All I Ever Dreamed

by Michael Blumlein

Of course. Science is nothing if not expedient.

  —The other reason is because it’s feasible. That is, we think we have a chance. We think we can do it.

  This I should have known. But the fact is, I’ve never wanted to be a goat. Not ever. Not once. Not even part of once.

  —Maybe so, she says. But remember, you never wanted to be a human until you got a human brain.

  I recall her saying once that living within limits is what living is. I’m sure I should be grateful, but this so-called alternative is hard to stomach. It’s like offering an arm to a person who’s lost a leg. A pointless charity.

  Moreover, it seems risky. How, I wonder, can they even do it, fit a human brain into a goat?

  —With care, says Sheila Downey.

  Of that I have no doubt. But I’m thinking more along the lines of size and shape and dimensional disparity. I’m thinking, that is, of my soft and tender brain stuffed into the small and unforgiving skull of a goat. Forgive me, but I’m thinking there might be a paucity of space.

  She admits they’ll have to make adjustments.

  —What kind of adjustments?

  —We’ll pare you down a bit. Nothing major. Just a little cortical trim.

  —Snip snip, eh, Sheila Downey?

  —If it’s any consolation, you won’t feel it. Most likely you won’t even notice.

  That’s what scares me most. That I’ll be different and not know it. Abridged, reduced, diminished.

  I’d rather die.

  —Posh, she says.

  —Help me, Sheila Downey. If you care for me at all, do this for me. Give me a human body.

  She sighs, denoting what, I wonder? Impatience? Dis­appointment? Regret?—It’s not possible. I’ve told you.

  —No?

  —No. Not even remotely possible.

  —Fine. Then kill me.

  An ultimatum! How strange to hear such words spring forth. How unwormly and—dare I say it—human of me.

  I can’t believe that she will actually do it, that she will sacrifice what she herself has made. I can’t believe it, and yet of course I can.

  She sighs again, as though it’s she who’s being sacrificed, she who’s being squeezed into a space not her own.

  —Oh, worm, she says. What have we done?

  I’ve had a dream. I wish that I could say that it was prescient, but it was not. I dreamed that I was a prince, a wormly prince, an elegant, deserving prince of mud and filth. And in this dream there was a maiden sent to test me, or I her. An ugly thing of golden hair and rosy cheeks, she spurned me once, she spurned me twice, she spurned me time and time again, until at last she placed me in her palm and took me home. She lay me on her bed. We slept entwined. And when I woke, I had become a human, and the maiden had become a princess, small enough to fit in my palm. I placed her there. I thought of all her hidden secrets, her mysteries. I’d like to get to know you, I said, enraptured. Inside and out. I’d like to cut you up (no harm intended). I really would.

  Did I say I’d never be a goat? Did I say I’d rather die? Perhaps I spoke a bit too hastily. My pride was wounded.

  In point of fact, I will be a goat. I’ll be anything Sheila Downey says. She has the fingers and the toes. She has the meddlesome nature and the might.

  Words and thoughts are wonderful, and reason is a fine conceit. But instinct rules the world. And Sheila Downey’s instinct rules mine. She will slice and dice exactly as she pleases, pick apart to her heart’s content and fuss with putting back together until the cows come home. She’s eager and she’s restless and she has no way to stop. And none to stop her. Certainly not me.

  So yes, I will be a goat. I’ll be a goat and happy for it. I’ll be a goat and proud.

  If this means a sliver or two less cortex, so be it. Less cortex means less idle thought. Less hopes that won’t materialize. Less dreams that have no chance of ever coming true.

  I doubt that I will love again, but then I doubt that I will care.

  I doubt that I will doubt again, but this, I think, will be a blessing. Doubt muddies the waters. Doubt derails. Sheila Downey doesn’t doubt. She sets her sights, and then she acts. She is the highest power, and I’m her vessel.

  Make that vassal.

  Command me, Sheila Downey. Cut me down to size. Pare me to your purpose.

  Yours is a ruthless enterprise. Ruthless, but not without merit.

  This world of yours, of hybrids and chimeras, humans and part-humans, promises to be an interesting world. Perhaps it will also be a better one. Perhaps more fun.

  What good in this? For humans, the good inherent in making things. The good in progress. The good in living without restraint.

  What good for worms? That’s simple. No good.

  All the better, then, that I won’t know.

  But will I? Will I know? Today’s the day, and soon I’ll be this capricornis personality, yet one more permutation in a line of permutations stretching back to the dawn of life. I will lose speech, that much seems certain. But thought, will that building also crumble? And words, the bricks that make the building, will they disintegrate, too?

  And if they do, what then will I be, what kind of entity? A lesser one I cannot help but think. But less of more is still more than I ever was before. It does no good to rail at fate or chew the cud of destiny, at least no good to me. If I lose u’s, so what? I’ll lose the words unhappy and ungrateful. I’ll lose unfinished and unrestrained. Uxorious I doubt will be an issue. Ditto usury. And ululation seems unlikely for a goat.

  And after that, if I lose more, who cares? I’ll fill my mind with what I can, with falling rain, crisp air and slanting light. I’ll climb tall hills and sing what I can sing. I’ll walk in grass.

  Living is a gift. As a tiny crawly, as a fat and hairy ram, and as a man.

  Call a pal.

  Bang a pan.

  Say thanks.

  Adapt.

  BLOOM

  Dear Charles,

  I received your letter and would have replied before now, but have been just too busy. There’s work, always a challenge but more so lately, not just because of the mutations, which, here as elsewhere, are proliferating willy-nilly, but also because of new reporting requirements and the mounds of attendant paperwork. And the ethical dilemmas, bombarding me without pause. I should never have become a doctor. How can I be objective and at the same time compassionate, opinionated and at the same time just? Is it moral to extend life if life is nothing but suffering? Is it decent to deny an addict his drug? How do I possess power without abusing it? And when abuse has occurred, how do I atone?

  I am constipated with morality. And on top of everything there are all the new technologies to keep up with, the bald-faced consumerism, the winnowing of time, which we package and dole out as though it were a commodity. And in fact there is a project here, a pilot project funded by the Thanatosophobe Group that has done just that, slotted and parcelled out nanoseconds of time that can be transfected from one cell line to another. They are using eel cells of all things, slimy creatures if you ask me, but curiously amen­able to such manipulations, perhaps because of their annular morphology, the worm that eats itself and all that, circling round and round to infinity. At any rate, I’m on the group’s review committee and have secretly been supplying patients for their research. Nothing to show yet, but then a few nanoseconds of added time in a human can be very hard to detect. In light of your own interest in immortality, I’ll keep you posted.

  I have so little of my own time, it seems. After work it’s the kids, Felice and Brian, twelve and six now, did you get the pictures I sent last Xmas? Felice’s involvement in acrobatics continues unabated. She’s up to four days a week. It’s obvious now that we were right to choose acrobatics over gymnastic training. She’s way too long and spread-out to be a gymnast, and she’s getting longer every day. God, the girl is growing. She looks like her mother, especially in her arms and hands, willowy and grasping, and her shoulders, broad and muscular. She hangs
from things like a chimpanzee. She swims like a dolphin. Climbs and throws and runs, burns bright, crashes. The walkway under the house scares her at night. Since I don’t think of her as the scarable type, or don’t want her to be, I dismiss her fright and wave her out the door with her basket of laundry. She chides me later at bedtime, the time of day to unwind and say what’s really real. I am scared, she says. You don’t believe me, but I am, and I don’t like the way you act. And I ask myself, which is right? To send her out alone into the night to prove that she can overcome her fear, or to do as she asks and go with her, to make her feel safe. And when I’m wearing pants, I tell her she’s old enough, I tell her to take the laundry down to the washing machine by herself. And when I’m wearing a skirt, I welcome the invitation to join her, feeling honored to be asked to accompany my daughter through the needle of her fear. I tie my scarf over my head, the new printed silk scarf I got from Helen. I pull on my puffy quilted jacket. Felice and I go downstairs together, and I have to admit I’m also a little afraid to wander down here alone, afraid of a rat, or a raccoon unexpectedly cornered. I have to admit I too imagine things in the dark, things that make my chest hollow. That make my heart pound. Sensations that in a different situation make me beg for more. Fear is so close to pleasure, Charles. Why is that? What makes them different?

  And Brian. He keeps me busy. His moods are marked by a volatility to match my own. What amazes me about him is the intensity of his self-absorption. Sometimes he honestly cannot be roused. What are these worlds he lives in? I say worlds, but it’s probably just one, a single world made up of his deepest desires and fears, encompassing everything. He has long conversations that take place between his beaver and his blanket. He has tiny Lego men trapped in cardboard egg cartons. I worry that these worlds of his are shaped by TV values and violence, by cartoons of ugly-looking thugs and simple-minded good vs. evil confrontations. I probably shouldn’t. His ability to space out, and conversely, to focus, is extraordinary. It’s the ingredient, the root, of success, success in the sense of giving voice to the inner life, voice first and then form to bring it into the open, to make it communicable. What is his form? At the moment it’s intricate pencil drawings of different systems and emotions: the bold space explorer; the gory, haunted house; the burning building either saved by the firefighters or set further ablaze. And his Legos, where he is boss man, sysop, adventurer, sewer rat. And he likes to pretend he’s a baby animal, mewing and baby talking and cuddling into a lap. I think of this as a kind of breast-feeding, which he never had and therefore misses. Helen is more embracing of him when he’s in this mood, which I suppose goes to show that she’s the one with the breasts. If mine were shaped properly, they’d be soft and mounded too. My nipples would be pink and firm, and when Brian curled into my lap, even though I haven’t been pregnant, I’d sense the nesting form of a fetus, the shape and pleasure of a child in my body. And when he nuzzled me, instead of my feeling tense and invaded, I’d be grateful for his attachment. I’d nuzzle him back. Like him, I’d sniff and lick. The boy runs on animal instinct. The superego was invented with him in mind.

  They take it out of me, these two, and I guess they put it into me too, although why the taking out seems more noticeable than the putting in has me puzzled. Maybe because the first is quantifiable in minutes spent on chores and carpools and school meetings, minutes given and not returned, whereas the second, the payback, is vaguer, is not bound by time, is more like a lake, or a web, an intermingling sense of loyalty, togetherness and pride. Outside the family it’s hard to count on any of these. Loyalty is fickle; togetherness, to a loner like me, frightening; and pride, in the noble sense of fulfillment and honest expression, despoiled by greed and ambition. In the family everything is perfect. In the family contentment reigns. I go into my room and lock the door. I close the curtains. In flowing gowns I dance. In strings of pearl and shell, in golden bracelets I twirl, I unfold, I step off the world.

  I am a pilgrim of my own body.

  I’ve been beating around the bush, Charles. I apologize. I’ll try to be direct. I am too busy to write because my body is changing, and I can barely keep up. You must know how it feels to be breathless. To be chasing something that you’re just on the verge of catching. To be tense and hard and so keenly aroused you’re ready to burst. This is how it is these days. I’m putting on new clothes. I’m checking myself in the mirror. This happens in movies, this transfiguration, man into fly, into beast, man into woman. It’s the errant biological ray that triggers the shutting down of certain genes and the expression of others. It’s the witch’s spell to punish vanity. It’s necessity, the fusing of the two sexes the only means of negotiating the tricky terrain of life. The only means to survive.

  I’m having a sex change. Two sexes, did I say? I’m at two now and trying to get myself to relax and take things a step at a time. The estrogen has made it hard because I get so moody. It’s not easy living with me these days. Helen has been incomparable. I can see that she’s frightened about where this will all lead. She says as much. But she’s willing to give things a try, within the realm of reason. Meaning the realm of safety, which for her means the absence of violence and the presence of choice. Fair enough, a good definition, though not the only one. Other people, patients I see for example, seem to find safety in being punished and hated, this the safety of the known and predictable, the safety of patterns.

  People amaze me, Charles, with the strength they have to get what they’re after. Attention, oblivion, escape from notice, abuse. All this and more parades through my door every day. So that I can’t help think there’s no such thing as aberrant, which leads to difficulty in administering treatments to restore patients to normal, when normalcy is a fallacious concept to begin with. And now the bugs aren’t responding anyway. We’ve got killer pneumococcus, killer E. coli, killer Hanta virus. Prions, genomic fragments and other vectors we haven’t even named. The more able we are to look, the more we see. We’re being assaulted. How can anyone feel safe?

  I’m doomed, my friend. Doomed to this life on the run, to the cycles of the moon, to my spasms of personality. The sex police are after me. How can I stop to write? The Devil whispers in my ear that I should remain a woman. That it’s not the estrogens that are giving me breasts, that are taking out subscriptions to Working Woman, Ladies’ Home Journal and Victoria’s Secret. It’s not them that get me so hot and creamy and suggest that sex with anything is sex with everything. Not them, but my nature.

  I’m mental. I know that. There’s a history of mania and depression in my family. My grandmother sat in a chair in her bedroom, shades pulled and a stuffed dog in her lap for the better part of a year before she eventually died of other causes. Her sister, my great-aunt, got electroshock treatments every three months to keep her mania under control. Otherwise, she’d walk the streets in her underwear, eat nothing and talk endless nonsense. There’s other mental disease in the family too. Our stock in this regard is not the best. It’s obviously a chemical thing, I take no responsibility, and why should I? We’re born with the baggage of molecules; what we do is pre-ordained. On the other hand, molecules can be altered by chemicals (witness what I’m going through), and I’m taking Lithium now, double dose, just in case. And one of the newer serotonin-uptake inhibitors too. Also, every few days I stick a bare wire in one of the kitchen plugs to give myself a little jolt. A little pick-me-up. Home remedies have always been big in California. It can’t hurt.

  So I’ve been busy. Did I say that? One thing happens and then another right on its heels. You send a letter, and I send one back. One moment I’m posing at a mirror, the next I’ve shrunken into a corner in despair. Causality? Melodrama? Short-wave radiation? I’m afraid it’s just beginning. These swings of mood, these highs and lows with nothing in between, will be the death of me.

  So why don’t I write a story on that? Why not a story on human sickness and frailty and mental imbalance? A story of self-abnegation and thwarted love? I could peddle it
to the talk shows and the tabloids. I could get proposals of marriage, barroom confessions, offers of help and salvation, late-night phone calls for kinky sex. I could be popular. A big success. Why not? Why not just sit down and crank out a story like that?

  Because I can’t, Charles, I can’t write that one any more. I used to be able to, I used to have that satisfyingly morbid taste. That black humor that appeals to you, that rebelliousness, that anti­authoritarian sneer. Romance was infantile, love was fuck. Human kindness, a gall in the throat.

  But I’ve changed. I think differently now. It started when I decided to have the sex change, when I thought I was going to be a woman. I was dreaming about long hair, big tits and a cunt big enough to embrace the world. A cunt to lay eggs and bear live young, a cunt to bleed and give birth to all living things. A cornucopia cunt full of fruits and vegetables and trees and bridges and ants and outhouses and lakes and dicks and other cunts. And tits like mountains, rolling and tumbling and soaring, soft as clouds, firm as tablets, tits to nourish whatever needed nourishing, to grab onto when drowning, to fall into, to suck milk from and drip milk out of, to sprinkle milk on the ground like rain. A woman could do this, and I thought I’d be a woman, because then I could too. I’d be all the things I’m not. I’d have that new power, and I’d be at peace.

  But women get pushed around, and they can be nasty too, niggardly in their affections, ugly-hearted. And careless and overly-protective, and fearful to the point of cruelty. It wasn’t becoming a woman that made me think differently. A snake that sheds its skin is still a snake. It’s because I’ve had a change of heart. I’m not a cynic anymore, Charles. I’m not a skeptic. I believe in the goodness of things. I believe in love.

  I wear a necklace now. I asked for it, and it enslaved me. I became a slave to Helen, as I always feared. It happened in the desert, in a broad canyon at the base of a ridge of mountains. We were walking along a stream. It was springtime, and the dirt was soft. There were wildflowers everywhere. She was ahead, and I asked her to slow down. I wanted her shirt, her pink tank top. She gave it to me, and then I asked for her underpants, and she gave me those as well. We walked along until I had to stop. I had to touch her. I licked her thumb, then put it in my mouth and sucked it. The sun was getting low and putting us in shadow, so we climbed a side canyon to get back in its warmth. And later when we were naked, she fully naked, me all save the necklace, I breathed her in. Mouth on mouth, I inhaled her. The hair under her arms, her long strong legs, her twirling dance of happiness. She bent at the waist, palms on the sand, feet veed out and planted. Her breasts hung down in wedges, and I crawled between her legs and turned face up to suck her nipples. A few drops of milk trickled into my mouth. I crawled back out and kissed her tiny asshole.