She regretted going to the party, but invitations were not coming the way they had when she was twenty-five-when she fed yam and pig intestines through a cotton gin and could still be someone’s age-inappropriate girlfriend, when she rigged a voting machine to a hose and stood in a glass tank as patrons cast their votes, when the confluence of an unimpeachable pelvic floor and a strong debut made her into a wanton, Brooklyn-dwelling monster those were the days. It was 545 hyper-utilized square feet, a one-bedroom in Bed-Stuy that she could afford only because the closest subway station was five blocks away. Not for the first time, her apartment felt as if it was too small.

A man was playing trumpet across the street, and she opened the window and asked him to stop. She took a Xanax and walked around in circles with her arms above her head. Why not just kill yourself, the author wrote, after a long treatise about the Round Earth conspiracy.Īt home, she tried to open up her airways with peppermint oil and steam. Subtler than her larger body of work, meaning it involved significantly less self-harm. Hack bitch, it began, before segueing into a surprising deconstruction of one of her more recent shows-soft depictions of black women in ornate Victorian dress: horsehair crinoline, ivory boning, bantu knots.

As Myriam was getting off the train, the first email came. It isn’t sustainable, her mother said, and, technically, she was right. It had been eleven years since she’d left home, eight since she’d graduated from a mid-tier art school and made her name showing audiences how much abuse the human body could withstand. She called her mother, and they had a nice conversation until they came to the subject of her work. It made Myriam uneasy, and she excused herself and took the earliest Metro North into the city that she could find.Īs soon as she got on the train, she put her head between her knees and tried to breathe. They told me it was about endurance, he said I was thirteen. A man looked into the camera and described being bound and tickled. It was about competitive tickling as they watched, a hush settled over the room. He adjusted the antennas and said he was going to show them a documentary. When he turned it on, she could hear the crackle of the cathode.

Later the host of the party corralled everyone into a room with an old tube TV. You’re still young, he said, and all night people offered similar condolences for her career. After an opening of her new work which had only three attendees-a pair of Danish tourists and a woman who wanted to know if the toilets were free-she went to a party in Poughkeepsie and received a crushing pep talk from a sculptor whose assistants were always under the age of twenty-three. She monitored the daily pollen count, bought a Neti pot, and tried not to think about the gallerists who no longer returned her calls. When she began to have trouble breathing, Myriam tried to wait it out.

Leilani raven