Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  If you could do anything, what would it be? After the drive to pick up Bob, I started asking myself this question. Most of the ideas I came up with were dust, I let them blow away. One image that lingered was of a community center—a special educational retreat, like Professor X’s Mutant Academy, where my favorite freaks could train, trade, rest, and play. It would be slightly off-center, with water for swimming, gardens, animals, studios, and multiple kitchens.

  La Mariposa was broke. A few of us were poor, with families who were lower class or refused to support us. In America, this is dangerous. Not having money makes you a target. You’re mailed high-interest credit card offers weekly. If you get sick or hurt and end up in the hospital, you’re liable to leave with tens of thousands in debt or more. Quality fresh foods are vital, but they’re harder to find in lower-income neighborhoods than high-fructose corn syrup is, which poisons the treats we crave to make ourselves feel better; candy abounds in our corner of LA. Then there’s the illnesses of stress: how fear, scarcity, and shame, imagined failure, infect the body. The dark side of the Dream.

  We were also cute and smart, though—what my father, who hates American power games, calls “the other 1 percent.” Attractive, intelligent, and savvy enough to scale class brackets, we could probably, if we really wanted to, achieve: fame and/or money, illusions of safety, US success! Capitalizing on our blessings—like our curiosity to learn, our interest in cultivating our talents, and our juicy youth—could spoil them though. Easy come, easy go. Our youth would soon. Beauty is fickle. And God leaves the room when you sell out; it just happens, sorry.

  Sometimes we wished we didn’t know better. We wished we could just do it. Package our work and selves into market-ready forms, join in, and win. But something inside us refuses to reinforce a system that demands that we appeal to it, while it demonstrates little to no awareness or interest in who we really are and will probably fuck us over. But there’s got to be another way.

  The way most of our peers sought success was through music, fashion, cool, youth, branding. Another way was through “art.” The art world has money. “It’s money games for plastic faces,” my friend Tracy, an artist I met after an opening and whose paintings sell for $15K, says.

  We knew art kids who had mansions. Usually, these kids were the sons of preexisting wealth who knew how to work the system, but we knew how to watch them. There are enough stories of under- and middle-class “artists” “making it” for people to believe and pursue the Dream. The problem with the Dream is it’s not so dreamy in reality. It’s more like Monopoly or Risk than the fantasies I want to make Real.

  “Make more red paintings!” Tracy’s first Los Angeles gallerist demanded. “And never put words in. Words don’t sell.”

  My first boyfriend used game theory to win $300K playing online poker in 2008. Excited by the prospect of making money, I tried to learn, but found theory irksome. Assuming your opponent is working for his own best interest as a rationally intelligent decision-maker in a made-up system? And having to behave the same? Apparently, modern economics and politics are founded in the same theory.

  I always hated games like Monopoly and Risk. I remember more than once throwing these boards across a yard, delighted to see their miniature war machines and buildings disappear into flowers and grass. At recess in grade five, I convinced half the student body to play my way every day. We played truth or dare, seven minutes in heaven, and make-believe. We all kissed and hugged and wrote and told stories about our innermost desires. “I’ve never met a more sexually charged grade-five cohort!” Mme. Partridge exclaimed. No one ever ratted me out as our perverted leader. Mousy, quiet, and petite, I get away with a lot.

  The residents of La Mariposa are ambitious like me. We want revolutions of popular consciousness (spiritual, queer, Aquarian Aging), as well as alterations to our economic systems (redistributions of wealth and new definitions of it based on what we really value, like love and longevity). Some of us, like Nadezhda, are more materialist. She studies machinery, systems, and code. Morgan studies her body: nutrition, addiction, and fitness. Max is Mephistophelian and many other modes of mythic (the canons within!), while Miffany intuitively nurtures. I was astounded by Alicia’s intimate understanding of cycles of attachment, abuse, and trauma, especially with regard to sensual heterosexual dynamics and American racial politics. I learned so much. And most of this was happening in the privacy of our home.

  I wanted to publicize La Mariposa’s knowledge and our dreams, our insecure reality and alternative visions. I was—and still am—convinced they’re common. Maybe we could catalyze a movement? But the means I sought to make our dreams known were too mixed up in the Dream. To be seen, moneyed, on screen.

  After I broke the contract, I had to scramble for money. I didn’t know what to do, so I made an appointment with a professional witch. Sylvia worked out of a Los Feliz Craftsman house, where she lived with a roommate and three cats. She usually charged a minimum of a hundred bones for her services, but in order to showcase a new program—a three-month-long mentorship that promised prosperity—she was taking free meetings with prospective mentees.

  When I arrived, I realized I was wasting her time. Mentorship cost three grand. I’d walked the hour from Koreatown to Sylvia’s place to talk about my lack of funds. When it became clear I didn’t have the resources to hire her, Sylvia suggested I “put it on a credit card!” This made me feel less guilty for taking the free meeting; we each had our own schemes.

  I’m not sure how it came out, these things just do around me, but sometime during our meeting Sylvia told me she used to do sex work. I told her I was considering sugar babying again, but that I only wanted to do it if I could be a sacred prostitute, like the Sumerian goddess Inanna. Sexual healing, and respected for it.

  “Do you know what an egregore is?” Sylvia replied.

  I shook my head, excited by a new word.

  “An egregore,” Sylvia explained, “is a spiritual entity that is created through the collective thoughts and ritual participation of groups of people throughout time. Initially, the egregore is a thought form, an idea. It’s created from and by the human mind. How it got there in the first place is another question, one that gets at the heart of the occult, so perhaps it’s a bit much to go into now, but as people connect to this spirit, as we worship, paint pictures, whisper chants, write hymns, and contemplate and fetishize and pray to it, this spirit, or idea, becomes Real. It becomes its own thing, which then starts to influence and inform the people who interact with it, and even people who don’t, who are just in proximity to it.”

  Sylvia’s two examples of egregores were the Whore and Jesus Christ.

  “Even if there was a historical Jesus,” she said, “what Jesus Christ is now is far beyond what the man was then. He’s an abstraction, an archetype, and . . . he’s Real. Above and beyond how people conceive of him, he exists independently of the Church, of any single person or religion, exerting influence all over the world.”

  Sylvia’s point was that no matter how mindfully I went into sex work, I would be contending with millions upon millions of people’s ideas (including my own) of what a whore is. It’s hard not to be influenced by this. Collective (un)consciousness. We may think we’re just putting on the uniform of a job we can then take off, but the codes of these ancient ways are powerful—they’ll seep in, become us.

  The idea of the egregore helped me understand why I had killed our reality show contract. Why, as soon as the lark became real, I developed a fearsome allergy to visibility. I knew, no matter how smart we tried to play it, how our show—how we—would be received. Pretty Young Things, Repeat After Me, I Said Na Na Na (Na Na Na) Na Na Na Na Na. Girl forms aren’t taken seriously. That’s what the branding agency was paying for. All-girl sleepovers. Shots of us getting dressed up. Most people hate-watch TV. And reality TV!? I’d always hated it! Why had I thought to make this show in the first place? Because everyone I told the story of my life to told me to.
In Los Angeles.

  I had been, not for the first time, organizing my life according to norms. I had embarked to fulfill expectations and desires that were not only not my own, but also counter to my own expressed interests. But this was worse than ever before, because I would have been taking five young friends along with me!

  Episode 08—“Fizzy ill logic and taut! oh law gee”

  We live at a rare evolutionary turning point yet our attitudes and ideologies have not caught up.

  We are still too programmed by the oldworld psychology of failure, too hobbled by guilt and shame and self-doubt, too scarred by eons of suffering and privation to fully appreciate the meaning of our New Age.

  —FM-2030, Up-Wingers (1973)

  “I FEEL LIKE I’M TRAPPED behind glass,” Morgan said, miming a tight wall around her with her hands. “It’s like an aquarium. I’m in this glass box and I can see you all on the other side and I want to join, but I can’t break through.”

  I hadn’t seen Morgan in months. After we decided we wouldn’t make TV together, she had deferred her studies in the middle of winter semester and retreated to her family home in the Bay. It was summer now, and I’d agreed to take care of two cats who belonged to one of my mom’s friends for three weeks in Oakland. Albert was athletic and mischievous. Nabokov was neurotic; I had to give him kitty Prozac every other day. I was staying close enough to Morgan’s home for her to drive over one afternoon.

  Morgan’s anxiety had been one of many reasons why I killed the deal. During our one-on-one interview, it had become clear to me how unclear she was within herself. It was like looking in a rearview mirror. Morgan behaved like I had at her age: dysphoric anxiety, splitting personalities. She questioned everything—brilliant lines of thinking, but too many, simultaneously. She’d get lost trying to connect It All, then panic under uncertainty.

  Back in the Bay, Morgan was in treatment at her parents’ behest. She insisted to her fifth doctor, “I don’t have an eating disorder, I have an anxiety disorder that manifests as an eating and exercise disorder.” She seemed great to me, except that she was ninety pounds.

  We went on a pilgrimage to our favorite American sanctuary: the grocery store. This one was an independently owned mega health food store, like Whole Foods before Whole Foods, a hippie haven in Oakland. There we bought French and Spanish cheeses, local tomatoes, cucumbers, lemons and limes, cumin, pistachios, fresh figs, purple yams, dinosaur kale, olives, sardines, two varieties of cantaloupe, and jackfruit from Mexico. We took our lot back to the house where I was cat-sitting and prepared to eat.

  Jackfruit tastes like cotton candy. It’s got a hard shell and little pods of frothy flesh you have to excavate from tight compartments of what feels like cartilage. We gave up using cutlery and dug in with our fingers—my nail beds stayed sticky all afternoon.

  Communal meals were common at La Mariposa when Morgan and Miffany lived there. The first I witnessed was pupusas with spicy slaw served out of a plastic bag. Morgan liked to roll homemade sushi. Her vegan “ice cream” consisted of frozen bananas and cocoa powder blended in a food processor. Ice cream–like for about three minutes before it melted flat—she’d urge us to eat it fast. Morgan must’ve been 115 fit pounds when we first met. She’d talk about her anorexic past and her oral fixation as a problem, but I didn’t take it that seriously because she seemed so perfectly healthy, and every femme I knew had food control issues.

  But then I shadowed Morgan on an errand run around town. I had just start researching our show. “Driving in LA makes me nervous,” Morgan said. “So I chew gum.” She had thirty packs in the compartment between our safety-belt locks, and more in the glove box. Chewing to her manic heartbeat, whenever the wad in her mouth became too stiff, she’d stick it onto her steering wheel before popping more minty elastic into her mouth. By the end of our forty-minute drive, Morgan’s wheel was covered in white mounds like the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains.

  It’s unclear what caused Morgan’s anxiety disorder. There was a migration from Colombia to California, but Morgan was barely old enough to remember, she remarked, as she chopped up more cucumbers than could fit in either of our stomachs.

  “But maybe that’s the issue!” she continued. “They say the early years set you up. If you’re not held enough, or looked at with love, it can fuck you up.” She also had a work-hard father, a self-made success, who expected a lot from her. “But he’s also—and Mom—they’re really great,” she countered. “Or they did their best. I know I’m blessed. I should be grateful. Maybe I’m spoiled. Sometimes I think I’m stupid. Or it’s like what we always used to talk about in Alicia’s room: The world’s changing, we’re all leveling up at the same time, but it’s hard. I have a hard time keeping up.”

  “You’re only twenty-two,” I said. “You don’t need to have it all figured out already.”

  “I know, I know,” Morgan said. “But there’s this pressure, like only the prodigies matter. You should be famous by twenty-three. But also, I don’t believe that—my heroes got good when they were older. Damn. I don’t know!” She laughed.

  By the end of our meal, after presenting dozens of hypotheses as to what was wrong with her, Morgan came to the only natural conclusion, with which I concurred: A spiritual plague infects our society and culture. We aren’t the only sufferers.

  That summer, Tracy made a beautiful painting of a rose garden. I was visiting her studio often, avoiding my personal life. Tracy was a friend of my friend Susan’s friend. I liked being around her because she was honest, older, sober, and believed in magic.

  The canvas was the size of the wall. Pink-red roses set against LA’s blue sky. I saw it in her studio one week, and then the next week: it was half-covered in black paint.

  “It’s the view outside the window from my therapist’s office,” Tracy explained. She had been attending therapy every day, trading paintings for the service because she, like me, currently had very little money. Vertical blinds, represented by painted-black rough cuts of canvas, blocked the view of the rose garden I’d loved the week before. The garden had had me breathing easy, and now I felt trapped, angry, even, at Tracy for shutting us out.

  I also understood. I know what it’s like to feel as though the world—the beautiful and the Real—is inaccessible to you, and yet right there. There were nights in New York I screamed for escape, convinced I was in prison because an activist family friend in Egypt was, with no expectation of release, and this was skewered all over the news—twenty-four hours, and fake fake fake. I was writing journalism at the time, and knew how it went. An article was published in W under my name, but I hadn’t written half of it. It was as if no one had. The writing was that which was absent of meaning: a product. I was learning so much about “the real world”—the business of media, encounters with power, et cetera—that I went crazy, because I hadn’t yet learned to cultivate the stillness you need to process it all. I lived voraciously, lonely and hungry for information. I’d moved to this new country alone, never stopping to think, That’s kinda crazy, maybe because I feared falling like Wile E. Coyote when he realizes he’s walking on air. A year into this mental state, all I could hear 24/7 was the siren of anxiety.

  You have to learn to simultaneously see yourself from without, while feeling from deep within. Or that’s how I’ve saved myself. When I feel my heart surge, I zoom out with my eyes closed and watch my life’s movie—which is always comical, even at its most tragic.

  Morgan and Tracy are perfect to me. Creative, inquisitive, and novel. Perfect because I don’t see their suffering—not even its side effects, like their selfish agoraphobia or infectious anger—as part of them. They’ve just caught a disease, like the best of us. The sensitive ones.

  I want to heal us. It’s delusional maybe, my disease. I want to remove the black blinds from Tracy’s garden, have Simone restore the growth beneath, and then we’ll all drink iced tea under weeping willows. Morgan will join. I’ll have lifted the top off her aquarium, a
nd called out from above for her to hear: “Don’t you see, Morgan? You’re a mutant, a talent, so special and alive. You can breathe underwater! Look how long you’ve survived.” Cynical Susan will join us too, laughing her most graceful, childish giggle, having made a meal for all, reluctant mother that she is. And our Canadian friend Kimia—she’ll be clementine, lilac, and gold, unburdened by the bruising purples I often see stalking her soul.

  Once when I was real lost—delirious, anxious, dumb with evil thoughts—I painted Kimia. I’d just bought my first paint set, and I’d just seen her for the first time since we had both left New York and lost touch. I laid out my new paints and without judgment or expectation blotted and brushed my vision of Kimia: dark tides lurking violet and cream of peach. I hadn’t been able to cry since she told me she thought she was dying, the week before, when I’d seen her in Montreal. “My head is shrinking,” Kimia had said, and it was true—her eye sockets looked as though someone had punched into wet clay, and her skull was at least 12 percent smaller than I remembered, as if fired in a kiln. “Don’t tell anyone,” Kimia had made me promise. “I’m going to go to the doctor but only when I’m done.” She was in the middle of writing a screenplay she’d sold on spec. Her apartment felt like my bipolar grandmother’s in the midst of a manic episode, when the air would shake, rustling her notes-to-self, and the trash littered everywhere, spooking all other life out. In a few strokes of paint, I was bawling. Thank God I couldn’t see the canvas through my own home aquarium’s worth of tears. My first painting! It was ugly, I tossed it, then I felt so light.

  I wish writing felt less like revenge on the world. My first drafts are furious and petty. I delete whole chapters that critique the culture industry, and most of what I’ve written about Lucien. Then I turn my attention to what I’d ideally prefer to write about, like my friends. I’d like to write about us on a series of grand adventures, rather than homebound and depressed or anxious, but I’m not flexible enough in my creativity yet. I move through text as if lost in a cartoon jungle, machete in hand, guiltily cutting down foliage, hoping that my path of ruin leads, eventually, to a natural clearing, to safety and freedom.