Earlier that day he had left his apartment in Stuyvesant Town and since then had been walking and mooching and jumping on trains. He had borne west (actually plumb north) with Broadway and come north (actually east) with it and had passed through that part of town that once was the Puerto Rican barrio and now was a great campus dedicated to the higher arts. And even after not-so-many years that district was changing again. And now early afternoon had found him here under the statue of Verdi. The ground in front of him was covered in hard round seed for the pigeons. If he stepped on the seed he would roll and would fall flat, feet over ass, and the homeless men on the benches would erupt in laughter. Ha! he thought. There we have it. If you kept your nose out in front of you you would be fine.
So if he just talked to Quicklime, anyone, a professional. Veronica. Someone who would listen. Veronica had been a good listener, though the running-away-to-America business was the closest Jean Dotsy had ever come to telling her anything that mattered. My God though, she used to come out with it. Veronica was not a bright girl, thinking back. She used to tell Jean these very stupid things. Details of unspecified successes. Or successes Jean never paid any attention to the details of. And then the words of reassurance. ‘I feel certain it will happen for you! I think it happens for everybody, at some time! The way it has happened for me, I can’t imagine my life having turned out any other way! Now doesn’t that sound silly! But nobody’s life is truly bad! It just looks like some people’s lives are bad! It’s an illusion! It looks that way to give us balance! But all those people whose lives look bad are living completely different lives to the ones we think they’re living! The lives that those people live are actually happy and successful, or will be soon!’ This with the ring of white gold on her finger, and the rock on it.
But, she didn’t mind. He just didn’t have the energy to laugh about it now. But no, Jean didn’t mind, he didn’t think. She was happy just to listen to Veronica’s voice, whatever she came out with. They used to go to a tearoom on the Terenure Road for their lunch. They used to go there and Jean just liked to listen to her voice, the sound of it, and to stare in her eyes and for Veronica to hold her hands in hers, and they rolled their eyes at the same time when the radio in the tearoom announced ‘Pleasant Hour, sponsored by Eir-Lite’, feeling there could be no escape from work. And Jean rolled her hands over the tops of Veronica’s so as to capture them again when they became loose. Just the sound of her voice, with that music. Sometimes Jean’s attention drifted to all those strange arrangements and the gusto or the leadenness or the pum-pum-pum of the singer and the strange words about beautiful Ireland with its fallen-away forts and shattered cathedrals, and the air that was very … blue, in that tearoom. And other times her attention went back to Veronica. Veronica’s speaking voice was like her own. Soft and mellow and serious, people said. People said she was like Marilyn Monroe, and that Jean was like Jennifer Jones.
***
The card had a picture of hills on it, three ranks of them, each of the back two receding from the one in front in a lighter shade of green. His eyes hovered about the gilt lettering:
BRING OUR BOYS BACK HOME
He rang the number. It was a New York number.
Aidan Brown – ‘Quicklime,’ he insisted again – was able to see him the following afternoon. They met at a coffee shop on Third Avenue, close to Clive’s apartment in Stuyvesant Town.
‘I’m ready to go home, Mister Quicklime. And what I would ask for is that you arrange a soft landing, so that I’m not going back to penury and damp and hardship, so that I might see out my last years in comfort and maybe in the company of others.’
‘Oh, you’ll be marvellously looked after. But you’re young yet. Only in your mid seventies. You’ve many years of good use left in you. That’s what we’re about in this organisation. We’ll say to the community: “Look at this man. He is an elder, he is a wise man. Learn from him. Learn from him!”’
‘No, no. I don’t want any bother like that. Or perhaps that is a condition of your service?’
‘There are no conditions. No contracts. Whatever it is you want from us we’ll do it, one hundred per cent. Tailored your way.’
‘And you’ll look after all the administrative hassle, you say? Tie up all the loose and frayed ends on this side?’
‘Loose ends will be tied. Frayed ends will be burnt. You should have no worries about any of that. We will do everything, from arranging shipping of your goods to physically boxing your goods. And the legals. It’s all part of the service, and all absolutely gratis.’
‘I have a lot of stuff in that apartment. I … I don’t want to be getting in anybody’s way …’
‘You’ll be getting in nobody’s way. The day of departure, you just leave your apartment as you would on any normal day and we’ll take care of the rest. You’ll be safely on the boat, steaming ahead for Ireland, before a single item is moved.’
‘Boat?’
‘Yes, we use our own transport. But it’s a very comfortable boat, with stabilisers, a jacuzzi and television. And plenty of space to move about in.’
‘And that’s free too?’
‘It’s all free. We’re sponsored by the President of Ireland. Just leave it with me, and I’ll get back to you with a departure date, which pier to go to, etcetera. Should be sorted out in the next few days.’
The waitress tidied the counter in front of them, and Quicklime paid for both their lunches, and ordered two teas and whatever cookies they had in the house. He stretched himself, puffing his chest forward, and looked at himself in the strip of mirror facing them. He was wearing the mould-blue sweater he’d had on the first day their paths had intersected.
‘I realise,’ said Clive, ‘that I’m not in much of a position to make extra demands, it being a free service –’
‘Clive, Clive. It’s all on the state. You tell me what you need and I’ll ensure you get it, no questions asked.’
‘– but there is one thing, one thing that I’ll need to know, straight up, that you can provide, otherwise I won’t be able to go ahead with any of this. I’ll need some security. Protection. I’ll need the strongest men you can find. They’ll need to be armed. And I’ll need a cleric. A priest. And someone versed in the dark arts. A witch, or an augur, or whoever you can get.’
The waitress put two cups in front of the men, and the pot of tea.
‘And milk too, ma’am,’ said Quicklime.
He poured Clive’s cup, then his own. He tipped the spilt tea from his saucer back into his cup. Then he poured in his milk, and stirred it slowly with his spoon. Clive could see his taxed expression in the mirror.
‘None of that, of course, will be any problem,’ he said. ‘We’ll have all of them to meet you off the boat, or be on the boat with you to escort you to land, and to stay with you at all other times.’
‘It’s all to do, you see, with, you know – this thing I tried to tell you about the last time.’
Quicklime chuckled. ‘All this transgender business? Don’t you worry now, we’ll get you some very beefy fellows to look after you!’
‘Oh no, Mister Quicklime. No, no, it’s, it’s … You’ll remember I mentioned the fairies the last time …?’
But now his companion appeared distracted, his attention directed towards the front window, as if something passing had caught his eye. He got up from his seat and stood at the window, looking down the street.
‘Mister Quicklime, please, if you wouldn’t mind hearing me out, now that I have you here –’
‘Can you hold it a moment? Just one moment,’ he said, bustling back across the floor. ‘I’m just going to the loo.’ He grabbed his rolled-up trench coat from his seat. ‘If anyone comes in and asks after my whereabouts, don’t tell them where I am. I get embarrassed. I have a bowel condition. Best tell them nothing. None of their business.’
After twenty minutes, Quicklime had still not emerged from the bathroom. The only people to have come into the coffee shop in all t
hat time were a couple of Hispanic construction workers.
Clive followed the sign to the conveniences. It took him into the kitchen. The door to the loo cubicle was ajar.
‘Did you see a man come in and out of here in the last twenty minutes?’ he said to a man flipping French toast in a pan. ‘A little shorter than me, pudgy, bald on top, with light ginger hair? He has a bowel condition.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said the cook. ‘He didn’t go to the bathroom. He just went straight through the back.’
***
On a chisel-blade corner in Greenwich Village was a business that announced itself, in a red neon cursive and stencilled letters in silver sticky tape, with:
CASEY BYRD, THERAPIST, A.N.A.C., S.U.T.
‘I’M ALL EARS’
The corner was mainly glass, blocked out with sheets of paper except to let the neon sign show. The door opened on to a first-floor reception area. In the same wedge-shaped space were a chair and a chaise longue. The city lights made will o’ the wisps through the sheets of paper, and the neon sign hummed irritably like a fly trying to push through the glass. In the sharp corner of the room sat a late-middle-aged woman with a heavy tan, short parrot-blue hair under an astrakhan cossack hat, and tattoos all the way up her bare arms. Sweat and hair dye streamed down her face. She also wore safari shorts and knee-length flight socks.
‘I saw the sign from outside,’ said Clive. ‘I’d like to talk with Casey Byrd.’
‘You’re talking to her. Do you have an appointment?’
‘No …’
‘That’s okay. Normally I’d close up now, but I’ve had a quiet day. Lucky for both of us.’
‘Yes. I’d just like to say, straight off the bat, as you might say, that I was born a woman.’
‘Please – to the couch.’
‘No, I’d rather get this part out – and out of the way – right now, standing here, otherwise it will become a distraction. I was born Jean Dotsy, in the Irish Free State, seventy-four years ago. I became a man, not entirely of my own free will, some forty years ago. The transition was drawn out and not completed. The treatments were rudimentary. They were able to fashion a tube of sorts for me but it has only ever effectively operated as a run-off pipe, never a penis, and I never could grow a beard for all the pills that I took and oils that I applied. Anyone who is close to me, which is one person, recently departed, knows this about me.’
The woman took off her cossack hat and patted her forehead with a handkerchief.
‘So – your secret died with this person who’s just died?’
‘No, not quite. No – lately I’ve become rather uncomfortable in my skin and have made no great secret of who I was formerly. Many, many people probably know.’
‘And this uncomfortable feeling …’
‘No, that’s not the problem I’ve come here about. I mean, that was easily dealt with. People have listened to me on that one, they’ve heard me out, or at least it hasn’t seemed to bother them.’
‘The problem is then that you, well – you say that you didn’t undergo this transformation willingly?’
‘Again, no, that’s not my problem. Not in the way that you think it is.’
‘But it is a problem?’
‘Not the one I’ve come here to talk to you about!’
‘Okay. So your problem is that not enough people take you seriously as a man?’
‘What?! Yes, but … no! That’s not it!’
‘But you don’t want to be taken seriously as a man, because you didn’t become one willingly?’
‘No! No! I did want to become one! I mean, I must have, even before my hand was forced.’
‘Your hand was forced …? What kind of cruel society …? Ireland, you say …?’
‘But it was my decision, ultimately! That’s to say – it didn’t take much pushing. I mean, I was pushed – there were other forces, and it was necessary to take drastic action, and I didn’t come from a culture and a time where I could make such big decisions of my own free will, and these forces forced me to put my body finally beyond use, but … I grew into my new skin. I was happy to have that skin, you know, when I did have it. But this is all … No, I’m not here for help in that way. This was all after the important change.’
‘I see. I understand.’
She invited him again to take the chaise longue, and he stretched himself out this time.
‘The important change. Okay. So – your acceptance of yourself as essentially a man?’
‘No! I never did think that I wanted to be a man. There was no light that flicked on, no moment of “Ah, eureka!” before I did become a man. I didn’t very much like men. I wouldn’t have wanted to become a man, it wouldn’t have entered my simple mind.’
‘A-ha!’
‘I hated them. No, that’s too strong a word. No – I hated them, I did! The last time I spoke to Veronica, in that tearoom on the Terenure Road –’
‘Woah, woah, pull up –’
‘– just the day before, I’d been to the doctor about my fainting fits. I was fainting a lot around then. I’d fainted that time after trying to make myself pee standing up. But there was a germ in there, you see, and that was the cause of the fainting. I’d let a germ in. But the doctor, do you know what he said to me? “You need a husband”, and, as I got up to leave, “Smile, Jean, just smile.” If there’d been anything I could have done to take the smile off his face I would have done it, let me tell you. And the next day, over lunch, Veronica looked over my shoulder and she said to me, “That Indian medical student has been staring at you the whole time”, and I knew that she was trying too hard, and I knew that she was troubled, and I said to Veronica, “How do you know he’s a medical student?”, and she said, “What else could a handsome Indian man in Dublin be but a medical student?”, and I said, “You’ve obviously not read about the recent murder case in Dublin in which a handsome Indian cook beat his Irish girlfriend to death with a pestle and hung her on a meat hook to drain and cut her into small pieces with a cleaver and put her in a pot of mince and served her to the guests in his restaurant.” And later, later the same day, after I drove all the way out to Dunleary and parked my car, a little Ford Anglia, by the coal pier, there was a man with a cap pulled low on his head carrying a bale of something wrapped in waxed butcher’s paper – paper which, now that I think about it, he probably used to masturbate with – and he startled me by peering in at my window and rapping on the glass with a penny, and I could see the yellow boiled sweet he was sucking, there in his mouth, and I drove further down the road to a place near the baths where in any case there was a view of the open sea. He was the last man I saw while I was alive for the first time. Can you imagine? But my problem now is not men, or how I feel about being one, or how and when I came to the decision to become one.’
‘While you were “alive for the first time”? Do you mean –’
‘I’m a ghost, you see, as well as anything else. Well, I’m technically not a ghost.’
‘No. You are technically not a ghost.’
‘No, I am a sort of reincarnated spirit.’
‘Yes, I can see how you might see yourself as a reincarnated spirit.’
‘I am a reincarnation of my own spirit. And the body that I occupy is my own.’
‘Interesting way of putting it.’
‘That was where I expired in the last life. In Dunleary, in my Ford Anglia, by the baths looking out to sea. I was young, but I had warnings, and the warnings did not alarm me. Just that morning, as I’ve told you, I’d had another collapse. Standing above my toilet with a bare foot on each arm of the mat. “To hell with it,” I used to say. “To hell with it”, like an American person. I would take it upon me – take off my black fashion pants, then my knickers. Sometimes I would feel that the angle was not right and I would have to bring my feet forward until my knees touched the freezing cistern and I would put my hands on the ceramic top and I would look at the window. It was not a window you could do much else with bu
t look at – you could not look through the window. The wavy surface of the glass I would think of as the wavy surface of the tide. The mould that clung there was seaweed drawn in the churn. I would feel for a moment a calmness, like I was part of something, a natural flow, that I never had to think or worry. I would think of water, how it sounded and moved, and I would listen to the sighs from inside the walls. My legs would quiver and they would not stop quivering. I would move my hands to the backs of my knees and I would be tense there, like metal traps. I would wait and I would push. I would wait for some command. I would get confused and I would wait for – I didn’t know – a feeling, something – waited and pushed and commanded it myself. I would say, “There must be some valve”, and then I would collapse. But because I had an explanation for these collapses – I had a germ inside me – and because I would always come round from them they did not panic me unduly. If I was standing when I felt a fit coming on, such as over a toilet, I made sure to sit down, such as on the toilet. And later that day by the baths in Dunleary I was already sitting down, in my Ford Anglia. I felt the usual sensation in my knees and saw an expanding blot in the centre of my vision, a spot of blight, a tear in the light, and I slipped away with typical compliance, dreaming of a world and a life not beyond the sea that I was facing but beyond the wastes that lay behind me. I did not think that the thing rising in my throat was blood and in any case I was so tired now. And it was with calmness too but confusion that I observed my body from the position of the angle of the windscreen and dashboard – the inside angle, the acute one. I seemed to be revolving slowly like a creature on a spit. This was the “I” that was observing, not the “I” that I was observing, who obviously was in no state to be observing. My body looked very sad and blue and large and clumsy, like a crow, dead, with its mouth slightly open and its tongue pale and dry and slipped. I think I wanted to cuddle myself, to keep my body warm, because it was curled, girding the heart, the way leaves curl, and I had been wearing a brown cardigan with a loose-knit weave that looked like it gave no protection at all. This other me – the one that I was now – felt so tiny and light and free, and yet I was not free because I was stuck on that axis, turning very, very slowly. So slowly that I only got long looks at my body after what seemed like many hours of passing through metal and glass and acrid precursors to modern plastic. After the completion of one of these rotations, perhaps the third or fourth, I noted sadly – although maybe I am just recalling it with sadness – that my body had fallen over to the side, so that the head was on the passenger seat, and the face was set in the weirdest leer. Everything began to change. “Began” is the wrong word. “Everything” is the wrong word. There was no beginning, no linear or planar arrangement of time, and there were no “things” in this new place, and “place” is the wrong word too in this context, clearly. Although I did at some point perceive sweetly scented soft domes in suspension which became stone and which I gnawed on and which caused some hidden teeth to break through my gums, gums which I had seemed to retain, or perhaps develop, for my journey, although “journey” is perhaps not the right word either. And I felt a ridge like the rib of a vault although I was not high up as under the vaulting of a roof but very low down as under the vaulting of a crypt, and I was pressing upwards, against this rib, and this pressure rolled me upwards with the rib towards a point where it and other ribs converged. A grinding sensation, or a grinding noise, gave way to a conversing sensation, that is, a conversation, between a greatly divided form of me or separately existing mes, and many others, all of whom I could easily occupy or assume, whose consciousnesses I could take on, who, in this everywhen, could say this and think that while another said this and thought this, and – was a button pressed? Yes, a button was pressed, revealing sections of governing code: obelus up-tack pilcrow interrobang caret ampersand caret inverted question mark hyphen right pointing guillemet interpunct comma underscore underscore underscore backslash dagger pilcrow interrobang tilde yen sign registered trademark manicule smiley face smiley face smiley face smiley face underscore asterism maqaf meteg smiley face –’
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