Part Five: Panic

Opening the Black Box

Wham, wham, wham, wham.

My eyes slam open. My heart is hammering in my chest, and the panic is back, except it brought its big, mean brother this time. It’s worse than I’ve ever felt before, tightening around my chest like an iron vise, pressing the life out of me. Tears are streaming down my face, completely uncontrolled, and I’m so overwhelmed that I can’t even sob, not really. I just lay there, panic paralyzing me. One—and only one—thought locks my mind in a cold loop.

You know the stories, it howls, shattering in its intensity, driving all rational thought before it. If you put on those clothes, that look, and it hits you like it did in the stories, then you’ll know, and you can never un-know it.

I don’t need to think to know that knowing would demand action. I’ve never been the type to pretend something isn’t true just because it’s inconvenient.

After a geologic era, I muster a feeble response. They knew. All of them knew—every trans person I ever met, they knew, they always knew that they were something else, someone else, their whole lives. A woman, a man, neither. The people I knew knew.

Mae looms from the comic—that damned comic, again. She knew, but she didn’t know what she knew. Both my parents are veterans. Unknown knowns—the phrase crawls out of a rusted memory from a garage talk with Dad, his cigarette smoke swirling around us both in a fearful Minnesota December. It’s a term the military uses for knowledge that you can’t understand until you have the context for it. I can’t remember anything else from it—just the cold, the term, his cigarette burning the cold away, and a pair of beaten-up leather jackets failing to protect us from the winter.

The vise tightens around my chest.

—10 years ago, give or take—

R—’s new to the graduate program. She’s tall, maybe 6’3” in a soft black turtleneck and gray houndstooth pants, loose blond hair and slender grace as she walks through the tiled floors of the university hall where we both work. I’m in my second year of my Master’s, and she’s a year behind me, but she is smart. Way smarter than I am. I’m in one class with her this semester, and she deserves to be here way more than I do.

She’s also trans. Like everyone else in the department, I’d gotten a letter the week before announcing her social transition. She’s not my first trans friend. I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons with A—, whose bright, easy laugh has been lighting up our living room every Saturday for a year now, so the idea of transness itself stopped being strange to me quite a while ago.

She is the second, though, which suggests that trans folks are a lot more common than I’d ever considered. I wonder, idly, whether I might be trans too, for a few moments, before I dismiss the thought. Trans people had to have always known, and I, obviously, didn’t. That’s just how it works.

I have literally no idea where I heard that. I don’t think about it.

—Now—

I find that I can move now, and I shakily pick up my phone. It’s 4:30, the quiet time of night where even the night owls have given up and gone to sleep. It’s just about the only time that the city’s really quiet. I have no idea how long I’ve been awake, but I’m sure it’s been a while.

I absolutely cannot stay in this bed.

Standing takes time. My strength is completely gone, and the more I can move, the more I find I can finally cry. The sobs are so intense that they wreck my balance, and I feel fundamentally off-kilter even without them. I stand eventually, and sit again, a sense of emotional vertigo overtaking me. I grab my pillow, hugging it sight to my chest, and try again. Better, but the panic is still there, crushing the life out of me. I remember the stuffed animals I had, when I was little, a mountain of plush comfort. They’d been taken from me, all at once, one day while I was at school, given to a thrift store and, eventually, other children.

I wish I had one now.

I wobble to B—’s bed slowly. She jerks awake when I’m barely in the room, snatching for the little white ceramic lamp next to her bed. Dim light washes over the room, and with it I lose the last of my restraint, sobs coming loudly now.

“Zac?” she asks, worry replacing fear in an instant. I have no words. Years and years of English training and I have no words at all. I sniffle, and cry even harder. “Oh, honey, come here,” she begs, her own voice nearly overcome in terror-tears of her own.

I’ve never been this bad before. Not when Dad died two years ago. Not when he was diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that would eat him from the inside out a year before that. Not when, a month and a week after he died, two months and a day after her father died, I made a headstone for my cat with the tools I inherited from him. My cat, who’d been diagnosed with and died from cancer in the month following my own father’s death, a spiteful punch to the gut from an uncaring world that had utterly broken me for months.

I manage to make it to the bed before I collapse into her. Her strong, athletic arms wrap around me and pull me close, her warm skin on my cheek, and I finally really let go, howling with panicked, terrified tears. Something inside me knows something and is shouting it at the top of its lungs, only I can’t understand the message. I cry and cry in B—’s arms, completely nonverbal. She strokes my long, dark, thinning hair and tells me over and over again that things will be all right.

Time passes. Neither of us knows how much.

“I’m so scared,” I finally say.

“It’s okay, honey,” she said, holding me close. “I’m here, no matter what.”

“But what if I’m a girl?” I ask, and the question is barely more than a whisper. I’ve never thought a thought like that all at once, not even in the lonely darkness behind my eyelids.

“Then you’re a girl and it’s okay,” B— says. Her fingers twine in my hair, and I sob again. We go in circles like this, over and over. She makes sure I don’t feel alone. It’s the only tether I have in the whole world. Finally—finally—the vise around my chest eases a little. I become aware of the rest of my body again. We lie there, the tears slowing to a trickle, and then an intermittent spurt now and again.

She doesn’t let me go, and I’m more grateful for it than I’ll ever be able to say.

“I have to pee,” I say finally. Her arms ease a bit, and I pick up my phone. It’s about seven. I’ve been crying for almost three hours, nonstop.

“Do you need help?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say, honestly. I’ve never been proud, and now seems a terrible time to try it on for size. I stand, but I’m wobbly. Not as bad as I was coming in. B—’s already on her feet and coming around the bed to support me. “I’m okay,” I amend myself.

“Are you sure?” she asks, worried eyes keen, even in the dim light. I nod. The bathroom is the next room over, and it takes me an embarrassing amount of time to get there. My mind wanders. Flutters. Remembers yesterday, the mirror, photos. Remembers that there was a craze a couple of years ago when someone made a program called FaceApp that could gender swap your face. People played with it, posting the realistic-looking results to social media here and there, laughing at the results.

I’d avoided it like the plague. Some instinct I couldn’t identify—some essential, deep part of me, warned me like a rattlesnake’s tail. Stay away from this one.

I look at the toilet, lightheaded, dehydrated from crying. Maybe help would’ve been a good idea. I sit instead of standing, and start my business. I look at my phone, and a sense of dread knowing settles over me. I feel it, inevitable and heavy over me, like a glacier. I’ve started this thought now. I can’t not know. I unlock the phone and open the app store. Downloading the app takes seconds.

I’ve been finished peeing for a bit now, but the app is open, and I’m thumbing through my pictures, looking for something of me. A portrait. Anything. But, of course, there’s nothing. I never, ever take selfies. I tap for the camera, and snap a picture of myself. I’m hunched over, overweight, visibly exhausted. My receding hairline has been causing me quite a bit of distress for the past several years, and the angle here highlights it. My face is a flesh mask, as usual.

The gender swap filter is right there. I tap it, and it gives me two options for a feminine face. I hesitate, but the glacial press of inevitability is too much. I tap the less feminine one and, after a moment, there she is.

Her chestnut hair parts to the right, flowing over her shoulders. It’s not full or poofy, but it shines in the app’s artificial light, and it’s exactly my hair’s color. Her forehead is smooth, the wrinkles I’ve been picking up as I age gone, and a sharp, clean, full hairline marches across her forehead. Her cheeks are round, her lips just a little more full than mine, but her face is mostly the same as mine. Except, you know… I can see a whole face, not a collection of pieces.

I fall in love with her immediately. I’ve never seen a picture of me I’ve liked even a fraction as much as I love this picture. My heart sinks down through my toes, into the floor, and falls, uncontrolled, toward the center of the Earth.

“Shit,” I say, and lock my phone. I set it roughly on the bathroom counter next to me and bury my face in my hands. “I’m in a lot of trouble.” The vise releases my chest, the truth of the statement indisputable, and its pressure is replaced by a numb emptiness, like something momentous has happened after far, far too long. I’m too tired to be sure of what, but the tattered shreds of my mind that are still functional suggest possibilities that I’d never seriously considered. I shy away from them.

Standing takes effort. I edge over to the sink and wash my hands. The bath towel is far away down here, so I grab for the little hand towel and, in doing so, catch sight of my reflection. Again, the mask. Again, not-me. Again, I can’t hold my own gaze. I fill a cup of water, drink, and shuffle back to the bedroom. B—’s sitting up on the bed, worry still in her eyes. I slip under the covers and sit next to her.

“Everything okay?” she asks, and I wonder how long I was in there. I don’t answer for a while, not sure what to say. The silence stretches, and answers her question so completely that I know better than to bother explaining.

“Remember that app from a few years ago that lets you gender swap your face?” I ask, and I’m kind of surprised to be saying it. It feels like something forbidden, impossible, and as soon as I notice, I find I can’t say any more.

“Yeah?” she asks, and scoots a little closer, sneaking an arm around my shoulders. I bring up my phone and unlock it. The app is still there, but the face? The woman I saw? She’s gone. The picture’s missing. I look in the photo files the phone’s storing, but even the source picture’s gone.

“It’s gone,” I say, disappointed. I really should be more upset. I go back to the app and take another picture of myself, then feed it to the gender filter. The result has poofy hair and weird makeup. She’s wrong. I shake my head and use the other filter. This one’s worse—she looks like she’d gotten fired from an ‘80’s music video for showing up with too much hairspray in her hair. I shake my head. “Those aren’t right,” I finish lamely, and set the phone down.

“You liked the other shot?” B— asked. I nod, a tiny bobbing of my chin and forehead. I want to explain what I saw, how right she was, but I find I have no words. I speak a different truth instead. “I’m scared.” She pulls me close, and we huddle together there, skin to skin.

Time passes.

“Well, we might as well get to it,” I eventually say. My voice is dull, flat, resigned. The glacier is pressing down on me again.

“Are you sure?” B— asks. I look at her, and her brow is knitted in worry.

“I have to know,” I say, and it’s the truth down to the soles of my feet. B— nods, and her face has the same resigned look I figure I’m wearing. She stands and pulls on a bathrobe, then goes to the closet and starts pulling a few things out. I make to stand, but she presses me back into the bed firmly.

“Let me get things set up,” she says, and I nod and watch. Silk and cotton spill onto the bed at my feet, in black and yellow and red and blue and green—piece after piece. Eventually she slows and considers what she’s laid out. “Okay, this gives us a few options. You ready?” she says. I nod, and stand.

She hands me a pair of black boyshorts, and I put them on. I’ve worn boxers since I was twelve. They’re tight, and fit oddly, but not in a bad way. Next is a sports bra, also black. I look at her, a bit baffled, and she helps me put it on. Next comes a shirt, and we stuff it into the bra, so my chest will have form. Then it’s a button-down, work-type blouse and an ankle-length quarter-circle skirt. After the skirt, I get wobbly again, and sit on the end of the bed while I button the blouse up.

“Want to try some lipstick?” she asks. I nod.

“Might as well,” I say. She pulls out a red tube, and I sit and feel the liquid-plastic sensation of lipstick sliding onto my lips for the first time. B— stands back. I look up at her.

“Ready?” she asks.

“No,” I say, and stand. She understands my meaning, though, and steps backward, so that I have a clear path to the full-length mirror she keeps on her wall. I take a deep breath. Another. This is it. The big moment. Every piece of media I’ve ever read or watched or heard—and boy, are there a lot—say that this is about to be one of the most important moments of my whole life. I step forward and look at my reflection. It’s a good outfit, I have to admit—well assembled. Exactly the sort of thing a working woman might wear in the office. My broken, wrong face above it all, of course.

Disappointment. Mild annoyance. Exactly what I feel every time I try to put together a new outfit. B— looks at me expectantly. I shrug.

“Nothing,” I say. We look at each other. She looks confused, but not half as much as I feel.

“Wanna try something else?” she asks eventually. I nod. The blouse and skirt come off, and she offers a red and black dress with cute sleeves and a great neckline, but in a retro ‘50’s style. I bought it for her for Christmas some years ago. It’s one of my favorite pieces of clothing in the world. We slip it over my head, and she zips the absurdly tiny little zipper under my arm. It’s the first dress I’ve ever worn. The tickle of its hem around my knees is a very new feeling. Odd.

B—’s eyes meet mine. We hold there for a moment, just being together, before I nod. She steps back, and I cross in front of the mirror again. The sports bra is clearly visible—a real faux pas—but the dress fits better than I’d expected. The colors work for me. I love the cut, just as I always have.

Again, the mild annoyance. The disappointment. I turn to her and shrug.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “This is supposed to tell me something.”

“Nothing?” she asks. I shake my head.

“Just a man in a dress,” I say. She helps me strip again.

“Let’s try one last thing,” she says as she hangs the dress up again. This time, I spread my arms as she wraps a silk wrap skirt in red and gold, with a beautiful paisley pattern, around my waist. Over that goes a black pull-over top, with a low neck, but not low enough that the bra shows.

I move to step in front of the mirror, but she holds up a finger and crosses back to the closet. After a minute of searching, she pulls out a box. Inside is a long blonde wig, and she combs it out. After a bit of wrestling with my own shoulder-blade-length hair, she slips it onto my scalp. It’s too tight, and itches. She combs it some more. Eventually, she backs away.

“It look any good?” I ask. Her face screws up, and she bobs her head from side to side.

“It gives you a hairline,” she says. I nod, and try the mirror again.

Again, annoyance. This time, it’s a man in a skirt wearing an absurd wig. I sigh, and pull the wig off.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “This is supposed to be a big deal. Like, one way or the other, it’s supposed to tell me something, and just…” I gesture vaguely at the mirror.

“I don’t know either, babe,” she says. We look at each other.

“Maybe if I wear it for a while?” I half-say. She shrugs. I shrug.

Breakfast happens. I drink some more water, rehydrating. The silk of the skirt is warm. We’ve got nothing planned for the day, so I turn on my computer and play Hades for a while. This time, I don’t die an embarrassing number of times. The  padding in my bra itches, and the skirt really is getting rather warm as the late-July morning starts to burn away the cool of the night. I glance at the clock. It’s been two hours since I went to the kitchen to start breakfast. I give it another hour.

Now I’m hot and annoyed. I sigh.

“I give up,” I say to B— as I head for the bedroom. She trails after me, and I strip down once I’m out of sight of any windows. No disgust, no excitement, just… annoyance and too much warmth. The bra takes a little work to remove, and I don’t bother changing out of the boyshorts. I go into my own closet and grab a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. She sits down on the bed as I dress.

“Still nothing?” she asks.

“No. I expected…” I say, frustration flooding my tone. I take a breath and pull on my shorts. Tamp it down. This isn’t her fault. “Excitement, disgust, even just a general unease or satisfaction, you know?” I continue. Still annoyed, of course, bot much more clearly not at her. “Not nothing.”

“Really nothing at all?” she asks. I pull on the short.

“A vague annoyance,” I say. Her eyebrows rise a bit, and I shake my head. “It’s the same thing I always feel when I look in the mirror. You know how much I hate clothes shopping.” She looks a little confused, because I do go clothes shopping more than a little—always searching for a cut or shade or pattern that’s never there. I always leave dissatisfied, even if I do usually leave with something. I pause, realizing I’ve never explained this to her.

“So, outfits basically come in two varieties for me: acceptable and terrible,” I explain. “They’re never really right, but I can’t seem to ever find what I’m looking for. I felt exactly the same when I saw myself wearing these,” I say, and lift the edge of the silk wrap skirt, “as I do when I wear anything else that’s fine.” I let the silk droop.

“You’ve never liked wearing anything?” she asks. I think the question through before I answer.

“Maybe the vest S— made for me?” I say, shrugging. The vest is made from a gorgeous red silk brocade, with antiqued brass buttons—by far the most ornate and decorative piece of clothing I’ve ever owned, the material very far outside the scope of what’s usually permissible in men’s wear. S— is an old friend of mine. She made B—’s wedding dress from a matching brocade silk. It doubles as her renaissance fair regalia.

It goes without saying that I don’t like the rest of the suit that I have to wear the vest with. That is something I’ve complained to B— about many, many times.

B— looks at me, confusion in her tight eyes and drawn lips. I meet her gaze, and I’m sure my expression is the same. We hold there for a while, neither of us knowing what to say. Eventually, I walk to the door and she trails after me.

The day passes. I continue to feel nothing in particular. There’s a hit-and-run accident in the neighborhood. When the cops ask, I tell them that I didn’t really see anything—just heard the crash, and somebody getting into another car, but not clearly enough to guess at anything other than gender. Ironically. I don’t say the last bit.

After dinner, we try crossdressing again. Five outfits this time. No results. We return to the living room, the evening’s waning light pouring in through our western windows. B— settles into a couch, but I’m restless. Pacing. B— waits, sensing that something’s coming.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for here,” I say eventually. “Just… it’s frustrating. And confusing.”

“I can see that,” B— says mildly. It’s quite the understatement.

“I just…” I trail off. I catch sight of the one—and only one—photo of myself we have hanging in the house. I’m standing with my brother and father, at his last Christmas alive. He and my brother are smiling, but my smile is a slashed grimace across my face. I hate the way I look in it, but it’s the last picture I have of Dad looking like Dad.

It was also his last Christmas gift to me.

“I just wish I understood what I was doing here,” I say eventually. “Like, the books and stuff talk about performing gender and, you know, duh. It was the most boringly obvious thing to me.” My mind skitters over the queer literature courses I took while I was finishing my doctorate, where I’d learned the concept. Just-for-fun courses, I’d told myself. I was always the only cisgender, heterosexual person in the room. Obviously the sort of thing a cishet guy does for fun. The thought doesn’t really penetrate, and I roll on.

“Like, I am constantly and consciously aware of the performance I’m giving,” I say. My mind scrabbles for an analogy, and snags on Hamilton, the musical—we saw it a few weeks ago. “It’s like I’m on stage for a play and everyone’s doing their thing, and it’s completely natural for them, but I have to deliver my lines and not screw everything up for them. Except I also have to run the whole technical crew—every body, every person, moving all the set pieces around so that everything works for everyone else.” This doesn’t make sense. It perfectly reflects how I feel, but it sounds bizarre even as I say it. I sigh and turn, and my eye snags on that stupid picture again.

“I just…” my arms sag. Something bubbles up, and it’s out of my mouth before I can even consider it. “I just wish I could have a single picture of me that looks like me.”

“What?” B— asks, confused. I can’t really believe I’ve said this, but it’s out, so I have to keep going now.

“It’s like it’s not me in the pictures,” I say. “It’s like… I’m in there, somewhere, but I’m wearing a mask on a mask on a mask, and it moves when I tell it to do things, but…” I trail off. B—’s eyebrows have climbed her forehead, and I laugh once, tired and frustrated. “Doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

“Not really,” she says. A beat. “Come here, hon. Sit down.” I do, slouching opposite to her. We sit there for a long while, quiet, looking at each other, our legs crossed against each other. The sun sinks, and blue light creases to yellow, then orange. I feel tired. Confused.

“Want to try painting your toenails?” B— asks. I shrug.

“Might as well,” I say. “Haven’t exactly gotten anything else out of the day today.” B— stands and heads to the bathroom, then returns with a handful of nail polish bottles. She settles back in, props my oafishly large feet on her lap, and starts brushing a basecoat on.

“Pick a color,” she says, and I look at my options. Blue, purple, and burgundy. None are really my kind of color, but B—’s not that big on nail polish herself. I shrug, and pass her the burgundy nail polish. The fumes from the basecoat aren’t strong, but they’re new to me. We wait in quiet companionship as it dries.

“Okay,” B— says, and unscrews the burgundy polish. “Stay still.” I nod, and she starts to brush the big toe on my right foot. I watch, and the deep, rich red fans out with the nail polish brush and across my nail. I’m… fascinated. I feel my focus narrowing, closing in around that brush, that rich, gleaming, liquid red, the slow spread of it from toe to toe to toe.

I’m not fascinated. I’m transfixed. Wordless. Calm. B— waits, all ten toes red with their first coat, but I don’t really see her. My attention is stuck on my toes. Eventually, she begins again, and the red pigment, which is now somehow a part of my reality, a part of me, becomes even richer, deeper, better. My mouth slowly droops open. It doesn’t take her long to finish all ten toes a second time.

My silence is deafening. Even I am aware of this fact, and I am aware of, basically, nothing that isn’t the ten digits attached to my feet.

“Here, let me try this,” B— says, and produces a nail polish bottle that I hadn’t seen before. The top’s off and she’s brushing before I can muster up the will to say anything, and I watch, wordlessly, as a faint metallic flake sparkle brightens the burgundy, a perfect contrast with the paleness of my skin tone.

“I look like a classic car.” The words slip out of me before I even realize I’m saying them, and they’re true. B— smiles a little and squeezes my foot, then paints the other one. We wait for it to dry, then a topcoat, to protect this perfect, perfect color.

“I look like a classic car,” I say again in utter wonderment. This time she looks up and meets my gaze. We hold for a moment, before I’m dragged back to my toes, their sparkle, and the way that the late summer evening sunlight, all orange and dim, makes them glitter and gleam in impossible lambent perfection.

We wait as the topcoat dries. Every inch of me screams a certainty that I never, ever want to have unpainted toenails again.

“Well, that was interesting,” I say. My toenails are red.

“Yeah,” B— agrees. My toenails remain red. I can barely believe it.

We watch something on TV, and I’m able to pay it a measure of attention, but my toenails are awfully red. I’m beginning to understand why M— told me not to paint my fingernails. It’s hard enough to pay attention to the universe when my toes are almost six feet away from me. That strikes me as an odd thought, in a dull, disconnected way—this is my body, so my toes are me, right? Except, that’s not quite how I’ve ever thought of things.

The sun’s down now and we were up really early. B— and I agree to head to bed, and wow, my toes are really red. Off come my clothes, B—’s boyshorts stay on, and I sit on the edge of the bed, the low, mellow light of my dim bedroom washing over my red-sparking toenails. I swing them under my covers, and I’m sad to see them go.

Continued in Part 6.

Author’s note

B— and I have our own bedrooms. It started off with needing separate beds because I’ve always been an extremely light sleeper, so her rolling over would wake me several dozen times each night. We realized that we quite like having our own space, so we keep separate rooms, where we can be as messy and chaotic as we want without bothering anyone else.