September - Last Words 3 страница

"Have you prepared yourself for this as well, Frank?" Lydia asked me one morning, and I was glad to say that I was able to nod back.

As soon as Alexa had finished with the books that Hunter had given her, they were passed off to me. I began to go through the pages and actually understand theory. A lot of the books were familiar to me; I had seen them in Hunter's room for a long time now, ever since our research trips back and forth to the alternative library. He owned his own copies now that were bookmarked, underlined, and dog-eared. I saw the names, Feinberg, Bergman, and Bornstein, that Alex had told me about and I began to put theories behind faces and names. Alternative histories flowed around me. It wasn't the waves of feminism, which had now reached its forth peak according to Hunter, but the alternative history of those who were in-between. I learned about sex differentiation and biological differences like the effect of hormones on the body, along with intersex people and forced surgeries performed after birth. I read about a case study of people in some villages of Greece who had been born girls, but once they hit puberty, were transformed into young men because of a genetic abnormality. I learned how these people were revered in some societies, made into shamans, healers, and storytellers, while they were chastised and killed in others.

But all throughout history and all cultures, especially within art, these people were remembered. These people existed. There were the viragos in Hellenistic philosophies, the sisters of Rebeccah, the ladyboys in Thailand, the hijras in India, and so many more. They were doctors like James Barrie, musicians like Billy Tipton, and Viking Warriors. There were always speculative cases, like Joan of Arc, and there were always crimes that centered around gender transgression. I was floored by the book that I held and read through the history and stories that had been hidden from me as I grew up. I thought there had been no representation and that this entire ordeal had sprung out of thin air. But there was nothing that didn't have its own history and story to tell. It was here, it was in art, and there was no way to deny it.

I began to get excited about theory and about learning again. It made sense when it related to people's lives on a visceral level. I would never be able to engage in the debates that Alexa and Hunter had, but I knew enough to explain it to other people now and do it well. I knew enough now that if someone got into an argument with me, and I didn't want to tell them to fuck off, that I could explain it. The culture and time period that we lived in now didn't express this variation outside the binary and a lot of the time these bodies were excluded from the waves and made to wait on shore. But it was happening soon, Hunter assured me. Though people had been born with very distinct bodies, we were all now realizing that these bodies could be changed without ever opening the skin.

As I tried to explain to Lydia and demonstrate to her how hard I had been working, she stood silently and waited without giving praise. She always wanted the best from me, and while what I had been doing was good, there were far more important issues to consider.

"I think you need to prepare for Hunter after the baby, because things will be even more different than they are now. History is important, but it won't always help with your present," she informed me, but didn't give me any else to go on. I expected her to send me to the resource library and meander around there awhile, but I had been doing that book learning. I didn't think there was any more I could do that Hunter hadn't recommended to me himself. I knew the pathway of surgery, of hormones, how to get care and how to not, and all of these other different areas of interpretations and explanations for that present moment. I knew these facts, logically, but I still had no idea what Hunter wanted to do yet. I knew he was still thinking, and I thought that there was nothing else that I could do until the time came.

Lydia was persistent, though. She needed me to consider our personal history and not the collective. She needed me to examine what I felt and what I saw, in addition to those other voices all around me. Where was Hunter and where was Jasmine, and when did one become the other? Hunter always said that I knew, and that was one of the reasons he trusted me so much. If I knew all this time, where was the difference? Was knowing all that time a bad thing, did it prevent the self from changing? If the self was ever-evolving, where did this process end?

There was a huge difference between Hunter and Jasmine, a definite evolution that I could see now in a linear fashion because I witnessed it every day. It wasn't just the clothing or the hair cut, or all the things we had done in August. Hunter had changed beyond those physical things. His eyes had a light to them that was never there before, he walked differently, and talked differently. I thought these were strange manifestations of a masculinity that were buried and mimicked, but that was wrong. This was beyond what the world called masculine or feminine, and it always had been. I thought back to the Savers trip, and the myth that we embedded in our lives. The art that made it more bearable, that made it liveable. This change he was manifesting - of course - it was about art all along. He was different because he was happy. He walked like he was walking in his head, he saw things like he was seeing them in his head, and he was talking like that too. Even though he had not started testosterone, his voice changed. It was his voice now. He was still the person that I met when I was seventeen and who I had loved as Jasmine for such a long time, but he was Hunter now. I knew this. I called him by that name. I loved him by that name. But he was a lot less scared, less skittish, and less evasive with his own reflection. He was not shaking in fear of himself anymore. I had no idea that he had been in fear. Hunter had needed me in August when he was first coming out, and he needed me to help him out if people got the wrong pronouns, but for the most part, he was content. He was great, actually, and I had no idea what Lydia was even talking about.

I left that day in a bit of a rush, and tried to push it from my mind. When I hugged Hunter as I got home, I waited for a breakdown or something to slip-up. But he laughed and told me some story he had read and then got me to feel the baby (which was going to be here so soon), he seemed fine. Even Gerard was fine that night. So I trusted Hunter, and I began to await the arrival of my daughter with Lydia's whispers in the back of my mind.

Nearly a week passed without much happening and I felt betrayed by the vague promises I had been given before. I felt like I wasn't doing enough to help and I was jumping each time the phone rang thinking that it would be time for Paloma to come. Nothing happened, for a week straight, and I kept myself sane by going through the emails from the show. There was a huge response, other than newspapers, since Vivian had made us all cards and given out our emails. I was actually getting jobs to do people's weddings and baby showers again. I was getting Christmas jobs, even though it was mid September. It was exciting, and I replied that I probably could do it, and I gave them my rates. I had rates! I couldn't believe it. I would also get emails that humbled me, more from people like Mike who saw the exhibit and wanted to thank me. Some wanted to send condolences, and others wanted to send hate mail. It wasn't enough to stop me, and I dealt with it all with the handy delete key, and that was that. I even had my first creepy email, about someone who had tried to seduce their own art professor and then wanted to know why it went wrong and if I could give them some tips. I forwarded the email to Vivian with a note that read "Callie? Dean?" and she sent one back congratulating me on my avid fan.

"It's a milestone," Vivian responded. "We don't always get creepy fans and it can be a sign of magnitude when you do. I figure there is a nut-ball one in every hundred responses. So congrats; your inbox must be taking a hit. So long as everything stays in internet form and no one is being hurt, you'll be fine, Frank. Besides, sometimes the artist just needs to step away and let the work have a life of its own."

Her last response seemed odd to me, that work could have a life of itself. I was so used to seeing what I produced as an essential part of myself, as an extension of my body in some way. It was what those photos of Gerard and I had been about. I had wanted to prove to myself that he existed, and existed next to me, inside of me, as a reflection of myself. He was me and I was him, and I no longer wanted to keep him a secret. I was done with that route of my life because I could see how tiring it would become. So even when some people in the office had gone to see the show, I tried to not let it bother me. It felt a little odd, knowing that they had now seen me naked, but if they were too immature to handle it, then I didn't need to fix them.

But the emails kept coming in. I began to realize that these responses went beyond the people who I had talked to at the opening party that were moved, but from people who had gone there and been moved without my presence. Through that separation, my work extended beyond myself. It was still me - yes, that was a photo of me and this here was what I produced, but keeping it inside forever would have rendered it useless. There would have been no response, and all the hate mail in the world could not make me regret sharing even an ounce of this, even if that separation hurt. People picked up on details in my art I had never seen before. They were seeing words in the Tower of Babel. One woman sent me a poem that she had seen and just "had to write it down" because it was so moving. She thought I had put it there on purpose, and when I explained to her that I hadn't, she told me to be a poet. It was these small exchanges, these small acts of connection, which made me understand what Vivian was talking about. My work had inserted itself into the conversation and though it was still apart of myself, it was part of someone else's world too. That woman may keep that poem for years, I thought. And I had been a part of it. It wasn't just physical relationships with art (and as I could see from my creepy email, seduction could have its problems), but these emotive moments as well. I began to bless the internet, something of which I had no use of before, and something of which Gerard was still uninterested in.

Hunter had been getting email too, and experiencing the same type of elation and connectivity that I had been. But Gerard didn't have one, and Vivian had listed his contact information as my address. The emails for him came at a slower rate until one newspaper article - just a small thing, but it was local and that was what mattered - was published and talked about his Alzheimer's and battle with stroke with resounding empathy. There were people who had lost their parents to the disease, people who missed their loved ones, people who were still taking care of someone who had progressed too far into the disease so that they were always lost. Other people extended their gratitude that someone was talking about the ability side of the disease more than the tragic loss that accompanied it.

"They can still do things," one man wrote to me, "It's not like they're just the disease now. Thank you so much for showing that he can still create art, that he is still a person. That is what I needed to see. I took my dad to the show, and though he wasn't sure of a lot of things, he liked what he was doing. He liked it, I could tell. You can always tell."

I had to leave my office after reading that email, it had been too much. I sat in the bathroom stall for a long time, even when people were going in and out, and even as our breaks started. The man was right, I knew. He was completely right. There was someone still there, and I loved that person just as much as I had when I first met him, before I knew what was going on. I had tried so hard for such a long time to only see the illness and to shut away Gerard. I thought it would make it easier, but it didn't. It just made me miss the time we had lost.

Our relationship had completely changed, I was not in denial of that. But to insist that Gerard was sick and nothing else was going on was a complete and utter lie. I had tried to ruin that mythic capacity he had with the archive and establish the person, but I had been creating a sick person. I learned that slowly, as I got myself away from the project and I began to embrace Gerard, in whatever capacity. This was aging, and he was merely doing it faster than most, but I knew what I was doing when I was seventeen, and I still knew when I was twenty-six. He was Gerard, the man I loved, and though it felt like we had completely reversed our roles and I was the teacher and he was the student, it made us stronger. It transformed us, in the same way the relationship had at the beginning. We were all transforming, and it was not bad.

I pictured Gerard over the last few days, like I had pictured Hunter. He walked differently, his eyes were different, and he talked differently too. Not badly, but differently. He had been recovering from his stroke quite well. He never used the wheelchair anymore and was managing to switch over to the cane even when he was up on his feet for long distances or times. He would sometimes walk with a specific gait with the cane, to an unknown music in his own head. Hunter and I teased him about it occasionally, and he enjoyed the attention it got him. He was still talking, some nights quite lucidly, and even when he wasn't, I had learned to take a step back from his speech. What he was saying still made sense, and it was our fault that we couldn't understand. Humans had a need to communicate and to form language, even if it was a different version, I knew we would be able to figure it out. Gerard still had feelings, too. I could see them in his eyes, even if they did sometimes become harder to access, to express. We worked together to get them out, but I knew they were there. He always would be there. I knew it would get worse and we would have to start again, maybe even each new day. I was not an idiot. I knew there would be times when even the three of us who had taken on his primary care - Vivian, Hunter, and myself - could not do it anymore. We had Mikey and Alexa as back up, and Walter in extreme instances, and I was sure that was enough. But that was a fear in itself, needing more people. We were all afraid of needing more people beyond what we already had, and it was also a strong fear for Gerard, too.

"I used to be afraid of this," he had told me that morning.

"Of what?"

"Getting old. But really... it's not so bad." He had tried to smile then, and been successful. The paralysis on his face was really only noticeable when he smiled or frowned, and his ability to enunciate certain complexities of speech had returned. He had expressed his feelings well that morning, and I thought of them as I emailed back the man who had confessed to me about his own father.

He was seventy-three, and ten years into the disease. "Or, you know, just general ageing. He's ten years into bad aging, that's what I'd want to call it," he wrote to me, and I nodded at my desk. It was just bad aging. That was exactly it. We had been calling it the forgetting disease, but that made us all feel sick. Making it into an illness like that resurrected that soucouyant in our house, and that was not Gerard, that was not him. That was the darkness in all of us, wanting to attach to something real and finding causation. But sometimes bad things just happened, and we didn't need to create their origins.

I told the man, whose name was Scott, about Gerard's improvements since the show, and he shared more with me about his father. He assumed, at first, that I was Gerard's son, but I corrected him. "Oh, of course, I saw the photo. It's harder, then, harder than what I'm going through. Though it's a role reversal for me, I never had the same relationship, that intimacy. I hope you two still have that."

His comment about intimacy had me staring at the screen for some time. I knew I was doing a good job with Gerard, that we were still interacting and having a meaningful connection, but our bodies? Where did our bodies go in this? Ever since his stroke I had been afraid of touching him, as if he would fall or I would somehow set off another reaction. I didn't want to keep doing that. I didn't want to keep feeling like that. The conversation we had about growing old had been an intimate topic. But where were my hands? If they were on him, it was to steady him. If I touched him as I gave him his pill, it was to give him strength and show him how much we all needed him to do this. I touched him to make sure he wasn't cold, that he was clean, that he was happy. What about behind his eyes? Did he miss me, and my body, too? Was that still a sensation he knew? The painting we had done, that had been intimate. But we used to extend those sessions onto other things. We didn't anymore. I grieved so deeply in that moment of realization, and then began to wonder if it was still possible. Could I still surrender myself to him and know that he would be there to hold me like I did when I was seventeen? The art show was the last time we had come close to it and I knew that part of that had been Hunter's presence. Between the two of us, one on one, we needed to be held. I needed to know that I could regress with him, and be seventeen again.

Scott and I continued to email back and forth, and suggested meeting at one point. I told him I was waiting for Hunter (the other artist in the display) to give birth - and he completely understood. "Whenever you're free, then," he told me, and I smiled. We emailed and I knew that when all of this was over, I would go and see him. He had accepted both sides of my relationships and I was elated. The rest of the week, our emails kept me sane, and kept my head focused when all it felt like I was doing was worrying and waiting.

There were more emails, too. Too many to name, and too many to list. I wondered when they would stop coming, but I knew it was not up to me anymore. People could keep talking all they wanted about it. The exhibit, through it was a temporary display and would eventually be taken down and sold, seemed to stretch on. It didn't seem like it would end and a part of me hoped it never would. What was once something that was put together so fast because we needed to express our last wish together became something more than I ever expected it to be. It became the size of Alaska, the size of a giant, the size of the tower itself, and somehow, something beyond all of us. I would still go home to these people, these very real people, and I was glad that I had that part of my life. It was just good to know, that even at my young age, I had changed something through art, no matter how small, along the way.

When an email from my old art professor came up in my inbox, the community of voices that I had created for myself seemed to shift. I felt myself regress to the time when I was barely nineteen and she had been criticizing my photographs like there was no tomorrow. I became on edge again. She was retired now, she said, when I finally got the guts to open the email, but she still went to art shows at the free gallery.

"I thought that had been you on that portrait in February, but I never knew for sure. I see so many students. But when I saw the photograph, there was no doubt. Nothing was left to the imagination there," she had written, and I was about to give up because it was just too overwhelming reading her thoughts on my work, especially since I thought she was referencing my naked shots, but I forced myself to keep going. It was better than the data entry I was in the middle of, but if she began to tell me I was handsome, I was out. "But then I realized that the photos do have a lot of imagination. Your titles were simple, and when they got complex - I'm thinking of the last one - they didn't obscure the detail. Titling something in French is really pompous, but you translated it. You did a wonderful job. The whole show was nice, though I don't exactly like the title because I feel that it became too much by the time I got around to the last exhibit. It's one issue to have a theme, but to be overzealous with that theme and not let people figure it out for themselves is another. That's talking down to your audience and explaining a bad joke. But that is my only tangible criticism," she wrote, and I could hear her distinct haughty voice with her last line. I was getting good at reading bad reviews, though, and I powered on.

"I had no idea of the relations to these people, but I could piece it together. It was really beautiful, all the love you must have shared. It made me envious - and Frank, believe me, I don't say that often. Getting an admission of feeling out of me is incredible. I thought you were just another student and were too self-conscious to flourish. Your work had potential, but I thought you were so stuck inside yourself that you could not see it. Maybe you still can't see it, which is why I'm emailing you. You're certainly not stuck inside yourself anymore; you care for others deeply. But I need you to recognize that although you are good, you can get better. You can always get better. You have that potential, and I don't think you should ever stop."

She had signed it after that, using her full name Patricia Smith, and then I was left at the computer with this huge void that I did not know what to do with. She had cut through the units and webs of conversations that I had been having, and went back to professing. She cut right through the crowd and went right to me. This time, praising me and me alone. Even her only tangible critique had been for a title, something easily changed. I still didn't agree with it, but if I wanted to please her, it was just as simple as a redubbing. I could not deny that this felt good, but I resented the fact that it was coming to me right now. She was telling me that I could do something great - and that I still should. She was telling me to keep going. Just when I had begun to feel at peace, that I had made a change, she was telling me that it was not enough. It would never be enough. I would always be running, I realized. I would always be wanting to flee. Flee into apparent greatness or into apparent failure. I was getting tired just thinking about it.

I had jumped around in her original message, only wanting to see where my name came up, but her email had been much longer, and had talked about the other displays as well. When she got to Hunter's, I noticed that she had used the wrong pronouns. I stopped reading suddenly, and I felt my face get very red. My hands tensed on the keyboard and my mind began to go a mile a minute. This was no longer about me; she had brought everyone else into this. As much as I wanted Professor Smith's approval, as much as I may have needed it nearly seven years ago, she had not given it to me. She had let me fail, and I had moved on. What I had created instead, in her wake, was so much bigger and better than she could have imagined. She was envious of me - she had said that right there. I read it over several times in my mind to be sure of it, and it was a fact. While I pined for the fact that maybe I could have been a photographer, I wondered if it would have been worth it in the end. If I had to trade everything that I had done in the past seven years in order to obtain that one goal, I knew I wouldn't. I knew where the persistent force to pursue that goal would take me at all costs. And it was not worth it, climbing that tower. Didn't she understand that in my work? The tower was not the place for me, and especially not for Hunter. My blood ran cold when I realized that she thought Hunter's display was not genuine. That it was a "mixed match of identity, much like herself" and I wanted to scream. I did not need her approval. If she understood anything about art and beauty at all, she would have realized that this was all genuine. Every last word we etched onto our canvases or carved into a mobile or took a photo of, was us. These were our bodies and these were our souls. This was not some competition of who was smarter, and it was not worth the time and energy arguing over. I went to my email inbox, deleted it, and I erased her from my mind, from my archive. In a fleeting second, I wondered where the lost emails went once banished from the internet. I wondered where The Professor and Professor Smith went, and if they would be happy when they got there.

I sat there and thought for ages, and then turned around and wrote an email to my parents. Hunter and I hadn't had a chance to see them when we got back, and then we had been completely sidetracked. I knew my mother would want to hear about the show, and I knew that I wanted her to see it. I needed my father there, too. He could send us money all he wanted, but he needed to understand this. Like how Vivian brought Walter, I needed to know whether or not my father could be let into the archive. I had put him in there when Hunter and I had drawn our family trees, and I knew that I was going to be okay when Paloma called me dad, but these decisions had been made before others. They both needed to know about Hunter's transition before I could allow them inside fully, and I finally knew how to articulate that now.

As I began to explain it in writing, I began to realize his identity in my head much more than before. I began to see Hunter through Hunter's eyes instead of my own. I thought through what Lydia had told me, and how I needed to prepare for this transition, this change, myself. This was what she had meant. It was not the conception of Hunter that I needed to see, but how I interacted with it. I needed to understand not just him, but my relation to him now. It was still odd to me, thinking about it some days. I would look at Hunter sitting in a chair, wearing clothing that was very similar to mine (though he had started to develop his own style, he was somewhat limited with being pregnant) and I would tilt my head. Sometimes I would try to pick out Jasmine in his face, but then I would stop myself. I would still call him Jasmine sometimes, and still use she every once in a while. It was in my head, mostly, but I didn't think it was a big deal. When I saw she in that email the professor had sent, it enraged me. I thought it didn't matter to Hunter if I called him incorrectly sometimes because I still knew who he was, and accepted him. But it was not that simple. It never was. I knew that everything was still the same and that we still loved one another, but our outside worlds would be very different. It was that outside world that had been scaring us both all along, but for very different reasons. All that time I had spent worrying about being invisible in my identity because I had been in a straight relationship and was about to have a baby was no longer an issue. I was in a gay partnership; the person who was having my child was also a man, and we both slept with another man. I had no idea how to express this language to other people, but getting used to it myself was still taking some work. This work - getting used to my own life and learning how to work through it - that was what Lydia had meant. Our relationship was strange, all of mine had been. But I still needed to go outside and participate. I knew that more than ever after reading those emails.

For Hunter, I knew the paths that he could take, but I still didn't know what path he was going to go on. He, he, he, he. I said the wonderful pronoun over in my mind again and again. I was in love with a man, I thought to myself with a smile. I never thought I would be, ever again, after Gerard, but Daniel had surprised me. And then Hunter even more. Life was full of these moments, these cruxes where things just stop being hard, and then started changing and then...I didn't really know yet. I knew not to believe that life got easier, because it didn't. But was it worth it? Holy shit, yes. I couldn't recall how many times I had wanted to kill myself since Gerard had left, and I didn't know whether or not he was coming back. It was those days that I had blocked out of my head until recently, until things actually got better again.

You understand things in past tense, I told myself. I didn't understand how confused, how completely and utterly alone I had felt without him. But I was speaking about those times, those darkest days that I could ever imagine, in past tense now. As I wrote the email to my parents, I was speaking in present tense. I was telling them about the art that I had done, and my relationships with people that I loved because they were still happening all around me.

"Hunter, Gerard, and myself all have an exhibit, sort of our last big art project together before things get hectic with the baby. We're naming her Paloma, and Hunter should be having her anytime now. I would like to know what you think of the show - all three of us - not just my section. Gerard did some really nice abstract pieces, and Hunter did collages and mobiles. Hunter is what we're call him now. You know him. He's a good guy. I can explain it more later if you want, but know that this is what is going on. I love them - all of them. And in a few days, now, hopefully, we're all having a baby. Together."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14