For as long as you can remember you have loved looking into shimmering surfaces. The tremble of juice in the glass clutched in Henry’s hand as your father ambled past you through the kitchen; the glassy look of love from the dog when tossed a bone; the waver of horizon as lightning touched down at the center of the pond. Tonight, it’s the spin of square light across the walls of a dance floor that has you dizzy. You’ve left the trappings of your body, your lonely brain dislocating with the gentle guidance of drugs and the possibility of touch.
There is a woman dancing across from you. She leans toward you, through the fog, the one that’s emanating from the machine in the corner as well as the one that has taken up residency in your mind, and says her name is Lacuna. That it means lake, a chapter of a book never written, the hollow part of a bone. You move closer until your knuckles brush against each other’s.
When the music stops you wander into the bathroom alone, peer at yourself in the smudged glass of the mirror, study the line of your chin, the way a soft blond mustache has appeared above your lip. Some mornings you pluck it, but secretly you feel proud of it. It makes you think how you have always been molting, attempting to cast off some part of yourself, your body, to transform into something other. Maybe not just one, maybe several others. There is a plurality deep inside you. You are, and in other ways you are not. You are beside your self. You have been trying to explain this to people but they don’t understand.
• • •
You walk out into the night for a cigarette you will regret. Not because of the molten damage to your lungs but because smoking guarantees a throbbing migraine in the morning. But you need to fumble with something, to do something with your hands, so you strike a match and take a sharp inhale. There are clouds over Central Square and the air has that clean cold smell to it and then the sky opens and you are standing under a streetlamp in the falling snow.
You already are another, your mother says when you try to explain it. You are a twin.
You have a real live double on the outside of your body; for most of your life he was there across the room from you, reflecting you, his very existence a taunt you had to learn to love. Even now, Henry is reflected in every mirror you look into. What you share and what you own: a forever-moving target. Henry hardly considers it; you can hardly bear it. You’ll be seeing Henry tomorrow; he’s asked you to help him knock on doors for one of his causes. This week it’s cystic fibrosis, last week it was fracking, next week polar bears or melting ice caps or Lou Gehrig’s disease, any incurable catastrophe. Sometimes it feels as though your brother was born guilty and running with every hopeless cause is his attempt to circumvent his pain. You agree to help him simply because, well, you’re used to doing things with him. What your mother doesn’t know and what you’ll never really say to her is that you have another double. You are not just the masculine woman people see when they look at you, the one who looks like Henry, but there is another brother, inside of you, a third twin.
You think about returning to the dance floor but it’s late and the snow is piling up and your heart is drumming from the nicotine, and if you’re going to be honest your anxiety is also drumming from being close to someone else. Drinking helped, but walking is better, so you set off into the night, fast, over the river, up the hill until you are at the steps of your apartment. You take the dog out. She tries to bite the snow as it falls. In bed you open a book and close it. Turn the lights off. You think about how most nights feel like a kind of eclipse. You close your eyes and move into intervals of darkness, your sense of self a fracturing of form so that when you dream, you dream in pieces. You wake up late with nothing but the coming and going of night to ponder, get into your car, and go. The migraine is like an earth quaking inside your head. You knew better than to smoke that cigarette, but a little brain damage can also be a welcome distraction.
The coffee at the union office has the taste of wet cardboard. The volunteer explains Henry is already out, knocking on doors, that he couldn’t wait for you but has picked a packet of houses for you.
The first door you knock on: blinds flip open, a ghost-white naked torso leans against the windowpane. Opens the door. The man has a shaved head. Says he hasn’t been well. You try to maintain eye contact while also trying to make out if that is a swastika tattoo on his biceps. He doesn’t seem to register that you are a woman or a man, or at least that’s how you perceive his indifference. That’s as good as it gets these days. He says he won’t be donating. He’s been sick with . . . something else.
The next address is at the end of a cul-de-sac off the main road. As you approach you notice a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN bumper sticker on a Crown Vic parked in the driveway. Next to the door there is a wooden sign that reads: ERIC’S WAY. You glance at your sheet and notice the names don’t match—you are looking for someone named Daniel.
You are about to knock on the door when you remember an old English fairy tale that was once read to you and Henry on a school outing. The story was of a woman engaged to a murderous man named Mr. Fox. Through every door of his house the woman passed there was this warning: BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD. LEST THAT YOUR HEART’S BLOOD SHOULD RUN COLD. You had closed your eyes to listen and while you did a photographer snapped your picture for a local paper. You were in a red-and-white-striped shirt, your long hair twisted into braids. In the picture it looks like you are dreaming. You thought that with your eyes closed you looked more like a boy. You thought maybe if you were a boy you’d be safe. But then maybe you’d be vicious like the man in the story named Fox.
You knock on the door and this time a small man answers, says, Hello. He reminds you of Rumpelstiltskin, like he’d be good at stomping around. He takes one look at you and asks you if you are looking for Henry. For some reason this worries you but you say, Yes. The man invites you in and there is your brother, Henry, sitting on the couch. He doesn’t seem glad to see you. There is sadness and an uncertainty in his eyes. He grips the clipboard on his lap. You look around the room. There is one black sneaker on a shelf beneath the television, on one of the walls several paintings of a thin young man with dark hair and doe-like eyes. A chessboard, mid-game, sits on the table but has the feeling of having never been touched. There is a woman in a rocking chair in a corner of the room, her plump hands rest over a pile of drab-colored yarn she has been knitting. You sit next to her and notice there are tears in her eyes. Eric, you learn, was the couple’s son, who died in a motorcycle accident years ago. This house was his and his parents now live here. The woman asks you if you’d like some sweet bread as her husband shows your brother posters for the benefit they hold for local schoolchildren in her dead son’s name. He told me he was too tired to play chess that day, the man says. I just don’t know what he was doing out on that road.
You watch Henry out of the corner of your eye, the way you have since you were born, just minutes before him. He seems defeated. For all of his charitable work you’re not sure your brother has ever really listened to the stories people carry with them and tell him and here he is in a mausoleum of grief.
• • •
When you get home that evening you walk the dog along the Charles River and notice that the dog’s hair, once white at her chest, is turning orange, almost red. At the grocery store you see the woman from the dance floor the night before. Lacuna. She tells you she has just come from yoga class and you start rambling on about mandalas and how at the four gates there are eight different graveyards and in the graveyards are jackals and crows and sometimes zombies but also sometimes something called clear understanding and they are supposed to represent individuation and how your mother took you and Henry to graveyards as children and you are starting to feel like you are having an out-of-body experience when she puts her hand on your wrist and asks you if you want to come over for dinner. You let out a breath and in the same moment you get a text that your friend across town has gone into labor. You drop your phone and when you pick it up there is a crack across the frame that you study for a moment then realize Lacuna is still looking at you waiting on an answer, and that you like it when she looks at you and you say, Dinner, yes.
After she leaves you buy wine and a chicken and you walk slowly to the address Lacuna gave you. When you reach it you walk around the block again and again in a circle which is actually a square and it feels as if you are walking a labyrinth, and you do this until you understand that your circumambulating is in direct conflict with time and the minutes passing, which crush down on your shoulders until you finally stop in front of her house and press the buzzer.
Inside, Lacuna shows you a drawing her father made. It is blue and compass-shaped and you immediately feel affection for it. You and Lacuna grill vinegar chicken on the fire escape even though it is very cold outside. Later, she invites you into her bed. She sleeps and you stay awake. Her apartment is level with the elevated trains that run late into the evening. There is something about the train that reminds you of high school, the feeling of being awake forever, of always trying to undo some puzzle inside while your brother slept soundly on the bunk bed above your head. And there is something about Lacuna’s hesitation, and yours, that puzzles you. Hesitation, you think, is intimate because its origin is fear and that makes you think you may never be here with her again so you try to imprint the night onto your mind: the feel of her fingertips tracing your ear as she drifts into sleep; the way, in her sleep, she shakes her fist in the air as if angry at someone you hope is not you. When you gently press your nose into the soft place at the back of her neck her body moves into you. You think of your friend giving birth, air flooding the baby’s tiny lungs for the first time. Across from the bed is a Langston Hughes poem tacked on the wall and you read it over and over again by the streetlamp’s light until it feels like a kind of mantra. When you finally close your eyes you dream of the sun’s corona, of garlands, of heat and boundlessness.
• • •
The next morning you are still high from holding her as you walk home to find Henry on your stoop holding a cat. He shoves it into your arms and says, Here. I found it in a dumpster. I’ll die if something happens to it. You are about to ask him in for coffee when he gets back into his car and drives away. The cat licks your shoulder and tries to bite at your ear. Inside, the red dog seems taken with this new creature. You think about Henry’s growing attachment to the wounded. You pour some milk in a bowl and add cat food to the list on the refrigerator that reads: spatula, paint for the living room, box grater, call the electrician about the fixture in the hallway, find a surgeon who takes your insurance, milk, and now cat food. You cross off a few things; ones you think about every day and never do. Last time Henry had been over for dinner he had scrawled at the bottom of the page in red ink: Having a list is almost as good as having.
At the supermarket to buy cat food you stop in the cafeteria to eat lunch and catch up on reading. You are at the corner of a long table sitting beside a quiet Middle Eastern family. There are four of them, father, teenage boy, a slightly younger girl, and a young boy who seems perhaps seven or eight. You watch as the younger boy reaches for his father’s food, the old man slapping his slender fingers away from the cardboard box of tabouli. When the boy hangs his head in shame the father beckons him back, fills a spoon, and hands it to him. None of them have said a word, which makes you curious about them, but to learn anything you would have to look directly at them and that feels strange, invasive. Still, you glance at them from time to time.
The young boy is now playing with his plastic spoon, his older sister obviously annoyed, and then he loses control of it and the spoon slingshots through the air and lands, lentils splattering, in the center of your book. You pause, knowing he is watching, wondering how you will react, and you slowly reach down, pick up the spoon, and raise it to your lips as though you are going to eat the lentils and you and the boy both start laughing almost uncontrollably and the laughter breaks the silence and words come tumbling out of the boy, racing out of his mouth, his body shifting with each one as though words themselves were at the very heart of what animates him. He wants to know, Do you like movies? Have you seen any scary ones? Do you know about Chucky? He asks you if you are a boy or a girl and you shrug and he teaches you an elaborate handshake ritual that ends with the two of you pulling on each other’s earlobes. The girl tells you how much she loves Michael Jackson, gets up, and does a pretty good moonwalk, her slight form gliding across the cafeteria floor, sneakers squeaking on the tile. The teenage boy leans in and asks you what you are reading. You look down at the books; there are always two, as though your brain needs to be able to move in two divergent directions at all times. One is The Melodious Plot: Negative Capability, Keats, Axis Mundi, and Learning to Love Beyond Logic; the other is a dog-eared copy of Self-Esteem for Dummies that you picked up at a tag sale last summer. You can’t help but blush as you read the latter title out loud but when you look up the family is nodding thoughtfully. It occurs to you then that the father may be mute, that until you interrupted the family had been communicating in his language, a language made of gesture. For a moment you feel bad, as though you have inadvertently created a situation in which he might feel excluded. But when you nod back at him the father smiles and silently offers you a box of cookies.
• • •
That night you are in Jamaica Plain for the monthly queer hip-hop dance party. You meet a trans man tattoo artist and he shows you his scars from top surgery, thin reminders of where his breasts used to be. He gives you a number for a surgeon and as you fold it and slip it into your wallet you stop and think again about hesitation.
You think of you and Henry racing through a field of sweetgrass when you were children, your shirts off, your bodies nearly indistinguishable save for the long braids your mother made you wear; you think about last night in bed and how you didn’t want to take the binder off your breasts and how you don’t often wear a binder because your breasts are too large and it hurts your chest and feels even less natural, but that afternoon you had felt especially loose and chaotic in your body so you had put it on; you think about how, when your breasts are bound, you breathe differently; you think how fight-or-flight roils constantly inside your body and you think about how, when you were small, you were afraid of houses and how you hid in the field, stayed in the lake, and how it must have been hard for Henry, the way you were always missing.
Was there some kind of monster inside of every house? Perhaps it was the feeling that there was a monster inside of you. But you don’t feel monstrous. You feel like part of a lineage that has never been recorded. You feel like . . . an interval.
It begins to snow again as you walk to the store to buy bread and salad greens for dinner and another tin of food for the cat. In the bakery you run into Lacuna. You see a nervousness wash across her face. She tells you of the dream she had while you were holding her. She dreamt that she had found you at the end of a road that disappeared into brambles, that you were obsessively digging into the dirt at the end of that road and that you were muttering something about omens, and that she was trying to reason with you, and shaking her fist in the air because in her dream she was afraid you would dig so far that you would fall through the earth and never stop falling and nothing would ever contain you again and when she said this you stopped digging and she thought she had finally reached you but instead you had found what you were looking for: a tiny perfect blue cube. It was mesmerizing, she said, and it glowed from the inside and just when she was reaching out to touch it you threw it into the air and the cube turned the world of the dream into night and then all the stars started to shift around in the sky and from your pocket you produced a dried flower for her, one you said you had carried across the ocean.
You tell her how you used to stuff flowers into the books you read as a child and how they were always falling out, and that you were disappointed as it wasn’t the form but the fragrance and the color, the grace you wanted to preserve, and about the letter your father has just sent you about physics and the imagination, which has sent you into a minor fugue state. And you say when you used to study music you became obsessed with fugues because you wanted to know more about imitation within variation. You tell her that you love the dream because you’re not sure you’ve ever come across a problem that you could resolve.
You think about finding your brother Henry in the stranger’s house and how you thought you had just witnessed him becoming a man and the strangeness of that phrase because you have never felt as though you were becoming more or less of a woman or man, and you realize that what you saw was Henry becoming more human, you saw your brother finally taking in and holding some of the trouble in the world, and you remember your father when he was a postman, coming home from work in the middle of a storm, carrying three kittens he’d found in a snowbank on the side of the road, two orange and white and one calico, and how suddenly everything ceased to exist as you and Henry sat on the rug watching the kittens rumble and scratch, shaking off the snow.