Praise for Exquisite Mariposa
“Ecstatic and painful, Exquisite Mariposa is a diligent search for the heart of The Real, taking its place alongside the great Young Girl books of becoming, from Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps to Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. To Duncan, The Real equals self-knowledge, compassion, and perception. She is a genius, and I’d follow her anywhere.”
—CHRIS KRAUS, author of After Kathy Acker and I Love Dick
“Exquisite Mariposa is like if Eve Babitz wrote Weetzie Bat: luminous, loopy, magical, and picaresque. It’s an honor to even live in the same Los Angeles that this book describes.”
—CLAIRE L. EVANS, author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
“Fiona Alison Duncan will raise your consciousness and spirits with her unworldly presence, her sensuous and intense perception, her free-floating mind. She may be an alien, but she is a friendly, peace-seeking alien who just wants to talk. I could listen to her voice all day.”
—SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT, founding editor of Adult, contributor to Artforum and Bookforum
“If you described it to me, there’s no way I would read it. It’s everything I hate in life and literature, but somehow it’s really good.”
—DEAN KISSICK, Spike Magazine
“Exquisite Mariposa is one of those books that had me from the first sentence to the last and beyond. Duncan churns up all the digital, performative, hypersocial chaos of our present ‘reality,’ even of the near future, and crystallizes it into dreamy and raw poetry. Page after page, paragraph after paragraph, this story, built on jewellike insights, sometimes made me laugh and sometimes made me sad and always registered as true.”
—JARDINE LIBAIRE, author of White Fur
“An unapologetically raw account of coming of age broke in Trump-era Los Angeles in the social media–saturated Now, this meditation (almost manifesto?) on materialism, media, power, performance, and sexuality uses inventive, of-the-moment language to tackle that circuitous route to self-discovery that is your twenties—in a startlingly original way.”
—LILIBET SNELLINGS, author of Box Girl: My Part Time Job as an Art Installation
“A funny, thought-provoking novel that levels pointed critiques at gender and class inequality and captures what it’s like to be a young person today . . . The novel’s ideas and voice are a pleasure . . . Exquisite Mariposa is an incisive story about the struggles of sensitive, artistic young people as they figure out how best to live.”
—REBECCA HUSSEY, Foreword Reviews
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2019 by Fiona Alison Duncan
First published in 2019 by Soft Skull
All rights reserved
“I Want to Believe” © 2016 by Maggie Lee. Image courtesy of the Artist and Real Fine Arts, New York. Photograph by Joerg Lohse
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Duncan, Fiona Alison, author.
Title: Exquisite mariposa : a novel / Fiona Alison Duncan.
Description: New York : Soft Skull, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019008878 | ISBN 9781593765781 (pbk.)
Classification: LCC PS3604.U5268 E97 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008878
Cover design & art direction by salu.io
Book design by Jordan Koluch
Published by Soft Skull Press
1140 Broadway, Suite 704
New York, NY 10001
www.softskull.com
Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Printed in the United States of America
13579108642
To Noo,
Who rescued who?
I have always been a girl.
I have never had a strong sense of reality because I’m a girl.
—KATHY ACKER, unpublished notebooks
Contents
Episode 01—“Pilot”
Episode 02—“It’s a trap!”
Episode 03—“Love loves to love love”
Episode 04—“It’s a trap!!”
Episode 05—“F is for Fake”
Episode 06—“Simone”
Episode 07—“Bob”
Episode 08—“Fizzy ill logic and taut! oh law gee”
Episode 09—“Angels Flight”
Episode 10—“Noogenesis”
Episode 11—“All the Real girls”
Episode 12—“This is when the Real fun begins”
Acknowledgments
Episode 01—“Pilot”
THEY INVITED ME INTO THEIR home and within a week I was discussing its telegenic potential with a reality show producer responsible for nothing I’d heard of. The producer was interested, and he wasn’t the only one. “It’s like The Real World meets Instagram,” cooed an ash-blond writer-curator. A strawberry-blonde suggested selling it where I eventually did, to this branding agency I’d worked with before. Their slogan: Be Human. We were in one of Ed Ruscha’s once-homes in Brentwood or Malibu, some far West forestial place, eating sancocho, a Dominican stew our friend Rivington Starchild served warm with whole avocados thanks to his mom, who coached him through the family recipe over the phone. It was American Thanksgiving. I was heartbroken, broke, and delighted with life, telling everyone about the phenomenon I was sleeping in.
“There are three rooms, four beds, and five residents,” I’d begin. “I’m subletting a bed in a room with two. I wake up next to this beauty—she’s an oracle, I swear. All of these women, man. They’re all so brilliant, so beautiful, and so different!”
The first night I hung out with Nadezhda she drove me between art openings on the back of her motorcycle. I’d silently promised my father I would never be a passenger on the back of any man’s bike after he told me once about a woman he knew who’d died that way. But Nadezhda wasn’t “any man.” She was chiseled and statuesque with Soviet subway art tattooed on her right biceps. The night of our first ride, she was clandestinely young, twenty, a surprise I liked watching people register. People kept mistaking her for my big sister.
I didn’t know to put the visor on my helmet down when we went over the highway. In the bathroom at Night Gallery, I found I’d amassed an eye mask of dirt. The art that night was predictably forgettable, unlike Nadezhda, who seemed to me like the matryoshka nesting dolls she kept on her desk, except every new layer revealed someone brighter and bolder. Later, she revealed she was terrified she would kill me. Her hands had cramped perilously as she gripped her ’85 Honda handlebars. I learned, or remembered, because I should know this by now: I have a tendency to see what I want to see.
Nadezhda’s apartment hallways were overripe banana yellow. Little white butterflies decorated the building’s brick-red awning. The place was called La Mariposa, after the street where it was located. Two teenage girls were skating outside when I first walked up. Their black hair, which swished straight down to their sacra, flashed like mirrors in the sun.
I had been in Los Angeles for three weeks, trial living in my new friend Amalia’s Koreatown studio while she was away at an art fair in London. Nadezhda lived nearby. Before I’d even arrived in LA, she had DM’d me an invitation to come over, which I ignored, because I didn’t know her; she was a follower.
But then, I’d had the most exquisite three weeks. Night swims in heated pools, two beautiful new bedfellows, chauffeured rides through Laurel Canyon, long walks alone. Cigarettes were six bucks at the bodega, where plantain chips were sold i
n unmarked ziplocks and brain-sized avocados came ripe. Trees were flowering—it was October. I was feeling unusually trusting of what was coming to me, and more than that, I was dying to talk about it. So, on my second-to-last day in LA, I wrote back to Nadezhda, a girl with whom I shared no close mutuals.
None of her four roommates were home when I came by that first day, though their presence was evident in the knots of clothes on the floor. Nadezhda let me talktalktalk, which turned into dinner, a drive, and an offer-cum-plan. In two weeks, I’d return to live in La Mariposa temporarily as I looked for more permanent digs in my new crush, Los Angeles.
The first time I met Morgan she was eating dry flakes of nutritional yeast straight from the jar. She reminded me of my best friend, Simone, whom I had lived with in Montreal when we were around Morgan’s age of 21.75. Simone and I had been roommates in an apartment we called “Hermie Island.” We lived among moldering art installations, communal clothes, and several overflowing garbage and recycling bins. It was a long way out of the apartment—down a haunted staircase, past the neighbor who resented our borrowing a Persian rug of his we had found, through a snowbank in winter, mud in spring, and better-things-to-do in summer and fall, my happiest seasons in Montreal. Eventually, we dedicated a whole room to the trash we were too lazy to take out.
I guess I was nostalgic for this. I saw Hermie Island in Nadezhda, Morgan, and Co.’s household—in the mountains of bananas, the hall of mirrors, the dropout work ethic, and the frequent friend drop-ins. More than ten people owned keys to Hermie Island. At La Mariposa, I was introduced to new guests weekly. Like Jonas, an angel in thigh-high heels. And Mía, a beautician who’d make herself up like a train wreck, shading in bruises and liquid-lining cuts. Morgan was home less than some of these guests. She had a boyfriend with a place in Silver Lake, a car, and an ArtCenter degree to complete.
Alicia intimidated me. Composure does. Those who can pose. Alicia Novella Vasquez, aka @lightlicker, likes to shoot herself from below eye level. This angle imparts power. She told me she’s wary of men who selfie from such a vantage point. (See: Adolf Hitler framed by Leni Riefenstahl.) All of the residents of La Mariposa are attentive to codes and slippages, the subtleties of self-presentation, especially online stuffs. They see beyond base programming, analyzing filters, comments, and composition, how often you post, in relation to whom, and with what probable intent, conscious or not. When I only knew of her, @com.passion was Alicia’s Instagram handle. By the time I moved into a bed next to hers, she had become @lightlicker.
In person, I started to see how Alicia sees. Good models do that: they stare back. Alicia, which is pronounced with a see—not a she—at the center, has this intensity. Morgan says that’s what all the residents of La Mariposa have in common: We sense. Intensely. That is, we’re attuned to detail.
Take for example: Walking for pho one evening with Nadezhda and I, Alicia pointed to some writing on a wall on Wilshire Boulevard. In downtown Koreatown, below a Deco stone mural of three figures—a man in a tux, a man in a turban, and a woman dressed as a chef, her head bowed, one tit out—someone had scrawled: You have 24 hours, Los Angeles & not 1 minute more, so(w) help me, God. The paint was fresh-blood red. To the left of the three figures was more: or do you need ANOTHER ACT of God to convince you?
The three of us stood before the threatening words for a moment. Nadezhda’s face was polka-dotted pale pink. She’d left the house with an acne-spot treatment on knowingly, like mock editorial beauty. The streetlights seemed to bend, aquamarine to teal. I remember thinking, It’s so like Alicia to spot something like this. Alone, I probably would’ve walked right by.
I watched Alicia’s gaze closely after that. Her irises scoured the world the way my little brother’s did when I used to watch him read as a child—line by line, charging through new information. Months later, when I brought this moment up with Alicia, she told me, “The writing’s still on the wall! Or at least the part that says”—I’d missed this—“‘The only path to heaven is to transcend and ascend each and every time adversity strikes.’”
I wore Miffany’s clothes while she was away. It was her bed I was subletting: $350 for three weeks. I think she made a profit off me. Balance it against the clothes I borrowed. A Playboy-logo hoodie, a shearling jacket, the bluest blue jeans. Her bed had four dense pillows and three fleece throws I’d wake up tangled in every morning. She hadn’t made her bed before my arrival, which made me feel welcome, already in the fold. I’m trying to remember if I’d met Miffany IRL before I wore her clothes, but that’s a thing about the now: Our selfies precede us. You may think you know me, but I don’t even know me. Yes, we’d met. Once, in passing, at Gogo’s show at the Ace. I was wearing a white Vejas dress the designer had gifted to me after Beyoncé’s stylist returned it stained with makeup. I remember Miffany strutting in, a barbell in her belly button. September 2015, New York Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2016, just months before I took over her half room.
Miffany and Alicia shared what would have been the living room. Their beds were maybe six feet from each other, another six and you were in the kitchen, a few more to the front door. Safety-pinned sheets partitioned the space, poorly: permanent sleepover. I loved it. From Miffany’s mattress, I’d look out over Koreatown to the Hollywood Hills. Every morning and night, through a series of cathedral-round windows, I’d pray to these sights: a high-rise crowned with the word EQUITABLE; another one, which read THE GAYLORD; and a billboard that said BADLANDS—the name of a publisher I was working with at the time.
Signs!
I was, and still am, very into reading signs. The world is full of them, and I’m full of it—convinced of reality’s divine design, believing in magic, magnetism, the Wishing Machine, and maybe, that everything happens for a reason. That last bit I’m still skeptical of, as I am of “reason.” I’ve experienced its exploitations and recognize its—or my perception’s—limitations. I guess what I really believe is that it serves me to believe that everything happens for a reason, meaning-making being a reason, or a way, to live. I don’t know! I’m shy to share existential meandering like this—intuitive, experience-sprung, flirting with flaky vocabularies—around most people. My father’s a strict empiricist. At La Mariposa, though, I found a home for what I had long feared might be my lunacy.
(Did you know lunacy means “moonstruck,” from the late Latin lunaticus? Influence, too, has an astrological root: “Emanation from the stars that acts upon one’s character and destiny.”)
In Alicia and Miffany’s room, we’d talk about it all: infinity, etymology, astrology, spirituality, empathy, epigenetics, trauma, rape, race, class, sex, gender, technology, fashion, art, Justin Bieber, black holes, souls, The Matrix, fractals, spirit animals, family, branding, anxiety, the economy, conscious capitalism, collective consciousness, consciousness raising, Kundalini rising, twin flames, nail care, nicknames, rage, age, real estate, acid, Vine, love, and what we should make for dinner.
It was our talk I wished to capture. Truth seemed to be spoken nonstop from within this apartment. I loved how it flowed. One could join in and drop out at one’s convenience or interest. Sometimes three of us would be talking at the same time and, somehow, we’d all still hear what the others had said. Often, another one of us, who we didn’t think was listening, would chime in through a wall.
Our conversations, I felt, were in great contrast to the kind of talk trending online—the declarative, opining, often whining sharing on social media, which, for me, can individuate painfully, or twist into violent groupthink, bullying, and othering. Voice matters. Pitch and pace. More information is conveyed aurally/orally than in text. Hesitation, flirtation, pain, parroting, conviction, heart: One hears these things. I wanted the Internet—everyone—to hear us. That’s what I told the girls: “I want to give you a platform.”
I could visualize it, and so I thought it was right. That’s what a famous R&B singer told me when I interviewed her at the Hotel Bel-Air: “I could see it all,�
� she said, “like it had already happened, and so I knew my dreams would come true.”
I saw us waking up before the camera. In the morning—or afternoon in Nadezhda’s case—yes, but also like what I thought people meant when they used the word woke. That term was trending at the time. I’ve always been attuned to trend. After all, my parents cursed me with the initials F.A.D. I thought woke referred to a kind of consciousness, a mindfulness, an awareness of one’s shadow and ego, a caution about our capacity for projection and delusion. I thought it meant an ability to perceive what was really going on, to situate oneself with regard to power, desire, economics, family, history, et cetera—to know oneself in relation to others, and to act in kind. It turns out many people were using the word to refer to someone who reads and can repeat trending news with a social justice bent. Even in their thinking, Americans are materialistic. La Mariposa wasn’t, or not only. True, we loved fashion and music—broadcasting our taste. But all the women in this household also saw themselves as sharing states of becoming. And when we were home, we didn’t fake anything. On the bus, we may have worn bitch faces to ward off male gazes. At part-time jobs, we probably smiled at shit we hated, because it was energy efficient. And online, we certainly pretended to be more successful than we were, because that was the game. But here, at La Mariposa, we allowed ourselves to process uncertainty. Fear! Nadezhda called it an incubator. “I like it,” she said, “as a place girls come to, to grow to be themselves.” Many of us have and will phase through; there are perennial subletters.
It was ready-made media. The apartment’s themes were even reflected in its structure. There was a body—the living-cum-bedrooms/open kitchen—and to each side of that, two bedrooms—like wings! The layout of La Mariposa is like a butterfly.
All I saw were signs.
And then there’s Max. I feel less bad about neglecting Max since he told me he deliberately dons a cloak of mystery. “I think I have more of a sense of who my housemates are than they do of me,” he told me once over coffee. “I’m something of a withdrawn person.”
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