It's Never Just One Astronaut
Fiction as tourism, girl as hotel, and a lot of hyperlinks that I am really excited about
“Who am I?” the question which ruled the desperate kingdom of my early twenties, has since transmogrified into the question of “What am I?”
For quite some time, I had a particularly bad case of “identity dandruff,” and was shedding labels at a remarkable rate; no longer could I rightfully conceptualize myself as a college student, a Floridian, a part-time employee or even a writer. The spring of 2020, the spring of shadows, became the summer and then winter of shadows; in the dark I couldn’t see anything, especially not “what” I was.
Imagine my surprise when I found out I had become, of all things, a hotel. Of course, I moved to New Orleans to manage a hotel, a real one, with an ice machine and everything, but I mean to say that I became a hotel. Am one, currently. It wasn’t a bildungsroman anymore, honey. It was a buildingsroman. And I had guests.
Let’s call them underlings, the strange cast of beings who perambulate the lobby of my subconscious, wandering mostly, purchasing very little. I have been thinking more and more about my underlings, where they were born and under what circumstances, what secrets they might share with me, how easily they may be squashed or forgotten in the bureaucratic labyrinth of my adulthood. I have started to feel very tenderly towards them, have started to feed them small crumbs beneath the tablecloth at supper. This is more or less how it went down:
Last September, one single astronaut appeared in my head. She crashed somewhere along a forgotten and crumbling coastline, and, for a time, she survived off the land. Using the informational plaques about tide pools as a makeshift rosetta stone, she taught herself the local dialects. She became fluent in the language and in the customs of her new planet. She named herself Urchin.
And I’m like, okay. I can handle one astronaut.
Then the DJs arrived, refugees fleeing from a land to which they may never return. They brought backpacks full of USBs and drink vouchers belonging to extinct nightclubs. My heart hurts for them, but at least they have each other. (It turns out every DJ needs a DJ just like every therapist needs a therapist. This among the wisdoms they have taught me.)
There came the Boy in the Lionfish Costume. Who even knows what he has suffered.
And the Pumpkin Patch Keeper. All through November, she wanders the wastes in a dress she got off Depop, recording, for minimum wage, the final words of rotting pumpkins forsaken by the upper-middle class. She has seen a lot of darkness for one so young and is honestly not to be trusted.
And of course, there is the troll under the bridge, Swarovski. (I feel quite strongly that all women should have at least one troll inside of them for the same reason that all houses should have front doors: to vet what villagers be worthy of entry.)
It took me a long time to accept what was really at play here. Warming themselves around the crackling HD yule logs of my imagination, were characters. Characters! Living inside me while I lived inside the world. I mean...what the fuck?
The sort of work I had been fiddling with for years—ecopoetics and transcendentalism in the anthropocene—all of it had worked together to de-center the human and restore agency to an incredibly animate and intelligent planetary terroir. I didn’t care about people [respectfully] !!!!!!!! The poet in me blew her back out hunched over bugs and sprouts trying to annihilate her own humanity in order to better understand the diaphanous quality of the light & other enchanting nonsense.
I still do this. Only now I concede to the fact that character work cannot be exterminated. I need my hands and my eyes and my eardrums to tell my little stories. No one grows up to become an omniscient voiceover (putting a pin in this one for future workshopping tho!) And so all the underlings made themselves at home, ran up my private phone bill, telling me their stories, on and on. Even in my sleep.
This essay by Zadie Smith posits alllll the right things about fiction (if you’ve got a subscription handy). Behold: “The voices of characters joined the ranks of all the other voices inside me, serving to make the idea of my “own voice” indistinct. Or maybe it’s better to say: I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.”
There are a lot of blueprints for this sort of Jennifer’s Body Math Equation (diminutively referred to as possession). Is she still Jennifer, or a bloodthirsty demon riding the high life inside of a hollowed out Megan Fox? If the body’s cells replace themselves every 7-10 years, are you still even you, bro? If a body is severed from all of the stories it has to tell, what remains thereafter?
Obviously it’s the codependence that frightens me. If I am a hotel today, I run the risk of vacancy tomorrow. If I begin to identify as a Writer of Literary Fiction, I’d perpetually wind up at the mercy of whatever the characters choose to reveal. Visions of me stumbling blindly through the alleys of myself with a bendy straw in hand, trying to suck the stories out from hiding. Icky vibes!
On my lighter days, I feel a little like Julio Torres in his HBO comedy special “My Favorite Shapes.” I can only describe the hour-long foray as a surprising and tender attempt—not at magical realism—but magical tourism—wherein we the viewers get to meet and greet the little fictions that waltz across Torres’ interior landscape. On a conveyer belt.
It’s strange. Here they are, the characters, making little Ikea rooms out of my skeleton and yet I cannot say I know them at all. Their motivations are obscure, their trajectories winding and their desires unknown. I do not yet understand how to lift them up into the light.
The jury is out—and let me be honest—the jury is getting frozen margs and not coming back any time soon—on whether or not I think HBO Max’s Doom Patrol is a viable watch. BUT I was eating seaweed snacks in my jammies at 2am and then there was this moment from episode 2 that pretty much tore out my jugular.
Broken, sarcastic superheroes, unlikely team, yada yada. The crux of Crazy Jane’s schtick is that she’s dealing with 64 personalities that emerge at random from her subconscious, from a place she calls the Underground. She’s locked herself in a room and Brendan Fraser’s character is sitting outside the door, speaking his monologue very quietly, very delicately. He ends by saying, “I don’t want to cause you more pain. I’ll never know what kind of trauma makes a girl split herself apart so many times.”
Great characters, like great people, are often born of a wickedness equally proportional to the love that sees them through it—though this much was probably obvious in the context of the DC cinematic universe lol.
But still. In the quiet moments between the political, environmental and epidemiological cataclysms of these last most dreadful years, that’s when my characters, my little underlings first appeared to me. They showed up with nowhere else to go, and little by little, began to change one poet’s mind, maybe even the course of her narrative entire.
Who speaks through you? How would you ever know for sure that you’re not possessed? Don’t you think your body is vast enough to accommodate a few stowaways? Wouldn’t it be just a little less lonely?
Goodnight, my cherubs. And remember: listen closely.