Dear Diane,
It was Caroline and her obsessive willingness to survey YouTube panopticon footage, her power to squint at compression artifacts until they resolved into auras, that finally brought us to Mona Slinks. Caroline had been looking for studio clips from the sessions around the Space-Girls era, alternates of the famous photos from “Psychic Attraction” (you at the piano, your family circling your shoulders like a congregation), some shadow of Mona in the corner of a frame. Instead, she found a café open mic that someone had filmed, maybe without the knowledge of the participants. The grainy video had seventy-two views, a mic placement that sucked up every crowd chuckle or clinked mug, the stage and performers squeezed into a spatial dungeon in the lower left of the frame. From the applause, even compensating for echo, there couldn’t have been more than fifteen, twenty people watching each performance. In the corner, a blocky camcorder timestamp gave the year: 1998. We watched it while we were in our underwear, the space heater on us against November chill, a plate of canned spaghetti I’d made split between us on the bedspread.
It was hard to make out the exact appearance of the woman who was performing: Agness Underwood, said the description. Her body glowed in a compression artifact aura—did she have short hair? tank top? glasses? wrinkles cut deep in suntan skin?—and room tone hiss and tape degradation had largely swallowed up her chucking guitar strings. But we could hear what she was singing: “Psychic Attraction,” with the original lyrics.
Thanks, she says, voice rasping at the conclusion of the performance, which earns hoots and whoops. —I wrote the words to that one.
There’s good-natured laughter, and the performer laughs along with it.
From there, it was automatic. The coffee shop in the video was still in business; it still had a legal address listed with the Montana secretary of state. The ZIP code was adjacent to the PO Box for Lipstick Killer Recordings. And as Caroline pulled up a copy of the local phone book, hunting Agness Underwood’s address, I found myself praying: don’t let there be anything. Let this trail be dry. But there her address was, plain as the ocean. Caroline plugged it into the map search, rubbed her hands together as the street view began to load.
A couple of weeks before, me, Caroline, and Ronda were all together in the bar in Elephant Butte, a social outing, a queer takeover. There was nothing to take over; the vacationers were mostly gone for the coming winter, the town people holed up at home, just us and the bartender reading a book on real estate investment between fill-ups. Ronda and I were laughing meanly about someone she’d once known, an older trans woman from a support group with a sense of paranoia about people, a habit of lecturing Ronda about her makeup and clothes choices with a haughty smile—real ladies don’t use reds that bright, real ladies don’t blot—and we sat there coming up with other things real ladies didn’t do, defecate during anal sex being Ronda’s best and transmute food into bodily nutrients being mine, while Caroline sat between us at the bar sketching storyboards in her notebook. After ten minutes of transsexual banter, she got up and went outdoors, and the conversation between Ronda and I became one-sided, then petered out. Ronda didn’t even seem to mind when this happened anymore while the three of us spoke: she accepted the way the conversation faded when I began to worry about what Caroline thought. That upset me enough that I excused myself and went out as well to find her somewhere in the dark.
I circled the building, but Caroline was nowhere I could see in the parking lot. Where had she gone? How far away had she wanted to go from us? Circling the bar, I suddenly wished for her to be very far away: somewhere she didn’t have to hear transsexual women talking, somewhere she didn’t have to see us or think about us or feel the sadness about us that it seemed in that halogen parking lot moment as if there was no way for her not to feel, because we are poison women, Diane, because our bodies do all turn what enters them into poison, and we make poison and spread poison, because we are sadness itself. There is no way for us not to be that.
This is what I was thinking when Caroline came back from the convenience store across the street, smiling and camera moving, holding out the knife she had just bought: a six-inch switchblade, its handle carved from an alligator, cheap fake rubies its eyes. She hadn’t been thinking about us at all: if our being mean to the older trans woman had upset her, she had quickly forgotten it.
I’ve gotta go into work tonight, I said, getting dressed. —I’ll leave you and your grandmother alone together.
You’re joking? she said. —Come look at her house with me. Don’t be a doof.
I’d made it onto my bike before she appeared on the porch, buttoning a pair of jeans against the cold.
What the fuck is wrong with you? she asked me. —This is my grandmother, finally! We’ve been trying to find her for like months! Can you not take like fifteen minutes to be late to work? It’s not like you do anything! You change water for people!
I looked at the cis woman I’d summoned, standing there in the afternoon light, her roots now almost totally exposed beneath her fading purple fringe.
I should not have to take care of you, she said from the porch, and her voice was different. I couldn’t make out her expression: I imagined it angry.
I’ll be back late, I repeated, trying to keep quiet: I didn’t want to be angry back. —You know—help yourself to anything in the fridge. Or anything you want, okay? Just help yourself to anything.
With that, her hazel eyes resting on me, I biked into the desert, leaving my trailer and the bare sand space beside it behind, before I could see what Agness Underwood’s Montana house looked like.
I didn’t actually have work that night. I passed houses behind chain link fences, land on which nothing but death brush could ever grow, gas stations shuttered with plastic bag fossils hanging loose over the pumps and no gas anymore. At one of these I stopped, smoked a cigarette, and cried. I was crying a lot these days. For a long time, when I was younger, I couldn’t cry at all, so I never really take an instance of crying for granted when it comes. It will take me a long time, I know, to get sick of it, to want something else.
The baths were all clean, but I skimmed them anyway, walking along the stone edges in bare feet and sequin dress with my long net moving around two bathers, some young hippie couple here to photograph abandoned boomtowns. When I was done, I looked out at the mountain where I’d first seen Caroline’s red eye watching me, and then I went into the third bath, took off everything I was wearing, sank and soaked beneath the water and the stars.
What was the purpose of this, actually? Cleaning sacred springs of dust, suntan slicks, little wet wads of toilet paper? What was actually the purpose of my life, except as a brackish pond where bills and wages exchanged places? Nothing I’d done in the past year had obvious market value. I’d grown some plants—I’d stretched some muscles—I’d paid some rents—I’d learned how to summon the archangels to my aid. I’d listened to my favorite band. In magic you summon the angels to create a clean space from which you can work; over time, that space becomes wider, cleaner, easier to attain. Emptier of anything but what you bring to it.
Caroline was offering me a real place in her story, in yours. That’s what I’d summoned her to do. And the only magical error you can make is to lack the courage of your convictions, not to believe, absolutely, that what you desire is good and not wrong. The only magical error you can make is not to follow the advice the angels give. One time I followed that advice, and it brought me here: a desert where I skimmed spa water and wrote letters to you in the dark. And one time you followed it, and it brought you Summer Fun.
I sat back, floated with arms and legs spread like a star inscribed in a circle, my head up and then my head down with the heat of the earth bubbling beneath me and the stars washing down from above.
We would go, tonight if possible; we would drive north into the Continental Divide. We would plunge in—race the chthonic spirits of America’s cannibal soul to the bottom—and we would bounce, roar up out of the canyon like a bald eagle bursting into flames, on tire tracks of fire we’d fly north and west in the car we’d trade my life in for, drive as high as the mountains could take us all the way to Montana and Mona Slinks’s door. I’d stand there at Caroline’s side as she bowed, finally, to accept the anointing blessings of her proto-punk rock queen. Mona would teach us the songs she’d written—do away with Caroline’s false inheritance, teach us the true one, the one not bound to the world, to money. We’d learn to play instruments, to manipulate new forms of video. The two of them would resurrect the Pin Up Dollies, multigenerational, forge anew the band that should’ve played by your side all along. They would let me play with them, perhaps bass or tambourine. You would join us too. We would become the greatest band in America at last.
That’s where we were going to now. It was going to happen tonight, once everything I’d bought, everything I owned was abandoned to the red desert sands. It was what every rock song had told me to do.
I stood up—wet, cold, shivering—from my geothermal womb, and I made the Sign of the Enterer, as best as I could without back strain, at the moon in the sky. I put my clothes on and went to tell my boss that I was quitting, effective immediately, to help my cool cis gal pal achieve her dreams. I made it as far as the office, which is where I called Ronda.
Come pick me up, I said. —I need to crash with you for a while, okay?
Love, Gala