Hey, Necromancer!
On finding Leonora Carrington in her home in Mexico City and asking her to be a death guide.
What did we have on that day? We must have looked like maniacs. Striped long skirts and bracelets made from silver duct tape, dragging a leather suitcase that looked like the underbelly of a snake. We stood in front of a thick wooden door in the leafy Mexico City neighborhood of Roma, across from an enormous earthquake-collapsed building, overrun with cats and scorpions. I had come with two friends full of purpose—to make art, to find a death guide—and in the almost hallucinatory Mexican sun, we knocked on the door. After a good amount of time, the door swung open, and a moonfaced housekeeper named Yolanda told us in Spanish to come back in two days. Leonora, last of the living surrealists, wasn’t well.
Four years earlier and six weeks too soon, I’d given birth to a baby. You might say my death drive, as Freud calls it, had made itself known. The baby’s lungs weren’t working properly, so he was hooked up to an incubator, and I was told to go home without him. It was a full moon. There were no beds, they said. I remember lying in our bedroom with
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