73 Dream

 

I’m wandering a maze of blocks, the shadows of daylight eclipsing the open-sided blocks at my sides. Glimpses of a town I’ve seen before, just outside. But I can’t go to them: I turn, around a column that juts out at angles from the wall beside it. Like Lego blocks constructed of clay-tile material painted in bright blues, oranges and yellows.

Nobody’s on the other side of the column. But I hear her voice—Vivian: “We’ve got to find the lake.” Inside the maze?

Another turn, around another column of the pottery Lego blocks, in green and red. Not here. Nothing’s here, nobody’s here. Her footsteps fade away. I glance upward. There’s a sign on one of the corridor walls. Viale Gruber. The last name of Rachel, one of Vivian’s closest female friends. “She’s the girl I’d marry if I were attracted to girls.” Why would they’ve named a street after her in this place?, I wondered.

I followed Rachel’s alleyway out of the maze, into a dusty piazza like the ones you see at noon on a summer day in the South of France or Italy. I know this town: the plaza, the houses, the dusty pastel light all belonged there. But not that maze—I didn’t remember it there. Of course, things change but I could never’ve imagined such a thing in that town.

I stand, right foot forward, my torso leaning but unable to move. Vivian sprinted up to me.

“We’ve gotta find it.” She gasped.

After she caught her breath, I pointed to an opening around the next wall. “Let’s go in there.”

White sign, blue letters: Esposizione.di Ogetti Egizi. Arrow pointing inside.

“Do you really wanna look at a bunch of bones,” Vivian huffed. “We’ve gotta find the lake!”

As far as I know, Vivian’s never been to France or Italy. Knowing her, I’d guess she still hasn’t gone there, even if she could. They simply were never places she wanted to visit.

Although I am glad I spent time in Toulouse, in France,  I never wanted, and still don't want, to go to any place in particular. I have never fantasized about other places for the same reasons, really, I have never fantasized about sex: You don’t fantasize about what’s been forced on you. If you’re raped at a very young age, sex is not something to wonder about or hope for. And so it is when you’re connected to some place by something that is not of your doing. So even though I had no particular desire to travel, I knew I’d have to get away from this block. But I didn’t know where I’d go, much less how I’d get there.

But back to that maze. She didn’t want to go back in unless we were going to find the lake. Normally, I’d have to talk her out of going in, out of taking a chance. At least that’s how it seemed until she’d decided I’d become too much of a woman to suit her. “I just can’t go there,” she’d say. And I knew I couldn’t change her mind about that one.

Or about not wanting to see the bones, or about wanting only to see the lake. She had no interest in seeing the town, which was somewhat familiar to me, although I didn’t know why. There was, outside one of the Lego blocks, a turreted place I’d seen before—with or without Vivian? And the cathedral, in the texture of chalk and the colors of flint and rust after it’d absorbed sun, rain, wood smoke, more rain, cannon smoke, frosts, smoke from railroad engines , tanks and mustard gas, and the dissipating sunlight of October dusks. The cathedral’s stones imbedded it all; the lake Vivian wanted so much to see reflected it.

72. Fatigue

 

I’d love to make Mrs. Littington disappear. And the lady whose name I never knew, I never want to know. Get rid of all the others, the ones I’ve forgotten or never knew in the first place. What did they have to do with mother, with any of us?

I’ m so tired now. I’ve been tired for so long, I want to close a door and cry. But the tears won’t come now, even if I want them, because I don’t have the emotional energy, or even a space inside me, to allow anyone to see them. For crying in the presence of others is always an involuntary form of sharing, or at least diverting one’s attentions. Those activities require energies that I just don’t have right now.

Maybe it’s this day, and the hope that it will be my last on this block, that’s so drained me. But taking hormones does that to you, too.

The first time you take them, you’re expecting something to happen even though the doctor or whoever prescribes or gives them to you tells you nothing will, at least for a while. Two pills: one is white and has the texture but not the taste of an aspirin tablet. The other, small with a hard shell in a shade of candy-coated cow piss—which is pretty much what it tastes like. Not that I’ve tasted cow piss, candy-coated or otherwise.

After I took those pills every day for a couple of months, I couldn’t notice any difference. But Vivian did. She called me, ostensibly because she wanted to return something I couldn’t recall leaving.  It’d been a few months since she pronounced me “too much of a woman” for her tastes and broke up our relationship. She’d found a watch with a woven black leather band when she was cleaning, she said. And indeed she gave it to me when we met for supper in a Greek restaurant.

But there had to be another reason for her wanting to see me—I could hear it in her voice when she called. I couldn’t imagine her wanting sex with me again. So what, I wondered, did she want?

As I cut into the piece of chicken I ordered, I got my answer. She called my name—my old one. I looked up at her. “Something’s different about you.”

“What?”

She reached across the table and dabbed her fingertips on my left cheek, where she used to stroke. “It feels different.”

“How so?”

“It’s….softer.”

“Huh?”

“It really feels softer.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

All right, I said. I’ll confess something: I am taking hormones. Her face grew longer. “The doctor said my skin would get softer. But not this quickly.”

Then she asked me to stand up. “Wow! Your body’s changing.”

“How so?”

“None of your clothes fit you right.”

“I think I’ve gained a bit of weight.”

“Maybe you have. But it’s in your rear…and you’re growing boobs!”

I couldn’t notice those changes yet, I said. And I felt like I needed more sleep. “But,”she cut me off, “You don’t seem depressed.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not. I don’t even feel sad that much. Or even angry. Maybe…”

She cut me off again, “Maybe you accept things, or are resigned to them.”

“You could say that.”

She could. None of it surprised her. Before that night, I hadn’t told her I was taking hormones. And I don’t know who could or would’ve told her. But she asked me to supper so she could find out what I was like on hormones. Why else?

The old lady whose name I never knew is looking my way again. Who could or would’ve told her.

Make it tomorrow, please. I’m so tired. I want the operation, then some rest.

71. Waiting to Escape

 

If all goes as I intend—I’ve given up planning a long time now—I’ll be away from this block for good tomorrow. Still, it’s a relief, almost, to be here now.

Now I know there’s still at least one place where bricks continue to fade and flake, but the walls they’re in are still standing. Where roof tiles and sides darken with the shade of green copper turns when it’s been left out in the rain. But I know there’s no copper, or any other metal, in those tiles because of the way they curl around their edges and splinter, though they never quite fall apart.

And the people—the ones who still remain—women—are as I expected, though somehow not quite as old. The lady whose name I never knew, still pale and lined but not wrinkled in the way of people who spend their lives in the shadows of their homes. Not much exposure to sunlight—or to rain or wind, either. Her black dress, another ageless but not timeless layer, gathered into neat if not completely symmetrical folds around her waist by some band I can’t see. Just like what she always wore, except that it’s black.

Mrs. Littington, she’s another story. Her jacket sheathes the small mounds of her breasts and falls in a nearly straight line to her hips, which are tucked into pants of the same color, and the same shape, more or less. It makes perfect sense on her, just like the dark hair that reins in the crown of her head and clings in perfectly straight segments that end around her ears and, in the back, just above the collar of her jacket.

It’s not comforting, really, to see her, the lady whose name I never knew, the houses, the yards in shades of gray that end in chainlink fences, a street that ends in a cemetery yard on one end but whose other end cannot be seen from here. However, I’m glad to see everything here for what I assume to be the last time.

Some people leave the places where they were born and raised because they need to know that not all people look or talk like their family members or neighbors, and that not everybody lives in the same kinds of houses. I learned such things, too, but it wasn’t the reason I left. In fact, if I’d learned otherwise, it might not’ve made any difference to me.

Adam left. The man whose body was found in the basement—and whose autopsy has my former name—is gone. And Louis, whom those other boys in school nearly killed. The other boys, who might’ve killed me if Louis hadn’t been there. All somewhere else, I don’t know where. Now mother’s on her way out. I expect I’ll be, too.

None of this makes any difference, really: This block is still more or less what I left. At least, it feels that way. Which, of course, is enough reason to get out and stay away.

Most of all, I’ve got to get out while it’s still safe, at least relatively, for me to be here. The lady whose name I never knew—She’s squinting in my direction again! Hopefully, I’ll be out of here before she starts talking to me, asking me questions: before I find out she’s recognized me.