I
…If you were a goddess, Xylea said, what goddess would you be? She paused to think for a second. If you were a goddess, you’d be the goddess of beauty and illusion…
…That haunted me, for some reason. The reason was that my life had, without my noticing, been drained of reality, or the pretense to reality. I was a celibate, anhedonic whore (let’s say a depressed whore). Sex itself meant nothing to me, having become mere performance, empty enchantment. I fell in love with ghosts, or people who soon became ghosts, whose names I no longer remembered shortly afterwards. Though that’s not true, either, of course I remembered their names, once in awhile. It was at the beginning of falling in love that I would forget a name, a name disappearing behind its shimmering hallucination. When I looked at the years behind me I saw an imaginary bridge called art/desire (or beauty/illusion) that had led me to this arbitrary point (its origin, equally arbitrary, imbued with a sham mysticism), but the bridge was actually a promontory leading to a post-apocalyptic sea that could no longer even be called dead. This sea had no future. My most interesting and heartfelt conversations with friends were invariably about suicide, a circumlocutory suicide whose completion would almost be an afterthought.
…Every night I went to bed haunted by the prospect of losing my beauty, and every day I woke up more beautiful than the last. I talked to Genesis about bimbo beauty. She said that her muse, her artistic muse, was Florida, the real Florida (for her, Florida and beauty, Florida and bimbofication, were inseparable). I place myself in the foreground of decay, she said, and this I call home. Much like our beaches and waterfront getaways, I lure you in with my beauty but please know that this is not why you are here. Behind me you must bear witness to our history and our bloodshed. That is the story I am only beginning to tell. I understood her completely, like the degrading hyaluronic acid in my face, or like the poetry of the word “femicide.” Or like how even “fascism” was becoming beautiful, from the vantage of some alien, schizophrenic landscape.
…Next year, she said, I will become something far less human, I will become more and more “woman.”
…I see his fat hairy gut heaving, his four-inch dick in my mouth. A man with no sexuality/sensuality, no inner life to speak of. He hires a sex worker but can’t enjoy sex because he hates himself, and in hating himself, obviates the possibility of desire, of being desired. He doesn’t want to be here, I make him sick, I look like my photos but that’s the problem, trashy surrealist Slavic whore has a body off the screen, my bedroom gives him vertigo, the porn collages and political posters about Palestine, hating cops and ICE, etc., or maybe it’s the menorah, or maybe it’s the contradictions, the seeming contradictions of a woman to the euthanized imagination, the taxonomic hypochondria, of a man, it’s the first day of the new year and he can’t even get a blowjob in peace, he tongues my asshole, I fake moan, trying to stir some life into him, he cums in my mouth silently, tepidly, and afterwards looks like he’s in pain, I try to ask him about his life, or his kinks, he’s hired me for the entire night, but all he wants to do is go home, sorry, I can’t do this, he says, which works out for me, since he’s already paid me and I can take a hot shower, read queer dystopian sci fi in bed before falling asleep.
…In New York, her mother is dying of pancreatic cancer. Last night I dreamed that the entirety of the human species was sick with brain cancer, some inevitable fluke. Afterward, the client mentioned Stephen Hawking. Oh you mean the guy on Epstein’s list, I said, into psychosexually humiliating little people? Oh no, he said, that’s not what I meant, and then it was just some trite quote about how if aliens came to Earth we would see them as the conquistadors. Damn, I said, we’re just doomed to repeat the shitty last five hundred years of colonialism throughout the fucking universe, cool imagination bro. I hate my clients more and more every day. Amber’s sister, a beautiful willowy trans girl, said as far as she was concerned all her clients could be lined up against a wall and shot. We all went to the rose garden together in Amber’s car on a bitter-cold day in early January. Amber’s sister’s arm was in a sling from when she got t-boned on Christmas by someone taking a joyride in a stolen car. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, her languid way of walking, her dazed, pretty face, the vaguely insolent way she was so aware of her own beauty, the way only a trans girl in her twenties can be aware of that kind of thing, as if she had fallen asleep into a dream of herself, a somnambulatory dream, as if all the sordid indignity of her life only served to enhance that beauty, as if nothing could truly reach, truly touch her. I was trying to get over my winter crush on T, another beautiful Oakland whore. I love beautiful people, aesthetically beautiful people, I let myself fall into their orbit these days without really thinking about it, without really caring about the outcome of my feelings, giving in to the pure meaninglessness of attraction, the way a fascist Japanese novelist might love beauty, which is very different than the way a fascist Italian poet loves beauty, a non-ideological non-programmatic fascism drawn to a world of appearances, or a world of speculative shadows in which things sometimes appear, a world of flames that is also a world of ashes. What if I stopped thinking of fascism as the enemy, I thought to myself, what if by refusing it its own ontology of enemy/sameness it lost its insipid charisma, pathetic power, what if I loved this fascist reality as myself, since I am ultimately not separate from it, what if I loved the occult thing in me that was drawn to other occult things, things that are occult but have no mystery besides themselves, illusions born from illusions, the way someone elicits a desire in me that I can no longer even call sexual, the way everything becomes delirium, macular time, a quiet winter poem, whispered, prefiguration of death, or the last hour of every angel…
II
…Lala was talking about a friend she’d lost, she said she would be okay if heaven were to take place in a single instant, an ethereal flash, a brightness before an even bleaker death (a death on the other side of death), just enough time to hug a loved one goodbye, so that endings could coincide for once, without their usual cruel asymptotes, ashes of memory, misery and shit, and then when I fell asleep I dreamed I had traveled to Seattle to see my mom’s family, but somehow I didn’t manage to see them at all, everyone was mad at me, texting me, attributing my absence to some innate selfishness, so on my last night in town I decided to go see them unannounced, wandering around in the dark in an unknown neighborhood, a neighborhood that didn’t resemble anywhere my family had ever lived or anywhere I’d ever been before for that matter, the houses were positioned as if in a maze or a hall of mirrors and at the end of the maze or the mirror was a steep cliff, past the cliff there was nothing, plummeting darkness, some intrinsic evil that wasn’t even evil, but only appeared to be so because to see it for what it truly was would have driven me, driven anyone, fucking insane, I found the house, I approached it from the backyard, it was completely dark inside, darker even than what was outside, maybe as dark as the darkness past the cliff, but no, not quite that dark, and it suddenly occurred to me that my family (my mom, my aunt, my cousins, etc.) were probably all dead or at the very least had moved far away because it had actually been many decades, not a long weekend like I’d supposed, since I last saw them, and then just when I was giving up hope my grandfather, who’s been dead in reality for a long time, found me on the street and gave me this incredibly loving hug, which I felt as an electrifying physical presence in my body, my actual body, not my dream body, though in real life he had been cold and withdrawn, an almost comically reserved Old World Eastern European, he only hugged me once or twice while he was alive, the first time when I was ten years-old after my grandmother died suddenly of an asthma attack one night, but what amazed me was that it was his presence, his actual presence, not his dream presence, that I felt, just as the darkness was real darkness, and the death real death, and the house a real house where everything indecipherable, lost and fragmentary resides, the weekend before Lala had slept in my bed, she crawled in while I was sleeping and told me about how earlier in the evening she’d been bitten by a dog, a Rottweiler with big dumb sad eyes, I’d been there for that, I saw the blood, the surreal violence, the suspended desolation in the living room, I went home after that because I was cold and tired, she’d been really fucked up when I left her but now she’d sobered up, that was the night she gave me the dream of my grandfather, though we didn’t talk about her idea of heaven until a week after that, instead we talked about the last guys we’d fucked, she kept repeating this text message she’d got from the last one in a variety of rhythms and inflections, you fucked me so good it was great, you fucked me so good, it was great, you fucked, me so good it was, great, you fucked me so, good it was great, etc…
III…The last time I saw Marko, my grandfather, was in 2011, in Seattle. He was well into his nineties, mostly blind, he slept more than half the day, had prostate cancer that moved at a glacial pace, he complained of a persistent itching, but otherwise he was pretty healthy, still able to hike a little in Mount Rainier, swim in Lake Washington, that side of the family is remarkably robust, Žarko, his younger brother, a survivor of the concentration camps of Mussolini, Hitler, and Tito, in that order, is still alive and spry at the age of ninety-nine, when my mom told him (Žarko) about my transition, he said, oh, that’s interesting, in a curious, benevolent tone, as if she’d been talking about a certain species of cnidarian or sea sponge that was capable of changing biological sex, I went over to Marko’s house one afternoon in early spring to spend some time alone with him, as far as I remember that was the last time we were together, it was a gray day and you could see the lake from his living room, he offered me a glass of slivovitz, the Slovenian plum brandy he drank before dinner, which I was grateful for, because by then I had started to get the shakes pretty bad, he showed me his Russian copy of War and Peace, he remarked on the persistence of war, violence, and imperialism in the history of the species, he had no hope for the species and no theological or political convictions, he loved and believed in nature and that was enough, on the border of death he remembered flowers, the molecular structure of plant cells, countries that no longer existed, childhood illnesses, women he’d fucked (he’d been a nearly compulsive seducer), he invited me to his study where he could look at blown-up photographs on a computer monitor, he showed me a photograph of a beautiful Jewish woman sitting in a little boat on Lake Geneva, my girlfriend, he said, her family died during the war but she was given papers, that afternoon they’d gone to a hotel, that’s how they used to fuck in Central Europe, obscure afternoon trysts in dusky hotels, for a moment I felt that she was me in the future, that that moment on the lake had not yet taken place, was actually a prophecy, foreimage of feminine beauty, vague catastrophe…
III…A few days later I realized that the dream had been profoundly dangerous, my grandfather’s embrace the transtemporal embrace of ancestral death, something could have gone wrong, I could have fallen into that darkness, in reality, out of reality. Lately it’s occurred to me more and more that I have no past, a trans woman has no past, no ancestors, not even a death to look forward to, in ten thousand years, the terfs say, a future paleontologist, a hypothetical or imaginary paleontologist, will dig up your skeleton and call you a male, but no, I think, they’ll see my big bags of silicone there, too, they’ll know I was a hot bimbo t-girl with a dick, I’ll inscribe that on your skull, Luce said, just in case, I laugh about this because we all know there will be neither science nor gender in the future, just pure devastation, roaming hunger, cultic cannibalism, fear and trepanation, endless necrophilic night…
III
III…Black and gold visions of some Mesoamerican temple, stylized figures in profile carrying water, performing ablutions, etc: a dark, clean place. Blue and turquoise lizards walking diagonally on air. Cleopatra as the first bimbo, no there were others before her. Rita Hayworth’s father who carried out a sadistic and extreme bimbofication on her when she was a little girl. Marilyn, our saint. The overwhelming erotic rush of it in time, femme time: archetypal, brutal, futuristic. Before roses were associated with femininity, she said, they were used in rituals to heal trauma, as if by subterfuge women were aware that femininity were itself both a trauma and a balm, cure, bed of roses, you’ve made your bed now sleep in it, etc.
III…New goal: 1500ccs.
III…I felt romantic love drain out of my body, a kind of retarded illness. I always felt that I was cursed, some obscure and sinister curse ran in the family. Curses aren’t that smart, she said. Look at yourself, Leila. I realized she was right. I had transmogrified myself beyond karmic recognition. I don’t want to see the Holocaust anymore, those evil hallucinations. Evil is a hallucination, it was the invention of evil itself that was evil, let it go, let all superstructures crumble, become dust, a passing dream. I rubbed rose petals on my cheek, bit into them, my skin not soft as a flower, but just a flower…