Dead collections, p.19
Dead Collections, page 19
“I guess not.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I got to a place where I was living in the basement at NorCal Historic by not taking any risks, and I got to be with you by taking them, so I’m going to keep taking them. This isn’t going to be risky, just long and boring. I’ll split it up into three nights instead of two. I’ll park at the Walmarts where the RVs go.”
“Sol,” said Else, “I just worry about you. I want you to be safe.”
“I’ll be safe. I’m still a person who hates to not be safe.” I embraced them, and they pulled me close, tucked the top of my head under their chin like a violinist or a mother bird. I touched their jawline with my fingertips. “This is going to feel amazing if you try T.”
“Does the stubble get caught in people’s hair?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I still can’t grow a beard for one shit.”
“I think I’ll always be femme,” they said thoughtfully. I felt the sweet vibration of their voice moving through my skull. “That’s the funny part. I mean, not in dresses.”
“Maybe. You seem to like dresses.”
“Ah, no, I’ve just always looked hot in them, and I really just like it when people think I’m hot.” They withdrew from me and sat down inside the van’s back door. Today they had on a neutral sort of outfit, a black sweatshirt and black shorts made of the same material, and thick-soled Doc Martens, real shit-kickers. No makeup, and so I could see the beautiful velvet-gray that lines their eye sockets when they’re tired, that perfect line of delineation between the socket and the cheekbone. Getting older is the most goth thing of all. “I so appreciate that you don’t think this is weird, Sol.”
“What’s weird?”
“Standing here in this little outfit and saying I’m curious to try testosterone, actually. And I’ll probably get my nails done when I come out of the psychiatrist’s appointment.”
“It’s not weird to make your body yours,” I said. “It’s not weird to want a custom body. There are cis guys who are femme, and nobody ever tells ’em to just transition and be women, if they’re going to show that limp wrist.”
“How do I know it’s the right custom body?”
“You try some things, and if you don’t like them, you stop.”
“It’s such a terrible world,” they said, twisting around to put their feet up. “So terrible for so many people, but I don’t know why that means I can’t try to be the person I fantasized about being when I was twenty-two.”
“You never told me enough about that.”
“Someone glamorous,” they said, and their face lit up, a matte and diffuse light. “Someone science-fictional. Someone with a gender so advanced that nobody had even heard of it before. I don’t know how that turned into ‘witchy high femme.’ The law of entropy, probably.”
“And loneliness and eagerness to be loved,” I said. “I mean, I get it. We default to what people like. But, Else, you should leave ‘witchy high femmes’ to the witchy high femmes. You’re a hunk of a different matter.”
“Yeah? You can tell?”
“You should see your face,” I said. “You should see yourself talking about this. Use a mirror. You’re the one who still can.”
“Come up here,” said Else. “Come up and let me hold you, before you go.”
* * *
—
I suppose I’m an exorcist now. It doesn’t feel like that—it feels like I’m still an archivist—except I’m hardly making any money, just what other people slip me under the table. But it’s not that I really need money for anything but gas and a few clothes. I’m a trans man; I only shop at Uniqlo anyway, where the sleeves don’t go down to my fingertips.
It did work, what Alice and I did in City of Industry. And then other things worked: the thing I did in Stockton, and then the thing I did downtown at the MOMA. And from there, other things have continued to work. I can identify the problems in an archives—the collections that are still raw, still full of unrealized anger or lust or curiosity—from a visit, now, sometimes several visits, sometimes just the catalog. I seek out eidolism—the lights, the scents, the whole upside-down church-basement service, and also the sense of familiarity and safety that means I am unsafe and among strangers. When I arrive, these ghosts quicken. I felt them in a hospital archives that had a radium-water jar and a whole room devoted to children’s teeth. I felt them in the basement of a film vault under Berkeley, where hundred-year-old silver nitrate film is stored at forty degrees Fahrenheit to keep it from exploding. I even felt them in the little comics museum on the waterfront, a soft neutral space with no dangerous edges and a Starbucks nearby, but which turned out to have a small archives in the basement with unprocessed papers by Percy Crosby, who spent the last sixteen years of his life in psychiatric wards. I processed Crosby’s papers in a night. Artists leave easy archives: manuscripts, letters, drawings. They usually know what’s worth keeping and what’s not.
Occasionally, I break in. Sometimes the person who alerts me is a researcher, and I don’t have a contact at the archives, and I don’t get a response to my email about eidolism. It’s still a fringe belief, and the more people understand it, the more precarious vampires’ jobs become. But most of the time, I’m invited in, especially as my sense of where the trouble is gets more acute and I get better at my work. I feel it the most behind my right eye. I’ve been to most archives in the Bay now, many in Southern California and in Nevada and Oregon, and I’ve even been up—with Else—to Alaska, but I have never been back to the Historical Society of Northern California.
* * *
—
I stay out for a few days at a time. It’s stressful to be out in the van, even with the grow tent inside. I sleep badly, and the reflections in the walls give me both dysmorphia and dysphoria. So every third day or so I spend in Marin, at Else’s house. I like to time it as tight as I can, because it feels better when I take all the risks that are possible to take—when I cram as much life as possible into the small container I have. I usually pull up to the door around an hour before first light. Over the soft gravel of the access road, the van makes a low blur of white noise, and in the absolute darkness broken only by the city’s smear of light on the horizon, I can see the lights of Else’s house burning as bright as the sun.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Victoria Savanh, who edited the book with style, humor, and élan. Working with her is like fencing with an Olympian—the swish of the rapier, the total control, and the glee of watching her nail it again and again. You’re not losing; you’re learning.
I am very grateful to my agent, Kate McKean, for seizing the book from slush and thumping it with an open palm until editors were drawn by the sound. Kate always makes me feel emphatically welcome in publishing, and she should be celebrated with her own holiday.
Thanks to Austen Osworth for valuable early notes on the manuscript, and to Dave Cole for superb copyediting. Sabrina Bowers gave the book its note-perfect internal design. A very special thanks to Calvin Kasulke for his help at every phase of writing, including informing me that what I had with “vampire archivist” was not a joke, but a book.
I would like to thank Aaron Fellman, Sarah Guldenbrein, Danny Lavery, Julian Jarboe, Erin Cashier, Fait Poms, and Calvin again for their love and support. Each of you has taught me something vital.
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Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections
