1 The bad dreams got better once we were in the building. I almost totally stopped having that nightmare about Lux in the hospital. One night, I dreamed that she was cuddled up behind me as I slept in the huge bed in the apartment we’d taken over. We’d slept that way some nights in the IRT station, for warmth and because we were really good friends, you know? I woke up after that dream and stretched under this huge white down comforter I was sleeping under and felt good, felt that she was out there somewhere and someday I would find her.
Things were good there. It wasn’t exactly utopia, because you could tell there were de facto leaders calling most of the shots. There was Makayla, for one, who had gotten there first, so people would kind of ask her what was okay and what wasn’t. They went to her when they didn’t know what to do. I guess there could have been worse leaders. Kristin was another leader, but I could tell she was getting bored with the whole scene now that things were running smoothly. One day we were sitting down in the lobby alone, and she started talking about the life she missed.
“Things were cool when there was so much to do,” she said, “and nobody knew how to do it. They’re fine now. They don’t need me around. Somebody gets sick, the Red Cross is here. Mold comes back, go ask The Disaster Fund. Meanwhile, there are no huge waves, no space dives, no life or death, you know? That’s what I need. That’s what I have to go find.”
Two days later, she packed up what little she had and said goodbye. She had never needed the building like the rest of us did. Some people were sad to see her go, and hugged her and thanked her. Some wanted to throw a party for her before she left, but Kristin said that wasn’t necessary and would just waste lots of resources. Makayla stayed up in her room until the very last minute, and when she did come down, she stood across the lobby with her arms folded over her chest and nodded at Kristin.
Makayla was weird, that was for sure, and after the whole thing with Drusilla, she got weirder. I mean, she didn’t like me or José or Sebastian, that wasn’t the problem—lots of people don’t like us. She started staying up in her room and only coming down at night to do the work she was assigned, or to check the supply closet. She checked that thing like fifty motherfucking times a night. She and Jaden fought a lot, too, not huge fights, but little shows of dominance on her part when the whole building was together, to show who was boss. She was constantly undermining whatever he suggested.
Jaden, for his part, stayed cool. He was a pretty rad fucker, I have to say: easygoing and smart and nice to everybody. When Makayla started shit with him, he just walked away, or stood his ground without getting pissed off. He still talked to her the same as when they lived together, calm and chill as a motherfucker.
Eventually, Makayla stopped letting anybody go into the closet at all. She would drag supplies out into the middle of the lobby and let us collect them there.
“It’s less of a risk for everyone,” she grumbled when someone asked her one night. “I should be the only one who goes near that thing.”
The closet situation wasn’t exactly horizontal leadership, but in the end it didn’t seem like a battle worth fighting. We all got what we needed, and were pretty sure Makayla’s intentions were legitimate. So everyone let it be.
In the meantime, José kept up with his street tactic training. He had these zines that he carried with him everywhere. I had always thought it was kind of stupid, intentionally a throw-back affectation, like the map. But now that we weren’t plugged into anything, they were pretty useful. He used a really old one called Bodyhammer to figure out how to build shields.
But it wasn’t just the shields he made. He started making suits out of duct tape and wadded-up old clothes that could be slipped on and off like shirts and pants. He and the other committee members raided stores and found bike helmets in the street and in apartments. They were like goddamn garbage warriors or something. Their shields could be held with one arm, and José showed people gathered in the lobby how to link their other arm with the person next to them to make a wall.
“In tight, shields up!” José yelled. Sebastian was near him in front of the group of people, but stepped back and let his brother do the leading.
The line of shields formed, again and again.
“Will this really help protect us?” someone asked.
José stepped back, scratched his head, and dropped his leader tone. “Somewhat. If rubber bullets were being fired at us, it would stop them. If we get into a situation where cops are using clubs, it will stop them. You can deflect a taser with this thing, if you know what you’re doing. But if they’re shooting real guns at you? Well, there’s probably not a lot we can do to stop that.”
“Who’s going to be shooting at us?” asked an older woman who had joined the committee. I had worried that she would get hurt, but José had said she was more likely to get hurt not knowing how to defend herself.
José stopped. He looked at his brother, and at me. They didn’t even realize how dangerous what we had in the building was to power. They didn’t realize at all.
“There’s going to come a day when we all need this,” was all he said.
2 José started a library of his zines. There weren’t a lot, but he figured that if he was getting information about how to do things like street defense from them, everybody should have access to the same ideas he had. The thought behind it was twofold, he said. Horizontal information sharing was important, but what was even more important was that others might read the stuff and come up with ideas that he didn’t. It worked, too. People started reading them and passing them around and talking about them. One day even Makayla came up to our apartment to borrow some. She had gotten thinner, and looked like she wasn’t sleeping much. She didn’t say more than five words when she came knocked on the door, and didn’t stay long. She left with four zines. As she was headed out the door, I put my hand on her arm. She nearly jumped a fucking mile.
“You okay?” I asked, peering at her. I maybe didn’t care; she could be a real jerk. But maybe I did, too.
“I feel safe here. I do,” she said, answering a question I hadn’t asked. “It’s just hard to sleep sometimes.”
“Are you eating? Doing things to relax?”
She shook her head. “Eating when I’m hungry, which isn’t all the time. I try to read a lot, but I go over the same sentence over and over. Maybe I can read these, though.”
I tried to call to mind the picture of her snapping at Jaden, or the day she threw Drusilla out. But she looked so fragile right then. I almost wanted to give her a hug. But that would have been weird, right? I’m not a huge hugger. I was pretty sure she wasn’t, either. I patted her on the shoulder, once, awkwardly, like a bro. She closed her eyes like she was barely able to stand someone touching her.
“You’re strong,” I said. I wanted to add more, about what she did for the building, about what a badass it was obvious she was. But in the end I just shrugged and she went back to her apartment.
While José was leading the street defense committee and starting his zine library, Sebastian was doing his thing with the entertainment committee and the kids. It was the most separate I had ever seen the twins, and they both seemed so happy. They were good guys, you know? Mostly Sebastian, but even José who tried to be such a hard-ass. I never knew guys like that. I mean, the main dude in my life growing up was my asshole dad, who I never wanted to be like, and his fuckwad friends who always came around and drank and made stupid sexist jokes and shit like that. Then, once I left home, I was with these douchebag punk dudes who talk a good game about anti-oppression and equality, but at the end of the day are as sexist and homophobic and everything else as anybody else. I guess maybe if I grew up around guys like José and Sebastian, things might have been different for me, I might have landed somewhere else. Person-wise and gender-wise, too. Like, I always knew I wasn’t what they told me, I knew I wasn’t this girl in frilly dresses that I had to be before I had a choice. But then I would look around me and see these asshole dudes and think I’m definitely not that, either. So I landed somewhere in between, some crusty weird genderfucking person who everybody is confused by and most people don’t even think exist, if that makes any sense. I don’t know. Being there in the building, I had plenty of time to think about these things.
It wasn’t like I was completely idle. I helped clean the place, went out on the food gathering committee sometimes, played with the kids sometimes. Once in a while I sang and played guitar with the music group. But mostly I thought about leaving. It was weird, you know? There was this place, this great place that had come up out of all this misery and despair, and that’s what I’d always hoped for. It was like my motherfucking dream of what would happen when the world and capitalism and all that other crap fell. This. But it was nothing, because there was no Lux. I thought every day, maybe I’ll take a boat to New Jersey, maybe I’ll have the Red Cross relocate me to a shelter there, maybe I’ll start looking. Then this dread would come over me. I’d start picking at the pimples on my chin and acting weird and nervous and then José or Sebastian would ask me what was wrong and I’d say nothing. Finally, I’d just stop thinking about her at all, because, you know, having a dream once in a while that she’s alive and okay is better than knowing for sure that she’s in the fucking ground somewhere forever.
I tried to think more about the building. Everybody was radicalized by being left behind, nobody had faith that anything would save them but themselves and each other. Here was the real dream of it all: we were winning. We were warm and eating, we were happy and free. But how long could it last? For now, we were still under the radar, just another building in a city full of destroyed buildings. But what would happen when they found us here, playing music and playing soccer, stealing and surviving? What then?
It got boring just thinking about all this stuff, and it got boring following the leader at committees. I started making my own zine for the library. I’d never made one before, but I really liked the aesthetic of some of the real old (like last-century-old) zines José had. They were little rectangles typewritten with old machines or handwritten and cut out of a bigger sheet of paper and plastered over a magazine picture before they were photocopied. That’s how all the text looked. It was tedious, but it was what I wanted. I started getting people to write things down about the building. About how they had gotten there, their lives before it, what their life was like now. People wrote about all sorts of things, in all sorts of languages. Some of the kids drew pictures. Alejandro drew himself playing soccer with Sebastian.
One morning, I woke up and went down to the lobby with the idea that I was going to get this really old lady, the one who’d been training with José, to write something for my zine. She usually was down there, waiting for something to start, talking to people. I kind of felt like an archivist, you know? I wanted to get everybody.
When I got down there, though, I walked right into the middle of another Makayla/Jaden fight. Or, rather, a Makayla meltdown. It took me a minute of listening to even figure out what they were talking about.
“Why the hell aren’t you out there more?” Makayla said. She looked just plain bad. Her jawline was sticking way out, all the softness gone from her neck and cheeks. Her eyelids were twitching. It was something I’d noticed before, but now it defined her sunken face.
“What are you talking about Makayla?” Jaden said, calm as ever.
“I mean it, Jaden. There are a million bikes in this place. You ride faster than anybody I’ve ever met, and you let other people go out and do the collecting of all the shit we need. That’s some sienty bullshit. That’s some entitled, sienty bullshit that you think staying in this building when you could be doing the slag that people out there are doing, but better, is okay.”
“What do you want from me, Makayla? I slag hard here. Everybody does.”
“I want you to do more, Jaden. I want you to do better. Get your shit together.”
He looked at her. He probably saw what I did, the hollow eyes, that she was clearly losing her shit as we watched. Since he was Jaden, he probably felt a lot worse about it than I did.
“Okay, Makayla,” he said. “I’ll get a bike. I’ll go out and gather things we need. Does that make you happy?”
“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t look happy. She looked like she was trying to think of something else to say, but couldn’t. Finally, she turned and walked away, back toward the staircase on the other side of the lobby. Jaden took a deep breath and turned around and began walking the other way. He passed by me without saying anything, even though I’d obviously seen it all.
I started to wonder if maybe Makayla needed help that we couldn’t give her. Maybe we needed to get her out of the building and to New Jersey. Not like, commit her or anything bullshit crazy like that, but get her somewhere where she could talk to someone. I wondered what had happened to her before we’d gotten there. It seemed like something bad, maybe. It wasn’t hard to imagine.
After I saw that fight, Jaden started going out in the mornings and collecting food and water. Since we had the in with the Red Cross truck and all the stores around us had gotten so depleted by people scavenging, anyway, it seemed more like he was doing it to appease Makayla than anything. It was kind of uncomfortable how much he still loved her. We all saw it, even if he was living with new people on a different floor. I guess I used to think that sort of thing was weak and weird, but since Lux disappeared I’ve been pretty weak and weird myself. It’s strange how much people can mean to you. I guess I had never really known before that night of the attack, you know? Before then, nobody meant much to me.
I would think about that for a second. Then I would push my mind to something else.
3 We had pretty much everything we needed in the building, but I was running really low on painkillers. I’d tapered down my use—at first, after finding so many in the pharmacy, I’d gone a little nuts. Then I’d worked my way down to taking them every other day, then every couple of days. It was really goddamn uncomfortable, too, but what are you gonna do? It wasn’t like there were any pharmacies where everything good hadn’t been taken. So I started sobering myself up. I kept a couple for emergencies, but mostly I was clean.
That was a motherfucker. But the real bitch of the situation was that my period started coming back. I guess all the anxiety and discomfort I felt around that unhappy event was part of the reason I started taking painkillers. The added bonus was that being strung out eventually stopped the bleeding altogether, my body just couldn’t get its shit together enough to have a habit and function like that. I mean, I know nobody likes getting their period, it’s not fun for anybody to have blood leaking out of their body, but it induced straight-up panic in me. Having a tampon held inside my body all day for five days made me hyper-aware of my junk, a feeling I tried to avoid at all costs—you don’t even want to get me started on what sex is like for me with about 95 percent of the people I’ve had it with. But you can pick when you have sex or not, most of the time. You can’t pick when your body decides to start dripping blood and tissue everywhere.
The first time I got it in the building, I didn’t know what to do. I was squatted over the piss bucket in the bathroom of our apartment. My pants were down around my ankles and there was this big bright red spot inside my boxers. My breath started coming in a little jagged. I pulled my pants back up and proceeded to freak out.
José and Sebastian are the only ones I really confide in about anything, but they weren’t going to get what I was talking about at all. My hands were shaking a little. After the steady diet of oxys and Xanax, it’d been so long since I’d gotten the fucking thing that I think I had two tampons stored somewhere in one of the pockets of my knapsack. That was it. I tried to think of asking someone if there were any around the building. Then I started thinking about how that would get people thinking about my junk, which, based on the inappropriate questions they ask me about it, people think about more than the average person’s junk. Then I would be thinking more about my junk, which was pretty much unavoidable in the situation anyway, but sure as hell didn’t need to be exacerbated more. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
I took a deep breath and went for my painkillers. If now wasn’t an emergency, I didn’t know when would be. My lower abdomen was pretty much pulsing with pain. Normally, I’m semi-numb to what’s going on in that part of my body, but, with the pain, that was not a possibility. The thing I had to do first was get rid of that pain in any way possible. So, Vicodin it was.
I know it was mostly in my mind, but I almost felt better as soon as I’d taken the Vicodin. My breathing got back to normal and I was able to look for my tampons, which would be a fuckload harder to find than the painkillers had been. I rummaged around in the drawers in my room, in my pockets, in the pockets of my bag. Finally I fished them out. The wrapping was so wrinkled it was almost destroyed, and one of them had popped open. I went back into the bathroom with them and the stupid girly underwear I have to wear to hold the pantyliners in place. I took a deep breath and put the unopened one in. As soon as the painkillers kicked in and I was able to function again, I would have a couple of hours to figure out what to do.
The first thing I did was curl up in a ball. I tried to think of a million things that weren’t what was happening in my body. I remembered health classes, talks from adults during puberty, all that fun stuff. I was super-aware of what was happening to me and how much it was absolutely against my conscious wishes for what my body was supposed to be. So the best thing to do now was put my mind somewhere else. The first thing I did was go through my mind and try to alphabetically repeat the names of drugs I’ve done. Acid, amphetamines, benzos, bath salts, crystal meth, Dilaudid, DMT, dexies, drag, ecstasy, fast, GHB, h-bombs, ice, jet fuel, ketamine, lazy, move, morphine, nexus flips, OxyContin, opium, PCP, psilocybin, Quaaludes, red light, sativa, trigger warning, trance, ugly Sam, Vicodin, waffle dust, Xanax, yellows, zero. I couldn’t always get all of them on the first try, so I went over the alphabet again and again, until I got them all. Then I repeated them until I chilled the fuck out.
By my third go through the alphabet, I felt a lot better, body-wise. The Vicodin had kicked in, and I was able to stand back up. My brain was working a little better, so I figured I had two options for what to do about tampons. The building was half cis women, so I assumed at least some of them got their periods regularly, and they kept supplies on hand. Those supplies were probably in the closet that Makayla kept the key to. So I could ask Makayla. That was option one. Option two was to go look for a pharmacy and hope they still had some hanging around that hadn’t been water-damaged. This was an infinitely preferable option for some reasons, and a worse one for others. If I went looking for tampons on my own, I wouldn’t have to ask anybody, they would be thinking less about my junk, and none of them would decide I was a girl just because I had to deal with this stupid bleeding. However, the stores had been pretty well picked over by then, and it wasn’t very likely I would find something that so many people left in the city needed. And it was getting more dangerous out there by the day, especially for people looting stores for things they needed. Still, the second option was how I wanted to proceed. Definitely.
I tried not to think about the wad of cotton inside me, even though I couldn’t feel it or anything. But it was there, I knew it was, and it freaked me out in a way that’s hard to explain. Did you ever, you know, hurt yourself and everything you do draws your attention back to the part of your body that’s hurt? This was kind of like that, only worse, because I generally do my best to make sure I don’t think about that part of my body at all. It’s a blank space in my mind. Except for moments like now.
My head was a little fuzzy from the Vicodin, but I started rummaging around in my room for the crowbar I hadn’t had to use in a while. I grabbed it and stuffed it into my knapsack. My breathing was normal now, and my heart was only moving a little faster than usual because I had to go raid a pharmacy again, something I hadn’t done in a while. I got my shit together and walked out the door of my apartment, down the stairs, and through the lobby. I could’ve told José or Sebastian. I could’ve asked them to come with me. But I just couldn’t bring myself to.
Out in the street, things still looked like a third world country. People wandering around in rags, looking for food and water, garbage piled high down alleys and away from places people were eating and sleeping, rats running to and from the piles of it, mud caking the streets, the sun beating down mercilessly on it all. The motherfuckers with the machines hadn’t even come close to where we were yet; they could still be found working away at all the places with the real money, making them presentable for the kinds of people who lived there. We were in a luxury condo, sure, but this part of Brooklyn still had just enough people who nobody cared about for them to be here yet. So it still looked like it had shortly after Bernice.
I went down the block to the first Allen Brewster’s. I rummaged the fuck through the place and found absolutely nothing useful. There was another store just like it down the block, but that had been picked over, too. I went into four chain pharmacies, all of which were within ten blocks of the building. Nobody had anything I could use.
“Fuck, motherfuck, goddamn,” I whispered to myself. I crouched down and tried not to think of my stupid fucking body and what it was putting me through. I wished for the millionth time that I could have had a surgery and had all these organs and crap removed from me. But that had never been an option for me, not living on the streets, not without any access to medical care even when I was sick as fuck. One day, things were going to be different. But today they were not, and I had to deal with that.
Okay. Deep breath. I was going to have to go back to the building and find out what the women there did when they were in this situation. I was going to have to talk to Makyala.
Just the thought of it made my heart start beating faster. People can’t usually make judgments about what they think my gender is. I wear men’s and women’s clothes, I keep my already pretty flat chest bound down, sometimes I pack, sometimes I don’t, I don’t shave the mustache on my upper lip that some people pin as male and some as female, I keep my voice pretty neutral. People have a hard time knowing what to think, which is exactly what I want them to think, which is really what I am, you know? This kinda in-between, masc-femme, genderless, genderfuck, person. But the minute Makyala heard about my period, she would always think girl from then on. She would start forgetting and using “she” instead of “they” when she talked about me, even if she didn’t mean to, even if she had every intention of continuing to think of me the way I really am. Then other people would do it, too.
I walked back to the building feeling kind of dazed. I went up to Makayla’s apartment and knocked on the door.
“Yeah?” she said, opening it. She looked like reheated shit. Her hair was all over the place, she’d lost even more weight, and her eyes were sunken. For a minute I stopped worrying about the period thing and started thinking, holy shit, this girl really needs help.
“I . . . um . . . I was wondering if there are any supplies . . . I mean, like, I’m bleeding, and . . .”
“Bleeding from where?” she asked, suddenly sounding panicked and looking me up and down.
“I’m not hurt or anything, I just . . . I got my period and I need tampons,” I said. I could feel the heat rising up my cheeks, making my face red, embarrassing me even further.
“Shit, girl,” she said. Girl. There it was, second word into the conversation. She stopped herself. “Sorry, sorry. I mean, I thought you were hurt. I was relieved. I didn’t mean . . . yes, they’re in the supply closet. I’ll get you some.”
We walked back down to the lobby. She didn’t say much, and neither did I. My heart was going fast again, this time from being misgendered. All the adrenaline from this day was killing my buzz, and I would have to take another Vicodin when I got back upstairs.
Makayla opened the closet door and handed me a box of tampons. I stuffed them in my bag. She sighed.
“There’s not a lot left, but this is where they are if you need them. There’s not a lot of anything, really.” She stepped back from the door and let me look in. There were a few boxes left, but the room was mostly empty. “The Red Cross connection is drying up, and God knows there isn’t much left in the stores. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I worry about it every day.”
“Makayla?” I said. I wanted to put my arm out, put my hand on her shoulder. “Maybe you should let go of the closet for a while? Maybe you should take a break and let someone else worry about it?”
She grabbed the key hanging around her neck. “I’m fine. I’m fine. Fine. And I can take care of this. Don’t worry about it.” She tucked the key away under her shirt. I saw how much her hands were shaking. “If you need anything else, let me know.”
“Okay,” I said. All things considered, it hadn’t gone as bad as I thought it would. One single misgendering, and she’d almost apologized for it the second it happened. And now I had something new to focus my mind on, which was that Makayla was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, losing her shit.
I started wondering what would have to happen to get her out of the building and to somewhere she could get help for whatever kind of nervous breakdown she was in the middle of having. But no matter how I thought about it, I couldn’t figure out a single thing that would ever make her leave.