27. Time

Now that I’m coming closer to my surgery, I realize that I am probably not going to become a better, wiser or more capable person, ever. I’ve also been released from the illusion that I hate men. These days, they just don’t figure much into my life. I could even say, perhaps, that I have no need for them. The funny thing is that they’ll have even less need for me, as a woman, than they did in my male existence.

Those guys—the ones who fucked me when they saw me in a dress—won’t come near me after my surgery, any more than they’d do it with any woman who’s not a wife, or perhaps a sister. Actually, most of them would lose interest in me soon even if I were to keep my male apparatus intact: I’m getting to be too old for their tastes.

Actually, I’ve felt too old for most people for a quite a while now. If I am, I don’t mind. Mrs. Littington seems not to’ve noticed me at all, and that woman whose name I never knew squinted in my direction as if I were somehow familiar, but she wasn’t quite know how. Or does she? Then maybe I’ve become another of her secrets like the ones she kept with my mother, or that mother had with her.

There’re some things that bind people more closely than the secrets they tell each other: the true secrets; that is to say, the intimate knowledge that they both know but never speak of. Now I know why mother never begged me to come back, not even in her last days. I think she always knew I wasn’t another boy, another man, from this block.

They’d had no need of me, nor I of them. And I think mother didn’t need to see me as I was, as I was becoming, as I am about to become. In any moment, there is only what I am and what she is and whatever anybody else may be. And the moment passes; I pass; I’m passing. So was she; so she is.

What would she’d’ve known about me had she seen me through the years that have just passed? What do people know about those whom they see regularly? Hobbies? Fact is, I’ve never had any. Or favorite TV shows, or favorites of much of anything else. None of that stuff matters, anyway. You can have in common with another person, usually a man (if you’re a man), the most banal compulsions—namely, the collecting of objects and the emotions and connotations attached to them, from one’s own or someone else’s past.

That’s the reason I don’t save things. Well, that and the fact that I haven’t stayed in one place long enough to store them. But the first bras, the first pumps, sandals and skirts I acquired have no sentimental value for me. In fact, I don’t even remember what color they were or what, if anything, I paid for them. I needed them, or something like them, and they were the best—which is to say all—I could get. Some things wore out; some stopped fitting and other things I just couldn’t stand anymore. The time for change inevitably comes, and it’s all you can do if you expect to stay alive.

So it is with becoming a woman. The male aspects of my body’ve outlived whatever usefulness they had: they never protected me, and I’m not going to use them to propogate. So I’m going to change, and I’ve been changing the chemistry of my body to prepare for my surgery.

And mother doesn’t need for me to be a man any more than I do.

26. Display

She doesn’t look bad. A little better than I expected—no, I wasn’t really sure of what to expect. I know that no embalmer, no beautician can ever preserve your recollection of somebody. Painters and sculptors never do, either, and the further they are from the truth of their subjects, the more they’re loved, or at least respected, at least by those who spend their days being experts.

But that’s neither here nor there. Mother’s expression, in the casket, mirrored the one I saw in my mind when we spoke on the phone. Calm, if not cool, like the twilight of the longest summer day. The end of something, for someone who’d only known fate. If she didn’t know anything else, she knew I’d leave and that I’d never come back, at least while she was alive. There was nothing she or anybody else could do about it. As I’ve mentioned before, she was never one to rage against the dying light or get involved with any other kind of nonsense.

If she’d been sick, she hadn’t mentioned it. Near the end, she’s said, “I won’t be here much longer.” But she’d never explain. How could she’ve left the block, I wondered. Or why would she do such a thing: She herself said, “It’d be the same anywhere.” And followed it with, “There’s no reason for you to come back”: something I knew in my mind and hoped she would continue to believe.

Actually, she didn’t believe it, any more than I believe in anything else. She knew it, far better than I could’ve. It was a warning, or more precisely, a way to preclude the idea of coming back, should it ever occur to me.

But she knew I wasn’t coming back. If I’ve tried to avoid anything in my life, it’s the circumstance of loneliness without the luxury of living alone. I’ve always dreaded the holiday season, or any other occasion for the gathering of my relatives: Nothing is worse than forced camaraderie in airless rooms. And the only thing as bad as the physical presence of forced relationships is the recollection of such people when you’re seeking solitude.

Or—here’s another thing I never could stand—people trying to convince me that I want company when I don’t. That’s a regular feature of the holidays once you get to know a few people wherever you land, however briefly, after springing away from this block. To recall, and to be forced to recall: those are the greatest curses of all.

So even though mother wasn’t (as far as I know) dying of some dreaded disease or particularly old (or old at all) I must say that I feel, however selfish it may seem, relief that she’s on her way out of this block, at least physically. Perhaps the sadness will come later; perhaps I will mourn her in another year, or even the coming year (which isn’t far away). I never again will have to wonder whether I should be visiting her, or anyone else, and she no longer has to deal with the inevitability of my life. I’m feeling no loneliness, no desolation, at least not now. And this Christmas, this New Year, I won’t owe—or feel that I owe—anybody. I can finally treat each holiday as what it is: Simply another day to survive, another day when I have the same needs and desires I’ve had on any other day. I’ll finally not have the need or obligation to meet them in more ornate or convoluted ways than I otherwise would.

Not that I don’t enjoy ornamentation, even a little spectacle. I wear the most striking or ornate clothing I have. And if anyone takes a photo, I don’t look at it.

25. The Killer

 Far as I know, mother never got a divorce. Somehow I can’t imagine her doing it, even if she’d been married to the Marquis de Sade.

It’s not that she enjoyed abuse, and certainly not marriage-- or men much, if at all. All of her life, people said her unwillingness to “suffer fools” would leave her lonely, would lead to her dying alone.

Nor was it a matter of religion. Even though she sent me to Catholic schools for as long as she could, she wasn’t a particularly pious person. I probably spent more time in church than she did. When I asked her to tell me what all the strange prayers meant, she didn’t know them. She said she’d forgotten them; I’d recite them as best I could. But I only frustrated her.

Sometimes I think if she’d been a bit older, a bit more aware when she met the man who penetrated her loins and disappeared before I came out, she’d’ve never been married. Sometimes I think something like that about the woman whose name I never knew and other women on this block, and still others I’ve met since leaving. But not Mrs. Littington.

If selling your body teaches you anything, it’s this: all possession is temporary. Few, if any, men learn this lesson because, well, they don’t have to. They can live under the illusion that once you’ve paid for something—spent money on it—it’s yours for all time.

Which is funny, because all marriage laws, contracts, vows and ceremonies were devised by men. And they’re all based on that same principle: A man owns a woman (As I’ve since found out, in a few cultures, the reverse is true.) for a period of time: “till death do us apart” or some period that’s finite simply because all lives are. He owns her, at least as long as he’s paying for food, clothing, a roof over her head and those and other needs of the children.

But since men forget that “The good men do is of’t interred with their bones,” they believe that their dominion continues when they’re gone. By the same token, they think that some relationship continues, as long as they’re spending money to maintain it, once the man decides—or the man and woman agree—to live their lives apart from each other.

To steal a line from one of the herd that never recognized me as one of its own, divorce is simply the continuation of marriage by other means-- usually, his means.

Maybe mother’d seen enough of this block to know that when a man decides he’s going to disappear, it’s best to let him go: Initiating proceedings would simply mean making some attempt to summon him back, however briefly, to her home, whatever or wherever that may’ve been.

And for what? So they could create a document saying that the previous one didn’t exist? Or that is was a falsehood or mistake?

In other words, I think mother was smart enough to know—though, to my knowledge, never articulated it—that a woman can’t use a man’s way to resolve a situation he, or one of his kind, created.

Of course, it’s brutally difficult to grow up as a boy when no one teaches you how to fight—and I use that word in the male sense—or to run or deny. On this block, it could’ve been fatal, as it nearly was for Louis Torre. In fact, if mother hadn’t kept me in the kitchen, in the presence of women, as much as she had, I’m sure I wouldn’t’ve made it back. And I’m sure I’d’ve never been able to come with the knowledge—not the belief—that I could come back, and that after doing so, I wouldn’t have to again.

Once we’ve buried mother, I won’t have to come back. There’ll be nobody who would recognize me now, and nobody-- except for that lady whose name I never knew-- who might remember what I was.

Actually, if any of them’d been paying attention, they’d’ve thought I’d died years ago. The certificate was signed; my name appeared in a newspaper column. But they never saw the body about which the police, the coroner and a funeral director had signed documents: more papers. According to them, my last moment on this block—on this planet—or at least the moment someone realized there was a dead body—was at 2:34 in the afternoon. The 18^th of June, 1992: The deceased, had he managed to sidestep his fate another six weeks, would’ve been twenty-five years old. No longer a boy, in the opinion of most of the world, but not quite a man, either. But well beyond either one, in terms of this block.

As far as anyone on this block knew, that body was mine. Anyone, that is, except mother. Anybody who’d remembered me, if she’d thought about it, would’ve been surprised that I was back on this block. Perhaps some of them,--and certainly any man, any male, if there were any left—would’ve said among themselves, “What was he doing here anyway?”

To tell you the truth, it’s a fair question. What would I’ve been doing in the basement of a house that’d been abandoned, where an old woman nobody ever saw but whom everybody knew was nearly deaf and lame, lived? Especially since, having been there before, I'd had no wish—no reason, really—to go back.

In that basement, I wouldn’t’ve known it was one of those cold, wet days that often follows an early heat wave but precedes the official beginning of summer. Or that anyone’d been waiting outside, or whether that person’d bothered to conceal his weapon. A weapon that somehow or another’d been used, after another weapon that may’ve been concealed. And, once inside, no one except for the person who used the weapon and the one on whom he’d used it would know.

Noone’d’ve found the body for days, perhaps weeks or months, had someone not phoned and claimed he’d heard “a disturbance” coming from the house. To this day, no one except the caller knows who made the call, but rumor has it that if came from another state.

So why did the police respond to it? No one’s answered that one, but rumor also has it that the killer rang the precinct. He—or she—has never been caught.

Here’s something even stranger: the police talked to my mother once, only for five minutes—about as long as it took them to conclude she’d had nothing to do with the killing. Mother doesn’t do that sort of thing, or ask it of anybody.

No one’d asked her to ID the body or to provide any information about my life since I left this block. There’d been no funeral, which surprised nobody since, for as long as I can remember, I’d told her I didn’t want one. There’s nothing I wanted less than to be laid out in full view (or at least in front of) gawkers and grievers. Especially when I couldn’t do anything about it.

As I’ve heard, the cops’ve never arrested anybody, and not long after the burial, they stopped investigating possible suspects.

All I know for certain is that I wasn’t there when it happened. But I could’ve given the constables enough information to make them suspicious.

I know of one thing that’ll lure a certain kind of man to a basement that isn’t his own. Actually, to be more exact, I know of one kind a person who can do that: one young enough to be a son, nephew or grandson. So while I may not know who the bait was, I know what it was and that it was switched, yanked away from him.

Maybe he never saw the pre-adolescent boy someone used to entice him. I also suspect—very strongly—that whoever led him down the stairs wasn’t his killer. He’d’ve known better; so would’ve the killer. How else would the killer’ve gotten the hammer and bayonet—and the man who fathered me—inside those concrete walls?