MANDY HARRIS WILLIAMS

Mandy Harris Williams is a multidisciplinary vocalization artist. Her work utilizes multimedia gestures to analyze and re-imagine desirability privilege as a real and mythological market and political force, Blackness, and its micro and macro structures.

Notes and Excerpts from a forthcoming novel set in Post Fascist America

By Mandy Harris Williams

I’ve spent a lot of time in my career using critical analysis to create solutions, and at this moment, I can’t help but feel like it won’t be the planning or argumentation that wins the day. Intellects and artists far more impressive than I have left us explicit instructions: we could lay them out, but it's the imagination that fails us. And perhaps not the destination, but the habitus, of moving on imagination rather than fear. For all of the rationale, this moment refuses to observe, I now know: this is a game of fantasy. The fantasy of who we are and who we will be is the most powerful force in the world. And so for the time being, I’m more inclined to communicate through these means. 

Here’s what you should know before you read this snapshot.  This is an excerpt from a story tentatively called “Our Attempts at Innocence”about a 43 year old artist living in artist housing in Los Angeles in a somewhat near Tongva land  future. In this first piece you’ll be meeting Yolanda. And Yolanda is one of our protagonist’s neighbors in a Co-Op called 2048-b in Northeast of Downtown Los Angeles and they’re in the early stages of  friendship as well, and this is a sort of date. 

———

It was only bothering AJ a little that Yolanda was late.  They were calculating the risk.  It was June––leisure quarter. The show would  start a bit behind the hour… Grace, period. In December, they had arrived 15 minutes late to a dance performance with not quite so much grace. Things were more tightly tuned in during the winters, and although this had been made explicit, had been decreed in the new Social Accords, they wondered if it had been that different from before. (Surely some gestures just got new names and in being named became formalized.) They suspected that there might be something about the darkness or lightness of a season, that made for natural reasons why grace periods might be extended during some times, but not others.  They had never thought to keep track the average grace period of the shows they’d been to before. They had no reliable data to answer their own questions with and in this way, in these times,  the past often seemed more uncertain than the future. Had it been this way or more like that? They felt pressed to parse through the minutiae, to keep little details straight, small memories of how it had felt before, and every iteration of telling the past was cause to brood. It had been about 2 minutes of brooding over such details, before they sighed in relief. We should be okay this time, they told themselves decisively. Yolanda could show up say, 5, 7, 8-ish minutes late, and they’d be okay, AJ thought, creening ever so slightly to themself as they considered modifications to pace and anxiety that this might engender.  They checked their watch. 2 minutes more and they’d send a hurry up message. 

They decided to revel in the short wait. Opened their mouth and stretched their jaw, tasting the smell of the blooming summer Jasmine stronger than before. It’d become stronger. They faced away from the early evening’s slow traffic to  stretch their neck, leaning their head to the side, releasing it and allowing it to swing to the other side before stretching there, enjoying the trickle down effects of the Social Accords, namely, this effect: that the SA’s seemingly brought about a great deal more public experience of ecstasy. But AJ was still self conscious sometimes.  They reached into their bag and pulled out an antique compact they felt proud to have collected, delighted in it’s impractical heft, molded  like a  (now faded) golden shell, a luxurious sort of camp. They pressed the lock, its top springing open, as they caught the top with their opposite  thumb and stood it up, they’d begun to peer deeply into their own eyes, when they heard “AGE!”Running feet,  “AJ --- heey sorry, I’m late. Argh,” Yolanda prostrated without breaking stride–– demonstrating their neurotic, chiding, inner monologue, all while half running towards AJ. 

AJ saved Yolanda the trouble. “It’s okay,” they said, palms pumping out in front of their ribs. The two met eyes for a moment, then hugged, AJ squeezing Yolanda’s ribs evenly for 2 seconds, pausing for 2, and then releasing just as evenly. They were each delighted in these mutual overtures. 

Yolanda and AJ met 2 years before in the city’s Resettling. It had been a year or so of distanced admiration at Co-Op meetings and other community events, before the two had a chance to connect more deeply out of happenstance, when AJ mistakenly received a batch  of Yolanda’s mail––they realized Yolanda’s box was just above theirs–– and took the opportunity to deliver it personally to Yolanda’s room, a large sunlit two level loft with no doors, filled with books and stacks of papers and other projects, from each of which, it seemed, Yolanda must have just walked away. They invited AJ inside and the two, sat facing one another on benches at a long table. AJ found Yolanda explicit in their first interactions,  almost curt, but somehow comforting. She asked a lot of hard and necessary questions up front. Some were full of rage, but substantial. Each one was uttered with an extremely even tone of voice, modulated by considered lilts and exaggerated words. They were aggressive, but not violently. More like an athlete. Swift, focused, goal-oriented, strategic.  AJ wasn’t completely at ease, but they felt safe. 

Tonight, of course, would carry no less level of safe scare. AJ broke the hug, holding Yolanda at a half arms distance, taking pains to re-examine their outfit. As usual, they looked like an icon. Flat leather slippers, with a simple hugging dress, ruched up in to butterfly hems, with an  asymmetrical cut at the bottom, and a mini Telfar bag. AJ would have never anticipated those proportions, they seemed fresh! “ Woooooow,” they crooned. 

Yolanda kidded back, pressing their lips and brows into a two parallel flat protruded disbelieving lines, and rolling their eyes. “COME ON!” They said, hooking AJ’s elbow before charging them to the edge of Downtown on a 15 minute walk that took them 12 minutes. They’d barely had time to catch up when they burst through the doors of the concert hall, but AJ felt unrushed.  There would be enough time. 

They walked in through the doors of the concert hall. AJ’s heels clacked, embarrassingly loud, so they squeezed all of the muscles from their pelvic floor, rolling all the way up their vertebrae to the back of their head, taking pressure off of their now louder steps on the marble of the reception area floor. The pair strode urgently towards the auditorium,  beckoned by warm lights and the smell of douglas fir pine, and orange oil. Everything smelled stronger now. The wood had been sanded down, re-contoured, instead of replaced as often and oiled more often in lieu of harsher cleaning products and waxed and cared for differently. Lubricated, coated, pine and orange, and AJ could smell that and all of the care, and AJ could smell the people, their greases, the sillage of hormones, hands all over everything. There was a richness,  a not unpleasant organic history you could inhale.  Yolanda quickly brandished a small tablet at the threshold, granting the two access to perfectly positioned (they all were) seats in the balcony.

AJ had once heard that the world was their oyster. That the world, was  a throbbing singular organ, a bottom feeding aphrodisiac with impenetrable armor, but at least it was theirs. Now their world smelled different and felt different too. A pulpier sort of fruit. The seeds solid but not like the shell. Meant to be exploded. Meant to be hard enough only to bring the information needed for the next generation, to bear. She found this world to be both immaculately structured, but watery in form. How had it been before? 

The lights began to dim. AJ and Yolanda grabbed for one another as they had done, rushing, before.