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Juan Camilo Velásquez

Limelight

“Hi my little victors,” Victoria said to four thousand of her biggest fans. A white ring of fire burnt her pupils. “I’m going live because I cannot be bothered to upload a video to YouTube.”

That wasn’t true, Victoria was still banned from the platform.

“Today I want to talk about something important… God it’s so bright, what the hell!” she uttered, disgusted.

She reached behind her phone for her Adam Selman Lolita sunglasses. The ring light reflected even brighter on the black UV lenses.

She shuffled in her seat trying to find the best angle, but she realized it was a problem of camera blocking, she got up and dragged her Pierre Jeanneret chair a few inches back, the screeching sounds echoing across her palatial home. She gave her fans a full view of her outfit: a vintage black Chanel skirt safety pinned on her waist and a Vetements t-shirt she stole from Opening Ceremony a few years back but hadn’t worn because she had didn’t want to look like a “hypebeastette” – her words not mine.

“OMG! You look so cute!” replied MacaGirlie98 on the livestream.

“I’m gonna stop you right there…” Victoria leaned closer to properly read, “MacaGirlie98 because I know you are lying. Even the mirror called me a pig this morning.”

She waited for her viewers to reply to her self-hate with compliments, but they didn’t. Annoyed, she started playing with her platinum hair, turned her middle part to one side, then the other, only to end up doing a pouf hairstyle like when she was fifteen. She let it all fall down and played with her frizzy ends, twisted them into delicate curls like her mom did when she was six. She tried several other hair styles but she hated all. She threw her sunglasses on the floor and put her mane over her face.

“Yeah I am in a bad mood,” she laughed. “I got another light attack yesterday,” she continued speaking with one eye peeking through the curtain of hair. “The worst part is that I looked so hot, I had the skinniest day, no, you don’t understand, I literally only had one venti cold brew and some popcorn for dinn–” she stopped in her tracks, the mass of hair sat still for a few seconds.

“No, Stop. Stop! STOP!!” She screamed with the entire power of her diaphragm. “I already know what you’re gonna say ‘Oh Victoria’s anorexic! Oh, she’s such a bad role model! She’s so problematic! She’s a contrarian! She’s a bitch! BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!’”

Her guttural screams woke up her neighbours’ convalescing grandmother.

“Who cares? Get new words you tedious trolls!”

If Victoria’s attitude towards her fans seemed cruel, it’s because it was, but that was part of her charm. Sure, her viewers enjoyed her fashion commentary and handbag reviews, but her videos only went viral because schadenfreude sells. She made fun of everyone she deemed less cool, which was almost everyone, and stopped at nothing to humiliate her enemies’ tastes and sensibilities. Fans didn’t really care about what she said, they watched for the unbridled passion and creative disdain with which she said it.

Victoria let the silence regain some territory. The viewership began to dwindle. Wearily, she pulled her hair behind her right ear and massaged her temples with the tip of her slender fingers, the California sunlight gleamed on her gold bracelets which jingled melodically against each other. She pulled back the skin around her eyes and pouted for her audience, many of whom audibly gasped at the glamorous sight.

Like almost every other video, this livestream was filmed in Victoria’s kitchen, which was her headquarters and magnum opus, the peak of her creative vision. She was not a professional interior designer but she took pride in nothing as fiercely as she did in her purchasing skills, which she gave the name of “taste” or “vibes.” She displayed every detail she handpicked: the sleek cabinetry in Nimbus Cloud and Graphite Grey, which she paired with silver handles, the Bertazzoni oven in black, the light blue Le Creuset pots hanging off the rack, the oversized white marble island which could seat twelve, along with the matching floors and backsplash. Like most of its time, her home was built using an open concept blueprint to save on drywall costs, so the living room would often make an appearance in her videos, especially the white cloud couch, the Armani Casa coffee table and the 70-inch TV where she played the experimental films of John Candles on mute. The whole space was exceedingly bright with massive windows on every wall and a floor-to-ceiling glass door that led to the pool and the beach. Victoria always recorded facing West, towards the Pacific Ocean, so the sunset glow would kiss her skin.

But today, she raised her hand to cover the sun.

“What was I saying…” she scrambled her muddled brain for the train of thought she had prematurely disembarked. “Right, so the point is that, just as I was gonna start a livestream to say hi to you guys yesterday, it happened.” She turned her icy blue eyes straight into the camera.

“I saw the light... the motherfucking light aura… It had been a whole two weeks since I last saw it. I really thought I was moving forward, I thought I was finally healing but I- I-” she stuttered. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

“I give up.”

She lit a cigarette with her silver Zippo and read some of the replies on her livestream.

“Stop, please stop. I already see people in the comments telling me it’s just a migraine. Stop! STOP!!” She switched back to anger impressively fast. “The Sherlocks and Poirots in the chat have to leave, ok? Like, do you think I’m stupid?? I’ve been dealing with these light attacks for almost a year now and you think you’re the first person to think they might be migraines?? Like, do you hear how fucking stupid you sound? You’re embarrassing yourself. Stop! Stop! STOP! Log out, delete your account, throw your phone in a river, become Amish, just stop!” she said, angry but maniacally laughing.

She lit another cigarette.

“You guys love being so sanctimonious, God!” Victoria continued. “Of course, I’ve talked to dozens of doctors about it. They all swear it’s just migraines, they prescribed me all the Ergomar and Vicodin in the world but those pills don’t even work anymore…” She ashed her cigarette on her skirt.

“No offence to doctors but they are all useless charlatans. No, I mean it, what’s the point of a diagnosis without a cure? I don’t think they’re migraines because I never actually get headaches. It’s something more, like, metaphysical than that.”

She let out a big sigh. She squinted and used her right hand as a visor over her eyes.

“Anyways, I woke up feeling so hungover this morning! I ordered a bacon cheeseburger, two extra-large cheese pizza, a mint milkshake and four Diet Cokes. And for dessert I got a box of twelve donuts…” she listed every item with increasing speed, trying to push the calories out of her body.

Victoria disappeared from the frame for a few minutes and returned bearing a tray with some of the food she had just listed. She sat at her table eating, smoking and told her viewers about her fight with Jenny, a YouTuber who was famous for her elaborate makeup looks and over-the-top challenge videos, like the one where she tried to paint a mural in Downtown LA only using makeup products. The eyeshadows, blushes and other pigmented dusts wouldn’t stick to the wall, so the mural ended up a big beige mess of liquid foundation. Victoria was secretly ecstatic with the result of the challenge, in fact, she would’ve used her own oxygen to blow the makeup off that wall if it meant her friend would be humiliated in public. But, in fairness to Victoria, Jenny had recently slighted her in one of her videos, saying that, even though Victoria was fun to watch, she didn’t really have a talent, to which Victoria responded with a string of tweets, all of which are published in chronological order below:

“.@jennycallahan you are a fat piece of shit. the only reason you know how to contour is cus you were born with an egg for a face”

“I won’t name names but some people in the so-called beauty community are unqualified to be a part of it. They are only obsessed with beauty because they lack it.”

“I guess making teenagers look like 60-year-old divorcees is what passes for talent these days.”

“When you are as ugly as @jennycallahan everything you say comes from a place of ugliness. Every word you utter is stained with the mark of the devil. Ugliness signals an absence of God in one’s soul.”

Unfortunately for her enemies, and the world-at-large, Victoria did have one talent: an uncanny ability to rationalize her bitterness, envy, all-consuming insecurities and general misanthropy into idiosyncratic tirades, which garnered her a sizable audience. Edgelords, gays, communists, bimbos, activists looking for someone to cancel, social conservatives, and the clinically bored gathered to watch her complain once a week. Or at least they used to.

This was before the “light attacks” started, when Victoria’s career was blowing up. A year ago, The New Yorker published a profile that synthesized her rambling speeches and claimed she was performing a commentary on “American consumerism, the attention economies of late capitalism and the limits of the Dionysian.” Victoria was in on the joke, the writer claimed, and in a way, he was right. Victoria might not have actually understood anything the author wrote nor did she ever set out to do “performance art,” but she was certainly laughing all the way to the bank, earning seven figures for being herself. Victoria was just living her life in front of the camera, oblivious to certain codes of conduct of liberal media, which made her unique in a sea of passive sycophants, social climbers and homogenous careerists who repeated the same talking points over and over again. Maybe she wasn’t THE voice of her generation, but she was certainly the loudest voice of her generation – and that was enough. After the article, she went on a whirlwind of collaborations with some of the most famous YouTubers in Calabasas, special appearances in comedy shows, talk shows, podcasts, and even a contract for a reality show about her life. The sun had never shone brighter, but maybe she got a bit too close.

“It’s so fucking bright!” she screamed, before immediately regretting it.

“Ok, fuck I really need to stop screaming,” she whispered, “but you guys piss me off so much.”

She turned her phone around to show her viewers how she tried but failed to pull a velvet curtain. She grabbed a creaky art deco chair that wasn’t meant for sitting, let alone standing, and used it to pull the curtain from the railing. For every tug of the fabric, there was a precarious squeaking of the chair, but eventually Victoria managed to cover almost every corner of the window.

“Hmm” she stood looking at a conspicuously stubborn corner that refuse to be dimmed. “I need to find a way to cover that spot. I’ll be right back… talk amongst yourselves.”

She came back with a box of black garbage bags and scotch tape. She got on the chair and stood on her tiptoes, ripping off scotch tape with her teeth.

Victoria had developed a crippling photophobia that led her to live in the shadows. She rigorously avoided direct sunlight, as she believed it was the cause of her attacks, and she even stopped leaving her house except for emergency errands like filling her prescriptions and getting her Starbucks. Initially, she made an exception for recording videos, but as the attacks multiplied, Victoria ended up replacing the golden hour aesthetic that made her famous with the man-made LED and fluorescent lighting that every beauty guru used.

“So, yeah, I’m stuck at home. Again,” she said to her fans once she finished covering the door, in a tone as somber as the setting.

The room turned a hue of dark grey that looked more like a washed out black, coincidentally one of Victoria’s biggest sartorial pet peeves. It is impossible to quantify Victoria’s influence, in fact, the greatest minds of her generation were working hard to monetize this very question, but it was undeniable that there was a time when she inspired thousands of mini Victorias to wear only the crispest of blacks

She took a sip of her Diet Coke and shook the glass close to the mic so her fans could hear the ice clinking, a sonic trademark of hers.

“I was going through everyone’s stories and people seem to be having so much fun,” she gave the camera a sarcastic smile, the same she used for service workers. “There’s so much joy and love in the air...”

She took a sip of her Diet Coke.

“But honestly, who cares? That kind of performative happiness is corny and undignified, like, if I have to hear another adult scream ‘Yay!’ like a child, I will slap them across the face,” she said, sounding rather unconvinced.

“I’m not being miserable, shut up!” She said immediately after. But no one in the comments was calling her cruel, in fact, everyone egged her on as she fought the phantom of her haters.

“Slay yass mawma!” said patricktheestar.

“Beautiful girl, carry my seed” wrote trad_asuka.

“don’t let the haters get you down <3,” replied ashleybodan.

“Awww thank you guys.” Victoria responded.

She reached for another cigarette and reacted to the compliments with languid gestures and stylish poses. In the juxtaposition between the flame and the gloomy room, her glamorous persona emerged again. She appeared delicate, her movements balletic; not rehearsed but certainly assured, nonchalant. She blew out a wispy cloud of smoke that lingered in the air giving the livestream image a much-needed grainy look, as it was shot on film. She leaned back on her chair and stared into the distance, like she’d seen in fashion editorials. This was the Victoria that charmed the world with meme-able gesticulations and quotable rants. This was the Victoria who “reflected the country’s moral decline and metric-driven mania in the most delicious way,” according to prominent twitter philosopher Daumne.

But that Victoria was dead. She died when she got her first light attack on a beautiful August afternoon. On her way home from filming a fight for her reality show, she cruised victorious down the highway, feeling herself, figuratively and literally, as she masturbated while taking selfies on her phone. But, out of nowhere, a shapeless light appeared in the middle of the highway. She blinked a couple of times trying to make it disappear, but it lingered. She closed her eyes for a few seconds but the bizarre glimmer chased her everywhere, even behind her eyelids, and soon it was now clouding her vision so potently and expansively that she could not see what laid ahead. Petrified and perplexed, she exited the highway by miracle but as she was pulling into her home, the aura morphed into a vibrant snake, with raggedy edges and angular shapes, that slithered about and threatened to bite her in the face. She tried finding her home but the contours of reality escaped her and in the blink of an eye, her G-Wagon ran into a palm tree. Since then, Victoria suffered from these light episodes several times a week. She had tried everything to cure them: modern medicine, acupuncture, essential oils, meditation, temperance, tarot cards, electroshock, hypnosis, bloodletting and even prayer – but nothing worked.

She grabbed a slice of pizza, dipped it in ranch sauce and put it close to the camera for her fans to see the grease dripping off it. She took a sizable bite.

“I don’t know if I told you guys, but I’ve been working with an expert on Asemic writing,” she told her audience in the more esoteric cadence she had been developing recently.

“His name is Bruno and he specializes in art therapy. He tells me to draw the lights whenever I get attacks, but he says I have to just scribble them down as they come, I have to commit them to the page without thinking about what they mean or what they remind me of. Just the shapes.”

She grabbed another slice.

“Bruno says I have to try really hard to not associate the shapes with letters in the alphabet and I have to avoid forming words at all costs!” she said before quickly taking another bite.

“He says I have to stop thinking like a human... He’s very spiritual, but not religious, so I’m not sure what he means. I think he wants me to stop looking for messages in the lights because I told him about that medium who said the lights were being sent by my dad. He thinks she’s a crook,” she said with grease running down her chin.

“So, I have to draw the lights and make a little meaningless system out of them. It’s hard to explain... actually, let me show you.”

She ran to her bedroom and came back with a ream of papers.

“Look at these ones, you guys,” she said as she showed pages of stylish scribbles in black and blue pen. “Isn’t this such a cute vibe? Imagine this on a tracksuit kinda like Gwen Stefani in the early 2000s… so cute right? I was thinking they would go great with the snake earrings I’m designing...”

She showed her fans dozens of pages of sloping and slanting strokes, diaphanous yet precise, like the most exquisite cursive calligraphy you’ve seen but even better because they were unencumbered by the utilitarianism of the English language.

“So, these sketches are going to save my life,” she laughed. “Well, I don’t know… but it is kinda nice to draw these, it allows me to stop thinking, you know?” she said as she devoured her fries.

Victoria was not a mukbanger, she rarely even consumed solid foods on camera, so her most hardcore fans began to suspect something was amiss. But the attention of casual viewers started fading as her affect flattened, and a mass exodus took place as soon as Jenny started her makeup tutorial livestream.

Victoria took another bite of her pizza, pulling at the pizza without exhibiting much pleasure, love or even desire to eat.

“Bruno says the hardest part is quitting human thought. He says you can only really achieve that in death, but that you can definitely try in life, you just have to be disciplined in your asemic craft and open your heart.”

“so when are you gonna open your heart?” someone called fingersoup commented right away. It caught her eye.

“Excuse me?!” she exploded “Are you fucking kidding me? When am I going to open up? Bitch, I opened my home and my life to you motherfuckers. Is that not enough?”

Some viewers who were on their way out were momentarily retained.

“So, I guess the answer is never,” fingersoup wrote.

“you are so toxic and you won’t rest until everyone is as miserable as you. i have been a fan of you since day one but you’ve changed so much, you lost your charm. unfollowed,” wrote ashleybodan.

“You wouldn’t know charm if it fucked you in the mouth!!!!!!” Victoria yelled back.

She stood up and walked out of the room. The viewer count spiked momentarily as rumours spread online that Victoria was going on a rant against her fans, the only target left for her. But everyone was disappointed to see her come back wearing a white pillow case over her head and walking with her arms stretched forward, like a zombie.

“Look! I’m nobody! Are you happy now?” she asked. “No thoughts, no opinions, no desires. You guys can project whatever you want onto me!”

At first her viewers reacted with laughing emojis and some even called her an icon for coming out dressed like Casper, but after six minutes the joke had gotten old enough for everyone to realize it was never a joke.

“Go ahead! Say whatever you want about me!” Victoria screamed without a hint of sarcasm. An undeniably distraught tone had taken over her voice.

But nobody said anything about her because nobody cared. She sat in place for a few minutes waiting for a reply that never arrived, watching the viewer count plummet from behind the porous cotton fabric.

A profound silence filled the room, three more people left the livestream. She crawled through her memories trying find something provocative to say but much to her own surprise she was out of opinions.

“Ok, so I’m just gonna be honest for a second, don’t cancel me for it, but don’t you guys think it’s incredibly retarded that Jenny paints her eyebrows like a chola? And don’t get me started on that corny flat brim black hat of hers, she thinks she looks so edgy…”

In one sentence she had uttered a forbidden word, made racially insensitive remarks and insulted the fashion sense of every other woman in middle America: she was desperate for attention. But the hordes of cancellers that would’ve come with pitchforks a few months ago were busy doxing an influencer who tweeted that “young Musolini was kinda hot.”

She sat in silence with the remaining twenty-five viewers for almost ten minutes.

Twenty-one.

“Do you guys know when you’re falling asleep and you start seeing weird images? When you’re, like’, still awake and you start seeing rough sketches of the images you’ll see in your dreams?”

“What is she on?” lilacs4ever commented.

“You know, like, when you’re in bed trying to fall asleep there’s always a point in which you have to make a choice: you either hold onto the last shred of consciousness or you let go fully into the dreamscape in front of you,” she expounded quite seriously, one state of being she had not explored much in her YouTube career.

“She’s officially lost it,” said CarolineRamsey.

“Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that… I think I need to stop fighting the light attacks and instead follow them,” she said.

“Victoria, have you ever considered that maybe being on your cell phone all day is what’s triggering your attacks?” fingersoup replied after an awkward silence.

Trying to ignore the last comment, Victoria’s eyes turned to her lighter. She played with it between her fingers hoping the cold metal would erase her fingerprints. She opened it and stared at its flame, which burned vigorously and shone forcefully, unlike the ambient glow of her electronics, so diffuse and meek against a fire that threatened to harm her if she gave it a chance. These thoughts slowly formed in her mind, unasked, and instead of being able to dispel them, they lingered, in the foreground of her consciousness, in stranger and fuzzier array, as a realization brewed deep inside of her that impressed her but also calmed her: her life would never be the same. She would never be the Leo sun, Carrie Moon, Samantha Rising that shone brighter than every other girl in every room. In the flame, she saw that which she would never be again. Memories of warmer times unfurled in her brain, her palpitations thickened like military drums as she reminisced on the last time she felt on fire: it was at an award show for content creators where the women were willowy and the men were smarmy – the mark of a successful Hollywood soiree. Victoria sauntered on this cloud of recollections, looking back on old friends and a bypast life, trying to hold onto it one last time, but as her fingers caressed the open seams of the past, a light brought her back to the present.

A spine-breaking pang moved through her body. She shook her head in denial of what was to come and she reached over to light another cigarette. She kept staring at the flame trying to forget what was coming but eventually the effulgence of the glowing demon overtook her zeal. She looked sideways and saw the negative impression of the flame peacefully dissipating into the penumbra while that demonic glimmer she knew too well grew in size and intensity. She looked at her phone and desperately tried to read people’s replies but there was a blind spot in her sight. Her stomach dropped.

“It’s just the photo-bleaching of staring at the flame, it’s nothing,” she whispered very quietly.

But slowly, a swirling, pullulating kaleidoscope of light slowly formed in the corner of her eye. It danced in circles as if hypnotizing her and it worked because suddenly the world whirled in front of her. Viciously potent, the luminous figure dithered in her vision, spiralling into a mythical snake that vibrated with every beat of her heart.

She stood up and crossed her arms. The persistent ray of her ring light shone in the cavernous kitchen so that her fans could still see her silhouette. Silent, she paced back and forth, disappearing and appearing from frame. Her pace quickened, her body stiffened.

“I can’t believe this…” she whispered. Her words sounded surprisingly empty, their only attribute was their existence. She was resigned to the fact that she had to utter them.

The aura expanded and developed a violet streak on its edges. Victoria’s vision was so impaired at this point that she could no longer read her phone: words were missing letters and sentences were missing words, the zigzagging aura speared through entire chunks of meaning and it took her a double take to recognize the world. Her mouth tasted like acid and the right side of her face grew numb.

Out of nowhere, a volcano erupted in her skull. Never before had she felt hammers and chisels chipping away at the crevasses of her brain in such a vicious way. She became entirely motivated by an insatiable longing for something that cannot be described or denominated without resorting to the most fatal terms. She wanted to, in precise terms, put a power drill into her right temple and take out the entire neural network that was throbbing in her head. She craved nothing more than to rip her eyes out of their sockets with her silver Noritake teaspoons.

She threw her food on the floor and screamed. The neighbours screamed back at her. She pulled her hair and wiped the little makeup she had on with her bare hands. She ran around the house breaking vases, of which she had many, pouring dead flowers and dirty water that streamed all over her marble floors. She came back from her bedroom with two bottles of medicine which she emptied in her mouth so inconspicuously that none of her fans noticed it at the time.

The five viewers left sent her heart emojis. They couldn’t see it but their idol Victoria was currently witnessing the fabric of reality unravelling and revealing its primordial scaffolding; it looked like a vast black sky filled with incandescent fireworks. A ring light reproduced by meiosis and multiplied into a thousand circles in a profound black sea. Victoria floated in its waters, trying to connect the dots and see if they spelled out her name, but she stopped herself from clawing at meaning and instead continued swimming directly into the light. She dispelled her thoughts as she focused on the luminosity itself, in its most pure essence, meandering like a freshwater creek and asking Victoria to drown herself in it. She was so consumed by the light that it was no longer a discrete figure, it enveloped every inch of vision, of her consciousness and of her self, until they fused into one.

A notification popped on her phone. Her brain tickled her out of her dreams.

“Low Battery,” her phone said.

She levitated above herself and through the light blotches saw her pathetic figure: the shadow of someone who was once someone but who is now no one at all, scavenging for dopamine in the same mines that gave her black lung.

“Goodbye my little victors,” she said.

Victoria grabbed her phone and turned it around so it was facing the pool area. She cautiously opened the glass door, prepared for the enemy to burst forth, only to find that, at last, the sun was setting. No longer the bilious power that made her sick, it was a mellow companion, reassuring her with a velvety touch. The sky was tinted in cozy shades of purples and pinks, as if buckets of watercolours had spilled over the ether. She walked indolently into the swimming pool and waded in the water for a few minutes. She relaxed her body. The three viewers left commented on how easily she floated, as if she was just another drop of water in water.

A few minutes later the livestream went black. Her battery died.

Juan Velasquez is a Colombian/kind of Canadian writer living in Montréal, QC. His academic writing has appeared in Bright Lights Journal, NECSUS and Cleo Feminist Film Journal and his creative writing is forthcoming in carte blanche.

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