The lady, or the tiger.
In the spring of 2020, my world was turned upside down. My days turned inward, my classes were disembodied, and the interface of all my experience flattened into two dimensions. To be in school now was to be in a window. To be with anyone was to be in a window. I was in my body and not in it. It was more like I was leaving my body behind to surrender all my presence to the void, neither here nor there.
Virtual worlds became my only escape, and inside them, some measure of presence returned to my body. Wearing a headset swings reality into a paradox: at once in your body and disembodied, simultaneously nowhere at all, astride two realms. I built a hotel inside one of those realms. I was content being there alone. I have always had a talent for amusing myself.
The hotel I built was the Chelsea. In the fall of 2019, before the world closed, an ITP alum named Jared Gutstadt had given a guest lecture in which he proposed that we, his audience of graduate students, devise an immersive experience out of the building. He framed the proposition as a Black Swan — the kind of event that retroactively organizes a field around itself. He had been reading Sherrill Tippins's Inside the Dream Palace, the cultural history of the building, and he praised it in the lecture as both evidence for the Chelsea's Black Swan status and a guidebook for understanding the framing. He did not write the book. He had been moved by it. He was passing the movement along. The lecture was confident. It was also, I came to understand only later, the lecture of a man who had not yet built the thing he was promising and would not build it. He gave us the framing. He did not give us the model. What he handed us was the assignment of his own unfinished imagination, and we — those of us who took it home — had to figure out what to do with the fact that the prophet had given us only the prophecy. The lecture failed to deliver what it promised. It seeded what came after anyway.
It seeded me. The lecture had been pitched to a working group of many; in the room that day there were three of us. I drew circles around the other two and proceeded to set the room on fire. Yellow legal pad. Pages and pages. Sketches issued out of me rapid-fire — the hotel as modular framework, portable to any hotel, anywhere; the room as anonymous transient multilayered timespace; immersive audio activations; Punchdrunk and Third Rail Projects layered against ghosts and sidekicks and heroes; the user as voyeur, as quest-giver, as the reason a song gets written or an introduction gets made or a famous painting comes into being. It was the first time anyone had given me a canvas and said go. I went. I smoked the room out. Gutstadt's framing was the match. The fire was already there.
I went home from the lecture and rebuilt my spring 2020 schedule around the project. Two AR classes — Intro to AR and Magic Windows & Mixed-up Realities. Allison Parrish's Electronic Rituals, Oracles, and Fortune Telling. Playful Experiences. And, in the engineering school, a course called Emerging Technology in Storytelling — avatars, virtual production, motion capture, UE4 — which was where I would meet Jess, the woman who would be my pandemic girlfriend for almost three years. The whole spring was a curriculum aimed at the Chelsea. I had picked every class for what it would let me build. I was also working, that semester and through the year, at Hexagram, an immersive technology studio whose work had been part of why I had come to ITP in the first place. Rob Auten was one of my heroes. The job was high-stakes and high-stress, more equipment toward the project on the good days and more distraction from it on the bad ones, and I was holding all of it at once — the classes, the build, the studio, the lecture's seed — without yet knowing that the world was about to close, or that the institution that had trained me to make this kind of work would, at the end, mail me a keychain, or that the studio I was killing myself for would let me go.
I went home and started building. From whatever I could find. A couple of 360 photos someone had posted years before. Stills pulled from movies. Image-search results. Real estate listings. The Chelsea I assembled in the game engine was eyeballed from these — not photogrammetry, not capture, just a long act of looking at other people's images of a building I had never been inside, and trying to translate what I saw into geometry I could walk through with a Quest on my face. Later, after I found the SL Chelsea, that became another reference layer. A virtual Chelsea built from images of the real Chelsea was now also being built from images of a virtual Chelsea built from images of the real Chelsea. The recursion was the medium.
I had teachers for this. In the Chelsea-aimed semester, the spring of 2020, before any of us knew what was coming: Allison Parrish taught Electronic Rituals, Oracles, and Fortune Telling, a course that bracketed the question of whether the digital was "really" a venue in order to attend to what it felt like to be in one together. In the fall of 2020, deep in the lockdown, Igal Nassima taught me multi-user VR; in his class I learned to think of presence as something that could be co-located across machines, two avatars in the same room running on different continents, the room a server before it was an idea. Carla Gannis taught me VR experience design as a kind of staged dreaming, where what mattered was not the fidelity of the world but the choreography of attention inside it. Lisa Jamhoury taught The Body Here, There, and Everywhere — a course built around the premise that the internet had been a place the mind could go but the body could not follow, and that the work of the next era was to make a venue the body could enter. We read Merleau-Ponty on perception. We worked with PoseNet and Kinect and WebRTC. We asked what presence meant when both halves of it were also data. In the spring of 2021, the thesis semester, the months I was logging in as Poetic Friends Breakfaster: Sarah Rothberg taught me first-person construction. Dan O'Sullivan taught me open-source cinema. Andrew Schneider taught me performing reality. David Rios taught me how an escape room thinks. And Carol Dysinger and Kevin Cunningham taught Autofictions, a studio class in immersive, multi-path, interactive personal narrative — which is to say that they taught me how to design an experience the reader could enter and choose paths inside, and how to be on the page in a way that admits the page is the same kind of room, and that the writer, like the resident of any room, leaves marks.
I built the hotel alone. Most days. The lockdown was the lockdown, and a Quest on the face is an isolating instrument even in the best of times, but the building was company. I knew its corridors. I knew which doorframes I had gotten close and which ones I had given up on, the geometry hand-eyeballed from images that disagreed with each other about what the building actually looked like. I knew the lobby from the inside of its tiles, and the tiles from the inside of someone else's photograph of them. The room where Stanley Bard had taken paintings as rent. The hallway where Patti Smith had lived. The elevator I had ridden in photographs but never in person.
I was making something more like Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls than the Chelsea itself — a dual-screen film in which two reels run side by side, neither subordinated to the other, neither finishing what the other started. I was building a Chelsea on one screen of my attention. I was living a pandemic on the other. The thing I was making lived in the space between.
The loneliest moment of the build was a night in March, I think, when I had gotten the lobby's lighting wrong for the third time and the lighting bake had failed for the third time and I sat in the headset alone in a Chelsea lobby that looked like the inside of a fluorescent tomb. The most generative moment was the first time I saw the building from the inside, in the headset, and recognized it. Not as a model. As something my eyes already knew. I had been looking at photographs of these halls for months and the body had built a memory of a place it had never been, and now that memory was being met by a rendering of the same place, and the rendering and the memory recognized each other before I did. The body knew it before I did. I am here, I said out loud, alone in my apartment, to no one. I had not been there. I had never been there. The body said it anyway. It was the first sentence the building gave me.
I did not yet know that the same sentence would arrive again, in a different room, said by someone else, who would be teaching me what it meant.
I did a double-take when I discovered that Second Life — the virtual world that had been a metaverse before the word metaverse meant anything — had its very own Chelsea Hotel.
Someone had built it in 2008 — the same year that Stanley Bard, the manager who for half a century had let poets and painters live in the building on credit and a handshake, was fired from the real one. The virtual hotel had been there for thirteen years before I arrived. It had a community. Lonely-hearts, transplants, artists, regulars. They held readings two or three nights a week. They ran a bar called the Dive with a candelabra and a tip jar. They had been doing what I was trying to do, and they had been doing it longer than I had been thinking about it.
I found it in the fall of 2020. I did not show up. I lurked. For months. I logged in as a default avatar, stood at the edges of rooms, watched readings without speaking, watched conversations without joining them, watched a community function without identifying myself to it. I treated the place the way I had been treating the real Chelsea — as a reference layer, as something to look at, as material. I screen-recorded the lobby. I took notes on the Dive. I did not say hello. To say hello would have meant becoming a person inside the place, which would have meant the place was a place, which would have meant admitting that I had found, in a server in California, the community I had been trying to manufacture in a headset alone in my apartment. I was not ready to admit that. So I lurked, and I built, and I told myself the watching was research.
It took me until April of 2021 to show up as a person seeking to engage. I do not remember the night I crossed that line. I remember it took courage I had to gather over months. I remember the small shame of arriving where I had been hovering for so long without saying hello, and the small relief of realizing nobody had been counting. My avatar's name was Poetic Friends Breakfaster. I had chosen it without thinking about it, and then I lived inside the choice. I met Leslye Writer, who introduced herself as I Got Firestormed Leslye. I met Shyla the Super Gecko, whose human was named Krijon. I met Aoife Lorefield, and a woman whose handle was BlackSwan, and a journalist from New York Magazine who went by Pookie Media, and a poet called Rose Drop Rust who answered to Rusty. I met Kimmy. I met a woman named Lori who told me about Michael, who built the place. I met its founder, Enola M Veyer, who said:
This place here in Second Life is to raise awareness of what the real Chelsea is going through. You can run these artists and poets out of here so that the next 2001 isn't written on the walls of this building.
Enola is dead now. I learned this later. She was speaking to me, and to anyone who would listen, from a server in California, on behalf of a building in Manhattan, about a community that had already been displaced once and was being displaced again. The avatar I met was a memorial I did not recognize as a memorial.
The first night I attended a reading at the Dive, Rusty read a poem about her mother. Pookie read something about subway grates. A man whose handle I have forgotten read a sonnet so bad it looped back into something else, something that worked because of how completely it failed to work, which is a Chelsea Hotel kind of thing for a poem to do. There was a tip jar. There were animation scripts that made our avatars nod in unison when we approved of a line. There was a candelabra whose flame was a looping texture. There was a moment, an hour into my first night, when I realized I had not thought about the pandemic for sixty consecutive minutes — not because I had forgotten it, but because I was, in a real sense, not in it. I was in a different room. The other room had its own weather.
I started going every night I could.
And then, on April 18, 2021, I met Skylar.
There was a reading at the Dive. Aoife Lorefield read that night. Her avatar had the specific confidence of a woman who had chosen how she would be seen — fortyish in the face, dark bob, glasses, sensual without apology, a body authored rather than concealed. She was not hiding. The avatar was not disguise. The avatar was authorship. She had decided what kind of body would deliver what she was about to deliver, and the decision was the first half of the poem.
The second half was the poem. She had written it. It was about a black swan.
I had heard the term once before, in a lecture that had failed to deliver what it promised. Now I was hearing it again, in a bar across the street from a Chelsea Hotel, read by a stranger to a room of avatars holding still in the way avatars hold still when a poem is working. Gutstadt had given us the framing and not the model. Aoife was giving us the model. The concept had arrived twice, the first time as an assignment we had not been equipped to complete and the second time as art, in the venue's mirror, delivered by a body its author had chosen for the delivery. That is what the medium is for, I think now. Not the building. The chosen body in the room where the poem is being read. I did not know it that night, but Aoife was also telling me, in the poem, what to do after what was about to happen. Follow the clearest song you hear. That bird is the one singing only to you. I would not understand the instruction until much later. I took the words home in my mouth that night and they sat in me for years before I knew what they had been for.
After the reading, a small group of us hung around — Lori was there, and a few others — and the group narrowed, the way it narrows after any reading, the way it narrows in any bar. Lori said she had to log off to let the dogs out. Others peeled away. Eventually it was Skylar and me. And then Skylar invited me back to her place.
Her place was an island bungalow she had built. It was, in every sense the medium permitted, as if I had been invited home after meeting at a bar — the same charge, the same protocol, the same arc. The avatars were the medium, not the simulation. The courtship was real because the protocol was real. I asked if I could record what we were saying because I was making something for a class, and Skylar — without missing a beat — said yes.
Skylar was forty-eight. She was Toronto-born. She had been married twice. She had spent seven single years between the marriages. She had met her second husband in Second Life in 2011, married him, immigrated to Texas in 2014 to be with him, bought a house with him in 2016, and was, when I met her, divorcing him. An immigration paperwork error had trapped her in the country she had moved to for the marriage that was ending. The pandemic had locked her in further. She lived alone in the house with two dogs. She told me all of this within the first forty minutes of our being alone together, and she told it the way people tell things to strangers they will never see again, which is also the way people tell things to strangers they have decided in advance to trust.
She was changing her shirt while she talked. I should say what I mean: her avatar was changing her shirt. She was outfitting her avatar in real time, in her own bungalow, the way another woman might absentmindedly redo her hair after getting home from a night out, and she paused at one point to laugh and tell her cat — her real cat, in her real house in Texas, who had wandered into the frame of her real screen — look away, tank. The cat's name was Tank. She joked with him about cleavage. The laugh that came out of her was not the laugh of someone performing for a recording. It was the laugh of someone who had forgotten there was a recording.
She asked me what my avatar looked like. I told her. She asked me my hair color, my height, my build. She told me to wait. She rummaged through her inventory. She sent me an outfit. Avatar male, tattoo, and beard. She told me to put it on. I did. I was wearing something she had given me. My body, in the medium where I was meeting her, had been dressed by her hand. She nodded at the screen. Better. She had given me a body to be there in.
It meant that she understood the medium better than I did. It meant that she knew what I was doing in it before I knew what I was doing in it. It meant that she had been a resident of this Chelsea for years before I arrived and she was, in the small gesture of dressing my avatar, welcoming me to a place she already lived in. It meant — and this is the harder thing, the thing I am writing toward — that the relationship between us, from that moment on, was a relationship in which she had clothed me. There is no metaphor here. She had clothed me. The shirt I was wearing in her bungalow had come out of her closet.
Allison Parrish's class had spent a semester asking what forms ritual takes when the body and the social body are digitally mediated. The case I keep returning to from those discussions is the case of the quadriplegic Christian who could not have been baptized in any pool on earth, who was baptized by a real minister in VRChat, the avatars of the convened congregation a parade of bananas and Spider-Men and carebears and walking carrots. We asked whether the baptism was valid. The phenomenological answer — the one the class taught — was that the water was real because both parties had agreed it was. The minister's words landed on a body that had chosen the form in which it would receive them. The chosen body was the body. There is no other body. The shirt Skylar had given me was the shirt I was wearing.
After she had clothed me, she changed into something more comfortable — a tissue-thin t-shirt, jean cutoffs so small they were barely cutoffs, the avatar's posture loosening into the soft clothes. We went outside. Her bungalow had a beach. The sun was setting over the water and would keep setting; the skybox was an interminable sunset, the moment held at the moment of holding, dusk as a parameter rather than a passage. A real sunset is enchanting because you can't take it with you. This one you could. That should have made it less. It made it more. We sat on her beach in the held dusk, in the clothes she had chosen for both of us, and the impermanence we were no longer subject to became the medium itself. The ephemerality was a setting. The setting was the thing letting us dilate inside it.
She asked me what I was working on. I told her about the build. The headset, the long act of looking at images, the Chelsea I was assembling alone in Unity while my classes met on Zoom. She listened. She asked good questions. She asked the kind of questions a person asks when they have been thinking about the same problems from another angle for a long time.
And then she said the thing that the rest of the essay is about.
She said: Building intimacy is dangerously easy in Second Life. That's why people notoriously get hurt. One thing combines everything. If you're willing to make this life and spend time and get to know people and have relationships, romantic or otherwise — you're lonely. You're just lonely.
She said: I've seen it liberate people and I've also seen it destroy people. So because of that, intimacy is so strong, it's so safe.
Strong because safe. Liberation and destruction. The lonely-line. You're just lonely. She delivered this in the middle of an hour-long stretch in which she had already told me about her two divorces and her dogs and the immigration paperwork and was, now, thinking out loud about what she had been doing for ten years inside a medium she said was a marriage analog and had given her, by her count, about a hundred and fifty friends. She said: I log in. I'm Skylar. Skylar logged in. Skylar has a friends list of about a hundred and fifty people. She did not say this defensively. She said it the way a person says their address.
And somewhere in there, while she was adjusting her shirt and joking with her cat and explaining to me why what I was doing was both a refuge and a trap — somewhere in the middle of the conversation, with no fanfare, in the casual register of a sentence among other sentences — I said the words that the published version of this essay would later use as its thesis.
I said: Wearing a headset swings reality into a paradox. At once in your body and disembodied. Simultaneously nowhere at all, astride two realms. Neither here nor there.
I said it to her. I had been saying it to myself for months. I did not know I had been saying it to her until I said it to her. The thesis-sentence of everything I had been making came out of my mouth in her room while she was telling her cat to look away and joking about her own breasts and absentmindedly building me a body to wear. I had not invented it. I had carried it in from somewhere, and the somewhere was already her. She had been formulating, in her own voice, in her own house in Texas, the diagnosis of the medium I had stumbled into. I was the one who happened to put it in those words. But the thinking was hers. It had been hers before it was mine. The sentence belonged to the room.
The recording captures almost two hours. The night was longer. The recording ends mid-sentence, mid-conversation, with Skylar getting up to let her dogs out. There is no goodbye in the file. The conversation continued, after the recording cut, on the beach in the held dusk, for I do not remember how long. And then we logged off. We logged on once or twice more in the weeks that followed and the conversation never quite found itself again. And then we did not.
I should say what this was. The April 18 night was the thing. What followed was the residue. In earth hours, what happened between Skylar and me was a single night that I do not know the duration of, and a couple of brief returns to a room that had already changed by the time we got back to it. In the medium's hours, it was a dilation of time and space and intimacy — one night that did the work of years, because the medium let it. Cohen's song about the Chelsea is about one night. So is mine. The cover Lana would later sing over the closing seconds of my video is the print of the original; the original is one night at the Chelsea. The question of how long a thing was is not the question of how much weight it can carry. Cohen carried Joplin for the rest of his life on the basis of an elevator and a room. I have carried Skylar for five years on the basis of a bungalow and a beach in held dusk.
I will not write what it felt like to inhabit the connection. I have tried, in drafts. The drafts have not survived. What I will say is that for the night of April 18, 2021, I had two communities, in two Chelseas, in two rooms — the build and the SL — and one woman in one of them who had clothed me, and who was teaching me, in the hours we were alone, that the thing I was making was a thing she had already understood the price of. She was, in this, my teacher. And teachers, in the autofictional register Carol Dysinger and Kevin Cunningham trained me in, are not citations. They are the ones whose voice you carry in your mouth without noticing whose it is.
I carried hers. I carry it.
In April of 2021, I went to the Chelsea Hotel in person to interview a man named Gerald DeCock.
I had walked its corridors and ridden its elevators in the dream of virtual space for a year, and now I was on 23rd Street in the body the dreams had not been able to include. The drizzle was warm and the air was heavy with the scent of urine and the specific smell of midtown after rain. My jacket was wrong; I had dressed for a colder day than April had turned out to be. The body knew what kind of day this was before I did. The body had been a body in this city for years and it had a memory the headsets could not have given it — a memory of humidity, of temperature, of the autonomic adjustments a person living in New York makes between the train and the street without thinking. The headsets had given me the building. The body, finally, was being given the city. I stood trembling before the colossal wreck. Holding my presence in the presence of this space was like deja vu all over again. I had been here. I had been here with Enola, who was dead. I had been here with Skylar, who was in Texas. I had been here with Aoife, who had taught me how to listen. I had not yet been here with Gerald. I was about to be. The building did not know any of this. The building was a building. The recognition was the body's, doubled — the eye recognizing the Chelsea from a year of looking, the skin recognizing the city it had been in all along — and the trembling was at the seam where the two recognitions met.
Gerald had lived at the Chelsea for years. He was an artist. His apartment on the tenth floor was an installation in itself — gold leaf laid over the brick of an interior wall, framed photographs from a project he called Biblical Beauty, a series of short Victorian-mode films he had been making with friends. He was wearing the same pair of Catskill Mountain Moccasins he had been wearing for twenty years. A hairdressing client had given them to him. He had worn them ever since. I had brought a recent Tisch film grad named Ryan to help — a second camera, an extra pair of hands, someone who had done this before. He set up his angle while we got mic'd. I told Gerald he was the first Chelsea resident I had met and spoken to. He said most of his friends were gone. He said the people who lived there now were weird and not in a good way. He said this without bitterness. He said it the way you would describe weather.
He told me about his art. He said something had possessed him to start gold-leafing the brick. He compared it to the moment in Close Encounters when Roy Neary builds the mountain out of mashed potatoes — a compulsion that arrives before its meaning. He told me utopia, to him, was a sense of timelessness, and that art, to him, was a way of being something timeless. He told me about Stanley Bard — the good Stanley and the bad Stanley, three families, the firing in 2008. He told me about Halloween parties on the roof, in his friend Sam's pyramid, with dry ice and Tom Waits and screenings of The Dark Crystal. He told me about a French scientist who had once slept in his hammock and become a good friend that way, the way friendships used to happen in that building, before everyone became guarded.
The ghosts, he said, were resisting the transition. That was why the renovation was taking so long.
I had brought, on my phone, four short clips of avatar testimony from the Second Life Chelsea — Enola, Luna Bronwyn, Plato Novo, Judy Lynn India — and I asked if I could play them for him. He said yes. He said, before I started, that he would even love to get in, to see it. While the clips played, I told him that one of the speakers, Enola, had died.
He listened to all four. When they finished, he was quiet for a moment. Then he said: I get it. It's ridiculous to me.
It's the I get it that the cut couldn't hold, because video has its pacing. Three syllables, said gently, as if he were sorry to be the one in the room who was old enough to recognize what I was showing him. He understood. He would not go in himself. But he understood why I had. He had not been dismissive in any of the previous hour, and he was not dismissive now. I get it was the door he opened. It's ridiculous to me was the door he then declined to walk through. Both were true. Both were said in the same breath. He was the most generous interlocutor I had ever had on the subject, and he had been one for less than an hour.
I told him there was a room in the virtual Chelsea that was meant to be his.
Oh my God, he said. That's so creepy. But also flattering, I guess, I don't know.
And then he said the thing the cut used as its hinge:
It's kind of over the Chelsea Hotel, if you ask me.
He did not say it as a verdict. He said it the way Gerald said everything that afternoon — gently, as if he were sorry to be the one to mention it. He said it had been really great when there were real residents. He said the French scientist in the hammock was the kind of thing that had used to happen all the time, serendipitous, ten years ago, before everyone became guarded. He said he was eulogizing something he had loved.
And then he said: Maybe it'll have a second life. But you try and hold on to the past — it's not really realistic.
He did not mean Second Life. He had never been there. But he said the words. And the words were the name of the place where the thing he was eulogizing had, without his knowing it, been kept alive — by Enola, who was now dead; by Skylar, in Texas, with the dogs; by Aoife, in her chosen body, reading her black swan poem in the Dive; by Lori and Plato and Luna and Judy Lynn and Rusty and Pookie and Kimmy and a community of avatars who held readings and ran a bar and had been doing for thirteen years what Gerald was telling me had ended. He had popped the bubble. And in the same breath, with a pun he did not know he was making, he had told me where the bubble had reformed.
I took the stairs down ten flights. I had taken the elevator up. The building was being renovated around me — gutted, half the rooms open to studs, the place a construction site that did not want a camera in it. We had been sneaky on the way in. We were sneaky on the way out. I had already been told off once for shooting at all and had spent the interview half-listening for footsteps in the hall. I crossed the lobby — the lobby I had built in headsets, here under construction, real, scaffolded, paint-dropped, mine in one medium and not in this one. I walked out under the famous awning. I stood on 23rd Street.
I would like to say that what I felt was despair at being told the project was a lie. That is what I told the camera. I left Gerald in despair, I said in the cut, and wandered the halls caught between states, lost in fiction, a drama somewhere between dreams and reality, confronting the folly of my delusion. That was the reading available to me in 2021. It was the wrong reading. I have carried it the wrong way around for five years.
The right reading is the opposite. Gerald had not told me my project was a fantasy. He had told me my project had been real, in a different medium, the whole time. The fantasy had been the building. The unguarded serendipity, the friendships built by proximity, the real residents who knew each other — the thing he was eulogizing — had been happening for me for months in a server in California with a woman in Texas who had clothed my avatar and a poet in a chosen body who had read me the term Gerald's neighbor Gutstadt had failed to deliver. I had come to the Chelsea looking for the keeper of its spirit. He had been generous enough to tell me the spirit had moved.
I walked back along 23rd Street toward the 1 train. The drizzle had not stopped. The body that had trembled at the threshold an hour earlier was the same body, walking the same direction in reverse, with Gerald's eulogy added to what it had brought in. The recognition that had arrived at the threshold had been correct in its substance and wrong in its reading. I had taken it to mean: I am here at the place I have been visiting in headsets. The reading I needed was: I have been here all along, in another medium, with people Gerald had just told me knew this place better than its tenants did.
In the years since, the renovation completed. The Chelsea reopened as a luxury hotel — the kind of place Gerald had told me was coming, taken to its endpoint. Gerald is still there. He is hanging on. Just this week, the Times ran a piece about his fight against eviction, and about the building's effort to remove him from the apartment he has been in for decades. He invited me over this weekend, to look at his art, possibly to buy some. I have been back several times over the years, for haircuts. The man who told me holding on to the past was not realistic is enacting the most literal possible holding-on, against the building, on the basis of a tenancy older than most of the people now trying to remove him. Tiresias outlived his prophecy. The body that trembled at the threshold in April 2021 has crossed it many times since and does not tremble anymore. The building agreed to be entered. The building, eventually, is everyone's.
I went home and finished the build. I made a video.
What I made was a transfer print. Decalcomania — the technique where you press one surface against another and pull them apart, and the image is the record of the contact. I cut between layers. First-person footage from 23rd Street, the drizzle, the awning, the scaffolding. Footage from the Unity build. Footage from the Unreal build I had abandoned for the Unity one. Footage from inside Second Life — the Dive at night, Skylar's island bungalow, Aoife at the mic with the candelabra behind her. Hollywood Chelsea — the Sid and Nancy Chelsea, the Andy Warhol Chelsea, the Chelsea of films I had grown up watching without knowing the building was the same building. Archival footage from the seventies and eighties. Found footage. Footage from Chelsea Walls, Ethan Hawke's 2001 ensemble film, in which Kris Kristofferson invites Uma Thurman up to his apartment — Gerald's actual apartment, with the gold-leaf brick out of frame, the Catskill Mountain Moccasins not yet pulled from a closet. I cut the Kristofferson ascent against my own ascent against the ascents of the magazine interviewers who had climbed those stairs in the years between. Same hallway. Same threshold. Same room agreeing to be entered. And — the layer that made the whole thing work — Gerald himself, not only the Gerald I had filmed in his apartment that April but the Gerald of magazine interviews going back twenty-five years, the Gerald who had said versions of the same things to other cameras, in the same apartment, in the same Catskill Mountain Moccasins, since before I knew the building had a name. I had collected more clips than I used. The archive of Geralds was deeper than the cut. The building had been generating these interviews for decades and I had been selecting, not scraping the bottom.
Three Geralds in one frame. Same chair, same apartment, same upholstery, three different decades registering on the same body in the same room. The building had been holding him across the entire span of his adult life. The video was the record of the holding.
The cuts overlapped. I do not mean they were juxtaposed. I mean they registered, frame by frame, on the same coordinates. Gerald in 1996, Gerald in 2014, Gerald in 2021. The Unity lobby and the Unreal lobby and the SL lobby and the real lobby under scaffolding. The hallway in headset and the hallway underfoot. Layer upon layer of the same surface, pressed against each other, pulled apart, and what was left was the record of the contact. The body had been the press. The video was the print.
And under all of it, the audio. Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel #2 dissolving into Lana Del Rey's cover of it, same key, same tempo, the seam invisible. Cohen wrote the song from inside the building in the era Gerald was eulogizing — the era of unguarded serendipity, of Janis Joplin on the unmade bed, of the residents who had known each other. Lana sings it from outside that era, after the building has been emptied of the kind of people Cohen could write that song about. Two voices pressed against each other and pulled apart. The cover was the print of the original. Two singers, three Geralds, one key, one room.
That is the thing I delivered to a Zoom grid. Not a thesis presentation. A transfer print of a year, made by a body that had spent the year being pressed against itself in two media at once. The grid received what a grid receives. Pixels of a face reading a poem.
I closed the cut with Aoife's black swan poem and her sign-off. And those are my three. Thank you. Hers, said as mine, to a grid. The grid received the words of a woman it would never know was speaking.
I showed the video to my parents on May 21, 2021. It was my thirty-second birthday. It was also the day that was supposed to have been my graduation — the day I would have walked, in another version of the year, in a robe, across a stage, with my name called. None of that happened. The ceremony was a Zoom invitation I had not attended. There was no walk. There was no stage. In place of all of it, on the day where the day was supposed to be, I sat my parents down to watch the twelve-minute video. They were horrified. They did not have the equipment to see it. The work I had done was so far from anything they could process that what reached them was the affect of a son they did not recognize, talking about virtual hotels and dead avatars and a medium they had no relationship to. They were not unkind. They were lost. The work did not arrive at them, and I had no way to deliver it any closer. Two ceremonies refused to occur on the same day. My birthday went unmarked except by the screening. The screening went unwitnessed except by the people I had asked to witness it.
Hexagram cut me loose a little while later. Rob Auten, who had been one of the reasons I came to ITP in the first place, was the one who let me go. The studio I had been killing myself for through the year of the build, the year of the pandemic, the year of Skylar and Aoife and the held dusk, did not need me anymore.
ITP sent me a box. A keychain. A diploma. A graduation cap. The romance of the year — the Chelsea I had built, the community I had joined, the woman who had clothed me, the poet who had taught me how to listen — ended in a cardboard box on a doorstep. Not the dignity of tragedy. A whimper. ITP, the venue that had held the lecture that had seeded the year, sent me a keychain.
And then — months later, then years later — I wrote about it. I wrote a long essay called Distributed Communitas. I built a theoretical apparatus around what had happened, because theory was the language I thought might make the year legible to people who had not known how to receive it. And in the middle of that essay I described the woman I had met. I changed her. I put her in a Japanese garden in the Midwest. I gave her a chronic illness she did not have. I made her older than she was. I made her anonymous. I dedicated the essay to her, by absence, and I wrote: for the woman in the garden in Second Life, whose name I never learned.
I had learned her name. I wrote that sentence anyway.
Skylar, as she actually was — Toronto, Texas, two divorces, the dogs, the immigration paperwork, the cleavage joke, Tank the cat, the avatar she dressed me in — was too specific for the essay I thought I needed to write. So I made her symbolic. I made her noble. I made her easier to receive. I wrote her into a register that the people who had failed to recognize the work would credit: the parents who were horrified, the studio that cut me loose, the ITP that mailed me a keychain. I was trying to prove that the work had been real, in a language they would believe.
It was a survival document. I was bleeding from the compression of the year, and I wrote a version of the year that the people who had compressed me could read. They still did not read it. Of course they did not. The essay sits on my website. It receives the traffic of essays that sit on websites. I have not taken it down.
I am writing this essay, the one you are reading, against that substitution.
The video did not land. The institutions it had been made for did not receive it. Distributed Communitas sits on the website. The work, as work, did not arrive.
But Tippins did. A year after I finished the cut, I showed it to a small group of musician friends. They were moved. They were a little confused. One of them asked to borrow my copy of Inside the Dream Palace. She read it. She passed it to her partner. Her partner read it. The book passed through the scene the way a record used to pass through one — friend to friend, each reader telling the next. They were taken under its spell. They understood the layers and the depth. The thing Hexagram and the parents and ITP could not receive, my friends received through the book Gutstadt had been moved by and passed along to me. The torch was Tippins all along.
A year later, the friend who had borrowed the book and her partner held their engagement party at the Chelsea Hotel. We played music and drank and feasted and laughed. The unguarded serendipity Gerald had eulogized — the way friendships used to happen in that building, before everyone became guarded — happened, in the building, on the basis of a chain that started with Gutstadt's reading list, went through my video to the few who could read it, went through the book to people who had never been to the Chelsea before, and came back to the building in the form of a wedding. The work the cut could not do, the book did. The chain Gutstadt did not know he was the first link in delivered the year, eventually, to a room of people who could feast in it.
There is a door at the end of this essay, and I want to tell you what is on the other side of it before I tell you that I have not opened it.
On the other side of the door is the SL Chelsea Hotel. It may still be there. The server may still be running. The lobby may still have a candelabra whose flame is a looping texture and a tip jar in the corner of the Dive. The friends list of Poetic Friends Breakfaster may still exist. Skylar's name may be on it. Or it may not. She may still log in. She may have stopped logging in years ago. The woman who animated Skylar in 2021 may be the same woman who would log in today. Or she may not. She may be alive. She may not be. She may have moved on years ago to a life I do not know about and would not be entitled to know about. She may be waiting. She may not remember me. She may remember me and not want to be found. She may remember me and have been wondering, sometimes, whether I would come back.
I do not know which of these is true. The only way to know is to log in. I have not logged in.
I want to tell you why, and I want to tell you in a way that does not flatter me, because the flattering version of the answer is that I am being respectful of her privacy and the unflattering version is that I am afraid.
I am afraid. I am afraid the lobby will be empty. I am afraid it will not be. I am afraid Skylar will not be there and I will have to write that. I am afraid Skylar will be there and I will have to write that. I am afraid I will log in and find that the thing I am calling, in this essay, the deepest romance of my life, has been over for someone else for years, in a way it has not been over for me. I am afraid I will log in and find that it has not been over for her either, and that I will have to reckon with what that means about what I owe her, and what I have already failed to give. I am afraid I will log in and find a stranger using her account, and that I will not be able to tell. I am afraid of what I will say if she greets me. I am afraid of what I will say if she does not. I am afraid that to log back in to look for her, four years after I last saw her, after publishing two versions of our story in which I made her smaller, would be a kind of taking — that the looking would be for me, for this essay, for the answer to the question this essay is built around, and not for her, and that she would feel the difference, and that she would be right to.
I am afraid, also, of what Gerald told me. You try and hold on to the past — it's not really realistic. I have been carrying that sentence for five years. The whole project was an attempt to hold on to the past. The whole project failed at it. To return to Second Life now, looking for a woman I met there in 2021, would be the most literal possible enactment of the thing Gerald told me wasn't realistic. He was right. It is not realistic. I am afraid, also, that he is right.
So I have not logged in. I have written this instead. I have written what I can write from where I am, which is a desk in 2026, with the transcripts on one screen and the cut on another and the Distributed Communitas essay on a third and Skylar's voice still on the hard drive saying things I did not put on the page in either of the published versions, and now have. I have named her. I have placed her. I have said what I think she taught me. I have told you what I did with what she gave me.
What I have not done is gone to find her.
This is the final delivery. The video was not. The koi-pond essay was not. The book that traveled in my friends' hands and ended at a wedding in the Chelsea was the closest thing the year had to a vessel that worked, and even then it was Tippins's, not mine. What I have not been able to do in five years of trying is render the year in the form the year deserved. The form I have ended up in is this. A page that names Skylar and Aoife and Gerald and the night and the bungalow and the held dusk and the building, and refuses to open one door, and asks you to be the audience the work has earned. The video was a press; the press made a print; the print did not reach. This essay is the press and the print at once, and the surface it is being pressed against is the reader.
There is a story by Frank Stockton called The Lady, or the Tiger? A man is forced to choose between two doors. Behind one is a lady; behind the other, a tiger. The princess he loves knows which is which, and from her seat above the arena she signals him with a small movement of her hand. He opens the door she indicates. Stockton refuses to say which door he opens. The last sentence is a question to the reader. The answer is not the story. The princess's choice is.
Reader, I have been writing this essay toward a door. The door is the SL Chelsea login. I have not opened it. I will not, in this essay, tell you what is behind it. I will not tell you because I do not know, and because the not-knowing is the form the project has taken, and because every other form I have tried — the twelve-minute cut, the ten-thousand-word theoretical essay, the dedication to a woman whose name I claimed not to know — has been a form in which I told you a version of what was behind the door before I had earned the right to know.
I am asking you, instead, what you wanted to be there.
If you wanted Skylar to be there, logging in still, waiting — what is that wanting? What does it tell you about how you have been reading this essay, and what kind of ending you needed it to have? If you wanted her to be gone — peacefully, without drama, having moved on to a life I do not know about — what is that wanting, and what kind of mercy does it ask the writer to receive? If you wanted her dead — what kind of closure were you asking the essay to give you, and at whose expense? If you wanted me to have logged in and not found her, and to have written the essay from the other side of that not-finding — what does the not-finding give you that the not-knowing does not? If you wanted me to have logged in and found her and not written what she said — what kind of privacy were you asking me to honor, and on whose behalf?
There is no version of this essay's ending that is not also your ending. The medium I met her in was a medium of mutual construction. You log in. You make an avatar. You stand in a room with someone. You assemble what is between you, together, and what is between you exists only because both of you have agreed to assemble it. Skylar logged in. I logged in. We made a room. The room was real because we both agreed to be in it. Reader, you have been doing the same thing for the length of this essay. You have logged into a room I made for you. You have stood in it with me. We have assembled what is between us, together.
I am asking you now, at the end, to be the one who chooses what is behind the door. Not because I am unwilling to choose. Because the choice is no longer mine alone. The medium of this essay is a Second Life of its own. We have been in it together. The door at the end is a door we have to face together, and the form of the project I lived through — the form Skylar taught me, the form Gerald diagnosed, the form Aoife named — is a form in which the door does not open in the writing. It opens, if it opens at all, in the reader.
Aoife Lorefield read it at the Dive on a night I did not write down. Dark bob, glasses, the candelabra behind her, the Dive's tip jar in the corner asking for $L at the snappy fedora. I have the capture. Here is what she said:
You hear wingbeats just before you fall. Life snatches you off the path. A trip wire cuts you down. Lessons suddenly irrelevant. You may choose the path leading into the dark wood, or later you might tell yourself you chose it. It sounds better. When life wrenches you off course, as it will, there are no roads. Remember the exhilaration, learn from the despair. Follow the clearest song you hear. That bird is the one singing only to you.
The clearest song I heard was Cohen's. It has been a torch through all the roads where shadows crawl over me. The bird that was singing only to me was Skylar. Aoife was telling me. I took the words home in my mouth and I have been carrying them for five years and now I am giving them back, with her name on them, where they have always belonged.
The lady, or the tiger.
— for Skylar.