Hostile architecture, rosary flotillas, and alien invasions in Saratoga Springs
When I lived with my grandparents in Meskwaki Nation, I used to practice losing access to various faculties. Most often it was my voice. I’d go nonverbal and practice communication in other ways. Body language, written word, rudimentary signing. Sometimes I had a limp. Other times, I blindfolded myself, trying to stretch out my senses to fill in the blanks.
Two days ago, I was at Cranberry Lake Biological Station, on the island I’ve been privately calling “the Island of the Buried Stone Giants.” I packed my shit (overpacking as usual) and made for the shoreline to catch the boat that’d bring me to my car on the mainland. An ashen rain fell gently and the air smelled of brine and rot.
Remi carried two of my bags while I handled the rest. We swapped stories of horror and joy until Larry the boat-man greeted us. I loved Larry on sight. I love old, handsome men with gentle masculinities who take their time to talk and always seem to smile in a surprised, genuine way. I want to look like them when I’m old. I want that energy.
We took the aluminum boat, the one Larry said was “Good in bad weather but not very comfortable.” It bucked like a stallion and split the lake in two. I tried to keep my eyes open, tried to take in as much of our misty surroundings as possible, but the rain stabbed me everywhere in tiny smoky-quartz athamé knives. Marked me deep. I closed my eyes and stretched out my Real Body, the one that filled my hollow body whenever I practiced my aerials, the one that felt pleasure in all things. I remembered a meditation one of the new age people my mother had taken me to shared, back when things first started to be Wrong with me in a more disruptive way. St. Germain, master of the violet flame. I could almost see my Real Body glimmering with that. Heatless fire. And that Kaveh Akbar quote about God. “A bladeless knife with no handle.”
Memorize the bathwater, memorize the air. There’ll come a time I’ll wanna know I was here.
In my mind’s eye I saw Larry with his baseball cap and sunglasses. He was short and compact and weathered. There are many moments in my life I tend to bookmark as “dying dreams.” Things for my old body to return to one day when I take my final breaths. This was one of them. Ashen rain and the fury of someone else’s god beating into me on all sides. The brine the rot the men the deep. Tree trunks and brand-new rosaries of eggs thickening in the saturated never-driftwood, those drowned old growth forests bound to the no-nutrient floor.
I laughed. I smiled. I tarried at the threshold between the Island and my next destination and I wondered: what’s in store?
“It’s never what you’d expect,” Smokii Sumac had said to me. We were in Toronto and the clouds looked possessed. Seconds prior to this declaration, we’d been taking bets on what’s next. Aliens, Smokii claimed. It’s gotta be aliens, right?
A few nights ago, Remi and I had been under the stars, talking about the boys we love who are breaking our hearts, when a flotilla of lights broke across the sky in a perfectly straight line. We freaked out until we found out it was Elon Musk’s “Starlink,” and the magic died. I stood in the darkness of my cabin for a long time and wondered where this feeling of mad hope had come from. Prompted by the threat of invasion. Prompted by the unknown. Tim’s insane lines in I Think You Should Leave’s most recent season: “My life is nothing I hoped it would be and all I feared it would become because for fifty seconds of my life I thought there was monsters on the world.”
My first evening at the Flaherty: Queer World Mending Seminar, Pablo de Ocampo gave a speech about the Flaherty’s philosophy of “non preconception.” Secrecy, in other words. The programmers know what’s in store. Who’s being featured. But we, the audience, know nothing until the program unfolds. I smiled to myself. There was no big reason Samara had brought me here, as I say. No transaction, no deeper intention, no… preconception. She had brought me here to share something she found lovely with someone she cares about. But in this moment, I found my Big Reason. I had grown weary of Knowing What’s Next. This would be a good disruption to my usual laissez-faire involvement in the Narrative, my “okay I know, I know, but I’m not allowed to say.” Here I didn’t know, but I was being told, whatever it takes, I must Say.
The first screening of the seminar opened with a question.
What is the difference between desire and pleasure?
After a spell, and an opening short film that I fell asleep to, I woke up with my answer.
Pleasure is when I take what is consensually given to me. Desire is when I make the offering.
Around the second Madsen Minax piece, which I adored and obsessed over and Needed, deeply, for my research, my left eyelid began to flake and itch and burn. I rubbed a little bit of chapstick on it and immediately thought: big mistake. But there were more films, more stories to live, more moments, and my friend Merrill was sitting next to me being the coolest person alive as usual, and I wanted to be here.
I hung around longer than I wanted to, getting sleepier and sleepier, because there was so much to see and do and talk about. I pulled cards for a PhD student called Jacob in a room called “Barbie’s Butthole,” where I’d buried my two hands in a bucket of rich soil and played until someone sat by me who reminded me a little too much of someone else, someone who I’d categorize as “dastardly.” I felt so much hope well up in me, so much hope and fear and yes, lust, in that room. Lust for life, for touch, for strangers and old friends and old friends made new with time and space. Then it was bedtime and I fell asleep in my dorm. Alone and happy.
The next morning I immediately knew something was wrong. My left eye wouldn’t open all the way, and the itch had gotten worse. It burned. My brain played and replayed a scene from Melissa McCarthy’s Spy, when she shows up at work and Allison Janney’s character yells, “Well I’m allergic to disgusting childhood illnesses!” I prayed it wasn’t pink eye, flipped a coin, and went back to sleep.
The dream I had I shared with Samara and a handful of my friends. I will not share it here, only that it was vivid and terrible, like everything you’ve ever felt as a child distilled into adulthood and garnished with an unmet need for intimacy so deep, your want outweighs your fear.
I woke up to a fire alarm at 9pm and my eye was completely swollen shut. I got in a Lyft, rode to the nearest Urgent Care that was still open, twenty minutes away in Malta, and calmly explained to my attending what was going on while the staff got into a shouting match in the hallway over my biological sex. The shouting match carried on for ten long minutes and my nurse and I pretended not to hear it. At one point, she slammed the thin plastic partition between Triage and the hall, as if that’d do anything, and I snorted.
When I got out of Triage, one of the nurses who’d been trying to argue for my bodily autonomy, Justin, looked like he was about to cry and yelled, “I can’t believe we’ve been talking about this. We should not have been talking about this. We’re better than this, I swear.”
I gave no indication that I knew what he meant and followed my attending to my room.
The young, hot doctor was built like a linebacker and was kind to me.
“Do you have a uterus?” he asked, point blank, gesturing to my belly.
I sighed in relief at his blunt tone and nodded.
“When was your last period?” he asked.
“Now,” I said. As if on cue, another cramp wracked my body, and I winced. “Started yesterday.”
“So no chance of pregnancy, then,” said the doctor. “We have to ask. Gotta know how many patients we’re treating. You know how it is.”
I smiled and nodded. “I know.”
He apologized before he dug his fingers into my eye and I apologized for cursing.
They diagnosed me with contact dermatitis, tested my vision, and put me on 30mg of Prednisone for the next week or so.
My head was all soap opera synthesizers and a desperate wish to be touched. Disgust at my appearance outweighed my desperation, and at every turn, I found myself shrinking away from smiling back at anyone who grinned at me. Mitski’s voice in my head, “If I gave up on being pretty, I wouldn’t know how to be alive.”
Samara picked me up from the ER at around 12:15am. I went to the CVS. Everyone was exceedingly nice to me. I got what I needed and sat in Samara’s car, being grateful. Hoping everyone in the world could tell how grateful I was, I am.
When we got back to the campus, Samara wrinkled her nose at how impossible it was to navigate.
“Everything is so twisty and turny here,” she said. “It feels like they did it on purpose. It’s like they want you disoriented.”
“Hostile architecture,” I said, wildly aware of how little help I was being. Depth perception is real, apparently.
She dropped me off outside my dorm and we parted ways. Even with the pain and the plans falling apart I was glad to be here, glad to have seen her.
Plus, at least I don’t have pink eye. I take solace in that.
I’m very tired now. Last night I dreamt about aliens. Aliens and dogs trying to save us from them, just like they’d done eons ago, before a single white person had even imagined a New World. Laying down their four-legged lives for their people. Saying “I love you” with their last words. I thought I’d go to the 2pm screening today but I don’t think I can. I think I’ll focus on finishing my commission from Karen Goulet. But first, sleep. Sleep and dream and awaken on the other side of another threshold, guarded and barred by non-preconception, fuzzy as an uncharted map in a survival game, haunted as this land of healing waters and old, old spirits.
ᔖᐘᓄᐱᓀᐢ 
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