Chapter Three:Crossing the Property Line

  [cw: alcoholism, internalized transmisogyny, blood, self-harm, suicidality, medical abuse, sexual harassment]

  “There’s nothing special about a scared, hurt child. A fucked-up childhood is the most mundane, boring thing.” Lilly licks her lips to wet them, tasting the fke of dead skin almost peeled off, scented with tobacco smoke stains. “I don’t see why I would revisit it.”

  “Everyone’s childhood is unique to them. It helps give a map of how you ended up the way you did,” says Houndstooth. “I’m not saying you need to revisit it. Just that it could help you understand, if you want to.”

  “I’m not sure I want to. Any time I think too much about anything, anything at all, I get this feeling. Like I’m a hunted animal.” She grimaces, frowns. Eyes focusing in on the ants making away with a prize crumb. Lichen on the haphazard stepping stones. “No… no, like I’m a caged animal. Like I’ve already been caught and captured. Trapped somewhere I can’t get out of.”

  “If you want to go on a walk or something—”

  “No, it’s not that. Thank you, though. It’s not the house, it’s bigger.” Her voice is trembling, getting smaller. “It’s like my whole life, I’m caught in something I can’t control. And when I think about it, it’s a puzzle I’m trying to solve, that I don’t actually want to solve. I won’t like any of the answers.”

  “The truth can be scary.”

  “It will just hurt me.”

  “Without the truth, you won’t know what to do. You won’t know what’s right, or how to protect yourself.”

  Tears are pooling in Lilly’s eyes, all the warm, damp heaviness in her face. She’s suddenly angry with Houndstooth. No good reason. Just sick of being pushed and prodded into pces she isn’t ready to be.

  “Give me some time, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Houndstooth shrugs. “It’s just that eventually you’ll have to face what—”

  “Eventually. So let me be for now.”

  Staring at the cigarette ashes drifting across the tabletop in the breeze. It would be so easy for someone like her to just disappear. Just vanish. No problem at all, she’s done it twice before.

  *****

  What you try to send away comes back to you. Thoughts of lonely nights, questions about her past. This pce is comfortable enough that she just wants to lie around existing. When she’s still and calm it catches up with her, her muscles snapping to sudden alertness.

  Sure, maybe she should try harder to recall what happened in the years between her disappearance and her new friends abducting her from a Target parking lot. It seems important to Houndstooth, and to Arsenal, who’s made some allusions to a friend vanishing. She’s not the only person involved and it’s probably selfish to prioritize her own trauma.

  Yet every time she tries to focus on the memories she glides away, like she’s been abducted again. Could be something she’s doing out of fear or something that was programmed into her like the actions of a mesmerist’s victim in an old horror movie. She knows hypnosis isn’t real but something other than her seems to be in control. Some backseat driver, occasionally grabbing the wheel. The memories of the bald man talking about suburbs are still present, accompanied by random useless fshes of a daily life that she can’t rete to: going into a bank and dropping off cash and thumb drives into some safety deposit box; opening a mani envelope and finding three sets of house keys beled A, B, and C; pulling into a rge upscale hotel for some kind of conference or meeting and checking in under a false name with a fake ID; struggling with heels while carrying tightly sealed buckets of a heavy liquid up and down staircases; waiting in an elevator and her pager going off; approaching an 18-wheeler across an empty wn in an industrial park. Dozens of memories like that, of no substance, with no conversation or connection with other people, no idea what meaning they hold. Interstitial moments, as if her mind blotted out everything important so all that bled through was the in-betweens, staring at mpshades, fixing her tights, watching a groundskeeper leafblowing the sidewalk as she waits a few minutes before going in to a rge neobrutalist building for some reason she can’t fathom.

  All she can say is, I was employed. Doing what?

  Recalling it would force out answers. The distance of time offers the comfort of being her own person, not defined by whatever happened. Her childhood, long past. Her teenage years, which seem so recent and are in fact well behind her. And the haze of a career in something that partitioned off her mind, even though everything that leaks through seems so boring, so mundane.

  An overwhelming amount of isotion in those moments. Solitude had already been the norm for her life. The majority of her childhood being raised by two parents increasingly hateful of the ‘swishy faggot’ (her father’s words) they had bred into existence, living in a town where homosexuality was for all practical purposes forbidden, moving in with an aunt who was present only in body but who was in mind utterly focused on crafts projects and gambling, had all left her in a state of expecting loneliness as her default, a loneliness so deep that it continued whether or not other humans were present around her. Then, years working for whatever organization that had been—Coordination Division in Houndstooth’s words, but the only phrase she remembers is ‘real estate brokerage and epistemological security’—had further deepened the rift between her and all other people and beings. And had greatly deepened an already apocalyptic mass of distrust brewing inside her. She likes little walks, likes cigarettes, likes driving in a car, the hum of refrigerators and air-conditioning, private bathroom stalls. She is aware that these are not the things healthy people like, but she is also, at this point, still discovering herself as a series of symptoms of perpetual and deep desotion.

  At this house, now, it’s the opposite. People are everywhere, far too much for her comfort. She’s trying to get used to it. The presence of other people is nice, the ck of privacy is complicated.

  Nails and her being, for different reasons, the current fuckups of the household has led to a mutual familiarity. They often wake her up to talk briefly. There’s usually already a group breakfast cooked by Dante, a quiet and reserved guy who lurks in the attic embroidering patches to sell to tourists at Lake Merritt, and Houndstooth has usually made cheap, bitter coffee.

  The group present at the house that day—sometimes just five, once as many as fourteen—eats breakfast together while people discuss tentative pns. Some go to food panties or dig through dumpsters; they have a coordinated chart of all the best dumpsters in the city, when they tend to get the freshest food, how difficult they are to access, any risks. Up on the wall is an accompanying map of Oaknd, annotated with highlighters and pen marks and post-it notes until it looks like an erstatz war pn. Dumpsters have been a learning process for Lilly. At first she was disgusted to learn how much of their food came out of the trash. Seeing this, Arsenal and Scatter encouraged her to join in the harvest, and she realized that a lot of the time it was perfectly fine, not gross or moldy or stale, frequently left in bags or packaging that kept it perfectly clean. Just thrown out because it was nearing an expiration date, or because of overstocking, or because of some package defect. Then she was shocked to learn that taking food out of the trash is not only illegal but that some of her housemates have been attacked for it by security guards or harassed by cops.

  “It’s literally trash. Why can’t we have it? It’s not like we have the money to shop anyway!”

  “If they let people survive for free,” says Arsenal, “how would they get people to work?”

  It has been strange realizing that she can now survive without working. Some miserable wage bor had seemed a necessity to life, as inescapable as death. Yet here she’s living perfectly fine without any of that. Would she even be able to work a job right now, in the state she’s in? Would Nails, or Piper, or Scatter? She doubts it. Their capacity to live at all is predicated on learning all these little tricks of survival. Of course someone wants to stop that.

  Some of the people who live there or drop by work on bicycles, or gardening, or clothing repairs. There’s a nearby print shop with some friendly employees and Scatter coordinates making zines—printed out little essays and DIY magazines—and distributing them to a variety of locations around the city, including public libraries, music venues, punk houses, and squats. There’s also what they somewhat facetiously call ‘quests’ and ‘missions’, and they haven’t yet let her in on the details of those. She supposes she still is a security risk, but she hates being cut out of the conversation. It reminds her how much her access to this sense of connection is contingent on something nebulous. After breakfast people go their separate ways, usually leaving just her and Nails to fuck around in the backyard or the book room or the basement. The two of them help clean up a few things, do the dishes, cycle the gray water. Eventually it turns into chilling in the backyard or the basement. Nails drinks far too much, supplied through their refined shoplifting skills, and they’re frequently drunk by noon. They rant about whatever occurs to them, like the history of dandelions or how meat processing works or how the media controls people. Eventually they become sullen and irritable, or silly and senseless, and usually spend the evening sobering up. People return home, everyone eats again, and most of them decompress smoking and drinking in the backyard, occasionally making a little fire to sit around telling stories. There’s a certain pattern to her life developing here, even if it’s frequently interrupted by random events. Lilly spends a lot of time kicking around the backyard or hanging out in the basement watching movies and pying Smash and racing games with Nails.

  The other girl in the basement, Piper, is also often around the house, but keeps very much to herself. She refers to herself as a ‘femme’, hates to be seen without a dress and makeup on, and spends a lot of her time reading literary novels and manga. She’s not too great at carrying on conversation unless she’s talking about herself, and even then it’s only in bits and pieces. One conversation reveals that her favorite book is The Bell Jar and her favorite manga is Fruits Basket and she struggles with self-harm. Another conversation and Lilly finds out she was born in Sydney, Australia, but raised in Rockford, Illinois. A third conversation revolves around the fact that she’s very dysphoric and being around Lilly, who has bigger breasts and has already had bottom surgery, is very difficult for her.

  “Well, I’m not responsible for your feelings,” Lilly snaps.

  “I didn’t say that,” responds Piper, who goes out of the room with a copy of To The Lighthouse and doesn’t return until she’s finished reading it, and doesn’t speak to Lilly for two more days. Eventually Lilly apologizes.

  “The thing is, because of the holes in my memory, I feel weird about my body,” Lilly says. “I don’t—I don’t feel like I earned it.”

  “No one earns, or deserves their body,” Piper says, her tone still bitter. “We’re just stuck here until we get to die.”

  “Well, I think you’re really pretty,” says Lilly, smiling.

  “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.” That’s true. “I know what I look like.” That’s not true.

  “I think you look a lot, uh, different in real life from how you look in your mind,” says Lilly, picking her words carefully to try to achieve a higher degree of honesty.

  “I look like a man in a dress.”

  “You look, I mean, I can tell you’re trans, but you don’t look like a man to me.”

  “I look like a transvestite not a woman. When I go to stores people don’t call me ‘ma’am’, they call me ‘sir.’ When I’m out in the street, I can hear how people talk about me. No one is half as quiet as they think they are.”

  “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “It’s their reality. They know what they’re talking about. I’m the one with dysphoria. Maybe for you it’s different. You can live as a woman. I’m just a freak.”

  “So?” Nails interjects with palpable irritation. “So what? I’m a fucking freak. We’re a house full of freaks. Freaks have a long and fine tradition.”

  Piper is starting to tear up. “I don’t want to be a freak. I want to be a girl.”

  Nails gets closer to her. “One of us. One of us. One of us. One of us! One of us! Gooble gobble gooble gobble one of us! Gooble gobble—”

  “Shut up!” Piper gets up and runs up the stairs, out of the basement. Stomping steps ring through the ceiling overhead.

  Lilly turns to Nails, shocked and furious, and shouts, “Why did you do that?”

  “She’s gotta learn some day,” says Nails, staring miserably at their posters on the wall. Paramore, She Wants Revenge, House of 1000 Corpses. “She’s trying to be, like, a fucking cisgender woman, right? She’s trying to be a taxpayer. What does she want to be, a housewife? What’s the good of reading books all day long if you can’t think your way out of a paper bag? Fuck this shit. She just wants to be part of something that will never accept her. And she’s gonna keep carving up her wrists until she stops trying to see something in the mirror she isn’t. You, you’ve already been that thing, right? That’s why you drive her crazy. It’s not just that you pass, it’s because you were assimited.”

  It stings because it’s true and it’s not. She wants to say, that wasn’t me. In some way that matters, it wasn’t me.

  Nails continues, “And she’s jealous as fuck because she will never have access to that. And it’s one thing from cisgender women but you’re a tranny too, so it burns her up to sleep next to you, knowing that you’re forgetting a life that she desperately fantasizes about having the chance to live. There’s no solution in her fucking stressing about it. She has to accept the reality or she’s just going to, well…”

  They gesture vaguely at the stairs. The loose ragdoll movements of the fifth can of Steel Reserve today.

  “Fucking christ do you think she’s self-harming right now?” Lilly asks, the wheels in her head turning faster and faster.

  “Yeah, probably, why else would she just run off like that?” Nails takes another drink.

  “You can’t fucking do that to people!” Lilly jumps up.

  “What are you gonna do? You’re probably the person she wants to see least right now!”

  Her fingers grip the banister, pressing painfully against the unvarnished wood. “Someone has to do something! You won’t, you’re just fucking wasted. Besides like you said, it’s not like what she wants is helping her out right now.”

  Lilly finds Piper in the upstairs bathroom by the sound of crying. The door’s unlocked, and inside Piper is there with a razor bde, making practiced, neat little cuts in her wrist. At the edge of each one the blood pools up in a bead. As Lilly enters, Piper turns, startled, and all the beads spill onto the tile floor.

  “Hey, stop, stop,” Lilly rushes in and grabs Piper’s hands. The razor falls from her limp fingers.

  “I don’t want to live like this anymore,” Piper says between tears. “No one’s ever going to think I’m pretty. I was an ugly guy and now I’m an even uglier girl. No one ever treats me like a person. Everywhere I go, it’s always hatred and mocking and pity and sympathy. I’m like a three-legged mangy dog to people. They want me gone. I just wanted to be a pretty girl. It’s not fair.”

  She’s squeezing Lilly’s hands and Lilly holds on tight until the blood stops flowing and the cuts clot. Tears fall, diluting the red droplets on the floor.

  “My life isn’t worth living. I’m not like you, I don’t pass. I’m not like Nails, I don’t want to be an outsider. I don’t want to be a freak. I spend all my time hiding from the world and I still see myself in mirrors. I hate reflections. I’m scared of cameras. I’m not supposed to look like this. I want to die. Just fucking let me die. Please. Just let me die.”

  “I’m not going to do that,” says Lilly.

  “Why not? What could be worth living about my life? Look me in the eyes, look at me, and tell me, honestly, that you think my life is worth living.”

  Lilly meets her eyes and sees in them a horror and desperation she’s only seen a few times in her life before—

  have you ever seen someone die

  —and she meets Piper’s gaze. “I think your life is worth living. I think you’re in pain right now, you’re in so much fucking pain, I can see that. You’re in excruciating pain. But it’s worth staying alive because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Somehow your life got you here, and it’s going to keep you going, if you hold onto it.”

  Piper kicks halfheartedly at the wall. She looks like she wants to scream but something is holding her back. She squeezes Lilly’s hands and Lilly can almost feel the suffering there, some horrible energy Piper has been forced to carry through the world, flowing into her palms. “It hurts so fucking much.”

  “Yes, it does. It hurts a whole lot. There’s a lot of misery in this world.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “No, it’s not fair. That doesn’t mean the solution is ending it.”

  Piper starts sobbing again, unable to speak, and her hands go soft and limp in Lilly’s. Time passes like that. Someone opens the door to use the restroom, mumbles an apology, and closes it again. After a while Lilly says, “I don’t think Nails was trying to hurt you. I think in their own way they’re trying to help you.”

  “They don’t understand,” says Piper. “They’re not dysphoric. They don’t get it. They’re genderqueer, they think they’re the most radical. They’re unaffected by these things.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true,” says Lilly. “Maybe it is. Either way, we’re all trying to figure out how to live together. We’re in some kind of community, we’re sharing a house, sharing a room. It hurts you to see my body because you wish it was your body. Maybe it hurts them to see you because you feel like you have a pce in this world.” She pauses, thinking. “Maybe it hurts me to talk to you because you have a sense of yourself, and I don’t. We all need to figure out how to co-exist in this context.”

  Eventually she talks Piper into letting her bandage up her wrist and by the time she’s walking Piper back downstairs Scatter is home again. Piper bursts into tears and tells Scatter she’s been cutting again. The two of them go to talk while Scatter makes some food and Lilly goes back to the bathroom, cleans up the blood, disposes of the razor. When she gets back to the basement, Nails is still sitting in the same spot, still drunk. There’s a crushed can next to them and a welt on their forehead.

  “Is she okay?” is the first thing they ask.

  “Yes, for the moment,” says Lilly. She takes a deep breath. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I didn’t really think she’d kill herself,” is all they say. Lilly waits for more but there’s no more. They’re resolutely staring into the empty space in front of them, looking at something Lilly can’t see. The anger’s welling up again.

  “But you knew she’d hurt herself.”

  “I knew there was a good chance. I don’t have the time to use kid gloves with every spoiled binary white girl I meet.”

  “You have all the time in the world.” She makes a sweeping gesture around the basement living space, the mess there, the videogames, empty bottles, a rotting apple core. It’s got a darkened fuzz on it that wasn’t there yesterday.

  “Way to miss my fucking point.”

  Lilly grabs the apple core, chucks it in the trash. “I got your point. So she annoys you. You don’t need to torture her.”

  “You missed my point.” Nails still hasn’t moved, still hasn’t stopped staring at the same point in the wall. It’s not the posters, it’s the space between them. “The thing is, if I say it again, she’s not going to cut herself then. So something changed. She needs to experience change as pain. I understand that. It’s my way of respecting her.”

  “Find a different way. You’re just drunk all the time and hurting people. And we have to live with you, in the same room. She has to go to sleep next to you and so do I.”

  “And I have to go to sleep next to you two.”

  “Can you just stop being mean?”

  “Mean? Fuck, you have no fucking clue. I’ve been mean. I’ve seen people be mean. You have no fucking clue.” They grin. “Oh, I can be fucking mean if I want to. This ain’t it.”

  “You know what? Talk to me when you’re fucking sober.”

  Piper has fallen asleep on the living room couch halfway through the chamomile tea that Scatter made. Most the people who stay at the house are out tonight on a quest, so Scatter and Lilly end up hanging out while Scatter sews up a hole in her backpack.

  “Zone 0: (A)Proximity.

  “Location being unfixed in time is what distinguishes the animal; it is also an affront to the linear territory of captured time. A variety of techniques are undertaken to affix location to a grid of regurity. This is a primal ecclesiastical function of nd-as-property within the system of the symmetrical Eschaton, and finds its origin in the domains of the god-rulers of city-states from the Ur-Yangtze inception onward. Two bodies congregate respective to a material object, a space; as such these bodies are territorialized within the new tier of time-spaciality. Many bodies can be made to congregate and lose their nomadic autonomy as such, being rendered as the subjects of Hammurabi, Qin Shi Huang, or the location-aggregate of the Roman Senate. Moctezuma lies at the heart of the complex system of Aztec imperialism. The ke as location for Tenochtitn-cum-Mexico City serves as a rupture in the territorialization of the post-Toltec terrain, a rupture which gives a center to the expansive regime. Acre by acre, violence indoctrinates bodies into the system of the Aztec empire as many tribes and societies are congregated within the explicitly centralized system. The dispcement of the Mexica to Lake Texcoco serves only to deepen the function of domination, as the dispcement of Rome to Constantinople, or the dispcement of London to Washington, DC. The system of congregation, like all animals, moves freely; it is only in retrospect that we can see the sessile form it has taken and understand the ways it unfurls itself and affixes to a regurized time-spacial grid. This grid is weakest in its immanent materia: there is nothing in the water of Lake Texcoco that provides for the continuation of Moctezuma’s rationalized regime any more than the water of Chesapeake Bay or the Strait of Hormuz guarantees the robustness of the petrodolr as an international mechanism. Dust is only so much silica and organic matter and has no allegiances in the temporal-spacial regime of empire eternal.”

  She pauses, processing the material in her head. It’s dark outside. Although Scatter is concentrating on tying off a section of thread, she gnces up at Lilly to make sure everything’s okay. Lilly smiles awkwardly. She doesn’t really know anything about Scatter aside from what she sees day-to-day, yet it’s enough for her to trust this woman with her life. She’s never known anyone like this before. The way she behaves, the decisions she makes, the atmosphere around her.

  “Likewise, the congregations taken as most basic are reified from nothing at all. Landed property is a continuity that, in the manner of a doppelganger, repces nd and season. There is no organ for home mortgage. Landlords cannot depend their authority on a substance they exude from their pores. Nowhere in the fleshy body will be found the cell that guarantees the validity of a marriage certificate. Despite every effort by science to find the body politic in the aggregation of desires and flows constituting the corporeal body, all have come up cking. No one has succeeded in identifying the wife, husband, mother, father, from a tissue sample, and every effort turns into a mere arrangement of hormones, wanton proteins who derive meaning only from having it assigned to them. Does proximity depend on love, or does love depend on proximity? And what of the age of cybernetic proximity, a retionality mediated by digital information or the flows of global materia? Do these dislocations serve to undermine or strengthen the time-spacial order? Whose blood is spilt when the world is co-located with Lake Texcoco, with the Pentagon, when the image of the Roman Coliseum’s crumbling yet persistent facade stretches from every crib to every exopnet? Whose love is responsible for rebuilding the meaning of gdiatorial combat or an international peacekeeping mission?

  “Space, and with it time, becomes a matter of information to the ndlord, the right-wing ideologue, and the hopeless romantic. Zoning is the process where the abstract, abject, and uncomfortably immanent materia is rationalized into systems of potentiality. The purpose is not a mausoleum per se but a farm. This is to prevent disaster, we are told: if commercial zone intermixed with industrial zone intermixed with residential; if he intermixed with she intermixed with it—what disasters might result? What hybrids, what possibilities, what lines-of-flight? We are all already intermixed in the pne of immanent reality, so zoning serves, like all territorialization, as a fiction for evading genuine responsibility and awareness. Whether or not we draw conceptual lines around congregates of cells, the polluted air he breathes out will still find its way into her lungs. The water spilled in the soil does not obey the edge of the industrial zoning district. Zebra mussels fill the bay. Even the pnet itself is uncomfortably porous, dependent on the sun, subject to interstelr events. Much of the early history of warfare depends on metals collected from meteorites. So too does warfare and disruption continue to depend upon and create intruding Others, and puts the lie to the zones of time-spacial delineation it seeks to found. Xenophilia and xenophobia codetermine each other, each spreading through currents and eddies of violence. The wars of colonization, imperial expansion, cold wars, sex wars, race wars, civil wars, culture wars, express an impossible yearning for control at the same time that they expunge its potential from reality. And these Others emerge in many fashions.”

  Lilly looks up. Scatter is done sewing, is leaning back in the loveseat with her eyes closed. “Hey, you awake?” Lilly asks.

  “Yeah, yeah, totally,” says Scatter, but she doesn’t move or open her eyes.

  There’s a sound from the kitchen. Lilly sees that Nails has emerged from the basement, and is staring at the three of them with bloodshot eyes. They’re sober now, that’s a look Lilly has come to recognize. They’re sober and regretful and they won’t say anything as their awkward fingers mutely trace the smudges on walls and surfaces. Sure enough after a minute of staring they go back down into the basement. Lilly follows. There’s really no reason to leave them alone.

  “You wanna py some Smash?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you had any dinner?”

  “No.”

  “Scatter made some food, I’ll get you some.”

  *****

  Talking to someone, holding someone, being held. Such a lonely life, so alone all her childhood. Now she’s haunted by the blood, Piper’s blood. What can you say? Lilly is still young, still beautiful, both of them are on the lucky side of things as life for transgender women seems to go—and Piper wants to die. Lilly used to be very suicidal as a kid. She saw an illustration of gallows in a Western picture book and that death filled her with desire; the first time she fantasized about hanging herself she was five or six. She doesn’t remember most of her life; what’s she supposed to say to Piper? To Nails? What’s Scatter supposed to say to her?

  The impressions that the CRT television screen burned into her eyes fade away as she’s drifting off to sleep, that simple glowing space where everything is tidy and organized and numerically accounted for. Like looking into a house through a window. Becoming the fourth wall.

  There’s something in there, cwing at her. Some great eye looking down onto her from the darkness. She can feel the tension trying to leave her body but it’s caught, swirling around, circling inside her like an animal trapped in a cage. Because the world isn’t safe, because she can’t rex.

  When she was young she wanted to die. She thought everyone else might be an illusion or a demon or a robot. They all followed rules that made no sense to her. They were part of a pn that was working against her. Her mother’s poison words. The preacher’s hand made her flesh feel like it was burning. Maybe it was devils all the way down. She broke into the church she used to go to and even though she was an adult and she didn’t believe in anything anymore some part of her was afraid he would still be there, lurking inside the wood, beneath the floorboards, watching from the shadows. She was afraid to do anything. The cross seemed to be made of the flesh of angry men. She was wearing a skirt. Every step she took in public filled her with terror.

  It’s really not that hard to be an anarchist and be afraid of cops and judges and the US military and federal agencies and nazis and foreign governments and local governments and authoritarians and fascists and capitalists and the bourgeoisie. It’s not that hard to live in fear as an adult, when you lived as a kid afraid of God and preacher and mother and father and principals and teachers and boys and their parents and girls and their parents and cops and judges and business owners. When you were just a crazy queer kid. And it’s easy to see how one follows the other, a whole world of unjustified hierarchies leading to a fractal dialectic of abusers and victims and hurt people hurting people.

  Fear tugs at her body like the wind in a hurricane. Terror and dread from every cardinal direction. Four walls and roof and floor, closing in. Even the ground, even the sky, even the darkness of the night. Every night she’s outside could mean a man walking up to her, could be her st night.

  And she’s wearing a bra, and the wig she only wears for breaking and entering. Picking away at the locks. The number four gets stuck for a moment and Darren’s getting anxious, serrated pin stuck like teeth, then it’s open, into the mouth of the very rge Man who looks like every preacher and every president and stands with abaster fists at the end of every tunnel of light waiting to assign you a new gender at birth. Darkness, cement, gss, dust. The cracks tear open, the serpent ughs dark fire.

  *****

  And inside, they find what looks, initially, like a regur office. At first Lilly is worried they risked a lot for nothing. Darren is still extremely nervous, but as someone with an established life he has more to lose than her.

  That’s a lie she tells herself because she doesn’t want to think about what jail time or a hostile interrogation looks like for someone like her in a pce like this.

  What does a regur office look like? asks some part of her, internally. I don’t know. Like this. Desks, papers, file cabinets, computer monitors, charts. Gray dust woven into meaningless objects to mark the ephemera of transactional retions. Like her mind is creating this space to fit the expectation.

  “Isn’t it too perfect?” she asks.

  “What does that mean?” he whispers.

  “Like a set in a movie,” she says. “It’s as if someone wanted to convince us this is an office.”

  He stops and turns to her. An eyebrow raised. Quizzical. “Now you’re really searching. That sounds paranoid.”

  Past the office is an open area with several cubicles, in front of that a solid wall with a single door. The two of them move quickly, checking to make sure it’s completely empty. The door on the far end is an emergency exit without an arm, the kind with a bar to open it. Through it she finds a foreshortened reception area, with a desk, a couple chairs, and a few pamphlets. Pamphlets and business cards beled with the logo, Michigan Shipping Receiving and Holding.

  “Okay how about this?” she says, “how come nothing beyond the reception area has the company’s name on it?”

  “Huh, that is a little peculiar,” he says.

  “I’m telling you, this is a front,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “I have no clue. But my instinct is telling me.” She grins. “This could be interest—”

  Suddenly a light from out front—someone is walking along the downtown sidewalk with a fshlight. She quickly dodges back into the back area and closes the door. A little too fast. Darren jumps.

  “What was that?” asks Darren. “What happened?”

  “Oh, there was someone out front. Like maybe security or a cop,” she says. “They didn’t see me.”

  “That sounds like our cue to go,” says Darren.

  “No, I’m sure it’s fine,” she says. She turns and smiles at him, doing her best to look confident, reassuring. “Besides, I wanna figure out what’s going on here. There’s definitely something strange.”

  “Listen to me,” says Darren, tensed. Ready to leave at the slightest sound. “This isn’t an RPG, right? If something bad happens there’s no dungeon master looking out for you. This is a bigger profile break-in than we’ve done, we can get in serious trouble. This is an active business. Whatever we’re going to find here isn’t worth it.” She just keeps smiling at him and he continues. “I’m saying we should go.”

  “You’re wrong,” she says. “I’ve been doing active businesses, churches, a bunch of pces. I just don’t talk to you about it because I don’t want you to worry, and besides, pusible deniability.”

  “Pusible deniability?”

  “Yeah, if you get interrogated, you don’t know anything about it.”

  He winces, runs his fingers through his hair. “Look, if I get interrogated I’m complicit either way. You’re barely an adult, you know how this will look.” There’s an edge of trauma in his eyes that makes her feel guilty. Things he’s experienced that he won’t share, that she has to piece together through absences. It’s overwhelming so she wants to push past it, make it go away.

  “Well then, you’re already implicated in my crime spree or whatever, right? Why are you so worried, no one’s coming in here. It’s been like five minutes.” She knows he won’t leave without her. If she just holds her ground.

  There it is. A sigh of frustration and he drops his shoulders. “Alright, okay. If you agree to two things: if anything else happens we leave, and in the future you will tell me what I’m implicated in. Capiche?”

  “Yep, can do. Now look at this.” She directs his attention to a very tall set of filing drawers hanging away from the wall at a lopsided angle. The floor is marked with curved scratches from someone repeatedly moving it back and forth.

  “Okay, that’s weird,” he admits.

  “Help me move it.”

  It turns out she doesn’t need help because it’s light enough that it’s clearly empty and rolls on hidden casters. Behind it they find a metal door flush with the wall, also locked.

  “Okay, yeah, fuck you might be onto something.” He sighs again. “Be really careful. If this is a front for something we don’t know what it is. That could be booby-trapped or who knows what. Cover your face going in, there might be a security camera.”

  Lilly examines the lock. “Yeah, well, to be honest I don’t know that I can get into this. I don’t recognize this kind of lock.”

  Darren checks it out. “Ohhhh that’s a good one. That’s a whole disc system, I don’t know how to pick that either. But look there’s a keypad.”

  “So? I can’t make out which numbers are distressed.”

  “Yeah but I think I recognize this kind of keypad.” He smirks. “Typical. All this effort and they get a cheap electronic mechanism. Watch this.”

  He goes back to the cubicles and rifles around for a few minutes with office supplies until he comes back with a clipboard. On the back is a magnet so it can be affixed to filing cabinets. He runs the magnet past the upper portion of the lock, above the keypad, and an audible click can be heard. Pressing down the handle, he pushes the door open just slightly. Lilly fixes the wig so the hair hangs in front of her face, and he raises an arm like he’s shielding himself from a bst.

  The room inside is an office of a different sort. There are no windows or fluorescent lights overhead, no cubicles, just a few nice wooden desks lining the walls. Wood paneling on the wall. She doesn’t need to know anything about furniture to know this stuff is expensive. There are metal file cabinets under a couple of the desks which look much more robust than those in the other area. Whereas the papers in the other area had been somewhat disarrayed, the desks are tidy and empty of paperwork. There’s a globe, made of dark stone, with the map of world in silver outlines.

  No cameras in the corners where the crown molding comes together. Nothing visible. Yet she feels like she’s being watched. An uncanny sensation, one she’s had before. In the church. When she was young. How a small animal must feel aware that somewhere in the dark forest a mountain lion is stalking, silently, an owl drifting overhead, a bear within the cave. An ancient predator.

  Darren goes over to one of the file cabinets and tries to open it. It’s locked. He tries another, also locked.

  Maybe it’s the stuff Darren was saying earlier, maybe it’s the sudden increase in security to get in here, maybe it’s the tone shift of this dimly lit room. Maybe it’s apprehension, maybe precognition. She’s looking around the room for something, she doesn’t know what. She goes back out into the office full of cubicles. The setting that had seemed pyful before now seems sinister. There are four doors, one at the back where they came in, one to the reception area out front, one presumably to the warehouse and loading bay, and the one they just uncovered to the hidden room. Multiple directions to run if need be. Besides, there’s nothing besides them making noise in the dark. Total stillness, silence. A strange odor, a little musty, a little acrid. Yet the pce feels unmoored. The sense that they are no longer in the town, that just behind the calm stable walls is a whirling abyss they could vanish into with one wrong step.

  This was a mistake. The thought arrives unexpectedly. She doesn’t want it, pushes it away. This is finally something interesting.

  She goes over to one of the desks and gnces at the paperwork on it. A profile of someone, a description of their appearance, where they work, where they live, where they shop, who their family is. She starts to flick through the pages. School records. Employee evaluations. Medical records—these should be sealed and inaccessible, shouldn’t they? Psychological evaluations. Their likes and dislikes. Notes from their therapist?

  “Holy hell,” says Darren. “What is this shit?”

  She turns. He’s gotten into one of the file cabinets and is reading through a document.

  “Updates on a test,” he’s almost mumbling. “A battalion? What the hell did they test on a battalion?”

  She pulls a paper out of the file cabinet. It looks like a professional publication. There’s no listed author, just a golden seal in the center of the top, a torch, urels, a sword, very generic. Everything generic, like stage dressing. She reads out the title, “Rewiring the African American Community through Sub-Prime Mortgages: How the Loan Crisis Among African-Americans has Created an Ideal Situation.” She drops the paper like it stung her. There’s something venomous in the nguage used. “Darren, maybe you’re right. I don’t like this. I think we might be in over our heads.”

  “They’re talking about testing on troops during Operation Desert Storm. I thought that’s what it was. Jesus Christ, I was thinking it might be Vietnam, but the dates… that’s while I was serving!”

  She pulls another page out and starts reading out loud. “ ‘After the Rodney King riots we successfully observed an increase in white identity solidarity and broad support for police intervention.’ Darren, what the fuck is this shit?” She flicks through the pages, waiting for something obvious to jump out at her—a swastika, some other identifiable white power symbol. It’s nothing but raw rhetoric, on each page. ‘Reguting Birthrates.’ ‘Energetic Cartography and the Distributed Europa.’ ‘The Zion of the Dominion.’ The ringing in her ear must be tinnitus, the fuzziness in her eyes stress. Darren’s not responding. In a frustrated hiss she says, “This is like Nazi shit or something. C’mon.”

  “Yeah, this is fucked up,” he says. He sounds distant, dissociated. “Wait, we need to go, I know, but let me just—like, I heard stories about shit, I just have to confirm a few things.”

  Lilly starts looking through some of the desk drawers. One of them is entirely empty. In the top drawer of the next one she finds a box of 9mm ammunition, a pair of handcuffs, a clipboard, and a tape recorder. She turns the volume all the way down and starts pying it, then slowly turns up the volume until she can just hear. There’s a voice speaking with an echo behind it, it sounds like it might be in a lecture hall or theater.

  “Cybernetics and systems theory is the past, right? It’s the technology of the old totalitarian societies of the twentieth century. Now a lot of people are interested—and invested—in the new technologies of the future: information technology, biomedical research and metagenomics, defense securitization. And these are important things, there are subsidiaries of Coordination making sure we will be there every step of the way with new advances in genetics or satellite technology. However it’s my job, and the job of this department, to make sure that we don’t lose step on what works.”

  The next drawer down she finds a folder beled ‘Delicate Sword 7’. Inside are photographs of young priests, pastors.

  “The advancements made between, say Baron Hausmann’s efforts to ameliorate the social decay of the major European cities and the city pnning and psychogeography of the contemporary suburb, or between the antebellum pntation and the current prison, are massive and undeniable in their efficacy. Proven results, right? Bentham’s panopticon looks like a joke in the face of the mechanisms we are now relying on every day. And our job, our task as a team, is to carry these advancements forward.”

  She stops. One of them looks familiar. Not her pastor, someone he worked with. Someone who hung around the church, awkwardly, smiling at the kids. She never liked his eyes. The way it seemed like there was nothing inside them.

  She remembers this man. It’s a bad feeling. Why does she remember this fucking guy?

  “That means integrating our old control models with new control models—for example, distributing opioids as high-end branded drugs, not just to certain poor, troublesome, or non-European poputions, but throughout the popution before it has become problematic for us, a model we call addiction saturation. Now you may not have heard much about that yet, but I guarantee by the 2010s you will. Or, for example, we have some really great guys cultivating Ismist networks here in the States, in the UK, in France and Eastern Europe, in China, working with the intelligence agencies in those settings and in the Gulf states to pn point events that will trigger a broadspread securitization in a variety of cultural—of cross-cultural—contexts. It’s fun stuff, really 1800s swashbuckler kind of stuff.”

  She feels a rumbling inside her, in her chest. Like an earthquake. The earth falling away all around her.

  It’s the smell, that’s what bothered her. That’s what she noticed when they opened the door. The smell of decay. Putrefaction.

  “These are fantastic, because they’re proven techniques, they continue to work. Most of what we did in the 70s to diffuse the social decay then was taken right from the pybooks of monarchical agents hundreds of years ago. At the same time, we need to be looking to the future. We’ve got a lot of new faces to this department, and the reason you’re here is because you’re bringing new ideas, new perspectives. We’ve got company guys—and gals!—who will help us work with various nodes of the intelligence community. We’ve got representatives at major corporations: financial, logistics, defense, agriculture, manufacturing, even children’s media, you name it. The corporate cliché of the moment is synergy, and that’s exactly what we do, what we specialize in. What we’ve always done.”

  The prey recognizes the scent of rotting meat on the predator’s breath.

  “Our job is to enable the inevitable. So let’s talk systems theory, cybernetics, and let’s really get our minds working, let’s start thinking about how we can move things forward a few paces, advance the plot as it were.” The tape after that is almost like static, but with beeps and clicks, as if the sound has been scrambled or encoded in some kind of way.

  “Hey, Darren,” she whispers, “did you hear any of that?”

  He doesn’t respond. He’s furiously looking over medical documents, cross-checking things.

  “Darren. Darren.”

  Rumbling, growling. The corners where the crown molding comes together. The eyes of the youth pastor.

  “In a minute,” he says, not a whisper, and the volume of his voice in the near silence is arming. She gets up and goes to check the other room, but nothing is stirring among the cubicles. The fear she had felt earlier has become dread, a feeling of vertigo, the floor were slowly dissolving beneath her to give way into the tremendous chasm she can’t escape. There is a continuity to the gaps, there are gaps in the contiguous reality. Run, her little mammal brain is saying, her scared insect brain is saying, run. Too te. The trap’s already sprung. The hand of God is upon her.

  A deep rumbling rises around her.

  It’s not in her head.

  A truck, the warehouse. A semi truck, the vibration of a massive diesel engine.

  “Darren!” she hisses as loud as she dares. “Darren there’s someone here, we have to go, we have to go right now!”

  The smell of decay sharpens.

  A fshlight beam crosses her vision. Something collides with her skull.

  The spine ends in a collection of neurons and fatty tissue that holds some meaning in physical form, some sense of self, and in that moment it cracks, disjoints, unbecomes itself. She doesn’t see what happens next. She doesn’t know what happens next. There is a thick milky void like liquid tex, drowning her, and she floats into it. Names and figures lose the ideas attached to them. What is a dolr bill? What is the air, that painful substance in the painful cavity of her lungs? What is a body? She is letting go of being a person. New chemicals fill her brain. She could die, she could die, she’s always had a death wish. Why would she have sought out death, if she did not wish for it? Why would she be herself? If she had no death wish, wouldn’t she have stayed the same as they expected her to be? How could she have learned to be herself, if she had not learned to love death? Who can love herself without picturing that moment: a body in a gutter, rotting, beetle rvae crawling through the flesh, livor mortis and adipocere, a beautiful abstract of color?

  And she’s sitting in a square white room with sound-absorbing tiles, indistinguishable from an office or a cssroom or a padded cell with its total ck of features. Pin, four walls. Nothing to see. No distinguishing features.

  Have they been touching her body?

  Who makes pces like this? Who builds and inhabits these sorts of spaces? Do they know what they’re doing? Do they have a little architectural drawing that says: Room for Holding People Captive (No Windows, Two Covered Outlets, Reinforced Walls and Doorframe)?

  She’s overly aware of her body. The pain of her spine, compressed as she tries to shrink back. Trying to make herself a little insect in a cage, an animal in a zoo. Make sense of the captivity. She’s naked. The lights stay on and when her eyes are open she has to see her body. They’ve taken her wig.

  Her fingernails were painted a pastel pink that chips away when she picks at it.

  Amazing that the mind can keep functioning at all without anything to focus on. When she was a kid her teacher showed them how to spin the water in a 2-liter soda bottle so it would create a vortex. When you stop spinning the bottle, the water keeps moving. It doesn’t even know why. Her brain is working off of inertia.

  There are gaps.

  It’s a dungeon in a medieval city. She smells the mud, the pig shit. Outside, the church bells ring, lovely and threatening. Someone is calling down to her, calling her a sinner, a heretic. A man in red robes is standing over her muttering that she’s got to find some way to repent or he’s going to break every bone in her body.

  It’s a pin square room with white walls and a single door. Anywhere, everywhere. Any four walls.

  They’ve touched her body. A bandage holds a bit of cotton to her inner elbow. Some medical tape covers gauze on her forearm. Smudged blue marker on her arms. A metallic taste in her mouth. She spits onto the floor. Blood.

  She sees her body, thin and pale and frail. Pathetic. The walls are silent but her ears are humming.

  Light. Light, and sleep. She traces the walls with her fingertips.

  They will never let me out of this pce.

  She pees on herself. She cries. At some point while she’s not awake they clean her body. The urine and marker smudges disappear. The bandages and the pain in her arms remains. She cries more. She vomits but what comes out is a clear sticky liquid. Like precum.

  The room seems to be a cube. A single base unit for something rger.

  Light, and sleep, and light.

  An old man stands in front of her. From where she’s lying on the floor he seems very big. He speaks in harsh clipped words but with a tone of compassion, like a battlefield doctor examining patients in triage.

  “What do you remember?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Her throat is dry, her words scratchy.

  “Good. Who is the president?”

  “George W Bush.”

  “Who is the vice president?”

  “Dick Cheney?”

  “What is your name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is your mother’s name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is your sex?”

  “Female.” She pauses. “Or… oh. Huh. Female? I’m not sure.”

  Pain in her neck, in her head. Something is squeezing, squeezing her mind. Little arthropod legs clutched between fingers of raw iron, breaking, shattering.

  Voices.

  “Hemorrhaging. Still?”

  “That’s to be expected.”

  “She’s ideal.”

  “Reduced to idiocy.”

  She’s sitting on an uncomfortable couch. The fibers itch under her thighs. She’s wearing a hospital gown and has to hold it clutched when she shifts so that the fibers won’t get between her legs, so that people won’t see her butthole, her crotch. It doesn’t matter. It’s thin, cheap material and they can see the outline of her genitals. The exposure is so vioting. Using her body to shame her.

  A psychologist sits across a desk from her. Someone she assumes is a psychologist, or a psychiatrist, or a psychotherapist, by his affect and the accouterments of his desk. White hair, a tidy, neatly trimmed beard. Hungry eyes. There’s a little pstic model of a brain on his desk. On the wall behind him, a photograph of a flower. It could be any flower. A generic flower, a universal flower. Set dressing.

  He’s smiling. “When did you first know you were a woman?”

  “When I was young. I’m not sure. I don’t remember my childhood.”

  He makes a note. “You don’t remember anything from before the… accident?”

  “No.”

  He makes a note. “Are you aware that you are biologically male?”

  She lets out an exaggerated sigh and he makes a note. “Yes. That fact makes me uncomfortable, but I am aware of it.”

  “It makes you uncomfortable?”

  “I feel that I should be female. That I should have been born female. Was my brain transpnted into a different body?”

  “Hah! What a fascinating presumption. No, no.” He’s sucking on the tip of a pen. “You are in the body you were born into. And you’re lucky, it is not an unattractive body. You are, in fact, a run-of-the-mill transsexual. I’ve seen my share of transsexuals, and you’re one of the more attractive ones. Certainly not the most but you could easily fool the dim-witted into believing you’re a female. What options you have id before you.”

  Some part of her hates to hear this leering old man call her attractive, especially in his vaguely interested clinical tone. He’s still sucking on the tip of his pen, in and out of his mouth. Is he aware of what he’s doing?

  But it’s more important to her to be told that she’s attractive. That she could be female. That’s her only chance.

  “What kind of options?”

  “You don’t recall your past at all?”

  “No.”

  “Splendid.” He spends a couple minutes scribbling away on his notepad, a little half-smile on his face. “You’re a case study, you know, in the future. The old ways are falling apart. All these kids have grown up watching television, they have no proper parents, no identity models. Something must be done to retain the structure. The original structure, you understand, the imprint that you’re supposed to be carrying on. And you, you have crossed over. You have made castration a god, do you see that?”

  “No.”

  “And thus you find a new path. You have rejected the life of a young man, you wish to be a young woman. In your case, it is possible. An attractive young woman, already. The b work shows you’ve had access to some estrogenic compounds, birth control I would expect. We will immediately get you on a proper prescription.” He stands up, walks around his desk over to her, and with a quick movement cups her chest and squeezes. Then he goes and sits back in his chair. He makes a note. “Your breasts already show some development so we will leave that as it ys. For now. As for your phallus, you wish naturally to have a surgical intervention, a vaginopsty, is that correct?”

  “A vaginopsty?”

  “We will put you down for a neo-vagina. We will see about the breasts. They certainly could be bigger, but you aren’t on a standard hormone regime yet. The face could also use work, I’m going to put that down as well. The nose is a bit wide and angur, the Adam’s apple of course stands out.”

  “Oh.”

  “Rhinopsty, a tracheal shave, chin and jaw are also rather apparent. Those could be handled, maybe some brow correction, is that to your liking?”

  “I don’t remember what I look like.”

  “Then of course there is simply the matter of payment. And your, as it were, legal situation.”

  Another man comes into the room, a bald man who she takes an immediate dislike to. He moves like he wants to think of himself as a shark in the water, but he’s too stiff, too anxious. He wants to seem older than he is, more powerful. His aspirations too transparent, they carve away at his authority. The psychologist turns to him. “You asked me, what are my thoughts? Well, my perspective is that this is a perfect candidate for recruitment for your program. It has no memory of what came before. It is a true transsexual, capable of functioning as a woman nearly as well as a biological female. I suggest you process it, you will of course handle the payments? It has no name as yet, you’ll have to handle that, but I believe it’s ready to serve your functions.”

  “I’m a little skeptical about taking on these trannies,” says the bald man, licking his lips, “but you’re telling me this is a good idea, you’re the expert, doc.”

  The psychologist gets a little look of glee, holds his face at a slight angle like a cat admiring a bird in a tree, and unches forward with a speech that’s obviously been waiting in his mind. “Transsexuals and nascent transsexuals are, in my opinion, among the ideal targets. Identity trauma and instability creates the proper context for trial recruitment. I imagine even without the head trauma or the scopolonoids we would have someone practically begging for guidance and a sense of self. They are lost and will adhere to anything that validates them, that gives them structure. This is, you understand, the cutting edge of reconstitutive psychology. We are healing the wounds of social decay.”

  With a shrug the bald man walks around the room, examining her from all sides, while the psychologist continues. “In America, most transsexuals dispy a longing for progressive or leftist politics, no doubt an infantile response to the ck of acceptance during their process of sexual transition, or simply the result of a learned helplessness due to childhood abuse. A sense of belonging and community can be used to correct them, and bend them toward a properly heterosexual and socially responsible practice. I imagine that as younger generations grow up increasingly influenced by media, there will be ever more need to incorporate such transsexuals into our sphere of society.”

  “I don’t like the thought of that.” He’s staring at her crotch, at the awkward bulge in the hospital gown.

  “Please, think of this as a woman,” says the psychologist. “It is in many ways like a woman. You can use it for simir functions, and to the outside world it will appear nearly identical.”

  “It’s some kind of faggot though, right?”

  “Not at all,” says the psychologist. “Recent studies have shown that it shares brain characteristics with a biological woman.” His tone drops to a conspiratorial whisper. “In fact, it’s perfectly normal and heterosexual to find yourself attracted to it.” The bald man turns to look at him, tensing up, and the psychologist continues. “Within the year, we should have its surgical situation cleared up, so to speak, and it will be both ready for deployment in a variety of social contexts and in a high level of medical debt on the books.”

  “What about the voice? Surgery?”

  “Hardly! Vocal training can handle that. In fact, if you or I had the inclination, we could also learn to be female mimics.”

  The bald man stares at the doctor with clear contempt.

  “I’m not suggesting that we do have the inclination!” the doctor ughs. “Anyway, we’ll fix him up into a her by the end of the year, and by that point I imagine the training will be complete. I can assure you that before Bush’s second term you’ll be able to deploy this one in the field with a high degree of control and fidelity.”

  “Bush’s second term? What do you know that I don’t?”

  “I know we’re in a war, and wartime presidents rarely fail at reelection. It’s just not financially feasible. Now, I can have the assessment for this one written up by two days from now, would that work?”

  “Whatever, we’re gonna hold it for the rest of the week, so any time before Friday.”

  As the bald man is about to step out of the room the psychologist catches his attention with a gentle touch to the arm. His fingernails are immacutely clean. “Will you be… personally attentive to this case? As a trial for future experiments?”

  A grin. “Depends on how good your work is, doc.”

  The first question—has my brain been pced into a different body—gives way to a second, much more nagging question—has my brain been changed? Has someone done something with my mind? Am I myself?

  The question is much harder to answer. It seems apparent, a male body should demand a male brain, a male mind. She doesn’t have strong memories. Has only the impression of memories, the impression of a self, but that doesn’t matter, does it? Hypnotics, scolopolonoids, hallucinogenic, induced memories, neuro-linguistic programming, confabution, fantasy, fugue, all of these were words at the doctor’s disposal, words now in her mind. He seemed certain that she was a she, despite her penis, despite the hair on her legs and arms, despite the bulge in her throat, her fairly ft chest, her growing beard. How is she to trust his words? He might be a closeted homosexual, maniputing her for his own reasons. He might be maniputing her for the reasons of others. They want her in financial debt, right? They want ways to incorporate her into their system, right?

  She tries waking up and thinking of herself as a man, as male. She’s staying in a guest bedroom in a house in a suburb that’s still under development. The window is covered and armed and the door is locked. The company said she owed them, that she had agreed to work for them, that they owned the house, that she was to stay in the room. She is fed a simple meal every day and kept isoted. She says, I am a man. She tries to think of it, hoping her memories will come back. There are stories like that, right, where men get hit on the head and think they’re a woman? She feels miserable but that’s normal, at least she’s being normal.

  It doesn’t work. They bring her pills, spironoctone and estradiol. When she takes them she feels miserable. When she doesn’t take them, she feels much more miserable. Her head hurts and nothing seems right or even remotely acceptable.

  She’s sick of staring at the walls. They talk about scheduling training days and surgery. She isn’t keeping track of the days so it’s all meaningless. There’s a camera barely hidden in the bathroom and two in the hotel room. They’ve given her a few books to read: How to Win Friends and Influence People; Think and Grow Rich; The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; The Road to Serfdom; Human Action. Books about the importance of being nice to people. Not trying to bring others down. Personal freedom. The marketpce. The power of positive thinking. The cameras make her want to move fast in the bathroom; to shave quickly, to shower quickly, to shit quickly.

  She starts taking the pills regurly. They leave her with her thoughts, with words like ‘transsexual’. After what feels like a few weeks, a voice and posture coach arrives. “Well,” she says, “you’re a mess, but I’ve seen worse. Let’s get you presentable.”