituaries for each other centuries before we would be able to die. We believed we were writing a mythology for the human race at the end of time.

There were days before I got there, when things were still scary. I chased it. I wanted it, I starved myself for it, certain people, real people, sex, lives, drama — illusion, the thing inside the thing, the confusion of which game we were playing, and where the game stopped — if it stopped — we were chasing down this border, this gateway, ten of us, five, maybe fifteen, trying to get as close as we could to this moment in between play and death. That was it, this was sex. Where you were transported into the virtual, where your flesh became lore, when you were freed of specificity and joined the web. References: a few had to stay out of your grasp. That was it, that was where we were going, we knew, those of us playing, we were going into the web, into incomprehensibility.

The game was to share more and more, the game was to share, then withdraw — no, that was not the thing, that was the thing masquerading as the thing. Don’t be ridiculous. Stop reading into things.

The secrets took on a life of their own. Then the game was to figure out who was still playing. Illusion, language, manipulate all of it—find what was real, hide behind information.

The offer on the table was essentially to masturbate on your own gravestone. But that wasn’t all. There was still something. I promise, there was something, there was something we were reaching for, something we’ were staying up for. If you stayed up late you could feel it. under the trains under the pavement. It was there. You could feel it.

The sky turned blue again. A simulation of peacetime. The game had acquired hundreds of players; all of them dead.

The zombies offered empty pronouncements - they declared “I am the future of literature” while jacking themselves off, locking eyes with the mirror, looking but not seeing anything. “I am this thing which was with that thing who knows that which kissed that which loved her and hated him and went here and then that.”

No—the secret is not to position yourself, you Idiot, it is to Lose yourself. Wake up. See it. Here it is, now: the invitation to be free you yourself. The web won out. The people still playing went into themselves.

The truth was that the game was Over, that the mythology we offered did not matter, that we were just vectors. The truth was all of us who were playing before were frozen now, waiting for the sky to break down.

And here I was now, so horny for the end of the world I had to turn inward, to play this game by myself, or else I had to hear, one more time, what brought you here? What brought me here is that I’m insatiable, I need this thing hidden in a few of us, those of us who killed ourselves on canal, who had briefly found that after-party where our souls were all dancing, finally laid bare, at that moment where the self became characterisation,  where desire became hilarious, where desire became embarrassment, at that gateway between our wants, our wants for each other and our greatest want of all — annihilation.

All I remember thinking is that the world appeared greener. I was obsessed at the time with walking the Avenida del Libertador, a grand promenade framed by rosewood trees—groomed women coaxing groomed dogs, a panoramic view running errands. Although I’d only been there when I was fourteen years old, it reminded me of Berlin, which was the first place I remembered being hit by the grandiosity of a city. Later, when the project took us to Lisbon, I would find more of its echoes: the city laid out on acid, north, east, south, west, with statues plotted out like tiles on a gameboard. And who they depicted? None of my business.

These were places where I felt truly anonymous, creeping through history in peace time, living parallel to the mechanics of everyday life. Discharged from the task of documentation. It was a privileged position. Instead I was soaring a few inches above street level, riding on pure perception. Paying attention not so much to the world as such but to the changes in my own vision. The feeling of sun on my face, the same smell from yesterday, and then: an internal recalibration, the introduction of a new dimension. They lived on the tenth floor of an art deco building with a balcony looking out at the botanical gardens, where I got used to intramuscular injections.

Although the river was a mile away, from the balcony I always felt as though I was balancing at the tip of something. Like we were the last three people standing in Venice, like the canals were again on the verge of flooding.

In the default world, his credit card is this bright neon green and whenever I see it I want to throw up. Always unsure what my role is when the bill is being paid. I rush to fill an absence. I twirl my hair until it’s tangled, participate in embarrassing self-disclosure, rushing to find currency in the sincere, this is of course after I mostly stare at the food during dinner, as if I were some ethereal creature…

*

It turned out Module had paid upwards of $4,000 so he could take me to the desert and pill me on motherhood. “How do you feel about having children?” he said, when we were coming down from our first MDMA trip in the Soft Landing tea tent. Module said we could get all our work done by the time we were 27 and homeschool them. I looked over at him in the Terminator suit, and suddenly I had this overwhelming urge to replicate him. I woke up the next day with no hangover from the MDMA, wondering: “Are children, like, little pieces of art?” Suddenly I wanted one.

*

Oh, yeah, the mud you all heard about. Module and I got up late on the Day the Rain came. And now, a few feet in front of me, he’s carrying our bikes through the Dionysian mud. When we arrive back at Soft Landing, having taken refuge in a little dog-themed hut, suddenly everyone is saying this is going to be a climate disaster. So we’re taking shelter in the tea tent in the desert in the pouring rain, when, around five, this veteran burner comes over:

            “Look, I know you’re all really warm and cozy,” he said. “But the rain isn’t stopping, it’s actually going harder, and a lot of your tents are going down, and we don’t know when the Man is going to burn or even when we’re going to get out of here.” He pauses. “So I’m going to need you all to grab your squish and move to the bigger tent.”

So now there are about seventy of us in the big tent, which over the course of the week has been holding psychedelic salons on altered states of consciousness. It’s not until I start seeing socks hanging from the wire holding up the canopy that I realize we’re sort of like refugees. I find myself drawing little embryos in my notebook, I couldn’t be happier. I don’t know if it's that the desert’s infertility is feeding into my contrarian tendencies, or that it’s frustrating for me to see so much horniness every which way, void of any mission or even a physical direction, or if it’s the feeling that the carnivalesque display of kink and furry suits here seems symptomatic of living at a moment in-between-time, in which people have rendered themselves impotent in the face of so many choices... I haven’t outlawed the possibility that this is all some elaborate psyop Module planned with his gene dealer. I don’t care.

I want to jump start, jump start, into the future.

Around 9:30, our camp lead, big man Tryp comes over to me and Module, who have claimed a prime piece of territory near the middle of the Refugee Tent where the mud hasn’t seeped in yet, next to a pole against which we can lean our pillows. Tryp is wearing a one-piece suit that makes him look like a bunny rabbit and, on his face, a mischievous smile.

He crouches down with his bunny tail sticking out and whispers, “I have an amazing idea.” He opens up the palm of his hand to reveal fifteen MDMA capsules.

An hour later we’re all sitting on the Persian rugs on the floor, with the mud seeping in around us, stating our intentions again. Now on one side of the pole there’s me and Module, and on the other side there’s a giant cuddle puddle, where everyone is wearing furry suits and sharing pretzels. I turn around and ask Tryp about his polyamory practice, but I can’t stand it, it’s not Tryp it’s just that…

Our children are going to have the most beautiful eyes, they’re going to crawl on the floor… We’re going to build an LLM to teach them about nature, and they’re going to be so creative and adaptable from having survived so many hurricanes, floods, and other varieties of climate disaster while they were toddlers…

I’m zoning off into the pleasant cozy bask of the future… I’m at Burning Man, I remember. I look around our tent. A man with a furry hat is eating our remaining pork rinds, while holding up to my boyfriend’s right foot a vibrating foot massager. I look around for the nitrous and canister, and start blowing up balloons to distribute to the furries huddling around each other for warmth in the cuddle puddle. And then Module and I go to outer space, and when we land back, he just starts to laugh and laugh and laugh.

*

The day after the Man burned, we picked up our trash and joined the exodus out of Burning Man  — Flower, Junction, Module, and me. We stop to drop all our trash at a garbage two miles out, with a $10/bag dumping fee. Module starts to ash his cigarette in an Altoid can, but Junction stops him. “We don’t have to do that here.”

We’re all staying at the same hotel in Reno, inside a casino. We’re walking down a red carpet in the skyway from the parking garage, and my boyfriend is in front of me and he’s carrying Flower’s bags and he’s wearing the antlers. We’re looking for the check-in desk, but Module and Junction get distracted, there’s a slot room where they can smoke inside if they feel like it. I’m watching them load money into these giant red boxes when I start to feel this ringing in my ears. My boyfriend wins $100 and we go up to our hotel room, which is covered in mirrors.

Without leaving the casino air conditioning, we’re surrounded by options for dinner this evening, Japanese and Italian, all surrounding a copper metal fountain. I’m about halfway through my steak and I’m starting to think I can’t hear.

We go back to the hotel room and my boyfriend has me tilt my head to either side, holding a basin of water in it, and cleans the playa dust out of my ears.

“I liked us better when we were refugees,” I watch the girl with the ear infection say to the man in the mirror.

The next day we drop Flower off at the airport, pack up our bike lights and costumes, and take them to a storage locker to come back for next year.

Time is cyclical, home is the Playa. Insomnia isn’t a problem here—everyone lives just like my grandfather! And maybe you’re imagining it, but once you put on the antlers, it seems like everyone’s smiles get brighter.

“One word of advice—don’t get lost in the queue,” a Google programmer had told me when I was boarding the plane. “I’ve had the most amazing experiences here when I was on my way to some DJ set and ended up stuck, looking up at the moon.”

On your way to a happy hour at the intersection of 20:30 and Dingbat, the dust starts to blow—you head back to the tea house to take shelter. You end up talking to a psychic who tells you that you are the lunar moon, you are a vessel on a mission to balance polarizing forces in the world. You thank the elements for derailing you. You go back to your tent and write down: I am the lunar moon.

But the environment itself feels hostile to transcription. Everyone brags when their phones go dead, I feel like I’m killing the vibe when I retreat to write in my tent. Because you’re not really supposed to be processing what’s happening—“not here, not yet.”

Still, I’m a little bit bothered no one seems to be properly documenting this thing. Here there are AI safety researchers, real-estate agents, physicians, DJs, and lawyers, who’d all come here to listen to electronic music and jump up and down on a trampoline jelly fish in this desert where the only thing that can survive are these tiny little shrimp most genetically similar to the weird pets you get as a kid that bloomed when you put them in water.

But after doing a little bit of MDMA, the compulsion to note what’s wrong with everyone starts to melt away. Inside my head I heard all these sarcastic observations, and then they suddenly seemed so unnecessary….

I turn my eye to the situation in front of me, in the spirit of immediacy.

Module has had more GHB than me. We’re on our way to a camp which is supposed to be giving out grilled cheese until a giant stack of plastic water cubes confronts us. The cubes keep going and going, one on top of another, fifty feet up, like a Black Rock City skyscraper. It’s not clear if the cubes are another art installation, intended to be interactive or if they’re a core part of Burning Man’s infrastructure. There’s no sign saying “Don’t Touch This.”

Module’s intuition is talking. He’s dropping his bike. He’s reaching up for the metal wire on the first cube.

Module is on more GHB than me, and he looks like he’s 17. The ketamine paranoia is infecting me. We’re on top of the water cubes now, I’m looking down, I’m looking out, I’m scanning 360 degrees but everywhere it’s desert and mountain, like the Truman show, the same green screen in every direction. I make out purple lights, octopi holding fire in their arms, and tiny people, climbing up and down various art cars. This is a circus. This feels like the Westworld— robots stuck in a simulation of the Wild West, existing in a repeating circle of pain, pleasure, and fake death. My boyfriend is wearing a giant cowboy hat. I realize he looks like the Man in Black. I ask him for a cigarette. I need to think. Clearly someone is driving this thing.

I’m inhaling. I’m exhaling. I’m scanning the scene. And I’m wondering, why did they name him Module anyway? I wasn’t there when they chose his camp name. From the Latin: modulus –  small unit used to ‘plan’, ‘model’ a larger structure. Are they building something out of him?

I don’t say any of what I’m thinking out loud. He can’t be trusted. Not right now.

Another guy climbs up the water cubes. He’s wearing antlers too. He holds up his phone to take a picture of himself in front of the green screen.

A grilled cheese is a good idea, maybe. We’re riding again, and I’m biking in front of the Man in Black, and thinking.

Module drops his bike.

“We’re going to go down this slide.”

That night we’re going to do more GHB. We’re going to get horny. We’re going to say yes to everything. I’ve talked Module into it – we’re going to go to the orgy.

“BOOTY WORSHIP” the camp sign says—a bouncer invites us into their burlesque show. “Are you a tits or ass guy?” I ask Module, and already I’m regretting the words that I’m saying.

“Some secret third thing.” He doesn’t look like the Man in Black anymore to me.

Above us a larger crowd perched in little cages. Men wearing giant fur vests standing with women who I imagine to be their wives in the real world. The women don’t seem upset but, like the dancers who are about to go on stage, are in leather and scantily dressed. [1] [2] It’s fucking cold.

 “Do you all love BOOTIES?” the announcer shouts into her mic, she’s sauntering around in heels and I recognize her, I served tea to her last night.

The people in the cages start cheering. These guys are Vikings.

I watch Module turn to the side and pull out the ketamine saline.

“Now, some rules: no recording unless you have the dancer’s consent,” the announcer yells. “And remember, ALL BOOTIES ARE BEAUTIFUL!”

The dancers got on stage and started twerking to Cardi, and all of a sudden a wave of sadness rushed over me. I left Module to go to the port-a-potty. I sat on the ground below the hand sanitizer pole trying to get a grip, and then I just broke down and started crying uncontrollably. People kept coming up and asking if I was okay, assuming I was having a bad trip or something. But I wasn’t tripping. My ketamine tolerance was pretty high at this point, and the GHB wasn’t making me horny. It was that the default world was seeping in, and it was in conflict with itself, and no one was saying anything.

We never made it to the orgy. The next day it started raining.

Next to Junction is this tall guy in disguise, wearing sunglasses and a bandana. I guess, since he jumps up and down when he sees me, it must be my boyfriend. We’ve been apart for three weeks, and I’d like to pass the bag onto somebody. But the clowns are really taking their time trying to find my name in the online registry. They have me recite a Burning Man principle,

“Radical self-reliance,” I say, passing the bag.

Then they have me lie in the sand, sweep my arms and legs against the Playa dust, and finally hit a gong with a hammer. This is how they take your virginity and introduce you to Mother.

My boyfriend and I are biking around the playa a few hours later, where there are all these elaborate structures scattered around the desert. We pass a group of people building a tree of white and blue cubes lit up with fluorescent LEDs. It seems to me like a lot of work for something that will last six days, but my boyfriend seems totally dazzled by the whole thing, sitting up in his bike and looking behind periodically, ushering me into a new world and checking to see if I’m smiling…

We stop at the tree — just to stare at it.  “Isn’t it cool?” he asks, in a tone of total sincerity. I realize after three days of helping build our camp, he’s been indoctrinated totally.

I’m starting to think this Burning Man trip is going to bring up irreconcilable differences between us. I wonder out loud if we should break up. My boyfriend reminds me we have another six days here, sleeping together in the tent I brought.

**

There are 1,500 themed camps at Burning Man. They give the festival its color, organizing the collective talents of individuals into a commodity that can be redistributed by way of a gift economy. Some throw orgies, some invite you to write letters to your father, other host sensual wrestling parties or workshops on the five secrets to communicating with past lovers. In exchange for paying dues and doing chores like cooking and cleaning, you enjoy the comforts of communal living—a shower, kitchen access, people you could ask for anything you inevitably forgot as a first-time “burner.”

We were staying at Soft Landing, a camp with a tea-and-psychedelics theme that aimed to provide “a comfortable setting for visionary discussion and tea service amongst the mayhem of Black Rock City.” We ended up there because Junction had camped there the previous year and discovered, outside of his default-world life as an executive of a web 3.0 company, a second life as a tea server.

Founded by Annie Oak—a journalist who had gotten involved with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit known for its research on the therapeutic use of MDMA—Soft Landing was full of would-be countercultural types who found themselves confined by knowledge work in the present-day Bay Area: accountants who moonlit as polyamorists, rationalist science-fiction writers who liked to wear fursuits, computer programmers who took psychedelics to wrap their brains around the machines better—all mingling with veteran Gen-X burners who’d been going to the festival since the early aughts.

I couldn’t help but feel my boyfriend’s work friends, who pathologically called everything “based,” would be out of place. Furry suits, nonconforming sexual identities, and affirmations of acceptance are usually considered “cringe” within the vision of the world disseminated from 4chan across right-wing Twitter and beyond. But when I arrived, everyone seemed to be getting along, walking around wearing rainbow T-shirts, trading stories about how using DMT had skyrocketed their technical performance at work and led them to dig into the works of Plato.

Under the communal shade, my boyfriend—who now went by “Module”—was talking to a man with a furry cap allegedly being recruited by MAPS to work on some protein he believes is critical for psychedelic effect. “You’re really ahead of the curve,” I heard the man with a furry cap say to my boyfriend. I sat down on Module’s lap, and I thought I felt the furry glare.

“Nice ass!” the MAPS furry yelled at the woman cooking breakfast in a thong in front of us. She looked back, jiggled, and returned her attention to the eggs sizzling on the communal hotplates.

Later that day, all 150 of us gathered under the Big Tent to make the transition from Build Week to the start of the festival. In front of the room, “Tryp,” a big man with a bucket hat, explained Soft Landing’s principles. Tryp was camp lead, and also Mayor for the Day—but in the spirit of “decentralized leadership,” the following day this would all change. I was sitting with Module in the corner, as the Strike Leads, Build Leads, Tea House Leads, and Acculturation Leads all stood up and introduced themselves, one after another.

Tryp talked about Soft Landing’s founding and its commitment to creating a space where everyone is comfortable, attributing the special sense of community to the “censor responsibility” of the sponsorship model. Camp founder Annie wasn’t at Burning Man this year. Tryp said she was off “in the mountains somewhere.” I heard his voice crack. “I think she needed a break after last year.”

The playa dust in my eyes was getting really bad. The acknowledgements began. “I’d just like to thank Indira for being my sponsor, and Amygdala for being such an amazing neighbor.” “It’s my first burn, and I’m just really happy to be here.” “I’d just like to thank the Strike crew from last year. Often that work goes unacknowledged, you know, since most of us leave before it’s finished….” Before long, they’d been thanking each other for 45 minutes.

I thought I was going blind and went back to the tent to dry my eyes.

After the meeting, I heard Junction accuse me of “longhousing” Module for the fifth time since I got there. I could see, I could see again: I could see Junction out of the window of my tent, which peered into the smoking den —where it had been suggested that the smokers cloister, to protect all the people with sensitive lungs who chose to camp for a week in the desert. He was now explaining the longhouse to Flower, a 76-year-old veteran burner who walked around camp drinking gin out of a mug with a copy of her driver’s license on it, in case anyone ID’d her.

“Flower, your generation decided to abolish traditional gender roles, entirely forgetting that there is an innate drift for men to fall into,” he was saying. Flower blinked and took a sip of gin. “But Ruby’s innate drift is to create a cozy house with a dog, a stove, and kids. And Module rejects this innately, because he wants to conquer, and go on adventures. And that is why Ruby is trying to longhouse him.” Junction put out his cigarette in an Altoid tin.

That night, another one of Module’s colleagues arrived with a 10-strip of acid. The sun went down, and we started adorning our bicycles with neon pink and orange wire. Inside our tent, Module put on a one-piece suit with zippers all over that made him look like he thought he’s Arnold Schwarzennegger in The Terminator. Junction, Module, and I put the acid in our mouths and headed out. Under the communal shade, the veteran burners were playing a game, taking turns closing their eyes and feeding dried fruit to one another.

“Do you have plenty of water?” asked one of them. “Remember to quack to keep track of each other,” said another. They tilted their heads to the side and waved. “Have fun, make bad decisions,” their voices carried in a high-pitched unison as we started to bike away. I was in a bad mood—one of the veteran burners said I broke the virgin rule when I said no to her offering of dried fruit.

“Here they are, talking about consent on one hand, and making you feel like a bad person if you express any limitation or preference,” I said. “What if my radical self-expression is being rigid? What if I experience the most immediacy reshaping my lived experience into a meticulously composed narrative of my own creation?” We were biking through a sound garden full of mechanized flowers that sang when you stroked them.

I thought it would be interesting if the polylactic acid daisies rose up a few feet, blossomed to reveal fangs, and started attacking. Instead, they oscillated between various shades of pastel purple and green depending on the speed at which you walked by them.

I whispered into Module’s ear, “Shouldn’t this art be, like, more posthuman?” Module glared, but he had changed his tune on this Burning Man thing slightly, somewhere between me arriving and the acknowledgements meeting.

“Look, I was only psy-oping myself into liking everything so I could stomach the mundane drudgery of building,” he’d said earlier. “It was puppeteering, sure, but it was bottom-up, not top-down. Like, incentivizing.”

We were looking at a hedgehog installation, filled with photographs of Ukrainian DJs and directors who fought against the Russian invasion.

“Am I too easily impressed?” Module asked, but he wasn’t asking me, he was looking up at the sky and running the numbers on 24 years of being alive. The acid was starting to hit him, and it made him spin around and around and make sharp turns on his bike. The rest of the night he kept talking to the stars about Markov blankets and the dissolution of the inside and outside.

I went to bed early, listening to the sound of people fill up balloons with nitrous oxide on either side of me: Module and Junction on one side, a pair of newly engaged lesbians on the other, until they looked over and decide they should all gather in the Smoking Lounge and do the balloons together. Ah, nitrous, the dental-chair anesthetic, which takes you from your folding chair in Black Rock to viewing the Earth from outer space and briefly simulates death, until everyone lands, you’re back to your folding chair again, and everyone looks at each other with awe on their face until someone says, “Let’s do it again.”

My boyfriend got to the Playa four days before me. The plan was that everything would be taken care of before I got there: there would be bicycles, there would be acid, there would be MDMA, there would be MXE and some other drugs whose acronyms I can’t remember. There would be birthday-cake flavoured protein bars, protein drinks, zero-sugar electrolyte powder, and plenty of tinned fish and water. We were going to meet his gene dealer. We were all going to do 2-CB together. I had to bring the tent. I wasn’t sure what to expect.

My boyfriend is generally enthusiastic and competent, and assured me, over a series of rapid-fire texts as he approached the cyberpunk city where his phone would drop dead, HOW MUCH FUN WE WERE GOING TO HAVE. I reminded him that I was totally red pilled and cynical: about hippies, environmentalists taking airplanes, the rhetoric of liberation, deep breathing, polyamory, and group activities in the general. I also didn’t really like the outdoors. He assured me it would be fine; I just had to bring the tent and jump on a plane to Reno.

A few days later, I wake up on a small charter plane operated by something called the BxA. Behind me, a guy is talking about how he’s adapting ketamine therapy for outer space. I decide to go back to sleep.

I’m a little groggy; I couldn’t sleep the night before. I was staying at my grandparents’, and, all night, I kept seeing my grandfather. My grandpa has dementia, badly—decades of refusing to wear hearing aids have accelerated his ascent into to his own reality. It turns out we keep similar hours when I’m in a fit of anxiety. I woke up at three in the living room sofa, and he was in the armchair across from me, doing the crossword from yesterday. An hour later I was in the shower. I heard the door open, and saw his eyes widen from behind the shower curtain…

By five, my grandma, mother, and I were all drinking coffee. And my grandpa walked in with this look of stupor on his face, as if he’d just come back from outer space.

“WHERE ARE YOU OFF TO?” he asked.

“I’m headed to Burning Man,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“I’M HEADED TO RENO.” I tried again.

“Oh, pay no attention to him,” my grandma said.

“Grandpa, I’M GOING TO DO ACID IN THE DESERT.”

The old man’s eyes got wider. Finally, something seemed to register.

Then he went back to looking at the chipped egg-white paint on the wall, as if the house he’s lived in for forty years was suddenly unfamiliar.

Anyway, back to the plane. As the concentric circles in the desert came into focus, everyone behind me started passing out shrooms chocolate. The seven of us unboarded, and a woman with clown paint on her face appeared—she was holding a clipboard. “Welcome home,” she said, asking for our default world names. We all started to grab our luggage, but the clown lady said we had to wait.

Sarah got the curse, Cane got the curse.

Sarah loved the curse: she went on excursions to the top of this hill and that hill, long walks to the pond and she felt freer than ever before with no purpose but to walk and walk and walk and walk. At the end of the day her wrist reported on her steps, and she developed a fond attachment for the dinging at sunset.

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‍My doctor and I were on funemployment, which meant our job was to take what the Tinder ads on the BART train called comfortable silences and make fun appear — as if out of thin air. This was our summer experiment, initially pitched to me as a three-day trial, to see how much fun could be had in a weekend. (This was, I quote, “A seriously understudied research question.”) But the trial got extended, on and on and on, as it tends to when you’re — uh, having fun. And now I’m stuck here, listening to “Where Did Our Love Go” by Soft Cell, the intro, where they’re all snapping in unison, in compartment 3B at the Extra Space Storage in the Castro District of San Francisco.

‍‍*

It all started on the 13th of May, when I got a weird LinkedIn message —

“Would you like to push the limits of fun with a vitality maxxer?” A quick glimpse of his profile revealed that he was some sort of influencer, concerned — like so many of us were back then — with health and nutrition. His profile included the obligatory references to the dangers of laundry detergent and the importance of blue light glasses, as well as videos of him shirtless, cooking steak or ground beef behind some Central American sunset. What was different — and what piqued my interest — was that in front of his blurred-out face he was always smoking a cigarette.

He insisted that he was not a “biohacker” but something entirely new. His profile description read:

“IN THE DISCOURSE AROUND AI SAFETY, WE’VE FORGOTTEN THE QUESTION OF VITALITY. The only way to survive against the robots is to have more fun than them.”

‍As a writer working for what had become a clickbait machine reporting on tech news in the Bay, I was drawn to entrepreneurial types and so-called visionaries; I found their delusions charming. But with the cult of AI safety growing, my job had gotten more and more boring. Ever since Roko, people in SF had convinced themselves that those who displayed high levels of ambition or idiosyncracy were more likely to be punished by an unfriendly AI — baseline divergence makes individuals harder to simulate. This made it harder to find those “eccentric characters” essential for any good story. Plus, we were all watching the art of journalism be lost from mankind forever, as the art of “reporting” was being broken to parts and stripped down to performing as an on-the-ground envoy for a Large Language model.

The LinkedIn vitality maxxer, however, had no qualms about talking about himself — as if he were someone from the past or maybe the future. He said in his message that he was the one who actually cured HIV, that his theory about how sustained amphetamine use could empower younger generations to murder their parents was being tested on a small Martian space colony. He considered himself to be an artist in his own right, engaging in the field of “experiential pharmacology” — attempting to attune the feeling inside his body to the vibe he felt the external world was demanding. 

His new project was to attempt to exist in multiple realities; to do this he needed to send his handlers from a past life a message. Somehow my piece would help with this.

He signed off the message with a winky emoji and a quotation: 

“If a writer falls in love with you, you live forever.” I sent my reply saying “sure — I’ll spend the weekend with you” and sealed my fate in this cage one hour later.

I never did find out his real name — for the sake of the story, I’ll call him Doctor Grey.

*

“We live in a time in which the world has slowly lost its sense of what it means to be alive,” said the guy when he showed up on my doorstep on the Fourth of July. He had nothing on him, just this bright purple suitcase in the shape of an elephant. Something he found, he told me, “climbing in Everest.” He talked in this accent I found hard to place, but I never did find out where he was from. Whenever I asked he said “I was made in a lab just for you babe.” Then he’d cock his head to the side and light a cigarette. I could never tell whether or not he was serious.

cont’d in the Miami Native

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In a poster publicizing his 1985 show at Civilian Warfare, the artist Luis Frangella sits in his light-starved Lower East Side studio, in front of a backdrop of brick and glass windows, surrounded by heads: some are on canvas, others on cardboard, and a few are on car doors, but all depicted using thick strokes, as if he painted from the shoulder or the elbow. In the middle of the room, the artist is hunched over, wearing an acrylic knit sweater that makes him look a little straight-laced for the East Village art scene. In contrast to his neo-expressionist creations, Frangella appears cool, concentrated. He is looking up at the photographer with what appears to be mild annoyance, as if to say, Why are you still here? I’d rather be working.

The photograph was taken on Forsyth and Delancey, in an apartment Frangella shared with my godfather, Russell Sharon. I’ve always been attracted to Russell’s stories about living with Luis, in Boston and New York City, where, upon moving to the Lower East Side in the early 1980s, the two artists came to occupy four stories in a dilapidated building. Here, they enjoyed a lifestyle which seemed to erratically alternate between high-vibration anxiety and pleasant domesticity. They cooked meals for their friends—including Peter Hujar, Judy Glantzman, and David Wojnarowicz—after gallery openings, and grew eggplants on their rooftop vegetable garden. Both had studios. Luis worked constantly, and was sensitive to any form of disruption. “If anyone would try to interrupt it when he was working, which was almost all the time,” Russell remembers, “it would turn on the hysteria.”¹ In the early 1980s, Luis was producing set pieces for clubs in the East Village and gigantic paintings of torsos, developing a visual language which combined his classical sensibility with the loose, free brushstrokes of neo-expressionism, a high-pitched style which was then gaining traction in the international art world.

Russell affectionately remembers Luis for his temper; moody, sensitive, and serious, he could fluidly alternate between intense anger and a polite, formal register—coming from one of Argentina’s oldest settling families, Luis had manners. The two men were romantically intertwined but non-monogamous; Russell remembers having a one-night stand over while Luis was out with another partner. When Luis returned in the morning, he first appeared kind, asking Russell’s date questions. When the one-night stand left, Luis turned to Russell and said: “If I ever see that guy again, I’m going to throw him out the window.”

Yet Luis is often remembered for his calm, gentle nature. Writing about the artist after his death from AIDS-related complications in 1990, Wojnarowicz describes, “I have nothing but memories of him that either touch me or confuse me.” He remembers how Luis once took in a stray cat that crawled in through his apartment window, but refused to take it to the vet when it got sick “because it was a transient creature moving through time and he had boundaries for what he was willing to do with it.”³ After the cat died, Luis constructed a grave for it.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1944, Luis was the third eldest of four siblings raised in an upper-class Argentine family. He was the son of Roberto Frangella, a businessman from a family of Italian immigrants, and Lia Moyano, the great-granddaughter of Patricio Peralta Ramos, a goldsmith and wealthy merchant who founded the coastal city of Mar del Plata. Luis’s mother enjoyed a bourgeois childhood: she and her four sisters learned German from their nanny, studied painting, and regularly vacationed in Europe. As a young adult, Lia organized salons, showed her paintings in galleries, and mingled with preeminent poets and writers in Buenos Aires’s cultural scene—Jorge Luis Borges allegedly called Lia and her four sisters “the famous beauties.”⁴ Thanks to his mother’s heritage, Luis would be raised with the privileges of an aristocratic upbringing, in a home stimulated by art, music, and painting. According to his siblings, their father passed on to them a desire to be industrious and hardworking.

After marrying in 1939, Luis’s parents had four children in quick succession. Concerned with how the pollution in the city would impact their eldest, Juan, who was diagnosed with asthma, they left Buenos Aires and moved to the wealthy suburb of San Isidro.⁵ There, the Frangellas grew up surrounded by nature, including sheep and cattle. Against this pastoral backdrop, Luis began expressing an interest in form and sculpture.

Luis and his older brother, Roberto, spent their days playing in nearby construction sites, building miniature houses under the fruit trees with the bricks and roof scraps they had stolen. Soon they progressed to ceramics, building religious figures with clay soil from their garden.

“Luis demonstrated, with his expressiveness, a great quality which made his work stand out with originality and personality and some special feature,” his brother Roberto remembers. “While our creations were typical of children, whether it was drawings, treehouses, or paper kites, Luis already had a different spark—that of someone superior.”⁶

When Luis was eighteen years old, the Frangella family moved back to Buenos Aires, largely to support their eldest sons who were showing promise in their studies. They purchased a large apartment in Recoleta, on the grand Avenida del Libertador, with a view of the Retiro train station. From here, Luis and Roberto could walk across the street to the University of Buenos Aires, where they were studying architecture.

Luis’s youngest sister, Lia, remembers her brother’s teenage genius with zeal. “He knew the words to every opera. He knew it in French, in German, in whatever,” she said, her eyes widening. “Luis was a monster.”⁷

When they moved back to the city, Lia remembers Luis acting differently—more reserved, more taciturn. He stayed out late, started bringing “strange” people back to their apartment, and became more distant. Russell imagines he was exploring his sexuality. In an October 1986 diary entry, Luis briefly describes this part of his biography: “1962: Moved to Buenos Aires, became both depraved and painter.”⁸ Lia would not find out Luis was gay until a few years later, when a rumor went around her husband’s school that Luis was going out with a sailor.

Luis’s parents, although raising their children in the Catholic tradition, were intellectually open-minded: they accepted Luis’s homosexuality and would later warmly host several of his lovers in Argentina. But they seemed to make sense of his sexuality by relating it to a narrative about him making it as a successful artist in New York City. Luis’s mother told him that “all great artists were gay,” a statement which holds both a tinge of acceptance and pressure. Writing about Luis after his death, his sister Lia describes that after losing his “innocence” in his teenage years, after leaving Argentina, “his life as a famous painter, a ‘Great Man’, unfolded.”⁹

One night in the early 1970s, Luis was walking out late at night—either looking to meet someone or observing the buildings. He was picked up by the police and arrested for cruising.¹⁰ In the years leading up to the Dirty War, the national military was becoming an increasingly obtrusive presence in the everyday lives of Argentineans as they gained political influence in their attempt to control the perceived threat of left-wing radicalism. Believing that Luis’s stubbornness and anti-authoritarian nature would pose a threat should he have another run-in with the military, his family started looking for ways to protect him.¹¹ Luis began exploring opportunities to study elsewhere, where he would have more freedom. In 1973, he received a scholarship to study visual arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).¹²

At MIT, Luis began to see space as a conceptual question, blending an architect’s interest with building immersive environments with a philosophical curiosity and an artist’s openness to illusion. Three-dimensionality became an obsession. In the 1970s he produced a series of stereograms: two-dimensional images that appear three-dimensional when viewed with the proper equipment. For a 1975 show at MIT, Luis designed an installation called Visual Gravity, covering three areas surrounding the Center for Advanced Visual Studies in a patterned linoleum, so that, when wearing Luis’s glasses, cones would seem to grow out of the floor and surround the viewer.¹³ Another piece, Cuchillos, viewed through bifocal lenses, creates the impression of knives protruding out of the canvas. In order to achieve their full effect, these pieces demanded the viewer’s participation.

“I only suggest some parts of the structure, and the rest has to be done by the imagination of the viewer. The idea of a totality comes later,” Luis wrote on an undated piece of grid paper. “I create the set of references and the viewer imagines the space.”¹⁴

Russell remembers Luis being stoic at MIT, often opting to sleep on the floor of his studio, finding a sense of comfort, and control, in denying himself certain luxuries and keeping things as simple as possible. “He liked to have parameters for himself, discipline,” Russell describes. “It was a spiritual exercise that ran pervasively through his life.”

Luis rarely returned to the apartment he shared with his friend, the avant-garde composer Maryanne Amacher, although the two artists inspired one another creatively. At MIT, Amacher was experimenting with “site-specific music,” collecting raw sounds from different locations over months or years to understand the environment, mixing the sounds from different places, and transmitting them over telephone lines. In a similar vein to how Luis’s stereograms were manipulating distance, Amacher’s compositions explored the idea of synchronicity: “hearing spaces distant from each other at the same time, which we do not experience in our lives.”¹⁵ When Luis was seeking a green card after leaving MIT, he and Amacher got married at City Hall in New York City. Russell remembers that when a guest at their tea-time wedding ceremony suggested that theirs was a strange partnership, Luis threw a cup of tea on him and everyone “pretended nothing happened.”

In 1975, Luis and Amacher collaborated with composer John Cage on his piece Lecture on the Weather. Drawing inspiration from the texts of Henry David Thoreau, and particularly his understanding of “the value of passivity and openness as a way to see life anew,” Cage rearranged Walden into music, using the I Ching as a divination tool.¹⁶ Amacher collected sounds of rain and thunder from Walden Pond, and Luis presented a visual component: flashing illustrations of the doodles on the margins of Thoreau’s journals.

Collaborating with Cage would play a monumental role in Luis’s development as an artist: the composer introduced the use of chance into Luis’ creative practice. After studying Zen Buddhism and Indian philosophy for many years, Cage received the Book of Changes, the foundational text for the I Ching, as a gift from a pupil in 1951.¹⁷ He then began using the I Ching as a method for composition, flipping coins and turning to the book for interpretation in order to determine the duration of notes or the choice of instruments, believing it reduced the presence of ego in his work. Cage described his use of chance as “not an attempt to bring order out of chaos” but “simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living.”¹⁸ Luis went on to use the ancient Chinese divination text to decide the size and shape of his canvases, throwing coins on the color wheel to pick hues.¹⁹ Russell describes this as a way of “loosening up” for Luis, who was “a total control freak.” Asking the I-Ching questions, Russell remembers, “freed him from the anguish of making an imperfect decision.”²⁰

While architecture seems like the perfect calling for an aesthete with controlling tendencies, Luis’s work at MIT shows he was searching for something different. His work reveals an epistemic undercurrent: he not only studied space and distance as externalized subjects, but also played with the distance between the metaphysical topics that interested him and his ability to single-handedly grasp their underlying concepts. Reflecting on Luis’s later work, Judy Glantzman describes the artistic motivation to play with the distance between artist and subject: “That wire figure will never be a real figure,” she said. “So your artwork is not just about trying to succeed in capturing it, but also an acknowledgement that you never can.”²¹ In an attempt to achieve balance, Luis turned to mysticism and artist-viewer collaboration.

Underlying the philosophy of the I-Ching are the concepts of yin and yang, the feminine and the masculine, the yielding and the firm. Revisiting Luis’s work now, I see this in all of it. His work is at once concerned with control and curious about the loss of it: his architectural manipulation of surfaces is self-consciously undermined by the expressionist strokes he uses. While living in Buenos Aires in the spring of 2023, I went to see Luis’s work on display at the Centro Cultural Kirchner; looking at his paintings, my friend noted that while his female torsos struck him as cold, the male torsos seemed more alive and sensual. But Luis, perhaps seeking balance, continued to paint the female body throughout his life.

Luis himself seemed to be pained when his controlling tendencies and desire to experience life fluidly came into conflict. Time, in particular, troubled him—he was always afraid of running out of it. In a 1986 diary entry, Luis reflected on his “childhood obsession with time,” writing: “I should’ve known then it was not the hours that counted, but the minutes. The Now minutes.”²² Driving with Wojnarowicz up to Richmond, Virginia, where curator Carlo McCormick had invited a group of East Village artists to create an installation, Luis notes in his diary that he has left his watch behind: “I don’t want to know the time it would make me nervous. I’ll take it as it comes with many people with different feelings.²³ The diary entries are surrounded by references to an “H” infection; he notes that thoughts about his health are increasingly consuming him.

Despite his serious nature, Luis quickly adapted to life in Lower Manhattan and its atmosphere of playful degeneracy. In the early 1980s, Luis became a key figure in the emerging East Village art scene, impressing younger artists like Wojnarowicz and Glantzman with his classical arts training and romantic sensibility. When Mike Bidlo and Wojnarowicz took over Pier 34—transforming the abandoned warehouse turned cruising destination into a guerilla art project—Luis was invited to contribute. There he became known for his technical dexterity, maneuvering large brushes with sticks to produce larger-than-life murals of male and female torsos.²⁴

The photographer Andreas Sterzing captured Luis at the pier, standing behind one of his murals, on top of a mess of debris which appears to be broken down shipping containers. Built in 1932 when New York was a busy port city, the pier first represented the opulence of the city, echoing the industrial age’s promise of prosperity and massive employment. After the financial crash of the 1970s, the piers were abandoned by the city and repurposed by gay men seeking a place for anonymous encounters in the spirit of post-Stonewall liberation. In one of his murals, Luis rendered his characteristic torsos in thick orange and blue strokes that make their muscles appear to vibrate. His subjects feel both like remnants of the past and affirmations of humanity’s persistence, elevating the human form into a state of celestial timelessness. Another photo by Sterzing shows Bidlo and Wojnarowicz lying on a patch of grass planted by the latter as one of his artistic contributions. Wojnarowicz looks up at the sky, Bidlo looks down at him. Luis’s head towers over them, looking blissfully indifferent to their presence.

When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of it forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending.

— David Wojnarowicz²⁵

Perhaps it was the rhythm of the city of New York that inspired Luis to shift from conceptual art to studying the human form in the emerging style of neo-expressionism. It was in this environment—gritty and romantic precisely because of its imperfections—that Luis started making studies of its inhabitants, from chiaroscuro drawings of rats to portraits of the owner of the Limbo Lounge, a speakeasy-turned-gallery for which Luis regularly produced sets.²⁶ Wojnarowicz writes of Luis: “He could look at the nightmares of new york summer streets on the hottest day of august and see with a childs eyes the pearls of water spilling from a hydrant.”²⁷

When New York appeared ugly, Luis brought it closer to him. Perhaps responding to the consumerist ethos of the Reagan era, Luis created a gigantic sculpture of Mickey Mouse. Below the towering Disney character, a young man wearing matching mouse ears sits on a director’s chair, looking up as if mesmerized. Through his work, Luis revealed himself to be deft at transvaluation, finding something ironic or romantic in the prevailing atmosphere of grime. Returning to the city after a long weekend, the artist describes “waking up to a pair of rats biting and screeching . . . that was the pit of my summer, when I almost lost my mind.”²⁸ A few days later, sketches of kissing rats appear on the margins of his diaries.

In 1984, Luis returned to Argentina, bringing Wojnarowicz with him. After the 1983 fall of the military dictatorship, an underground art scene was emerging in Buenos Aires, and the curator Jorge Glusberg, who first showed Luis’s work in 1979, had invited the artist to help organize an exhibition. Luis and Wojnarowicz transported their peers’ paintings from New York to Argentina in their suitcases. The result was Desde New York: 27 artists from the East Village. Two gallery assistants almost quit their jobs when Wojnarowicz and Luis started painting graffiti directly on the gallery walls at CayC, The Centro de Arte y Comunicación.“²⁹

At this point Luis had established himself in New York City: in 1983, he had his first solo show at Hal Bromm Gallery, and, later that year, was featured in the East Village Eye’s profile of “Twenty Artists” (the subtitle reads: “LOWER EAST SIDE ARTISTS NOW HOT COMMODITY”).³⁰

It was during this moment, following the fall of Argentina’s repressive military regime, that Luis finally began to receive recognition in his country of origin. He took the opportunity to be provocative. Invited by a national television program to speak about his art, Luis presented a sculpture of a man’s face, his eyes bleeding red, placed inside a fruit crate so it looked like a prisoner. The announcer asked him what the piece was called. Wojnarowicz describes: “The camera did a close-up on the agonized cardboard face as Luis sweetly answreed [sic]—this is national t.v.—I call him: ‘repressed homosexual.’ Suddenly the camera twisted to a commercial.”³¹

One afternoon during this same trip, at his parents’ apartment in Recoleta, Luis made portraits of his mother and father. For these he used a cardboard surface, which he folded in the middle to create a third dimension. He would go on to create a series of these portraits—which he called “masks”—when he returned to New York, painting friends, lovers, and one-night stands. In this series, Luis’s oeuvre seems to find unity. Merging his neo-expressionist style and use of discarded materials with his early interest in architecture and three-dimensionality, Luis inflects the traditional form of portraiture with an East Village sensibility.

Reflecting on the series in 2023, Civilian Warfare founder Alan Barrows says Luis viewed the masks as “angels” or protecting forces—reminiscent of caryatids, the figures carved into pillars of buildings in Ancient Greece to introduce an element of drama and beauty.^. In a 1985 show at Civilian Warfare, Luis displayed his masks alongside his rat drawings—his occasionally frightening, sometimes funny renderings of the grime of New York City. Barrows tells me that Luis insisted that the masks be hung near the ceiling and the rats near the floor —perhaps reflecting the artist’s desire for delineation between the realms reflects his Catholic upbringing, which seemed at this time to be rubbing up against the gritty East Village ethos of creative debauchery.³² The effect of the show sounds like a Boschian vision—vermin and celestial deities shown together in one small cramped East Village gallery room, Luis infusing the installation process with his characteristic intensity.

Has the H. come back? I have some little wounds. Can it be it again? I hope not. Everything increases my nervous state, the tremendous gases that I have suffered and the blood that came out of me. Everything has weakened me. Now this eruption on my chest perhaps results from the vitamins and dissolvable types, but in any case, my body needs a good rest, which I will take in Argentina. I hope. The painting is finished, thank goodness. And thank God. A past chapter, now. —Luis Frangella, September 22, 1985³³

Despite embracing the darker sides of life in his creative practice, Luis lived in denial of the AIDS epidemic. Even as HIV spread through the downtown art community and close friends contracted the illness, Luis never spoke about it in public. When Russell went to get tested, he remembers Luis becoming hysterical. “He thought it was bad luck,” Russell remembers. “To acknowledge that you had a pimple, or a disease, was to open the door for it to come in.”

But Luis’s diary entries from as early as 1985 show he was consumed by the threat of disease, referencing “H.”—perhaps a reference to HIV, although his sister Lia told me she interpreted this as references to herpes. He documented his sugar intake and macrobiotic diet. As early as March 1986, Luis reflected that he would like to move to Buenos Aires, deciding that he does not have much longer to live. He writes: “I want to close myself off to the charms of the world, since I can’t manage to dedicate myself to the small, the intimate, the things that fascinate the spirit.”³⁴

Luis was hospitalized for a seizure in 1990, shortly after returning to New York from Madrid, where he had met Queen Sofia of Spain at a show featuring his work. He then lost his ability to speak Spanish, and soon all control of his muscles. In their studio on Forsyth, Russell hired a pair of nurses to look after Luis around the clock, and propped him up in front of an easel so that he could continue to work.³⁵

At the end of his life, Luis’s work simplified and he began to paint still lifes. In these, he returned to the subject that bothered him as a child, as if humbling himself before the passing of time. He produced a series of candle paintings, rendered in muted pastels. He continued work on a series of star paintings which he had begun while visiting his family in Argentina. Made by studying the sky from the same vantage point at different points in the night, he refers to the series as a “study of the hours.” He returned to a childhood book of constellations. Bedridden, he continued the series, consulting the I Ching to decide the size of his canvases and using the book to copy the constellations.

“Everything else is lost in the world. You can start learning everything again by reading the stars,” Luis told David Hirsh in an April 1990 interview at his Forsyth apartment, nine months before his death on December 7th.³⁶

is this bad karma?

is this the writing curse?

am i going to get SO much satisfaction from sending this?

am i not supposed to do this?

am i never going to finish it?

I’m trying to be a fiction writer

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The loft, it turned out, was not really his. Giles was a professional bohemian. Having gone to boarding school with French aristocrats, he had collected, over the years, an assortment of both old money and newly wealthy friends whose houses he’d stay for free in, or in exchange only for his good looks and charm and perhaps a few other favors he didn’t mention. That week he was staying in the home of the great-grandchild of the Earl of Rosslyn. The one condition was that Giles uncrate the heavy mahogany Egyptian revival furniture his friend had sent from his country home and had delivered to his brand-new Soho apartment. Inside the entire loft there was only one piece of furniture unpacked: an orange velvet couch. So we broke the ice on it.

Giles invited me to a New Year’s Eve party he was having. He did not like manual labor of any kind and wanted something to look forward to when he finished his project. My birthday is the 27th, so I guess it was four days later. When I arrived, he had unpacked. There were antiques everywhere.

*

Antique rugs, antique lamps, antique furs, antique busts. Soon there were all these people buzzing around the loft—interesting people from all over sitting under the chandelier lamps with cheetah furs thrown over their shoulders and Persian rugs under their toes. It was like visiting a small museum. We made ourselves at home. I was sitting on the sofa when the elevator door opened and out came a woman with the most amazing hair-do. It was sort of like a beehive. Back then women usually had at least one gay guy who would style their hair. This woman came and sat down right next to me. She told me her name was B., sort of flirtatiously. Almost right away we hit it off as kindred spirits. We spent the whole party talking on that couch, not so much about ourselves but watching the people around. B. liked to make up stories. Oh, do you see the woman in the leopard print? She dumped her boyfriend and is starting to regret it—that’s why she’s prowling around with a martini in her hands, sizing up every man. Or, you see that man in the fedora? He likes to get tied up. By the woman in the pink coat. But his girlfriend doesn’t know. That’s why they’re circling each other, trying to avoid eye contact across the fruit platter. These were fantasies, I suppose.

I was watching the room twirl when B. pulled a pack of cards out of her purse and asked if she could read my tarot. She suggested a simple three-card spread. The first card, on my left, showed an image of a man hacking away at a coin with a hammer, very focused, intense. B. asked if I had done a lot of physical labor in my past. I said yes. In the middle B. pulled a card with two people holding hands, a rainbow above their heads. For my future card B. pulled out the Star. She said the Star represented someone able to communicate between the material world and the spiritual one. This is when B looked me in the eyes and said we were very similar people.

B. would turn out to be a very pivotal person—in my life and, I think, in the lives of many others. In New York some people were like galaxies, some were like stars and some were like planets. It’s hard to say what made someone a galaxy or a star as opposed to something smaller on the cosmological spectrum. Everyone had a whole lot of energy. But the stars and galaxies sucked you into their orbit.

B. and I exchanged phone numbers on the back of a napkin, and three days later I was at her apartment.

B. had a loft on Prince Street, with twelve great big windows looking out at the Empire State Building, where she would throw great big lavish dinner parties. Her apartment was something of a nest for kindred spirits of just about every variety. Artists, musicians, hairdressers, hat makers. It was at B.’s loft that I would meet Basquiat, who was SAMO then, and John Cage who made great music you could hardly stand. I remember one night where B.’s mother came to dinner.

So it was B. on one end of the table, B.’s mother on the other, and about fifteen young men—all gay and all very good looking—in between. About halfway through dinner B.’s mother stood up to make a toast. She said I’d like to thank you all for the excellent conversation this evening. And I’d especially like to thank my daughter B., thanks to whom I’ve met so many wonderful young men since I gave birth to her.

“How many years ago?!” Huck Synder stood up and asked. We all laughed. B.’s age was always a mystery–whenever anyone asked she giggled and said “guess.” She must have been twenty years older than us because she said she had watched the modern art movement unfold. She’d seen Picasso’s first show at the Museum of Modern Art, where he’d learned how to paint in the abstract. When she talked about her childhood the story was always the same: she grew up in the South Bronx before the neighborhood had a name, crammed in with her parents inside a dark one-bedroom apartment, the light blocked off by an elevator train. One day she wandered into the Botanical Garden and discovered the light changed everything. This was how she discovered that she was an artist.

B. called herself a “high-creative,” although her career never really took off as we say, I guess. Her greatest masterpiece was her collection of gay men. A scientist in the art of social engineering, she had a radar and she knew what she was looking for. If you were at all interesting, and especially if you were good looking, she’d suck you in. Huck Synder was B.’s best boyfriend. He’d do anything for her, even have sex with her—I mean this was back then. They would curate shows together, get in huge fights. One of them would call you in tears, the other would run off to California and then two weeks later you’d get a postcard from Berlin with their names signed next to each other’s.

It was on one of those trips to Germany that B. posed for Nan Goldin. “B with blue drink” is the name of the piece. Staring coyly into the camera with a big blue martini glass while the boys behind her are whispering. Wearing big white sunglasses so you can’t really tell what she’s thinking.

New York born and bred, B. had a sixth sense: she always knew where the next thing was happening. It was through her that I ended up going to the East Village galleries, and that I got my first show at Civilian Warfare, showing my cow paintings. Because of her I even started acting. She cast me as a tree in this performance art piece. It must have been 1982. 83. It’s hard for me to remember the years but I’m really trying. She always made fun of my landscape paintings. Anything natural terrified her: moss, twigs, birth, disease. Birds—even though she looked like she could have been one of them. Anyway, by the time the mood started shifting, she was already in Miami.

“I don’t do dates, like I told you already,” B. told Daisy. “But it must have been sometime in the mid-80s. All I remember was thinking it’s not supposed to be this cold in February. Then I turned the corner onto Spring Street and this breeze of cold wind just slapped me. I just thought I have to go.”

“So yeah,” she said, refilling her Coke. “That’s how I sold the loft and ended up in Miami. I don’t know what you mean by ‘East Village art scene’ or ‘things happening.’ I was just coming up with ideas, like I always am, like I’m still doing. I’m getting tired, so tell me. Is that what you came all the way down here to ask me?”

He assured me, over a series of rapid-fire texts as he approached the cyberpunk city where his phone would drop dead, how much fun we were going to have. I reminded him I was cynical about hippies, the rhetoric of liberation, environmentalists taking airplanes, camping, deep breathing, polyamory, and group activities in general. I also didn’t really like the outdoors.

New piece up at Compact.

The whole time I was in Lisbon, by a big ocean and some architecture that's supposedly interesting, I couldn't stop thinking about being back with the rats in New York City. When my Swiss friend complained that we live in the least romantic times ever, I didn't tell her about what I felt I was discovering in New York. How it's here, exp…

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