Breathing Exercise

40 hen she began to have trouble breathing, Myriam tried to wait it out. She monitored the daily pollen count, bought a Neti pot, and tried not to think about the gallerists who no longer returned her calls. After an opening of her new work which had only three attendees—a pair of Danish tourists and a woman who wanted to know if the toilets were free—she went to a party in Poughkeepsie and received a crushing pep talk from a sculptor whose assistants were always under the age of twenty-three. You’re still young, he said, and all night people o≠ered similar condolences for her career. Later the host of the Breathing Exercise Raven Leilani fiction W BREATHING EXERCISE | 41 party corralled everyone into a room with an old tube TV. When he turned it on, she could hear the crackle of the cathode. He adjusted the antennas and said he was going to show them a documentary. It was about competitive tickling; as they watched, a hush settled over the room. A man looked into the camera and described being bound and tickled. They told me it was about endurance, he said; I was thirteen. It made Myriam uneasy, and she excused herself and took the earliest Metro North into the city that she could find. As soon as she got on the train, she put her head between her knees and tried to breathe. She called her mother, and they had a nice conversation until they came to the subject of her work. It had been eleven years since she’d left home, eight since she’d graduated from a mid-tier art school and made her name showing audiences how much abuse the human body could withstand. It isn’t sustainable , her mother said, and, technically, she was right. As Myriam was getting o≠ the train, the first email came. Hack bitch, it began, before segueing into a surprising deconstruction of one of her more recent shows—soft depictions of black women in ornate Victorian dress: horsehair crinoline, ivory boning, bantu knots. Subtler than her larger body of work, meaning it involved significantly less selfharm . Why not just kill yourself, the author wrote, after a long treatise about the Round Earth conspiracy. At home, she tried to open up her airways with peppermint oil and steam. She took a Xanax and walked around in circles with her arms above her head. A man was playing trumpet across the street, and she opened the window and asked him to stop. Not for the first time, her apartment felt as if it was too small. It was 545 hyper-utilized square feet, a one-bedroom in Bed-Stuy that she could a≠ord only because the closest subway station was five blocks away. She regretted going to the party, but invitations were not coming the way they had when she was twenty-five—when she fed yam and pig intestines through a cotton gin and could still be someone’s age-inappropriate girlfriend, when she rigged a voting machine to a hose and stood in a glass tank as patrons cast their votes, when the confluence of an unimpeachable pelvic floor and a strong debut 42 | RAVEN LEILANI made her into a wanton, Brooklyn-dwelling monster; those were the days. Days when her mother called and asked why she would do these things to herself in public for white people. Myriam didn’t have a good answer, only that there was something pure about force, about a fervent belief in her own body, which could be technically boiled down to such clichéd maxims as Mind over Matter and No Pain, No Gain. She found a place in her mind that was dark and cool and still, and then she opened a show at the Domino Sugar Factory and let herself be repeatedly pushed down a flight of stairs. Now she was twenty-nine, and her career was not going as planned. Myriam Says Relax, a show in which she sat for two hours with a lye relaxer in her hair, had not been received well. After an hour, the sodium hydroxide had begun to...