75. Crossing

Even today I’m thinking about jumping from one of those long bridges that spans those nooks of the ocean that’ve been misnamed as rivers and bays. There are a few, not very far from this block, and I could walk along their sides. I had to cross one of them to get here; I’ll have to cross it or another to leave. Crossing is just that: You’re not on one piece of land or the other, one state or the other; you’re on the bridge.

On one shore, you freeze, you’re hungry, somebody beats you; none of it changes. But you don’t know what’s on the other side, even if you’ve been there before. The streets on the side you know follow perfectly straight lines—or at least they seem to—to other streets, to avenues, to railroad tracks—you never realize they were abandoned—or to graveyards. On the other side, you don’t know where the streets, the alleys—Are there streets? Are there alleys?—will lead you. Even if you’ve been there before, you’re not sure of where you’re going.

The body the police identified by my former name was rolled on its head on a cellar floor under a house abandoned on a street that ends two and a half blocks from the street that cuts it off at the other end at a storefront of dirt and broken glass that separates rotted ties and rusty rails from the street. No one who doesn’t live on this street, or the street where it ends, has ever seen it. Or died on it: That’s one of the risks you run when you’re there. No escape—to what? Die here, don’t go to the other side. Or maybe you go, die, to the other side.

But there’s no going to the other side without crossing, without the bridge. A place where you’re not there or there. Almost every bridge big enough to take you away from this block has a sign, a marker, on it telling you when you’ve crossed from one town to the next, the county line, the state border, the national frontier. The line is completely arbitrary: You never see it; you never know you’ve crossed it until you see the sign. Still, you haven’t gotten to the other side; you’ve left because to get from the place to which you’ve come, you still have to cross. There’s no coming back; there’s only going back. (That's why I think of jumping; that's why I never will. ) On most bridges, you can’t do that without going to the other side first.

And you don’t know whether you can leave—actually, sometimes you know you can’t—once you’ve gotten there. You can’t follow the streets, the alleys, or even the wind, in the same way on the other side as you did in your old home. Nothing on the other side takes you in the same direction.

So the only certainty you have is that you’re on the bridge. But you can’t stay there—that’s not the purpose of a bridge. I remember reading that Paris grew into the great metropolis it’s become when the Pont Neuf—the first bridge in centuries to be constructed without houses on it—opened to the traffic of the time.

On the Pont Neuf, on the Brooklyn or Golden Gate or most other bridges, you can stop to look at the view, if you were ever impressed by such things. But you can’t stay, no matter how pretty or tall the buildings, no matter how softly the light shimmers on the water. You have to move along, from it, away, at some point. Then there’s the other side. Or the river, the bay, the ocean.

At least you always know which way the water flows: to the trench opening all around you, inside, at the bottom. The way it’s always gone. Not like the streets on the other side.

I think about jumping now, again, when I’m within sight of what I’d always hoped for. Only days from the operation, if all goes according to plan: I didn’t even know about the operation when I was living on this block. I knew only that I didn’t live in that body, with my former name: dead on this block. Or worse: dying, waiting to die, on this block.

Nearly every day I envisioned that body dropping form one of those bridges, dropping all the way to the bottom of the ocean. I wished there was another place, another body, for me—another time, even.

I left only because I knew the body on this block would kill me before…before I could…kill myself. Kill him. Die. Die on this block. Before this body, this block, this house, could take it—whatever it was—from me.

Yet I never knew what was on the other side of the street where the block ended. Or how I could get there, or if I ever would. But knowing what was there: That kept us here.

Mother always knew I’d go, but I don’t think she knew when. Or how. She also knew I wouldn’t come back because I couldn’t. But now I have no choice but to go.

62. Aftermath

There’d never been a fire on this block, at least not one that anybody remembered, until that body to which they gave my name was found in the basement of that house three doors away from the one in which mother and I lived. The brick shell remained; everything else—the walls, the tables and chairs that’d been left behind, the concrete in the basement—had burned into dusty ash. Including the body, or most of it, anyway.

Word on this block said a lot of things. Someone settled a longstanding grudge. But who? Mother? The lady whose name I never knew? From what I know, no woman ever killed a man on this block, mainly because men didn’t stay long enough. Or, like Adam—actually, there was nobody else like Adam; he lived here alone in every sense of the word.

The cause of the fire, like the death of the body in the basement, was never determined—at least not officially. There was no report of an inspection; as far as anybody knows, none was ever done. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised there wasn’t much of an investigation into the death discovered underneath the house.

It’s probably just as well. Some detective, some inspector, could’ve—if he’d wanted and was allowed to do some work—find some “evidence.” The could’ve used it to prove, or at least claim, that someone died at a certain hour from blows to the head, blood loss or shock, and that the body died before it burned. Or whatever. And that the fire began whenever they said it did, sparked by spontaneous combustion. Or whatever explanation they came up with.

And difference would any of it’ve made, anyway? If that body had been mine, the cessation of its movement would’ve mattered only to two people on this block. And mother’s on her way out. For everyone else, it’s another story to exaggerate or embellish in whispers. You can’t spread anything without stretching, bending or otherwise distorting it.

I was there to revenge or collect—what? And someone stopped me. That’s one story I heard. Another: some lover, some ex-lover did it. What would that person’ve been doing on this block, anyway? What would I’ve been doing there, for that matter?

Funny how nobody asked those questions. Not the cops, not the fire inspectors; nobody. Then again, I don’t imagine that anyone on this block would’ve talked to them. I know I never would. They wouldn’t know a murder if it were mailed to them. I mean, they listed Adam as a suicide. And up to the day I left, that’s what everybody insisted—if they mentioned him at all.

61. Exposure

 

Drizzly, rainy day. Late morning. Or later in the day, perhaps.

One window at the end of two long walls, my head at the other end. In between, gray grainy haze. Could be the rain, but I don’t hear it; I didn’t hear the window. Only the cold.

I pull the sheet over my face. The bed—just a mattress propped on iron bars—I don’t recognize it. These sheets bristle, grainy against my skin.

Otherwise, I’d’ve never noticed I hadn’t showered in a few days. In those days, I could get away with that. I could’ve—in fact, later I did—grow a beard and nobody would’ve cared. Except maybe for him.

He’s bored his head into my chest and tangled himself around me so I can’t see him. Only the gray, rainy haze; the sheets—I couldn’t see the color—bristling against my skin. And cold on the other side.

Dark hair. How did I know? His chest rasped against mine. But I never saw it, never saw him. Or his lips, at my neck or at the tip of my penis. Only felt his lips when they were around my soft slack slab of skin. Skin and saliva between my thighs.

Wet and gray and grainy. Then just wet, and cold outside. Wet, a sudden rush, I’m not ready. Never saw it coming; never saw it. Just a rush through me; I couldn’t hold it back. Not because he wouldn’t let me.

59. Exile's Children

 

I didn’t leave this block because I felt stifled or tortured. Nor did I go with any mission or calling, or even any sort of ambition beyond staying alive. And I wanted that because, as the saying goes, “What’s the alternative?” I still don’t have the answer.

Long before I knew I would undergo the transformation I’m about to culminate, I knew I couldn’t stay. Even before I learned about the hormones, the surgeries and the people who submitted to them, I knew that some part of me wouldn’t survive the move from here. Yet it was necessary for survival—mine, at any rate. And, I realize now, the reason mother never begged me to come back was that she knew, too. She always expected I’d return, however briefly.

Somehow she survived this place—until now, anyway. I’m not sure she would’ve had she left. But she had no reason—or at least not the same one I had—to get out of here. A mother, a single mother, like many others here—most of whom were here before her—there’s never been any shame in that here, at least not among the women. The nuns were a different story. “You didn’t have a father. You’ll never become a man,” Sister Elizabeth yelled at me in a room full of kids who would’ve snickered had she not slashed the air with her long wooden ruler. And she wasn’t the only one who reminded me—actually, who reminded the other kids, I didn’t need it—of my family situation.

It was probably all I had in common with other kids on this block. There were a couple of others in Sister Elizabeth’s class that day. One—Howard—laughed, for which Sister Elizabeth slapped him. But the other, Louisa Parker, slid her pale oval face into her long angular hands so I could see only her shaggy dark hair.

They’re gone, too. Howard ended up in the army. Whether he joined or was sentenced to it, no one’s exactly sure. He ended up in some place in the Middle East—some place where all you see are men—and never returned. No one ever said why. And Louisa—all I know is that someone saw her on a street in New Orleans, or in some other city besides this one. Why she left this block, I don’t know. Can’t say I can’t blame her because I don’t know whether she had to leave. She probably did: It’s the only way I know of that anybody goes from here.