For Brad (5)

On January 18th, 2013, I was in a car accident that stranded me in 17 degree weather for 5 hours without proper cold-weather clothing.  I was wearing one of Adam’s dress shirts, having taken it from the floor in a rush the morning before, without thinking too hard about where the day might take me. 

My phone died while I was waiting to be picked up.  I had been texting Bonnie thoughts and she’d been appropriately empathetic to my situation until the battery died, and all I could do was stay in one place and hope I was found.

I knew then that Adam watched me for voyeuristic if not ultimately scientific reasons, and this was the first night he sauntered into my head, a voice of reason trying to coax me into keeping a clear head while confronted with the bone-aching cold.

“The human body can withstand any amount of cold as long as the internal temperature stays above hmmm… let’s say 75 degrees.”

I shivered, and stamped my aching feet, and kept moving in small circles.

“Of course, some humans experience a kind of… spontaneous hibernation.”

His voice sounded dry and unconcerned.  I could feel he was reading facts, or simply repeating those he had rotely memorized. 

“The animal which you are,” he mused in my head, “is found in Northern climates that can reach temperatures as low as 15 or 16 degrees.  But you also den during those months when such temperatures might be reached.”

I kept walking and tried not to cry, snow falling into my hair, which was still long, and his voice dipped and softened.

“The coldest you’ve ever been,” he reminded me, “was a winter in Poland in 1343.  You used to talk about it all the time, although I was never sure if you were joking with me.”

“Well, fuck,” I said out loud to myself, and I could feel him chuckle.

“You’ll be alright, Eve,” he reassured me.  “I’ll stay with you until help arrives.”

Since then, it’s all been the same.  Adam wanders into my thoughts, loud and intrusive, when I am trying to understand something I can’t, when I’m afraid, or when his interest breaches the distance that keeps him unknown to me.  Panting on the glass, I suddenly am blind and notice his face pressed to the window of us.

Once I decided to examine how I was a boy, his intrusions became brotherly, in a way, or educational the way a hygiene video might be. 

Finding myself a boy in unexpected situations at work, Adam will clear his throat politely and enter the scene holding a pointer stick and demonstrating his thought with a diagram on the board. 

“THIS section of the brain,” he says, “is often thought to be responsible for the urge to act on aggressive behaviors.  It’s activation is dependent on the use of certain neurotransmitters such as epinephrine, of which you are experiencing a normal surge.”

I bite back swear words, and imagine putting my fist through the dual layers of treated glass magically without maiming my hand.

“What’s happening now is a reaction triggered by the frontal lobe, which recognizes higher moral function, and the more subtle forms of cause and effect.”

Because he’s Adam, I want him to explain every experience I have that I can’t account for otherwise, and so he watches me talk to Bonnie, his glasses perched on the end of his nose like a psychologist.  It’s something I’ve given him permission to be, which helps me feel allowed to be anything at all: that I might have a safety net in him wherever I dare to travel in myself. 

I know that Bonnie doesn’t have such a safety net when she travels the unknown corners of being a girl.  I don’t either, but I wonder sometimes if the water over there for her is as foreign and strangely depressing as I find it.  See, as a girl, I’m special and unique and sometimes even beautiful or valuable.  As a boy, I’m… not any particularly interesting kind of boy.  There’s very little about me which a girl might find redeeming or fascinating or even worth loving.  I’m moody and often angry and resentful of others.  In a girl, those things can sometimes have poetry, but not here.

Bonnie’s eye change when she’s a girl.  How I know she’s a duplicitous creature is by her eyes, which are sometimes a boy’s and sometimes a girl’s.  I’m not sure how I know, or what changes therein to make me think so, but it’s subtle enough I know the change is real, and happening on a small scale, through the tissues of her tiniest muscles in her cheeks.  When she changes, I always touch my own face more, because I know I’m not.  I fear, or I think I fear, being something slow enough and stupid enough that I could kill her in seconds through suffocation; through my inability to move; by never asking her to dance.

“The metaphor of the sleeping princess,” Adam begins when she walks into the room, and I try to ignore him.  She lays in bed next to me, and I kiss her and think of the ways her body comes to life when she’s kissing a boy like Clyde or Brad.  Under them she becomes moving flesh and fast breath and blinking tears. 

“... such as a sword or other weapon,” Adam continues, his voice quieting to something almost a whisper as she stills under me, and turns to stone.

“A tool,” he says, his voice cracking hoarse as if he’s telling me something he never meant to say out loud.  “The magic he might possess to make something work again is dependent on the mastery of the skills it takes to do so.  In other words, no matter how you slice it, it’s never the car’s fault it won’t turn over.”

I touch the soft skin of her cheek with mine, and listen to her slow and even breath.  I want to tell her that never being a boy, for my whole life long, means that I don’t know the way other boys do how to show her myself in such a way that she might fall in love with me.  Even if I did know, there might be nothing to show.  Not knowing how to build the invention of the two of us, I listen to her breath at the edge of the pile of junk it is, and ask Adam, inside, why he can’t just tell me how to do it, but he doesn’t explain.  When I lift my head to look her in the face, she has pity in her eyes which tell me she already knows I can’t.

The pity makes me angry but I’ve thought more than once that it might be better than nothing.

It’s not that I expect her to love me.  It’s that of anyone, I thought she might.  It’s not that I had an expectation of her reaction to me, but I did have one about the world into which I might be bringing this boy, where…

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,” Adam mutters, and I know he means something about Brad, and playing with fire.

If she was going to find a girl and I was going to find a boy, then didn’t that mean… something?  I don’t know.  I’ve never known.  But I know what happened was my fault because I wasn’t given enough lessons with… something.

Maybe as a boy I had an expectation that the world would work a certain way which it did not.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  But the becoming of one for me meant subjecting myself to a world which I had never been a part of before.

When I had tried to talk to her about it before, carelessly perhaps, Bonnie had drawn the same conclusion that my high school friends had drawn when I tried to explain to them something I saw in the world.

“So you’re a woman-hater, basically.”

But I had just stared it down in the sexual politics of Jenna, and I didn’t see that.  I saw that there were girls, of which I had been one, and some of those girls saw the world a way which made me the enemy to them.   An enemy which required not vanquishing, but enslaving to some cause.  Which is not to say that men don’t do the same thing, but I would now be looking at the other side of the equation.

“You Justified,” Adam muses, “Is such that you desire a flat world.  One where relational politics are not non-existent, but rather as fair as possible.”

I slide away from Bonnie, and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

“That’s interesting,” he continues, “Because for you it seems to mean that you wish to buy peace by arming the world with guns.”

Yes, maybe that’s true.  Yes, I like when things are fair, but I never thought of myself in the manner which a girl might see me.  I never thought about being the subject of all the punishments I learned as a girl, because I was born with the idea in place that everyone on earth believes in their own superiority. 

Maybe I read every situation wrong, or created strife where it didn’t need to be created by the elimination of what I saw to be power over me that didn’t ever exist.  Maybe I was misled by something, somewhere, which embedded social messages into me that I never shook loose. 

But I don’t want to live for a girl. 

That doesn’t make me a badguy, does it?

I curl into the smallest internal ball for Adam, who pokes me until I open again.  I mean… I mean it looks like because I don’t know how to love her, I hate her.  I mean… it looks like all this stuff I don’t feel and I want to explain it but I don’t know how.

“Res ipsa loquitur,” he replies with his eyebrows raised.  I wonder briefly what’s Latin for “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck.”  I already made her think I hate her, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it, now.  He watched me get there with the same dry sensibility as ever; looking over his glasses and awaiting my reactions.  I wanted him to tell me how to be the kind of man he is, but he didn’t, the same way a father chooses to let his son become his own man. 

In more ways than one, Brad has suggested for the last year that I have much in common with our father, and when he says it, I know he means the particular father of sin which bred us into monsters; the kind of man who beats his family and enacts violence when denied sex.  They all start out life just like me, it seems, and all the men of the house seem to know it.  There is a kind of man I don’t want to become, and it seems I’ll become him simply because I don’t want to be manipulated by a woman; because that concern makes me paranoid; because my paranoia has made me cruel.

I think I was cruel as a girl, for the same reasons.  It didn’t make me dangerous or despicable in the same manner.  It didn’t make me a man-hater.  It didn’t make me a dyke.  It didn’t make me possibly abusive, and while I might’ve tendered those things for myself in my fears and thoughts, I wasn’t treated that way, and it made them safe to think, and the paranoia alright to explore.

I feel this all at Adam, and he clears his throat softly, as if taking notes.

If I spoke to her in this moment, it would be to say, “I should know better by now,” and finish it with some litany of things I know as a girl but for some reason can’t file or place as a boy.  If I spoke to her, it would be to say I was sorry, but I already know it would not be accepted. 

“Why?” I imagine her demanding, and, unable to say why, I would make something up, which she wouldn’t believe, or would misunderstand, and then we would fight.

I should know better by now that she is a person of a particular nature, but what I don’t know is how that nature might be applied to me as a boy, and all the chances I had to find out were done in a kind of haze of violence over a scar in me, or maybe it was in her.  If I knew how, I would ask, little by little, to explain every corner of the junk pile of our conversations, but they go by too fast, and I can’t undo a single thing.

She turns to me and tells me she’s going to make herself cum for me, and I think there’s no possible way I could ever get hard where I am, in this hole, and I hope she doesn’t notice.  Adam’s ears redden at the same time mine do, and she positions herself on top of me.  Inside I turn to look at him and wonder if he’ll tell me what to do.

“After everything,” he admits, as if he doesn’t want to, “It’s… the desire to understand that which is beautiful and unknown… that seems to prevail.”

I don’t tell her I’m a virgin and this is the farthest I’ve ever gone with a girl, but I want to.  I know then I can’t be any one of three boys I know I can be, but a different one I can’t remember ever being touched except by Brad, and those boys I have made a soup out of can coalesce into an idea of a single boy I want to be, once I figure out all the pieces, and maybe this is just the worst part of me, and I’m wading through boys and prophets and ballads and abandoned swords all made of wood down in a place where I can’t find love, but I want to get out, and I want to do it for her.

When her mouth meets mine, she comes to life like she knows all that, timid to open her mouth into mine; as if she knows I’m a person she’s never kissed and I might be a boy to her, like Clyde is.  I wonder briefly if she thinks I’m Clyde, as her breath picks up, and she winnows her hand between us, to touch herself.

“The first time I…” Adam begins ,and trails off as she moans, and I clutch the back of her neck with my fingers.

“Well, it was terrifying,” he assures me, humor thin in his voice which strains to break again.  I think he means to tell me it’s alright, and to remain calm.

Her eyes open, blank as two galaxies, and I grip a part of her thigh under her black skirt for reasons I try to memorize in case someone ever asks.  Because I wanted to touch her skin.  Because I wanted to feel her moving.  Because the earth is spinning too fast, and that could make it slow down.  Because if it can’t slow down then I want to die together.  Because I want her to think I’m stronger than I am.  Because I want to make her feel safer than I know I can. 

I watch her emotions pass over her face, brushing back with my free hand wisps of her hair.  I think it’s vulnerable of her to do this now, and show me this, and look at me, after everything.