by Brian Hodge
“Is that why you wouldn’t make any promises of something more permanent?”
“It was a fantasy. Something forbidden. You can’t live a fantasy every day of your life — it loses power then.”
“What about love? Did you love her?”
The toughest question of all. The two souls/one flesh proposition. He wandered back to the window, forehead to glass.
“I suppose I did. Yes. Yes. I did love her.” He shook his head and sighed. Scratched that nagging itch. “That was the problem, wasn’t it? Somewhere along the way I think I got scared of what that was going to mean.”
And wasn’t it the great human irony? Most of mankind viewing monogamy as right and proper, yet so many going to such lengths to sneak around it, to exploit the loopholes. While those who condemned it from the outset eventually succumbed to jealousies and the need to bond … only to later betray.
We never learn, he thought. That’s the only constant.
Lana was interred a couple days later, ushered into the afterlife by a minister who looked more befuddled than grieving. The square pegs of the world were always more difficult to eulogize.
The turnout was small, scarcely a dozen paying last respects under a sky that couldn’t make up its mind between bright and overcast. The sun played masquerades with clouds, and the air was gravid with the damp of a southern spring.
Beneath his shirt, the itch still nagged. Heat rash, perhaps, unaccustomed to such brutal humidity. He’d probably have to see a doctor.
He knew at a glance they were Lana’s nighttime friends, a trio in gray and black who oversaw the sendoff with a melancholic brooding. Beneath overcoats worn against the unpredictably hostile sky, they were of indeterminate gender, caught somewhere between the poles of male and female.
While circumstances may not have been the norm, the emotions of grief were universal — that longing to connect with others who had shared the now-dead. Once the service was concluded and the mourners turned toward home, he approached them, and their gazes ranged from guarded to inimical.
“Oh, look,” said one of the trio. Long blond hair, full red mouth, mascaraed eyes; male origins betrayed by a squarish jaw. “I bet I know who this is.”
The tallest of the three nodded. Dark hair cropped close, sparse stubble on the jaw. The hands were delicate, though, this one traveling the opposite road of change. “You’re Gary, aren’t you?” The voice fell between alto and tenor, a vocal netherland.
He said that he was, and while there was little warmth, the introductions were civil. The blond was Alexis, the short-haired one Gabriel. The third of their group — small and pale, hostile eyes red from weeping — was Megan. Ringlets of brown hair fell into her blotchy face, and she pushed them back with incongruently large hands, veined and knotty.
“Let me guess,” said Gabriel, appearing less accusatory than analytical. “You’re feeling guilty because you dumped her, and you think that’s why she did it.”
Gary frowned. “How do you know what went on between us?” This was either scary insight, or an unerringly accurate guess. “Lana did it … immediately.”
Gabriel shrugged, stared at the dead sky. “I’ve seen it happen before.”
“I’m sorry,” Gary said, and hated how lame it sounded. “I never meant to hurt her.”
“No, of course not,” Megan said. “She didn’t have feelings, did she? Just a new kind of thrill, until the new wore off.”
Gary stared her down until she closed her angry mouth. “I didn’t come here for a debate.” Then, to all three: “I can’t say I was perfect, but I never intended anything like this to happen. I did care for her.”
Alexis nodded. “But you didn’t truly understand her world. Did you?”
“The best I could.”
“No.” Gabriel shook his head. “If you’d really wanted to, you would’ve already met us. We didn’t see much of Lana the past few months. Those belonged to you. She subjugated herself for you. All so you wouldn’t be hit with too much at once, and go running.”
Gary took a step back from the rawness of the implication, that he was ignorant of the real Lana, as opposed to the Lana she had chosen to reveal. He’d thought all along she simply preferred being alone with him.
“I should go,” he whispered, and took another step.
“Why not join us tonight?” Gabriel said. “At the Fringe. You know that much about Lana, don’t you? How much she liked that place?”
“I know of it.”
“Then join us, why don’t you? Have a drink to her memory with the people who knew her better than you did.” Gabriel looked distastefully about the cemetery, all spires and vaults and crumbled beauty. “I think you owe her that much.”
“At least,” he said softly, and thought for a moment, then told them he would be there.
He carried the stares of Lana’s friends throughout the rest of the afternoon and into evening along a gauntlet of French Quarter bars, smoothing down the roughest edges of remorse and responsibility.
Mardi Gras was over by two months, but revelers still choked the Quarter’s streets, furiously bent on good times. The South had always seemed so fundamentally more sensual than New England, its passions ignited by a crueler sun, and allowed to boil out and flow and cool like sweat. Here the food was rich and spicy, full of delicious venoms that the heart embraced. Here Dixieland rubbed amiable shoulders with punk. Here an empty glass was intolerable.
Gary had lied, of course; had no intention of meeting them at the Fringe. To promise otherwise was simply the best way to save face, avoid conflict, for he felt low enough as it was. Sitting there baring his head and soul for them to whack on would do no one any good. He’d get along better on his own, never prone to crumbling into tears and begging strangers to listen to his woes. Let the drinks settle inside, then, and glaze him over with silent brooding.
The French Quarter, and Rue Bourbon. Strip shows and jazz bands and karaoke. He watched from the shadows while slow numbness crept in, absently scratching his chest, fighting that persistent itch. It took deliberate effort to stop and realize just how long he’d been at it — enough to make it second nature.
He rubbed again, probing with tender fingers.
Swelling. There was swelling going on under his shirt.
Gary rose to tread the churning sea into a bathroom that may have last been clean back when Louis Armstrong played. He stood before the cracked mirror and parted his shirt—
—and stared at the two feminine nipples jutting from his chest. Protuberant and erect, their areolae as large as silver dollars.
His reflection, staring. Cracked in the middle, two jagged halves misaligned at their juncture.
“She was contagious,” he muttered in cold shock.
And quickly reconsidered this afternoon’s lie.
Through a spitting rain, he found it an hour later, twice stopping street locals to point him in the proper direction. The Fringe had been built in a renovated warehouse downriver from the French Quarter. Night seemed deeper here, the air ancient. Few would ever come here by mistake.
Although Lana had spoken of the Fringe several times, he’d never accompanied her here. He supposed that she alone had been enough to sate his curiosity about her kind, so until tonight he’d had no real need of this haven for gender-benders, and those who sought their company.
Within its dark and hallowed walls Gary found a world of alternatives: music, clothing, anatomy. A maze of multiple levels in architecture, as Lana had described, each was dimly lit and an enclave unto itself. There was supposed to be some sort of garden atop the roof, where ephemeral couples might retreat for whatever liaisons their bodies, lacerated or not, would allow.
Gary bought a bottle of wine at the main bar, weaved through the open center where dancers writhed beneath black light and strobes to music that sounded like the roar of an industrialized armageddon. The volume could peel skin.
Here he was groped endlessly and let it happen, reeling with an in
toxicated pleasure in so many sliding hands, so much sensory delight despite the known world of his own flesh turning strange on him. Here, at least, pretensions were few, the common denominator belonging to rhythm and movement and surrender. The real effort lay in pulling back, pushing on, remembering why he was here.
He found them near the uppermost levels, Gabriel and Alexis and Megan tucked into a secluded booth. One noticed him, then all watched as he approached their table and slammed down the wine bottle.
“Finally.” Gabriel looked pleased.
“We’re mourning the way Lana would’ve wanted us to,” said Alexis, the blonde, tipping a highball toward a forest of bottles and glasses, hours’ worth of bereavement. “Sit, sit.”
He glared down at them while fumbling with his shirt buttons.
Megan perked up, brushed ringlets of hair from her face. “I so don’t want this asshole at our table.”
“Megan,” chided Alexis. “Don’t be a bitch.”
Gary sat beside Gabriel, tense as a coiled spring. He left his shirt unbuttoned but draped shut, feeling steam build inside.
“After what he put Lana through?” Megan went on. “Whose side are you on? Lana was fragile.”
Alexis reached across the table, intimately touching Gary’s arm. “Lana was like a … a goddess to our little family. She was the first to get the go-ahead for her final surgery.”
Megan wiped her eyes, smearing mascara. “It should’ve been me. But no, my therapist says I’m not stable enough.” She gulped her drink in desperation. “He’s not satisfied with my reasons for the change. He says I’m doing it because as a boy I was so threatened by the thought of wanting to make it with my mother.” Hysterical laughter. “Freudian quack.”
“Answer me one thing,” Gary said, low and electrified. He yanked open his shirt to bare his chest. “Just what the hell is happening to me?”
They stared at his nipples, in full extension, plumped as though ready to nurse. By now a pattern of four more pink-brown welts had erupted beneath them, down his ribs, like especially prominent mosquito bites.
Alexis smiled broadly, mischievously. “Isn’t that sweet. You empathized with Lana more than we gave you credit for.”
“This is some kind of joke to you?” Gary shouted. In that moment he wanted to hit Alexis, woman-in-the-making or not.
“It must’ve been love.” Gabriel leaned in to dart his once-feminine tongue onto a nipple. Unexpected pleasure trilled through Gary, horrifyingly intense. For a moment he wanted to feel it again, ever the hedonist.
He snapped his shirt closed, head aswim. “But I’m not the one who was taking hormones.”
“When two people love each other,” said Gabriel, “a little bit of each one stays inside the other. From you, Lana took a certain amount of independence, I think.”
“And this is what I got from her? Tits?” His laughter rivaled Megan’s in hysteria.
“It’s much more than that, Gary, surely you can feel that by now,” Gabriel said.
Gary peered down his torso and felt a rush of vertigo. With a clearer head maybe he could make sense of this, pinpoint some allergic reaction as the culprit. But a clearer head was at least a morning away.
“I don’t want this, I don’t understand…”
Gabriel propped his head atop a loose fist. “Do you know what the worst part of being us is? The very worst aspect?”
The question sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Try for an answer, any answer: “Your body is wrong, a prison…? What? Just tell me.”
“That’s it for me, all right,” Megan said.
Gabriel cocked his head. “Not quite.”
“Oh, isn’t it?” Megan shrieked, then stood and whirled on Gary. “I hope you know someday what it’s like to wake up every morning with something like tumors hanging between your legs! Because that’s what these are to me!” Clumsily, she hitched up the tight black dress she wore. Her genitals were framed within a garter belt and the tops of her stockings. “These are wrong! I don’t want them and nobody will help take them away from me!”
Alexis rolled her eyes. “I hate when you’re like this, girl. You’d think it was PMS.”
Gary watched, mortified, as Megan lowered herself enough to plop her genitals, flaccid from estrogen, onto the tabletop. Something new in her eyes, though, a drunken madness made worse by grief.
“Nobody cares,” Megan murmured, “I’m a joke and nobody cares,” then she seized Gary’s wine to smash the bottle against the table’s edge. She held the dripping, jagged remnant and for a moment it gleamed like surgical steel.
“Just a few little cuts, it’s no big deal,” she said.
Blood was drawn at the first firm stroke, Megan’s face twisting into an agonized mask of rapture and liberation. Alexis screeched and pushed herself away in the booth. Gabriel reacted with more sorrow than shock, shutting his eyes as Megan continued to saw.
New sights, sounds, tastes, sensations … damn them all. This was too much. Gary bolted to his feet and reeled from the booth. Fixed his eyes on the way he’d come up and lurched toward it. A moment later a firm hand gripped his elbow to steer him another way.
“Let me help you,” said Gabriel.
He tried to wrest free. “I just want out of here.”
Gabriel held firm. “And this way’s quicker, I promise.”
Gary struggled another moment, then saw the exit sign glowing where Gabriel pointed, and surrendered.
Gabriel hustled him through the gathering crowd, and when they burst through the exit, released his arm. Now on the roof, Gary recalled Lana’s talk of the garden. The fresh air hit him like smelling salts, thick and tainted with the watery brown scent of Mississippi mud. It drew him on, and he lurched past greenery, shrubs and bushes and small trees in planters. Within, shadows moved to the rhythms of breathy moans, and he saw them: face to face, head to lap, groin to buttocks.
Help. He needed help. Medical help.
Near the far edge of the roof, Gary collapsed, spent and shaking. He rolled onto his back, beginning to shed tears at the night sky while distant thunder rolled. The desultory rains were moving on, leaving gray and violet clouds in their wake, boiling past the face of the moon.
Gabriel knelt beside him, rested a comforting hand upon his traitorous chest. Beneath the hand, Gary’s skin throbbed. It wasn’t unpleasant, this rebellion, and part of him yet remained intrigued.
“Poor Gary.” Whispered, soft.
“What’s wrong with me?” Choking on tears.
Gabriel shook his head. “Megan — I’m sorry you had to see that. I was afraid she’d hurt herself someday. Things could never move fast enough for her.”
Gary shuddered.
“I never got to answer my own question. What the worst part of being us is. Can you guess?”
Again, that nudge of familiarity. Further this time, all the way to recollection. Lana had put to him the same question the night they’d met, before he had known the truth about her. The riddle had gone unanswered, soon forgotten.
“No,” he said, “I can’t.”
Gabriel looked fondly down at him, that androgynous face at once strong and tender. But calculating. “We can’t go all the way across, you know. We never will make it one hundred percent.”
His hand stroked Gary’s lap, popping the button of his slacks and drawing the zipper down. Massaged him, bared him, and, heaven help him, against all expectations he was growing erect.
“If you’re going man-to-woman the surgery’s pretty successful but the hormonal changes are lacking. If you’re moving the other way, like me? The hormone change is better, but not the surgery. They can build me something that looks like a cock … but it won’t much act like one.” Gabriel gave him a squeeze. “This spontaneous hard-on? It’s something I’ll never know. At least, their way.”
Gabriel began to peel away his own clothing and reveal his hybrid body. Still on his back, Gary saw moonlight glint off the shiny healing scars of a doubl
e mastectomy, amid sprouting hair. Lower, Gabriel’s last remaining femininity hid within a triangle of hair.
“You’ve known Lana’s half, now try my point of view,” Gabriel murmured, then straddled him, mounting firm.
Raped. The thought was murky, surreal. Am I being raped? His hips surged upward all the same. Tomorrow had always been soon enough for self-reproach.
“So the very worst part of being us?” Gabriel stared down, sheened in sweat. “We’re made, not born. We can’t procreate. But … I think maybe you can change that.”
This was more than coitus, Gary knew when he saw the others gather round to watch. This was tranquilizer. This was anesthesia. Bribery and reward and homage.
“A friend once told me that the South is a land of ghosts.” Gabriel’s breath was deepening with the rhythm, voice growing huskier. “I believe that. And I believe that New Orleans is a magic place. There are people here, they know things that others feel they have no business knowing at all. Maybe they’re right. But I don’t think so.”
When Gabriel stripped Gary’s shirt away, he saw the twin rows of nipples aligned down his torso. Erect and straining, like those of a sow lying before her farrow of piglets.
Gabriel bent low, placed his lips to one, and sucked.
Gary gasped, shaking his head yet unable to deny the river of warmth flowing inside, a glow he could label only as maternity.
“Lana looked for someone like you for a long time. I never saw her any happier than after she met you. Someone open-minded … eager for new experiences … who wanted to break with his past.” Gabriel touched a quieting finger to Gary’s lips when he started to speak. “But let your conscience off the hook. She didn’t kill herself over you. She did it for us.”