Meeting K in A Thousand Bloods made me consider the importance of blood, since she was so connected with it. Not in the sense of the blood that spills as a result of an amputated organ, but of the blood that transmits, that circulates or flows to carry a message. It reminded me of your bout of malaria in Burma. I would get so worried whenever your fever spiked over something as simple as a cold, thinking it was a new episode. And I’d begin trembling as if I were the sick person and not you. I imagined the guilty mosquito had to be a female anopheles, because only the females suck blood in order to hatch their eggs. I cursed that female who could activate the illness in your liver, circulate it throughout your body, messenger it through the bloodstream.
S and K were talking about something—I can’t remember what. I had taken a seat and was just watching them. I fixated on K’s corneas. I could see they were red from exhaustion or maybe from another urinary tract infection. Blood in her corneas too. Yoro, Yoro, Yoro, goddamn it forever. The blood of your blood that has bled out of me over so many years of searching. Can there be any greater waste of time than looking for something? Love, yes, of course, one looks out of love, but in the meantime you don’t love anything else but what is not there. Which is absurd. Looking for love, instead of simply loving the person who is present, who is not hiding away, who doesn’t require that you waste years following her trail. That’s why if I could jump from blood to blood, Jim, if I could live in other people’s lives, I would be faithful to you. I would be unfaithful (again). I would get bored like the thick blood of a slothful man. I would bleed wood and not think of anything but the material of the trees. A carpenter. I would be a carpenter, and then I’d be the bird that bleeds the bark. I would also be the bullet of a hunter that slices through a deer. Fleeting. The blood of gunpowder shot by someone else’s hand. Sliding smoothly through hair, skin, flesh—my last destiny, warm body, animal, burying me in its middle, distancing me from the loneliness of a cold grave. I would drip in a grove. I get to know you anew. I would close like your glottis that hinders my blood from dripping down your throat. I would open it like I used to open my glottis to swallow your germinating saliva. I imagine now how it works on my organism. Your saliva germinates reeds that wave in the currents inside of me, in my esophagus, my guts, the soft walls of my stomach. Fields of tails like elongated blossoms in the springtime of a body that gets its light through your saliva. Photosynthesis. Erosynthesis. While you sleep, I would trap insects with my tongue to spread over your wound. I would forget you. I would believe in peace. I would make war. I would make love in wartime. I would be the index finger that pokes an eggshell to learn the taste of yellow. I would live crouched in the ghostly pyramid only for the pleasure of relaxing my muscles—strong, red—when that beam of light illuminates it for thirty seconds each year. And every once in a while—and I mean once in a while—I would be me again, same as I could be anyone else. Me now, me then, and me in my remote past, inhabiting the simultaneity of my infant’s crawl, my first steps, with the search, always the search for your blood: Yoro. Goddamn you forever, Yoro.
I don’t curse Yoro when I feel her inside of me. Because then she’s also blood of my blood, this blood that instantly transmits the message that I’m pregnant, and it doesn’t matter much whether I am or am not, because the message is repeated for weeks in each and every beat of my heart, tirelessly, over and over again, reverberating in me like Morse code in a submarine. Certainly this is our first inner call of life. There it is, connecting. I suppose these signals are felt most clearly in pregnancy, this perpetual repetition notifying of a transformation in course, which doesn’t originate in a person’s own body, but in someone else’s, one that is invading you, the blood of your blood that nonetheless inhabits you as a different being.
Everyone around a pregnant woman caters to her and cares for her as if they were protecting their own mother’s fetus. How odd. It’s a type of invasion felt by few men, unless they experience a metamorphosis themselves. Anyone who’s written about metamorphosis wrote about pregnancy. A cockroach, a swan, a bull, golden rain. If I had lived my entire life in isolation, and one day someone told me that another body would sprout from my own, I might find the idea of turning into a cockroach far more plausible. We clutch our heads when they talk about magic, but we’ve normalized pregnancy to the point of making it banal. Not me. I say: this can only be magical, and because it is, I’m often overwhelmed by the same fear as the person who woke up one day transformed into a cockroach. I find myself controlling my thoughts from time to time as if this blood transmitted information through the internal communication system to the still-premature brain that would allow it to pick up on what I’m thinking.
What happens when I doubt my daughter’s existence? Would her DNA somehow register it as contempt, as if I didn’t believe in her or want her? What happens when I don’t care to live, not even for her? How unbearable it would be to not have secrets. At times I’ve felt hatred, thinking she’s a kind of vigilante, a spy. But then I feel guilty, worried that my scorn might somehow impede her growth. And again I think about your blood. The blood of your father, now circulating through me. And the blood of your family too. That sister of yours, whom I’ve never liked very much, is also my sister as long as you are circulating inside of me. The blood that raises the alarm when something is wrong, though only when I believe I’m pregnant, of course; the daily scrutiny for blood after each pee. I go back to thinking it doesn’t really matter if my pregnancy is a lie, because that fear is there, the fear of bleeding. Perhaps the fear of bleeding is the fear of accepting the fact that my little girl doesn’t really exist, and the blood is then the sign of the termination of my fantasy. And then there’s the blood flowing through the umbilical cord as my belly button begins fading away. Me, who was always stuck to my mother’s skirts, I feel as though I’m cutting the umbilical cord that ties me to my mother every time I glance at my belly button. Maybe the last trace of cord that ties us to our mothers is cut in order to make the new cord that ties us to our daughter. You see, the cord that tied me to my mother, the cord that even her death in Hiroshima couldn’t cut, is now being severed by life. Life is by far the strongest explosion. Will I feel my body spit out the plug of blood that signals an approaching birth? I imagine it would be released like a clot, like a plug, like what happens in the morning during a period when the blood’s been retained all night, thickening, getting darker from the pressure. I wanted to feel that release so badly. And I was so afraid that it was never going to happen.
Sir, allow me now to call your attention to the fact that I am once again addressing you directly. I will now move my testimony forward.
A torrential rain has begun, and it’s unlikely that anyone will come looking for me while it lasts. The roads will be impassable for a few more days after it abates, as you can imagine. But by then I’ll be ready to come to you instead; I’ll turn myself in. So for now there’s plenty of time to enjoy telling my story. Truth be told? I don’t care whether you’re interested in what I’m about to say, but what else is there to do in this lodge if I can’t leave? All I can do is play with the only other person here with me now, in one form or another: you. So let the game begin. Do you remember my saying that there were details about my life you could understand only if I doled the information out morsel by morsel? What I meant is that if I were to tell you all the particulars of what had impacted me the most in one fell narrative swoop, or more specifically the single greatest incident after the bomb at Hiroshima, you wouldn’t fully appreciate it. No doubt you would grasp it as information. That’s not hard to do. But what I’m trying to do is drench you in the details. I want you to soak up every drop of my happiness, sir. That’s why now, in this savage rain, I’m beginning my game, a game of riddles, and here’s your first clue:
Rain.
Drop after drop it’s been saturating you throughout this story, without your ever noticing. Do you feel capable right now of gathering all the little written droplets tog
ether to tell me which is the particularly significant event that I wish to highlight now? I suspect not. So let me just crack the window a sliver, enough for the water to christen the text lightly as I plow on. Let’s see if maybe, just maybe, you’ll figure out what all the fuss is about. If you puzzle it out before I have to reveal it, you’ll have won the game, in which case let me congratulate you beforehand.
Remember my friend S’s sex toy store, where I got my crime weapon? Let me tell you it thrived, which allowed her to buy the space next door to set up a library accessible through a small door, so the murmuring of clients wouldn’t disturb the readers’ need for silence. At first I thought it was strange how much effort she put into gathering such a large number of books and buying a space that was elegant and comfortable, with wooden tables and individual lamps for each reader, because I didn’t see the logical connection between the store and the library or couldn’t justify the need for a reading space so close to a sex shop, seemingly an unusual juxtaposition. Yet whenever I went from the shop to the library or back, I never felt a gap between the two, only a soft transition to and fro, and soon I discovered a simple explanation precisely through reading. Our genitalia are not our bodies’ most erogenous zone, and neither is our skin; it’s our brain. That’s why I’d always gotten so aroused by reading books that had nothing ostensibly erotic about them. It was the primeval sexual organ that got so excited, activated by the challenge of thought, which at the same time activated my desire. I bet you still have no idea where I want to take you with all of this? And I say, “I want to take you,” because I wouldn’t mind if you won the game—it would make you a worthy rival. So let’s see now, another clue, one little drop after another of rain:
The brain, the most erotic organ in the body.
If you’ve accepted my challenge to play, it’s because you’re interested, and so in a way it could be said that you are interested in me, as the other player. Arousing another’s curiosity is not an easy task. I presume it means you attribute a certain amount of intelligence to me. Thank you. This is precisely the case. I am an intelligent woman. So the question is, are you suitably intelligent to read between my lines? If so, this acumen will allow you to reach a climax before I have to explain. Just as in S’s library, I’m the book that attracts your attention, but also the book that foresees my ending.
I spent many hours in the library. There were days when you could say I was content, but invariably I was lonely. A while had passed since Jim’s death, and with his death, the abandonment of the outer search for Yoro (not the inner one, which I always carried with me). What I just wrote between parentheses could serve as another clue, expressed in this way: I carried Yoro inside of me. But let me continue—this last bit might get clearer toward the end of my story. I felt as though my love for Jim, the love we shared, belonged to another life. I felt disconnected from those past times. And yet, though my life was in many ways a new life, I still bore the same emptiness as before. I felt the gravity of eight months’ worth of gestation, while still feeling the absence. My belly showed as full as it was deserted. Read this quote, which I’m copying from one of my notebooks, a quote Okakura attributed to the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu, probably paraphrasing slightly:
“A room is valuable not because of the walls or the ceiling, but for the emptiness that the walls and ceiling enclose. The utility of a pitcher of water is in the emptiness that can contain the water, not in the shape of the pitcher or the material of which it’s made. The emptiness is able to do this because it contains everything.”
I would think of myself as a pitcher at times, whose hollowness was meaningless, a pitcher without water, a pitcher full of water, but water that would never break before I went into labor, that didn’t keep my clay moist. There was no water for someone who thought that with me they might quench their thirst.
Third clue:
Emptiness can do everything, because it contains everything.
Under those circumstances, reading helped relieve my aloneness, but not just any kind of reading. I read mostly testimonies of people like me who had put into writing their reflections on absolute forms of isolation. Knowing that other people had gone through similar things made me feel I had companions, even if they were dead. As I write this, I realize that it might seem a little gloomy to feel that the dead are still with us, but the mere act of reading how other people have gone through situations like mine before brought them back to life for me, before me. I felt these others place a fraternal hand on my shoulder as I read what they wrote years or even centuries ago. Did you know that in some countries they are already studying the best way to warn the citizens of the future, people from other worlds millions of years ahead of us in time, about how truly hazardous the stockpiles of nuclear waste are? Language will have morphed completely by then, so how can we possibly take preventive measures against the dangers of nuclear waste for people who will be born or come to Earth for a visit thousands of generations hence? Fortunately life on Earth is still so young that as it stands today, we can understand almost all of what has been carried forward in written testimony. So how could I help but feel as though someone dead for only a few centuries shares my same era on Earth? If someone happens to read me a thousand years in the future, they’ll still understand me. You see? Two thousand years hence they’ll still appreciate this story, and yet it’s pretty clear they wouldn’t judge me the same way you are judging me now. Your law is worth nothing over time. Nothing. I’m not even going to trot out that hoary comparison with grains of sand. Your law isn’t worth a grain of sand. My words are so much grander than your law. Anyone’s words will outlast the law by thousands of years. Even the words of people who don’t know how to read, illiterates, will last longer than your current laws. Language is what I think gives cohesion to a single generation, a family.
When I was at my worst, I kept in mind all those people who thanks to their written testimonies accompanied me despite being dead. Perhaps they had died precisely because they couldn’t abide being isolated and misunderstood. So at times I thought of myself as being strong, a survivor—because I was alive—barred from the world that knew me best, the netherworld, whose doors you are opening to me. Thanks. Aren’t you just the gentleman? I won’t hide the fact that at times I feel self-pity and don’t want to “go gentle into that good night.” How woozy I get when I think of the passing of time nowadays.
With me in mind, S stocked a book that contained the beautiful and explicit testimony of what they used to call a hermaphrodite, one who at baptism was forced to take the name of a girl: Adelaide Herculine Barbin.
This man was born on November 8, 1838, in the French village of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, though his diaries were published only a few years ago for the first time. I was moved by how he dealt with the main issue, his intersexuality, but there was something deeper at work: how honest he was in telling his story, the simplicity and purity he demonstrated in a century that saw what Herculine Barbin was as a public disgrace. Herculine was uncannily aware of his tragic destiny from early childhood, when nobody, not even he, could appreciate how exceptional his body was. He foresaw his own tragedy and yet was still able to love. Just like me.
Herculine describes somewhere in the diary how his doctor, who was aware that he was more man than woman in his adolescence, commented on how accurate his godmother had been by insisting on calling him Camille. Camille is both a masculine and a feminine name. So at least one person noticed that Herculine Barbin’s gender was undetermined at birth. The same thing happened to me when I was born and my gender was considered ambiguous, though I didn’t have a godmother who called me by a name that reflected who I ultimately would be. The whole naming business has always obsessed me. Honestly, I’ve never understood why we have to spend our entire lives with a single name given to us by someone else. A person’s name is the most sacred thing of all. It sees us through our entire lives, personifying us to everyone else, and for that reason it’s something we should be abl
e to choose ourselves. Countries have rituals of all varieties, but not a single ceremony that allows us to confirm or reject the name we were given at birth. We haven’t even opened our eyes yet, and someone has engraved the name inflicted on us on a marble slab. Me, I refuse to accept it. I will be the one to choose what name goes on my tombstone. Please, leave it at H, for Hiroshima. You’ll never know my birth name. My gender and name were imposed on me, the outcome of a mistaken assumption, like a bad bet in a game of cards. But it was my life being wagered, not just money, when I was no more than a lump of defenseless flesh that surely could sense her parents’ disappointment at not being able to pridefully proclaim the key words of the event: “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” Maybe I noticed the disillusionment while I was still wrapped in my mother’s warmth, the silence or the shame of whoever tried to imagine me outside of that undefined limbo.
The book included a medical report written in 1860 by a Dr. Chesnet, who detailed the state of Herculine—who was customarily known as Alexina—when Herculine visited his practice at the age of twenty-two because of sharp pains that were probably caused by inguinal testicles, meaning testicles that never fell and so remained invisible. The doctor’s report was originally published in the Annales d’hygiène publique et de médicine légale, and I unapologetically tore the reproduction of this report out of the book because I couldn’t help feeling as though it belonged to me even though it didn’t exactly correspond with my case. I didn’t have access to any other kind of official report on my body. So here’s the fourth hint, it’s a little more self-explanatory:
I never had access to any kind of report on my body.
The report said the following about Herculine:
The Story of H Page 22