The default world, p.1
The Default World, page 1
Advance Praise for The Default World
“Naomi Kanakia’s tour de force novel of a trans adventuress among the tech elite is a beautiful cis nightmare in the mold of Manhunt and Tell Me I’m Worthless, ripping off bandage after bandage around body politics and the belief that money and dreams can reshape how we treat each other. The questions her unforgettable antiheroine Jhanvi asks—and the conversations on friendship and what it asks of us that this sparkling, often brutal book will start—are worth your attention.”
—JEANNE THORNTON, author of Summer Fun: A Novel
“The Default World is the wild, often hilarious and troubling story of Jhanvi, an angry, witty trans woman who tells it like it is. She’s entitled, demanding, outrageous, funny, careening, an extremely entertaining and sometimes horrible person who I can’t help loving and rooting for.”
—MATTHEW KLAM, author of Sam the Cat and Other Stories
“The Default World takes a scalpel to constructed myths of joy, allyship, and solidarity within and surrounding queer communities, exposing with unwavering scrutiny the messy networks of insecurity and vulnerability that hum and throb through trans lives and experiences. A heady mixture of satire, exposé, and hard truth-telling.”
—BISHAKH SOM, author of Apsara Engine
“Bananas, grody, uninhibited, histrionic, mortifying, funny, and awful. As a satire of contemporary tech-bro burner hippiedom, it’s a riot. As a dissection of what it costs to make it as a trans woman in a dude’s world, it’s harrowing.”
—CAT FITZPATRICK, author of The Call-Out: A Novel in Rhyme
“The Default World is the best sort of novel, one where you fall in love with every one of the tragic, flawed characters, all of them in the midst of great change. And one which ends, as all novels probably should, with an apocalyptic, disastrous sex party! I loved reading this book not only for its story and characters but because it felt deeply honest to me. I was immersed in its world, and recommend it to everyone.”
—MATTHEW ZAPRUDER, author of Story of a Poem: A Memoir
“This fierce, fearless, and unflinching novel interrogates who we are and what we want. How do we know who we are among an onslaught of identities? And if we don’t know who we are, how can we know what we want? Naomi Kanakia’s unexpectedly tender conclusion is that the truth is in kindness, in closeness, in feeling.”
—TAYMOUR SOOMRO, author of Other Names for Love: A Novel
THE
DEFAULT
WORLD
NAOMI
KANAKIA
Published in 2024 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
feministpress.org
First Feminist Press edition 2024
Copyright © 2024 by Naomi Kanakia
All rights reserved.
This book was made possible thanks to a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.
This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First printing May 2024
Cover design by John Elizabeth Stintzi
Text design by Drew Stevens
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kanakia, Naomi, author.
Title: The default world / Naomi Kanakia.
Description: First Feminist Press edition. | New York City: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2024.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024000516 (print) | LCCN 2024000517 (ebook) | ISBN 9781558613164 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781558613171 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Transgender fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3611.A493 D44 2024 (print) | LCC PS3611.A493 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23/eng/20240111
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024000516
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024000517
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For the one who deserved this more than I did
CONTENTS
Cover
Advance Praise for The Default World
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Amethyst Editions at Feminist Press
Also Available from Feminist Press
About Feminist Press
1
“Excuse me, but are you trans?”
Jhanvi looked up from her soda water. The guy asking the question was one of the servers: tall, scrawny, with acne and a loose ponytail.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Is that rude? You look amazing. You’re, like, a goddess.”
“Uhh, yeah,” she said. “I’m trans.”
“I am too!” His voice had gotten higher, and Jhanvi closed one eye. Was he a trans man who was partway there, or a trans woman who’d barely begun? “I’m Tony,” he said. Or was it Toni? Really, the unusual thing here was that he’d even asked—Jhanvi assumed most people saw her broad shoulders and heavy brow and clocked her instantly.
“Do you live around here?” He was holding a tray of glasses in one hand, but he touched her shoulder with the other. “I would’ve noticed you before.” A woman in leather pants stood behind Toni, shifting her weight, trying to sidle past the oblivious server.
The woman finally twisted around Toni, her hand already sprouting a phone as she walked past them, and Jhanvi let out her breath, turned her attention to Toni.
“Uhh, I’m visiting,” Jhanvi said, shrugging a bit.
“I knew you couldn’t live here,” Toni said. “Sometimes I feel like the only trans woman in San Francisco.”
She! Jhanvi’s smile got brighter and more authentic. Other trans women were friendly to her if she met them at a trans meet-up or brunch or dance party, but if she saw them in public? No fucking way; they usually cut her dead, out of a fear, perhaps, of being clocked. She saw them sometimes, noticing them from a slight patchiness to their hair or the top-heaviness of their shoulders. When she made eye contact, they’d look stolidly onward, pretending they hadn’t seen her, and the utter hatred and despair would boil up inside her, and she’d think fuck you, and swear to herself that if she was ever beautiful and cis passing, she’d be different. She’d see people, acknowledge their humanity.
“Hey!” Jhanvi said. “It’s so nice to meet you! Yeah, I should be around a lot, I think my friend comes here? I’ve been to this bar with him, anyway.”
“A friend?” Toni’s voice rose, pulled so high into her nose that Jhanvi could hear the nostril hairs quivering. Toni would learn to relax her vocal cords someday, let her lips and tongue do more of the work of feminizing her voice. “Who is it? How do you know him?”
Jhanvi’s ears suddenly got hot. She’d never stopped feeling like the geek in the locker room, panting out some obviously fake story about all the sexing he’d done.
“He’s … I guess …” Jhanvi shook her head. “No, Henry is a sex friend. I shouldn’t be embarrassed. He’s really, really good looking. It’s pretty absurd.” This assessment of Henry’s looks was a recycled line, something she repeated like a mantra when thinking about and discussing her visit.
“Oh wow, can I see?” Toni’s hair brushed against Jhanvi’s shoulder as she propped herself on the edge of a stool to peer at Jhanvi’s phone.
“He is beautiful,” Toni said. “Where’s he from?”
Henry’s best feature was his skin, swarthy but with perfect golden undertones that made his picture shimmer slightly on the phone screen. He had dark eyes and prematurely graying hair and beautiful white teeth.
“Look at that jaw,” Toni said. “It’s like something you’d see on TV.”
“He’s so beautiful,” Jhanvi said. She’d been saying the words in the weeks leading up to her visit—he’s so beautiful—because she knew that was the consensus. It wasn’t her personal opinion of him, but that didn’t matter—she wasn’t sure anymore what she actually liked in a man. Everyone’s appearance was buried in too many layers of social meaning. What mattered was not how he looked, but that other people loved to look at him. Henry needed to be beautiful, somehow, for the calculus behind the visit to work.
“Well, girl, where is he?” Toni’s hand still rested on Jhanvi’s back.
“I have no clue,” Jhanvi said. “He’s supposed to meet me here. He’s one of these fire-eaters, right? Not that punctual, those people. He lives on this street, but the code he gave for his door didn’t work, and he’s not responding to my texts. But it’ll come together.”
She gave a broad smile. Hopefully not too manic, because she really was at peace with her stranded state.
But Toni’s forehead creased. “Oh no,” Toni said. “Is there someone you can call? Another roommate?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Well,” Toni said. “I live with my dad, but I can ask him if …”
“Don’t worry about it. If my friend doesn’t work out, I have other people to call.”
“You are so chill,” Toni said. “I’d be freaking out.”
“Oh … yeah,” Jhanvi said. “I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? You sleep rough for a night. Or drink coffee, smoke some meth, stay up.” Pausing for a second, assessing Toni’s eyes, Jhanvi sensed the need to adjust her story. “But I’m not really here to see him. I’m just crashing at his place.” Toni relaxed, took a breath, and Jhanvi winked.
This was amazing! She was totally pulling this off. Being a woman was really good. If only people knew. It was so good—at least, if you’d been born a man. Of course, that made no sense—being trans was awful, a short train to death and despair—but not for her!
Nope. In certain, very limited circumstances, it was an improvement. Like, she’d once sat all night in this exact same bar—literally this exact one—getting drunk by herself, trying to work up the courage to talk to girls during her “learn to pick up women” stage. After saying hello to three girls, she just gave up, because she could see how unwelcome she was: some red-faced Indian nerd, trying too hard, in expensive jeans and a shirt that did little to hide his paunch and flabby arms. Well, look at her now, talking to a stranger like it was nothing.
“Okay,” Toni said. “I gotta go, but order a drink, I’ll tell the bartender to comp it. Let me know if your friend gets here, I want to see him!”
Jhanvi squeezed closer to the bar, basking in that belonging, that sense of “I know someone.” She ordered a hamburger, figuring Toni could comp that too. It was Sunday afternoon and the bar was relaxed. She saw four people shooting pool, two guys messing with a jukebox, groups of friends squeezed into booths, gushing over flights of beer.
Everything here was different from Sacramento: it was in the texture and taste of the place, in every detail. If you knew both cities, you couldn’t mistake one for the other. People in SF were so thin, so tall, so beloved of the gods. At this same kind of bar in Sactown, there’d always be that weedy, desperate grumble, that feeling of being down. Even at a hipster bar, the guys would be bandy-legged, in T-shirts, with bushy eyebrows and baseball caps, and the girls would be in shiny T-shirts and unfashionably low jeans. Not that they would be poor, or even low class, but the whole aura would just be resentful and wounded—not like here. Sacramento always had an aura of second best, of loserdom. That was also what people said about this place: San Francisco wanted to be New York—and it was true. But that made Sacramento even more pathetic—it envied something that was already ersatz and fake.
She watched a gaggle of perfect girls at a nearby table, somewhere between twenty-five years old and a very well-preserved thirty-two, speaking indecipherable syllables in high, liquid voices as the brittle bristles of their eyelashes cut the air and tunic hems swished around their stretchy leggings. Her eyes followed one girl’s legs down into a pair of high-heeled shoes, glossy black, attached by a strap around her ankle.
The sight made Jhanvi shiver, and when the girl’s eyes briefly turned to her, Jhanvi dropped her eyes, though she knew it was weak and creepy to break eye contact so fast, as if she’d done something wrong. She should’ve smiled and looked away slowly instead.
“Okay!” Toni said. “I took my break to come tell you. I just saw you stand up, and wow, you’re stunning.”
Jhanvi colored. She was about six feet four inches, an Amazon, and big in all her dimensions—she chose her clothes more by what fit than by any sense of style. But today she’d come in a bright orange dress with buttons down the front, a bit more of a tunic than a dress on her. She had a momentary vision of herself, a giantess propped on this stool, her chunky heel locked into the foot bar, and her hair teased to frame her face and then pulled back. She knew her makeup was on point, with long lashes and smoky black around her eyes and a bright red, almost orange lip that matched her dress.
Women sometimes complimented her looks, but Jhanvi always wrote them off. She was just tall. She knew her broad shoulders, square build, and brow bone read as inescapably masculine. Not to mention that her clothes rarely fit—they bulged at the belly and were baggy on her hips. Tights and leggings rolled down, not finding any purchase on her soft, round midsection, and dresses that were knee-length on cis women were too short for her, while ankle-length gowns stopped dowdily at the top of her calf.
“Thanks,” Jhanvi said. “How’s your stuff? Are you on hormones?”
“No,” Toni said. “I’m sort of backwards, I’m identifying as a girl to see if I can do it, and then I’ll start hormones.”
“Totally. That’s the right thing to do,” Jhanvi said. “This is the hardest part, and by the way, if you ever feel like, oh, you know, you’re not a real trans—that people like me are better than you, further along—that’s silly. Don’t believe that, because you’re at the hardest part, trying to tell people, get them to believe, you know …” She realized her intended wording—something other than what they see—might be insulting.
“Hey, thanks!” Toni said. “That means so much. You are so cool.”
They smiled tentatively at each other, and for a moment Jhanvi felt the slide into her old self—into the fear and the confusion, the sense that something was slipping away and could not be recovered. She’d sat across from so many women in so many bars, or at so many house parties, trying and failing to find the right words.
Jhanvi sometimes had trouble—everyone did, she knew—assigning the proper gender to people who were early in transition, but in this case, watching Toni’s thin frame and her graceful movements, the long, fitted shirt—a man’s shirt, but still—hugging her hips, Jhanvi thought, okay, this works. Jhanvi could probably gender Toni correctly without slipping up.
“So, uhh, what’re your plans? Why are you visiting?” Toni said.
“Oh!” Jhanvi said, raising one finger. Now was the moment to test out her cover story. “Yes, that’s it. I’m gonna get married.”
“What!” Toni said. “Are you kidding? To who? To Henry?”
Jhanvi inwardly murmured to whom. “Sorry, that’s a new line I’m trying out, as a way of explaining my plan. I read in a book you should try out each conversational gambit over and over, using slight variations, to see which one works best.” Jhanvi tried to ignore Toni’s confused expression and continued.
“No, I, uhh, so you know all these tech-bro types have great trans benefits at their jobs—like, lots of money for surgery and hair removal and whatever you need, and Henry is always telling me to learn to code and get a job here. And I’m like, Or I could just find a techie and marry them for their benefits. And he always laughs, because it’s just a line. But a little while ago, Henry was texting and complaining to me about his girlfriend, Audrey, and how they were poly and she didn’t want to marry him, and all this stupid, pointless drama they were having over this party they all run, and he mentioned one of his friends had paid a hundred thousand dollars to rent out an event space—”
“For one night!?”
“No, for the year. But still, it’s empty most of the time, nobody lives there. It’s for this event they throw for Alterna-Fest. It’s called The Guilty Party, it’s a bit famous. His girlfriend, or his ex? She kinda runs it, and she’s always online, talking about poly and kinky stuff, being an influencer, or whatever.”
“Fire-eaters,” Toni said. “They’re so selfish. We get them in here all the time.”
“Totally! So I got mad, and I was like, you guys have this much money to throw around, and I’m fucking earning twenty dollars an hour and happy about it, and fuck you. Forget the poly thing, she just doesn’t want to marry you, Henry!”
“Truth bomb.”
“Totally, and he got quiet and was like, You’re right, I know. So we had a long talk, and I was like, You are so valuable. I would marry you in a second. And he was like, Well, why don’t you?”
