Dead Collections Read online

  I let myself back into the archives feeling sticky and lumpen, but better. Warmer. Someone just needed to whisk these congealing lumps of blood into a thinner paste. I did some exercises—yoga, push-ups, pull-ups—haphazardly and badly, which helped, and then I sat down and tried to read Middlemarch. But my concentration’s not great right after the transfusion; I feel blurry, bloated, a little drunk. It takes the rest of the night to even out, and then I’m okay for a couple of days. Anyway, I put Middlemarch down, because the phone rang and I forgot that it wasn’t daytime.

  * * *

  —

  “Historical Society of Northern California. This is Sol Katz.”

  “I thought I’d get your voice mail,” said Elsie. She had a remarkable voice, a voice with more body in it than most, that used the whole of the throat. “Why are you at work?”

  “Grant deadline.” My heavy tone was artificial; I love writing grants.

  “You must care more about your work than I ever have about anything. You could at least write it at home.”

  Sometimes at night, my office did feel like a home—the angle of the light was the same, but the silence, just me and the buglike rustling of the collections, turned it quiet and sour and safe. I didn’t feel strange taking off my clothes. But tonight that feeling hadn’t kicked in, or maybe I was still blood-drunk; I saw a warm halo around the transom window over my door.

  “Do you want me to send you to voice mail?”

  “Ah, no. Actually, I did want to talk to you. If your grant—”

  “It’s done. Now I’m busy making it worse.” The phone receiver was cold against my face; I switched it to the other ear. “Help me get my mind off it. You’re worried about the donation?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How so?”

  “How do people let go of these things?” Her voice was lightly suspended on a puff of breath. “Even if they want to. Even if I want to.”

  I put my feet up against the side of the bookcase by my desk, small insectile feet in black Converses with no dirt on the white soles. “It’s hard. It’s why people are always trying to give me their porn.”

  “What!”

  “Our porn’s alive,” I said. “It’s ours. It’s us. We need to find a home for it. Isn’t that what the AO3 is about?”

  “Well, fanfic’s about much more than porn—”

  “Wasn’t for me,” I said, and she laughed.

  “I wrote whole PG-rated novels. I was a big-name fan, you know. I was SylviaSalazar.”

  “Oh, God, really?”

  I’d meant to sound impressed, but I’d despised that writer’s work back in the nineties, and now it left me gasping with startled laughter. She was right; they’d been long, clean, polite stories, prose as dry and impactful as a dinosaur’s footprint. Straight-A student fanfic, with no mess or sweat in it.

  “It’s how I met Tracy. She was teaching a class at the community college in Marin. And there I was, pleated skirt, patterned explicitly after Thora Birch in Ghost World, a very young twenty-five. I thought I could sashay up to her, cut her a little in multiple senses, show her I could do more with her characters than she could. You know that fan-writer arrogance.”

  “It’s not arrogance,” I said. “It’s a good workman’s pride in coming in at night and fixing the things the day workers broke. And it’s a feminine pride—the only pride most men allow women to have, knowing that they’ve solved everyone’s problems without being detected.”

  “It sounds like fanfic was a little more than porn to you.”

  “Nope. Anyway, I take it she didn’t bow to you.”

  “No. She hated my work. And when I asked why, because I was a young twenty-five, she told me it was because she admired it and thought I was talented, but I’d let myself become a hack. Which was true. And I knew it was true. I’d never felt so seen.” A tiny deliberate cough, like the period at the end of a sentence. “Have you ever had something very beautiful happen, but built on something that wasn’t healthy at all? Because after that we fell in love. She loved me more than I loved her. I know that’s true. Here I was, average-looking, average intelligence, an average writer, more than convinced that I was much more than average, that I had the world in a lozenge and all I had to do was pop it in my mouth, but here was this stately, powerful, gorgeous butch, and she came to need me like a machine needs a battery. And I was a young twenty-five.”

  “Was that a rhetorical question?”

  “Which one?”

  “Have I had something beautiful happen, built on something that wasn’t healthy at all,” I said. I was nervous, unaccountably nervous; my hand shook as it brushed the glossy coolness of my forehead.

  “Have you?”

  “No,” I said. “My life hasn’t been that messy. I don’t think that’s a good thing, but there you are. Anyway, this is pretty far afield of your question. And the porn example was part of that, by the way. There are a lot of ways to refuse to let something go.”

  “So what are you telling me? Not to refuse . . . ?”

  “I’m telling you to let me worry about it instead,” I said. “Let me launder your pain like Mob money. It’s my literal job.”

  “Touché,” she said, and I did feel it, through the phone, I felt the touch, the very palpable hit, my thin brittle saber against her jacketed chest. “I’m glad I met you. You’re honest.”

  “Indifferent honest,” I said. “But when I lie, they’re unusual lies.”

  “It’s hard for me to imagine you lying.”

  “I’ve lied twice in this conversation alone.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, I could ask, but I won’t.” She coughed. “Good night, Sol. Good night, moon.”

  “Good night, Wedding-Guest and the loud bassoon.”

  When I’d hung up the phone I stared at it for a while. I didn’t know where all that had come from, two lies and the Coleridge bit. It was like something from Gatsby: “That’s the secret of Castle Rackrent.” I didn’t even know what the second lie had been.

  And now that the conversation had been punctured and I was coming down, I felt the desire that had been in me. I’d loved listening to the tiny noises of her throat. On the phone everything is breath and speech; it is the least articulate medium for talking to people, the one with the least information, and yet the most intimate one. It’s on the phone and during sex that we notice breath the most. Now I could barely catch mine, empty reflex though it was.

  I’m always a little terrified by desire. For so many years I did not know what to do with it; the bubble of heat embarrassed me at best, panicked me at worst. How do you feel desire with a body that you can’t bear to have touched? Transition was just beginning to change that when I became a vampire—a state in which I had hardly been touched by desire at all. The blood ran down through the cold, ridged gutters of my body, disinterested in flowing anywhere specific.

  Of course, the stereotype of vampires is the opposite: that we are sexually insatiable, and that when we get to fucking, we have trouble controlling our urge to sink our teeth into people’s necks. What I’ve found is that both are slightly true, though for other reasons than you’d think. The insatiability, both kinds, comes from loneliness and fear, and the relief of being held although we are cold. We want to be held so much that we sometimes consent to be held by people we know are playing Russian roulette with our bodies—who are drawn to that chance of a bite, and the little chance within that bigger chance of becoming something like me, something that can be scorched to death by the touch of daylight.

  But I was afraid. The phone had been the only thing that protected me from wanting, and it was a very thin thing, a bit of plastic, a rubber cord. I had never failed in my defenses before. I’d never been in love either, except with television.

  * * *

  —

  There’s so little to do at night in the city, especially after the bars close. The only things that stay open twenty-four hours are a few restaurants and the gyms and drugstores. I’ve killed time at all three, but it always died hard. Tonight I went out to a Walgreens a mile away, a safe distance to walk in winter. I felt shaky and blue although I was hot and red with blood. I hadn’t felt this physically weak in years. I rarely go outside after three a.m., even in winter with three whole glassy hours hanging from the tree until dawn, but I was too restless.

  The office was on the border of the Financial District and the Tenderloin. In front of the tech company headquarters, there was life: men selling sunglasses, clothes, and household supplies off lumpy blankets. Not far off was Folsom and its leather bars. Uptown, there were some places that also stayed open quite late, a few coffee shops and the lobbies of the great hotels.

  At the drugstore, I pretended to look at soda and herbal nonsense, just to have something to do, a different kind of fluorescent light crawling over me. I barely knew how to use the city then. Now I do.

  CHAPTER 2

  Feet of Clay

  When I was young and watched TV for sustenance instead of pleasure, I watched nothing more often than Feet of Clay, which Elsie’s wife, Tracy, had created. It had hit me in the tenderest part of my adolescence, the sharp hinge under the skin of 1993, a funny bone far too delicate to absorb any real blows. Not that I was ever really an adolescent, but I had the tenderness of one. That’s what it’s like to be a trans child and not know it. You have all the fragility of adolescence, but none of its resilience, the clever cartilage that always grows back.

  The X-Files was a few years old then, but everyone was still talking about aliens and conspiracies. I remember that time, with its faint stink of documentary, when there was a secret under
every sodden and mildewed thing you picked up in the woods. People seemed to assume The X-Files was a dramatization of something real. Feet of Clay was a knockoff, really, except set in space, but as often happens with knockoffs, this one secured something genuinely creepy. A doppelgänger of the real show. The actors were an uncanny valley version of Duchovny’s and Anderson’s already uncanny faces. (His bonier than it’s supposed to be, and somehow overgrown; hers with no more detail than the moon.) Instead of those two, Feet of Clay had Randall M. Groves and Joshua Stack and Ella du Bois and Ali Payne: Groves with his blocky head and the air that it burdened him, Stack with his vampish mathematical perfection and long chin, du Bois a spider caught in her own gray web, and Payne as butch as women on TV then could dare be.

  At the beginning, the explorers played by du Bois and Payne discovered a group of shape-shifting aliens—ostensibly made of clay, though they always looked like what they were: actors draped in layers of drippy Technicolor latex. They were called the miha. Once they arrived on human planets, they began killing people, replacing them, and taking over their lives as if nothing had happened, and killing in turn anyone who seemed to notice or complain. By the end of the show, most of the extras you saw in the background were miha, and most of the main characters were adept at pretending they hadn’t noticed.

  It was a time when telling your stories in arcs was still new, and most shows compromised on a pattern of artfully scattered monster-of-the-week episodes combined with arcs that kicked in for the true faithful. Feet of Clay was different. It was more of an anthology of life with the miha: police cases, corporate satires, melancholy love stories. There was also a good deal of lesbian subtext. I didn’t like that at all. It made me feel condescended to, viciously seen. I only ached more when people pretended to see me. All the girls I had crushes on in high school, all those unfocused holy feelings without a body in them, were obsessed with Feet of Clay—and I never liked the show at all, until I found Groves and Stack’s characters, Zaduk and Shalk, who are introduced in the second season.

  These two live on a space station where everyone’s a clone of one of the first people to come and live there. There’s a whole society that can’t reproduce any other way, so it’s just an infinite remix of different configurations of people put together in different families. Everyone’s been everybody’s lover and everyone’s been everyone’s child and everyone’s been everyone’s enemy in some previous generation. But they don’t know who’s who, because there’s a computer and a small staff that assign the clones lives and families, and keep you from meeting any dead friends, or from knowing your own clone’s history.

  Zaduk is a man whose previous self was a murderer, and Shalk is a man whose previous selves are all detectives. Zaduk has always been aware of people watching him, and he’s never known why. He has never felt the slightest urge to hurt anybody, although he’s a lonely and unhappy man who knows something is wrong. Shalk knows he’s mediocre, a fraud, and wonders if all the previous Shalks knew too. He’s assigned to watch Zaduk always, and he does.

  Those were the people on the show who were private, who were all mine. At night, Shalk sits around in his underpants and watches Zaduk on CCTV as he reads or sleeps or fucks. I understood Shalk more than anything, and I obsessed about his body without knowing why—his pale hairy thighs, his loose throat, his good arms. It soothed me to think of that body piled around mine as I tried to sleep. It was a guilty secret, a shameful secret, and for years I could not talk about these characters without blushing.

  * * *

  —

  At home, after buying a couple of bottles of juice at Walgreens and carefully putting them on the table the archives designates for drinks with covers, I sat down to watch an episode of the show. It had been so long that I just picked my favorite, which tracks sixteen hours in the lives of Zaduk and Shalk.

  Zaduk is breaking up with a woman he’s been seeing for a few episodes, and he argues with her in a café. Shalk’s tension is going up, his instincts are kicking in, he plays a tape of a former Zaduk killing a lover, and the lines, the moves are the same—Zaduk repeats them, tape-Zaduk repeats them, and Shalk shouts the same lines over them both. The argument ends, though, with no violence. Shalk sits back in shock. Zaduk leaves, goes to a bar, gets drunk, picks a fight, and Shalk spools up again, but of course Zaduk doesn’t know how to fight. He is beaten violently and left for dead. Shalk, who has only been watching him all day, forgetting to eat and care for himself, leaps up, runs to the scene, and finds Zaduk still there, lying on the sidewalk in the dark. Zaduk asks, “How did you get here so fast?” Shalk says, “I was watching you on CCTV.” Zaduk says, “Why?” Shalk says, “Because the city loves you and wants you to be safe.” Zaduk passes out from the pain then, and they don’t speak of it again. Credits. Created by Trace Britton.

  Why did she use that form of her name, so obviously intended to be ambiguous? Trace, a leftover pencil mark. I’d felt an obscure thrill when I learned that Trace was a woman. For some people, it seemed very easy to get inside a male identity and steer it with two careful hands. I knew I could never do anything like that.

  After the episode was over, I just sat in the dark. The thing was that the episode still had me. You’d expect an old fandom like that, whose purpose was spent, would spill from my mouth like ashes, but it didn’t. Watching those men look at each other, I felt the same longing and fear as I had at fifteen, when my whole life was longing and fear. The difference between me and most teenagers was that I didn’t know what I longed for, and I sure didn’t know what I was afraid of.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Butch

  The boxes came in, all one hundred of them, via two-day FedEx from the North Bay. File boxes and old moving boxes; Amazon boxes large and small. One was a wooden file cabinet. Attached to these was a rainbow of tape: packing, masking, electrician’s, and Scotch.

  I feigned a migraine to avoid going up to the loading dock. Nobody ever caught on that I always had a migraine on unloading day. I remembered to feign migraines on other days too. It took up all my time to remember who I was supposed to be, this character I overlaid on myself to pretend my life was normal.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, when all the boxes had been staged in the hallway, I feigned a lifting of the migraine and volunteered to move them. Although it had been less than a day since my last transfusion, I really did feel somewhat weak; my bones felt splintered, dry in my body. Perhaps it was an ill person’s blood again that ran, cooling and sloppy, in the dark channels of me. Sometimes I get a touch of that person’s body in mine, like a hand in a hand, like a song playing in another room and scenting the air of yours. It’s always only a touch. I couldn’t tell you what made them ill, or what their personalities were like. Once in a while, the clinic had fucked up and given me women’s blood, which of course carries estrogen instead of testosterone—I still take a T shot, but only to augment the blood. I knew the estrogen had come because I felt a little smaller and less firm in my skin, and slippery, and weepy.

  “Are you really feeling better, Sol?” Florence asked, as we were hefting boxes side by side. Florence was the assistant archivist, a dyke in her fifties, powdered with archival dust, glowing with health, and oozing sympathy. She had a way of asking if I was feeling better—skeptically, as if I might be lying about it—that made it clear she thought I was lying about having been sick in the first place. Didn’t mean I didn’t pretend well, or that she was observant. Florence was just like that.