A stewardess roved up and down the aisle and made sure people’s seatbelts were fastened. I slid the side of my ass against the knees of the two men sitting in my row. I sat down again. They did the yellow-cup mask demonstration, then the plane took off. I lifted the window shade and turned my attention to the view of the soot-covered buildings and assorted filth. I had succeeded in calming myself. For no reason, I began to feel better, I began to feel like a human again. When we reached the altitude of clouds, I distracted myself from my woeful and calamitous situation by reading a book, an LGBT novel about a man who transitions into a woman and then decides to go back to being a man. I liked stories about people changing their minds and undoing themselves, although in the case of de-transitioning, it’s most likely a rare occurrence, and I had to question the writer’s motives in portraying it. Setting aside the problematic parts of the book, I related deeply to the main character’s challenges when it came to friendship. Because he had made trans-friendly allies during his transition, when he transitioned back into a cis-gendered man, he lost all of his friends. Stunned, I put the book down. There was an odd and haunting parallel to my own life and experiences. I always related any given situation back to myself, another one of my great talents, and I remembered how much difficulty I had leaving Milwaukee and all the troubled relations I left behind. Like the protagonist in the LGBT novel, I had once lost all my friends, in the year 2008. Friendship itself had always been difficult, as difficult as it is for anyone, I thought sitting on the plane. About five years ago, I was semi-famous in Milwaukee for a brief moment, I even received attention in the local newspaper. I referred to myself as an emerging artist, I made crumbling assemblages out of found objects, and innovative performance artists and sculptors and writers and independent film directors and producers surrounded me, and there was an art critic for the local weekly who could not stop writing about all of us. It was a beautiful time, people had art galleries in their attics, and every weekend there was a show to go to, or some kind of absurdist performance theater, where women took off their clothes, even ugly women with misshapen bodies like myself, and men swung around their erections like police batons, my once-friends! Afterward, all of these fashionable and intellectually advanced people, even the ugly ones, went to a bar with a two-lane bowling alley in the basement. No one seemed to care that anyone was ugly, it was beside the point. My fame was very limited to a specific group of people who lived downtown, no one in the suburbs cared about us. Not even my adoptive family knew about it, partially because they never read the weekly newspaper and partially because it was for such a brief time. For a time as brief as candles, people were drawn to me, people searched me out, they asked where I was if I wasn’t there, some people even said I was mildly beautiful. Or perhaps they said I was beautifully mild. Either way. I was always very plain and somewhat shabby, no matter, there must have been an aura of artistic intensity around me, even though I didn’t go to college for art, I went to college for a practical degree in English, you can do anything with an English degree, a guidance counselor told me. I fashioned myself as an artistic person, artistic in my way of living, artistic in my choice of clothing. My favorite shirt at the time was found in a garbage can at the intersection of Farwell and Pleasant, a turquoise sweatshirt with an appliqué of a dog and rabbit in a hot air balloon basket. The hot air balloon itself was pink suede. So it was no surprise that once, a very long time ago, some people gravitated toward me.
Then something went wrong, someone turned against me, perhaps out of jealousy, I’ll never know, and he or she circulated a rumor that I was an artistic hack and called into question the originality of my work. It was said that my assemblages of found objects and texts owed too much to the work of Joseph Cornell and Henry Darger. A few weeks later an article appeared in the weekly newspaper with a photo of me and my work captioned: Appropriation or theft: the failed work of Milwaukee’s Helen Moran. It was an ugly scene; everywhere I went people whispered that I was a plagiarist and a fraud. A side-by-side comparison of my work to the works of Cornell and Darger showed certain similar technical flourishes and extensions, and although it was easy to see an unabashed and perhaps uncritical admiration, my found texts and assemblages were not exact copies, my intention had been to participate in the conversation, not to reproduce what had already been produced. At first I was hurt, embarrassed, ashamed, then I went to the library, looked at The History of Art by H.W. Janson and realized that in the art world there are no new, fresh images. Everything is a palimpsest, and behind that, another palimpsest. Even so, these rumors and words wormed into people’s brains and poisoned my reputation, right as the artistic group began to gain national attention in Chicago and Minneapolis; I no longer received invitations to basement bowling alleys or damp attics or absurdist theater performances or group shows or Biennales, over the course of a summer I was expelled from the artistic group, I was driven out like a leper. I wanted to shake people’s shoulders and scream, everything in the world is a palimpsest, motherfuckers! But no one would meet with me; no one returned my calls. I retreated to my hovel, a disgusting basement apartment in a decrepit part of town not even multi-billionaire international investors were able to rescue. I stopped getting dressed or going anywhere, which was a convenient time to do that, since my adult acne had flared up. Life was taking revenge on me.2 For a month or so, I sat in a basement room with dim light and hatched a plan to escape. In the end I had transformed my mildly beautiful self into a functioning hermit with a sour taste in her mouth. I no longer carried myself with an artistic aura. I started to hunch over if I went anywhere, which was seldom. I used to be a relational person, I thought, until people decided they wanted nothing to do with me.
How is someone supposed to live like that?
I decided to start over. I moved to New York City, a city that no one from Milwaukee imagined moving to a) because no one who lived in Milwaukee ever dreamt of leaving in the first place and b) because the cost of living in New York City is expensive, astronomically so. But I lived cheaply there on quinoa and rice. Or perhaps the word is frugally. I was sane in that astronomically expensive city living life frugally like an urban peasant. It took me years to find a stable living situation, yet I was saner than I had ever been in my entire adult life. Helen Moran, a sane and functioning adult in New York City: how? How is it possible to keep your sanity and exist on crumbs in the drawer?
You’ll see, I said to no one. I’ll show you. Someone will pay me one day to divulge how I lived so frugally, elegantly, and sanely in that glittering, amorally rich, and enormous hellhole.
4
As I woke up from a dream, the stewardesses collected trash. In my dream I was two women instead of one. We had been awarded a grant from a top-tier research-driven university to write a report on turtles nearing extinction on a remote and uninhabited island. Turtles: peaceful, monumental, stone-like creatures. When not dutifully writing our report, we were to be in charge of their feedings. We fed the turtles large, leafy plants the size of old gray desktop computers from the ’90s. It was fun having a friend; we wore thick rubber gloves fitted over our hands that made it impossible to type out our report. A turtle bit us through the gloves and it felt like getting your fingers snapped in a mousetrap. The dream became a nightmare when we found ourselves in a morgue, standing before my adoptive brother’s dead body spread out on an examination table, about to watch a man perform an autopsy as he rolled on his rubber gloves. We started crying, then one of us walked away, and I was alone again.
When I woke up, I noticed some of the stewardesses were wearing latex gloves, lightly powdered, and the powder traces could be seen dusted faintly across their shoulders and shirtsleeves. If someone studied the traces, if someone put the traces under a microscope, perhaps they would detect a pattern that would unlock the secrets of the universe. I stretched my legs out as far as possible, then began to shift my attention to the purpose of my trip. To find out what happened to him, I said to no one, in other words, to investigate his suicide, to investigate the loss of a will to live. Demystify the pattern, and demystify the death. His death, his death, a death that I abhor.3 I felt weeping in my eyes. I sniffled. The man sitting next to me asked if I needed a tissue.
I’m not crying, I said as I accepted it and dabbed my eyes gently.
It’s just allergies, I said. Don’t worry.