Dear B——,
I was in the hot springs again today before my shift, hunkered down beneath the waterline with my brain smoking so that when I closed my eyes the trillion-candlepower sun made the capillaries under my eyelids stand out like cave paintings. The rattle of bottles came from the yard—the owner talking low, an early run for coffee filters gone foul—my shoulders were tight where the sun steamed the water from them.
I was thinking about my shift—the amount of money I could expect to make from it; the impossibility of ever using that money to change my life, fundamentally, from what it was right now—when I saw the figure walking on the side of the hill just across the river.
I slumped back beneath the water, cool air on my cheeks where they stuck out of the warm. The figure had a wide-swinging, high-stepping gait, like a kid trying to splash every puddle in the rain-soaked sidewalk. They were wearing a hoodie; I instinctively respected this basic indifference to clothes that matched the weather. It was hard to make out more details than this, which had an obvious reciprocal meaning: there was no way that any figure over there could make out details about my body, either, here in the stew.
So I started to relax, which is when the figure held up the big digital camera from their side, pointed it at the hostel, and turned on the red light that I swear I could see glinting like Martian war-radiation from all the way across the Rio Grande: the red light that meant record. I ducked, held my head underwater until my blood churned through my ears like bubbles of cabin air from sunken ships.
When I surfaced, the figure was still present, their camera still out, the red light still on. As nearly as I could tell, the lens was pointed at the second, natural baths at this point, currently empty and awaiting the cleaning that I had yet to clock in to do. Flickers from the pink hands, fingers on the tight/wide angle selector. They were walking, careful where they put their feet even with their eyes in the viewfinder. They were walking in the other direction.
The figure’s face beneath the hood was obscured, their shoulders vibrating. And then wind on the hood: sucrose purple hair. A blast of sunlight bouncing off ears that seemed made mostly of metal and plastic. Lipstick radiant, cartoon pink against the brick-red hill, the dead gray brush, her cold gray eyes. The cis woman I had seen destroying the world in my dreams was suddenly filming weird rocks on the hill across the river from my place of employment.
Alarmed, I turned to face the back wall of the bath. But I kicked, in turning—subliminal betrayal; the body cannot be trusted—and sent up a splash. When I turned back again to see whether the dream figure had noticed, her camera was trained directly on me. My eyes met her eyes—one red and electronic, one a color I could not yet see. Was she still recording? The tan skin of my forehead breached the water, wind drying out the space between my eyes. A thought forced its way in: the image of myself rising out of the water, letting her see more of me, shoulders, chest. The thought was mortifying, sent me further down.
Beneath the water, I sat stewing, eyes open and stinging from the mineral particulate moving around me: tiny stones that blended with the water, that remained on my skin like armor, like dust, and above me I imagined her camera light sweeping over me like the ray of a red sun. But when I surfaced, her camera was at her side and her back was to me: she was clambering down the hillside to the north, likely bound for the bridge just north of Ralph Edwards Park that I knew would bring her back to my side of the Rio Grande. And I began to worry.
Setting the coffee on the chair mat and sitting on the floor with the back soon sign up on the door, I went through the Private Customer Files until I found her. The implausible name on her photocopied California driver’s license was caroline wormwood. Caroline Wormwood was officially 5’6” with HAZ eyes, and she was born September 11, 1987. The picture was terrible: ghost-pale turtlish face, large wide nose, sleepy eyes, freckles and acne jumbled together. Her hair color was listed as BLU, and I scrutinized the black and white photocopy, trying to figure out if this had been clear from the original picture. Did they actually let you do that in a driver’s license?
Other facts about Caroline Wormwood gleaned from the files: she’d paid for her stay in cash, at the lowest rung of the hostel’s sliding scale. Two weeks paid up in advance, with no intended departure date listed. The vehicle listing was left blank. She was staying in the women’s dorm.
After cleaning the shed, it was close to time for the townies and guests to roll in for their soaks, so I swept the bath area, tightened the pipes, and turned on the system before running to the corner store for a pack of American Spirits and an amethyst crystal. The morning was still burning off, and I shivered as I sat on the steps of the second baths, feet in the water and ashing in a coffee can, rubbing my fancy new crystal around the filter with my smoking hand. Across the river, the shadows burned off the hills, and the steam rose from the surface of the springs.
An older couple was the first to show up, just in for the night en route to Salida, Colorado: a lithe bodyworker wearing sunglasses and a big Horned God pendant, her husband’s gold-pigmented beard slowly fading to lead. Caroline Wormwood followed: I shivered again as I saw her approach. She’d ditched the hoodie and the video camera and was bare-legged, torso and shoulders shrouded in an olive army jacket with the words pvt wino stitched over the breast pocket, her kneecaps baggy and her calves goose-pimpled pink in the cool morning air. She’d painted her toes in glittery spiderwebs that curled against the leather of her Tivas. She gave me a sleepy smile—did she recognize me? Can you fail to recognize someone whose body you’ve recorded?—and her row of earrings sparkled and winked. Her swimsuit underneath her army jacket, unzipped, was a droopy two-piece, purple too, made of some dull-metal looking material. She tossed her coat on the deck and got into the hottest water, the purple hill of her head looming over the stone edge of the bath, black roots now visible, running vertical like shadowy claws about to make off with her skull. And I felt the feeling I get from cis women: the mixed fear/envy feeling, like toxoplasmosis, maybe.
Hi, she said suddenly, not looking at me.
Hi, I said, unsure of the etiquette in the situation. Hi, Caroline Wormwood, do you maybe have film of my body? Can you maybe destroy it while I watch you?
I feel like I’m boiling away, she said first. —Like I’m gonna turn into soup.
I can probably find some carrots and onions, I said.
She laughed, although I couldn’t tell whether it was earnest or the laugh cis people give when they relate successfully with a trans woman: the oh you are human! laugh.
Come in with me, she urged. —We can be soup together?
I don’t soak in public so much, I said, face level: how does one pretend to be normal? How does one pretend one has not had a strange eschatological dream about the person one is talking to?
Caroline studied me. —I’m Caroline, she said. —Listen, are you the one I filmed earlier?
I flushed and lit another cigarette. —Maybe, I mumbled.
Oh, it’s cool, she said, as if I had apologized. —I was just up filming the hills—I didn’t know anyone was going to be in the bath that early. I just film. It’s pretty neutral what I’m filming. I didn’t mean you any harm. —She bobbed under for a moment and then rose up. I tried not to see her eyes flickering toward my skirt; I tried not to adjust my posture.
She asked me my name. —Gala, I said.
Gala, like a party? she asked, and I shook my head. —Too bad, she said. —And your preferred pronouns are she and her, right?
My preferred pronouns are you and fuck, I said, kicking my feet out of the water and splashing her in the face. Which was not totally professional, but at least I didn’t actually dump the coffee can full of butts and ashes into her water when I bent down to get my cigarettes and stalked to the fence to smoke one, and then another. Then I went back to the water, where she was still floating there, quietly. She looked up at me as I approached again.
I’m sorry for offending you, she said, smiling. —Is it bad to ask pronouns?
I think you mean I’m sorry for offending fuck you, I said. —I explained about my preferred pronouns already.
Her smile twisted into a different smile. —What’s your problem?
Nothing, I said immediately, suddenly conscious that I was an employee of this place. —I’m sorry. I’m working; it’s early. It’s fine. —She was still looking at me strangely, so I added: —My pronouns are she and her.
We sat in silence for a while, and in the end I felt stupid for complaining, guilty for having been mean.
I’m Caroline, she finally said, as an olive branch. —Mine are she and her, too.
Cool, I said. —Twinsies.
She laughed. —Are you going to be around tonight?
No, I said to her, grateful that she’d resumed the conversation. —I’m going to go home and summon demons.
Can I watch? she asked.
I tilted my head at her: why would she say that? —I mean, I’m around most other nights, I said.
She nodded, and she submerged for a moment. I watched her swim for a while, trying to decide whether it’d be okay to ask her to delete the film she’d taken of me, if this was an okay boundary to establish between us. Something about my inability to just come out and say this—hey, maybe you could take the naked film of me on your camera and make it not on your camera!—made me angry, in part because I wasn’t sure anymore whether I wanted her to delete it. I slid my feet like a mermaid’s tail into the bath with her. Essential oils leached into the hem of my skirt, and Caroline surfaced, smiling.
What do you ask the demons for when you summon them? she asked. —Whatever they’re paying you, I’ll double it.
I stared at her—steam and sulfur rising around the sugar-bright hair that hung like a violet shroud at her neck—and I believed her.
Love, Gala