The Beatrix Gates

by Pollack, Rachel;

  Here is another one. Osiris, gentle God of Egypt, inventor of beer, brother-sister of Isis (who Is and is, forever and ever), lover of sister Nepthys, the Goddess of alchemical mud, Osiris was also brother and brother-in-law of Set, a nasty piece of work if ever there was one. Jealous like Iago, Set chops his brother into fourteen pieces and hides them all over the world. Isis, never one to give up easily, searches up and down the old creation until she can reassemble her jigsaw puzzle husband. Only, there’s one part missing. A hungry fish has gulped down the penis and dropped down to the oozy black at the bottom of the Nile. So what’s a wife (and sister) to do? Isis creates the world’s first—everything in myth is first, that’s the point of myth—Isis creates the world’s first strap-on. With the help of a God named Thoth, inventor of writing, science, magic, and Everything Worth Knowing, this wooden cock crows Osiris back to life.

  This is what we mean when we say “sex change.” Ripped apart, cut to pieces, and put back together. You have to want it. All of it.

  And Thoth, the God of geeks—if the name sounds familiar, it should. You know the ibis nano-tattoo on the upper thigh that marks someone as a member of the Nanochine Society? You know how some nons talk about fucking a trannie as “entering the Palace of the Ibis”? That ibis is Thoth. The Egyptian scrolls depicted the God as a bird-headed techie writing on papyrus. Sometimes the old Gods don’t die, they just keep busy until humanity catches up with them. In the ancient world, Thoth revived the dead, he taught the secret sciences, he steered the boat of heaven through the sky and the dark underworld. Sound familiar? When the nannies launch their expeditions into your cells, it’s Thoth who guides them. When you pass through the nano Cloud of Unknowing, and you hear that distant flutter of wings, that’s Ibis-Thoth.

  Dismemberment. Trans (trance) formation. The desire to die is the desire to live. Cancer, the desire to live forever. It took a tranno terrorist street dancer to see it.

  As they say in the Society, let’s not beat around the burning bush (and if you can’t figure out a bush that burns without being consumed, well, honey, there may be no hope for you). The nons—the non-transsexuals—who first built the Factory wanted their nan-o-ma-chines to make them better, to cure their sicknesses and keep them young, and make everyone pretty, but not actually different. They didn’t want to stop being who they were, or thought they were, to become something seriously new. And they didn’t understand why their tiny machines seemed to come up against unexpected limits, why nothing really worked. That’s when the Society took shape, for the tranno Ghost Healers (as they called themselves) understood that these manufactured machines were not robots at all. They were the elementary particles of desire.

  A True Story of the Past

  As I write this I am 108 years old. I do this now because 108 is a special number, 1/240th of the Great Year, the time it takes for the constellations to make a complete rotation around the earth. But hey, who’s counting? Apparently, only us Ancient Ones, the refugees from the Old World who managed to sail across the Nano Sea into the land of forever. We came to consciousness in a different world, marked by life spans and decay, birthdays and fixed identities. My lover, Callisto, a bright singer in nano-paradiso, likes me to tell her stories of those days. She says it reminds her that everything, including the nannies who release us from form and limitation, all come from the dust of dead stars. So here is something that happened long ago, in the year 1972, Old Calendar.

  I was living in London back then, a baby pre-op (as we used to say in those days of scalpels and drugs), and my girlfriend and I held a trans central station open house on Tuesday nights. For a while a Japanese woman named Reiko was one of our regular visitors. Truth is, Reiko wasn’t really her name, I don’t remember her name, it was so long ago. Reiko is the name of a friend of mine who gave me permission to transplant her name into my memory.

  Truth is, Reiko wasn’t really a woman, at least not by the rigid standards of 1972. She was a Japanese businessman assigned to a dreary job in a London office. But when she came to us, she was beautiful. And I don’t mean just in our sympathetic, loving trannie eyes. I don’t know what Reiko looked like as a man, but as a woman she was tall, austere, and stunning, even by the rigid standards of 1972.

  One evening she left her drab businessman body at home and stepped out as Reiko. I imagine her walking in Mayfair, or Bond Street, both graceful and nervous, her movements more elated with every step. At a certain point she stopped before a store window, maybe to look at a sapphire necklace or something as simple as a purple shawl. She was standing there when she heard people talking in Japanese about a beautiful woman. They were admiring the woman’s dress, her hair, her bearing. Quietly, Reiko glanced around to see who it was, and discovered that there was no one else, they were talking about her. What they said thrilled her, except—they were speaking in her own language. They were standing a few feet away from her and talking about her as if they could not imagine she would understand a word they were saying. Suddenly she realized. They did not know she was Japanese.

  She was tall, taller than most Japanese men, in her high heels impossibly tall for a Japanese woman. Or maybe they saw she was trans, and while they admired the style and performance they could not imagine that a Japanese man, whether executive or salaryman, would ever do such a thing. Standing before that shop window, bathed in the thrill of her true self, Reiko had lost her nationality, her language. She’d become an exile from a people who could not comprehend the possibility of her existence.

  A True Story of the Future

  Callisto saw her first High Trans when she was young enough that she’d just undergone her third round of nano-vaccination. Five or six, I would guess. She herself just shrugs her soft wide shoulders like pillars of air and says she doesn’t remember her age. Oh, but she remembers every detail of that first glimpse of the Living World.

  From Callisto’s description it must have been Katrina Harp, one of the five original Ghost Healers who founded the Nanochine Society. She remembers that the woman—man—creature—floated a little off the ground. Probably what she was seeing were the visible traces of the nano cloud that swirls all about a High T. Callisto had been out walking with her mother, who may or may not have suspected that her sweet boy was infected with the Germ of Becoming, as someone once called whatever it is that makes us trans. If Mom did know, she probably suppressed the thought—even now, mothers still want to believe their children are normal—but she must have worried about something because she tried to keep little C. from looking. No chance. That five-year-old probably would have wrestled Mom to the ground if it was the only way to view that wondrous sight.

  Harp, if that in fact is who she saw, was very tall, with gentle breasts and hips softened by a sheen of water that flowed up and down her body. Her long hair moved constantly, changing not just color but form, sometimes a stream of bright particles, sometimes waves of light. She was wearing a ragged dress of many colors, probably nano-silk, while up and down the arms long wavery strands of light emerged directly from her nearly black skin. And there was writing on her. Words and symbols in unknown alphabets, diagrams and drawings, they were written directly on her skin in yellow, blue, and lavender. She looked, Callisto said, like a treasure map to another universe. Which, of course, is what she was.

  Harp bent down to face her. She was so tall, Callisto said, her knees looked like mountains, her face like the sun rising between them. “Don’t be afraid,” Harp said. “You and I, we dream the world.”

  “No,” Callisto’s mother said, but without much conviction. But when Harp opened her mouth to breathe on the child, and Mom saw the famous perfumed cloud, she grabbed her darling boy-child and ran off down the street as fast as she could wobble with a five-year-old pressed to her chest and belly.

  “Poor Mommy,” Callisto said to me once, as she rolled herself tighter into my arms. “I was struggling so hard to get down, or just to see, I’m surprised we didn’t both collapse in the street.”
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br />   “She should have let you,” I said. “She was only delaying what had to happen.”

  “But she didn’t know that, did she? She was just trying to protect me.”

  “You? Or herself?”

  She shrugged, and the way we fit together it shivered sweetly through my body. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe in her mind they were the same.”

  Two days later Callisto was missing. Her parents ran up and down the streets, with her father convinced that “that creature” had kidnapped their child. It was laughable, really. If Harp had wanted the child, she could have just sent a government team to adopt her. But why? We don’t recruit. If you’re not born a T cell in the body of God no nano sex change will make a difference. And it’s not as if we’re dying out. The fact is, many parents, either poor or just ambitious, dress their children in whatever they think looks trans in hopes they can propel the kid into the ranks of the people who rule their world. We send them home.

  Callisto’s parents finally found their baby at the edge of a river that ran past the housing complex a couple of miles from Callisto’s home. Callisto had stolen one of her sister’s dresses, a ruffly thing in white, and used the baby pocket knife Daddy had given her (she still has it, sometimes wears it on a gold chain around her neck) to slash it into tatters. She’d taken one of Mom’s scarves as well, and cut streamers from it to tie on her arms and legs, and with a couple of crayons had written meaningless signs and pretend formulas in some imaginary language up and down her body.

  She didn’t hear her parents at first. She was staring at the water, imagining the river was her, and she was swept away, formless and bright, into an ocean of mystery at the end of the world.

  Her mother screamed and ran up to grab her, though I’m sure she knew it was too late, it had always been too late. Callisto turned and spoke calmly, but not in any human language. “It was all squeaks and clicks,” she said to me. “I didn’t really have any idea what it was supposed to mean. I just thought it was what I’d seen written on her body.”

  Her mother started crying, but her father, a man of action, hit her across the face. Hearing this, I let my Old World instincts take over, and I assumed her father was “queerphobic,” or whatever quaint term we used before genuine civilization came into the world. But no. He was a man of his time, after all. What he yelled was “You think you’re better than us? Gonna leave us behind and laugh at us? Gonna become one of them? You think creatures like that, with all their money and their nanomachine factories, you think they care about people like us?”

  Callisto ran away five times growing up. It wasn’t to escape her parents. After that first time they were more than a little afraid of her, and not very likely to harm her. And if they tried she had learned from a trans boy in school that she could report them to the Transgeneration Child Protection Agency. No, my little Callisto wasn’t really running away. She was looking for people with writing on their bodies.

  Over the years she found a few, including a lover, Hermes Tree, whose penis was so cleverly inscribed it displayed Orphic love poetry when collapsed, but when it opened up those same markings became part of detailed alchemical diagrams, what Hermes Tree called “the nano codes of creation.” But she never found Harp again. Truth is, no one has seen Harp for thirty years. People claim to have sensed her, to feel her all around them, but her body seems to have freed itself from a fixed reality altogether.

  When Callisto first transformed she spent the entire seclusion time after the insertion talking to her nannies in that same made-up language in which she’d answered her mother years before. She’d decided not to write it out on the surface. It was only for her and “the children,” as she called the microscopic tribe that created her and still lives inside her. But sometimes, when we make love, I can see the messages come awake under her skin, I can hear the nannies in her blood whistling and clicking to each other.

  Sometimes afterwards, as our dissolved bodies come back together, Callisto will ask me for a story. “Tell me of the Old World,” she said to me once. “Tell me how it changed, what it felt like.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but I won’t do it directly. Let me make a fairy tale out of it.”

  “Ah,” she said, and smiled up at me with a face bright shining as the Sun.

  The Beatrix Gates

  Once upon a time there was a girl named Kara, who lived in the Tribe of Red. Red people only ate food of that color, just as the Tribe of Green only ate green food. People were just made that way. Their bodies were different, their skins varied shades of their tribe, their hands and faces different, their inner organs even formed differently. The good thing was that the Reds desired exactly their own kind of food and the Greens desired theirs. They lived in different parts of town, with Green or Red restaurants and shops, and everyone was happy.

  Except for Kara. From as early as she could remember she wanted to eat green food. And more, she wanted to wear Green-styled clothes, which were not all green, but shared certain styles and shapes and fabrics, and were cut to fit green bodies. Sometimes she worried that she wanted to leave her tribe altogether and become a Green. But that was impossible. God clearly had made her Red, and that was who she was. Yet—sometimes—if she was really honest with herself, if she felt deep inside to what was true, she didn’t just want to be a Green, she believed, insanely, that she actually was.

  It made no sense. She was not stupid or crazy, she could see herself in the mirror, a normal Red. Greens had a ridge over the eyebrows, lines on the sides of the neck, long fingers, a separated upper lip. Kara had none of that. She hated her flat forehead, her stubby fingers, but she knew they were there. But if she closed her eyes, and stood in the center of her bedroom, and said, “I am Kara, of the Tribe of Green,” then her body opened up, and all her cells smiled. If she tried to take herself firmly in hand, and say “Don’t be ridiculous. You know you’re Red, you just need to grow up and accept it,” her skin tightened, and her cells shrank in on themselves, and her lungs wept and refused to take in any more air.

  As a teenager, the desire for everything Green, but especially Green food, became overwhelming. When she couldn’t stand it, she would go behind a Green restaurant or grocery and look for scraps of thrown away food that she ate so fast she came close to choking. This was dangerous, for if someone discovered her she would be arrested and ridiculed, maybe even beaten or put in a mental hospital. And even though it felt so good while she did it, afterwards she would lie in bed, hugging her shame and silently crying with the light off, lest her mother come ask what was wrong. Her mother loved her and wanted the best for her, but the best would mean some kind of treatment to make her normal. How her father would react she didn’t want to think about.

  Much more satisfying were the rare moments she could disguise herself as a Green and go out in the world, maybe even buy a meal in a Green fast food restaurant, one without a long line where people might have time to examine her closely. It wasn’t easy. She needed to buy—or steal—Green clothing, along with devices and makeup to change the shape of her body. Even more difficult was finding a place to put it all on. Greens and Red did mix in certain places, such as theaters or large department stores, but it was very dangerous to walk into a ladies’ room as a Red and emerge as a Green. If she were caught, they’d lock her up as a dangerous pervert.

  Could she really eat green food, or was she just fooling herself? It didn’t make her throw up as every Red had always said it would (a girl at school had said, “If I even think of green food I get nauseous,” and everyone agreed, even Kara, so no one would suspect her). But her body couldn’t really digest it. When she was a child she would pray every night to the Red God to let her go, and the Green God to change her so she could eat her “real” food, as she thought of it. Every morning, when she woke up and examined herself and discovered she was still Red, with Red clothes in the closet, and a Red mother who set out a bowl of berries for her, and a Red father who crunched red cereal in his thick red
teeth, she prayed silently, “If you won’t change me, kill me. Please kill me.” As she got older she stopped the prayers but not the desire to die.

  One day a new teacher, a Red of course, came to teach science in Kara’s high school. He looked like everyone else but there was an air about him, a kind of secret delight. Kara had to control herself from staring and staring. Finally, she deliberately messed up an exam so she could request a meeting to discuss her grade.

  As soon as she was in the deserted classroom with him she closed the door, strode up to stand over him at his desk, and said, “You did it. You changed.”

  He got up to walk past her to open the door. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  She closed the door again. “You crossed over.”

  “Stop that,” he said, and once more opened the door. “You want me to lose my job?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and then softly, “but I have to know how you did it. You were a Green and now you’re a Red. Please.”

  He tried to summon up a denial, to mold his face into a what-are-you-crazy, but it fell apart in a burst of compassion. Instead he just looked at her, and with a sigh he walked over and shut the door.

  He knew what she wanted, he told her. He’d known from the first day he’d seen her, and dreaded this moment, for it was a hard life, and even though it had its own beauty, no one could understand it. The best you could hope for was that you change and no one ever know. Worst of all, he said, was that it really wasn’t anything you could choose. The desire, the need, was so strong it was like … He frowned.

  Kara said, “Like being whipped by God.”