A Year Without a Name

by Cyrus Grace Dunham

  During my Vicodin naps, I kept seeing Amelia Earhart, John the terrorist, and Joan of Arc swimming through my dream space. Joan’s breasts were pulled taut with white fabric, underneath her armor. In one vision, I saw her breasts sliced off in a single sword cut. “Okay, Joan,” a man said, “we’ll make you who you want to be.” She would be flat, two perfect red circles, like the blood moon, where the breasts had been.

  A few weeks before surgery I asked a writer I admired how they know when a book is finished. They responded with a question: “When did you believe your name was Cyrus?”

  The answer was never, or sometimes, or not yet, fully. Conviction comes in bursts, as does fraudulence. Sometimes I say “Cyrus” out loud and there’s an electric click inside me, the click of alignment. The name Cyrus doesn’t knock me out of my body. But Cyrus is also tentative, a liberating gesture that I always fear will be taken from me when I’m yanked back to reality by the “truth.” That I’m a girl, and a daughter, and to claim anything else is to lie. That I’m consigned to being a liar forever. Who would ever believe me?

  The week before my surgery, one of my best friends, Chaya, sent me an email with no subject line quoting a Bible passage on the Tower of Babel, which earth’s people built after traveling east to escape a great deluge:

  Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth. Genesis 11: 4.

  The people wished to be known by God, to reach up to the heavens and become stars. God did not approve of this hunger for ascendance, for recognition. And so he destroyed the tower, scrambled its inhabitants across the world. Prior to this, all of earth’s people spoke a single common language; from then on, they spoke mutually unintelligible languages. This dispersal was called the confusion of tongues.

  God’s destruction of the tower implies that the will to “make a name” for oneself is full of ego, deserving of punishment. And some people still believe this: that the will to rename oneself is naive at best, grandiose at worst. That naming oneself is akin to playing God.

  But what is the alternative? To let other people play God? To accept the constraints of a given name, as if acceptance is always humble?

  If I am a tower, then I name myself with the knowledge that I will be dispersed, not that I will cohere. Any name can be destroyed, can destroy itself. My value is not in my permanence but in the resilience with which I recover, and re-recover, and re-form after the deluge. I know myself only insofar as I know that I will always surprise myself, that “I” will collapse and be scrambled whenever I think my own structure is sound. I know myself only insofar as I know I am not singular, that what I am in this moment is born out of everyone I have known, that when the deluge comes I will be washed away, nameless.

  Cyrus is a sign and he may not last. And still, I choose to be him now. I need to be him now. I choose to move toward something like manhood—a mercurial concept in which my belief flickers—because, for reasons I still do not know, it makes me feel closer to earth, to everyone and everything else in the flood.

  Seven days after the procedure, a nurse removed the gauze in the doctor’s office. She gave me a small hand mirror so that I could look at the contours of my new chest as she peeled away the cotton and removed the stitches from my grafted-on nipples. The left side of my chest was fluttering, like a hummingbird. It looked alive. Along the line of the incision, where the skin buckled together from being restitched, I was pulsing and rippling. It hadn’t occurred to me I’d be able to see my own heartbeat. I was right there.

  Lake and Roman had driven up from LA to get me. The two of them are in love now. Lake held my right hand and Roman held my left foot while the nurse undressed my wounds. Lake told me later that my eyes rolled back in my head when they took the gauze off. She said I looked like I’d just been beamed down into my body for the first time. It was so disarming for her to watch me be born that she fainted. I saw her register my awe, my fear, then watched her body sway and fall. Roman leaped to the ground and held her head in his hands. I looked from Lake to my nipples, to Roman’s hands, to Lake, to my nipples. We were in a triangle, in that moment; it seemed like we all had one head, one heart.

  My nipples were gray, almost green in parts. They’d been puckered and pink like raspberries before; the precious nipples my mother and father made. Sweet, soft, graceful nipples. I’d cut them off and tried to get an insurance company to pay for them to be sewed back on. Now I had saucers of dead skin, colors a body only produces when it’s struggling to heal.

  After the nurse finished taking out the stitches, I stood up and looked in the mirror. I was so much smaller than I’d expected, especially from the side; two or three inches thick, spine to sternum. It seemed impossible that my heart and lungs could fit in there.

  I couldn’t talk. I went to the bathroom, bent over the sink, let out convulsing sobs. My shoulders were hunched and rounded from the postsurgery compression top I’d had to wear for the last week. My chest was concave; my back was curled. I wept and wept, couldn’t stop. I walked through the waiting room, still weeping, past two teenage trans girls with their mothers, out into the medical complex parking lot.

  I sat in the back seat as we left the bay and drove down the I-5. We got out to use the bathroom a half hour south of San Jose. It was already over a hundred degrees. I was still hunched over in the button-down I’d worn to the doctor’s office. One of Roman’s wifebeaters was crumpled on the floor of the car.

  “You wanna wear this?”

  I unbuttoned the shirt slowly, then pulled the tank top over me without lifting my elbows above my shoulders. I went into the women’s restroom and an older woman screamed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  When I came back out and told Roman, he said, “You can’t use the women’s restroom anymore, man.”

  I walked in circles around the gas pumps while Lake and Roman kissed outside the convenience store. With each circle around the pumps, I tried to push my shoulders back a little farther, chest forward a little more. I tried to uncurl. I was afraid to look down and see my heartbeat twitching again. But each spin around I saw myself in the mirrored windows of the convenience store, tall and skinny, wide shouldered, hunched but trying to stand up tall.

  We got home at nine and I attempted to shower. It took an hour, working up the courage to stand in front of the water. I let the water hit the back of my neck and shoulders, wash over my chest from behind so it didn’t hit my nipples directly and dislodge the skin grafts. I threw up when I had to take the cotton off my nipples and see the rawness of these pieces of skin trying to reattach to my body. I got nauseous each time I looked down and saw my heart twitching. Why couldn’t I look at my own heart?

  Finally, dried off, I climbed into bed, turned the lights off, lay on my back. I scanned my whole body for feeling, feet to head, listened to the sounds outside. I laid my right hand over the left side of my chest to keep my heart safe, beating in my palm. I dreamed in the middle of the night that I woke up and a red hummingbird had pushed her way, beak first, through the sutures. I lay on my back and watched her buzz around my room in the predawn light. I stood up and walked over to the screen door, opened it, and watched the hummingbird slip out, down, and over the hillside.

  Afterword

  S​EPTEMBER 12, 2018, was the day my dad started calling me Cyrus. He’d known about the name for five months, but he hadn’t been able to make the shape with his tongue and lips. I saw him try, a few times, but he faltered.

  When I flew to visit them on September 10, it was the first time I’d been home in nine months. They greeted me as Grace at the door. That night, before bed, he said quietly, “I’m going to say Grace until the last possible moment. Until you tell me I have to stop saying it.”

  The next day he came with me to a barbershop and sat on a bench behind me while the barber tightened up my crew cut.

&nb
sp; “How old are you, son?” the barber asked.

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Oh,” he said. “You look young.”

  I sensed my father, who was sitting behind me, prickle with protectiveness. He stood up, walked over.

  “Cy,” he said, “I’m going to the car to get my book.” He said it with conviction, as if he’d waited to make the proclamation until he was certain he could.

  It’s been almost five months since my surgery. The incisions on my chest are closed up, except for an inflamed red patch underneath my right nipple that’s twice as thick as the rest of the scar. The left side of the scar reaches two inches farther toward my back than the right side. I’m working to be at peace with the asymmetry, even though I don’t think it’s beautiful. There are hard knots under the surface of the scar that crunch when I press on them. I squeeze them between the side of my pointer finger and the pad of my thumb to break them up. Every two days I peel off strips of beige silicone scar tape and rub vitamin E oil into the tissue. I still can’t lift my elbows above my shoulders. I have no sensation in my new nipples, but I have phantom sensitivity toward the middle of my chest, where the nerve endings of my old ones are.

  I’ve been on testosterone for seven months. I give myself the shot on Tuesdays, alternating between the left and right sides of my stomach. The most painful part is the first second, when the needle breaks the skin; after that, it slides in without resistance. I look forward to Tuesdays all week and visualize the needle 90 percent submerged in my abdominal fat when I’m overwhelmed or can’t fall asleep. The image calms me down. On Tuesdays, I wait to give myself the shot until I have a moment spacious enough for a proper ritual. Once the clear liquid has dripped into the syringe, I point the needle toward the sky and flick the plastic until the tiny bubbles gather into one pocket of air. I tilt the syringe slightly, back and forth, until it’s perfectly level and I can catch the bubble at the needle’s entrance. Then I release the remaining air. That’s my second-favorite part, other than looking at the needle when it’s inside me. The hours after the shot are my most deeply felt hours in the week. My skin tingles and everything looks beautiful. I am close to earth, attuned to and entangled in interconnectedness.

  My clitoris is four times as big as it used to be. My skin is oilier. When I’m at the gym, studying men’s bodies, I feel a heat in between my legs I’ve never felt before. Sometimes my eyes involuntarily travel to their groins, and I picture them seated, with their arms behind their head. I’m kneeling in front of them, blowing them.

  I have two patches of dark hair where my chin meets my neck. I shave every two or three days, and I touch the stubble all the time when I’m thinking or talking. I was ashamed of the hair at first, as though my masculinity was erupting out of me. But I also fantasize about having more, above my lips, on my thighs, in a triangle over my sternum.

  I’ve tipped over the edge somehow, and now most people in public think I’m a man, or at the very least, a boy. I pitch my voice down at gas stations and convenience stores so as not to confuse anyone I interact with.

  People don’t talk to me in public the way they used to, on airplanes, buses, or trains, waiting in line for something. Like I am no longer open for dialogue. When I am friendly, I often sense strangers’ discomfort, as if I’d only be kind in order to get something. To manipulate or accrue more power. I want to say, “But I’m a girl.” Or, “I was born a girl.” Or, “I was a girl once.”

  But, of course, I never say that. And, also, I’m not sure if I ever was. Instead I just pitch my voice back up, rupture my masculinity on the off chance that a stranger will understand.

  I used to stay home just to avoid the possibility of getting called “she” in public. But sometimes it feels as bad to be a man, especially when women flash their hatred at me. Occasionally, I attempt to use the women’s room; I imagine the familiarity will be comforting. But usually, within seconds, a woman chastises me. It’s worse when she looks terrified. I feel defeated and horrific, like I’ve disappointed every single mother I ever wanted to make proud.

  It’s scarier, if less resonant, when men flash their hatred at me. I was walking down Hyperion Boulevard in Silver Lake the other day, and I saw a tall blond man in a dress shirt approaching from up the block, holding a giant street sweeper across his shoulders.

  “You’re on the wrong side of the sidewalk, mate,” he said. He was British.

  “Excuse me?” I said politely, trying to understand.

  His eyes got wide. Red and seething. As if upon hearing my voice, he realized something he hadn’t yet. He said, “So you’re fucking with me, faggot?”

  Then he ran at me and swung the street sweeper at my head.

  I took off down the middle of Hyperion Boulevard, in my mesh athletic shorts and tank top. As I dodged cars, I thought about how boys made fun of me for running like a girl when I was a girl. How I probably still ran like a girl. But I wasn’t a girl anymore: the man with a broom was chasing another man, a feminine man. The anger is never because someone thinks I’m a girl pretending to be a boy. It’s because someone thinks I am a man failing to be a man. This type of violence is new to me.

  When I don’t open my mouth, I can slip into anonymity. Another white boy with his head down. I’m unmarked, invisible, and I like it.

  GD is the person I’m in love with now. I call them GD as a joke; those are the initials of a philosopher they used to pretend to like to impress men. They call me GD, too, the initials of my “dead name.” I gave them permission. They call me Cyrus when they’re talking about me to other people. When we’re alone, they call me Jimmy, the chosen name of my childhood that no one acknowledged. I have many names for them, too. Different feelings demand different names.

  I spoke to GD every day of my surgery recovery, lying on my back on the twin bed in the child’s bedroom. But I omitted GD from my initial narration of that week, which is the last chapter of this book. When I sent them the writing from that week, they asked if I’d left them out because I was ashamed to have fallen in love again, if I thought falling in love signaled a failure to self-actualize.

  I told them I wanted to protect them from becoming a character. I didn’t like how writing about people made me see them—the moments I’d chosen to write became realer than the moments I hadn’t. Sometimes it seems safer to omit, as a form of protection.

  But some part of me also hoped, even believed, that if I changed my name, started hormones, and removed my breasts, my need for acknowledgment would lessen. I’ve read enough Bildungsromans to want an ending marked by personal sovereignty. And I thought I’d get it, at times: independence, autonomy, resolution. Individuation pulls at me even when I think I’m outrunning it.

  I had always imagined that I’d be alone after top surgery; single, but still surrounded by friends, family, former partners who have become family. As if, breastless and complete, I would be cured of codependent attachment.

  Even though GD and I spoke throughout that week—and, in fact, I was in a near constant dialogue with my closest friends, with former partners, too—I do remember those seven days as if I was entirely by myself. I recall lying on my back in the dark, still but not sleeping, alone in the room of my mind. Under the monogrammed yellow sheets of another family’s female child.

  It seems contradictory that I could have felt so entirely alone when, as the pages of this book evidence, it is impossible to know myself outside of other people. For so long, I could only catch flares of something that felt like my “self” in the eyes of whomever I desired. Whenever I stopped catching those flares, I chased new sets of eyes.

  The truth is that, after all this, I still feel a special kind of euphoria in being witnessed. Something crystalline and hyperreal. Call this being: being in love, or being with. This story cannot end with solitary self-reliance. I am more at home in my body than ever before. But there are moments of profound and eternal-feeling aloneness. And still, I seek to be seen.

  GD came to Los Ang
eles ten days after my surgery. I drove to pick them up at LAX in my convertible even though I wasn’t supposed to drive yet. I put the shoulder belt behind my back so it wouldn’t rub my wounds and I kept my elbows in my lap while I steered. I drove GD to International Road and parked on the other side of a chain-link fence from the airplanes. The top of my convertible was down and they pulled my shirt off over my head. They pressed their ear against my chest to listen to my heartbeat. After, we looked at each other for a long time and they told me my pupils were dilated. They’d been dilated since surgery. They stayed dilated for many weeks after.

  Each day GD was in Los Angeles they painted bacitracin onto my nipples with a Q-tip, careful to cover the entire surface with clear ointment. They took pictures on their iPhone every day to document the changing colors: green-gray, purple, yellow, orange, and red.

  Later in the summer I went to visit them in Detroit, where they stay in a house on a canal. Their outdoor sink is overgrown with purple morning glory weeds, like the ones in my first memory, that bloom purple for the first part of the day and wrap their vines around the soap bottles or forks we leave on the shelf overnight.

  We went to a tributary of Lake Michigan called Torch Lake and I swam for the first time with my flat chest. It was raining and the water was turquoise. There were waves even though it wasn’t the ocean. I stood at the shore in my blue underwear, shivering. GD ran ahead and dove into the break. They went way out, farther than I did. I yelled at them to come back. They swam up to me and said I looked like a big boy. “A big boy next to a big lake.”

  I counted to eight and made myself jump in. The water was cold; it cut across the skin over my heart. I paddled over to GD, trying to swim even though I couldn’t extend my arms. I stretched out onto my back and GD held me up, just below the surface. I watched the blue water slosh over my chest. I felt my pupils dilate. I knew GD was watching me stare at my own chest.