“Sufficient drinking water shall be supplied to them. The use of tobacco shall be authorized. Prisoners may be employed in the kitchen.” (The prisoners had to break the stems of certain plants to drink their sap. When they were given water their captors would throw pails of it at their faces to watch how the prisoners licked one another to fight the thirst.)
“The duration of the daily work of prisoners of war, including the time of the journey to and from work, shall not be excessive and shall in no case exceed that permitted for civil workers of the locality employed on the same work. Each prisoner shall be allowed a rest of twenty-four consecutive hours each week, preferably on Sunday.” (It was a forced labor camp; there was no time of rest, let alone twenty-four hours’ worth.)
WHETHER JIM WAS OR WASN’T in Jack Bridger Chalker’s drawings is irrelevant now, but they proved something he’d said to me over and over again: “When the time came, death passed me by.” The idea gave him an aura of divine protection that people noticed. Jim truly lived as if death had missed its date with him. We’d been spending time in a natural reserve close to the Canadian border when I received a call that they’d seen the small Cessna Jim and a friend were flying in crash on the far side of the lake. We sped along following the trail of metal debris and charred shell, and I was ordered to remain in the jeep so as not to break down at the crash site. But there was Jim, trying to stitch up a spooked buffalo whose neck had gotten caught in a barbed-wire fence. The same thing happened every time misfortune came sniffing around. Either the whole lot got off scot-free or the bad luck touched someone else, and Jim would say, “Don’t worry. Like I said, Death forgot my hour.” Jim was seventeen years older than me, but he was still active and I never cared much for that image he conjured of the Grim Reaper as some absentminded creature. As it turns out, Death had not forgotten about him entirely. Or maybe I should say that Death, who certainly hadn’t forgotten about me, held off just long enough for us to get to know each other so that by taking him it could kill me once again, just like that, once more, time and time again.
Whatever the case may be, back then all I wanted was to believe everything he said, to trust that he would live forever. Maybe that’s the origin of a recurring dream I still have. I’m in a room with a big window. I have a book in my hand, but instead of reading it, I’m amusing myself by watching a bird in a cage. It hops from one branch to another, in that nervous way caged birds have. I observe it calmly for a few minutes. Then suddenly something happens. The bird has fallen to the bottom of the cage, where it’s trembling and convulsing. So I grab the cage and run outside to look from door to door for help—a veterinarian, someone, anyone. Each person sends me on to someone else, and I keep searching, getting more and more desperate, dashing here and there, and I can see the bird is suffering. Finally someone promises me that there’s a person who can help at the house on the other side of the street, but as I cross the street, a car hits me. I fall to the ground and watch as the cage is propelled into the air and the door pops open and the bird flies out safe and sound, spreading its wings at the same exact moment my heart stops beating. Jim used to say that he’s the soul that leaves the body at death. Only in his case he keeps returning to the same body in time to link the last heartbeat to the new one, which becomes the first in the chain of a new existence. If only it had been that way, the eternal pulse of a free bird.
Now, how could my dreams be of any consequence to you? As I already said, I’m writing this in the faith that someone else might read it without judging me. Who knows what those specialists in forensic psychiatry will make of my dreams? Am I innocent or guilty? It’s the luck of the draw when the evaluating psychiatrist won’t admit that today we still can’t categorize a psyche. But I know my case won’t be given to any psychiatrist, something I’m actually grateful to you for. Don’t think I’ve forgotten my fate is now in your hands—that only days remain, maybe hours, before you find me here in this cabin, this refuge where I write, undoubtedly sentenced to death, but still surrounded by life, water, beasts, vegetation.
I’ve had to look for so many things. Yoro was certainly the most precious of them all, but I’d already begun a journey of my own when I met Jim, to find other people like me who didn’t feel comfortable with the ongoing notions of sexual categories. Labels made me feel as though I were being stuffed into a corset cut to fit another person, or wearing a rubber suit that made moving a hassle and required a huge amount of effort to remove. I felt good stripped bare—I mean, as a non-category—but my neutral status was never enough for people, because as you well know, affixed to the bottle of formaldehyde containing a specimen of each species of creature, there has to be a label. The problem is that labels inevitably convey an air of reassurance simply for being accepted as such and printed out in ink. Sometimes I think this is the only thing that organizes our social lives, some small group of people that bands together and is willing to pay for the letters naming their collective on jerseys and baseball caps. So there’s no individuality, no space for being an outsider, since it costs too much to be a representative of one’s own self. Being truly marginalized is when you don’t even have a minority group to belong to. The world is composed of large minorities, but for a very long time I was radically on my own.
I remember the first vacation I took with my foster family. We went to London and spent a day in the Natural History Museum. We signed up for a guided tour of the museum’s Darwin Centre, which admitted small groups of five people. Our group was made up of my American parents and sister, another visitor, and me, and we followed closely behind our guide, who was a biologist dressed in a white lab coat, to see some of the species that would later be absorbed into the wider collection. She led us to a rectangular station and closed the door. The smell of formaldehyde, of dissected death, permeated everything. It left a deep impression on me. I observed the shelves of thousands of tiny jars that the biologist said contained the simplest organisms she wanted to show us. Bacteria, invisible life-forms from the most minute to the largest, up to lichens or micro-insects. The successive rooms, always rectangular and particularly narrow, were arranged along a lengthy aisle separated by doors. And the smell intensified with each new space; as we moved along, the size of the jars increased because they were filled with larger and larger specimens. When we finally entered the room reserved for simians and I took one look at those nearly human faces preserved in fluid, the range of expressions on those faces, those hands like children’s hands, I was hit with a sharp stitch of anxiety, the first panic attack of my life. My new family, the guide, the other visitor—none of them seemed to belong to the same species as me. I felt closer to any one of the animals trapped in their glass jars than to the ones observing them. That’s when feverish thoughts took me over, the dread of identifying myself as a stranger in that group of humans. What if the biologist put me in one of those jars for the next group of tourists? The terror was so great that I shouted to be allowed to leave. Once I was outside, and while they tried to calm me with a glass of water, I couldn’t help thinking that the incident had given me a bird’s-eye view of my own despair: of the hundreds of thousands of specimens in the museum’s collection, including the people I was there with, I identified with not a single one of them. The feeling of being a rarity in my species, a one-off, has accompanied me ever since, even now, when it’s no longer my problem. What made it difficult was that my singularity made me invisible; I felt as though the only dignified thing about me was my absence.