BLOOM

 

Dear Charles,

I received your letter and would have replied before now, but have been just too busy. There’s work, always a challenge but more so lately, not just because of the mutations, which, here as elsewhere, are proliferating willy-nilly, but also because of new reporting requirements and the mounds of attendant paperwork. And the ethical dilemmas, bombarding me without pause. I should never have become a doctor. How can I be objective and at the same time compassionate, opinionated and at the same time just? Is it moral to extend life if life is nothing but suffering? Is it decent to deny an addict his drug? How do I possess power without abusing it? And when abuse has occurred, how do I atone?

I am constipated with morality. And on top of everything there are all the new technologies to keep up with, the bald-faced consumerism, the winnowing of time, which we package and dole out as though it were a commodity. And in fact there is a project here, a pilot project funded by the Thanatosophobe Group that has done just that, slotted and parcelled out nanoseconds of time that can be transfected from one cell line to another. They are using eel cells of all things, slimy creatures if you ask me, but curiously amen­able to such manipulations, perhaps because of their annular morphology, the worm that eats itself and all that, circling round and round to infinity. At any rate, I’m on the group’s review committee and have secretly been supplying patients for their research. Nothing to show yet, but then a few nanoseconds of added time in a human can be very hard to detect. In light of your own interest in immortality, I’ll keep you posted.

I have so little of my own time, it seems. After work it’s the kids, Felice and Brian, twelve and six now, did you get the pictures I sent last Xmas? Felice’s involvement in acrobatics continues unabated. She’s up to four days a week. It’s obvious now that we were right to choose acrobatics over gymnastic training. She’s way too long and spread-out to be a gymnast, and she’s getting longer every day. God, the girl is growing. She looks like her mother, especially in her arms and hands, willowy and grasping, and her shoulders, broad and muscular. She hangs from things like a chimpanzee. She swims like a dolphin. Climbs and throws and runs, burns bright, crashes. The walkway under the house scares her at night. Since I don’t think of her as the scarable type, or don’t want her to be, I dismiss her fright and wave her out the door with her basket of laundry. She chides me later at bedtime, the time of day to unwind and say what’s really real. I am scared, she says. You don’t believe me, but I am, and I don’t like the way you act. And I ask myself, which is right? To send her out alone into the night to prove that she can overcome her fear, or to do as she asks and go with her, to make her feel safe. And when I’m wearing pants, I tell her she’s old enough, I tell her to take the laundry down to the washing machine by herself. And when I’m wearing a skirt, I welcome the invitation to join her, feeling honored to be asked to accompany my daughter through the needle of her fear. I tie my scarf over my head, the new printed silk scarf I got from Helen. I pull on my puffy quilted jacket. Felice and I go downstairs together, and I have to admit I’m also a little afraid to wander down here alone, afraid of a rat, or a raccoon unexpectedly cornered. I have to admit I too imagine things in the dark, things that make my chest hollow. That make my heart pound. Sensations that in a different situation make me beg for more. Fear is so close to pleasure, Charles. Why is that? What makes them different?

And Brian. He keeps me busy. His moods are marked by a volatility to match my own. What amazes me about him is the intensity of his self-absorption. Sometimes he honestly cannot be roused. What are these worlds he lives in? I say worlds, but it’s probably just one, a single world made up of his deepest desires and fears, encompassing everything. He has long conversations that take place between his beaver and his blanket. He has tiny Lego men trapped in cardboard egg cartons. I worry that these worlds of his are shaped by TV values and violence, by cartoons of ugly-looking thugs and simple-minded good vs. evil confrontations. I probably shouldn’t. His ability to space out, and conversely, to focus, is extraordinary. It’s the ingredient, the root, of success, success in the sense of giving voice to the inner life, voice first and then form to bring it into the open, to make it communicable. What is his form? At the moment it’s intricate pencil drawings of different systems and emotions: the bold space explorer; the gory, haunted house; the burning building either saved by the firefighters or set further ablaze. And his Legos, where he is boss man, sysop, adventurer, sewer rat. And he likes to pretend he’s a baby animal, mewing and baby talking and cuddling into a lap. I think of this as a kind of breast-feeding, which he never had and therefore misses. Helen is more embracing of him when he’s in this mood, which I suppose goes to show that she’s the one with the breasts. If mine were shaped properly, they’d be soft and mounded too. My nipples would be pink and firm, and when Brian curled into my lap, even though I haven’t been pregnant, I’d sense the nesting form of a fetus, the shape and pleasure of a child in my body. And when he nuzzled me, instead of my feeling tense and invaded, I’d be grateful for his attachment. I’d nuzzle him back. Like him, I’d sniff and lick. The boy runs on animal instinct. The superego was invented with him in mind.

They take it out of me, these two, and I guess they put it into me too, although why the taking out seems more noticeable than the putting in has me puzzled. Maybe because the first is quantifiable in minutes spent on chores and carpools and school meetings, minutes given and not returned, whereas the second, the payback, is vaguer, is not bound by time, is more like a lake, or a web, an intermingling sense of loyalty, togetherness and pride. Outside the family it’s hard to count on any of these. Loyalty is fickle; togetherness, to a loner like me, frightening; and pride, in the noble sense of fulfillment and honest expression, despoiled by greed and ambition. In the family everything is perfect. In the family contentment reigns. I go into my room and lock the door. I close the curtains. In flowing gowns I dance. In strings of pearl and shell, in golden bracelets I twirl, I unfold, I step off the world.

I am a pilgrim of my own body.

I’ve been beating around the bush, Charles. I apologize. I’ll try to be direct. I am too busy to write because my body is changing, and I can barely keep up. You must know how it feels to be breathless. To be chasing something that you’re just on the verge of catching. To be tense and hard and so keenly aroused you’re ready to burst. This is how it is these days. I’m putting on new clothes. I’m checking myself in the mirror. This happens in movies, this transfiguration, man into fly, into beast, man into woman. It’s the errant biological ray that triggers the shutting down of certain genes and the expression of others. It’s the witch’s spell to punish vanity. It’s necessity, the fusing of the two sexes the only means of negotiating the tricky terrain of life. The only means to survive.

I’m having a sex change. Two sexes, did I say? I’m at two now and trying to get myself to relax and take things a step at a time. The estrogen has made it hard because I get so moody. It’s not easy living with me these days. Helen has been incomparable. I can see that she’s frightened about where this will all lead. She says as much. But she’s willing to give things a try, within the realm of reason. Meaning the realm of safety, which for her means the absence of violence and the presence of choice. Fair enough, a good definition, though not the only one. Other people, patients I see for example, seem to find safety in being punished and hated, this the safety of the known and predictable, the safety of patterns.

People amaze me, Charles, with the strength they have to get what they’re after. Attention, oblivion, escape from notice, abuse. All this and more parades through my door every day. So that I can’t help think there’s no such thing as aberrant, which leads to difficulty in administering treatments to restore patients to normal, when normalcy is a fallacious concept to begin with. And now the bugs aren’t responding anyway. We’ve got killer pneumococcus, killer E. coli, killer Hanta virus. Prions, genomic fragments and other vectors we haven’t even named. The more able we are to look, the more we see. We’re being assaulted. How can anyone feel safe?

I’m doomed, my friend. Doomed to this life on the run, to the cycles of the moon, to my spasms of personality. The sex police are after me. How can I stop to write? The Devil whispers in my ear that I should remain a woman. That it’s not the estrogens that are giving me breasts, that are taking out subscriptions to Working Woman, Ladies’ Home Journal and Victoria’s Secret. It’s not them that get me so hot and creamy and suggest that sex with anything is sex with everything. Not them, but my nature.

I’m mental. I know that. There’s a history of mania and depression in my family. My grandmother sat in a chair in her bedroom, shades pulled and a stuffed dog in her lap for the better part of a year before she eventually died of other causes. Her sister, my great-aunt, got electroshock treatments every three months to keep her mania under control. Otherwise, she’d walk the streets in her underwear, eat nothing and talk endless nonsense. There’s other mental disease in the family too. Our stock in this regard is not the best. It’s obviously a chemical thing, I take no responsibility, and why should I? We’re born with the baggage of molecules; what we do is pre-ordained. On the other hand, molecules can be altered by chemicals (witness what I’m going through), and I’m taking Lithium now, double dose, just in case. And one of the newer serotonin-uptake inhibitors too. Also, every few days I stick a bare wire in one of the kitchen plugs to give myself a little jolt. A little pick-me-up. Home remedies have always been big in California. It can’t hurt.

So I’ve been busy. Did I say that? One thing happens and then another right on its heels. You send a letter, and I send one back. One moment I’m posing at a mirror, the next I’ve shrunken into a corner in despair. Causality? Melodrama? Short-wave radiation? I’m afraid it’s just beginning. These swings of mood, these highs and lows with nothing in between, will be the death of me.

So why don’t I write a story on that? Why not a story on human sickness and frailty and mental imbalance? A story of self-abnegation and thwarted love? I could peddle it to the talk shows and the tabloids. I could get proposals of marriage, barroom confessions, offers of help and salvation, late-night phone calls for kinky sex. I could be popular. A big success. Why not? Why not just sit down and crank out a story like that?

Because I can’t, Charles, I can’t write that one any more. I used to be able to, I used to have that satisfyingly morbid taste. That black humor that appeals to you, that rebelliousness, that anti­authoritarian sneer. Romance was infantile, love was fuck. Human kindness, a gall in the throat.

But I’ve changed. I think differently now. It started when I decided to have the sex change, when I thought I was going to be a woman. I was dreaming about long hair, big tits and a cunt big enough to embrace the world. A cunt to lay eggs and bear live young, a cunt to bleed and give birth to all living things. A cornucopia cunt full of fruits and vegetables and trees and bridges and ants and outhouses and lakes and dicks and other cunts. And tits like mountains, rolling and tumbling and soaring, soft as clouds, firm as tablets, tits to nourish whatever needed nourishing, to grab onto when drowning, to fall into, to suck milk from and drip milk out of, to sprinkle milk on the ground like rain. A woman could do this, and I thought I’d be a woman, because then I could too. I’d be all the things I’m not. I’d have that new power, and I’d be at peace.

But women get pushed around, and they can be nasty too, niggardly in their affections, ugly-hearted. And careless and overly-protective, and fearful to the point of cruelty. It wasn’t becoming a woman that made me think differently. A snake that sheds its skin is still a snake. It’s because I’ve had a change of heart. I’m not a cynic anymore, Charles. I’m not a skeptic. I believe in the goodness of things. I believe in love.

I wear a necklace now. I asked for it, and it enslaved me. I became a slave to Helen, as I always feared. It happened in the desert, in a broad canyon at the base of a ridge of mountains. We were walking along a stream. It was springtime, and the dirt was soft. There were wildflowers everywhere. She was ahead, and I asked her to slow down. I wanted her shirt, her pink tank top. She gave it to me, and then I asked for her underpants, and she gave me those as well. We walked along until I had to stop. I had to touch her. I licked her thumb, then put it in my mouth and sucked it. The sun was getting low and putting us in shadow, so we climbed a side canyon to get back in its warmth. And later when we were naked, she fully naked, me all save the necklace, I breathed her in. Mouth on mouth, I inhaled her. The hair under her arms, her long strong legs, her twirling dance of happiness. She bent at the waist, palms on the sand, feet veed out and planted. Her breasts hung down in wedges, and I crawled between her legs and turned face up to suck her nipples. A few drops of milk trickled into my mouth. I crawled back out and kissed her tiny asshole.

I feared to be a slave, Charles. I have always feared pleasure. But how can something so fine, how can the ecstasy of flesh and spirit be something to fear?

I have her necklace now, a tiny silver hummingbird on a silver chain. Its purpose for her was to be reminded to stay light, to rise not fall. For me it is to be wearing what was hers. To have wholeheartedly asked for it.

I am her slave. Willingly. Finally. It means the end of slavery. Good times ahead.

In another side canyon later, at dusk, when she was frightened we were lost, I took her hands. I held her eyes. We are not lost, I told her. There is nothing to fear.

For a moment she resisted. Her body tensed, her breath caught in her chest. Then she let go. She smiled, and made herself my slave.

And just then a black-throated hummingbird, attracted by my red shirt or the necklace, perhaps by my vast and expanding powers, appeared from behind a bitterbrush, flowering sweetly in that narrow canyon. It paused a moment then flew to our faces, hovering between us, humming the air, sealing the pact, the new and revolutionary pact, the love.

Does this sound plausible to you, Charles? Are there hummingbirds in New York? It was drugs that did it, revolutionary drugs packaged in revolutionary packages. Drugs and the laser knife and the mutant spores. I’m two sexes now, with a brain about to explode. The contradictions tear me apart, the possibilities tantalize me mercilessly. I’ve got one hand on the trigger, the other looking for paydirt up the hole. I can’t go on like this, worshipping the flesh, lavishing every minute of my attention on other living things, on cunt juice and gism and sweat, on insects and dirt, on wind, on myself. Take my hands away from me. Take my body. If something must remain, leave my head.

You asked recently to see my very first story, which I found, read and declined to send. It’s called RUNNING HEAD and is about a band of heads, grotesquely engineered to represent figures of speech, heads of state, heads of lettuce, a headlight, head cheese. There is a mad scientist and a plea for humanitarian intervention. A writer to whom the Heads come and beg for help and deliverance.

Coincidence? I think not. It comes full circle. Charles, and you’re in the loop. You, with your store of human heads severed from their bodies and cryonically preserved as a hedge against mortality, represent the chance to fulfill my destiny. The third sex, and beyond it, the fourth, are on the horizon. We cannot rely on evolution to take us there. Science is the answer, science guided by level-­headed, broad-minded visionaries like you and me. In a hundred years, or a thousand, when we thaw out these heads of yours, we must not make the mistake of re-attaching them to human bodies. Instead we must graft them onto all manner of life, sensate and not, onto trees and sheep and trucks and fences, grasses of every variety, bushes, lamp posts. We must mingle flagrantly and without shame. Meld the unmeldable. Embrace the plethora of life.

We do it now, but always in an outside-in direction, always from the external world into ourselves, metal to bone, polymer to skin, pig valve to human valve, quartz crystal to ear. I am suggesting we simply reverse the process. Develop life forms with silicious and ferric matrices. Devise non-carbonaceous compounds with the ability to divide, differentiate and respond to stimuli. The tools, though rudimentary, are there. Our geobiologists are this minute making inroads. Life abounds and we can join with that life. We can literally bring man into the world.

I can see it now, heads at every corner, underfoot, over­head, on chimneys and branches and stop signs. Your own head, Charles, might be on the very block where my off­spring will live, greeting them when they leave the house in the morning and welcoming them home at night. If you were grafted, say, to the camellia in our front yard, you would be able to feel the blush of the flowers as they bloom, experience the underground creeping of the roots, the tickle of tiny sparrow feet alighting. Would you get wet in the rain? My descendants could bring you a hat. Have trouble sleeping under the glaring streetlight? They could tie blinders over your eyes. And bring plant food when you’re hungry, and water for your thirst. And when the tree budded and bloomed and it came time for fertilization, perhaps a new part of you would appear, a little bump on your cheek, a little sprout of something on your chin. A new form. A new life. A new you, Charles, man and flower. A little flower.

Like me.