Contamination

Mango sun, blackberry moon, strawberry rising

Giovan Battista Ruoppolo, “Still-Life of Fruit” (17th century), oil on canvas (via Wikimedia)

Robinson invites me to a poetry reading that he’s being paid to shoot. Or it’s a party. Whatever it is, it’s at night. When I get there, Talia is there, and she’s talking to me fast, and it’s clear that I’m not supposed to be here. Why, I ask, Robinson invited me, and they invited Robinson. It’s Annetta Antigonia, she doesn’t want you writing about this, contaminating it. Who said I was going to write about it? And Connie is trying to fuck Aaron, she adds. Good for him, I say. And who is Annetta Antigonia anyway? Talia says she’s going to find out more and disappears into the crowd. Robinson tells me about DC, the Mexican diplomat he met, their weird sexual encounter in Arlington Cemetery, where my grandparents are and my father one day will be buried, and how the woman recoiled when he mentioned “Padrote Drogado” and Lizardi. Our compadres, her compatriotas. Bernardo, el Padrote Drogado, un hombre sensible, with his black metal and modernist books, his supranational revolutionary utopia, a dream of Mexico destroying the United States from within. Lizardi’s utopia is different—waving the Falange flag next to Dugin, telling us that he’d give his favorite Dimes Square twitter personalities little fiefdoms in his future balkanized Méjico. A while back Lizardi had posted a photo to Twitter with his girlfriend and his own followers (or at least I presume they were his followers) were eating him alive for it, because she was too marrón. They were both young, both teenagers, like a prom photo. When I asked him about it, he said she was cool, she was a radical feminist, and radical feminists make great girlfriends for fascists because they’re so authoritarian. Lizardi told me he found something charming in the doomedness of conservatives inviting the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian to rule his country, but that whole era was just indulging the Disney princess roleplay fantasies of middle-class Mexican women, rather than his own. Bernardo has an affection for Lizardi that seems a little fatherly. I would die for him, he said. Why? I asked. I don’t know, I’m just looking for reasons to die. Lizardi had defended Bernardo online when he did the poetry reading in Mexico City with me, responding “pendejo violado” to one of Bernardo’s local scene opps, adding fuel to a fire that ended in Bernardo getting doxed and fired from his translator-bureaucrat job. A father bonded to his son in humiliation. He has more time now for childrearing and writing the vertical dramas that will revitalize Mexican horror cinema. Someone said that Lizardi killed his elementary school teacher. Still, I recognize something in this kid. He can’t be cut out of the love I have for Bernardo. Maybe we’re both fathers of Lizardi, somehow. Lizardi posted an Instagram story from Miami during the Shield of the Americas summit, and I asked him if he was in town for that. Haha no I wish, he said, I’m just happy they let me into the country. The summit itself was something of an international laughingstock, Trump couldn’t even be bothered to pronounce Bukele’s name correctly, and some other Latin American Third Positionist Twitter personalities (a Peruvian who emphasizes the influence of Sorel on Mariategui; a Bolivian who posts Goebbels quotes, anime girls, North Korean flag in bio; a Guatemalan who retweets quotes of Franco praising Ho Chi Minh) were giving Lizardi shit over it, since he’s seen as a yankee sympathizer. Lizardi is connected to the late José Luis Ontiveros, an obscure Mexican fascist writer who happened to be a member of an intellectual society called “El Circulo de Ezra Pound,” which incidentally also included Bernardo’s wife’s aunt among its members. In Mexico Robinson had casually asked Bernardo how his actual son was doing, and Bernardo said something to the extent that he was a terrorist, just like the toddler’s mother, and that he supposed he himself was a terrorist too. Paternal nausea. Out of my vomit Bernardo emerges, dripping and erect. He heads to the bar. I follow him and am blocked by Aaron, who shouts my name, Mike! Mike! You know Annetta Antigonia! She was standing right there. You guys know each other right? Of course you do! I do know Annetta. We’ve met countless times, and she looks just as humiliated as I am by the introduction. Annetta says she needs to make the rounds. You know, we were lovers once, Aaron says. You and Annetta? Yes. You know something about love, don’t you Mike? Hardly, I say. Well you know how it’s the worst thing that could ever happen to someone, that it’s a fate worse than death, the ultimate degradation. Oh, that’s what you mean, I say, then sure. You know, you’re not such a bad guy, Mike. Thanks, I say. You know, someone was killed because of what you wrote in your Substack. What are you talking about, I ask. Executed, he says. Not the back of the head point-blank, but up against the wall and shot. By a firing squad. I’m not sure what you mean, I say, this is the first I’m hearing of this. Oh, maybe I’m misremembering, but why do you think that is? Mike, let’s do shots, Talia barges in, I’m freaking out and I need a shot to calm me down. I know you usually prefer tequila but I already got us whiskey. I hope that’s okay, she says, and I hope it’s okay I told you about Connie wanting to fuck Aaron. Aaron was gone. You know, growing up, Aaron was always like a big brother to me, she says. I wanted to fuck him, he was like this cool older brother, but now that I’m an adult I just see him as goofy. I hope you’re not jealous or anything. I hope you think what we had was meaningful. The shot tastes like nothing, and it travels slowly to my gut. You know, Aaron really likes and respects your work, but you really shouldn’t have said that back there. Said what? You know what I mean, there’s no need to talk about it now. You can tell me, I say. No, there’s no point, forget that I even brought it up. I notice Bernardo’s curly, black, finely-coiffed hair. I remember his wife had wanted Elena Velez in her boutique in Colonia Juárez and I made the introduction. Oh I loved your reading Bernardo, someone says, it was great. Thank you, he replies. You see that man over there? In the beret? He is my opp. He is the same one from Mexico City, remember? He is in league with my haters, spying on us and reporting back how we are cringe. But he should say hi, I think we have more in common than he would care to admit. Bluesy guitar noodling, a tall conical hat, and a closeup of an iguana. The mononymous Pauline, who tells the audience she’s going to sing an itty bitty ditty with her little titties, so bear with her. A gentle, lilting selection from her “Chansons.” Watching her lover walk away from her apartment from out the window for the last time, in the moment where he becomes a memory. How could I have lost you? The lingering sensation of his final kisses. He disappears into the cityscape below. Nostrand Avenue. Tears of ecstatic joy. I would let you break my heart again a dillion times. Something about pomegranates. Her lover is her guru, and her god, and his departure means the end of a mythic age. Now she wanders in godless disillusionment with a sacred wound that she adores more than the world itself. Applause. You made quite an impression on her, Robinson laughs. There’s literally no way that’s about me, I say. It’s about god. Lizardi appears, holding a copy of Aquel vivir del mar, a Spanish anthology of Greek sea poetry. Are you about to go on a long voyage? I ask him. In a sense, he says. There’s nothing of value in all the books of the so-called Latin American boom that you can’t get in the confessional autofictiontheory of Vasconcelos, he continues, now that’s a real hombre sensible, one who understood the true humiliated position of the Mexican nation, the failure to ground itself in some true civilizational spirit. All the infernal visions that the French decadents once had, Bernardo adds (or subtracts), and the unrestrained nihilism of the Russian romantics, survive today in the daily life of a Mexican. Bernardo recites that line by Rimbaud that goes something like: “I am damned and I loathe my homeland. The best thing is to sleep, dead drunk, on the beach.” And the gringos, are they grounded in some true civilizational spirit? Yes, and that spirit is death, a different kind of death: cold, materialist, utilitarian. What is your fruit horoscope? A voice asks. Mango sun, blackberry moon, strawberry rising. A whip, a butterfly, and the gradient before the sunrise. Connie’s long legs. Her poem about cheating on her doting golden retriever Marine boyfriend with a variety of anonymous men in Europe who can’t get hard. A catalogue of the various medicines that men take, of every kind of erectile failure. An orgasm without desire in a body beside itself. She returns home like Odysseus. Applause. Ugh, I’m just hopelessly in love, Talia says. She texted the cop again. I’m a yearner. I know it can never work because he’s such an antisemite. I can’t have that be the father of my kids. At least I made him insecure about his intelligence. He gets so angry when I mention you as a counterpoint to his ancient alien theories. I never actually said I thought he was dumb, though I don’t mind you using me. I just need a real man, she says. I wish he would kill me. I can’t go out with all these shrimpy poets. I need a man who could fix the shelf in my apartment, and you could never do that. A book of Brecht poems, a black turtleneck, and an empty room with each wall painted in a different primary color. I’m not a poet, Taylor says. He reads a piece of critical prose in defense of “hot literati,” written in response to the backlash against a glossy profile piece about some new literary magazine. Our image-based algorithmic culture favors sexiness over anything else, and girls just want to have fun. It’s socialism or barbarism. Considering that Big Tech and the US government are literally using AI to subsidize illiteracy, it’s good to try to make reading “cool” and “hot” so that people actually want to read. Of course, no one should “have to” be hot, especially when being hot is uncompensated labor. But think about who is actually creating these economic conditions. Applause. Suits, monocles, mouths open in frozen performance. Workers disappearing from a maquiladora that makes ideologies. Hands braiding hair in a mirror with no frame. The toilet of the world. Sophia, the Spirit of Wisdom, follows me into the bathroom. Annetta’s muffled reading bleeds through the door. Do you expect me to just pee in front of you? I ask, and she says sure. Do you have any blow? You can hit it but only if you promise to write about it. When we try to leave the lock is jammed for a second. Someone just wrote about Annetta Antigonia, Talia tells me. A broadside. About the ethical responsibility of intellectuals. Just now. Not just about Annetta’s book, but also Barbie Babeuf’s and Chelsea Choi’s. It was shared by Daphne Dillwood, who now has a ton of followers after streaming with Hasan Piker. Always with this aestheticizing reactionary cool-girl detachment thing. It’s frankly misogynistic, Talia states. Lumping them all together like that, just because they’re all friends from the same writers’ workshop. Barbie and Chelsea, sure, but really, Annetta, a fascist? She doesn’t have anything to do with them. This critic wouldn’t even know about the Gary Goebbels thing. And that was just one kiss, years ago. Aaron apologizes to me for the execution allegation. It turns out he was thinking of the torture chamber. I’m still not sure what you mean, I say, this is the first I’m hearing of this. You wrote that there was a torture chamber in the basement of every poetry reading and it really upset a lot of people. Oh, that. Sure. That’s not even original. I don’t have a problem with it, Aaron says, but some people do. They think it’s a bad look. The tranquil sun. Majestic chickens strutting in the courtyard of a mansion in Las Lomas de Chapultepec. A one-eyed Sinaloan landlord riding down from the mountains to make revolution with a retinue of dwarves, cranks, wild and beautiful women, and brave mountaineers. A sleeping toddler. A melting crystal ball with tentacles. Applause that curdles into something else. The gringos have found out who Bernardo really is, Talia tells me, and why he’s with you. Someone was tipped off by a Nexos agent. People are talking. Annetta was completely right about you, and now this is going to hurt my social standing as well. The visceral heat of mom finding your diary. They’ve become aware of their colonial position and your role in facilitating it. Caught with weed at customs. Ensnared in your own words. A theater of cartoon spider eyes. Fascinating Fascism. I’m not—How humiliating. This could be a diplomatic incident. He can’t be allowed to write the great NAFTA novel. This shouldn’t be so hard if you’re one of the good ones. Your hesitation says so much already. Bernardo draws in a deep breath and closes his eyes as the blade glides caressingly over his stomach. The knife rips him open. The squishy inside of a black fig. I devour him, a familiar taste. I notice Lizardi slipping out the back. The crowd relaxes. The devouring has proven my ethical distance for now. A few days later, an Instagram story from Miami. A ship, a tomb, an occult diagram, a handwritten dedication in a book: “Para el Sr. Lizardi, con todo el afecto y respeto. Fraternalmente.”