23. To Forget and Not to Dream

Sometimes I think memory is the curse of the human race. If it is, then recollection is the biggest practical joke, after consciousness itself, every played on our species. And forgetfulness is, if not its salvation, then at least a balm, a palliative: an opiate.

How many people have awakened from nights, weekends, or even whole weeks they couldn’t remember? Try as they might, they can’t explain the markings on their faces or the pain, throbbing from inside their temples, they didn’t have before those stories they were convinced were their lives stopped temporarily.

It happens to women all the time. They get stretch marks, sagging lines, sadness, resentments and all sorts of fatigue-not to mention twenty, fifty or a hundred pounds they didn’t have when their husbands began to express their ambitions as promises. The home they’ll make (where he won’t want to stay), the children, the cars and other objects ostensibly for the family he’s sworn to provide for and protect: all of these things, except for the children, pass just beyond the woman’s grasp—like dreams.

And they weren’t wanted or requested—at least not consciously—any more than those repetitive non-realities that parade through our sleep.

So I’ve made no effort to recall my dreams or any of my old wishes: I couldn’t tell you what I “wanted to be” when I “grew up”—or, for that matter whether I ever had any such daydreams. Maybe they weren’t so strong anyway; maybe there’s never been anything but necessity: I realize now that nothing could ever’ve motivated like the need to under go the transformation I’m about to complete (or, at least, the most dramatic part of it). It drove me, I now understand, long before I could even recognize it.

I wonder how much mother could recall. How did the girl she once was (This is as much as I know of that part of her life.) become the girlfriend—or whatever she was—to the man/ boy who injected her with his seed, which, in the swirling saline inside her, turned into the hallucinogenic pill from which her child descended, through airless haze, to mornings that didn’t surprise either her or the child even if they weren’t prepared for them?

Then again, not much in her life (or what I know of it), or mine, or anyone else’s was ever a matter of preparedness or lack of it. What could’ve prepared her for me? No one knows what to do with a kid who’s stuck with somebody else’s gender—least of all the child him or her self.

I can’t recall the part of my life when I didn’t know that the difference between boys and girls lay underneath their clothes. I’m not sure I can remember the time when I didn’t know that a man could erupt in hot, sticky streams from the touch of my hand—or his. Or that my organ between my legs—which soon be sliced open and spread--could do the same to another man’s touch, to my own—or to a woman’s. Or that women have organs—of which I will soon have rather pale imitations—they could touch to mine or that I could touch

And what did mother recall—or did she?—during our phone conversations? Or at the moment of her death? And what about the women at her funeral? Does Mrs. Littington recall the days when she lived across the street from me and mother or –Hey, is she still married? Is he still alive?

Actually , I hope she’s not thinking of the boy she accused of teaching her then-seven-year-old son how to curse—in English. Which is pretty funny, especially if you consider that he spewed all those bad words at me—for what, if anything, I don’t know.

Or that woman whose name I never knew. She never could direct her frustrations over changes at me as Mrs. Littington did, but mother’s boy wasn’t welcome. Nor, to my knowledge, were any of the other boys, of any age.

Someone—Vivian, I think—once said she wouldn’t want to revisit her childhood, not even the pleasant parts. She believed that reopening the pleasant surprises would make the house of mirrors behind the doors of the present even more painful and grotesque. And of course she didn’t want to relive the pain she endured from rapes and beatings she suffered.

22. What We Become

On this block, even in this day and age, most women become mothers, sometimes by choice but usually by circumstance. Some become wives—many more, I believe, than would ever’ve chosen such a fate. I always wonder whether I’d still come to such a conclusion had I been born female rather than to a female born. Would I’ve had a child—like the one I once was? Would I’ve wished him—given him—that long garden of childhood everyone wished he’d had or somehow remembers having had? For that matter, what would I make of a boy—or a girl? That is to say, what if I’d had a child who didn’t fall between his or her own nature and what teachers, priests, government authorities and others expect?

Long before I knew I could undergo the transformation I’ll soon culminate, I swore I’d never have children. It’s one of two resolutions—getting away from this block was the other—that I’ve ever stuck to. I knew, even then, I couldn’t bring anyone into this world to the same kinds of conflicts I had, or anything like them. Not that I regret them now: the struggle, the frustrations have turned me into a person who’s embarked on the most exciting, excruciating and ennerving experience one can have, I think, short of giving birth to another human being. Since I’ll never be able to do that (barring a sudden advance in medical technology) even after I’ve completed my transformation, I’ll never know for sure. But, as I said, I still have no wish to bring the needs of another mouth, another pair of eyes, another skin in to being.

I still can only wonder how many mothers…including mother…actually chose the role born to their children…and the role to which they’re always identified.

If you don’t give birth to or raise children, then the world –most men, anyway—will fix one of three labels to you: bitch, whore, dyke. A woman can be a bitch and and dyke, but one who isn’t a whore is a bitch. But somehow, the reverse doesn’t seem to hold true. And perceived lesbianism seems to preclude other two and men profess more hatred—because they feel more fascination—than for all of the other experiences put togther..

I’m curious as to where I’ll fit. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, in a way, because I’m not going to have any more to do with the male species than I have to. Hopefully, I’ll never have to turn tricks again, but I know better than to say “never again.” What I hope, at least now, is that I’ll never have to be of use to anybody again, for any reason or in any way.

21. The Seasons

That first sunny day, after the wind drew away the blanket of clouds that clung to the sky—twisting and tangling it with gray air reflecting the sullen sea and listless, dessicated leaves—filled me with the same fear, the same dread, I’d later feel when I thought mother was going to ask me when I was coming to see her. Sunlight fell and glinted like sleet striking glaciers of mirrors.

Even at such a young age, I could see that the sunlight—and the sun itself—weren’t the same ones that lit the previous November like a dream. The previous year’s light had already faded and dissipated into particles of green, yellow and the colors of bricks that disappeared from view any time I tried to explain them. Perhaps I’ve been fortunate for not having any illusions, ever, that I’m an artist of any sort. Some people think that anyone who gets away from this block, or from any of those other places that consume the youth of anybody who’s had to sleep in them, is a survivor. But I digress—I’ve left only because I could run, even if only for a time in my life. Even if I weren’t going through the transition I’ll soon culminate, I’d never be able to run that fast, for that long, again. Age has something to do with it, and so do the hormones. But I think—hope—the real reason is that I won’t have to run like that again.

But on that day I was describing, there was only raw, naked sunlight—not sunshine. And the cold. Sometimes, when I was a kid, I couldn’t believe the barren trees couldn’t feel it. Perhaps everyone’s born into it; that’s why mothers swaddle their babies everywhere in the world, even in climates that resemble the womb. I don’t know whether I was born into that light—I suspect I was. I know for a fact –at least from the most reliable sources I know—that two of my cousins (the ones I know about, anyway) were born in different years but in the same final autumnal shroud just before it was torn away by glinting, glittering cold.

One came just before graying November—the last man related to me, as far as I know. The other I’ve never met: He died on some nameless hill fighting in a country nobody on this block ever thinks about. (At least the women don’t, anyway.) When he was born, somebody—my grandmother, the doctor and my great-aunt say it was one of the others—declared him “not long for this world.” Which was strange because he wasn’t sickly: In fact, he was a larger and hungrier baby than any other born to this block—or so I’ve heard. I’ve also heard that his father—I never met him, either—said that on that day, he knew it was going to be a long, cold winter and there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it.

From that year, when I first understood the middle of November (Now I know what Gertrude Stein meant when she said T.S. Eliot “looked like the fifteenth of November.”) I stopped remembering my dreams, except on very rare occasions. I also realized, then, that from that time of year until the spring I wouldn’t see Adam sitting on his stoop again. No one seemed to know what he did. Apparently, he stayed in the house, but nobody knew whether he slept, read books, drank or did some combination of those and other things. Whatever he did, it was hard to blame him: If this sun was too bright for my eyes, I couldn’t imagine how it affected him.

It’s hard to see how he couldn’t’ve been born at this time of year, into gray chill followed by blindingly clear cold. I’d’ve come to such a conclusion even if I hadn’t known his birthdate: what people in America call Veteran’s Day; what others call Armistice Day. On this block, it was probably just another day, just like any other—that’s how it was every year I can remember.

And the day he escaped from the concentration camp: As best he could tell, it was his 24^th birthday. In those shadowy windowless chambers he’d lost track of day and night. It was only much later, when he tried to retrace the march of his days, that he concluded it must’ve been his anniversary, as he called it, or close to it.

He ran, across a frozen river, under the moon. It was the moon; he never mentioned “moon light.” The cold, and the moon—and the wind: They were his only guides as he ran in what he believed to be a direction away from the camp, away from the German Army. After hours—or so they seemed—a truck pulled up alongside him. “Get in!” The voice was in English.

He jumped onto the hay-bale and wheels lurched and rocked him along a road. The same voice later yelled, “Get out!” and soon after he did, the truck disappeared.

Fighting his own reluctance, he walked across a field of frost crystals to a half-timbered house. Inside, about fifteen men in different uniforms clustered around a fire. He didn’t follow the chatter, not only because he couldn’t understand whatever language(s) they spoke: their gathering had the quality of furtive cameraderie forged among people stranded in the same place by different circumstances.

He thought about jumping through the window, back out into the cold. But then he realized that at least two of the men were Americans and that two others, whatever they were, sided with la Resistance. But the realization that he could stay, at least for a while, frightened him almost as much as the thought that those same men could’ve been spies-in-waiting.

Poets love autumn in places like the mountains that surrounded that house. That season fits, almost perfectly, the definition of “melancholy”: a beautiful, gentle—or at least not violent—sadness. But the last flowers lose their grasp on the hillside; the silver air turns gray and the brutal, endless winter begins.

When the absence of the sun’s warmth accompanies an abundance of its light, colors disappear. Or at least one stops seeing them: they, without the filter of haze, seem to disappear; so do the sweet fruits and richly bitter vegetables. For months, he said, they lived on small animals they shot from the windows and dark, coarse peasant bread.

When he’d gotten to that house, he’d had no clothes but the prison uniform he’d worn since the day he escaped. The soldiers gave him cammoflage shirts, wool parachuter’s pants, socks—whatever they could drag up. They were all thicker and heavier than the striped shirt and pants from the camp, but he still felt cold, no matter how long he sat by the fire. Nobody pushed him aside, but he knew that sometimes he had to give the soldiers his space—by agreement, that’s what it was—because only half of them could sit by it at any given time.

It amazed me—but not him—that nobody came looking for him. In fact, no battalions, not even any individual soldiers, marched through that village for almost five months.

But the river he crossed melted; buds opened blood-red and the air filled with haze. Eventually, there were berries and other fruits, but neither he nor the other men could stay and eat them.