Immaculate Conception

by Ling Ling Huang

In our first class with Professor Thomasina, we were asked to introduce ourselves and name our current favorite artist. It was meant to be a fun icebreaker, but I watched as we went around the room and students, with a sheen of sweat, grappled for the most impressive obscure artist they could think of—all of whom were known or cliché, even to me. As soon as a name was said, everyone snapped their heads up and down compulsively as if to say, Yes, yes, I know that artist. I’m familiar with their work and, in fact, their entire oeuvre. It was the first day of four years of classes, and everyone wanted to prove they had nothing to learn.

When she passed me in the hallways, I had the urge to reach out and touch her. There was a surprising solidity to her slight figure, as if she created her own gravitational force. Anyone who got too close was in danger of falling into her orbit. Or maybe I was just so insecure that anyone with a strong sense of identity could destabilize me.

The internet stopped being a place to connect to others or to exchange knowledge, and became a way to perform belonging in the world you had inherited.

It never occurred to me to be competitive or even jealous of men. For a long time, I’d worried that it was internalized misogyny before I realized that the only artists I respected enough to envy were women.

This was the first lesson Mathilde taught me: artists create works of art; geniuses curate an emotional response.

Is there anyone who knows a young woman’s body better than her closest friends? By way of love or comparison or some combination of the two?

People are wrong about imitation, anyway. It isn’t flattery but an attempt at closeness.

Everything I’ve achieved has been from trying to keep up with her, and I only know who I am in relation to her. What do I do if she’s really gone? Will I also cease to exist?

I’d begun to nurse my envy like a spoiled pet, and even though I knew it was unreasonable, I started to resent Mathilde for leaving me behind.

Everyone in the world had become, in a sense, an artist, and thus no one was.

It seemed like the only power I had in the world was this: that I could withhold myself from someone who wanted to see me, even though I desperately wanted to see her, too.

Behind Mathilde, an afterthought. Something shimmering slightly out of frame. Raised and skewered. A tower? My body remembers the snaking circular structures before my mind does, before I remember those drawings I saw years ago. The words come to me last. This part of my life is just for me. Suddenly, I know where Mathilde is.

I often dream that I’m chasing my life, which is unraveling in front of me. I always wake before I can catch up to it.

What an unbelievable scam it is to get everything you’ve been told to want.

“But lineage is everything.” Mathilde shakes her head. “Maybe not. I’ve always specialized in impermanence, and it seems fate wants to keep it that way. It was arrogant of me to think I could make something that isn’t touched or disfigured by death.”

“I do kind of wonder,” she says. “What?” “Who I would be without trauma. How much of who I am is a reaction to my circumstances.” “We’re all reactions to our circumstances.”

“Does Logan know?” “He does not. And I can’t stress enough how important it is that he doesn’t find out. Imagine if you found that out about yourself.” He is silent for a moment. “You can’t, right? It’s an unimaginable thing. At best, it would cause confusion and pain. A lot of pain. Because remember, he is a real human being. His thoughts, his feelings, his love for you. All of that is real.” “At worst?” “Catastrophe.”

The grief, now shared, becomes almost joyous.

They can only see in two dimensions what I feel in three.

Heat radiates from our shared body and my consciousness understands this to be rage, even hatred. Eventually, the heat burns off, leaving agony and sorrow. Shame and self-hatred. I circle young Mathilde, wishing desperately to make her glow again, to bring back the joy I had seen. But there is nothing I can do. And while the narrowing had been a black time, responsible certainly for much of the trauma in Mathilde’s life, it was the loss of her faith, that vast gold-edged love, that was ultimately most damaging and painful, impossible to come back from.

She takes another shaky breath. “I’m starting to wonder if this is really what I want. It’s just so…unnatural.” “Well, I don’t know if the person who escaped to the desert to kill herself while making an incense cone out of her dead daughter’s body is the best judge of what ‘natural’ is.”

I don’t know which I want more: for fate to spare me or to strike me down.

I see friends on their way out of the city. Going to get lost in antique shops and oversized breweries. I’ve never felt more acutely that something is fundamentally wrong with me. Why have I never sought out their lives? Why does it take such extremes to fulfill me? I find myself missing my parents and wishing I had been able to accept the life they had offered me. Instead, I offered them mine, and lost them to it.

I sink to the ground after reading the review a few times. The familiar rush of shame and self-pity engulfs my body, but there’s something else, too. A wayward smear of pride for the friend who is still the best, and who can still surprise us all.

Her brain has accepted the device so fully, it has now become part of her.

Everyone is jealous, but they find a way through it. In the coming days and months, I realize how right Mathilde had been. I had placed her high, making myself necessarily low. To me, she was the moon, and I, the tide, alternately lapping at her bright milky feet and receding toward the dark shore.

I had believed a lie I told myself, which was that I have always been my best, my most fulfilled, when I was envious. Really, it was love that has always made me my best. It has been my love for her that has most fulfilled, most fed me. The SCAFFOLD, like everything new, promised I would know her completely, but to know is to cease wondering. If jealousy was like a well, I’d never reached the bottom, hadn’t realized the well was a tunnel to the mother of envy, which is awe. I would like to do everything over again. I have that thought a hundred times a day. This time, Mathilde, I would choose to never learn you.