“Watch me, Penny! Watch me!” This was the primary command my mother opted for instead of “Come.” It demanded a moment of eye contact before further direction.
A few times my mother accidentally yelled, “Watch me, Grace! Watch me!” or called me Penny in the kitchen, when I was making coffee, then giggled at her mistake.
“Freudian, huh?”
In August, I let Joshua come to my parents’ house to keep me company. I feared letting someone see me so weak. I worried they were finding purpose in the job of loving me. But I’d done that with others so many times before. What right did I have to reject it?
“It’s okay to need me,” they insisted.
My parents’ home was a dollhouse. Perfectly placed black-and-white candelabras and strange sculptures that mimicked the swirls and curls in the wallpaper. Victorian fancy meets gothic haunting meets art deco fourth dimension. I wandered through the house like I was tripping, elements of the decor becoming animated, the art on the walls announcing its needs, its judgments, its will. I couldn’t walk through the second-floor staircase vestibule without all the German expressionist graphite pencil drawings smothering me in their preconfiguration of the Nazi agenda. Who were these naked women with party-hat-shaped breasts who had been reproduced by men in rimless glasses, like my own? Were the girls sixteen, seventeen, eighteen? Were they lovers or models for hire? Were they sex workers? Were they Jewish? Had the painters fucked them?
My dissociation made the house so grotesque that I observed its inhabitants like an anthropologist. In the living room, in a glass cabinet, evidence of the homeowners’ children—clay sculptures, stick-figure drawings of a family, cardboard dioramas, framed, printed photographs of two little white girls in matching red one-piece bathing suits. One of the children, Grace, had made dozens of clay busts of men, with square jaws and mustaches that curled up around their lips. Some of the busts were covered in phallic protrusions on their faces, chests, scalps, and arms. Some of the sculptures even looked like giant phalluses, giving birth to dozens of mini phalluses, covered in even littler phalluses. Phallus trees, masked as abstraction. What an odd little girl. Little pervert.
Sometimes Joshua and I took Penny on quiet walks, or we worked on teaching her to roll over and lift her paw. Joshua read or drew in bed next to me while I half slept and half cried. I didn’t know if or why I was sad. It seemed eternal. Years of grief—for what, I didn’t know—surfacing for a purge.
Joshua was patient with my incapacity. It wasn’t urgent to them that I “feel better.” They seemed to believe that whatever I was going through was necessary.
“Caterpillars don’t turn directly into butterflies,” they said. “They make a cocoon so that they can turn into goo, and then re-form.”
Joshua relied on the natural world for metaphors and seemed to have an unending store of them. It was part of their bodilyness, part of how they kept me close to earth and also why they made me squirm. Dirt, shit, grass, rot, cum, sweat, drool, and mold. Whereas I was appalled by any proof of my own materiality, mortality, they were soothed by it. They didn’t see the difference between themself and organic matter.
Goo, they kept saying. You’re in your goo stage.
I had lived under the illusion, my entire life, that within the chrysalis the caterpillar’s body simply stretched, shrank, and molted into a butterfly. I asked Joshua to read me encyclopedia entries explaining the process and learned that the caterpillar actually enters the chrysalis in order to eat itself alive. In that digestion, it becomes like a soup, liquid life that will ooze out of the cocoon if you slice it in half. When I learned the term “self-determination” I imagined it involved an act of miraculous creation. But the caterpillar destroys itself to determine itself. The killing and the becoming are one and the same. Out of its eating itself, its utter decomposition, it is born.
6
I GREW UP THINKING that the saddest thing possible was to die a nobody. I remember lying in bed awake at night, haunted by all the people I’d passed on the street that day whom no one would remember. How many years after their death until it was as if they had never existed at all? I remember feeling smothered on skinny streets with tall buildings on either side, wondering how many people alone in their apartments were loved by no one. I thought about all the people in the world alone in cages and rooms with no windows, hidden away. It seemed to me that if you were on no one’s mind, you were as good as dead. The greatest punishment possible was being forgotten.
When I was little, I thought I’d be famous when I grew up. At the very least, I would be great. It seemed like the only possible conclusion. That’s what happened to special people. And I had been told, again and again, that I was one of the most special of all. I had a special family and I lived in a special world. Everyone in it would, should, be remembered.
By the time I was a teenager I knew it was unseemly to admit my belief in my own value out loud. I still believed it, though. I clung to it. When I had disgusting thoughts, desires, I recited mantras to myself, affirming my own superiority. I’m special. I’m great. I will be greater than them.
When my sister got famous, I was terrified. It had happened to her, and this was when it occurred to me that it might not happen to me. The only thing that seemed worse than being a nobody was wishing for greatness and not getting it.
I dealt with this pain by trying to eat alive the part of me that had always believed I’d get what she’d already gotten. Preeminent known-ness. And I ate it alive by deciding it was evil. By deciding that fame was the counterpoint and, as such, the sibling of the processes that locked people away in rooms so they’d be forgotten. If I told myself success was evil, if I really believed it, then maybe I wouldn’t want it anymore.
Whenever I noticed the desire in myself to be praised, to be recognized or rewarded, I told myself I was awful. I became a stand-in for the monolithic violence that made some people demigods and some people subhuman.
Analyzing the ideological violence of your own fear and longing is not, I’ve learned, the way to make that longing go away. It might even lodge it down further, drive it into the core of you, where it hardens and knots up, until it can’t be dissolved.
My hurt made my sister’s fame seem sinister. Not only because of envy, because of anger, but because of loss. I saw fame changing her life, pulling her away. The more I saw her name in print, her face reproduced, the more I suspected she was always on people’s minds when they interacted with me, the more difficult it was to experience her as real, as a soft, warm body. That’s not because she was any closer to dead. Nor was it her fault. It’s what fame, the massiveness of its distortions, did to me.
In lots of dictionaries the third or fourth entry under “name” is some version of “a famous person.” That’s the definition I scan to, the one that catches, the one that rings in my ears. A name is always a stand-in, a metonym for a whole person. But fame pulls the being and the name even further part. The name becomes bigger than the being. My proximity to fame made me cynical, and that cynicism made me suspicious that the purpose of a name is simple: we require a stable identity so that we can be known.
I can’t write about my name without writing about being known—the desire to be known, the disdain for and the fear of that desire, the sense that people believe they know you before you’ve even revealed yourself, and, as a result, the desire to hide.
There are parallels between what is disorienting about being known and what is disorienting about being gendered. Both circumscribe who you can or cannot be before you have spoken.
When I returned to LA, after time with my parents, I deleted all my social media. I didn’t want to exist outside my body. I didn’t want to feel I was in anyone’s mind, ever. And I didn’t want to see my name anywhere, written out in letters. It made me dizzy. It made me humiliated. It made me feel evil.
The chemicals of the new antidepressant had leveled out, but I still wasn’t able to do much. I did walk every day to a flat r
idge at the top of a steep dirt path, up the road from Lake’s and my house. We call it “the thinking spot.” If it hasn’t rained for a long time, the ridge is just tan dust, littered with beer cans, shards of glass, and other dispossessed items as wide-ranging as a car hood, a children’s bicycle, or a moldy “For Sale” sign. But when it rains, even for a day, grass sprouts up overnight, green blades pricking through mud. There’s a rope swing, too, hanging from the low, spindly branch of a black walnut tree that looks like a tarantula.
At the thinking spot, I developed a habit, a hobby even, of collecting and making piles of trash. I organized the shards of glass into colors, like Venus (mother of Grace, the boy), whom I met at the sea glass beach in Northern California. When the piles got big enough, I brought up a garbage bag and filled it up, then slid down the path with what I’d collected and emptied it into nearby waste and recycling bins. The trash collecting calmed me. I liked being around anonymous refuse. I liked cleaning up chaos.
Also at the thinking spot, looking up at the black walnut tree branches quivering against the sky, I began the practice of trying to fill up every single pocket of my body with air, in order to feel myself from the inside out. Into my toes, into the arches of my feet, into my shins. Into my bladder, into my anus, into my hip bones, into my colon, into my ribs, my armpits, and even my breasts.
The more of myself I felt, the more that Grace just…drifted away. As if I’d closed my eyes for a long time and when I opened them she was far out at sea, on the other side of a swell, a white spot appearing and reappearing in the water. There was no bringing her back, even if I wanted to.
I wanted to be nameless, nothing, the opposite of known. And yet I had no idea how. To aspire to be known was the only way I’d ever been taught to be alive.
The less I wanted a name, the more compulsively I named everything I saw. Tree. Glass. Car. Hill. Gun. Chicken. Knife. Shit. Cunt. Acorn. Caterpillar. Restaurant. I lay in the grass at the thinking spot and imagined myself as every other thing in the universe I could ever name, so diffuse and infinite as to be indiscernible, as to be unnameable.
In November I told Joshua I didn’t want to be called Grace anymore. Each day I imagined myself with the name of a different man I pulled from the folds of my memory. Samuel, the name of my mother’s father, an orthodontist who used to let me play with his dentistry tools. He had three last names over the course of his life, each one less Jewish sounding than the last, and told me stories about a talking shark that had followed him “from Coney Island to Saipan.”
Simon, the first two syllables of Samuel’s original last name. Edward, my late uncle, a lawyer who looked like a more clean-cut version of my father and had an encyclopedic knowledge of Civil War history. Michael, the archangel, and my third-grade teacher, who taught me about white holes, the opposite of black holes, out of which the disappeared matter emerges into another dimension. Mark (Wahlberg). John, the boy from America they found hiding in the caves in Afghanistan after 9/11, whose voice haunted me as Amelia Earhart’s had before him. Amelia’s voice had been a high-pitched whistle through the sky. John’s lips were so chapped, his tongue so dry, that he could barely get words out. I remember seeing pictures of John on the front pages of the papers at the subway newsstands when I was a kid. He was naked, blindfolded, and tied up. Kids at school said mean things about John and protective rage surged up in me. He’d felt so lonely, so isolated, that he’d done something much of the world saw as evil just to be embedded in a community. At least, that’s why I imagined he’d done it. They brought him back to America for a trial, to decide whether he would get the death penalty or go to prison forever. At night, when I closed my eyes, I saw his white, bearded skeleton face on the inside of my eyelids, loneliness behind everything. He looked dead even though he wasn’t, yet.
I remembered the name one morning, sitting out on the porch in the mist before Joshua or Lake woke up. In the room where Joshua and I slept at my parents’ house, there was a piece of green paper, framed and hung on the wall. It was the list of names my mother had chosen from when I was born. Betty, Myrna, Georgia, Esther, Jane, and a dozen more girls’ names. Grace was circled. On the right side, under the “Boy” column, just one name. Cyrus.
I whispered it, said it slowly, pressed my tongue against the back of my teeth to whistle the first syllable, pushed my lips out for the soft r, let my mouth curl around the us. Then I wrote it down, again and again. I wrote a big capital C on a sheet of paper from one of my yellow legal pads. The C opened its mouth for the following letters. Then I practiced in cursive. Then all caps. Then block letters.
Over breakfast, I slid the paper across the table to Joshua, facedown.
“Don’t say it out loud,” I told them. “I’m too shy to hear it.”
They didn’t look up, just scribbled, then slid the paper back over to me. They’d written an acrostic, “Grace” and “Cyrus” intersecting at the r, an uneven crucifix. I folded the piece of paper up and put it in my jacket pocket. We didn’t talk about it anymore. I told no one else.
A couple of days later, Joshua called me Cyrus during sex. I was on top of them, in the dark, their arms wrapped around the back of my neck. It was the kind of sex that made me feel like a man, which we’d been having more of lately. They said the name and I came, without anticipating it.
The next night they said it again. Cyrus. This time, impulsively, I told them to shut up. I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled over onto my back, unmoving. The humiliation of asking to be something you’re not. I’d already been denied when I asked to be called Jimmy years ago.
I apologized to Joshua profusely for having been so curt.
The next day I taped the piece of yellow paper to the wall inside my closet, so I’d have to look at it whenever I changed clothes. Sometimes I admired the shapes of the letters; other times I averted my eyes.
Cyrus remained a stranger whose ways I was trying to understand.
How would he wear his hair? How would he cuff his pants? Would he be bold with his opinions or listen and offer insight only when asked for it? Would he stay up late, meeting strangers? Would he take pleasure in spontaneity? Would he know that he was his best self at six a.m., put himself to bed early with his papers and pencils organized geometrically on the desk? Would he have lovers or prefer solitude? Would he push his hair back or let it fall in his face? Would he believe that the way things are can be changed or accept their immutability and go inward? Would he lift weights or would he run when he was moved to, even in the dark, or when it was raining? Would he have countless acquaintances or a handful of friends he kept extremely close? Would he believe in marriage? Would he be on time? Would he have Instagram? Would he be a vegetarian or would he buy steak at the grocery store to cook in a pan when he was home alone? Would he do ketamine on a Saturday night or sit upright at the table, reading, with a pot of herbal tea he’d just brewed? Would he meditate? Would he be a masochist? Would he take long walks with no destination? Would he read novels or philosophy? Would his journal entries be narrative or poetic? Would he travel? If he traveled, would he do it alone? Would he have sex with strangers and tell no one it had happened? Would he have sex with men? Would he be on Grindr? If he was on Grindr, would he post shirtless selfies, or ones of him in button-downs, his hair parted on the side, his glasses still on? Would he keep his cocks on the windowsill, or in a box in a drawer in his closet? Would he ever wear sneakers? Would he ever wear khakis? Would he look gay or straight? Would he be happy living in the country? Would he be polyamorous? Would he be celibate? Would he give a stranger a ride? Would he make money? Would he care about money? Would he be successful? Would he value success? Would he ever give advice? Would he wear short-sleeved polo shirts? Would he keep his word? Would he answer emails immediately? Would he speak another language? Would he be a socialist? Would he have opinions? If he had opinions, would he share them? Would he be a service top, or a dominant top, or a power bottom, or a submissive bottom, or all of the above? Wou
ld he have a beard? Would he have hair on his chest? Would he be able to fall in love? Would he rather wake up alone? Would he be a father? Would he have a dog he took with him everywhere? Would the dog be big? Would he cry? Would he introduce himself as Cyrus or Cy? What truth did the name contain? Was Cyrus inside of me already or had I invented him?
I told a few more close friends about Cyrus, mostly in texts or emails. It was too scary to say it out loud. But the name spread. Soon I was running into people who called me “Cy,” even though I’d never asked them to. Quickly, it seemed irreversible. I mourned Grace each time I was addressed as Cyrus. The new name rang with guilt for abandoning the old one, as if I’d been tasked with Grace’s care and I’d harmed her.
When people asked me what I wanted to be called, I froze.
“Either is fine,” I’d say, or, “Whichever you prefer.”
Being addressed was a constant reminder of my own lack of self-knowledge. I asked Joshua to call me nothing for a while.
When people asked me how I’d picked the name, I was hesitant to admit its place on my parents’ green list. My selection of Cyrus suggested loyalty as opposed to differentiation. But seeing “Cyrus” written in my mother’s looping script comforted me. As if Cyrus had always been there, waiting in an adjacent dimension.
When I went places where I had to meet new people, I tried to swallow my words while introducing myself. If people asked me my name, I pretended I couldn’t hear them. If they asked again, I said whatever came into my mind first. I’d tell one person in a circle I was Cyrus, then turn to another and say I was Grace. Cyrus, Grace, Cyrus, Cy, Grace. I noticed that when I introduced myself as Grace, my voice had a higher pitch. I was more concerned with politeness, adjusting my voice and speech to make whomever I was speaking to more comfortable. Cyrus, on the other hand, felt entitled to speak briefly, or not speak at all.
A Year Without a Name Page 9