The first injection I ever did was in a sheep’s rump. A friend of my mother’s had a flock whose wool she sheared and wove into tapestries and table runners. I must have shown a fleeting interest in homesteading, because one afternoon was spent with her demonstrating various tasks around the farm, of which I remember nothing save for one sickly sheep that needed a dewormer injection. I remember how weightless, like nothing, the syringe felt in my hand, and how impossible it seemed to stab nothing into a sheep’s solid hide, freshly shorn and nubby like soiled carpet. The animal had a patch of blue dye on its hind leg, meant to distinguish ownership, though I can’t imagine why they needed it as hobby farmers far from any commons. She said to bring it down with some force, which I tried to do, but after several attempts, during which I grew more and more faint, the task was relieved from me.
I no longer get nauseous. I do my injection quickly and without thought, because it’s when the thoughts get in the way that I psych myself out, like jumping off a cliff into a lake—too many false starts and the height seems even more imposing.
That evening my shot didn’t hurt—not an unusual occurrence, but infrequent enough that I smiled when the needle slid into my skin without pain. I’ve learned to celebrate the occasions when stabbing doesn’t hurt, even if it’s thanks to dead nerves from stabbing for so many years. I was dabbing at a slow spot of blood at the kitchen window, waiting for the water to boil, when I noticed the for sale sign was gone on the house across the street. For more than a year no one had lived there, and I’d gotten used to watching dark windows and an empty driveway as I drank my coffee.
Phin didn’t seem to care when I told him the house had sold, but he did pause his sewing and hum in appreciation for the warm mug I brought to him. In the summers we took long walks together, hands drifting together and apart to a music our conscious minds barely heard: the growl of a pickup or the loud voices of men meant a gentle relinquishing of the other; the deep shade of a magnolia overgrown the sidewalk heralded a coming back together in its chirring insect darkness. A few women passed by and we’d stay clasped. A school bus could pass, a family with a dog we might make room for while still holding on, but a front yard barbeque on the fourth of July meant letting go to multiply the number of fists available. The first few drops of a summer storm on our faces was a reason to hold on again. I missed this intricate dance of public affection, when to display and when to hold back. In the winter bedroom where Phin’s sewing corner was neatly organized with fresh bobbins and sharp scissors within easy reach, summer walks were far away and the fabrics spoke of our domestic: pilled knits of seasons passing, their itchy warmth yielding to spandex and swimsuits; faded corduroys with elbows mended too many times until they became a nest of threads; the empty tubes of denim sleeves and legs cut from jeans years ago when such ragged edges better suited us; flannel collars and cuffs worn ragged, silk linings from blazers outgrown patchworked into dressing robes that accommodated growing waistlines; thin cotton tees bearing a palimpsest of disappearing punk bands—all of this and more accumulated in Phin’s scrap bin, its final destination a forever unmade blanket or throw. A whole life could be built from the unending parade of fabrics that touch our skin, each saturated with meaning and complex memory, a life of moving things from bed to closet, of stripping the bed after sex, of loading and unloading the dishwasher. The only scrap shunned by Phin was polyester, cast off from torn windbreakers and dresses rescued from thrift stores before he knew any better. Synthetics made poor material, according to Phin, disintegrating too quickly to be reused, their harsh edges pulling at the delicate threads of natural materials until they frayed, which said everything left about the harsh chemical stink of time.
◆
I love my bike commute. I discovered solitude when I started biking, the early morning smells, each one throwing me back into a memory. I call it ‘The Vault’, but only in my head. A lawnmower running over cut grass : the expansive yard of my childhood I’ll never see recreated, the closest my mother could get to an English country garden with minimal effort. Whiff of moldy leaves : first-day-of-school. Sweet hay notes : cross-country races I endured with the dread of the uncompetitive, but loved for how they inserted me fully into the landscape, path clearly marked with bales dragged in place by sweaty teenagers. The Vault lets me move through memory without having to call up anything too specific.
Nearer to home I heard a name echo from the dark cavern of a UHaul across the street.
“Emma! Emma?”
“Emma, there’s still two more boxes for your room in the truck.”
“Emma, make sure Barney doesn’t track mud in the house. Take him for a walk. I need him out of my hair.”
The plea was accepted by a girl, maybe thirteen. As soon as she was pulled out of sight around the corner by the ill-trained Barney—a dopey-faced Lagotto romagnolo, an Italian purebred meant for hunting truffles and ducks in the Pennines—I was relieved thinking that her departure meant a reprieve from hearing her name. But immediately her parents started discussing her in loud whispers which easily penetrated the thin walls of the truck. Nothing catty, they clearly adored her, but lately something in her demeanor had them worried that the move might be impacting her negatively. They discussed possible explanations while carrying end tables: perhaps Emma missed her friends. Maybe Emma had a car hangover, as it wasn’t unheard of for kids in puberty to abruptly change how well or poorly they traveled. Had he noticed that Emma was requesting more bathroom breaks at highway rest stops, and then she’d stay in there longer than seemed possible?
I wheeled my bike into the garage and retreated inside before anyone noticed me. Phin called out from the bedroom.
“Lots of excitement out there today,” he said. A swath of midnight blue evening gown was spread across his lap, its heavens rent in two where he brought the scissors together.
In my forties I looked about as far from a teenage girl as one possibly could. I kept my beard neatly trimmed and let my mustache grow in to connect at the corners of my mouth. My voice made an echo chamber of my chest, deep and baritone. I was slightly below average male height, but I’d gained a small but respectably sized gut, one that made it look like I spent afternoons at the bar with other men, when really it was something I cultivated at our local bakery. My hairline started receding in my thirties, though it had the grace to wait until shortly after I met Phin.
I thought I’d outlived Emma. For the first few years I winced when I heard it, which was frequently as it rose to the number one name for baby girls in the first decade of the new millennium. I’d hear it from classmates and parents and friends and distant out-of-the-loop relatives; then, after I lost it, I heard it from customers, mothers and daughters bickering in airports or waiting in doctor’s offices, during Oscar season when a few actresses were talked about, figures so remote that it was easy to compartmentalize or change the channel. But neighbors can be anyone. And in this instance, one of them was me, or at least she was called as I was for the first twenty-nine years of my life.
Emma is a woman who thinks for herself, independent but probably not a rabble-rouser, strong-willed but not inconvincible, almost certainly a Virgo, all of which still described me. At the bookstore, I’d risen through the ranks by never quitting and being on time. But it was necessary to shed the name, which always made me look over my shoulder for someone else. I wasn’t young when I transitioned, and taking on a more fashionable name like Liam or Ciaran or Zeke only made me feel older and out of place. I chose Ryan—I knew no Ryans personally, which for me was enough of a cloak, and eventually I grew into the name, like one does a hand-me-down from a strange relative.
◆
When you’re young, you don’t put out bird feeders. Not even a plate of illegible seed. You still think beautiful things will alight on your wrist without incentive, singing songs to transport you to another world. But come middle age I’d grown tired of waiting for the few birds left in the skies, and so I strung up a feeder in the branch of a tree in our front yard, beneath which I placed a small bench. And the birds came. I liked sitting in their shower of discarded seed casings and chatter as they fueled up for long migrations. Where the seed fell to the ground it attracted rats, but they waited until night to come out and I rarely encountered them in person. Once I tried poison, but that only resulted in dead rats that didn’t scurry and only smelled, meaning I had to don gloves and throw them away. So I accepted rats as a condition of birds and left it at that.
From my bench, I watched Emma’s father clad in a cycling uniform and gloves wheel his expensive bike out of the garage and mount it. I’d seen him zipping down the hill in our neighborhood. He rode his bike like someone who had a car at home, which is to say madly, recklessly and with no regard for if he might pull a hamstring and not be able to ride tomorrow. Not long after he left, an athletic and harried Amazon driver deposited a massive cardboard box at the foot of their driveway. He drove off without closing the side door of his van, and now Emma’s mother was using all of her body to drag the box up the walkway and into the house. As I walked across the street toward her, I waved feebly.
“Do you need a hand?”
“Oh, thank you. We haven’t met yet. I’m Caitlin.”
I didn’t have much to think about the name Caitlin, aside from the fact that it was a name I associated with childhood friends, not suburban mothers, but I supposed they must have gone somewhere similar to have children.
“Will it fit through the door?”
The box was massive and more dense than seemed possible for its slim profile. As we puffed and strained against its bulk, Caitlin revealed that it was a new desk for Emma, a surprise, although she’d selected it from her Amazon wishlist.
“That must seem pretty weak parenting, but why make it harder for ourselves than it has to be?”
“It’s always seemed like a totally impossible task.”
I meant more the unending parade of gift giving occasions than the actual raising of a child, but Caitlin laughed good-naturedly. We were sweating after pulling the desk awkwardly upstairs, arriving at the threshold of a light-filled room that Caitlin indicated was Emma’s. In the middle of the gleaming hardwood floor, framed like an installation, was a puddle of vomit.
“Is that from Barney?” Caitlin took off through the house calling sweetly for the dog, whom she found crouched in the bathroom behind the toilet. Her soft cooing laced with worry for her sick dog traveled through the hallway as I looked around the room, which was still mostly empty. There were a few hardy plastic bins stacked in the corner through which the details of a girl’s life peeked through: glossy-covered books and clothing and headphone wires and old stuffed animals still too treasured to be donated but not loved enough to be rescued from their cramped quarters. A lofted wooden bed frame held a pillowy mattress with a nest of unmade blankets on top, and already on the walls were large wooden letters, as if from an oversized Scrabble board, spelling out E-M-M-A above the bed, their kerning so evenly spaced and level that I doubted the owner of that name had mounted them herself. On the bedside table was a lamp in the shape of a hollowed out E, its little lightbulbs darkened so that it looked like a marquee before a matinee. I called out to Caitlin that I’d see her later.
◆
Sometimes I go to the one place where my breasts still exist. I scroll through pages of before-pictures on the plastic surgeon’s website, trying to to guess which ones were mine. Shot after shot of headless breasted torsos, a sea of mostly pale white tits, sad tits, some stretched and spent balloons from years of binding, some still full and waiting for the slough, the double-calving off the glacier of the chest. Then I see it: the birthmark two inches above my right armpit, the size and texture of a pencil eraser. What surprises me is how different they look from how I remember them; the left one sags a whole inch lower than the right, and in the profile shot there’s a thumb-sized bruise on my sideboob. What was it from? When had I been so careless?
There was a knock on the door. It was 8:30, right on the edge of when it wouldn’t be right to knock on someone’s door unless it was an emergency, which is an excuse for why the knocking startled me, but really I’m always startled by knocking. Nervous to be caught looking at my topless former self, I sat up quickly and closed the laptop screen where my breasts lived and knocked my empty wine glass to pieces on the floor. The knock came again, more urgent, and while I tried to scoop up the shards of glass one inch-long dagger lodged itself in the meat of my thumb. I winced and waited for blood and pain where none was coming. I tried moving my thumb with the glass still inside, and that did nothing either, except for a strange tugging sensation. When I pulled the shard out, the hole that was left was a small tunnel through my palm almost to the other side, and looking closely I could see the flesh was no longer that, but fabric, fraying ends of thread coming off where my wholecloth had been punctured. I hadn’t stabbed myself—I’d ripped. I pulled down my sleeve to cover my hand and opened the door to Emma standing there, hands gripping the straps of her backpack, chewing on her bottom lip.
“Hello,” she said. “Can I come in for a minute?”
I shrugged and tried to look nonchalant as I stepped back and gestured for her to enter.
“I know you’re trans.” I stared at her, careful not to change my expression. “I read your staff picks online. Novels about transgender shapeshifters and alien space fighters. The Well of Loneliness. Stone Butch Blues, when clearly you’re not a lesbian. Plus, you’re super short. I figured it out.”
I’d stopped growing not much past her height. It’s not remarkably short for a man, though I am often the shortest man in the room.
“Yes, it’s not a secret. I’m very open about it. What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
She dropped her backpack to the floor and settled into one of the stools at our breakfast bar with a look of hunger in her eyes. But she didn’t need to say it; I could see she wanted to know how to go about it, changing into a man. It was the same hunger everyone had. If it somehow came up in conversation with a stranger on the street, they would also start asking about everything. I suddenly felt hardened to her, resentful. At Emma’s age, or rather, when I was still an Emma, I barely knew the word transgender. If someone had air-dropped a trans man into the vacant house across the street from my childhood home in our tiny college town, it wouldn’t have flipped my radar. I didn’t have a radar, because there was nothing to detect then. My time as Emma was spent suspended in a viscous state of not knowing and wondering why I felt so out of place; the very name had come to represent for me a state of ignorance more than the person I was before.
“No one ever asks about the after,” I said, switching on the electric kettle. “Everyone always wants to know about the beginning: how did you know, when did you start taking hormones, what did your family do, did you get ‘the surgery’.”
“I know not to ask that,” she says, proud of herself. I nod.
“You can find all of that stuff online, too. What do you need to talk to me for?”
She plays with a chopstick Phin left on the counter, using it as a drumstick on the edge of the formica. She has a lot of energy, too much I think, more than I remember having at her age, but then again it was so long ago that perhaps I just forgot what it felt like to be full of her.
“I’ve asked my mom for blockers. Cunt said ‘no’.”
I hadn’t heard that word since I was about her age, but I remember discovering its power, made cleaner and sharper by the fact that I could use it the right way since I had one. But then two things happened: the appetite for cunt as epithet cooled, and I no longer looked like its owner, so it had been decades since I’d heard it spoken with the sincerity that Emma used it now.
“In the future, you still won’t know yourself,” I said. She nodded again but I could tell she didn’t understand.
“It’s like this,” I said, pulling on a thread, “you start this whole process in order to get closer to some idea you have of yourself, some person you can see on a screen, but it’s only much later that you realize that that person doesn’t actually exist. You made them up.”
“You say it like it’s a bad thing. I want to make myself up.”
“Yes, it can be the most wonderful thing. I left that out.”
Just then Phin entered the kitchen. I was surprised to see him away from his sewing machine. To his credit, he didn’t seem phased to find a fourteen year-old sitting at our breakfast bar, but then Phin had had a difficult childhood. He knew something about what it meant when teenagers appeared in unusual places during the night. He nodded at her, picked an orange from the fruit bowl and introduced himself as he started peeling, filling the room with a burst of citrus.
“Hello. I’m Phin.”
“Silas,” she said.
“It’s nice to meet you, Silas.”
I’d been steeling myself to hear my dead name from Phin’s lips. I’d never heard it from Phin. He knew, I think, somewhere in the murk of his memory, that the name related to me somehow, although the exact nature of that relationship had been lost to him the way that details about our partners start to blend together after a while into a before and after. When the name didn’t come, it brought with it an even more intense ripple of recognition.
“It’s getting late. I think you’d better go home,” I said.
I was expecting her to put up a fight, but she just nodded and excused herself, said it was nice to meet us, and then left our home. I wished then that I had asked her instead to stay longer, talk with us into the night, share a joint maybe, even though I knew it wasn’t appropriate.
“She’s the one who lives across the street,” I said, as if explaining to Phin why Silas/Emma had ended up in our kitchen. Phin just hummed noncommittally and busied himself coiling his orange peel into a hollow shell, the juicy flesh consumed, its white pith meeting neatly to conceal his former hunger. I could have told him what her name had been before. I could have described the eerie feeling of having her at the breakfast bar. I could have shown him the hole in my hand from where the glass had entered me, the pale hole it left behind. But I was so happy to see him moving around in the dusky kitchen where we’d still not bothered to turn on the lights that I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t want to ruin the moment with my tendency to overanalyze and worry every little detail of the day into a bigger problem, and so I just wrapped my arms around him and melted into his warmth set to the humming of the fridge.
“Be careful,” he said, and I immediately took offense, feeling miffed that he’d disturbed our moment with such a sentiment.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I lied.
“Silas. It seems like he’s got a lot on his mind. I doubt his parents know. Just don’t get too involved. It could get messy.”
I sighed. I knew about messy. There were things in Phin’s past we never spoke about, adults he’d thought he could trust with his most important childhood secrets, only to be betrayed by them in a manner more vicious than the word could contain. It had made him gentle, sweet and caring, miserly with trust and evasive. We shared a dry kiss full of warning, and he returned to his quilts under the spotlight of his extendable desk lamp, the patchwork fabric spilling from machine to his lap and into shadowy darkness. It had been years since he first told me the rough outline of this trauma, a brief explanation as a directive to proceed cautiously, and we’d never spoken of it since; I wondered if I would ever get to hear his story and what about it kept him at the sewing machine stabbing the same piece of fabric thousands of times over and over, or if it was more important for him to hang onto it in disassembled pieces no one else could put together, a reminder of what he didn’t want to be.
Let one person try to change in the face of life’s hot winds and not be scorched by regret.
◆
I keep a box of old photographs under the bed. It feels odd keeping them there—I don’t want to hang them on the wall, but I can’t throw them away either, most having been taken in a time before Facebook, and so they exist nowhere else. I inherited all of my parents’ albums, but they stay in a box in the garage. The few I let in the house were allowed because they represent versions of myself I had chosen to memorialize, as opposed to the girl or woman in their polaroids who had never been familiar. Or else it was because I’d just grown used to their company over the years in the little broad cardboard box under my bed as we moved from place to place, like a collection of selves, each a tiny polyp in the reef of identity I was building to anchor myself and holdfast to.
Although there was no blood from the cut on my hand, I still put a bandaid over it to make myself feel better. I couldn’t sleep so I decamped from bed and sat reading in the den. Hours later I saw a light on in the second-floor of Emma’s house. It glowed pink from the curtains. I glanced at the clock—after two on a school night—and wondered what was keeping her up, if her parents knew about or endorsed such insomnia as a creative engine, maybe. In all their planning for their child’s future, did they ever stop and wonder that maybe she’d end up a 40-year old gay man? I very much doubted it.
The light switched off. Maybe she was sleeping, or maybe she was using the cover of darkness to observe my own lit window, so rarely illuminated as I’d learned long ago that in order to sleep I needed to read for at least an hour beforehand, and if I started that project too late my eyes would burn before I could finish, and then I’d lay in the dark, eyes smarting, thoughts spinning, wishing sleep for hours. Tonight, though, something pulled me out of the house. It was the feeling that she’d asked me to do something for her, bring her something important, and I’d forgotten about it until that moment.
Outside I knocked very, very softly. She came to the door almost immediately, as if she’d been expecting me, and placed one finger on her mouth to silence me. I followed her into the kitchen. Barney watched me quizzically, his head cocked and paw waiting on top of his favorite toy, but he soon returned to licking the peanut butter out from its hard-to-reach crannies. Emma removed a large yellow block of cheddar from the fridge and cut several slices using a large and gleaming chef’s knife in which I saw myself reflected, confused. I didn’t want to be rude, but I wasn’t hungry—in fact, I felt more full than I ever remembered being, bursting at the seams, though it had been hours since I’d eaten.
I watched her cook. She had a little divot on the tip of her nose where the soft bow of cartilage buckles under the skin, and when she smiles her right front tooth slightly overlaps the left in a way that’s gotten worse since she stopped wearing her retainer after braces in the ninth grade. Her left eyebrow has a scar on the end from when she fell head first in a bucket as a baby. The general look in her eyes is of someone waiting to cross a gap, but they aren’t quite sure what’s on the other side. And where to the left of my mouth there’s a small but deep scar from a late-blooming zit I picked in my thirties, her cheek is smooth and unpocked.
“You look so familiar,” I said.
She nodded and scraped at the pan to dislodge the buttered bread and cheese. Frizzy short hair, hair that I had from the time I was eleven all the way through high school, when it wasn’t exactly odd for a girl to have short hair, but still I was the only one who kept it past the tomboy phase, held onto it like a shield. Her strong ankles flare to calves round from running, the same pouch of stomach hanging over her pajama bottoms as I have now, though mine has grown and hardened. After carefully sliding two sandwiches on one plate, she returns the skillet to the cherry-red burner glowing up the kitchen and reaches for my hand. I jerk back before she can touch it, but a thread catches on a drawer pull and I unravel slightly. She smiles and sets to carefully untangling my loose end from the drawer, then she begins to pull hand over hand; I watch my hand loosen its bundle of fabric and thread that had been carefully packed together, like an exquisitely crafted puppet coming undone, being taken down to fiber and thread and glue and then nothing, just air, as the unraveled parts of me hang loose to the floor. I want to pull away, but the more I struggle the faster I come apart; she’s realized this, too, as she’s taking her time, skeining my soft body around her hands like a shepherdess at her spinning wheel, no longer looking vindictive but pensive, almost meditative in how carefully she makes sure my elbows don’t tangle with my collar bone and scapula. I want to say something before she gets to my mouth, ask her about what this is like for her to unwind the patchwork of her future self and see all the missteps and wrong moves come undone to raw material, ready to be respooled and woven again. At least, I hope she will decide to weave me. Or maybe she will leave me in a small paper bag on the doorstep for Phin, a little note saying that she thought this might help with his sewing.
When I’m just a pile of loosely coiled threads sitting on the counter, I watch Emma finish her grilled cheese. As she chews, small crumbs of buttered toast cling to the corners of her mouth and I wish she’d use the length of me like a dish towel to wipe them away.