One morning, I fell out of the tiny bed with a thump. I had punched through something, arrived some place I once sought to be, thought I sought, but without relationship to anyone.

    I called Clarke from a dark phone booth inside the commons. “Aloha! Aloha! AloooooHA!,” his message system sang in gay 70’s choir each time I tried. Finally, I reached him. I didn’t have anything to say. I felt so relaxed talking to him, though, I thought I’d humour him and tell him at least something.

I told him I’d been having dreams of Jesus, even though I never had any religious background.  Isn’t that strange?

“Well, he is a prominent figure,” he replied in his typical understated irony.  I knew he was being clever, but I wasn’t able to respond in kind.  One of the few things I was pretty sure of was my cleverness was gone for good.  

    “I started flipping through this Bible someone gave me when I was hitchhiking. It keeps going to the same passage. The part where the cock crows 3 times and Pilates disavows Jesus” I pronounced Pilate like the exercise. It was Peter, of course. 

    We talked randomly about Russian literature, and Clarke mistook Chekhov, pronouncing it Chekhovsky. He said he preferred learning a more marginal, bastardised language like Czech. I was sitting on the dark red carpet floor. It was so dark in that phone booth. I couldn’t see anything. “Things are getting so strange . . . An Indiana Jones hat starts to mean something . . .” I threw things at the wall, hoping something might stick, for him to take the clay I offered and dirty himself, shape it.

“I’m reading Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night.  He gives the most detailed descriptions and then just blanks out and lands in a totally new scene.  I thought of you.”  

“I think about you all the time” I blurted. 

    He mostly listened to me —  I called, after all.  We hung up awkwardly, after I waited for him to say some loving words, which did not come.

 

 

I made a tape with only Khachaturian’s waltz for Lermontov’s drama, Masquerade — each plunge and sweep centripetalising the mask.  Onward-thrusting, outrageously predictable, aware of its fate. Waltzes, like children’s lullabies, danced with adult seriousness.

Hidden on the other side of the tape (in the middle, so he would have to listen to over half an hour of silence first) was Bowie’s Moonage Daydream. I knew he would find it.

 

“Dear Pilates: Better leave the dedication "for oysters." I'll let you know when I run out of money. —Chekhovsky.” I placed the yellow sticky note on the cassette and mailed it cheap Russian post to his mother’s house in Petaluma.

 

 

 

 

******

Ben, opening his gmail on his desktop, with me, having taken mushrooms for the first time, looking over his shoulder. The ads are for teeth whitening, with before yellow, white after teeth adorning the corners of the screen.  One night, I broke some floss and it remained in my teeth for hours, and he rode his bike at 3am to Walgreens to get some double waxed floss to get it out.  I laugh at the ads and he smiles and scrolls down — there are more.  “If you don’t know me by now . . . ”  I croon into his good ear as I take him for a waltz in the kitchen, and he is in love with me, I can see it. 

 

Character sketch, like photography, is a certain violence.  The bleeding of immortalisations is second to violence. 

 

Moto-sy — the young guys on motosys bow when they cut you off.  Both in humility and as if they didn’t see well enough before they cut you off.  And then a big Mexican styled truck with tinted windows pulls out in front of a pedestrian — since no one can see whether the driver can see, everyone knows he has the right of way.  But in Barcelona the people on the street turn away, pretending not to see, so that you have move out of their way as a fellow pedestrian. That doesn’t happen here. This not-seeing— I also turn off my sight in a place like Barcelona. I’m more suspicious of anthropological equanimity than petty street violence.  

 

Thais see more than usual—although Vichak, as a Buddhist teacher, disagrees.  I always felt its affinity with Mexico,  Spicy, delicious food, the love of kitsch, cuteness—and something else I could’t name. Pinky, Thai massage therapists always joke about my pink skin, poking me and laughing. They talk to me because I speak some thai; otherwise they talk to each other, thank god, a deflationary apotropaic against atmospheric enlightenment. But they see ghosts too.  Piiiiii — with the rising tone.  The baan piiii— fairy houses — are for the spirits displaced by building sites, for the most part, not deceased relatives.  All my friends in Thailand have seen a ghost—except Vichak. Not surprising they are on a wavelength with the invisibles. The languages’s meaning is implied more through tone and context, it hovers, invites interaction (there are no wrong notes, Miles said). Spirits respond to the seduction of beauty, not pleas or demands, Van der Post says, rotating his aphorisms: 78 cards in a tarot deck 64 hexagrams as cosmological container, thousands of Tswana praise poems tied to their traditional bone divinations, but VdP only knows about 20 — he repeats them too much for chance.  Well, he is the only one who knows any of them, now.

 

“Let go” the dance teachers — even here —  learn to demand, and we tighten our muscles, spirits flee. Chanin occasionally saw my father. Perhaps my mother was too far gone, or maybe as he said, my dad lingered around to take care of me, he was worried that I have no one left. Chanin would say sometimes, usually late at night: you’ve done enough.  You shouldn’t have to do any more.  You need to rest. I would cry with infinite sadness, resting in his protest against fate, resting because I was there to learn how to. He cried more easily than me, a stream suddenly rushing down, but not infinitely, with measure. We are both connected to that well, but Chanin was rooted on dry land. All cenotes connect to one another underneath language. A gesture can divert them momentarily. The fool that he was, he touched my face whenever he saw he couldnt win: he knew I was only good with words because I considered them pathetic, incompetent, violently dumb. And when I get excited / My little China girl says / Oh baby, just you shut your mouse, I sang to him, calling out chord changes as he strummed guitar.

 

I pictured my dad following me around with the same atrophied body with which he wandered into the hall to adjust the thermostat again and again. Why do you see him and not me?  He clings, he seems confused, he worries about you. He’s reassured seeing you’re okay. Chanin told me that in a gentle serious tone.  It wasn’t easy for him to be so serious, his mouth strained to keep so steady.  

 

 

 

 

 

*****

 

“Your “Lady”, wild and fit for any deed, 

To whom so many things befell, is now no more!

The wench who could not even keep her man

Is now the queen of Dharmakaya Kuntuzangpo

That sluttish creature, brazen with conceit,

Pretension takes her now to the southwest!

That whining vixen, fit for any intrigue,

Has tricked her way to dissolution in the Dharmadhatu!

That dejected widow no Tibetan wanted

Inherits now the endless sovereignty of Buddhahood!”

 

 

“Prostituting herself, The Duke often writes these days in his articles, supposedly to characterise the political careerism in Catalan processism. I am sure that he uses this image more often now than he did before, though of course it is not an uncommon metaphor in this incestuous Catholic empire.  Sanchez says he has “abolished” prostitution, and local feminists are more suspicious of me as a foreigner sex worker than they are of Goebbels--who started out as a client. Then the next day, The Duke will write about how good it is that Catalan filmmakers are making it big in the box office, despite becoming less serious, more sellouts.  Puta is a word he uses at least weekly, 3 out of 5 articles weekly, a careful lever of provocations. His language is well curated, maniacally dead, boring, the neon light always flashing.   Mixing stuffy language with sexuality: “fornicating” when talking about his own acts — “but only when strictly necessary” he would say, as a side note to me and other admirers. Eros in a dehydrated sea monkey packet, it makes us all wet.  “Fucking” and “prostituting” when talking about the acts of more official, political people.  The key is the contrast.  “Rubbing ourselves to ecstasy, that extremely profitable act”  he wrote after it was clear he was following me on my escort twitter.  

 

Elihu must be reading him, because he has started using “copulate” and “fornicate” in his endless Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s annoying when the Duke uses it, but unbearable when Elihu tells me he longs to copulate with me.  Evan, writerly friend, asks tentatively, with sensitivity — did you ever think that maybe the Duke refuses to meet you in real life because you . . . 

He trails off.

Because I’m a whore?  Of course I’ve thought of it, and sure.  But that’s not nearly as bad as the fact that I’m not Catalan.  That’s far more shameful for him. 

 

Well — I hope you’ve written that.  Did you write that?

 

It is the first time that I am able to give myself the space and time to write. It is not only the money I have made in escorting, but the emotional resources I gained from the work and a slow-cooked, pressure-cooked understanding of economic reality.  Not to mention that escorting itself — making 500 an hour for dressing up and presenting some amicable, aperspectival version of myself to a man who never fail treats to me better than a Tinder date, who inspired my thinking around every topic because thinking from the farthest margins is necessary to see anything.

 

*****

 

I gave Ben a list of the songs I want to make covers of.  We play music together all the time and he is always up for improvising with me, but stops short of committing to projects with me, like everyone else.  

 

Did you take a look, I asked, pressing him, leaning forward.

Yeah, I think the clue is that Phil Collins song stuck in the very middle. That’s your secret soul, he says.

 

***** 

I had a dream that I went to visit Van der Post for a divination, and Hanien, his girlfriend keeps appearing right in front of his face every time I tried to talk to him.  It was deeply annoying, and I kept trying to get around to him directly, but they merged, violently, into one. 

 

The girlfriend every man wants.  He despised her.  I went to see Niall, co-holder of the same rare sangoma lineage, during the times Laurens and I were not speaking.  Despite knowing nothing about my relationship with Laurens, Niall told me, in his own intuitive divination — he didnt throw bones himself, he worked more with plants (he burned something and meditated), so the performance was anticlimactic.  “You have a pattern, a complex, we might say, of being the other woman.  Does this sound familiar?”

 

Feeling bold, I told him about Laurens van der Post's malpractice, his seduction, his lack of accountability — seduction sounds wrong: was he even trying to seduce me? “Could you divine if he is doing it for attention, to get money — has he stopped short of consummating out of cowardice? The point of seduction is consummation, I guess, so seduction just sounds wrong here. But if it was the third option, as a counsellor, as a healer, it’s still just as bad if he can’t speak openly about it with me. Yes, Laurens has a thing about me as the other woman” I spat it out.  Laurens was Niall’s brother.  The van der Post bothers. 

 

“Well, you can talk with him about that, I don’t want to get into it.”

 

“Actually, no, I can’t talk to him about it, because he’s an irresponsible child and he won’t have a reasonable conversation about our mutual transference, entanglement, whatever it is.  He tells me I’m his soulmate but he charges me for sessions. He should be paying me, as far as I’m concerned. So no, I came to you to try to understand this because I cannot talk it out with your brother.”  

 

He leans against the wall, straightening his back. He is as professional as his brother, but less well known.  He doesn’t have the charisma —his thing is pragmatism.  “The solution that I can offer you is that to dissolve the complex, you must understand it” he says, mediating the concreteness of African ritual with Western psychology. “To understand it, perhaps a ritual is helpful.”

 

“Is it something from growing up as a surrogate for my mother, to my intellectual dad? Then passed to my uncle?” I asked earnestly, but then re-remembered. “The more I understand and see myself, I think it is my unfilteredness, my raw energy, my openness, intelligence, and vitality — things that are generally attractive, but only in a part time way to most men, who want someone they can manage more — ‘more’ being the operative word, because I’m more unmanageable than the other flappers you have in mind.  What ritual do you suggest?”

 

“I do family constellations, both individually and in group, if that is something you’d like, we could arrange it. Otherwise, I suggest you see Hildegard.  She might be more helpful, as a woman.”

 

In constellations, the character playing me always ends up alone, looking upon a scene of entangled madness: the characters playing me and my family know nothing about myself or the situation. The scene begins simply by me placing the actors in a static choreography, physically, and the characters start having altered perception, the scene never ends, entangled in madness.  But I have understood it. He tells me, he’s been with a witch before, and he’s not going to try it out again.  “I dont want us throwing fireballs at one another.”  The “other woman” complex means that men want a woman who is compatible with their worldviews as a partner; they leave the “others" for affairs, avoiding upheaval because their work rests upon stabilising their little branding, so any work that I do on myself would mean becoming that kind of woman.  The madness is that I am ok with madness, deeply ok with the water.  And these men all peer over a floodgate with deep intrigue and a huge erection and cross themselves.

 

I went to a conference on land art with a handsome gay friend, just after meeting with Niall.  We pretended to be together. Laurens was there, giving a short speech on rainmakers, but it was more Hanien’s thing. Laurens clocked me, gulped with fear, and ignored me, leaving early. My friend caught a ride back to his place after the event, but Hanien ended up with several others as we went down to Cape Point and climbed up to the lighthouse.  By the time I came down, my ride, an art teacher who held painting sessions I sometimes went to, had left. Those of use left, about 15 people, gathered around and asked in the circle who would give me the ride.  I moved away from Hanien, already knowing my fate.  No one was going that way, they had things to do, it was out of the way.  Hanien, you can give her a ride, they said.  

 

Hanien drove me around to hunt flowers in the Cape on the way back.  She would stop the car to traipse over to rare flowers in that desert landscape, this distinct biome that hosts flora like nowhere else on the planet.  She painted flowers, pressed them, worked in plant based paints.  She didn’t know Laurens van der Post had been telling me how bored he was of her.  Her phone kept lighting up with messages from him. I peered at them in the dash, discretely trying to decipher words.  She started the flower painting after leaving a successful corporate job in real estate. One has to have a brand. She was quite good at painting them — one of my friends bought one of them from her, without knowing who she was. They are beautiful paintings—I would have bought one if I had money.  One of her exhibitions was “Invisible Flowers” after Calvino’s Invisible cities. 

 

“Laurens is not the man people think he is, you’ve seen that. He is slippery.  Julia studied under him for years and he was always hesitant to offer her anything of substance — if he has anything. She had to finish with another sangoma. He and Helene were a couple, but he never committed to her either.  Hanien is a typical Afrikaner.  She will serve him tea.  That is what he wants.” Another woman who gave me a ride said, coming over the same pass, a few weeks later.

 

 

*****