Excerpted from Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella, out from Kenning Editions on 11/1, and available for pre-order here.
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S1E16: “All About My Brother”
Nate’s POV
The first time it happened, I was alone. I was coming back from lacrosse practice with the other team captain, Nick. We shared a spliff as we walked back through Central Park, Nick peeling off as we hit the 83rd street exit.
“I’m gonna stay here and smoke.”
“Ok. Catch you later, king.”
It was spring, but cold out. Snowing almost. I didn’t want to go home. I’d been smoking in the apartment, why not. There was no one else there. Using my navy blue Motorola Razr flip phone as a surface, I started to roll another blunt.
That’s when my hand began to shake.
I’m just cold. That’s what I remember thinking to myself. I was still in my clothes from practice, just my St. Jude’s lax singlet and shorts. I’ll put my sweatshirt on. But I couldn’t zip the zip. My hands were trembling.
It was only later, as I looked for my keys, that I realized I’d left my weed in the park.
My mom was still in the Hamptons, where she’d been for weeks. She didn’t call much. And I didn’t call her. When we spoke, she said nothing. Just told me not to watch the news. “Don’t believe everything they say about Bernie Madoff Archibald.” I said nothing. I listened to her talk.
I’d long since stopped wondering why she was in the Hamptons instead of in New York with me. They hadn’t taken the Hamptons furniture. The Manhattan estate had been enough to cover… had been enough for whatever was going on. I was just a beautiful transgender himbo, allergic to the intricacies of global financial Ponzi schemes. I just knew when things were bad.
I took out my Motorola Razr flip phone and texted my mom, asking for our family doctor’s cell. “Don’t worry. Just sprained my ankle or smth during lax practice. Want to make sure it gets looked at before the Yale scouts come in two weeks. Okay. Love you. Have a good night.”
Then, I stripped totally naked in the living room, something I never did. I hated being seen with my clothes off, even when there was no one there to see it. I knew I was handsome. Even so, I loathed and was fascinated by the sight of my own body. They say the thing about transitioning young is that you get to be not just normal but regular.
It wasn’t til I entered the bathroom that, catching sight of my reflection, I noticed that I had become my father. I mean this literally. I had my his body and face.
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A Dog Named Bark
Nate’s POV
When Nate was little, his family had a dog named Bark. His father loved Bark. Bark was the son he’d never had. When the Captain would take a shower, Bark would follow him, waiting, at the side of the raised and claw-footed tub until the Captain exited, his weirdly hairless legs dripping, Bark lapping up the body lotion-flavored water that fell from his glutes and calves.
In the mornings, after his dad left for work (or “work,” as they’d learn later on, the Bernie Madoff-coded piece of shit) Bark would cry like a human child. No one knew what to do. They got a dog psychologist who Mrs. Archibald had seen on TLC.
“It’s his object permanence,” Mrs. Archibald would say to her husband, quoting the dog psychologist. “When he can’t see you anymore, he thinks you stop existing.”
“No wonder he gets so happy when I come back,” the Captain said. “Haha. My perfect baby boy.”
The dog psychologist was an attractive Wasian woman named Julie who, after graduating from a top vet school, was now making bank as the Upper East Side’s only canine mental health practitioner. She charged hourly; she and Mrs. Archibald talked for hours. It had seemed like a rip-off, even based off of tween Nate’s undeniably dim understanding of money. Years later, however, he understood that his mother had been getting a two-for-one deal.
“Pets allow us to externalize our unconscious minds,” Julie explained to his mother over Skype. Mrs. Archibald was sitting in the kitchen with her laptop, talking to Julie while drinking her morning au lait. “Does your husband assign his feelings to Bark?”
“Yes. Often. Even with little things.” Nate removed a power-c Vita minwater from the six-pack in the fridge and poured it over a cup of crushed ice. “Like, he’ll come back from a run with my son Nate—here, Nate.” She grabbed his sleeve. “Tell Julie.” Tell her what?
“Hi, Julie,” Nate said.
“Without object permanence,” Julie told them, “it’s impossible to imagine other people—let alone objects—existing separate from ourselves. To truly know the other is to see them as both a love object and an independent being with the power to walk away. To have is only possible via the potential for loss.”
“Wow,” Mrs. Archibald said. “That’s so sad.” She laughed to herself. The tea cup of au lait steamed, saying nothing. “Julie, why are you the only one who listens to me?”
Ideally, Bark was supposed to be able to develop mental pictures of the Captain, images he could keep with him in Mr. Archibald’s absence. It wasn’t until, years later, on acid and drifting through the Swiss cheese holes of his brain, that Nate remembered a child psychologist his parents had taken him to when a sleek and secret early transition had failed, to their collective surprise, to “solve” everything. The child psychologist asked him about his dreams. Nate said he couldn’t remember them. Nodding, the shrink gave him crayons and asked him to draw something. Nate drew Bark.
When Mrs. Archibald came for a family session, the child psychologist asked Nate if it was hard to think of himself as a permanent object, since transition was, in some ways, the experience of his own impermanency: who he was (girl) had quite literally proved to be impermanent, even if it had been replaced by a new object (boy) which, at least in theory, aspired towards durability.
“When you look in the mirror,” he asked Nate, “what do you see?” “What do you mean?”
“Like, do you see a girl or a boy?”
He wanted to please, but also he wanted to be honest. No, that wasn’t true. He wanted both: to please by being honest, the platonic ideal. “I see… neither?”
“That’s so interesting,” said the child psychologist, smiling encouragingly.
Even through the acid haze, he could still remember the imprecise con tours of the man’s face, that his name was Gary; that he’d known, in a vague but certain way, that Gary was a faggot, that this was in fact precisely why the Archibalds had plucked him out of the cascade of available child psychologists. Nate’s mom had tried to find someone transgender, but, in 2002, there wasn’t a single out transgender child shrinker in all of Manhattan, which was, for them, the entire world.
“So does this mean,” Gary inquired, “that when you look into a mirror, you don’t see a reflection at all?” At Chuck’s house, sans adult supervision, they watched R-rated movies with surround sound on DVR. After viewing Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1995), he’d learned that vampires have no reflection; unable to exist fully in space and time, light just passes through them. The immortal, bloodsucking demon can thus be defeated, in the end, just by putting a mirror up to its quietly non-existent face.
“Of course I see a reflection. It’s just hard to see that reflection as ‘me.’ I’ve never had any idea what I look like. I can recognize the individual features but can’t make them cohere into a face. Let alone my face. I just see like a mask. Or blur.” He felt anxious, suddenly. Like he’d gotten naked in front of his mom and Gary without even realizing it. “But I’m sure everyone feels something like that.”
“No, they don’t,” said Mrs. Archibald, before Gary shot her a look. After the session, Mrs. Archibald took Nate to Dean & Deluca’s, the upscale grocery chain which would file for bankruptcy in 2019, closing its SoHo flagship and existing only for tourists in global locations like Doha, Qatar.
“Get whatever you want,” she told him. Nate was used to being told that he could have whatever he wanted. And yet, as a gesture, it still felt sweet. Overwhelmed with options, he got a ham and cheese croissant.
A few months before he was charged with securities fraud by federal prosecutors, the Captain went golfing by their Hamptons house. Because of Bark’s lack (still) of object permanence, Mr. Archibald took Bark with him, keeping the dog on a retractable leash connected to his bag of clubs. It was hot out, weirdly hot for March. The joke was that, minus the weeping, Bark hardly barked at all.
The secret JP Morgan Chase business account that the Captain used for last-minute redemption payments was dry, almost used up, but no one knows that yet, Mr. Archibald thought, removing his nine iron from the leather caddy. Not even I know it, in a way. I want to know it, but I can’t make myself. It doesn’t feel real. He tried to do like Oprah said and focus on the now. But the now was slipping away. Don’t think about it. Just think about this moment. Just this.
Nate, who was shit at golf, was playing several holes behind his father when he heard the screams. Moving automatically, he got in the cart and went at max speed, which was 25 miles an hour. If he’d been watching himself on TV, he would have laughed: his father’s wails, pangs of horror, and the small luxury sports vehicle, crawling up the land art-like hills.
In a reverse Oedipal twist, the real Mr. Madoff was turned in by his very own sons. “I had more than enough money to support my lifestyle and my family’s lifestyle,” Madoff told journalist Steve Fishman from maximum security prison. “I didn’t need to do any of this.”
When Nate arrived, finally, at hole sixteen, his father already had a black eye from punching himself in the face. The nine iron head was bloody and Bark’s skull was caved in with brains sticking out. That it had been an accident—the Captain lost in thought, Bark sitting, suddenly, within range, loyal and wordless—helped no one. News of the scandal didn’t hit til months later, but even then, it didn’t seem to faze him. He was already a broken man.