1

Miranda Swami — petulant, difficult, voice of her generation?, depends who you ask — is staring at her phone.

It’s almost eight, which means that the post is already up, which means that in a thousand bedrooms and the booths of a thousand restaurants, people of power and influence are cancelling their dinner plans, calling their friends, refreshing their timelines, putting on their Sunday best and all the makeup they can muster, retweeting and reposting and regramming the news that, Holy Shit, Gwami the Seer’s first show, long prophesied in various underground rumor mills, is happening, is actually happening, which means dropping everything, which means skipping this evening’s PT session, which means calling a Black Car and griping pointlessly about the surge pricing but nonetheless making the quickest trip possible to North Brooklyn, to what an untrained eye might believe is just another dilapidated warehouse amongst hundreds, but where, if the account is to be believed, Gwami the Seer will be showcasing works that will rival only Banksy in price and clout. Those in LA curse their dedication to the sun and warmth; in Miami they’re screaming at whoever charters their flights —“Well make the fucking thing fly faster, Gavin!”— and in New York City, The Big Apple, they commend themselves for settling in this incomparable hub of art and culture, for they know that there would be no other place in the world where Gwami the Seer, keeper of five-million followers and bonafide director of the culture, would choose to ascend to her perch atop the world.

And Miranda Swami, meanwhile, is an entire borough away, tapping her feet and hugging herself tight and thinking that she should’ve been across the harbor an hour-and-a-half ago. But when Judith LeMeur says she’s coming to check out your opening and maybe even write you up in ArtChicDeco, there’s just no even half-believable excuse for declining. You agree because who wouldn’t?

So, you stay and you wait and then your professor gets a text that she isn’t coming, and you say, “Wait what? Are you serious?”

And he says, “Yup, she just texted me. Apparently got caught somewhere uptown, won’t be able to make it in time. I’m sorry, Swami.”

“It’s fine. It’s totally fine, honestly, I don’t even care. This whole thing was a bust from the start.” 

“Well, it’s not, not a bust,” says Professor Gillibrand, all sharp elbows and shoulders and tweed. “At least they seem to be enjoying themselves.”

He’s pointing to the only other two people in the cavernous, lauded, and selectively bestowed Eldred L. Apple Exhibition Center: a couple hanging around by the door. Miranda didn’t see them come in, which is insane, because they’re obviously begging for attention with all that pastel, his huge gauges, her rhinestone-choked mini-skirt, and, of course, the Bananas. The Bananas like some skin disease tattooed onto their forearms; the Banana logos splattered like Pollack paint onto any empty patch of clothing: his backpack and her earrings and the pins snapped onto his vest. Her tawny hair dyed the color of bananas, his shoes and the seat of his jeans with banana patches ironed on. One of his eyebrows is dyed yellow. The intelligencia of yore wore top hats, frocks and boutonnieres, now they get some dipshit Brooklyn tattooist they read about in a magazine on their Xanax dealer’s coffee table to permanently etch a piece of fruit onto their necks. How could it possibly have gotten this far? How could so many people have given themselves over to it?

Breathe, Miranda, she thinks to herself. They’ll get what’s coming to them. Don’t let them get to you.

Miranda Swami breathes and looks around the mammoth room, given to only the most promising students in the department, and all of that is well and good and truly humbling, but it’s physically too large a space for the meager sixteen pieces that comprise her exhibit. Sixteen pieces that were the culmination of almost two years of ceaseless toil. So much time and intention went into every brush stroke, every bit of laid plaster in this room. If they’d seen all the crushed, disposed canvases, the tubes of biodynamic paint creased and leaky on the tarp in the corner of her room, well, maybe the department would have marketed this thing better. It’s a travesty that it’s this dead, that the only attendees were two girls taking Gillibrand’s extra credit bait and this couple with their fucking bananas.

The pieces themselves, however, (and this is Miranda not wanting to drum herself up too much) are rev-o-lue-shun-air-ee. Gillibrand told her they’re like Picasso got a hold of a Magic-Eye book, so enjoy imagining that. A lifetime of theory and study went into the creation of this exhibit, and standing next to her Professor, her only measly champion, in a room of this size, makes her feel like she’s floating in space. She’d rather be floating in space.

Admittedly, she could have done herself more favors, played the politics game, been more forthcoming in class and friendlier with her classmates and not so damn condescending when they talked about their “uptown friend’s really very exclusive openings,” but it seemed better to hole herself up and commit to the actual work rather than skimping in that regard and making herself into, like, a totally loveable Mandy or a cool, edgy Miri, instead of remaining the private, unknown, aggressive Miranda she’s always been. And thus, an empty showroom, the result of all that isolation.

“Miranda.”

She has a name that sounds like a cartoon villain. Mer-an-duh. So many short, ugly syllables. Someone on a bus in grade school called her “Miran-duh” and it stuck. Such brilliance, such devotion to her craft, and still she struggles to attract ten people to her exhibition. All the while, people like the Twins are getting job offers and internship interviews left and right. It’s not fair, it’s not, it’s unjust, it’s…“

Swami.”

But if all goes as planned, it won’t be another week before the two are one, before Gwami’s reach and Miranda’s head can work in harmony, before an end to all the secrecy and pomp is —

“Swami!”

“Professor, I actually have to run, I’m late for a group meeting.

“Oh.”

So, the fidgeting Professor, who had just about worked up the unprofessional courage to ask his pupil for a drink, begrudgingly frees her from his presence, disappointed, and Miranda emerges into the night.

Night in the City is as bright as daytime anywhere else. Even the nascent fluorescent glow of the gallery couldn’t prepare her eyes for the staggering brightness of freshly-lit New York. The lights from the cars and billboards and phone screens conspire mid-air to create a hazy, half-daylight. But what was once so endearing, what was so fascinating — time’s inability to contain the city — now makes Miranda grumble. It’s been ruined, ruined by a yellow hue, ruined by the bananas.

Passing taxi cabs carry banana advertisements on their craniums, and all the stores have bananas in their displays. Any restaurant with a pulse is yellow-lit and leaning into the trend, and the billboards are all gargantuan bananas spinning on a loop or otherwise just Big Banana’s logo plastered bigger than a jumbo jet for all to see. All those city-block-spanning video screens play different versions of the same ad: someone enjoying a banana, dancing with a banana, dressed like a banana, laughing with bananas, enjoying life better with the aid of a banana.

Big Banana, the billboards say in letters big enough to crush you, Go Bananas.

By tomorrow though, everything will be different, God willing. All this will lose its sheen. The masses will return to worshipping their televisions, their gods, their health insurance providers, though that may actually be worse. Well, at least it’ll be different.

Wanting to preserve a visual vestige of a soon-to-be-shattered world, Miranda asks her Uber driver — “Mubarak, right? Yeah, for Miranda.” — to take the 9A. She sheds her usual aversion to the bananaic sights that have, like some noxious wildfire, engulfed the lower City’s milieu and instead deigns to focus on it all, taking in a long, last look at the horrible thing she’s about to destroy.

A world gone bananas.

The very specific path Miranda has asked her driver to take runs through the southern edge of Manhattan Island, a set of formerly blasé blocks at the bottom base of big banking buildings that’s become, with Big Banana’s purchasing and repurposing of the Statler-Abramson Building, a banana-themed carnival ringing day and night. Within the expanse of five-ish square blocks, affectionately called The Big Banana Bash, or the Bash, all the storefronts are painted yellow, street vendors patrol the sidewalks looking for avaricious children, and the rich and famous enter into trendy clubs — Peel, Bunch, and Amarillo, a Latinx spot, just to name a few. The drunk hop from tiki bar to tiki bar, drinking fruity cocktails out of commemorative mugs, everyone hoping to catch a glimpse of one of Big Banana’s famous board members traipsing around the place, maybe even grabbing a drink themselves, as they’re rumored to do when feeling saucy. How much the company pays for all that real estate is unknown, but the figure is rumored to be in the low tens of billions. Is it worth it? Who’s to say? But the Bash attracts crowds in a way the other New York City landmarks now only dream of. The Met has had to increase their entrance admission. The Empire State Building is mulling an end to their observation deck viewings, citing the impractical cost of elevator maintenance.

“A lot of fun down here, ya?” the Driver asks, costing himself a star. Alas, it’s not his fault he’s fallen under the Big Banana spell. He’s not alone, that is. The American tendency towards entrancement preceded Big Banana’s charm, a charm the masses were wholly unprepared to resist. The populace was like some bookish, four-eyed high school boy struggling with acne, and Big Banana the buxom blonde from the cheer team waiting at his locker seeking a math tutor. There’s a certain, ahem, power dynamic at play in such a situation. 

The Big Banana spell…*Sigh*. Big Banana came along one day, a rather obscure agricultural company with an unruly mess of plantation sites in Guatemala and a killer name, and decided to adopt the Luxury Commodity Model — mimicking Gucci and Supreme and Moet & Chandon — applying it not to a product, but to the company itself. Their “brand” became their product. They weren’t selling bananas; they were selling themselves. And where those companies did everything in their power to make their products cool, figuring the company would follow suit, Big Banana reversed the paradigm. They made themselves cool; cosmically cool, gravitationally cool. And everything else followed.

First, they came for the influencers, the pop stars and the Instagram models and the reality TV moguls, the offspring of celebrities who controlled the culture. Sometime early this year, all at once it seemed, they were snapped coming out of clubs, arm in arm with their latest spouse, looking out over yellow aviators and from under hats with banana prints, their clothes run over with banana tessellations, Big Banana’s “Twin B’s” logo plastered everywhere. The designers at Gucci, Louis, Chanel were paid handsomely to collaborate with the agricultural anomaly. All those arbiters of cool, assuming  fads followed only their fat fingers, got played, were manipulated into doing Big Banana’s work for them. They didn’t just make Big Banana a household name, they made them a premium product. Why buy Chiquita when Big Banana was on the next shelf, and for such an attractive price? For anyone under the age of 40, the choice was easy. And what banana-buying business would stock their shelves with Dole when Big Banana shipments would literally produce lines out the door?

When was the last time you saw a line out the door at Shoprite?

A good source of potassium, colorful and possessing the capacity for risqué association, part of a nutritious breakfast and part of the trendsetter’s wardrobe, what couldn’t bananas do? Big Banana bought the rights to that Warhol painting, the Velvet Underground/Nico one, and proceeded to license it out to the free market. Ditto the Twin B’s. Soon, everyone had unrestricted access to two of the coolest, most-powerful logos in the world, so no wonder everyone began to co-opt it.

By then, the designers at Gucci, Louis, Chanel, if they wanted to sell anything at all, were forced to infuse Big Banana’s logo into their very business plans. That was the cost of doing business.

Now, if you want to dress in all-yellow, smell like bananas, see through yellow contact lenses and spend anywhere from 30-3000 dollars doing it, you can. The beauty of the 21st century, kids: everyone has a choice on how to be exactly the same.

Miranda couldn’t stand the fruit even before the brand. She found them patriarchal, phallic to the point of parody. Once they became commercialized, things soured even further. What’s cool about a corporation? Nothing. And besides, what they do is so obvious. They partake in much wrongdoing, but no sin is greater than that.

And also, for the record, Miranda is not, as Caleb claims, an iconoclast. She does not dislike Big Banana just because they’re popular. She’s liked plenty of popular things. Lady Gaga, for instance. Popular isn’t inherently bad, but there’s much bull-shit in the popular. Nobody had particularly strong feelings about bananas — what was it, three months? Six months? — however long ago it was when this thing started, so why would they now? Because, suddenly, they’re “cool.” Because the greatest marketing campaign in the history of marketing campaigns made them so; forget Apple, there’s a new fruit in town.

Nobody was ever going to see through a ruse it’s been so much dang fun to overlook. But it was all ever about profit, about control, about power. No corporation in the history of the world has ever had any other motive. To believe otherwise is ignorance, willful ignorance. Big Banana peddles in willful ignorance.

But that’s what tonight is all about. It’s about exposing the company for what they are: market manipulators, capitalistic blowhards who are only different from the rest because they don’t need a fifth-floor full of data scientists to know what their audiences want, because they have, get this, actual human intuition. It’s scary to see an intuitive corporation. Scarier still to see a cool corporation. It almost defies belief. It’s unnatural. Unholy.

Last week, Miranda saw a line of people 50-deep outside a Dean and Deluca somewhere downtown, all of them lining up because they’d heard the store was getting in a shipment of Big Banana bananas the next day. These fucking people lined up A DAY EARLY FOR BANANAS. ACTUAL BANANAS. LIKE THE FRUIT. Bananas that will taste the same, rot the same, look the same in a fruit bowl or still life as any other. Except they won’t. They’ll taste better, last longer, look better because they have to. Because everyone wants to believe they will.

What is one lonely little girl to do? What single person is strong enough to stand up to a force like that?

But Gwami the Seer is neither a girl nor a person. Gwami is like Big Banana; she’s an idea, a suggestion. That’s why people follow Gwami in the first place, because she’s a suggestion of cool, because she’s been accepted to be so. The staggering idea of Gwami is why so many people of power and influence are going to trek to some shoddy corner of North Brooklyn and stand in line to see her molt. They want to be a part of something grand and precedential and communal. Thus, it falls to Gwami to reverse all of this, to challenge the Goliath. So much power and possibility in her hands alone, Miranda practically faints from the nerves. Gwami the Succubus ready to siphon all the cool from the corpulent company into herself. They’ll write about this in history textbooks. They’ll write about it on Buzzfeed.

The backstreets of North Brooklyn, like the furthest reaches of the Siberian peninsula, are discouragingly depopulated. Thus, they’ve mostly avoided the skin disease of commissioned banana graffiti and yellow window-paint that has infected the rest of New York. This is the ur-Brooklyn, the last span of the old city. It’s been spared much condo development. The once disparate and desolate landscape of old warehouses and condemned buildings have only become, over the past 50-years of gentrification and coalescence, a slightly less seedy version of itself. There’s no reason for Big Banana to market here because, well, who would see it?

“Are we, erhm, going the right way, miss?” the Driver asks, and Miranda grunts an affirmation. He’ll know soon enough. In fact, he’ll know right about now, because the camera flashes from down the street confirm that, yes, there are people here! There is civilization even here!

“This is fine!” Miranda shouts.

Four-or-so blocks down the road, Miranda jumps out, gives the guy 10 dollars in cash to leave the way he came, and watches as her will be done.

Once he’s out of sight, leaving her in the dark, she opens her bag in the dark and cloaks herself. The human, Miranda Swami, vanishes under a scarf wound tight across her face and a turban pulled low over her eyebrows. Any suggestion of a specific human is soon hidden behind mottled, muffling cloth.

An initial fear of reveal, of celebrity worshippers gone mental, surrenders to general excitement as Miranda, feeling compelled to do so, approaches the line of fashionable people waiting outside the warehouse, passing them from a so-called safe distance. It’s not like she can ignore them, for its one thing to see your influence in a number on a screen, and another to see it in the caliber of celebrity that waits outside a warehouse for you. The line, at least before it snakes and vanishes around the corner, is all fashionistas and men in scarves, some movie actors, an acclaimed producer or two, lots and lots of models, eye-grabbing outfits on every body, phones in every hand. This is not a place for a smart, Giorgio Armani suit, but a place for that suit spray-painted purple, and eyebrows dyed to match. Miranda wonders if they dress like this, hold themselves like this, when they’re alone, when they’re running to the bodega for milk, when they’re coaxing their cats into the bath. Miranda wonders if they aren’t like her in a way, if they don’t also contain a second person within them, the one they must summon, the one who affects.

The first of many approaching news vans, however, means it’s time to go. The collective internet will most certainly rip through all of their videos, and if she’s in the background, or God-forbid interviewed, she runs the risk of some intrepid, snotnose prepubescent putting pieces together on 4chan. Before that can happen, Miranda retreats away from the line and the streetlights and heads towards a shadowy side-path she’s never before taken in the dark. Streetlights don’t even bother reaching over here, for whom would they be illuminating?

Miranda hates the dark and, more so, what it conceals — demons that await the tantrums of unruly children, and swamp things a-shambling, white men with torture toys. Her steps she makes tepid, her breath she controls as the light dims further. If those in line couldn’t see her as she stalked and watched, well, what can’t she see now? What stalks and watches her?

The lane soon obscures itself under deliberately untrimmed vegetation, leading only its most intrepid followers to a door carved into the side of the building. You’d have to know it was there, and though she does, she still must grope around for its exterior. Use of this entrance supposedly requires a secret knock, like this is a Yakuza meeting, but she lifted a key the last time she was here and simply won’t stand for any pomp she herself didn’t prescribe.

Just as she opens the door, both a wizard-sleeved arm and a rabid, rank voice reach out to accost her. “Jou’re late! Late! Late! Late! Get een here, good Gawd, come on!”

She told him she’d be late, but with some people, the rich especially, you know it goes in one ear and out the other unless it’s what they want to hear. His hand is strong and unmenacingly firm and smells like firewood as it pushes her down the hallways, this one unlit, same as the next, and finally to the brim of a door with her name on it. One of her names, that is: Gwami the Seer, in neon-red light on the door.

“You’re going to post dee sign, yes?” he asks, dementedly. Everything said in that horrible stray-cat voice sounds demented. He looks like his voice sounds, too, with the grey hair sticking out from his ears, the John Lennon shades, the lab-coat-looking thing he wears which, from afar, makes him appear a mad scientist, though from this close you can see its intricate threading of $10,000 Merino wool. His name is Zanzibar Al-Feifel, and he’s the money behind this whole shebang.

And he is not pleased.“Yeah, yeah, I’ll post it,” Miranda says, affecting her Gwami voice, a gruff, roguish grumble conceived concurrently with Gwami’s iconic look.

“Good, good,” Zanzibar replies, his brogue vaguely Middle-Eastern, maybe also semi-French, but put on, as if it’s a chore to bring his pitch to that place. “And late! Late! Too late. Jou said thirty minutes, thirty! Eet ees one hour! One hour!”

“I told you ‘late!’ You said ‘thirty minutes.’ Have you let anyone in?”

“No, no, they know they moost wait.” he says, shooing away her complaints. “We let them een soon, get them roaming. Your entrance, no vorries, same as always planned. Now, queeck, please prepare. Time, time is not wanting to slow for you now.” 

Even when Zanzibar leaves her alone in the dressing room, she can feel his stress seeping through her skin. It’s like an oil slick of anxiety absorbing up through the soles of her shoes.

Fortunately, Miranda has a knack for losing herself in her work, and before the night truly begins, there’s work to be done. All the tools are laid out as per her instructions: the wig and the paint and the hairspray, the cans and cans of hairspray. First is the paint, white as plaster, which when applied liberally to her face, affects not just its shade, but changes its entire shape, making her appear portly and rounded. It’s not easy to fake-out the cameras, cameras that come at all angles, so she scrubs it into all the folds, the glands, extra around the ears. When all is white, almost offensively so, she goes to work on the hair. The wig is a termite mound of black strands, and she attaches it to her scalp with a purple glue-stick. The hairspray helps her work the wig-strands up into two curling mounds on either side of her head, Maleficent-like mounds shaped like horns and finished with these golden bangles Mother brought back for her from some Marrakeshi bazaar years ago. They were tasteless but expensive, and Miranda was glad to give them a purpose.

The transformation leaves her part-dragon and part-witch, completely inhuman, but most importantly, completely un-Miranda. That’s the important part of this: she cannot appear herself. Gwami is Miranda only in the broadest sense of the word. In effect, they are separate people.

“Miranda Swami” lives in the East Village and rationalizes her decision to pursue a Graphic Design degree instead of Fine Arts as “practical,” though really it’s because Mother threatened to cut her off financially if she didn’t “get serious.” Miranda Swami has two roommates, The Twins, she essentially had to bribe into accepting her as their third, and a brother she doesn’t get along with. Miranda Swami has trouble remembering her mother’s birthday, but her mother has trouble remembering her’s, too. Miranda Swami is a physical entity who walks on pavement and paints on canvas, who sometimes stencils and splatters spray paint on bridge-sides and building corners, who likes getting her hands and smocks dirty.

“Gwami the Seer” exists only in the superposition. Gwami the Seer has no physical form beyond Miranda’s imitation of her. Gwami the Seer exists as a series of thoughts on the internet, as a set of high-profile pictures and portraits spray-painted and stenciled and splattered on bridge-sides and building corners, in posts and pictures and videos (@GwamitheSeer, like and subscribe, ya’ll!) fleshing out the mind and milieu of this fantastical being, one whose keen nose for bullshit and lovingly brutal sense of humor has kept her in the good graces of a far larger part of the internet than most can even wrap their heads around. Gwami the Seer is an idea and a collection of ideas. And Gwami the Seer is, if you please, really fucking famous.

And all they have in common is this: the same mind makes both of them tic.

The mind is an engine, and Miranda Swami’s engine powers two separate beings, connected only by a shared set of skills and experiences. The two cannot exist at the same time; that’s what nobody would ever understand about the whole get-up, that it isn’t a character Miranda is playing, but an entirely different being brought into this world.

And here she is, ladies and germs, the one you all came to see.

Whatever remains of Miranda Swami is left in a heap in the dressing room. What leaves and saunters down the hallway in a flowing black and purple robe bought at a discount Halloween store is Gwami — the woman of the hour — the Seer. And she passes Zanzibar, who nods at some security fellows, as she moves forward through a pair of double doors into her kingdom.

Her kingdom is a converted pediatrician’s office, empty except for a standing lamp and a small spotlight, a desktop computer on a folding table, and an uncomfortable baby-blue chair flecked with exposed rust, aka her throne.

In a darkened auditorium some 60-feet of plaster, rebar and dried rat carcasses away, influencers in all their various forms flock in finally from the line outside, looking for somewhere to put their tripod, looking for a bathroom, looking to get a quote from the gallery owner, but most of all, looking for Gwami.

They said she’d be here. She’s got to be here. She said.

The warehouse is so deliberately dark, however, that these phone-faced mostly-phonies can’t see the exhibits rising up like Sauron’s spires in the open parts of the room. They can’t see the exhibits, they can’t see the curtains covering them, they can’t see anything except other blue-tinged faces illuminated by their own screens. Soon, there’s a growing anxiety among the attendees: there should be more to post right?

They expected so much more to post…

Meanwhile, Gwami logs onto a secure channel on a rinky-dink computer too decrepit to be hacked, and waits to hear the gasps and screams from the other room.

A few moments pass. Two spotlights by the warehouse entrance shoot white light through the hundreds of shuffling ankles. Somewhere on the ceiling a projector yawns to life, coughing a fat blue square onto the wall between the spotlights. Three words in its center: dialing…dialing…dialing.

There are the requisite gasps and screams from the other room, and Gwami enters her communion.

A little, green light flashes awake on the upper rim of a computer 60-feet away. Gwami the Seer smiles, and the entire structure around her shakes with the thunderous screams of 300 people trying to make the most possible noise while keeping their camera arms steady. Unable to clap properly, they slam their open palms into their chests, like gorillas, like tribal warriors. To Gwami, watching them on a screen, they appear as nothing more than stomping white ankles and the suggestion of faces.

“Well, well, well, what a turnout on a Monday night, and on such short notice!”

The people whoop and holler, proud of themselves for having so stolidly braved the surge pricing. Gwami’s voice booms outward like the voice of God from two dozen speakers placed strategically throughout the room. She’s meant to sound like she’s coming less from one specific place, and more from everywhere at once, or like she’s coming from inside their own heads.

“You’ve all come here for a show, for a first glimpse of something that will have a lasting effect on the world you live in. And you all get to see it first. But first, I’d like to tell you a little story.

“Once, you all were the people who directed our culture. You decided what was cool, what people wanted to wear, where they wanted to go…who they wanted to be. You were idols in the most religious sense of the word, and you wore that crest with pride, with a certain responsibility.”

Someone in the crowd snickers loudly.

“But something has happened to you, something none of you could have foreseen because of how ridiculous it once seemed. A corporation, filled with number crunchers, made up of beings better than you at your own game, snuck into your beds while you were sleeping and left a mark on your necks. They manipulated you into doing their work for them, into working for them, without pay, without thanks, without compensation. They used you like ragdolls, and like ragdolls, you will all be tossed aside when you outlive your usefulness. And none of you can see it. You so love being used, being useful, that you’ve covered your eyes with rags.

“But that is what you’re here for today: to have the rags pulled off. I hereby name the perpetrators of these crimes, the crimes of mass manipulation, of misdirecting the culture, the culture you all worked so hard to forge.”

As she says each of the names, the names of each of Big Banana’s Board Members, a spotlight snaps awake from the ceiling, illuminating one of the curtain-clad spires below it.

“I give you, The Devil’s Row!”

A sign in red neon, bearing those words, alights over Gwami’s giant, disembodied, virtual head. “Adelaide Ansley, Dominic Lambrusco, Agatha Wolonsky, Jean-Paul Bundi, Derek Cassiopeia, MaryJane Kant, Fausto Gutierrez, Naomi Freeman-Rothschild, Cynthia Rodriguez, Arthur Haynes, Cassius Winston, Dolly Meyers, and…Cindi Lapenschtall.”

Then, when all have been named — with varying levels of dramatism — the lights come up on the whole room. The curtains all fall. Wooooooosh, they sigh, adopting the prone position. There are less camera flashes than one would expect. The initial opinion of the onlookers is that the exhibition seems curiously pointless, without teeth. A gaggle of PA’s run around to collect the tarps. You might note the continued lack of gasps or screams.

But they come, the gasps and screams and murmurs too, as people approach, get closer to the plastic, 3-D printed sculptures, and see what’s really going on here. This ain’t no weak-ass wax museum shit.

Once they get it, some of the less confident influencers shoot dirty looks over at Gwami’s giant, self-assured head, quiet and conspicuous and watching from the wall. Others, finely attuned to popular sentiment, scramble to hide their banana earrings and forearm tattoos in their pockets. Those with no panacea from the embarrassment, wear-ing banana-printed shirts and shoes and lip-piercings, feel their skin growing hot, the sweat pooling up and dripping through their prescription deodorant, and unflappable itches forming on their necks and cheeks and crotches. They aren’t used to such humiliation.

The pieces, by the way, are structured to maximize their viewer’s embarrassment. They’re finely-conceived traps. When seen from afar, they appear to be nothing more than incredibly lifelike and amiable statues of the thirteen members of Big Banana’s Board of Directors. You may call them the Board. Each of the sculptures (3-D-printed somewhere in Queens for a truly staggering amount of money, but, hey, that’s what Zanzibar al-Feifel can do for you when he smells dollar-signs) shows the target smiling, holding a notebook or a pen or something, standing at a podium maybe, looking like the best version of themselves, and all is well and good, except for if you look through any of the numerous slits cut into the sculpture’s person, slits just large enough perhaps for a phone camera to slip in.

Over there by the door is a piece in the likeness of Big Banana’s outspoken Head of Research and Development, Adelaide Ansley. Famously photogenic, she’s mid-laugh with her hands on her hips, back bent forward, whip-straight smile adorning the wood nymph face. Brown hair flowing, brown skin glistening, button nose all scrunched. She probably just finished telling a joke.

If you were to get close, however, and see through the small slits in her abdomen to her insides, you’d see that she’s an automaton, full of levers and pulleys controlled by miniature figures of South American dictators, fat-chinned army generals, and white men in suits; they make her move, lengthen her smile with puppeteer strings, hold up the very nose on her face. The gist, one might say, is that Adelaide Ansley is controlled by sinister interests, that her being is entirely un-hers, that she’s a congenial face for a whole lot of less than congenial folks.

Cameras start snapping.

Jean-Paul Bundi, the half-Italian, half-Tunisian CFO, is a grotesque gluttonous monstrosity when viewed from within. His real-life paunch is seen as endearing, sincere, but in his internal view, it’s got its own face, a ravenous maw sucking money, money, money, wallets and old ladies’ purses into a bottomless black pit. Miranda likes this one, but Zanzibar thought it was too on the nose, which, she knew, it was.

Though so much went into Big Banana’s rise, its Board of Directors were doubtless the most important part. The Board was the truly, truly impressive thing about Big Banana, the proof beyond all doubt that they were masters of the internet and masters of culture. They knew that whenever a new fad or business or individual moves from obscurity into the popular crosshairs, the investigative force of the internet, ravenous for scandal and outrage to feed on, will begin snuffing for wrongdoing, for dingy pasts, for crude comments and rank representations. And yet, car companies keep burying emissions loopholes as if nobody will find them. White, male CEO’s keep groping women, as if every single thing anyone does isn’t captured online and made viral. But Big Banana understood the game and the pitfalls of their contemporaries. They gave the internet something to consider first.

Every member of Big Banana’s 13-member Board of Directors is a Person of Color or identifies as female or is a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Some are all three. They’re all of them personable as hell and do the interview rounds like pros, each with incredible smiles and stories, speaking humbly about their struggles growing up with single or alcoholic parents, in destitution while their brothers and sisters sold drugs and served time, choosing to be the change they saw in the world, describing their ascendancy as a mark of upswinging society, something to be proud of, like they’re everyone’s children or something. To attack Big Banana, to assail the company, was to assail the very Board Members who led it, and thus the marginalized populations they represented.

They’re so wrapped up in the framework and decision-making of the company that it almost seems Big Banana is some child’s lemonade stand run out of a garage, where the product and the producers are really one entity, i.e. you’re paying for the kid’s smile, not necessarily the puckering juice. Or what about this: if your mother sold pies at the market, but used high-fructose corn syrup and aspartame when she made them, you’d still support her, right? I mean, she’s your mum! You’re not a complete asshole. Well, take that phenomenon and apply it to a grand scale. Big Banana, the genius laid bare.

The internet, of course, loved them from the first. Influencers and thinkpiecers lauded the company’s progressivism, vocally investing in their product and their bottom line. That alone could have catapulted them into any number of Forbes articles, but when combined with the insanely effective branding? An organic banana company with a sense of humor and a catchy name led by a highly-accomplished team of marginalized populations? The glass ceiling lay below them in shards. They were revolutionary.

But look closely at anything, and you’ll see its cracks. Miranda is a product of the internet, gets her kicks there, and she knows that beautiful images almost always belie terrible truths. All of these people rising up from complete obscurity at once to become heads of a multinational corporation…seems fishy, right? So, she did a little digging on the Board, this Board that is so lauded and respected and beloved, and, uhm yeah, these people certainly seemed to be involved in some shady shit. After reading in some hellishly progressive message board about Big Banana’s ruthless expansionary tactics in South America, the deals made with warlords and dictators and macho military men, hearing distasteful rumors you too can hear if you keep your head low-enough to the ground, Miranda became fully convinced these people were frauds, frauds with nice smiles and lovely things to say, frauds with hidden pasts they’d just love to make unjudgeable before anyone could begin mulling a trial.

And that was the inspiration for this whole exhibition: someone needed to say something about the Board because nobody was. People don’t listen to what they don’t want to hear. Although the truth is unguarded, is available to anyone interested, exposing oneself to such a thing kills the very fine dream, kills the buzz, forces a horrible hangover. The culture won’t destroy one of their own without good reason. Sometimes you need to strap the people down and cinch open their eyes to get them to see. Horrorshow.

Besides, compared with her schoolwork, this was a leisurely breeze. Zanzibar put up all the money, outsourced all the labor, and only the ideas and the sketching were left to Miranda. And the ideas — remember, we’re talking about political art — were, ahem, easy to come by. Corporate slime has a million faces all hanging up on the wall for your perusal; all you have to do is climb up, select the correct one, fit it, and forget it.

And in 48 hours, when the world is sufficiently drunk with anticipation for Gwami’s next move, when the interview offers have been crammed so tight into the mailbox it’s threatening to burst, Miranda will publicly shed both of her skins — the Madonna and the Whore — and reveal the single ego beneath the two of them. Tonight isn’t just about bringing down Big Banana, it’s about burning them and Gwami both to the ground and then rising up, a fresh-faced phoenix, from the ashes.

These are the melodramatic terms of our fair heroine.

How’s that for “getting serious,” Mom?It’s just a shame, and Miranda will always stand by this, that Cindi Lapenschtall, CEO, had to get mixed up in all this. A shame. Necessary, of course, but a real shame.

Regardless of the guests’ embarrassment and the guilt Miranda feels for slandering Cindi, a woman she admires and emulates, the show goes on more-or-less as planned. There are some smutty words thrown at the face-on-the-wall by angry, humiliated influencers who are soon carried out by security — great news for the next person waiting in line —, and all the hip journalists surround Gwami with their mailbag questions:

“How does this kind of success feel?” 

“What are you going to do next?”

“Can we talk about the outfit? I mean, what gives?” 

“Can’t you give us a little hint about your next project?”

“What’s your go-to brunch spot in Williamsburg?”

You can’t blame them for such weak questions, they’re out of their element: nobody has ever interviewed Gwami the Seer before. Each of these questions could make or break their “journalistic” careers. Let them flounder, the harmless buggers, they’re trying their best.

Most of the other goers, even those wrapped in banana gear, form small, introverted groups, comparing editing softwares, discussing what kind of filters will work best over this and what hashtags will  attract the widest audience, trying to diminish their embarrassment by pretending they can’t feel it. A futile kind of ignorance.

And Gwami’s face is laughing towards the crowd and lording over them and soon most of the goers have even forgotten what they’re wearing and where they are because they’re too busy laughing with the face and hanging on her words and just reveling in being one of the few special presences at this historic happening. A few lucky ones get invited at random to engage the great gaze in lively conversation. Gwami discusses elephant rearing, childbirth, the Dark Web (or what she knows of it), and Lewis Carrol. She’s the belle of her own ball. And then, as if the shadows of Blitz planes appear on the ground, all goes silent.

The silence starts over at the gallery entrance and spreads inwards. By the time it reaches Gwami, it’s afflicted the entire space, and even the camera flashes cease. Phones go down to hips; the incessant murmuring momentarily remains in mouths. All one hears are the galloping breaths and the soft heartbeats, the clip-clop of two high-heels oscillating on the tile. A tangled mess of black cloth is pulled along from the gallery entrance towards its center.

Leading the black frock is a figure creamy of skin and bouncy of hair. More beautiful in person than Miranda ever could have captured in plastic, Cindi Lapenschtall, standing a majestic 6’4 in her stilettos, strolls through the place, coolly unresponsive to the attention paid to her. No security surrounds her, but nobody’d dare approach anyways. The presence of one cultural goddess is enough to incite frenzy in a population of influencers, but two? You can see the overloading amygdale rebooting. Unsure of where to lend their attention, everyone remains motionless, silent, unthinking…husked.

Now, if you don’t know Ms. Cindi Lapenschtall, you just haven’t been paying attention. Big Banana CEO; Time Magazine’s Most Influential Person of the Year. Multi-millionaire distributor of grants, currier of bipartisan political favor, fighter for minority rights, for the rights of women, and most important of all, a Trans Woman of Color. It only takes half a brainstem to understand that Trans Women of Color are the most at-risk population in the world. 25% of all Trans people have attempted suicide, with a ridiculous 67% depression rate within the community, and that’s just the start. 47% of Trans people are sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, and for Trans Women of Color the numbers are even higher. 25% of Trans people are HIV positive, but that’s 56% for Trans Women of Color! 56%! And 67% of all murdered Trans People are People of Color. Ridiculous numbers, horrible numbers, medieval numbers. Humbling, damning, depressing numbers. And then onto the sordid scene steps Cindi Lapenschtall, with a mane of curly brown hair and skin the color of mocha almonds, rising high in the finance sector on the back of the genius investments she made with dough put away whilst working three jobs, one behind a bar, one behind a desk, one behind bullet-proof glass. Suddenly, she gets a position at Big Banana, is named Chief Executive Officer, and in the press release, they say she’s everything they ever wanted in a CEO, smart and charming, efficient and hard-working, a representation of all that’s good with America.

And they’re right.

More a master of marketing and public outreach than of corporate affairs, she’s always on TV, on podcasts, on radio shows and on CSPAN lobbying for the interests of the poor and disenfranchised, donating whole schoolhouses, paying for college tuitions, stopping at elementary and middle schools across the country to talk about what being Trans is like, what it means to be different and what it means to be accepted anyways. Any way you look at it, even through the angry, suspicious lens through which Miranda seems to look at everything, she’s a god-damned heroine. And she’s loved and lauded as such.

Miranda has always felt a kinship with the woman. There’s an authenticity in her that doesn’t exist behind the smiles of the other Board Members. Thus, Miranda wasn’t sure how to represent Cindi in this exhibit. There could be no takedown of the woman, nothing brutal like the others, yet she was still a key member of Big Banana’s Board and thus theoretically complicit in any of the evil the corporation carried out. So, Miranda, in the dark on Cindi’s true intentions, tried to reflect this in her piece.

So, if you look through the little slits in Cindi’s smiling figure over there, you won’t see a damn thing. Just darkness, emptiness, nothing. It’s supposed to reflect a certain unknown about her character, as well as act as a kind of exoneration for both the artist and the subject. For Cindi, it’s the artist acquiescing to her subject’s perfect superficial face, and for Gwami, it’s a bit of armor against accusations that she’s desperate to find fault.

Of course, Cindi’s presence wasn’t planned; she’s too big a fish for even Miranda to have attempted to hook, probably the most famous person in the world, give or take. And, you know, you generally don’t invite someone to their own funeral. Somewhere nearby, Zanzibar starts feeling faint.

All the while, Cindi, redefining elegance and panache with every step, takes sparing looks into some of the exhibits, probably not thrilled to see her closest coworkers painted so unflatteringly. It’s all a timing thing, this slow walk. She’d have to be an idiot not to know that time has slowed, waiting until she peers inside her own facsimile to regain normalcy. Content right now to meander around, however, she steps through groups of onlookers as if stepping around sidewalk vomit. But the exhibition is designed as a kind of whirlpool, or an apostrophe. Every onlooker eventually makes their way to the center, and so does Cindi Lapenschtall.

Slowing, Cindi takes more than a moment approaching her Doppel. The sculpture has her fist up in solidarity, in power, a smashing fist, the kind you don’t want pointed at you, that would destroy you not just with the bluntness of its knuckles but with the promise of force behind it. Cindi tilts her head, seeming to betray the slightest hint of a smile. As a peer-reviewed art critic herself, she might have feelings about the style and the shading. Then she peers through the slit in her torso, seeing within herself as Gwami sees her.

While there aren’t exactly tears in her eyes when she pulls back, there’s a certain shimmering wetness. Her face flashes pale white, and her mouth hangs open stupidly. Tightening her hold on the corners of her dress, she looks up at Gwami’s fat, projected face, their eyes meeting for the very first time. Even though satisfied time snaps back into itself, though the room explodes with phones flying upright and cameras flashing boom and bang hither and thither, though both the CEO and the Seer are swarmed by questions and screams and reporters and photographers and fans and fans and screaming, aching fans, they two are alone in a quiet little world.

In this personal universe, neither a word nor a thought is exchanged in their stare, no understanding nor desire. They are simply two people who’ve affected the other, both trying to accurately gauge the extent of that effect. Like a strong acid trip, the experience in hindsight will seem to have lasted days and minutes all at once. When this world melts, Cindi will have left what feels like a burning mark on the inside of Gwami’s skull. She’ll wonder if she left the same on Cindi’s.

Gathering herself with the same coolness with which she entered, Cindi Lapenschtall, flanked on both sides by a groping gaggle of less-influential influencers taking unauthorized pictures and holding out sharpies, exits the gallery. Her steps quick, her pace brusque. Some onlookers will say they knew what was to come when they saw her face, her famously deliberate face, normally drizzled in a smile or furrowed in thought, here completely devoid of control, all wriggling and wrinkling and twitching uncertainty.

Zanzibar, fearing a riot, turns off Gwami’s face and maximizes all the lights. Disappointed stragglers eventually limp out of the building, the show unceremoniously over, forced to sober up from a night of unmatchable excitement. And worst of all, the service in this part of Brooklyn is so bad that hardly anyone can post. Cars threaten to take over twelve minutes to arrive at the pickup point. A collective tantrum is thrown on the sidewalk outside. Someone named Jezebel tells her friend Arabella they’re “like, definitely going to get mugged out here.”A small miracle of foresight, camouflage, and cleverness allows Miranda to mostly evade Zanzibar’s spiraling anxiety —

(“But what if they speen thees? What if-vwee become untouchable? Thees pieces, very very expensive, what if-vweee don’t get thee money? Even close to eet?”

“Zanzibar, calm down. They’re Gwami pieces. What do you think is going to happen between then and now? It’ll be fine! Now please, let me change in peace.”)

— and get six or seven blocks away unseen, where she finally removes her scarf, her turban, her heavy jacket, and calls a car to take her home. She allows herself to become Miranda Swami again, leaving the cloaking paraphernalia in someone’s trash can. For the final time, perhaps, she lets Gwami the Seer dissipate into the ether, wholeheartedly believing she can be culled back from the nothingness whenever Miranda so chooses.

🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌

The car hits a bump in Dumbo and the crown of Miranda’s head hits the handlebar above the window.

What a night she’s had. Opening two galleries as two different artists, how many others can lay claim to an experience like that? If anyone remembers her, she hopes its as a pioneer in the field of identity, and how we all contain multitudes.

“Miss. Miss? We are here.”

Door shut. Steps climbed. Hallway windows gazed through longingly. Home. Rest, or the promise of it, at hand.

Katie and Kathy — The Twins — couldn’t be sitting any closer to the TV. Neither sees fit to greet Miranda when she walks in. Perhaps they’re concerned that sudden movements will disrupt the steaming bowl of soup on the table by their knees. One of their entertainment networks is doing an evening devoted to the Gwami opening, essentially an extended breaking news segment seeing as nobody knew about the event until three hours before its start.

“Miranda, did you see?” Kathy asks without turning. Kathy and Katie, Katie and Kathy, identical twins with identical minds. Identical voices, laughs, fluttering laughs and fluttering eyelashes. Katie and Kathy, underneath two queen’s nests of cropped blonde hair, live for this kind of coverage: the intrigue, the glamour, the shine. “Apparently even Kandy Wu couldn’t get in. Imagine that…Kandy Wu.”

“Is this the Gwami thing?” Miranda asks, stepping forward, putting her bag down. In the glint of the refrigerator, she sees there’s a smudge of white paint still on her cheek. She scrubs it off, silent as she can, with the back of her palm.

“Yeah, it looked insane.”

“Totally insane. Cindi Lapenschtall showed up,” Katie adds.

“So weird, right?” Kathy asks.

“So weird. I mean the whole thing was like maligning her,” Katie decides.

“Did a lot of people go?” Miranda asks, planning an exit from the conversation. 

“Like all of Soho.”

“Here, look,” Katie says, holding her phone up for Miranda to come inspect. It’s someone’s uploaded video of the line outside the warehouse, a much longer line than the one Miranda originally saw coming in, one riddled with celebrities shoving cameras out of their faces, with turtle-necks and circular glasses, writing in notebooks while women in banana-printed crop-tops look bored from behind their sunglasses and over their cigarettes.

“That’s wild,” Miranda says, pouting.

After a moment, Katie asks, “Oh shit, how was your show?” The Twins share a knowing but guiltless glance. They are not as sly about it as they think.

Miranda, confused at first, realizes they’re talking about her show, not Gwami’s. Fortunately, there’s a response prepared for this. “Yeah, you know, a quiet start. But good, really. Really, really good.”

All millennials know the importance of everything being “good.” There is no bad, there is no disappointing, there will be no tears nor angry rants about the pointlessness of it all. Everything is always “good,” in homeostasis, and no amount of failure must ever reach the ego. Want to satisfy your folks, impress your relatives, and shrug off the finance majors who pollute the downtown bars? Tell ‘em everything’s great, because they’ll surely be telling you the same thing. Don’t want to appear lesser. Don’t want to appear unsuccessful. Don’t want to appear unhappy.

The Twins shrug a response; is this agreement or dismissal? Miranda hasn’t the energy to figure it out. She traipses to her room without another word. Neither of her roommates seem to care.

Sleep comes aggressively. Being two people tires one out, and Miranda falls asleep without brushing her teeth, very un-Miranda, her eyes still darkened with eyeshadow.

In the black of first sleep, she dreams of drowning in a sea of bananas, the fruits taking on liquid form and melting into a goo, falling from the sky to overtake and crush her. She’s in some kind of lab beaker, or else some other receptacle with glass walls. Though she bangs on them with all her might, and though a large crowd of faceless observers sit in bleachers outside, popcorn and candy and big-ass sodas in hand, there is no spare invitation to salvation. The bananas fall from the sky and turn to goo and eventually swallow her whole. She begins drowning on their sweetness. This is not their intended use.

Then, sometime in the bleakest night, a blood-curdling scream explodes outward from the living room. Miranda, ready to leave her dream anyways, instead rockets up out of it, and then out from her room.“

Jesus Christ, what, what’s happening?!” she cries, heaving, panic having stolen her breath.

Katie has her face buried in the couch and appears to be sobbing. Kathy is pressed literally right up to the TV, and she’s pleading “no, no, no, no, no, no.”

Living in New York, one is always half-expecting the next great terrorist attack, so you can understand why Miranda’s heart slams against her chest, sensing present danger. The TV shows a black, moonless sky behind the zenith of a luxury apartment-building uptown. At the base of the image, the red flare of ambulance sirens make it appear as if the building is falling down into a fiery, hellish pit. But it’s not, Miranda is.

It’s not a terrorist attack, it’s somehow worse.

The chyron says it all. Big Banana CEO Dead by Apparent Suicide at Age 32. Big Banana CEO Dead by Apparent Suicide at Age 32.

“Cindi Lapenschtall dead by apparent suicide at age 32.”

The girls wail into pillows and into their fists.

Looking out the window, so many lights that should be off are turned on; so many people pace in front of their TVs. Miranda experiences vertigo. The whole world shifts on its axis. She falls against the refrigerator.

The TV says something about a note, or, rather, a post. Something about Gwami. Something about an opening. Miranda doesn’t hear any of it. There’s a screaming pain in her abdomen that drowns out all the noise and makes her vision go white. She doesn’t hear the TV, and she doesn’t hear the crack of her skull hitting the tile as she falls.

Ask any millennial about silence, and they’ll tell you that it’s weird. Really weird. There’s only one time any of her generation might actually expect silence: at the very end of the world.