by Sharon Heath
Before leaving I asked, “Just one thing has me a little confused: if you’ve made the transition, why do you still dress as a man?”
He looked at me as if I were crazy. “Do I look like a woman?” Considering the strong jut of his chin and his sharp cheekbones, I had to admit that he didn’t, not really.
“Well then, why in hell would I want people to think of me as a freak?”
As a physicist, I knew that the world was filled with mystery, but I concluded at that moment that there would never be a fathoming of the odd complexities of the human mind.
I had no answer to Fidel’s admittedly rhetorical question, but I felt a wave of empathy for the myriads of dilemmas unfolding from human suffering, like the butterfly effect gone badly. I nearly forgave him his murder of Chin Hwa. But not quite.
And now here I was at this birthday party, about to celebrate a child who’d endured her own horrors. But in her case, a pair of angels named Father Wendimu and Makeda Geteye had come along early enough to— hopefully—make all the difference. Really, there was no accounting for the fickle twists of fate.
Looking down at the ground, I mused mournfully, Nor for the shifty gods of shoe size. Thanks not only to the voluminous heft of my belly, but also pregnancy’s propensity for loosening the body’s ligaments to help with birthing, the bottoms of my feet resembled nothing more than odd-shaped pancakes. The only shoes I’d been able to fit into this morning were my ancient, stretched-out Mahabis, the ones with unavoidably bright yellow soles that I’d bought thinking they looked oh-so-trendy. At this point in their entropic cycle, they looked about as stylish as the muumuu I wore that Adam, anticipating my future engorgement, had picked out for my last birthday; the garment’s red and blue chevron design pointed down toward my feet as if to purposely accentuate the color clash. Never mind, I told myself. It’s the thought that counts. And if Adam thought I was the sort of woman who didn’t mind looking like Mother Hubbard, so be it. And so much for our future sex life.
As luck would have it, my ruminations were interrupted by Makeda, who joined us just in time to let loose a gasp of what might have been either dismay or delight. Angelina, Ignacio, and I immediately turned to see what had prompted her reaction.
I saw that Assefa had appeared at the edge of the lawn with Lemlem, but what a Lemlem this was! Attired in a turquoise flared dress belted tightly at the waist, her matching beaded cornrows were complemented by a headband made of an intricate design of tiny triangular seashells. Tucked flirtatiously over one ear was a dewily fresh, purplish-pink hydrangea that matched the color of her bee-stung lips. And then the goddess smiled, a little shyly, I thought, the gap between her teeth lending just enough imperfection to make her wildly desirable.
We all felt it. Everyone moved toward her like a magnet, but we were too gobsmacked to actually comment on her appearance—all but Bob, that is, who cried out, “Kitten’s paws! Plicatulidae! Where’d you get them? Did you make that thingie yourself?”
It occurred to me that it was possible that only I—well, and undoubtedly Saffron Melamud—knew what a collector of shells Bob was; he was crazy about anything to do with the sea. I’d discovered that myself on my one and only visit to his apartment in Palms, when one thing had led to another, culminating in his semen staining the Wookie in his Star Wars bedspread and my discovery that I was embarrassingly capable of having casual sex. But that was in another incarnation entirely, one ushered in by Assefa dumping me for Makeda. Now she and I stared open-mouthed at the woman who’d ultimately won his heart.
Lemlem’s exquisite skin took on a slightly burnt sienna glow, as she hastily responded, “No, I’m afraid I’m not nearly so talented. It’s the custom with my people to celebrate birthdays with feasts of clay-cooked bread and bananas, mangoes, and homemade coca. There’s nothing we love more than to dress festively in objects from nature.” She patted her headband. “This was made by an Ethiopian designer who was born, like me, in the Omo Valley. She goes by the name Tizita.”
I blinked, and before I could censor myself, turned excitedly to Assefa. “Like the music! Teddy Afro!”
Assefa was slow to respond. So slow that I worried that everyone was watching us. His eyes slitted briefly, as if in warning. “Yes. Yes, of course. It is a common name in our land.” He nodded perfunctorily and gave Lemlem’s arm a squeeze, mumbling, “Now let’s go find Miss Sofiya.” He gestured to the small wrapped package Lemlem held. “We have a little gift for her.” I saw that he kept his hand solidly on the small of Lemlem’s back as he ushered her toward the playing children.
My eyes watered, and I quickly excused myself. In the downstairs guest bathroom, I flipped the lid closed and flopped down heavily onto the toilet seat. I figured it must be hormonal. I adored Adam, loved our life together. But Assefa’s voice whispered inside me, “Who are you to think you can escape tizita?”
Through my tears, the flame of the Diptique candle on the Malibu-tiled vanity top flared into a great blaze. I felt a sudden urge to pee. I heaved myself up to lift the toilet lid and loosen my gargantuan cotton panties, just in time, as it happened, for a rush of warm water to flood the bowl.
I knew immediately what it was. After clumsily rubbing my vulva with a great wad of toilet paper and hauling up my panties, I burst from the bathroom and rushed to find Adam.
He was standing toward the back corner of the yard with—natch!—Assefa and Lemlem. Mother was there, too. The three of them parted like the Red Sea when they saw me.
I barreled into Adam’s arms, bellowing, “My waters have broken! Oh, Adam, it’s really happening!”
I turned to my mother and cried, “She’s coming!”
Lemlem laughed and ventured, “Well, then, perhaps you should go to the hospital?”
The only one who looked unenthused was Assefa. His tone was neutral as he pronounced, “It is her first. It will take awhile. They have time.”
But as Adam made his excuses and began pulling me toward the house, I noticed a telltale twitching at the corner of Assefa’s left eyelid and felt glad.
We know that when one ocean wave supersedes another, all visible evidence of the previous one is gone, but in fact, the substance of each wave is formed from its predecessor. But if we accepted that a future measurement can affect an atom’s past, as was suggested by the recent work of Australian physicist Andrew Truscott, what if the preceding wave could be altered by the wave to come?
Every one of a woman’s eggs is present inside her from birth. The egg of Callay had already been in me when I’d made love with Assefa, who was in me somewhere, too, and whose essence would be in Callay—through the person I’d become during my wonderful, terrible romance with him. Perhaps she, or the possibility of her, had all the while been in him, too.
That particular train of thought was subsumed by something altogether different once Adam and I reached our bedroom. We sat at the edge of the bed and held each other for what felt like many lifetimes. I began to loosen myself from his arms. “I think I forgot to pack a pair of slippers, though these will probably—”
But Adam said, “No, wait.” With a kind of ferocity, he stroked my hair, then claimed me in a long, lingering kiss. Pulling back reluctantly, he searched my face. He whispered, “We’re about to embark on the adventure of all adventures, but this is the last day you’ll be all mine.” His green eyes were like saucers. I touched his cheek, which felt almost feverish with anticipation. The earnestness of him stabbed me. While my body clearly had its own imperatives right now, I wished—well, not to be crude, but I wished I could fuck him.
Whatever had I been thinking? Assefa may have swept open the door for desire, but this man, this Adam? This man was its home.
Chapter Six
IT HAD TAKEN nearly an hour to get to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, during which time labor began in earnest. More than once on that ride I had cursed my otherwise beloved obstetrician Dr. Abalooni for moving his practice from Pasadena over the hill to West Hollywood. Now, with no litt
le gratitude, I watched the back of my mother in the mirror that was angled over the hospital bed. She was leaning forward to massage the god-awful cramp in my calf. Her body obscured my open-for-all-the-rest-of-the-world-to-see tweeter, which I was quite pleased not to see. I knew, though, that she’d have to move out of the way of my sight line soon enough, once my contractions intensified and Callay slid closer to her grand entrance.
Sister Flatulencia, who’d officiated at more births of my father’s unwanted babies than she’d cared to enumerate, had once described childbirth as a series of increasingly intense menstrual cramps. Why, oh why had I trusted an ex-nun to be my expert on matters relating to the female body? But I could hardly have gotten my sex education from Nana, whose tweeter had most certainly clamped up sometime after giving birth to the son who would later die serving his country, and Mother had been no help at all, saying she’d been dosed with enough Demerol to keep her nearly comatose during my sojourn down her birth canal. (Alas, it had evidently stopped working at the pushing phase, when her clenched tweeter had decreed, Adam’s claims to the contrary, that I’d be born with a bullet-shaped head.)
Cramps? Hah! I could already tell the difference between the belly-clenching aches wrought by Mr. Heavyflow and this wringing vise that gripped my body every few minutes, threatening to annihilate me. I distracted myself by studying one of the banes of Mother’s existence, the cowlicky bald spot at the back of her head that Kelly Zhang liked to call her “cat’s butt.” If I weren’t in such pain, I’d have laughed. That was exactly what it looked like. But another contraction snaked its way through me, and I shrieked, instead.
“Where was Adam in all of this?” you ask. Down the hall barfing his guts out. I learned about that later. At the moment I knew only that he’d looked queasy enough for the nurse to temporarily banish him from this icy room before she left to fetch another heated blanket to help with the leg cramps.
“You’re doing beautifully, my darling,” Mother murmured, taking a break from rubbing my leg to move up toward the head of the bed to caress my brow. Even in this torture chamber, I loved the smell of her Chanel No. 5 blended with the sweet cocoa scent of Sherman’s and, at this moment anyway, the slightly bitter tang of sweat. But when I faced forward again, the sight of my bared body in the mirror nearly blew me away.
Who was this beast, with her twin mountains of thigh and ass bookending a vibrant, visceral cave, furred at the top, with fleshy curtains parting to let pass an ooze of something unidentifiable. I was mortified. Even more so when Adam re-entered the room, looking slightly sheepish but determined to join me at my side just as a particularly powerful wave overtook me. Mother rubbed my upper arm, and Adam kept a tender, but firm hand cupped over my belly. I reached blindly to grip the hand of each of them as my body wanted to arch and I let it.
For a time, we three got into a groove. Me alternately laughing, panting, crying, swearing, breathing into the pain, and writhing like a giant worm. Adam seemed to have vanquished his own bodily bedevilment and was fully present, his emerald eyes beacons of promise that this would turn out okay.
But all bets were off when the pushing phase finally arrived. I was way too exhausted to notice how wiped out my little team was. Cursing had become my primary mode of communicating, and I’d devolved into some ugly, slime-breathing demon that shouted over and again, “What’s wrong with you? Get her the fuck OUT.”
Dr. Abalooni was the pinnacle of patience. Later, I would use my Nobelist cachet to persuade the International Astronomical Union to dub a newly discovered star in the Andromeda Constellation, Abalooni, but for now he was simply the human who helped prevent a triple-knotted Nuchal cord from tightening around Callay’s neck, saving her from a dangerous drop in blood pressure and me from the Caesarian chop shop.
He did so with such swift grace that I knew nothing of the danger my child was in. It was just as well. As I struggled with the equivalent of a seven-pound watermelon pushing itself through an opening the size of small sink drain, my body became a conveyor of integrals of information to a self that was beyond spacetime, with a consciousness that somehow contained all that had come before and all that would ever be, down to the minutest detail of what I’d had for breakfast that morning (plain yogurt, walnuts, blueberries, and Kashi GoLean Cereal) and up to the explosion of supernovas trillions of miles away. It was as if all the particularities of “me” existed solely to provide a witnessing lens to the vibrant, pulsing dance of life. And then the shape of a butterfly coalesced from the vastness. It had immense black wings with just the slightest strips of white at their outer margins and a pleasingly furry-looking discal section, which became a kind of throbbing veil or membrane, filled with colors more brilliant and subtle that I’d ever imagined, through which I passed to find Grandfather (!), Nana (!), and Jillily (!), whose black tail flicked into its signature question mark shape and beckoned me back out again.
And then in a flash all this liquidity coagulated into a primitive lump of sensation, and I trembled with the shock of an actual living creature slithering from my tweeter with what Adam later described as “a Holy Shit cry” and I thought of as the most compelling sound I’d ever heard. Her first nickname was born with her, as we both saw she was covered with fine, dark, Lanugo hair. For months, she wouldn’t be Bunlet or even Callay, but Monkey. Our little hairy Monkey Girl. And in honor of that initial incarnation, we would agree to ask Jane Goodall and Serena McKenna to be her co-godmothers. God forbid anything happened to us, Gombe Stream National Park would be as good a place as any for a child to be raised.
Later, in the sanctuary of my private hospital room, Callay down the hall in the nursery, and Adam snoring like a steam engine in a bare-bones cot beside me, my mind returned to that numinously liminal state I’d experienced during labor. What stood out were the colors, which I felt hard put to name. I’d heard that butterflies could see many more colors than we do—they and bees, too. Both had a wider ultraviolet range than we humans, while heat-seeking rattlesnakes’ vision extends farther into the infrared. What if there were ways beyond the liquescence of childbirth to expand our vision, opening new doorways of perception?
My eye was momentarily caught by the photograph on the opposite wall of an earlier incarnation of this hospital that I’d learned in a previous pregnant families’ tour had been originally dubbed Cedars of Lebanon. Beautiful name, I’d thought at the time, for beautiful, earth-surfing trees. I’d read somewhere they were sometimes called the Trees of God.
But wait. I sat bolt upright in my bed.
My British colleague Stephen Hawking had finally come around to the idea that the blueprint of an object is not destroyed by its disappearance into the vortex of a black hole, but was stored in its event horizon. It was something that the team and I had been banking on. What we hadn’t factored in was the possibility that the blueprint might continue to exist but be simultaneously transformed.
And now the hairs on my arms rose up—not unlike how I’d felt at that moment years ago in my bedroom at Stanley and Gwennie’s, when it came upon me that human cells were comprised of infinitesimal black holes, continually exchanging dark and light matter.
It occurred to me now that the team and I needed to be prepared for the possibility that harnessing that exchange of energy through the Principle of Dematerialization might produce a singularity—a quantum leap in consciousness for our species!
The image came to me of the fiery dance of energy encircling black holes, its little licks of flame darting into an unknown dimension to retrieve something previously unimagined from the encounter. Could it be that our project would not only make possible fossil-fuel-free transportation, but also set in motion an evolutionary shift in human awareness? Something that would powerfully impact the precious little creature who’d just exited my aching tweeter? If so, we were facilitating something whose outcome was beyond our scope, but one we would nonetheless be held accountable for. How might that impact life on planet earth?
I fell asleep with many more questions than I had answers for, but despite my preoccupation with one little girl and the whole of the cosmos—or perhaps because of it—I dreamed all night of trees.
Sanctus
The Cedars of Lebanon were gasping. Their broad, horizontal branches reached out desperately; their roots, dug into limestone, were thinning. They’d been sacrificed in the past to the gods of Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the early temples of the Jewish people, in whose “Song of Solomon” they were compared to the beauty of the beloved. But now it was Nature herself, harried by her human devils, giving rise to the trees’ alarm. The cedars needed the cool temperature of their Middle East environs to thrive, but this devilishly warming climate was leaving them in the lurch. The groves strove to survive by migrating upwards, but the mountains above them just might not be high or cool enough.
These trees were strong and they grew slowly. It took a good century for their striking shapes to manifest, their trunks to thicken, their branches to spread parallel to the ground, sometimes solo and sometimes cross-hatching in groups, creating interesting patterns that scientists could spend a lifetime studying. But all patterning was breaking down now. They were eager to make the adjustment to their new circumstances, but they were running out of time.
Nearly 2,000 miles away, the forests of Swedish Lapland, inside the Arctic Circle, were on fire. The ground and flora weren’t anywhere as wet as they’d been. Denmark and Scotland, California and the Pacific Northwest were suffering extraordinary conflagrations, as well. The trees had put out the call to their brethren. Like their sister species across the globe, they were all crying out to the humans, but far too few of that species had the ears to hear them. If the trees but spoke the human languages, they would consider the term “tree hugger” an honorific and give heart to any and all who cared to take note of their plight.