Innocence

by Samael Wolf

  If anything, I was less comfortable with having been ‘fed’ from myself, even after Esti assured that she hadn’t used her pheromones to seduce me — and after feeling their effects even once, I felt like it was an assurance I could trust. It didn’t matter that she explained that she used the energy to more quickly track down Orkin, and to an extent, it didn’t even matter that she’d had no reason to suspect it would cause as much damage as it did. I couldn’t exactly put my finger on the exact nature of my disquiet, but it was somewhere a bit above ‘woke up to find my side of the refrigerator cleaned out.’ Never mind that it hadn’t seriously hurt me; it could have, and it was done without my permission during a moment when I was very vulnerable, emotionally and physically. Still, she promised never to do it again and I believed her.

  I also really wasn’t happy about her attempt to make me forget what happened last night. I’d listened to her reasons for trying, and Heavens knew, part of me did kind of want to forget and go back to a simpler life, but it was still incredibly wrong of her to have tried to force it on me, and I’d let her know it once we had—ahem—finished proving that her pheromones really were so distinctive that it would have been hard for me to miss having experienced them unwillingly at any point in the past. That was probably the best time to have had that argument, thankfully, with both of us still buzzing from the endorphins, cuddling even as I told her in no uncertain terms that I was not okay with her trying to make such decisions on my behalf, regardless of whether she thought I’d be happier not knowing. I would accept if she chose not to tell me about things in the future, but telling me and then trying to strip it from my mind? She may or may not have the power, but she didn’t have the right, and I would not be happy if I knew she’d done it to anyone else for such reasons.

  Mind you, I had no idea what I’d do if that ever did happen, but she seemed subdued when I said it. That made me wonder about what Sae had said about her being more afraid of me than the reverse. I couldn’t help wondering why that seemed to be the case. I made a note to ask Sae about it when I saw her for my shift at the coffeehouse.

  Sae was not at the coffeehouse.

  I was rather flummoxed as I walked in the door, gripping my cane as if for protection. I had never seen the young man working the counter today before, and it was obvious he wasn’t entirely comfortable there. It was already much busier today than yesterday and a line had formed in front of the counter. The stranger waved to me, apparently recognizing even if the reverse wasn’t true, which I supposed boded well. I waved back, still feeling rather bewildered as I fetched my apron and used the computer to sign in. Ten laborious minutes later, I managed to clock in after having to boot up the computer and find the appropriate website, but fortunately, he seemed to have the situation well in hand by the time I returned.

  I took a moment to just watch him from the end of the counter while I braided my hair. I could tell he had some sort of kitchen training, but I’d have bet he probably never interacted with customers wherever he worked in the past. He didn’t make much small talk, and he slouched when people approached the counter, as if he wanted to hide his face. I couldn’t imagine why; he wasn’t what I would consider handsome, but he was what I would consider beautiful, with fine features that looked like he’d never needed a razor in his life to keep hairless and eyes that seemed naturally set in a wide, guileless expression, with a blue-gray color that reminded me of the transition from a sunny day to a storm. His blonde hair was netted and covered with a cap, but I suspected with the way his head tipped downward that if it were free, it would kiss his cheeks and partially cover his face. If it weren’t for the rather plain clothes beneath his apron, I’d think I’d stumbled on a wayward model going for a ‘tragic bad boy’ look.

  If there were ever a man to make me think ‘trouble,’ I thought with a chuckle. I bet I could guess who this was now. Sae had given me the hint yesterday. This had to be her brother, another sibling called to fill in during an absence. He was also probably a member of whatever race Sae occupied. All Esti had been able to confirm was that my ‘dream’ of Sae having feline ears has been based in reality after all. She could apparently transform her physical characteristics, but Esti knew, and I had seen, that she usually possessed some sort of feline attributes. I wondered what the No-Name community would think if they knew real anime characters inhabited their hangout. For that matter, all the times Sae wore cat ears to work, were they actually fake ears? Now she had me second-guessing my own memory. Again.

  “You must be Kei,” I said as I went behind the counter and fetched a pair of nitrile gloves to signal that I was ready to take over, setting my folded cane beside the box. “Was Sae feeling sick this morning?”

  There came an unexpected pause, a hesitation that abruptly made me wonder if Sae had bothered telling her siblings how much I might know, or if I’d been completely off with my guess. There was some resemblance between Sae and this young man, but—

  “Actually, my name’s Aen,” he said at last, ducking his head even more. “Ley and Kei were both busy today. Sae’s fine, except she didn’t realize she’d be seeing you again so soon after siccing you on Esti last night and she wanted to pull some kind of mysterious soothsayer disappearance.”

  I tilted my head curiously, taken aback. He spoke very familiarly of Sae and the two siblings whose names I’d known, which implied that he was part of the family, but either I was misremembering how many of them there were, or—

  “I’m sorry,” I said, ducking my own head in apology. “May I ask your pronouns? Mine are ‘she,’ ‘her.’ ”

  Aen stared at me a moment, emotions I couldn’t name darting across that lovely face, before settling on a smile so tremulously happy that I had to curb an urge to throw my arms around its owner and hug until the tears came. “ ’She, her,’ too,” she said, confirming my suspicions, then cleared her throat a couple of times, face pinkening warmly. “Sorry. You’re actually the first person who’s ever asked. This is still kind of a new thing for me.”

  And the gesture had not gone unappreciated, I filled in by Aen’s suddenly very self-conscious posture, hugging one arm and gazing down at the floor. She looked like she was trying to resist the same urges I was. Unfortunately, I was terrible at initiating contact, so all we could do was be awkward together for a moment. Then more customers showed up and I hastily got to work. To my mild surprise, Aen stuck around after clocking out, chatting amiably enough between rounds of customers. I quickly realized I had managed to make a friend of her, even if it had been somewhat by accident.

  “I only realized I was trans earlier this year, so it’s been a thing for me,” she admitted, again looking aside as she spoke. “Suddenly we went from two sisters and two brothers to three sisters and a brother. I don’t think the others know what to think of it either.”

  “Sae didn’t mention it, but she did say she had two sisters,” I affirmed and was rewarded with further reddening in Aen’s cheeks. “She’d mentioned Ley and Kei before and I only had an idea what Ley looked like—“

  “It’s okay,” she interrupted, waving aside the apology I’d been about to make. “I lived as a boy long enough, I still sometimes forget I’m not. I’m not blaming you for not knowing. It’s not like I pass.”

  I opened my mouth to ask some silly question about clothing or make-up before the full implication of this conversation slammed home and I completely forgot what I’d been about to say. I’d gotten so caught up in placing her identity that I’d forgotten who, and more precisely what, I’d been speaking to. I checked about quickly, then leaned forward and motioned her closer, speaking in an undertone. “To what extent can you change your body? Isn’t that one of your abilities?”

  I wasn’t sure I’d really expected an answer, but Aen didn’t even pretend not to understand the question for its intended meaning. “I can change my form, but not in any way that changes my nature,” she answered candidly, with a little sigh. “An easy rule of thumb is that if it would ma
ke it harder to recognize me, then I probably can’t do it. It’s because my nature and my form are more closely linked than they are for you or most types of people. My outward appearance is a direct reflection of my inner nature.”

  I froze, performing my equivalent of simply staring at her in disbelief, floored by the transparency of the answer. “What is your inner nature, then?” I asked after a moment, if only because she seemed so much more forthright than Esti or Sae had proven so far.

  Aen’s answering smile managed to be both bitter and sly. “I am an unhelpful cat,” she said.

  “That figures.” I sighed, waving to a customer as they left. “No hints?”

  She shrugged, but appeared to think it over. “Well. Let’s see if I can put this into perspective. Quid pro quo, Clarice; what would you consider your central motivating event in life? What’s shaped you the most up to this point? You don’t have to answer out loud if you don’t wanna, just try to fix it in your mind.”

  I had no idea why she’d just called me ‘Clarice’ and guessed I’d missed a reference to something or other, but it didn’t seem important enough to complain about. Her question, however, was not one I needed long to think about. “I don’t mind talking about it if you don’t mind hearing it,” I said. I wasn’t sure how to interpret her next shrug, but I took it as a positive sign and hoped I wouldn’t bore her.

  Her name was Ava Xhin and she may have been my first crush. She was certainly my earliest role model.

  Ava Xhin began her rise to fame as a child competitor in a number of adult-dominated competitions. The child of naturalized American citizens who had immigrated from China, her parents were happy to fund her enterprises with the backing of the research and development firm for which they worked, Ava quickly established herself as a national treasure. Beginning at the age of eight, she began competing as often as once each month and at no less than eight times every year. Physical or mental, the field almost didn’t seem to matter; if there was no minimum age or she could receive a dispensation, she was bound to put in an appearance. She apparently only competed against her own age group when there was no other recourse, and even then she found ways to turn heads, such as when she participated in a relay triathlon by herself and won by a margin of nearly twelve seconds. Ava didn’t always win, but she never embarrassed herself.

  When it was asked why she wanted to compete against adults, Ava had this to say: “I want to compete with people at their prime so that I can better see where the bar is set for excellence, and then surpass it. America is full of the strongest and most intelligent people in the world, and I want to challenge them and myself to become even better. It’s true that you can fail because you aimed too high and couldn’t achieve your ambitions, but if you aim too low, you’ll never know what you were capable of accomplishing. I’m aiming for the top, and I will never, ever settle for less.”

  I can’t remember when I first heard about Ava Xhin, who was already being touted as one of the greatest female athletes of all time when I was a child. It seemed like she had always been there in my life, a woman who only grew more and more heroic over time as she used her notoriety as an athlete to jumpstart a career in philanthropy, women’s education, human rights, and grassroots campaigns to deescalate regional violence in western Asia by uplifting living conditions and easing the desire for violent revolution and religious intolerance. She even had her own short-lived comic book series, The Unstoppable Xhin, which depicted her as a real life Captain America who saved lives and rescued kittens in between urging us to eat our vitamins and say our prayers before bed. It was a testament to her life that the comics barely had to exaggerate her achievements.

  Ava competed in the Olympics when I was seven. I remember begging Dad for a newspaper to read because the television confused me too much to ‘watch,’ this being before I understood how adults could make sense of the disjointed imagery projecting from their weird boxes. I still have cutouts I made from that newspaper. She won gold medals in freestyle wrestling, weightlifting, and in the modern pentathlon. I idolized this sixteen year Wonder Woman more than any comic book character, identifying with her so hard that, yes, I even dreamed that one day we might meet and there might be something between us. She was only nine years older than me, and when I got older, that wouldn’t mean as much!

  When she turned seventeen, Ava joined the military, as many expected she might, and there she apparently thrived faster than they had any hope of containing. She seemed literally inexhaustible, and given any task, she would have it accomplished and be helping her comrades at it before her drill sergeant could think of a reason to goad her. The Internet had a field day when someone leaked an incident in which, taunted by a superior to outdo herself, picked him up and scaled a 15 foot wall with the 240 pound man clutched to her side like a wounded comrade. She was punished for insubordinate behavior, but the articles boasted a line which revealed the true feelings of her senior officers: “This is the fucking pinnacle of human evolution, this is what a super soldier looks like.”

  Deployed in Afghanistan, it didn’t take long before she distinguished herself with military accolades. A child soldier had thrown an IED in front of a line of JLTVs, light armored trucks. Ava pulled the soldier next to her out of her side of the truck and the explosion rolled the vehicle over them, miraculously causing few injuries. Somehow, she had gotten to her feet before anyone else could properly react and pursued the child, who tried to detonate a bomb vest. When the others found her, she was cradling the crying child, a fist full of wires clutched in a white-knuckled grasp, trying to soothe him in Pashto.

  If only the rest of her story had as happy an ending.

  At the end of her deployment, Ava was nominated and approved to receive the Medal of Honor for distinguishing service in light of managing to resolve the attack without loss of life. Everything was going well at first. She accepted the medal, shook the President’s hand, and photography flashed as one of the greatest athletes and heroes of our generation unknowingly took her last breaths.

  The reports, which came long afterward and what few were released to the public, are very clear. They say that a Congressional aide, suffering a psychotic break, bribed a security guard with nearly $1.5 million dollars in cryptocurrency to pass him a gun once past the checkpoints and that he made an assassination attempt on the President. I’ve listened to the recordings of the incident and the screaming renders the picture I get a jumbled mess, impossible to follow. There’s just one thing I’ve heard in them that has always made me wonder, when my mood is macabre. No explanation was ever found for what led the man, who was shot dead on the scene, to say it:

  “Burn like your father, the devil!”

  Ava Xhin was admitted to the hospital with twelve gunshot injuries. The aid managed to empty two entire magazines before he was finally taken down by Ava herself, and the last shots went into her at point-blank range. Trauma surgeons worked on her without pause throughout the next twenty hours, but the Sig Sauer P229R is a gun designed—more so than most—to kill what it’s aimed at, and although she may well have been the most powerful woman on Earth, Ava Xhin was only human.

  The funeral was private, quiet, and no one even knows where she was buried. I lost a piece of my childhood that day. I was eleven years old and suddenly I understood mortality. I understood and rejected it. Somehow I just knew that if I could have been there, I would have been able to point out where the bullets had lodged and how to remove them without causing further injury. I’d have been able to see where viscera was torn and where blood leaked and pooled. I could have saved her.

  And I vowed that one day a person like Ava Xhin would never die on my operating table.

  If there ever was a woman like her again.

  I didn’t tell Aen all of this, if only because I’d have started crying if I tried. It had been seven years since Ava died on that operating table, but the wounds were still tender. I gave her the salient points and still got a little choked up, but I kept it i
nside enough tell the story. I don’t think Aen had been expecting something quite this heavy; her expression was pained and several times it seemed like she wanted to say something, but although I gave her opportunities to interrupt, she waited until I’d finished before speaking.

  “That was a little more than I was counting on, but it actually helps prove my point,” she said, turning aside toward the door as she folded her arms, radiating pensiveness. “You’ve got a thousand things going on just with this one part of yourself: an idol, heartbreak, no justice for the fallen, a wish for a better world, probably a lot of repressed anger and not even one partridge in a pear tree. Now imagine if all these things somehow broke off of you and were used to make a person, and that person was literally the sum of all those experiences. Who would they be? What would they look like?”

  I tried to find an answer to these questions, but the question was just too abstract for me. “I’m not sure. I’d guess… like me, but more so, in the ways that got removed?”

  Aen smiled thinly. “That’s why I can’t give you a real answer; it’s just too complicated a concept, and being in the middle of it isn’t that much more enlightening. I could tell you what I’ve guessed about myself, but some of it would scare the light right out of you, and no one wants that. So — I’m an unhelpful cat, I can’t change it, and that means I’m stuck as a trans woman.”

  I digested this for a few minutes, long enough that another customer came in and I wound up putting together a pesto chicken sandwich while I thought. I thought Aen would wander off, but she did pull a stool out from under the counter and sit just out of the way while I worked, poking at a phone. When at last the customer was presented with a warm sandwich and an Italian soda, I thought perhaps I’d gleaned something useful out of that after all.