Usually, when he was in blackout mode, I’d just guide him around like a cat. I remembered how pliable I used to be, at least the shadowy mental cross-stitch I could summon from pinpricks of memories and what my friends told me later.
But this time I told him that he was good, that I loved him, and that I’d never leave him. I said, “You’re a good man” over and over. I hoped it would sink in even if he didn’t remember. In grade school I used to hit him in the nuts all the time, unprompted, for fun, and he would go down just like that. Sometimes he’d get mad. Sometimes he’d laugh. No one thought it was weird. Boys. When I said I was an unhappy child, I meant that I was also an angry child.
Later that summer, a job offer came in for him in Kingston. They offered him a lot of money. For me it wasn’t a question at all. “I’m thinking of taking it,” he said.
“If you wanted me to come with you, I’d come with you,” I said.
He was silent.
Then he changed the conversation.
A couple hours passed that night where I said goodbye to him in my head. I thought: Okay. I thought: Never mind. I thought: This strange boy from my past sewed my heart back together. I will mourn, I will hold him until he leaves, and then I will move on.
As we were getting ready for bed, he turned to me with screaming eyes: “Are you coming with me? Are we doing this? Are we really doing this?” He was shaking as I kissed him.
So we left the city and I moved east, again. We settled into the second floor of an old house with a balcony, a house with no screaming outside, no one beating on doors, no sounds of male rage through the walls. Ontario Works got me a job in a rental management office and I closed my eyes the one time they evicted two hookers.
We lived there for a year. I’m thankful for all of this. If your early thirties can be a rebirth, after rebirth had, supposedly, already been part of your life (I bought into the transition-as-second puberty stuff hard), then any period of your life can bring renewal. Can’t it? I believe in that.
One day, I had this clear feeling: We went to this diner that had just opened. They used all local ingredients, claimed we really didn’t have to tip, said that they were proud to pay their workers an actual living wage. I had a sandwich with soft thick bread, a kind of cheese I’d never heard of, fresh greens, and coffee that was somehow so fucking good I didn’t even put cream in it. I’d paid for meals that nice before, but this was the first time without any regret or anxiety. That was the special thing. And we drove home (he drove home) and I thought, I made it.
3
And so then. The morning when it happened. You and I had been together eighteen months. We woke up in terrible heat; the A/C had broken during the night. You went to open the windows and the air outside was wavy. Our room was shimmering in the light. Kids outside were running through the back lane, burning in the sun.
I put my head in your neck when you laid back down. “Hazel,” you said.
“Christopher.” I folded my legs over yours. Your phone rang. I saw it was your dad. You said you didn’t want to speak with him.
I only found out later that you told me second. I was always grateful for that. I was grateful you didn’t tell me first.
When you did, I hated you instantly. Because I knew my hurt would need sealing immediately. That I would need to fold my pain, stow it somewhere to shrivel and grow pale. This is the order these things go. Someday, a girl might do the same thing to you.
You told me how you knew from when we were little, how you admired me from afar, how you thought, when we got together, that maybe you didn’t want to be a girl, that maybe just being with a trans girl would soothe this part of your mind. Do you know what it’s like to so completely understand the force about to blow up your life?—well. I barely remember what you said after that. You were vacating your guts and I was listening and nodding but I could only think, I don’t want you to transition. I don’t want you to be a girl. You were the sweetest boy to me, and I loved you, and I still love you but now I have to help you. I have to guide you through clothes and bras and every way of dealing with hair and I have to watch your eyes grow heavy and frightened when you step outside the way I’ve seen countless girls like you. I have to listen to it all, over and over, again. To see you grow out your hair—oh God, you’re going to dye it, aren’t you? Of course you are. You’ll dye it something besides that pretty, pretty red. That pretty red hair.
It only took me two weeks to break up with you. Isn’t that awful? I couldn’t—I don’t know. I couldn’t do it. You didn’t know what was coming and I did. I know you wanted to try, but I promise you, we wouldn’t have made it.
For the first couple months I’d get off work and I’d feel it in my body. I mean a heavy shroud would emerge from my arms and vibrate through my skin. I mean it was a physical feeling. If I hadn’t known that feeling, been able to name it, known exactly why it was happening and that eventually it would end, I probably would have ended up dead. You probably don’t want to hear that. But, well, I’m not dead.
I stayed sober for three weeks after I left you. I knew that was only a matter of time, too. I don’t feel awful that I started drinking again. I was sober for long enough, and if alcoholics are always alcoholics, then can’t that logic apply to sobriety too? I can feel sobriety still there, those years of clarity and re-sprung desire still alive and sleeping in my bones. Like a patient lover forgiving me more than she should, waiting to come back when I’m ready.
I’ve seen your pictures. You look beautiful now. I guess you always were—well, I mean. You know what I mean, don’t you?
You’re applying for arts grants somewhere out east, I think. Like, east-east. From what I heard, you’re living in an abandoned factory by the sea that’s been turned into beautiful apartments. Your career has turned into the good-paying part of the gig economy and your girlfriend’s name is Mauve. How can I honestly start to tell you how happy I am for you, and how much I want him back? Do you know I would never admit this to anyone? Do you know what it means to be turned into the kind of person you hate against your will? I’m writing this down in private. God forgive me, God please give me the strength, the kindness, the wisdom to cover this in my soul and keep it there. I would never tell you or another breathing creature how resentful I really feel.
Jikji[1]
Jeff Noh
“Tout personne est titulaire d’un patrimoine.”
Dust blows from the Sahara and travels, through the prevailing winds, to the Republic of K. White masks purchased from small pharmacies in the capital provide a layer of protection against this dust, the condensation of breath gathering inside white cotton, humidifying it to make the barrier permeable. Such imperfections of division were, in essence, what the Bibliothèque Nationale had been referencing when it claimed that the French libraries were better suited to protect the Jikji, this proof of the universal heritage of humanity that deserved the protection of French climate control technology; French library protocol; the perfectly darkened enclosures of France. Because I had an aunt who lived in the Republic of K. who undoubtedly sold such masks in her pharmacy, this patrimonial disagreement pertained not only to the still recent memories I had of O. and her aspiration toward French culture—an aspiration that I had begun conceiving, however unfairly or inaccurately, shaped by my idiosyncratic understanding of pain, in terms of the broader project underway in Quebec to maintain its connections to France, the ceaseless maintenance of white infrastructure that took place in our favourite neighbourhoods of Montreal—but also, more improbably, that part of my life that I had imagined was uncontaminated by my memories of O., the interconnected fragments of family history that I tried to recombine with the scraps of free time that remained at the end of each day. It didn’t add up to much. The translation of the article on the patrimoine for which I was employed at the Centre de Recherche was now long overdue. The messages that I received from the director had grown, in recent weeks, terse and impatient, but I justified the office hours that I allotted to the reconstruction project on the secondary benefits it might accord to my translation efforts. How could a translator properly work, I rehearsed asking the director, with a tone of indignation, without a full understanding of his relationship to the languages? I had not heard from O. in almost a year, but the humanizing discourses of the French librarians helped me understand the euphemisms she had employed to describe the reasons she did not foresee things continuing into the future. (In addition to future and things, she also spoke of momentum, problems of space and time; she spoke of missing pieces.) I wished to forget these memories and realize that version of the future from which she had deleted herself. My research into the Jikji would thus help my translation of the patrimoine. These scraps of history would reconstitute my knowledge of the French, a language that was first recorded inside my blood, the prestigious cadences lapsed and imperfectly transmitted by the French soldiers arriving at the shores of Gwanghwado, mouths closing over mouths, the proof of my universal heritage of humanity.
1
The anthology of Buddhist teachings known as