Summer in the city. Heavy rain abruptly interrupts the day. Clogged with bags of dog shit, sewers spew brown water. I scoop it up with my sandal, feeling the cold, wet urban touch on my foot. The metro is held at the platform for five or maybe twenty-five minutes, and the acrid scent of waiting spreads through the moist air. An old woman in front stares through me, resting her head on her arm as she grips the handrail. She has beautiful long nails on her left hand, while her right hand looks like it belongs to someone else entirely: the swollen, red fingers end in short, cracked nails, darkened by fungi.
In my headphones, Patti Smith reads an excerpt from her memoir: her little sister has been diagnosed with asthma, which means they will have to get rid of her dog, Bambi, who has little dots on her back like the deer from the cartoon. Heartbroken, Patti escapes to the field with Bambi and tells her everything, feeling that Bambi understands—she sees herself reflected in the dog's eyes. On the way back, the dog suddenly stops and looks at Patti. In that instant, Bambi is hit by a bus. Are dogs so tragic because they are external beings? I turn off the podcast, preferring to listen to the monotonous hum of the metro instead. The train remains still, with its doors open, growing rusty under the rain. The old woman is asleep.
The room is crowded, but not in a disturbing way. Everyone is sitting on the floor, listening to Chris Kraus read from her latest book, which hasn’t been published yet. She wears a light brown Brando hat that makes her look like a fictional character. Many elderly countercultural figures are like this. The last time I saw Genesis P-Orridge, they wore a yellow tunic with tropical flowers and birds on it. A small wooden doll on the table next to them wore a matching outfit—a personification of Lady Jaye, their beloved partner who passed away in 2007.
When I learned that P-Orridge was diagnosed with leukemia in 2018, I became obsessed with the idea of writing a story that would unite my best friend from school, who died of a heroin overdose, with P-Orridge, who would appear as a shapeshifting, translucent, non-binary pagan deity. I envisioned it as a play where the two of them would converse in a dark room about spirituality, drugs and gender identity, but instead of inventing the dialogue I wanted to reconstruct it from their own answers—which I planned to obtain from Genesis via email and from my deceased friend through a Ouija board. I found the contact of a New York gallery that was collaborating with P-Orridge at the time. They responded and asked me to send them questions, which I did. I never heard from them again. Genesis died in 2020, leaving Ouija as my only option.
The sound of Chris Kraus’s voice blends with the street noise drifting in from the open window, making it harder to follow the scattered narrative. But the atmosphere is apapachadora, and it smells like someone else’s mezcal that I accidentally spilled with a poorly timed movement of my hand. Chris Kraus doesn’t want to be Kathy Acker. The biography of Acker that Kraus wrote starts with death: people trying to scatter her ashes into the sea, only for the wind to blow them back, with someone suggesting it was because Acker was afraid of drowning when she was alive. Many friends visited her at the hospital in Tijuana where she was admitted with late-stage cancer, as no hospital in the U.S. would accept her. I Love Dick was released around that time, and the book was lying on Acker’s nightstand when Dick from the novel came to visit her. Both Kraus and Acker are prime examples of life imitating art.
“I don’t want to be Chris Kraus!” I start the conversation. Chris Kraus looks at me with perplexity. “You know, like how you didn’t want to be Kathy Acker. I think it’s important to stick to your own identity, even if you feel like a bit of a failure.” I had caught her in the hall after the reading. I usually feel uncomfortable around people I admire, but Chris Kraus exudes an unbiased aura that makes me say things I wouldn’t normally say. Perhaps I shouldn’t have felt so at ease. Kraus points to her ear and replies, “I don’t hear well. Can you say that again?” But I can’t. Instead, I thank her for helping me embrace my cringiness. “Are you a writer?” she asks. “Kinda,” I reply. (Will I ever answer this question affirmatively without feeling like a fraud?) “What do you write about?” she asks. “Art…and also my animals.” “What kind of animals?” I like that she’s asking about animals rather than art. She says she has a dog too and shows me a picture of a chihuahua on her phone’s home screen. In return, I bring my phone to her face, showing her my home screen picture: my crippled dog, wearing a surgical cone and a plush rainbow hoodie that makes her look like a pothead.
Someone else wants to talk to Chris Kraus just as my friend, who has recently become obsessed with the traditionalist Eurasian philosophy of Alexander Dugin, arrives. He asks if I’ve read The Great Awakening vs The Great Reset. I haven’t. He explains the main concepts of the book, which bear an uncanny resemblance to the rhetoric of Russian state propaganda that I frequently heard from the always-on TV when I lived with my parents and that was aggressively echoed by my father during our arguments over video call after I left the country. Hearing these opinions from a neo-liberally raised American is quite intriguing. I want him to continue, but I need to head home before the metro closes.
The street is dark and wet, and the air smells like fried plantains with lechera. It’s barely raining, but even if it was, it wouldn’t matter.