Jetztzeit

I’m lying on the cold tile of a suite bathroom at the Chateau Marmont. It’s the afters, or after the afters now. That’s the scene heading. I came in here to talk to God, alone, but they’re already here, watching, circling like vultures. There’s a spotlight burning through me and I’m bathing in it self-immolation style. That’s the action. This is my parenthetical: I’m a vessel, in submission, gaze to the sky, crying, performing contrition. I’m Renée Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. I want to be the kind of person people believe was born for this—because I was. I’m nothing without it. I’m no one when no one is watching. I’m giving them my all. I’m a motherfucking star. 

There’s rap music blaring—high-tempo trap beats, cascading hi-hats, thunderous 808 bass pulses, and ad-libs of irate nonwords and animalistic sounds, all meticulously engineered to sonic perfection. It’s phasing right through the door into my gaping orifices. Everyone here is white. I get it—I get tired of myself, too. Like how nothing moves you anymore, except the thought of escaping yourself, becoming someone, anyone, other than who you are right now. I’m not talking about being trans, but maybe I am. My black friend once asked me what race I’d be if I could choose. It was obviously a trick question, but I still didn’t say black. Too easy. There’s no word for it—being sick of your own solipsism. It’s like Existential Dysmorphia. I just made that up. Whatever. I hock thick nasal drip into the sink and exit.

Everyone’s fucking. The whole place smells like a Dubai penthouse. There’s only one other person who isn’t and we’ve just met. It’s this boy and he’s in love with me, he says this without missing a beat. He’s acting because he’s an actor, like the rest of us. And I don’t just mean the people in the city. Nothing any of us says makes sense anywhere out of its context, where we say it when we do. It doesn't matter anyway. What’s important is a good performance. Making people feel something. I can’t remember the last time I felt anything. Are you aware that the lifespan of a character can be indefinite, outliving their actor as long as there’s someone alive to keep watching? Fiction is the closest we come to eternal life. Some old American writer said we are what we pretend to be. You can quote me. Here’s what we—all of us, including you—really are: a bourgeois family flirting with death. Passing around the same figmental stranger to get fucked one by one until he abandons us, leaving us to go mad and die. Like in Pasolini’s Teorema. Don’t think about that all too hard. That’s just the kind of reality we’re living now.

Too many things are like the Boeing 737s flying right over my head. I don’t care enough to understand. The actor doesn’t mind this so long as he sees that I’m there to watch him. To the sober eye there are few. But I see all of them—thousands. Tiny winking assholes, full of light. Planes still fly all the time, everywhere, despite everything my Agency professor said this when I said I don’t know if anything means anything. They only fall when no one’s there to observe them. And even then, they make no sound. I’ve only known 9/11 as an image. Just an Orthodox icon. The boulevard where the actor is parked is lined with insurance billboards and ads, all more of the same—depictions of things that never existed, fabricated to fill a void.

I’m in a car with a beautiful boy, and he tells me that he loves me, but he doesn’t love me. The boy is just acting because he’s an actor. The city, teeming with dead people and their dead dreams, is so alive. I love you, alive city. I love you, alive city. I love you, alive city. Not dead. Alive. Anything can happen here. Everything does happen here. His hand clutches my nucha, trembling with a desperation that feels like a silent plea for deliverance. It isn’t about me, but it puts me in a cult leader mood. I’m Marshall Applewhite and you’re watching Heaven’s Gate. I’m in power. I’m anonymous. I’m hot liquid. I’m a black latex gimp suit with a beating heart and an open mouth. 

The headlights of the car illuminate the ten feet of pavement ahead, incessantly performing autopoiesis, stretching further into the nothingness of the Hollywood Hills at night. We’re driving into the event horizon in a 1978 Ferrari 308 GTS, top down. This is the only time we get fresh air in the city. Past the limit, it’s akin to getting waterboarded. I can feel God’s warm embrace, eyes closed at this speed. We arrive at a mansion built like a labyrinth, nearly all glass. Inside, it’s adorned with extraordinary objects and art from Christie’s—I can’t tell the difference. In the living room, a ten-foot ammonia-scented taper candle burns. A wall-size “painting,” its bleached canvas splattered with frenzied cum stains. A banana duct-taped to the wall. An otherwise lovely sculpture of a small child, marred by its phallic-shaped nose. Everything here is obviously a kink thing.

“Are you ready?” the actor asks. I was born ready and I’ve always known for what. My mom says I came out before she even tried to push. The doctors had never seen anything like it. It was like I birthed myself, crawling out of her pussy on my own—the decision to exist entirely mine. Maybe in my past life, I was one of those aging actresses—clinging to relevance, ego-driven, feigning sexual assault to salvage a washed up career. Maybe this is still that life. I care about one thing and I’ll go to any length to get it. The only source of light inside is a back corner doorway to more unreality, emanating both a warm orange glow and a cool polyphonic hum, like in the basement is the sun itself. It’s got this gravity, dragging us down flights of stairs until we’re staring into the mouth of an apocalyptically lit up bunker that looks like Abu Ghraib reimagined as a sex dungeon.

We’re looking down at two rows of hooded figures, ten on either side, ostensibly captives, stripped from the neck down kneeling, facing each other, lined up forming a path to the back of the room where a medieval looking contraption, made for either worship or torture or both, is. They’re muttering something in Latin, or an extinct indigenous language, or maybe a non-language—just a string of guttural noises and grunts under their breath. Sounds that carry the indicia of language, making sense only to them and to whoever is present, in this moment, in this context, and nowhere else.

The difference between either the kinship I’m intuiting or the thin permeable walls of my consciousness experiencing total putrefaction is, at this point, insignificant. There’s a monastic air in the room giving me the impression that I’m finally being wrested towards something transcendent. Towards glory. It’s making me feel important. I am. That I’m here, and everyone not here is elsewhere for a reason. That I’m God’s gift to this Helter Skelter world. That the whole world is in this room. This is the only thing that has ever truly made sense. The actor begins to disrobe and I follow suit without second thought. 

I chose life. You didn’t. You were sold a concept of “meaning” and you bought into it, like a fucking Modernist. So when you saw a urinal in a vitrine, you thought Genius! You made choices, thinking they’d lead you to some grand revelation of your purpose, but you know it’s all bullshit. Maybe you were a mistake, an accident, or just a supernumerary in the system. And worse, you’re now hopelessly at the mercy of your own earthly desires, blind to the truth: the void you feel can only be satiated by the absence of desire itself—because in your marrow you know you’re undeserving of anything worth a damn. Do you hear me, you little retard? In the grand scheme of things, you’re nothing but a cockroach—disgusting, insignificant, and only noticed when you need to be crushed. I didn’t bother wasting time negotiating my being. I took control and grabbed it by the balls. I was born to be seen. I’m the Messiah and you’re watching The Second Coming.

Here's a quick etymology lesson for you: glamour comes from the Scots word glamer—enchantment, magic. It refers to a spell that alters perception. It’s not about reality, not about substance, but about what you can see, what you can want. People lap it up like dogs. Doesn’t matter if it’s vainglorious or soulless or downright wicked. But then there’s that line they throw at you when you start making it, when you “go Hollywood.” They liked you because you were one of them. They thought they weren’t charmed, and neither were you. They thought they were too smart for it, but here you are. And here I am. I’ve never been illusioned. I knew from the start that everything comes at a price. There are winners and there are losers, and the ends will always justify the means.

The actor slips a burlap sack over my head, saying how there are things I cannot see. He leads me, following blindly, but he’s wrong. I’ve seen it all. I’ve spent thousands of hours on Liveleak.com and now I think I’m Bataille. The adobe floor is cold and wet, probably with body fluid. You don’t get to walk the road to apotheosis without soiling yourself. The chanting starts. It’s like they’re calling out my name. I’m strapped onto the contraption and everything begins to close in around me. Spoiler: they sacrifice me. But I can stay alive if you start this whole passage over and don’t finish. Because what happens next is nothing. Just silence. Absolute, suffocating silence. The kind that swallows everything whole. The kind that even the greatest stars can’t escape. 

David San Miguel is a Los Angeles-based writer.