Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  We’ll say our prayers and think of you all of the time—okay, most of the time. Please. Let the TV stay.For once my prayer was answered. Mama came out and told me to cut through the hedge to Nila’s house and ask her husband to help us get the TV up the steps and into the house.I took off running.The adults moved the TV inside, Nila’s husband on one end, Mama and Rita on the other, and situated it catty-cornered to the picture window. Mama asked everyone to stay for dinner, but Nila had already cooked and Queenie and Rita said they needed to go. They had so much to do before they came back for good. My head snapped in their direction.“What do you mean, for good?”“Your mama will tell you, honey. Bye, you all.”The door closed and my mouth opened in a long, dry wail.“Why are they coming back? Are you leaving?”“Kids, I have something I’ve been meaning to tell you. Come sit on the couch with me.”Gary crawled on the couch. I kept my distance.“I know this is hard. It’s hard for me, too, but there are people who have never heard of Jesus. I’m going to travel with Brother Terrell and help him tell the world about Christ.”I put my hands over my ears. “I don’t want to help anyone. I don’t want to hear anything you say.” I ran into my room and crawled under my bed.Mama followed me and sat on the bed. Her voice rose and fell and rose and fell, saying all the things I already knew about Jesus and God and sacrifice. I couldn’t bear to hear her talk. I wanted her to go, just go. My brother bawled like a baby calf in the living room. I would have felt better if I could have cried, but I couldn’t squeeze out a single tear. The bed creaked and I watched the back of her heels shuffle away. I slid out from under the bed and headed for the front door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my brother and mother sitting on the couch. She held him in her lap and rocked him like a baby.“Donna? Donna?”The crack in her voice made me want to turn around, but I slammed through the door and headed to the brown, crunchy field across the street. Just a few weeks earlier, the tall green thicket of leafy weeds provided a jungle in which we played for hours. Now it was a bunch of tall sticks with a few gray leaves twirling in the hot wind. I picked up a long stick and began to walk and slash the dried stalks around me. With every step I repeated the same phrase: “I will never forget this.”Gary cried every night after our mother left and refused to eat much for weeks. He looked like a baby bird: big head, big eyes, bony little body.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Amy put her hand on Reese’s shoulder, but it felt lifeless, carved of wood. “Okay, I have doubts,” Amy admitted. Reese stared straight ahead. Amy had the futile sense of trying to console a statue. Amy took back her hand. “You want to be a mother, Reese. Do you not want to be a mother with me?” She could only see Reese’s face in profile. Distantly, a man’s whistling echoed down the tiled church corridor. “T’ve been fucking Stanley this past week,” Reese said. Amy’s thoughts wiped to blank. The total wash of denial. “I’m SOrry?” “All week,” Reese repeated. “I’ve been fucking him.” Amy nodded. Then she stood up, slung her purse over her shoulder, and walked the length of the corridor, turned a corner, then encountered a pair of heavy, ornate doors on the right side of the hall. She pushed through them into the cool of a hushed and darkened sanctuary. There, she found a pew and sat quietly, her mind unquiet, her body in the kind of physical pain that only heartbreak can cause—pain that, like an acid trip, can only be truly apprehended while in the midst of experiencing it—as she waited for Reese to stop looking for her and leave. CHAPTER SEVEN Eight weeks after conception I F YOU ARE a trans girl who knows many other trans girls, you go to church a lot, because church is where they hold the funerals. What no one wants to admit about funerals, because you’re supposed to be crushed by the melancholy of being a trans girl among the prematurely dead trans girls, is that funerals for dead trans girls number among the notable social events of a season. Who knows what people will say at a trans funeral? Will some queer make a political speech instead of a eulogy, so that for weeks afterward other queers will post outraged screeds about it on social media? How many times will a family member deadname or misgender the deceased from the pulpit, unabashed about it in his grief, peering out at this sea of weirdos who showed up unexpectedly to what he considered a family event? Did their son—er, daughter— really have all these friends? Which nice white cis person will remind the assembled mourners—a high percentage of whom are trans women themselves—that everyone must do more to save trans women of color, who are being murdered (murdered!), although this particular highly attended funeral is, of course, a suicide, because that’s how the white girls die prematurely.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And in the time between dying and death, a little Alaska sat with her mother in silence. And then through the silence and my drunkenness, I caught a glimpse of her as she might have been. She must have come to feel so powerless, I thought, that the one thing she might have done—pick up the phone and call an ambulance—never even occurred to her. There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow—that, in short, we are all going. So she became impulsive, scared by her inaction into perpetual action. When the Eagle confronted her with expulsion, maybe she blurted out Marya’s name because it was the first that came to mind, because in that moment she didn’t want to get expelled and couldn’t think past that moment. She was scared, sure. But more importantly, maybe she’d been scared of being paralyzed by fear again. “We are all going,” McKinley said to his wife, and we sure are. There’s your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze. None of which I said out loud to her. Not then and not ever. We never said another word about it. Instead, it became just another worst day, albeit the worst of the bunch, and as night fell fast, we continued on, drinking and joking. — Later that night, after Alaska stuck her finger down her throat and made herself puke in front of all of us because she was too drunk to walk into the woods, I lay down in my sleeping bag. Lara was lying beside me, in her bag, which was almost touching mine. I moved my arm to the edge of my bag and pushed it so it slightly overlapped with hers. I pressed my hand against hers. I could feel it, although there were two sleeping bags between us. My plan, which struck me as very slick, was to pull my arm out of my sleeping bag and put it into hers, and then hold her hand. It was a good plan, but when I tried to actually get my arm out of the mummy bag, I flailed around like a fish out of water, and nearly dislocated my shoulder. She was laughing—and not with me, at me—but we still didn’t speak. Having passed the point of no return, I slid my hand into her sleeping bag anyway, and she stifled a giggle as my fingers traced a line from her elbow to her wrist. “That teekles,” she whispered. So much for me being sexy. “Sorry,” I whispered. “No, it’s a nice teekle,” she said, and held my hand. She laced her fingers in mine and squeezed. And then she rolled over and keessed me.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I tapped the Colonel on the shoulder and said, “Hyde’s here,” and the Colonel said, “Oh shit,” and I said, “What?” and he said, “Where’s Alaska?” and I said, “No,” and he said, “Pudge, is she here or not?” and then we both stood up and scanned the faces in the gym. The Eagle walked up to the podium and said, “Is everyone here?” “No,” I said to him. “Alaska isn’t here.” The Eagle looked down. “Is everyone else here?” “Alaska isn’t here!” “Okay, Miles. Thank you.” “We can’t start without Alaska.” The Eagle looked at me. He was crying, noiselessly. Tears just rolled from his eyes to his chin and then fell onto his corduroy pants. He stared at me, but it was not the Look of Doom. His eyes blinking the tears down his face, the Eagle looked, for all the world, sorry. “Please, sir,” I said. “Can we please wait for Alaska?” I felt all of them staring at us, trying to understand what I now knew, but didn’t quite believe. The Eagle looked down and bit his lower lip. “Last night, Alaska Young was in a terrible accident.” His tears came faster, then. “And she was killed. Alaska has passed away.” For a moment, everyone in the gym was silent, and the place had never been so quiet, not even in the moments before the Colonel ridiculed opponents at the free-throw stripe. I stared down at the back of the Colonel’s head. I just stared, looking at his thick and bushy hair. For a moment, it was so quiet that you could hear the sound of not-breathing, the vacuum created by 190 students shocked out of air. I thought: It’s all my fault. I thought: I don’t feel very good. I thought: I’m going to throw up. — I stood up and ran outside. I made it to a trash can outside the gym, five feet from the double doors, and heaved toward Gatorade bottles and half-eaten McDonald’s. But nothing much came out. I just heaved, my stomach muscles tightening and my throat opening and a gasping, guttural blech, going through the motions of vomiting over and over again. In between gags and coughs, I sucked air in hard. Her mouth. Her dead, cold mouth. To not be continued. I knew she was drunk. Upset. Obviously you don’t let someone drive drunk and pissed off. Obviously . And Christ, Miles, what the hell is wrong with you? And then comes the puke, finally, splashing onto the trash. And here is whatever of her I had left in my mouth, here in this trash can. And then it comes again, more—and then okay, calm down, okay, seriously, she’s not dead. She’s not dead. She’s alive. She’s alive somewhere. She’s in the woods. Alaska is hiding in the woods and she’s not dead, she’s just hiding. She’s just playing a trick on us. This is just an Alaska Young Prank Extraordinaire.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  I made my way to Bangs to see him preach for what my mother said might be the last time, though I could not imagine the world without the force that was David Terrell.His shaved head gleamed under the lights; his all-black attire hung off his ruined body. He paced around in that aimless way I remembered from earlier fasts. “Y’all know I been prophesying the destruction of America for years; well, God told me the time has come. I asked the Lord the other night if there was anything I could do to hold off what’s coming.”He pulled his shirttail from his pants and began to unbutton it. “God told me there was only one way.”The people around me began to rock and moan. I don’t know if they knew what was coming next. I didn’t. Brother Terrell slipped out of his shirt, revealing a short-sleeved white T-shirt underneath. He unbuckled his belt, pulled it through his pants, doubled it, and held it at both ends. Clutching the waistband of his trousers with one hand and the belt with the other, he walked over and stood in front of one of the young men seated on the platform. He looked down at the man and extended the belt to him.“Brother Walker, God told me he needed someone to stand in the gap. I need you to stand up and take the belt.” The man did as he was told.“The prophet always has to bear the signs in his own body.” Brother Terrell walked over to an empty folding chair and Brother Walker followed, the belt dangling from his right hand. Brother Terrell knelt in front of the chair and took off his shirt.“God told me someone has to take the whipping for America.”Brother Walker dropped the belt and backed away, shaking his head. Brother Terrell looked over his shoulder. “Pick it up, Brother Walker. I know you don’t want to do this, but you have to. I have to.”The younger man picked up the belt and beat the prophet. When Brother Walker collapsed in tears, Brother Terrell called one of the other ministers to take his place. After the second whipping, the welts began to bleed. Everyone in the tent wailed and cried, and I was right there with them. Oh God. Oh God. Oh Lord. He called preacher after preacher. If they did not hit him hard enough, he looked up and told them that if they didn’t want to see children running through the streets of America with their skin melting from their bones, they better hit him harder. We screamed and moaned with every lash. The blood ran down his back. After about an hour, he pulled his T-shirt over his head and a couple of men ran to help him up. Blood seeped through the cotton of his shirt as he stumbled offstage between the men.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  She knew that in only a few moments the guillotine of sadness would slam down upon her, severing her from her pride, and anything that might keep back despair. She would beg, she would cry. But it hadn’t yet come down. The sentence had not been executed, and her sense of pride, in its last moments, remained defiant—say anything, no matter how stupid, don’t go down crying. “T guess I shouldn’t have taken off my panties,” she spat out, then hung up, and waited for the agony of heartbreak to hit as she considered the thousand other more biting or pleading ways she could have said goodbye. The trans lady picnic occupied a clearing atop a hill across from the Picnic House in Prospect Park. Reese had to admire how, in the way that trans women can be ever and subconsciously vigilant, the picnic’s organizers had chosen a militarily advantageous hill, the kind of hill a general would have chosen to make a stand: wooded on three sides, with a view of the grassy fields below as well as every path by which a pedestrian could approach. Arrivals to the picnic were spotted and identified among the drifting weekend crowds of Park Slope parents long before they had summited. No one would be sneaking up to surprise the transsexual women. Which is not to say that the passersby were not themselves surprised. Among many other instances, Reese saw it in the body language of a pair of teenagers ambling by. The moment the two boys glanced up the sloped lawns to the group of women sprawled on blankets passing Tupperware back and forth, their teenage figures suddenly huddled into each other to confirm and broke apart with a laugh. When Reese turned back from the teenagers, she found Sebastian As a Girl watching her. A jolt ran through Reese. In the intervening years, she’d downgraded Sebastian from real love to a teenage affair, and her own feelings from tragic to immature. But the near-familiar face planted doubts about that revision, the lingering suggestion that she’d downgraded defensively to spare herself. Sebastian As a Girl held Reese’s gaze for a beat or two, the almost-known features wobbling from an uncertain frown into a friendly, even smile, a slight nod, before she turned back to other women beside her. Iris tapped Reese’s knee, drawing her attention. “T know Felicity,” Iris indicated with a nod toward the pretty Latina girl who had somehow skateboarded there in a dazzlingly white dress and was just then making Sebastian As a Girl laugh. “Wanna go over and talk? Get an introduction?” “No, of course not,” Reese replied. “I’ve lost control of my heterosexuality, not my dignity.” Iris snorts. “As if you have dignity. You had to sneak out of Daddy’s house today.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  After the evening services, someone separated the trinkets from the money and put them into a different bucket. It wasn’t unusual to see members of the evangelistic team at the back of the platform going through the jewelry and taking what they wanted. Sometimes they paid for it and sometimes they didn’t. Mama contended that Brother Terrell always paid for what he took. He brought home several sets of china that we never used, silver, stereos, antique furniture, handwoven Indian bedding. I was the only girl in fifth grade with a diamond watch. Mules kicked the china to bits. Someone tore holes in the Indian blankets. I lost the diamond watch. We didn’t possess the capacity to value such things. They meant almost nothing to us.The one exception was the rings. My mother loved those rings. Every time we went to a revival and Brother Terrell asked people to prove God by digging deep and giving something they could not afford to give (he meant money), Mama slipped the rings from her purse and dropped them into the offering buckets surreptitiously. She took seriously the concept of proving God. She believed if she gave God everything she had, he would work things out so that she and Brother Terrell could be married properly and she could wear the wedding rings he gave her under the tent as well as out in the world. Brother Terrell fished the rings out of the offerings many times and gave them back to her. One night, someone got to the rings before Brother Terrell. He had to find another set and the cycle began again.My mother believed she and Brother Terrell were soul mates ordained by God to be together to build a great ministry. He received the visitations, and she translated them into their own brand of theology and wrote articles under his name explaining the revelations. She encouraged his ambitions to take his ministry worldwide and helped him develop a strategy to do so. She believed he would “do right” by her. All she had to do was pray and keep the faith. I know all of this because when we were not arguing about her relationship with Brother Terrell, she confided in me. She had no one else. She kept her affair with Brother Terrell a secret from her family and the longtime friends she had made while traveling with the tent. Neither her family nor her friends knew where we lived. The neighbors she befriended thought she and her “husband” were flashy dressers and secretive, but they chalked it up to their citified ways. They had no idea how secret their lives really were. To talk with anyone other than me about what was going on would have been to betray what was most important to her: Brother Terrell and the ministry.I was desperate for my mother to save herself, to save us. Especially after she told me she was pregnant.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Forever.”I jumped off the couch and faced her, hands on my hips. “I don’t believe you!”She looked startled. “What do you mean?”“Our mother wouldn’t do that.”“Really? I have something to show you.”She stood and walked from the living room into her bedroom. I sat back down on the couch with Gary and whispered in his ear, “Don’t worry. It’s not true.”Sister Coleman walked back into the living room, holding a stack of papers. With her reading glasses on the tip of her nose and her sensible shoes, she looked like someone’s favorite aunt. She flipped through the pages, licking her fingers in between to ensure she was turning only one page at a time.“This is a legal document your mother signed, giving you both to me.”She pulled out a page and handed it to me. Our mother’s signature was at the bottom.Sister Coleman kept talking. She would adopt us. We would be a family. She wanted us to call her Mama. Wouldn’t we like that? We nodded yes.“Yes what?”Gary spoke up. “Yes, Mama.”He gave her a quick hug. “Can I go now?”“Go ahead, sugar. I’ll call you for dinner.”The worst had happened. We had lost our mother. There was nothing left to say. Nothing left to do. I curled up on the daybed and fell asleep.Gary and I found it almost impossible to eat after Sister Coleman’s announcement. Food stuck in our throats, and breakfast especially proved difficult. Every morning Sister Coleman placed giant bowls of oatmeal in front of us and told us to eat. The cereal refused to stay down. We started each day hanging over the toilet and throwing up. I was late for school almost every day.One morning when I began to gag, Sister Coleman would not let me run to the restroom. I was going to eat my breakfast, she said, no matter what. Again that cool, firm palm on the back of my neck. I swallowed, took a bite, and the oatmeal came back up. My cheeks bulged. I flailed and scrambled to get up, but she held me in the chair. I threw up in the bowl and all over the table. When I finished she held my face and wiped it gently with a napkin. Something sour streamed from my nose. I was sorry, really sorry. She smiled and handed me the spoon.“That’s okay, hon. Just clean your bowl.”“But . . .”“Go ahead. Eat it.” She held my head over the bowl.I cried and pleaded and ate what was in my bowl.After a while, she replaced the oatmeal with mackerel. It was salty and fishy and the vomiting lasted all morning.We never told Sister Coleman’s husband what was happening in his suburban home, and we never told her aunt Eunice. White-haired Aunt Eunice sometimes sat with us while the Colemans worked. Her body was soft and comforting as a favorite pillow and she had enough patience to teach a seven-year-old to embroider.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Katrina had had a miscarriage. And with this thought, Reese feels another stab of something like grief. At what point, she wonders, does a mother go from wanting a child to wanting this child, her child? When does that transformation occur? Reese remembers that Katrina had felt relief at her miscarriage. Perhaps that first time, Katrina had miscarried a child, not her child. How else would she be willing to do it again? Reese herself had always wanted to be a mother to a child, and yet, it is only now that she realizes that, without quite noticing, she wanted to be this mother, to that child. Attachments had formed that had almost nothing to do with identity. Perhaps, even, the important thing was that child. It was, perhaps, too late for Reese to be this mother, but Katrina could still have that child. Somehow this was the worst thought of all. If she really wanted to be a good mother, she had to admit she had been wrong. The child was everything. Reese would disappear. Ames and Katrina could have her baby if that’s what it took. She experienced a moment of Solomonic self-satisfaction. Not that she knew her Bible all that well, but wasn’t the true mother she who would rather give up her baby than allow it to be sawed in half? The wind blew sand through the empty hospital and Reese turned to gaze at the ocean, freezing beyond the frolicking queers, and she recalled suddenly the Wim Hof method. Among the queers of Brooklyn, it will become a generally agreed- upon story that the first truly beautiful beach day of the season was ruined when a certain pale, aging, once-popular, still-haughty trans woman traumatized an entire community by throwing herself into the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean to drown a la Virginia Woolf in full sight of everyone who had just come for a good time. At first, she is the only one in the water past her ankles. Then she wades in to her waist. By the time the water hits her navel, a few onlookers on the shore have noticed the woman in the red bathing suit walking slowly into the sea. They watch her with consternation. She goes alone, with none of the excitement or shrieking that ought to accompany a polar plunge. By the time she is up to her neck, she has caught the attention of a few small crowds. Two hundred feet out, she rises slightly, on a sandbar. Small waves break over her arms. Then she steps off the far side of the sandbar, and goes under.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The paramedics—two young guys, one white, one black, equally fit —have Reese wrapped in one of those shiny Mylar reflective blankets, and have pulled the ambulance out to a patch of asphalt near the road, away from the beach. Reese has denied her swim was a suicide attempt. But she has regained her wits enough to know better than to shout “Wim Hof Method!” at paramedics responding to a supposed mental health crisis. It was a polar bear swim, she tells them. One of the guys interviews Thalia, then comes back. “She says you’ve lost a baby,” he informs Reese, “that you’ve been upset about it. Does that have anything to do with what just happened?” How dense are these guys? Why would they remind a grieving mother of her lost child? Besides, her clothes are still down at the beach; she’s sitting there untucked in a one-piece. “I’m trans, duh,” she snaps. “I can’t have a baby.” The men exchange glances, and Reese understands she has miscalculated. Transness is not the most direct route to non-suicidal credibility. The guy who interviewed Thalia has also asked some other people what happened, and everyone has described the same scene: a woman walking soberly and purposefully into a sea of lethal cold, refusing to turn back no matter what they shouted. Reese lets out a little derisive laugh. Who did they think she was to wear a bathing suit for that? Did they think she had no sense of theater or gravitas? Can you imagine Virginia Woolf being so undignified as to put on a bathing costume to walk her intolerable despair into the river? If she wants to be taken seriously when she walks tragically into the sea, she needs a big skirt weighed down with stones, not a polyester one-piece. The paramedics tell her that they want to take her to the hospital, and she refuses. She’s got the worst insurance that’s still legal; she can’t pay for an ambulance trip. Nonetheless, they say, she should go to the hospital. They can’t make her go, they admit, but in a mental health crisis in which a suicide attempt has been reported, she must speak with proper authorities. She has the option of doing an evaluation at the hospital or waiting here for those authorities to arrive. “Like what other authorities? The police?” The white guy shrugs as if to say, this choice is your doing. She imagines speaking to police on the side of the road while a sizable portion of Brooklyn’s queer population files past on the way home from the beach. She waves her hand angrily. “Hospital,” she commands. Reese enters the waiting room with a drawn, tight expression. She wears the cover-up and flip-flops that she had worn to the beach, an off-kilter outfit that seems a cruel joke to Ames. One that confirms the suspicions that one might have of anyone emerging from the psychiatric ward.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  She wants to be inured to hope. When it comes, it always disappoints, and unlike in her twenties, now it never comes simply, instead it arrives twisted, with caveats and strings. What was she doing here anyway? Trying to get some cis woman to share her baby with Reese and Reese’s detransitioned ex-lover? How sad her life has become that such a ridiculous plan was the best peg on which to hang some kind of hope. Reese used to say that she was only interested in people who’d had a major failure in life. She believed that one ought to have a singular major failure, in which all of one’s hopes were dashed, in order to sprout a life into something interesting, as pruned trees grow baroque and beautiful, because an unpruned tree only grows vertically and predictably, selfishly sucking up as much sunlight as possible. Only after the breakup with Amy did Reese begin to concede that perhaps Amy had been her own first major failure. She had previously been under the impression that she had failed majorly for most of her life, but in fact, she had simply confused failure with being a transsexual—an outlook in which a state of failure confirmed one’s transsexuality, and one’s transsexuality confirmed a state of failure. A mistake many of the transsexuals she knew made. Such thinking was static. You had to hope for something in the first place in order to have those hopes dashed. With Amy, she had hoped. She made her earlier quips about failure because she believed them, but also partly because she thought they made her sound urbane and worldly. She suspected, however, that actual failure had turned her unlovely. At thirty-four, she feels old. “What are you doing on the floor?” The floorboards creak as Ames steps out of the bathroom, freshly shaven, wearing a snug linen jacket, his fingers deftly manipulating a Windsor knot with practiced ease. “Are you crying?” Reese pushes onto her left arm and, looking up, wipes beneath her eyes carefully with the pads of her fingers so as not to disturb her mascara. “No.” “Yes you are! I didn’t know what I was hearing. What happened?” “T smelled the closet. And suddenly I remembered what it was like when we lived together. It made me so sad and nostalgic.” Ames lowers himself into a squat just beside her, resting on his heels. The joints of his knees crack. Tentatively Ames puts a hand on her back on the fabric of her dress. “It happens to me too.” Reese draws in a quick sniffle, but otherwise doesn’t respond, so he continues. “I read that of our senses, only taste and smell pass directly to the hippocampus, where memory gets stored. Sights, sounds, and touches get converted into thoughts and symbols before they continue on to the memory in the hippocampus. But smell connects directly to memory.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Wind stirs the water in the puddle beneath them. When Reese speaks, she doesn’t respond directly. “There’s that Reagan-era saying that weed is a gateway to hard drugs like heroin. I feel that way about a vagina. It’s a gateway drug. I used to want surgery; but I’m pretty sure that would just have been the gateway to wanting a uterus. And if I had a uterus, that would be the gateway to wanting a baby in it. I hear how that sounds. You add it all together and it sounds like my deepest desire is to go shopping for some other woman’s organs. I don’t lie to myself about my situation. If I want a baby, I have to take one from some other woman. Can you imagine how that feels for me? I gave everything for my womanhood and here I’m talking about taking things from women. I’m bitter bitter bitter about being in that place.” Katrina pauses, then asks, “Why do you have to use these words? ‘Take’? ‘Give’? This isn’t a zero-sum game. I’m not even offering to give you anything. I’m inviting you to join me, to put in commitment and work. I don’t think of a child as something given back and forth, and I actually think you wouldn’t either. That’s not how families work.” Katrina gestured to where the mom and girl had been on the sidewalk. “You think that scene doesn’t make me ache? That’s a scene that you build, not a scene you take from someone else. That’s what I want to build with other people. With children and mothers.” Reese pursed her lips, as if Katrina had invoked something sour. “Do you remember that I just went to a funeral? I’ve been doing this for the better half of my life. I know how things turn out when it comes to trans girls. Believe me, there can only be one mommy. You'll see. It’ll be the one with the right body for it.” Katrina opens her mouth. Abruptly she laughs. “I can’t believe that ’m more willing than you to think openly. Maybe the way you’re seeing things isn’t working. You're so sure how things are, how to do things. But the way you do things ends in funerals. Maybe instead of saying what the inevitable outcome is, just make a fucking leap. Because maybe I’m ready to. Maybe try recognizing the chances you have, recognize this chance with me, and be a mom if you want to. In a few weeks, my doctor is supposed to call and initiate care. I’ll get an ultrasound to hear the heartbeat. Why don’t you come along?” CHAPTER EIGHT Three years before conception

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  She knew that in only a few moments the guillotine of sadness would slam down upon her, severing her from her pride, and anything that might keep back despair. She would beg, she would cry. But it hadn’t yet come down. The sentence had not been executed, and her sense of pride, in its last moments, remained defiant—say anything, no matter how stupid, don’t go down crying. “T guess I shouldn’t have taken off my panties,” she spat out, then hung up, and waited for the agony of heartbreak to hit as she considered the thousand other more biting or pleading ways she could have said goodbye. The trans lady picnic occupied a clearing atop a hill across from the Picnic House in Prospect Park. Reese had to admire how, in the way that trans women can be ever and subconsciously vigilant, the picnic’s organizers had chosen a militarily advantageous hill, the kind of hill a general would have chosen to make a stand: wooded on three sides, with a view of the grassy fields below as well as every path by which a pedestrian could approach. Arrivals to the picnic were spotted and identified among the drifting weekend crowds of Park Slope parents long before they had summited. No one would be sneaking up to surprise the transsexual women. Which is not to say that the passersby were not themselves surprised. Among many other instances, Reese saw it in the body language of a pair of teenagers ambling by. The moment the two boys glanced up the sloped lawns to the group of women sprawled on blankets passing Tupperware back and forth, their teenage figures suddenly huddled into each other to confirm and broke apart with a laugh. When Reese turned back from the teenagers, she found Sebastian As a Girl watching her. A jolt ran through Reese. In the intervening years, she’d downgraded Sebastian from real love to a teenage affair, and her own feelings from tragic to immature. But the near-familiar face planted doubts about that revision, the lingering suggestion that she’d downgraded defensively to spare herself. Sebastian As a Girl held Reese’s gaze for a beat or two, the almost-known features wobbling from an uncertain frown into a friendly, even smile, a slight nod, before she turned back to other women beside her. Iris tapped Reese’s knee, drawing her attention. “T know Felicity,” Iris indicated with a nod toward the pretty Latina girl who had somehow skateboarded there in a dazzlingly white dress and was just then making Sebastian As a Girl laugh. “Wanna go over and talk? Get an introduction?” “No, of course not,” Reese replied. “I’ve lost control of my heterosexuality, not my dignity.” Iris snorts. “As if you have dignity. You had to sneak out of Daddy’s house today.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  At the end of three months in New York, Reese had an evil genie’s facsimile of her dream life: surrounded by children, with a man who promised to take care of her. Only the children were not her own, and her man lived an ocean away and rarely called her anymore. When she and Sebastian did talk, he was often drunk. Increasingly panicked, she held back the need to ask about the plane ticket, about the plan, about his love. When she finally blurted something out, on a low-quality VoIP call from some third-rate bodega calling card, it came out resentful, half-formed, and not at all the first move in the meticulous chess match she’d planned to get him back on track. “You’re never going to fly me to Norway, are you?” “T have a theory,” he responded. “What are you talking about?” “IT have a theory,” he said again, then went on when she didn’t speak. “My theory is that the only thing I enjoy doing is destroying my own innocence. I have no more innocence to destroy with you.” She had, after only three months of dealing with young men in New York, come to recognize the grandiloquence of a man in love with himself, the hero of his own private movie—and Sebastian’s movie included a dalliance with a transsexual, to establish his libertine character. “What the fuck does that mean? Am I supposed to find that some kind of tragedy?” “Tt means I can’t fly you to Oslo.” She knew it was coming. But still the pressure inside her chest made it hard to breathe, and when she finally spoke it was because something inside her had broken. “I waited for you,” she said into the crackling VoIP line. “You promised me.” “My promises are no good.” He sounded sad about it. “I want a family someday. I don’t think you can give me one.” How cruel to be accused of lacking the one thing she most desperately wanted, a thing she felt sure he could easily give her. She let out a low moan, but then, even in her incipient grief, hated how low the pitch sounded and cut herself short. She needed an unguarded moment, a moment of actual pain. But instead, fear of a non-passing voice shocked her into doing what she always did: Push down her feelings. Get cold. “We can fix this,” she said as evenly as she could. “I know we can. I love you. You love me. Just tell me what you need.” “No,” he said. “I just...you’re not a forever person.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Before it gets cold.”The grease had separated and congealed around the edges of my plate, and the bite of goulash I took before Brother Terrell came into the kitchen lay in my mouth like a dead thing. I gagged and ran to the trash can to spit it out, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and walked back to the table. Randall dropped his head into his hands. The nurses in the hospital had warned that Randall shouldn’t get upset, that it could aggravate his bleeding condition. Gary took his thumb out of his mouth and patted his arm. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” Randall jerked his arm away, pushed back from the table, and walked out the back door. Through the window I watched him pick up an old baseball bat and beat it against the skinny trunk of a tree. His belly swayed with each swing. It seemed to get bigger every day, a sure sign that the blood was backing up in his stomach again. We had not taken him to the hospital because Brother Terrell said we had to hold on to the promise that God had healed Randall and not let the devil steal our faith. The Bible was filled with stories of people who, as Brother Terrell often reminded us, paid the price for their faith. How much would we have to pay? I slid my fork tines through hollow tubes of macaroni. The bare scraggly branches of the tree trembled each time Randall cracked the bat against its trunk. Everything seemed harder in winter. Bark flew off, exposing the soft white flesh beneath.“I wish he’d stop.”Gary looked up at me. “What?”“Nothing. Just eat.” Brother Terrell eased himself down on the edge of the platform, resting his feet on the prayer ramp below. “Somebody bring me my guitar.” He slipped out of his suit coat and held it up. Brother Cotton exchanged the guitar for the coat. “Can I have a little water too?” Three men jumped up to get the water.“Fasting leaves a funny taste in your mouth. Y’all ever notice that?”Yes, amen, they had noticed.He strummed the opening chords of “They That Wait Upon the Lord.” “It’s hard to wait on God, but if you’re a man of God, there ain’t nothin’ else to do.”He closed his eyes, strummed his guitar, and began to sing.They that wait upon the LordShall renew their strengthThey shall mount up with wings of an eagle . . .The lyrics are an affirmation of faith, but the tune is slow and melancholy. That night Brother Terrell’s bare-bones guitar playing and his ragged voice turned the song into a lament. Mothers stopped shushing their children. Teenage girls held on to the notes they were supposed to pass.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The paramedics—two young guys, one white, one black, equally fit —have Reese wrapped in one of those shiny Mylar reflective blankets, and have pulled the ambulance out to a patch of asphalt near the road, away from the beach. Reese has denied her swim was a suicide attempt. But she has regained her wits enough to know better than to shout “Wim Hof Method!” at paramedics responding to a supposed mental health crisis. It was a polar bear swim, she tells them. One of the guys interviews Thalia, then comes back. “She says you’ve lost a baby,” he informs Reese, “that you’ve been upset about it. Does that have anything to do with what just happened?” How dense are these guys? Why would they remind a grieving mother of her lost child? Besides, her clothes are still down at the beach; she’s sitting there untucked in a one-piece. “I’m trans, duh,” she snaps. “I can’t have a baby.” The men exchange glances, and Reese understands she has miscalculated. Transness is not the most direct route to non-suicidal credibility. The guy who interviewed Thalia has also asked some other people what happened, and everyone has described the same scene: a woman walking soberly and purposefully into a sea of lethal cold, refusing to turn back no matter what they shouted. Reese lets out a little derisive laugh. Who did they think she was to wear a bathing suit for that? Did they think she had no sense of theater or gravitas? Can you imagine Virginia Woolf being so undignified as to put on a bathing costume to walk her intolerable despair into the river? If she wants to be taken seriously when she walks tragically into the sea, she needs a big skirt weighed down with stones, not a polyester one-piece. The paramedics tell her that they want to take her to the hospital, and she refuses. She’s got the worst insurance that’s still legal; she can’t pay for an ambulance trip. Nonetheless, they say, she should go to the hospital. They can’t make her go, they admit, but in a mental health crisis in which a suicide attempt has been reported, she must speak with proper authorities. She has the option of doing an evaluation at the hospital or waiting here for those authorities to arrive. “Like what other authorities? The police?” The white guy shrugs as if to say, this choice is your doing. She imagines speaking to police on the side of the road while a sizable portion of Brooklyn’s queer population files past on the way home from the beach. She waves her hand angrily. “Hospital,” she commands. Reese enters the waiting room with a drawn, tight expression. She wears the cover-up and flip-flops that she had worn to the beach, an off-kilter outfit that seems a cruel joke to Ames. One that confirms the suspicions that one might have of anyone emerging from the psychiatric ward.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  There was pain. A dull endless pain in my gut that wouldn’t go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving. And what is an “instant” death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous. Was there time for her life to flash before her eyes? Was I there? Was Jake? And she promised, I remembered, she promised to be continued, but I knew, too, that she was driving north when she died, north toward Nashville, toward Jake. Maybe it hadn’t meant anything to her, had been nothing more than another grand impulsivity. And as Hank stood in the doorway, I just looked past him, looking across the too-quiet dorm circle, wondering if it had mattered to her, and I can only tell myself that of course, yes, she had promised. To be continued. — Lara came next, her eyes heavy with swelling. “What happeened?” she asked me as I held her, standing on my tiptoes so I could place my chin on top of her head. “I don’t know,” I said. “Deed you see her that night?” she asked, speaking into my collarbone. “She got drunk,” I told her. “The Colonel and I went to sleep, and I guess she drove off campus.” And that became the standard lie. I felt Lara’s fingers, wet with her tears, press against my palm, and before I could think better of it, I pulled my hand away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Eet’s okay,” she said. “I’ll be een my room eef you want to come by.” I did not drop by. I didn’t know what to say to her—I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side. — That afternoon, we all filed into the gym again for a town meeting. The Eagle announced that the school would charter a bus on Sunday to the funeral in Vine Station. As we got up to leave, I noticed Takumi and Lara walking toward me. Lara caught my eye and smiled wanly. I smiled back, but quickly turned and hid myself amid the mass of mourners filing out of the gym. — I am sleeping, and Alaska flies into the room. She is naked, and intact. Her breasts, which I felt only very briefly and in the dark, are luminously full as they hang down from her body. She hovers inches above me, her breath warm and sweet against my face like a breeze passing through tall grass. “Hi,” I say. “I’ve missed you.” “You look good, Pudge.” “So do you.” “I’m so naked,” she says, and laughs.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  She shuffled her thick legs behind a walker and talked about the day the Lord would heal her.“I just want to walk without pain one more time before I die.”The three of us, Sister Coleman, Aunt Eunice, and I, were desperate for God’s attention: Sister Coleman for Bug, and Aunt Eunice for her legs. As for me, I prayed all the time for forgiveness. I was sure I had done something to make God hate me. How else to explain my mother’s abandonment. How else to explain Sister Coleman, a woman who couldn’t decide whether she loved or hated us. How else to explain why no matter how hard I prayed or what I promised, no deliverance came. Sister Coleman strapped Bug into his special seat in the back of the car and Gary and I climbed in beside him. Aunt Eunice lowered herself into the front seat, her walker stowed in the trunk. Sister Coleman slid behind the wheel. Her aunt grabbed her hand. “I believe Bug is going to walk out of the tent tonight, Lib. And I may leave my walker at the altar and walk out with him.”The tent was smaller than Brother Terrell’s but everything else about it looked and smelled like home. The dust from the cars driving across the field, the moldy canvas, the sawdust, the way people greeted one another.“Sister Mayfair, how are you? Come on over here so I can hug your neck.”The familiarity filled me with despair. Sister Coleman marched us to the front row of the middle section, so that we could sit in front of the prayer ramp. She had me spread a pallet for Bug on the ground. Once he was settled, she bowed her head. Aunt Eunice positioned her walker to the side of her chair and eased herself into the seat. She looked around, bright and expectant. She had told me once that she never left disappointed.“Even if you didn’t get healed?”“That just means the healing is still out there waiting for me.”I covered my eyes with my hand and pretended to pray. The organ music started, and it sounded so familiar that for a moment I thought it might be my mother sitting at the Hammond. I opened my eyes and raised my head. I recognized the woman. Evelyn. She had approached Mama at one of Brother Terrell’s revivals and said she wanted to play just like her one day.I recognized the preacher too: Ronnie Coyne, the man who could see through a glass eye. A picture of Brother Coyne would eventually end up on the cover of the Weekly World News , a tabloid cousin of the National Enquirer , under the headline, IT’S A MIRACLE AND A MYSTERY, SAY DOCTORS. That night he yelled into the microphone for a long time, then he taped up his good eye and had someone write a few words on paper and hold it in front of him.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  home. But Salomé did not stay long: she accepted an invitation of Nietz-herself And in this she succeeded with little effort, sche's to visit him, unchaperoned, in Tautenburg. In her absence Rée was for indeed she was a consumed with doubts and anger. He wanted her more than ever, and was woman more to be wooed prepared to redouble his efforts. When she finally came back, Rée vented than to do the wooing. his bitterness, railing against Nietzsche, criticizing his philosophy, and ques-And now listen to the splendid sequel: not long tioning his motives toward the girl. But Salomé took Nietzsche's side. Rée afterward it happened that was in despair; he felt he had lost her for good. Yet a few days later she sura letter which she had prised him again: she had decided she wanted to live with him, and with written to her lover fell into the hands of another him alone. woman of comparable At last Rée had what he had wanted, or so he thought. The couple set-rank, charm, and beauty; tled in Berlin, where they rented an apartment together. But now, to Rée's and since she, like most women, was curious and dismay, the old pattern repeated. They lived together but Salomé was eager to learn secrets, she courted on all sides by young men. The darling of Berlin's intellectuals, opened the letter and read who admired her independent spirit, her refusal to compromise, she was it. Realizing that it was written from the depths of constantly surrounded by a harem of men, who referred to her as "Her Ex-passion, in the most loving cellency." Once again Rée found himself competing for her attention. and ardent terms, she was Driven to despair, he left her a few years later, and eventually committed at first moved with suicide. compassion, for she knew very well from whom the In 1911, Sigmund Freud met Salomé (now known as Lou Andreas-letter came and to whom it Salomé) at a conference in Germany. She wanted to devote herself to the was addressed; then, psychoanalytical movement, she said, and Freud found her enchanting, al-however, such was the power of the words she though, like everyone else, he knew the story of her infamous affair with read, turning them over in Nietzsche (see page 46, "The Dandy"). Salomé had no background in psy-her mind and considering choanalysis or in therapy of any kind, but Freud admitted her into the in-what kind of man it must be who had been able to ner circle of followers who attended his private lectures. Soon after she arouse such great love, she joined the circle, one of Freud's most promising and brilliant students, Dr. at once began to fall in love Victor Tausk, sixteen years younger than Salomé, fell in love with her. Sa-with him herself; and the lomé's relationship with Freud had been platonic, but he had grown ex-letter was without doubt far more effective than if the

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Thousands of years ago, power was mostly gained through physical violence and maintained with brute strength. There was little need for subtlety—a king or emperor had to be merciless. Only a select few had power, but no one suffered under this scheme of things more than women. They had no way to compete, no weapon at their disposal that could make a man do what they wanted—politically, socially, or even in the home. Oppression and scorn, Of course men had one weakness: their insatiable desire for sex. A thus, were and must have woman could always toy with this desire, but once she gave in to sex the been generally the share of women in emerging man was back in control; and if she withheld sex, he could simply look societies; this state lasted in elsewhere—or exert force. What good was a power that was so temporary all its force until centuries and frail? Yet women had no choice but to submit to this condition. There of experience taught them to substitute skill for force. were some, though, whose hunger for power was too great, and who, over Women at last sensed that, the years, through much cleverness and creativity, invented a way of turn- since they were weaker, ing the dynamic around, creating a more lasting and effective form of their only resource was to seduce; they understood power. that if they were dependent These women—among them Bathsheba, from the Old Testament; on men through force, men Helen of Troy; the Chinese siren Hsi Shi; and the greatest of them all, could become dependent on them through pleasure. Cleopatra—invented seduction. First they would draw a man in with an al- More unhappy than men, luring appearance, designing their makeup and adornment to fashion the they must have thought image of a goddess come to life. By showing only glimpses of flesh, they and reflected earlier than would tease a man's imagination, stimulating the desire not just for sex but did men; they were the first to know that pleasure was for something greater: the chance to possess a fantasy figure. Once they had always beneath the idea their victims' interest, these women would lure them away from the mascu- that one formed of it, and line world of war and politics and get them to spend time in the feminine that the imagination went farther than nature. Once world—a world of luxury, spectacle, and pleasure. They might also lead these basic truths were them astray literally, taking them on a journey, as Cleopatra lured Julius known, they learned first Caesar on a trip down the Nile. Men would grow hooked on these refined, to veil their charms in order to awaken curiosity; they