X, p.12
X, page 12
To my left, the white noise machine was going. Above my head, the window gaped. I felt stiff and sore and a little constrained, like I was bundled in bubble wrap. My body was a long shape tucked under the blue comforter. I could move my arms just enough to raise it so I could see beneath.
I was naked. It was bad. Instead of taking away my tits, they had taken away my whole body and put me back in a different one, a kid’s body. They had given me the wrong surgery. I was back at the beginning and would have to repeat my childhood. I dropped the comforter.
I was in the body of the child I had once been, the child that had lived in this apartment and slept in this room when Mom wasn’t home. They were all in on it together, I realized: the hospital, the government, the social workers and psychologists who had reluctantly approved the surgery. And Mom, too. They had all conspired to put me back in here, back with this blue bed and black window and grey wall, where I would have to do the hellish thing all over again.
I woke up again, but now I was in a hospital bed in a room full of hospital beds. Whoever I was dating at the time—I can’t remember their name anymore—was standing beside me. They were reaching for my hand and speaking in a high, faraway voice, like they’d just sucked the helium out of a birthday balloon.
Then they were wheeling me out of the hospital. Now that weird voice was coming from behind me, bouncing back and forth like a metronome. Their long brown hair tickled my eyebrows when they leaned over me. Then they were helping me out of the passenger side of their Nissan and into our apartment, a completely different one from Mom’s. Our apartment was on the third floor, not the first; we went up the cold stairwell, their arm around my waist. And of course Mom wasn’t there, just as she hadn’t been in her bedroom when I woke up before. When my girlfriend opened the front door, a cat bounced down from the windowsill, yellow with early spring, and embroidered itself around their legs, in and out and around. No one else was there.
My girlfriend helped me into our room, and I laid down on my own bed, my hands resting on the bandages on my chest. I couldn’t believe it was flat, just like I had wanted for all those years.
It went so good, said my girlfriend. They were wearing a sundress. It’s finally all over.
But I didn’t feel good. My girlfriend brought me a cup with a metal straw, and as I drank the water, I listened to the noises inside me and outside me. Bubbling, breathing. A car honking, a siren, birds, kids on the tennis court across the street. The static of being alive.
Everything was as it should have been, but I couldn’t believe that my girlfriend was my girlfriend, or that I was where I was supposed to be. Was my chest flat because of the surgery or was it flat because I was a little girl again? It was true that I was an adult and that everything was different than I had dreamed, but it also wasn’t true, and I knew this because the ceiling in our apartment was the same one from Mom’s room.
Where’s Mom, I asked my girlfriend.
They frowned. You told me your mom was dead, they said.
####
For a few moments, I didn’t do anything. I just lay there, sensing things, only certain that I wasn’t dead because I was awake. My head felt like it was stretched tight over a drum. I could smell leather, poppers, mildew, rubbing alcohol. From where I was, lying down on the mattress, I could see that the table and the cart had been covered with their tarps, returned to their original lumpiness, and pushed back to their places along the wall. I shifted slightly, and my skin screamed. I froze again.
The light that had been reaching over the wall from the main area of the warehouse was now off, but I could still see with the glow of the Christmas lights. X’s laptop, duffel, and backpack were gone. X was gone, too.
Maybe I could catch her, I thought frantically, if I ran outside right now. Maybe I woke up because she had only just left, and something—the door closing, her keys jingling—had shaken me from sleep. Oh god, how could I possibly have fallen asleep?
Every movement burning, I got up and dressed as fast as I could. It wasn’t just my legs, stomach, and chest that hurt. My back did, too, and I wasn’t sure why. I was grateful there wasn’t a mirror in her room. I didn’t want to see any of it.
As I was shutting the door behind me, I heard footsteps. Someone was coming down the hallway, but the light was too dim for me to make out any details. I waved, but its pace didn’t change, the head stayed pointed forward. I stepped in front of it, and slowly, almost grudgingly, it cruised to a stop.
“Whose room is this?” I pointed at the door behind me.
Coke-bottle glasses rippled, St. Sebastian pendant gleamed. In their hand was a mason jar filled to the brim with something dark and viscous. Mouth slightly agape, as if they were shocked or still high from last night, the person just looked at me.
“Do you live here?” I asked.
Mason Jar rubbed the bridge of their nose. A green rattail snaked around their throat. They wore an unbuttoned aloha shirt, periwinkle blue with white palm trees, that was three sizes too big. Beneath it was a black T-shirt that said BE CRIME.
BE CRIME. Camille and the crowd and all the rest of it felt like it had been years ago.
“No,” Mason Jar said. “Volunteered for the show.”
“But you know the people who live here?”
Mason Jar just looked at me. How could they have volunteered for the show if they didn’t, the look suggested.
“Do you know X?” I asked.
“Ex?” Never had a single syllable been uttered so slowly.
“X! You know—” I began. But all I could think of to describe her was that she smelled like blood. “Tall. Uh . . . short hair. Buzz cut. They were working the show for a while.”
“Oh. X. Her.”
“Yes!” I cried. She was a her, then. Mason Jar’s chipped black fingernails disappeared against the blackness in the glass. Their green eyeshadow was smudged, but their eyebrows were too neat for that to have been an accident. “Where is she? Is she still here?”
Mason Jar shook their head. “She’s gone now.”
“Gone?” The hallway shrank like a hot coal.
“Yeah,” said Mason Jar. “Exporting. If they don’t find someone to replace her by next week, I get her room.”
“Exporting? Today?”
“No. Next month.”
The relief reminded me that it hurt to breathe. The fear of never seeing her again outweighed the question of whether I should go to urgent care.
“Where is she now?” I asked. “Is she still here?”
Mason Jar leaned forward and shoved the door to X’s room. It creaked open in that interminable way that shitty doors do. “Doesn’t look like it,” they said, peering into the fuzzy darkness. They were quiet for a moment. “Dibs on the mattress.”
I left the warehouse as I had entered it, though much more slowly this time. I trudged down the alley and heaved my body up and over the fence, the second leg dragging behind the first. It didn’t occur to me that I could have asked Mason Jar for an easier way out until I was on the other side.
I was too exhausted to care. Staring down at the rideshare app on my phone, I could already feel the sweet headache of an electronic air freshener clipped to the dashboard. I closed the app.
The longer I walked, the more I hurt. Bruises felt like they were spilling open, and every muscle ached, exhausted from flinching, clenching, tightening, brightening along my torso, through my back, between my thighs. The pain warmed as my muscles did, differentiating themselves from one another a little at a time. Soon I could identify where each pain came from, as might a studied butterfly its pins, were it alive to know. When I woke up on the mattress, my body had been a single slab of sensation. Now I could feel the length and breadth of bruises or cuts or whatever was happening on my shoulders, back, ass, thighs, legs. It made me think of a pencil sketch Petra put on the wall above our bed, of a naked woman tied to a stake surrounded by men with knives of every shape and size. The cursive script beneath her read: LA MORT PAR MILLE COUPURES.
I didn’t allow myself to think about what it would feel like to sit again, let alone lie down. For my skin to bend over the openings, against the bone, and over the ripples of inflammation
The stairs to Camille’s apartment took longer than they ever had before. I stopped to rest on the second landing. For the first time since I moved in, I was happy that my bed was only a few steps from the front door. Keys: dropped. Coat: dropped.
“You’re here,” said Camille. Still in her latex, she was at the stove, poking at something in a pot with a spatula. Her face was pretty and long-suffering, like Olivia de Havilland when she’s been done wrong by a weak-willed man.
“I’m here,” I agreed. I sat down and slumped backward, too tired to remove my shoes, or to care if she was mad that I disappeared without even a text.
“Where’d you end up last night?” Her voice didn’t sound curious. It didn’t sound like anything at all. Her eyes were red as lollipops.
“I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “What happened to you?”
She took the tongs off the magnetic strip on the wall and plunged them into the pot, withdrawing a girthy aubergine dildo. “Nothing of consequence,” she said. Boiling water dripped on the linoleum. Steam curled through her hair, misted the latex.
“Oh.” I slumped back onto the couch and closed my eyes.
####
The Hudson River looks like lava strewn with garbage. I wouldn’t have noticed, but a man slammed his shoulder into mine, spinning me around so I was suddenly face-to-face with New Jersey. I curled my fist, ready to crank and return it right into his fucking face, but when I spun back around, he was gone.
I turned, and turned, and turned again. Nobody around, except a guy pushing a shopping cart all the way on the other side of West Street. I pulled my baseball cap lower on my face, bumped up the audio on my murder podcast until my ears hurt, and kept going.
Instead of heading home after work, I took advantage of the weather and went on a long walk. It was warmer and wetter than it used to be at this time of year, but what else is new? Camille’s usually not home until late, so I spend a lot of time at her apartment alone. After living with Petra for a few years, I thought I would enjoy a little solitude, but I have to admit it got old fast. Sometimes, when I’m sitting there on the couch, I look up from my phone thinking I’ve heard something in the apartment, only to realize that all I’ve heard is silence. It wasn’t long before I started to catch myself waiting for Camille to get home. It was worse when the power was out, which of course only seemed to happen when I was alone.
It’s weird to miss someone. Camille is one of the few people I feel relaxed around. I never got there with Petra, and we lived together. Maybe we were close at the beginning, but it didn’t take long for us to start grating on each other. She wanted to get closer. I got jealous of my alone time.
The water keeps pace with my steps. I feel like getting in a fight. I wish that guy would come back and hit me again. I spin fast to see if anyone’s behind me, but no one is. Beach, bed, lungs.
“God,” says one of the podcast hosts. “Andrea Yates.”
“It’s just such a horrifying story,” says the other host.
“Truly horrifying. Five children. You know, the baby was only six months old.”
The sun is low, burns my eye. I click back through past relationships, Petra and all the ones before her. Which partner did I have comfortable silences with, if not with her?
X slinks into mind, and I am forced to consider her, as if she could even be included in this retrospective of lovers and playmates. I try to calculate the number of words exchanged between us. There couldn’t have been many. A couple hundred, maybe? Most of them were hers, anyway. Screams don’t count as speech. The podcast sounds tinny in my ear.
“That’s why it’s so tragic,” says the first host. “She thought she was saving her kids. Like what do we even do in that kind of scenario? How do we stop someone who wants to do something awful for what they are convinced is a good reason?”
“You always hurt the ones you love,” the other host replies. The reference is a deep cut for regular listeners. She’s quoting another serial killer, a Canadian who offed his wife and kids before scratching out the eyeballs in every family photo in their two-story, four-bedroom home. He said it to one of the cops who apprehended him. His affect was so strange, the cop reported later, he couldn’t tell if the killer was mocking him or being serious.
As the wind picks up, the streets empty. It’s a relief, and not just because I hate people. I’ve started seeing X. I mean, it’s not really her. But I still see her, or think I do—on my walks, during my commute, once when I went downstairs to the bodega for a midnight loosie.
The first time I thought I saw her, it was a few days after the warehouse. I only have a few white undershirts, and I was worried about staining them with blood and ooze, so I went to the pharmacy for some bandages. Fulton was crowded with rushhour foot traffic—moms with strollers and Dunkins, dads pooling to gossip outside the masjid—but I saw her, leaning against the brick of a corner building. When I rubbed my fists in my eyes like Ebenezer Scrooge and looked again, she had melted into the lens of the surveillance camera above her head. I could have sworn I saw her shoulders disappear into the crowd, but it turns out that everybody has a pair.
You would think that these visions would fade along with the bruises she left, and yet my head still whips around and my heart still grinds to a halt at each stark figure rounding a corner and every boot that shines in a headlight. All manner of gross things begin happening in my body and mind, though both know that my chances of seeing her again decrease with every passing day. The end of the month is only a few weeks off. Even with a generous, liberal interpretation of what Mason Jar told me, the very last day I could reasonably hope to see her is the thirty-first. And then what?
I look behind me. A black coat becomes a shadow. There’s a boot, but it’s canvas, not leather, and it’s abandoned, footless, by an overturned shopping cart. When the ghost of X ends up ghosting me, my unwanted hope squishes under its own weight, like the cherry of a cigarette put out before its time. But I still keep my eyes peeled. I still look.
I wish I’d never met her. I wish she didn’t exist. People who don’t exist can’t export, after all.
####
The Tuesday after I met X, I went to work, as usual. The train was late, as usual. As usual, there was a smear of human shit on the second flight of steps coming out from underground, and the same orange pile of fried rice on the pavement outside my office. The coffee from the break room was burnt, as usual. I was using a thumbnail to scratch something white and gluey off my shirt when I realized it was the same one I’d worn the Friday before, when I had met her. It was as if the intervening days hadn’t happened.
Work had slowed almost to a standstill. Instead of taking this as the gift it was, Aisha was all stressed out about productivity. Triskit bobbling like an infant in her arms and anxious wisps of hair clouding her ponytail, she went to talk to Forrest in his glass box of an office. I watched their lips move for like five minutes, Forrest looking resolutely at his monitor, before she came back.
“Will you hold him for a second?” Aisha asked, dropping Triskit in my lap. She was going up to Forrest’s supervisor on the next floor. Perhaps she knew what was going on.
Triskit and I stared at each other. This neck pillow with a face was what fifteen thousand years of domestication and a couple hundred of inbreeding had wrought. If Triskit could be descended from wolves, maybe there was hope for our human bodies in this hellscape yet. Maybe some hardy New Yorkers would survive long enough to evolve, to learn to thrive on their own piss. It would be Dune, but naturally, without those crazy suits. Or Sting.
“What an ugly little guy you are,” I whispered. Triskit wagged his Slim Jim tail. When I looked up, I caught my reflection looking back at me from the black computer screen. Bagged eyes. Hadn’t had a haircut in months. Underfed. I don’t think I’d ever looked worse in my life, and I couldn’t even see the carnage under my clothes. I laughed so hard Triskit flipped out of my lap and trundled under Aisha’s desk.
It wasn’t long before she was back. “They said they’re hard at work on it.” Aisha smiled as she reached for her ponytail, split it in two, peeled it apart to tighten it against her skull. “Something on the back end.”
She called for Triskit and picked him up, then settled into her chair to wait. If there was a god, Aisha would squeeze her hair so tight she’d pop an aneurysm, and we could all go home for the day. I checked the time. I was late for my hourly break.
The hallway was empty except for a woman walking a few yards ahead of me. I didn’t recognize her, so I figured she was from another office. Her pants were black and a little baggy, but I could tell she had an incredible ass. I followed her into the bathroom.
We peed for almost the same length of time. We washed our hands next to each other, but she finished first. She held the door open for me, smiling. Normally, I wouldn’t have given her a second thought, even with that ass, because most women are straight and who cares. But she was queer. I could tell.
Encountering another homo in the wild still feels like seeing a celebrity. They’re easy to spot when they look like me, but I can clock them even when they don’t. Femmes notice me (not because I’m gorgeous, although I am), and straight women don’t, unless they’re looking for something to fuck or fear. And even though I looked like hell warmed over, she saw me. I saw her right back. I wanted to see more.
