The Convulsion Factory

Androgyny

The afterglow fades, always.

The quicker it happens, the more compulsively you’re left to wonder about the night’s beginnings. Even if the object of earlier affections is still lying beside you, cuddled in the crook of your arm, it doesn’t matter. The afterglow fades, and the questions turn cruel and demanding:

How did this happen? What twist of fate and chemistry turned us from strangers into lovers in a few hours?

Gary knew it would happen all over again the moment he saw her. Some bar on Basin Street, past the French Quarter’s upper boundary. Fewer than a dozen drinkers, most of them hardcore, beyond redemption. Lights were low, smoke was thick, exotically resilient bacteria grew on the floor.

Look at her clothes and you wouldn’t think she belonged. Look in her eyes and you reconsidered. Slumming, like Gary, for the fun of whatever waited to be found.

It took twenty minutes of flirtatious eye contact through the smokebank before she came his way, taking the stool next to him. This he took as a good omen: She was no hooker. No hooker with her looks would work this stretch, and even if she did, she wouldn’t have wasted twenty minutes. Gary may have been new to New Orleans, but knew that some games were universal.

“What are you?” was the first thing she said.

“Career? Astrologically? How do you mean?”

She smiled, traced a lacquered fingernail around the rim of her glass, some fruity concoction, sweet contrast to his whiskey sour. “You’re not a tourist, I can tell that right off. No tourist ever comes around here unless it’s some conventioneer drunk out of his mind. But you’re not a native, either. Are you.”

“Long-term transient,” Gary said, and clinked his glass to hers. “But not all who wander are lost.”

One eyebrow ticked upward as she appraised and approved, or pretended to. “You’re literate enough to read bumper stickers, at least.”

Talk progressed, easy and loose and non-binding. They traded names, Gary for Lana, and libidos simmered during the seductive ballet. He liked best these encounters where roles were blurred. Who was predator, and who the prey? A tossup, one answer as valid as the other. In the end, he supposed it didn’t matter, as long as the orgasms were mutual.

Six years of high-ticket vagrancy had shuffled him through a succession of primary, secondary, and graduate schools of one-night stands and short-term loves. Money was no problem; an umbilical credit card kept him linked to the New England bank account. He never had to stick around when it no longer seemed wise. He didn’t want to leave behind a legacy of pain any more than he wanted to lug one around inside.

“You like riddles?” she asked after four rounds of drinks had worked their magic.

“Usually. Let’s hear it.”

“It’s not easy.” Lana smiled mischievously. “But. Do you know what the worst part of being me is?”

“The worst thing, let’s see.” He studied her a moment, the fine-boned face, the tall straight posture, the so-black hair, shoulder length. She didn’t appear to have lived too harsh a life thus far. Her eyes knew pain, though, and her soul was evidently as on display as her small cleavage. “You don’t know how to love.”

A coy shake of her head. “Wrong. So wrong.”

“You’ve never been in love.”

Another shake. She was enjoying this immensely. Sometimes this was the most fun game of all, opening yourself like a maze and escorting strangers into blind alleys.

“You don’t think,” he tried slowly, “you’ll ever find the right one to love.”

Lana tapped her chin, half conciliatory. “You’re still off, but you’re getting warmer.”

He offered a few more stabs at it, then gave up. Lifted his drink and swirled it, watched it in near-hypnosis. “I can think straighter later.”

“Love and friendship,” Lana mused, obliquely avoiding the answer to her challenge. “They’re opposites, in a way, you know.”

He professed skepticism.

“Really. Joseph Roux, in Meditations of a Parish Priest, said, ‘What is love? Two souls and one flesh. Friendship? Two bodies and one soul.’” Lana nodded. “I believe that, with all my heart.” She dropped her hand to his thigh — that thrilling rush of first contact. “How ‘bout you? Do you believe it?”

“It could work on me, give it time.”

And what would it soon be for them, he wondered. Love, or friendship? Two bodies, or one?

Snap judgments were risky, but he thought he’d be amenable to either. Something about her eyes, her manner, her tip-of-the-iceberg hints that, for the right person, she was much more than someone who merely wanted compatible flesh to sustain her until morning light. A needle-in-the-haystack find among French Quarter sin — someone worth sticking around for.

“Well, if you can believe that,” she said, leaning in close to whisper, “then I have so many secrets to share with you.”

Gary watched, listened, through dual filters: The Romantic longed to believe her, while the Cynic thought it mere puffery. Or worse yet, sweet bait so she could lure him to a partner in hiding and they would mug him.

He would bite. He would swallow. Have a little faith.

Soon they danced, pressed close as they leaned together and slow-shuffled about the floor, glowing with neon bleedthrough from the street. They were watched by the dismal eyes of other drinkers, weary survivors clinging to rafts of Jim Beam and Gilbey’s. The jukebox scratched out the mournful, gin-soaked laments of Tom Waits, the quintessential skid row troubadour.

She later led him out back to an alley with too little light, and for a moment he was sure that his judgment had failed him. But no knife appeared, no lead pipe fell from the shadows.

Lana drew down his zipper and, heedless of her dress, dropped to both knees before him in the grime. Overhead, the moon looked sickly, the color of whiskey.

Yet finally he knew that, for a while at least, he’d found a new home.

*

The afterglow faded, as always.

To his credit, it had taken longer than usual, four months of cohabitation in Lana’s apartment. Contact with the seductive unknown usually had that effect.

Lana had shared her most intimate secrets a couple of days after that first night. Stunningly unexpected though they’d been, they hadn’t been enough to send him packing. He was, by then, head over heels in … fascination, he supposed. This was too different to turn away from just yet, without exploration.

Scratch the surface of the mundane, and the underground of counterculture was revealed, rich and teeming. This was the landscape Gary had sought to travel, making up for the stultified upbringing of his first twenty-one years.

Scratch the underground and peel it back, and there was the land where Lana dwelled.

But the afterglow fades. He had bitten, he had swallowed. Best to move on before the emotional hooks barbed him any deeper. April had brought the warmth and renewal of spring after a winter of oddities. Now came the famous final scene, lovers at bittersweet poles, opposites that once attracted and now repelled. Gary had played it out any number of times. Never pleasant, just inevitable.

“How can you do this to me now?” Lana wailed. “My operation’s just a week away!” Her eyes were dazed and wide, glassy with psychosexual trauma. Tears were abundant.

In the center of the living room, Gary held her tightly. That desperate agony of final contact. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You knew what I was like before…”

Lana, snuffling and huge-eyed: “I … I just wish I could have children with you, that might make all the difference in the world … wouldn’t it?”

He bit his lip, hating it when she talked this way, blind to her limitations. It wasn’t healthy.

“Don’t live in a fantasy world, Lana,” he said gently. “Climb out, please.”

He crushed his eyes shut a moment, and when he reopened, Lana seized him by the shoulders, a peculiar fire seeming to ignite within her. One last, savage kiss, and when she tore away it was not without disdain.

“Then go.” Her voice had grown uncharacteristically husky.

Gary retrieved his two bags; a tendency to travel light. What is love? Two souls and one flesh. There was no worse pain than the rending of one back into two.

Out the door, then into a musty corridor whose air always seemed yellow. It led him to the elevator, an ancient suicidal machine, a wrought-iron cage that clanked and shuddered down a gloomy open shaft. A rehearsal for death, condemnation, descent.

The gunshot seized him head to toe.

Hand shaking, Gary levered the elevator to a grinding halt and reversed directions. Dust sifted from the cage’s upper frame. He knew what he would find back upstairs. It had been no ruse, no shot fired into a pillow to plead for attention.

Strange. Mode of suicide was traditionally a great divider between the sexes. Severe bodily damage — gunshot, car crash, and the like — was usually the province of men. Women tended to opt for neater methods — pills, carbon monoxide, or at least precisely opened veins in the bathtub.

Gary was too shocked to weep just yet. He stood in the doorway, one pale-knuckled hand clenched on the knob. This was the most masculine thing Lana had ever done.

The tableau before him was grisly, fodder for scandal and legend had it occurred in a small town. Here, though, few would care at all; back page news at best. The only sensibilities that would get a tweak were those of the police.

Lana lay half-sprawled onto the sofa, legs askew at odd angles. One small breast bared. Smoking gun in hand, its barrel having left a crimson fan on the wall behind her. Eyes open, bulging violently. Adam’s apple absurdly prominent. Her skirt was bunched messily around her hips, showing silken panties.

And that unmistakable bulge of male genitalia.

*

“What you’ve got to keep remembering is that you are not responsible for anyone else’s happiness but your own.”

Gary nodded like a man who’d heard all this before. “It’s not the happiness part I have a problem with. It’s the responsibility for her killing herself.”

Across the desk, uncluttered and orderly, Dr. Thatcher laced her fingers. “But it was Lana’s decision. You didn’t put the gun in her hand. You never even knew she owned it.”

Gary slumped in his chair, glanced about the room. For a psychiatrist’s office, it appeared remarkably non-academic. The furniture was shiny and modern, more in keeping with a corporate reception lobby. Even the couch was out of the way, in a corner in case someone felt their therapy mandated the horizontal — a nod to tradition, but only grudging. Of this, Gary approved, being no respecter of tradition. Tradition was too often a mask worn by regression.

“She was an adult who made her own decisions. And as painful as it may be to come to terms with, she lived and died according to those decisions. Her own. Not yours.”

“God knows I’ve never been the most reliable guy to get involved with. I’ve always tried to make that understood up front, at least.” Gary had been giving his hands a workout, tugging at fingers and knuckles. “But Lana … I’ve never had anybody place so much importance on me. I wasn’t used to that. Almost like she idealized our relationship.”

Dr. Thatcher nodded. Her hair was trimmed into a short blond helmet, and it wavered as one distinct mass. “That’s common among transsexuals. When a relationship is going well, there’s no greater person on earth than their partner. If it’s going badly? Then their partner is just this side of an ogre.”

Gary rose from his chair and paced to the window. Outside, Spanish moss swayed from willow branches in warm spring winds, like tattered flags on the masts of rotting ships.

Painful business, this visit to Lana’s psychotherapist. Catharsis, purging the guilt, whatever. Lana was two days gone, and on a whim Gary had phoned Thatcher to beg for the slot that Lana would never honor this week. There had been no mutual friends to speak of, none that he could open up to. Family? Laughable. He wasn’t even sure that he could’ve confided with Lana’s shrink had it been a man. That underlying shame of admitting the masquerade’s success, of having been duped into lusting for a guy in drag … and after he found out, it didn’t matter. Difficult to own up to that before another male. When he had entered Thatcher’s office, first greeted her, he’d had a brief impulse to request that she hoist her skirt. Double checking.

“It might also help you to realize that transsexuals can be suicidal over a long timespan. Feeling trapped in the wrong body isn’t a problem they can resolve as easily as a nose they don’t like. They’re at constant war with themselves, and with the perceptions of what their families and society expect them to be. Not all of them can shoulder that heavy a burden for long.”

Gary leaned against the window. “Lana didn’t much care what anybody on the outside thought. She had her friends in the same position she was in, these people she used to hang out with at some club called the Fringe. That seemed all the acceptance she needed.”

“I know. She was very stable in that respect.”

Gary turned from the window. “Lana wanted to have children with me. Does that sounds stable to you? The biggest miracle since the Virgin Birth?” He shook his head, his voice hoarse. “How could you approve her final surgery under those conditions?”

Dr. Thatcher smiled gently. She was good at that — years of practice, he reasoned. “Because it wasn’t a delusion. She wanted it desperately, but I never felt she for a moment believed it possible. Other than that, she was one of the most psychologically sound candidates for gender reassignment I’ve ever counseled.”

Gary slid along the wall, idly stopping to tinker with the fronds of a fern. To straighten a de Kooning print, level to begin with. Gradually easing back to the chair.

“She had this dream of perfection. Once she was healed from the surgery, everything was going to be perfect. Kept saying, ‘We’ll be wonderful, everything’ll be perfect, as soon as I get my pussy everything’ll be perfect.’”

“That’s another thing, Gary. People like Lana often have an unattainable ideal of perfection. Just as an anorexic always sees herself as too heavy. Some transsexuals are never satisfied with the results, particularly with the male-to-female procedure. They can go through years of cosmetic operations trying to reach a pinnacle of femininity. That hope can be all that keeps them going.”

“What happens if the hope runs out?”

Thatcher flexed her fingers, rested composed hands atop her desk. “Sometimes they kill themselves then.” An uneasy pause. “Lana’s emotions wouldn’t necessarily have stabilized after the vaginoplasty. For her, perfection might’ve been one more operation away. Or another. Or the next. Your continued presence in her life would not have been her salvation … because it had no bearing on her self-image.”

Gary ran his hands through his hair until it stuck out in mad winglets. Maybe he could shave it off, buzz it to stubble, the rudely bared head a sign of penance. He was finding absolution tough to come by here. This was like a hydra. Hack off the head of one source of guilt and another two sprouted to take its place.

Dr. Thatcher shifted in her chair, seeming to sense his reluctant self-forgiveness. “Why don’t we go back, focus on the beginning of your relationship and see what it was founded on. You say you made no promises of permanence. How did you meet her?”

“I would’ve thought she’d told you that.”

“She did. I’m interested in seeing how you perceive it.”

Gary settled back, absently scratching at his chest, stomach. Itchy under his shirt. Maybe a rash, guilt surfacing as physical symptoms. His nipples ached. There, Dr. Thatcher, how’s that for traditional Freudian symbolism?

“I met her in a bar near the French Quarter, four months ago. A straight bar, not one of the places where the gay-bi-TV types usually hang out.” He wet his lips, felt drymouth coming on. “Hell, how does anybody meet in a bar? We made eye contact, started talking. I thought she was gorgeous. Sure, there was something different about her, something exotic, but I never would’ve guessed. Later I found out she’d been on estrogen for over a year, had her breasts and the smooth skin. Her voice seemed natural enough. She’d been living totally inside her female identity all that time. Already gotten rid of facial and body hair. How could I have known?”

Dr. Thatcher nodded. “She was extremely convincing.”

“We danced, and started fooling around. Pretty soon we went out back, into this alley doorway, and she … she performed oral sex on me.”

For no more reaction than Thatcher showed, he may as well have been describing a trick knee. “And did you initiate any reciprocal sexual contact?”

“I tried to. She said it was her period. We went our separate ways that night. But I went back the next night, same place, hoping she’d be there. And she was.” Gary smiled, bittersweet. “We got drunk, and she went back to my hotel with me. The sex was the same, though, she said it was still her period.”

“When did you find out the truth?”

“The next morning. We were taking a shower. See, she had this trick. She’d push each testicle up into her pelvic cavity, then stretch her cock back between her legs and sort of keep it wedged between the bottom of her ass muscles. We were in bed, naked … and I didn’t know.”

“Until the shower. The act of coming clean.”

“The shower.” Only now did he start to blush. “Lana said she had a secret to share with me, and she thought I was ready. She squatted down and it all sort of … popped out into place. I think she just wanted to see what I’d do.”

“And what did you do?”

“I gagged. Dry heaved.”

“And then?”

“And then…? I rinsed out my mouth, and … I blew her.”

Thatcher and her amazing clinical nod.

“It wasn’t like I was thinking of her as a man, even though she told me her name was legally Alan, still, and she just made an anagram of the letters. To me she wasn’t a man, she was … was…”

“A woman with a penis?”

“Exactly. I’d never had a gay experience before, and I still didn’t think I had. I mean … look. I’ve spent the last six years living off a trust fund I got when I turned twenty-one.”

He backtracked for several moments, describing his earlier life, so different from the path he was now on. Born to a family of Delaware real estate barons, where mother and father advocated a hands-off policy of parenting, turning over such domesticities to hired help, while advocating stoicism and scandal-free civility for the good of the family name. Prep school uniforms were de rigueur, and polite conformity the norm.

“Twenty-one years was enough. I saw too many kids I’d grown up with turn into neurotic assholes. Centers of the universe. They might end up in the highest tax bracket, but I just knew that none of them would really live. I wanted to do a one-eighty away from all that. So I’ve spent the last six years trying everything I felt like I missed out on while growing up. Even if it was bad for me. And I’ve taken a special delight in things I know my family would hate. So, this? Lana? It was just so intriguing, I couldn’t leave it alone.” Gary spread his hands. “I don’t mean this to sound callous, but I went into my relationship with Lana like another new experience. Mostly decadent, but at the same time there was something hallucinatory about it. Sometimes even soulful.”

“Is that why you wouldn’t make any promises of something more permanent?”

“It was a fantasy. Something forbidden. You can’t live a fantasy every day of your life — it loses power then.”

“What about love? Did you love her?”

The toughest question of all. The two souls/one flesh proposition. He wandered back to the window, forehead to glass.

“I suppose I did. Yes. Yes. I did love her.” He shook his head and sighed. Scratched that nagging itch. “That was the problem, wasn’t it? Somewhere along the way I think I got scared of what that was going to mean.”

And wasn’t it the great human irony? Most of mankind viewing monogamy as right and proper, yet so many going to such lengths to sneak around it, to exploit the loopholes. While those who condemned it from the outset eventually succumbed to jealousies and the need to bond … only to later betray.

We never learn, he thought. That’s the only constant.

*

Lana was interred a couple days later, ushered into the afterlife by a minister who looked more befuddled than grieving. The square pegs of the world were always more difficult to eulogize.

The turnout was small, scarcely a dozen paying last respects under a sky that couldn’t make up its mind between bright and overcast. The sun played masquerades with clouds, and the air was gravid with the damp of a southern spring.

Beneath his shirt, the itch still nagged. Heat rash, perhaps, unaccustomed to such brutal humidity. He’d probably have to see a doctor.

He knew at a glance they were Lana’s nighttime friends, a trio in gray and black who oversaw the sendoff with a melancholic brooding. Beneath overcoats worn against the unpredictably hostile sky, they were of indeterminate gender, caught somewhere between the poles of male and female.

While circumstances may not have been the norm, the emotions of grief were universal — that longing to connect with others who had shared the now-dead. Once the service was concluded and the mourners turned toward home, he approached them, and their gazes ranged from guarded to inimical.

“Oh, look,” said one of the trio. Long blond hair, full red mouth, mascaraed eyes; male origins betrayed by a squarish jaw. “I bet I know who this is.”

The tallest of the three nodded. Dark hair cropped close, sparse stubble on the jaw. The hands were delicate, though, this one traveling the opposite road of change. “You’re Gary, aren’t you?” The voice fell between alto and tenor, a vocal netherland.

He said that he was, and while there was little warmth, the introductions were civil. The blond was Alexis, the short-haired one Gabriel. The third of their group — small and pale, hostile eyes red from weeping — was Megan. Ringlets of brown hair fell into her blotchy face, and she pushed them back with incongruently large hands, veined and knotty.

“Let me guess,” said Gabriel, appearing less accusatory than analytical. “You’re feeling guilty because you dumped her, and you think that’s why she did it.”

Gary frowned. “How do you know what went on between us?” This was either scary insight, or an unerringly accurate guess. “Lana did it … immediately.”

Gabriel shrugged, stared at the dead sky. “I’ve seen it happen before.”

“I’m sorry,” Gary said, and hated how lame it sounded. “I never meant to hurt her.”

“No, of course not,” Megan said. “She didn’t have feelings, did she? Just a new kind of thrill, until the new wore off.”

Gary stared her down until she closed her angry mouth. “I didn’t come here for a debate.” Then, to all three: “I can’t say I was perfect, but I never intended anything like this to happen. I did care for her.”

Alexis nodded. “But you didn’t truly understand her world. Did you?”

“The best I could.”

“No.” Gabriel shook his head. “If you’d really wanted to, you would’ve already met us. We didn’t see much of Lana the past few months. Those belonged to you. She subjugated herself for you. All so you wouldn’t be hit with too much at once, and go running.”

Gary took a step back from the rawness of the implication, that he was ignorant of the real Lana, as opposed to the Lana she had chosen to reveal. He’d thought all along she simply preferred being alone with him.

“I should go,” he whispered, and took another step.

“Why not join us tonight?” Gabriel said. “At the Fringe. You know that much about Lana, don’t you? How much she liked that place?”

“I know of it.”

“Then join us, why don’t you? Have a drink to her memory with the people who knew her better than you did.” Gabriel looked distastefully about the cemetery, all spires and vaults and crumbled beauty. “I think you owe her that much.”

“At least,” he said softly, and thought for a moment, then told them he would be there.

*

He carried the stares of Lana’s friends throughout the rest of the afternoon and into evening along a gauntlet of French Quarter bars, smoothing down the roughest edges of remorse and responsibility.

Mardi Gras was over by two months, but revelers still choked the Quarter’s streets, furiously bent on good times. The South had always seemed so fundamentally more sensual than New England, its passions ignited by a crueler sun, and allowed to boil out and flow and cool like sweat. Here the food was rich and spicy, full of delicious venoms that the heart embraced. Here Dixieland rubbed amiable shoulders with punk. Here an empty glass was intolerable.

Gary had lied, of course; had no intention of meeting them at the Fringe. To promise otherwise was simply the best way to save face, avoid conflict, for he felt low enough as it was. Sitting there baring his head and soul for them to whack on would do no one any good. He’d get along better on his own, never prone to crumbling into tears and begging strangers to listen to his woes. Let the drinks settle inside, then, and glaze him over with silent brooding.

The French Quarter, and Rue Bourbon. Strip shows and jazz bands and karaoke. He watched from the shadows while slow numbness crept in, absently scratching his chest, fighting that persistent itch. It took deliberate effort to stop and realize just how long he’d been at it — enough to make it second nature.

He rubbed again, probing with tender fingers.

Swelling. There was swelling going on under his shirt.

Gary rose to tread the churning sea into a bathroom that may have last been clean back when Louis Armstrong played. He stood before the cracked mirror and parted his shirt—

—and stared at the two feminine nipples jutting from his chest. Protuberant and erect, their areolae as large as silver dollars.

His reflection, staring. Cracked in the middle, two jagged halves misaligned at their juncture.

“She was contagious,” he muttered in cold shock.

And quickly reconsidered this afternoon’s lie.

*

Through a spitting rain, he found it an hour later, twice stopping street locals to point him in the proper direction. The Fringe had been built in a renovated warehouse downriver from the French Quarter. Night seemed deeper here, the air ancient. Few would ever come here by mistake.

Although Lana had spoken of the Fringe several times, he’d never accompanied her here. He supposed that she alone had been enough to sate his curiosity about her kind, so until tonight he’d had no real need of this haven for gender-benders, and those who sought their company.

Within its dark and hallowed walls Gary found a world of alternatives: music, clothing, anatomy. A maze of multiple levels in architecture, as Lana had described, each was dimly lit and an enclave unto itself. There was supposed to be some sort of garden atop the roof, where ephemeral couples might retreat for whatever liaisons their bodies, lacerated or not, would allow.

Gary bought a bottle of wine at the main bar, weaved through the open center where dancers writhed beneath black light and strobes to music that sounded like the roar of an industrialized armageddon. The volume could peel skin.

Here he was groped endlessly and let it happen, reeling with an intoxicated pleasure in so many sliding hands, so much sensory delight despite the known world of his own flesh turning strange on him. Here, at least, pretensions were few, the common denominator belonging to rhythm and movement and surrender. The real effort lay in pulling back, pushing on, remembering why he was here.

He found them near the uppermost levels, Gabriel and Alexis and Megan tucked into a secluded booth. One noticed him, then all watched as he approached their table and slammed down the wine bottle.

“Finally.” Gabriel looked pleased.

“We’re mourning the way Lana would’ve wanted us to,” said Alexis, the blonde, tipping a highball toward a forest of bottles and glasses, hours’ worth of bereavement. “Sit, sit.”

He glared down at them while fumbling with his shirt buttons.

Megan perked up, brushed ringlets of hair from her face. “I so don’t want this asshole at our table.”

“Megan,” chided Alexis. “Don’t be a bitch.”

Gary sat beside Gabriel, tense as a coiled spring. He left his shirt unbuttoned but draped shut, feeling steam build inside.

“After what he put Lana through?” Megan went on. “Whose side are you on? Lana was fragile.”

Alexis reached across the table, intimately touching Gary’s arm. “Lana was like a … a goddess to our little family. She was the first to get the go-ahead for her final surgery.”

Megan wiped her eyes, smearing mascara. “It should’ve been me. But no, my therapist says I’m not stable enough.” She gulped her drink in desperation. “He’s not satisfied with my reasons for the change. He says I’m doing it because as a boy I was so threatened by the thought of wanting to make it with my mother.” Hysterical laughter. “Freudian quack.”

“Answer me one thing,” Gary said, low and electrified. He yanked open his shirt to bare his chest. “Just what the hell is happening to me?”

They stared at his nipples, in full extension, plumped as though ready to nurse. By now a pattern of four more pink-brown welts had erupted beneath them, down his ribs, like especially prominent mosquito bites.

Alexis smiled broadly, mischievously. “Isn’t that sweet. You empathized with Lana more than we gave you credit for.”

“This is some kind of joke to you?” Gary shouted. In that moment he wanted to hit Alexis, woman-in-the-making or not.

“It must’ve been love.” Gabriel leaned in to dart his once-feminine tongue onto a nipple. Unexpected pleasure trilled through Gary, horrifyingly intense. For a moment he wanted to feel it again, ever the hedonist.

He snapped his shirt closed, head aswim. “But I’m not the one who was taking hormones.”

“When two people love each other,” said Gabriel, “a little bit of each one stays inside the other. From you, Lana took a certain amount of independence, I think.”

“And this is what I got from her? Tits?” His laughter rivaled Megan’s in hysteria.

“It’s much more than that, Gary, surely you can feel that by now,” Gabriel said.

Gary peered down his torso and felt a rush of vertigo. With a clearer head maybe he could make sense of this, pinpoint some allergic reaction as the culprit. But a clearer head was at least a morning away.

“I don’t want this, I don’t understand…”

Gabriel propped his head atop a loose fist. “Do you know what the worst part of being us is? The very worst aspect?”

The question sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Try for an answer, any answer: “Your body is wrong, a prison…? What? Just tell me.”

“That’s it for me, all right,” Megan said.

Gabriel cocked his head. “Not quite.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” Megan shrieked, then stood and whirled on Gary. “I hope you know someday what it’s like to wake up every morning with something like tumors hanging between your legs! Because that’s what these are to me!” Clumsily, she hitched up the tight black dress she wore. Her genitals were framed within a garter belt and the tops of her stockings. “These are wrong! I don’t want them and nobody will help take them away from me!”

Alexis rolled her eyes. “I hate when you’re like this, girl. You’d think it was PMS.”

Gary watched, mortified, as Megan lowered herself enough to plop her genitals, flaccid from estrogen, onto the tabletop. Something new in her eyes, though, a drunken madness made worse by grief.

“Nobody cares,” Megan murmured, “I’m a joke and nobody cares,” then she seized Gary’s wine to smash the bottle against the table’s edge. She held the dripping, jagged remnant and for a moment it gleamed like surgical steel.

“Just a few little cuts, it’s no big deal,” she said.

Blood was drawn at the first firm stroke, Megan’s face twisting into an agonized mask of rapture and liberation. Alexis screeched and pushed herself away in the booth. Gabriel reacted with more sorrow than shock, shutting his eyes as Megan continued to saw.

New sights, sounds, tastes, sensations … damn them all. This was too much. Gary bolted to his feet and reeled from the booth. Fixed his eyes on the way he’d come up and lurched toward it. A moment later a firm hand gripped his elbow to steer him another way.

“Let me help you,” said Gabriel.

He tried to wrest free. “I just want out of here.”

Gabriel held firm. “And this way’s quicker, I promise.”

Gary struggled another moment, then saw the exit sign glowing where Gabriel pointed, and surrendered.

Gabriel hustled him through the gathering crowd, and when they burst through the exit, released his arm. Now on the roof, Gary recalled Lana’s talk of the garden. The fresh air hit him like smelling salts, thick and tainted with the watery brown scent of Mississippi mud. It drew him on, and he lurched past greenery, shrubs and bushes and small trees in planters. Within, shadows moved to the rhythms of breathy moans, and he saw them: face to face, head to lap, groin to buttocks.

Help. He needed help. Medical help.

Near the far edge of the roof, Gary collapsed, spent and shaking. He rolled onto his back, beginning to shed tears at the night sky while distant thunder rolled. The desultory rains were moving on, leaving gray and violet clouds in their wake, boiling past the face of the moon.

Gabriel knelt beside him, rested a comforting hand upon his traitorous chest. Beneath the hand, Gary’s skin throbbed. It wasn’t unpleasant, this rebellion, and part of him yet remained intrigued.

“Poor Gary.” Whispered, soft.

“What’s wrong with me?” Choking on tears.

Gabriel shook his head. “Megan — I’m sorry you had to see that. I was afraid she’d hurt herself someday. Things could never move fast enough for her.”

Gary shuddered.

“I never got to answer my own question. What the worst part of being us is. Can you guess?”

Again, that nudge of familiarity. Further this time, all the way to recollection. Lana had put to him the same question the night they’d met, before he had known the truth about her. The riddle had gone unanswered, soon forgotten.

“No,” he said, “I can’t.”

Gabriel looked fondly down at him, that androgynous face at once strong and tender. But calculating. “We can’t go all the way across, you know. We never will make it one hundred percent.”

His hand stroked Gary’s lap, popping the button of his slacks and drawing the zipper down. Massaged him, bared him, and, heaven help him, against all expectations he was growing erect.

“If you’re going man-to-woman the surgery’s pretty successful but the hormonal changes are lacking. If you’re moving the other way, like me? The hormone change is better, but not the surgery. They can build me something that looks like a cock … but it won’t much act like one.” Gabriel gave him a squeeze. “This spontaneous hard-on? It’s something I’ll never know. At least, their way.”

Gabriel began to peel away his own clothing and reveal his hybrid body. Still on his back, Gary saw moonlight glint off the shiny healing scars of a double mastectomy, amid sprouting hair. Lower, Gabriel’s last remaining femininity hid within a triangle of hair.

“You’ve known Lana’s half, now try my point of view,” Gabriel murmured, then straddled him, mounting firm.

Raped. The thought was murky, surreal. Am I being raped? His hips surged upward all the same. Tomorrow had always been soon enough for self-reproach.

“So the very worst part of being us?” Gabriel stared down, sheened in sweat. “We’re made, not born. We can’t procreate. But … I think maybe you can change that.”

This was more than coitus, Gary knew when he saw the others gather round to watch. This was tranquilizer. This was anesthesia. Bribery and reward and homage.

“A friend once told me that the South is a land of ghosts.” Gabriel’s breath was deepening with the rhythm, voice growing huskier. “I believe that. And I believe that New Orleans is a magic place. There are people here, they know things that others feel they have no business knowing at all. Maybe they’re right. But I don’t think so.”

When Gabriel stripped Gary’s shirt away, he saw the twin rows of nipples aligned down his torso. Erect and straining, like those of a sow lying before her farrow of piglets.

Gabriel bent low, placed his lips to one, and sucked.

Gary gasped, shaking his head yet unable to deny the river of warmth flowing inside, a glow he could label only as maternity.

“Lana looked for someone like you for a long time. I never saw her any happier than after she met you. Someone open-minded … eager for new experiences … who wanted to break with his past.” Gabriel touched a quieting finger to Gary’s lips when he started to speak. “But let your conscience off the hook. She didn’t kill herself over you. She did it for us.”

Once content to observe, the others now started forward.

“It was the one sacrifice she wanted to make, to thank the rest of us for making her feel like she belonged somewhere. It didn’t take long to make up her mind once she decided you were the one. Your leaving just … accelerated the schedule.”

Gabriel kissed him on the lips, then eased his weight back onto Gary’s hips again as the others closed in. Half-men, half-women, walking wonders of endocrines, scalpels, and implants, taking positions at the nipples, joining to him with suckling mouths. They were very gentle, did not bite.

“Lana was carnal … and she was spiritual … and maternal. Like any goddess should be.” Again, Gabriel shushed him, still grinding with muscled hips. “Making children is more than functioning body parts. It’s a thing of the spirit, too. Lana understood that more than anyone I know. And now she’s closer to you than she could ever have gotten with her body. Can’t you feel her inside yet?”

He searched hesitantly, tentatively. Thinking perhaps there was another light, another warmth, pulsing within.

“No matter what, though,” whispered Gabriel, “don’t ever think she didn’t love you. She did. She does.”

Of course she would. How could she ever have done this to someone she hated? What is love? Two souls and one flesh.

Gary writhed, caught in a hurricane of tears and love, revulsion and desire. Fighting would accomplish nothing. And he was so needed.

So he lay back in this roof-bound Eden, beneath the roiling sky, and let them nurse. Soon, more found their way to the roof to take their place in line. And within, and from within, the juices flowed — testosterone and estrogen, progesterone and androgen — a mother’s milk to nurture and nourish wonders greater still.

Gabriel cupped his cheek. “You are truly honored. You’ll be the madonna of an entirely new gender.”

Gary surrendered fully, pleasure and contentment swamping his last efforts at denial. He stretched his arms wide, satisfied that he and Lana would forever be as one, and reached to embrace their children.