A Year Without a Name

by Cyrus Grace Dunham

  After an hour of wandering, I pulled her into the bathroom and pressed her against the wall, reaching under her dress. I couldn’t tell whether her resistance was part of the game, and my uncertainty made me tentative.

  “This is too premeditated,” she said. We returned to the party.

  I was drunk enough not to feel completely spurned, but ashamed I hadn’t known better. I felt like a little girl, too self-conscious to get anything right. And also, like a man. A boundary-crossing, despicable man.

  I drank the shame off, ordering round after round for us both. We danced, together and with her friends. As much as I longed for her attention, I liked watching the ease with which she moved through the room, the seriousness with which she spoke about ideas, even in settings like this one. And when she danced, which I hadn’t yet seen her do without hesitation, she threw her head back and laughed, seemingly toward no one. It turned me on to observe the details of her personhood outside me.

  Too shitfaced at the end of the party to figure out how to get home, she collapsed onto a bench at the edge of the garden. Her friend got us a taxi to share with two rich girls (Zoya called them that; I wouldn’t have opened myself up to the accusation of being called one, too). I spent the ride home putting all my energy into keeping down the swell of nausea rising in my chest. When we arrived at the guesthouse the gates to the building were locked. It took another thirty minutes to walk the perimeter of the compound and find a night watchman to let us in through a back gate. We stumbled back to the building, where she intermittently yelled at and shushed me, dragging me to the roof for her final cigarette of the night.

  One cigarette turned into two, and soon she wanted to drink more. She had taken a bottle of something from the party. I couldn’t say no.

  There was messy sweetness between us again. I was learning that she saved her affection for our time alone together. She kissed my cheek, and I wrapped my arms around her body.

  “Hi, Grace.”

  “Hi, Zoya.”

  “Hi, Grace.”

  We passed the bottle back and forth. I told her I was too drunk. She said the alcohol would help.

  We went downstairs and climbed into bed. I undressed her and kept my clothes on, lying on top of her with my arms around her. In the dark she pressed her lips against my ear and asked me to overwhelm her.

  This was an audition: What if I wasn’t sharp enough with my language? What if I didn’t walk the line between care and humiliation with enough mastery? What if I took my confrontations too far? Was I putting on a show, or trying to reflect her back so clearly that she couldn’t live without me as her mirror? Did she want me to worship or degrade her? Were the two different?

  I told her to say what she meant and stop hiding behind complex concepts and big words. Then I told her to drink less and stop fucking men because she was bored.

  Her breathing changed and I entered the meditation of controlling another person’s experience entirely.

  I told her, in quick succession, not to lie, hide, evade emotion, or ever think that she could do anything without my seeing her underlying wishes and fears. I told her I knew her better than she knew herself.

  She lay flat on her stomach; I fell asleep draped across her back and slept through the night.

  The first night I truly slept embracing someone was also the first night I had sex. I’d slept pressed up against friends before, but never had I wrapped my body fully around someone else’s. At least not since I was a little girl, nestled against my mother.

  The first person I had sex with was a girl I’d been obsessed with since I was fourteen. She read alone on the steps during lunch instead of socializing. She had an older boyfriend. She was a beautiful writer. I was enamored of her combination of solitude, talent, and promiscuity.

  The night after my high school graduation we had sex on top of the pink linen sheets of my parents’ bed. She lay on her back and I put my mouth on her and my fingers inside her. I’d thought about these actions so many times that it seemed as if they had already happened. She didn’t try to touch me, and I was relieved. Being touched never figured into my fantasies. When I imagined her she was always with a boy, handsome, kind, and subdued, until she was underneath him. I was not him, but I flickered in and out of his body, in the glow of her love.

  I woke up with her sleeping in my arms, my face buried in her hair. Sex had finally happened outside of me, in the world, with someone. I was real now.

  It didn’t last. As soon as we were apart, I replayed the encounter until it was as immaterial as all my other fantasies. Somehow, my fixation on having sex again was much more insidious than desire in the abstract. At least, when I’d only had sex in my mind, I relied on myself for fulfillment. Dependency on another—for validation, for existence—was precarious. But there was no turning back.

  Later in the summer, curled up in the dark in my adolescent bedroom, she cried when I touched her and told me she wanted to be my best friend, my sister, my daughter, that she wanted to be me, but that she wasn’t in love with me. This was an early introduction to the multiplicity of roles wrapped up in queerness, though I didn’t narrate it as such at the time. My worst fears had been confirmed: my touch was so unwanted that it brought my beloved to tears. My desire was inherently violating.

  I spent the rest of the summer holding her hand and sleeping with my arms wrapped around her, adamant that the ways she needed me were enough to fulfill my own needs. In August, I went with her to a cabin in Maine with no electricity, where she spent the summers with her mother. The night we arrived on the island, we had sex on a rocky beach next to a bioluminescent bay. She was the only body I had ever been inside of (though I lied to her about this, to gain the protective armor of experience), and I couldn’t summon, or even imagine, desire for anyone else.

  We slept on the beach, and in the morning I leaned over to kiss her. She leaned away and said, “You want more? For me, it’s like there was a bubble growing inside of me. Then it burst. Now I’m satisfied.”

  I did want more. I lied and said, “I understand.”

  If I couldn’t be the boy she desired, at least I’d be the girl who understood.

  I convinced Zoya not to return home when she’d planned to; instead, we went away for two days to a regal, shabby hotel in a fifteenth-century fort on the side of a mountain that she’d once heard was “romantic.” She ordered a taxi to drive us there in the dark.

  The drive was two hours; we stopped once at a McDonald’s in the shadow of two empty, unfinished high-rise buildings, with no windows, but neon signs that read “The Paradise” and “The Escape.” We kissed in a bathroom stall, and I told her that, in Maine, McDonald’s serves lobster rolls; in New Mexico, sopapillas. She pulled me back to the car, where we rode in silence, clutching each other.

  Our room was high up in the fort, with an arched stone ceiling and tall wood-framed windows that opened out to balconies. We flopped onto the bed, little girls in a hotel, then dissected the particularities of the context, whom it was meant for, and how it came to be. The fort had once belonged to a king who filled its rooms with wonders and oddities.

  She wrote and I read next to her; every fifteen minutes or so, she’d take a break and kiss me on the cheek. It was the first night we spent together that we didn’t drink. When she was done I pulled her to bed, where we stayed until sunrise, talking. Mostly, we talked about writing—whether it mattered, why she wanted to do it. I told her I wasn’t sure if I had it in me, that I couldn’t write without feeling my words were an unnecessary contribution. She agreed and disagreed, which made me trust her mind.

  “Falling in love makes me want to write, though.” I garnered strength from indirect confession. Vulnerability without submission.

  She was silent for a moment.

  “Please don’t turn me into a fiction,” she said. “It would be a shame if you did.”

  What would become of us if we wrote each other into our records? What could she mean to me, over time,
if her love was the narrative device that brought me into being?

  We woke up late, disoriented, the sun already in the middle of the sky. I lay on the bed watching her get dressed—picking which trousers to wear, applying perfume, gathering her things. Something I’d taken comfort in since I was a child, sitting dutifully on the bed watching my mother practice the same ritual.

  She wanted to see the town, and so we walked slowly down the hill. As we made our way down the tiered levels of the fort—all of which had been turned into sitting areas, dens, lounges for the hotel guests—she talked to me about this “colonial fantasy” we were participating in, allowing ourselves to romance each other inside of. She continued the game of prodding at my involvement.

  “Would you like a camel ride? Would that add to this fantasy, make your experience that much more authentic?”

  It was becoming clear that she, like me, struggled with a secondary, analytical voice that prevented her from taking total pleasure in anything. Whether it was sex, a beautiful room, a quiet walk—we were in any given moment until one of us stepped outside it to qualify and undo it.

  On the town’s main street, a dirt road lined with vendors at the bottom of the hill, I became nauseous. Zoya sat me down on a stone step and went to find me a Coca-Cola. I watched some dogs and pigs rooting through a pile of trash, ringed by the moat of a drainage ditch, until she returned. She placed her hand on the back of my neck and held the Coke while I sipped it from a straw. She stroked my neck.

  She surveyed the town’s main street. “Trash in the roads,” she said. “Trash in the rivers. Trash in the ocean. Trash filling up the world.” She couldn’t separate the apocalyptic from the romantic—the former informing the imperative for the latter.

  The town smelled like jasmine and burnt plastic. I asked her if she thought it was possible for a white person to write about India, in any way at all, without reiterating tropes of orientalism, without falling into romantic exotification.

  “Definitely not,” she said. “But one could try.”

  We walked by a gated girls’ school with two symmetrical painted peacocks facing each other above the entrance. A small sign on the gate read, “We shape our girls in such a way that they will have radiant faces, inquisitive intellect, strong willpower, and self-reliance in life.”

  “That’s us,” Zoya said. “We’re very good girls.”

  She was joking, but this was exactly the type of girl I had tried to be, had been praised for being.

  “I have an idea that might be silly,” she said. “Should we get a photo taken?” Two doors down from the pharmacy, in a six-foot-wide storefront, a young man sat behind a computer, surrounded by color-corrected, almost fluorescent photos of babies, couples, teenage girls, and families. Each subject posed in front of a different background—a regal palace, a grassy pasture, an interior whose furniture was printed with pineapple motifs. She explained that the photographer would shoot us in front of a blank white wall, then decide for himself what background to place behind us. We would get two copies, three hundred rupees, or thirty cents, each, and the original image too, if we liked. We sat in the waiting room, finishing the Coke. She told me about the history of these photo studios, which had arrived in India in the early twentieth century. People traveled for days to see themselves captured in a photograph for the first time.

  We entered the photo studio and let the photographer tell us what to do with our bodies. He gestured for me to lift my chin, for Zoya to demurely lace her fingers together at her pelvis. He placed me behind her and wrapped my left arm around her waist. I was the groom and I liked it. He flashed the bulb twice and told us to come back in thirty minutes.

  When I was a kid, my mom took pictures of dolls and ventriloquist dummies. She had metal cabinets where she organized toys by color and size—plastic cowboys, plastic horses, and plastic housewives. She had every kind of food, but miniature. When there was film left on the end of a roll, she let me shoot pictures on her camera. After she got them developed, we looked at the slides together on a light box.

  “You and your sister,” she used to say, “are the best works of art your father and I ever made.”

  Zoya and I walked down the road holding hands. It was getting late, and the whole town was bathed in yellow light. Rows of teenagers were walking home from school, groups of girls holding hands. An older man shook my hand and welcomed me from America.

  We passed a clothing outlet called Facebook Fashions, a banner (same font and logo as the corporation) hung between two buildings. We each took pictures of the other in front of it, and she continued to tease me. “You can tell your friends that, in India, they name stores after social media platforms. We’re just that desperate to be Western.”

  She bought an apple at a fruit stand for a donkey at the hotel we’d seen tied to a tree. She explained that she’d have to take bites out of the apple and feed them to the donkey herself. We walked by a stand selling pale green, gray, and orange scarves, and she suggested I use them as pocket squares. I asked her to pick two for me, and she chose pale blue and pale gray crisscrossed with a grid of red lines.

  At some point I asked her if she thought we looked strange to people. She replied, tersely, that nobody cared—either we were friends holding hands, or I looked like a man. We continued to negotiate this tension—between my curiosity about how we appeared in a context unfamiliar to me, and her impatience with my assumption that our behavior was any riskier here than in the spaces of my American life.

  We returned to collect our photographs. We each got an envelope with two glossy pictures inside it. I’d like to be someone pictures didn’t matter to, but I’ve always cherished photos of myself and someone I love or long for. Proof that I am, in fact, a person who loves and is loved, who fucks, who is coupled. When I see an image like this, it still feels like a miracle. Me? My arm around a woman? A beautiful woman?

  The sun was setting. One side of the sky was still pink, fading into a deep, bright blue. It was almost a full moon. On the way back up the hill, we passed a big willowlike tree emanating a chorus of high-pitched calls. A peacock lifted from a branch and flew in front of the moon, landing on a telephone wire. I screamed because I didn’t know peacocks could fly. She told me not to talk, and soon I could make out two, three, five more peacocks, perched throughout the tree like it was their house. I asked if they were wild, and she whispered they were probably put here, a long time ago, by the king, to make people feel royal; but now, what’s the difference. I tried to talk again and she put her finger over my lips, shut me up so I wouldn’t scare them off. We stood there in silence until it was too dark to see them, except for the ones on the branches closest to the orb of the moon.

  I said the image reminded me of a tarot card—the peacocks crossing in front of the rising moon felt like a prescient symbol, one meant for us and us alone. I wasn’t sure what the message was, but I wanted this moment to be a signal. I wanted proof I was in the right place. I wanted proof that I was falling in love with a person, not grasping for myself.

  There was hardly anyone on the return flight. Each passenger had a whole row. Foggy after two glasses of red wine, I lay splayed out under the prepackaged blue blankets and watched Deepwater Horizon, a big-budget movie about the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Mark Wahlberg played the protagonist; a pale, beefy family man who had contempt for BP executives and an intuitive relationship to the black sludge he and the other offshore drill operators sucked from the bottom of the ocean. Halfway into the film the rig explodes. For the remainder of the movie, a group of white men, with the exception of one black man and one Latina woman, caked in blood and petroleum, navigate the flaming rig; one character is burned alive, another crushed to death, others catapulted into the ocean. Ultimately, only Mark Wahlberg’s character and the woman survive.

  The film was a parable: men destroyed by the extractive industry for which they are the foot soldiers. Except for Mark Wahlberg, the hero. During the lowest depressive d
ips of my closeted high school experience, I googled Mark Wahlberg multiple times daily. Young Mark Wahlberg. Young Mark Wahlberg in a wifebeater. Shirtless Mark Wahlberg. Mark Wahlberg girlfriend. I ran my eyes over the notches of his six-pack, the way his briefs hugged his hips without skin pushing out over the edges, the ratio of length difference between the sides of his dark brown hair and the top.

  In the middle of the second leg of the trip, I dreamed I was in a small plane with an unfamiliar man, flying low in the dark above water, toward uninhabited mountains faintly visible in the distance. We dropped. I hoped our momentum would propel us over the mountains to a landing strip. But we couldn’t make it. I came to consciousness in frigid water, in near pitch black, tangled in seaweed. I intuited that the man was dead, facedown in the water. I was alone, no light or sign of company in my worldview.

  I woke up to Amelia Earhart’s voice, a fast, indiscernible whisper. She’d haunted my mind since I was eight or nine, when I found a book about her in the library of my new school. When she was a little girl in Kansas, she made long lists of the most successful men in industries like sports, politics, Hollywood, and business. I kept lists too. I wrote down descriptions of all the types of facial hair I’d seen in one day, or of the most handsome men I saw on the subway. I had a little table where I drew and made things, and I hid the lists there, underneath other stacks of paper. At night I went through the lists in my mind, imagining my dad in the outfits of men I’d catalogued, then imagining myself in them too.