The Lost Daughter Collective

by Lindsey Drager

  That he looked for others who shared his story in the Archive of Narrative. That he sought out every brand of storyteller and every genre of tale—the true and the not, the ethereal and the concrete, the particular and the universal—in order to learn if his narrative was shared. That he had never experienced such visceral loneliness as the realization that these narratives were so few.

  That to wrap the tongue around the he was perhaps the hardest part. That this was hardest because it meant revising the architecture of the father mind, recasting a then-familiar body into another role. It meant abandoning a certain kind of logic in search of a healthier one. In the end, it required a gentle and strategic recalibration to understand and recognize that a square is not a circle, nor a circle a square, but that—if you care to look hard enough—they are not in opposition. Rather, both live on the same plane of shape.

  That his son requested he place a coin in the word jar not when he swore, but when he said she or her. That he practiced, in all kinds of glass—both in public and wherever he faced it at home. That he watched his reflection tell him over again for months, “I am the father of a son.” That at first it felt like a splitting and then a failed suturing, but he knew it had to be done. For if it did not start with the father, where would it begin?

  That Peter’s union with the child’s mother dissolved when she would not accept their child’s Shift. That it started with lengthier eras of absence until he found her away for days. That when he asked her about her distance, her mouth and mind stayed fused shut.

  That when finally she left for real and always, she asked why the child was doing this to her. Try, he would tell her. I she would say back, over and over: Me. That in the end, she believed the Shift was not their child’s personal, local desire, but an external gesture of malevolence.

  That in the beginning Peter, too, thought about himself—that perhaps he was at fault, had somehow launched through his own body’s chemistry the internal events that caused his child’s Body-Spirit Synthesis Disorder. That he could not let go of the idea that he’d done something wrong in that twilight world of two-human union. That in the end this assumption placed at the center of the situation not the child but himself.

  That the allegory of the ice girl and her father without risks serves to inform us that parents who choose not to explain the world to their children are dangerous.

  That the moral of his own narrative serves to inform us that parents who choose not to listen to their children explaining the world to them are more dangerous still.

  That there was only one way to safely escape the complex web he faced, and that was this: sanction and implement his own daughter-loss to welcome, in her place, his son.

  THERE ARE SOME STORIES that linger on the periphery of the mind. There are some stories that make the nature of telling a complicated web of deceit, for while stories told over and over become reduced and calcified, they are also misheard and sometimes confused with other tales. And sometimes the tales are purposefully manipulated such that the dark parts that might induce heavy feelings go untold.

  Why did the people of once long ago not tell stories aloud? Why did they tell them to The Page? their daughters would ask, usually in autumn, for autumn is the season of girls.

  The fathers would look at their girls with a jealous kind of longing, admiring their desire to know. The Page was the conduit for distributing story. It was the way a single tale could be accessed by several thinkers in different places all at once. One could train The Page to do what one needed it to do. For example, it could make one cry.

  But if it was just a bit of paper, a layer of dangerous tree lace with symbols, how did this occur?

  An excellent question, the fathers would say, and gently pinch their chins. The symbols held a certain kind of power that could make one forget. This was how The Page would trick one into believing certain events had actually come to pass.

  Just as the fathers began to think of other things, the girls would ask: How does the ice girl’s story end?

  The fathers would look directly into their eyes. The fathers would recall the first time they held their daughters, and they would think of how the daughter body releases the soft smell of heat. The end can’t be revealed until you’re older.

  The daughters would not object. Because the fathers told them when they were very young that time is a factory and age the product of the factory’s toil. So the daughters knew as small children that wishing to grow up swiftly was a venture as senseless as hoping for a weatherless day.

  The girls would reach for their fathers’ hands, thinking silently that they were glad they were born after The Touch Wars.

  VIRGINIA AND HER FATHER

  EVERY STORY IS PURSUED by its own end. As in life, the characters do not know their fate. But the narrator knows how the story will end from the moment she begins.

  Virginia was born in the shadow of her sister, whom she loved very much. They were close in a way only sisters who have endured sorrow can be. Their mother had died of a then-common disease of the chest flesh that often afflicted women. The night they lost their mother, Virginia and her sister walked to the wood, lit a thick candle, and promised that they would stay forever bound. As everyone knows, women who experience certain kinds of horror and harm overcome it by suturing their lives together.

  In those first years without their mother, Virginia’s sister decided she was meant to be a performer. Virginia walked with her to rehearsals in the city and sat at the back of the theatre, where she had the whole performance to herself. She watched her sibling portray other women, and while she recognized that the form in front of her was her sister, she also knew it was, by some kink in the plane of logic, not. From the plush seats, her hands growing damp from anticipation in the moment before her sister stepped from behind the curtain and into sight, Virginia found herself falling for the trick. She felt she loved not just her sister, but also each and every woman that her sister captured and performed. She felt it in the core of her bones and the channels of her blood, the places where her mother had said true feeling is born.

  While Virginia admired her sister’s chosen field, she herself preferred the careful folding of paper. She had always found the properties of paper captivating because of its role as both artifact and conduit. Because her mother had studied this craft, too, she used her mother’s work as a guide, unfolding each creation to examine the ways the paper pleated and caved. She started with still figures: a rock, a pond, a tree. Then she moved on to more intricate scenes—a field with an abandoned bathtub, a row of empty and disheveled beds lying on a basement floor—and finally to full narratives. She would fold a story and present it to her father, and each time he read her paper stories, he would nod in gratitude, then gently kiss the top of her head. For through this artifice Virginia was resurrecting for him the woman they’d both lost.

  Virginia’s sister grew to be such a fine actress that she left to pursue her art in the region’s largest cities. Virginia stayed at home, and at night she would think of the myriad of women her sister was embodying, a myriad of women her sister was not. At first she believed it was because she so desperately missed her sister and wanted to find sisterhood through them. But she thought of them in ways that were more secretive than kinship. And as the other youth in the city began to speak of that mysterious attraction we deem love, she decided this was the abstract allure she felt.

  Because daughterhood requires long periods of being alone, Virginia often visited the river to conduct her folding. On one such day, she came upon a pair of women who were tangled together on the grass. At first she thought they were fighting, but when she moved around the trees to chance a better view, she came to understand that they were kissing. While she realized this was something ambiguous and intangible, something she could not fully unpack, she also realized the tingling in her bones and blood that said one day she would lie with a woman, too. It was something far less than desire but more than mere interest; it was something
akin to appeal.

  Soon Virginia found her room was full of the story of women loving each other, paper narratives told in the dialect of girl. In this way, her room became a stage, and on it, her imagination was given permission to be made real.

  On the eve of her twelfth birthday, her father knocked on her door. Detecting no response, he entered but found the room empty of daughter, full only of the sound of paper speaking in the breeze. He looked around, first in adoration and then in an effort to relive the days when his wife would fold him stories. But as he consumed Virginia’s narrative, knowledge slowly percolated in his mind. He read and reread; he read in all directions. He was a careful reader of folded stories, having learned the craft from his late wife. And this is how his daughter’s message was made clear.

  Virginia came home that evening balancing several reams of paper. As she entered the house, she saw in her father’s eyes a kind of fear and defeat that told her to put the reams down.

  You thirst for girls, he said. And she looked into his eyes and smiled, for there it was—it had been said aloud—and she felt unsheathed, as though an invisible robe that had been holding her arms across her chest was unfastened and, after a lifetime without them, she could finally use her hands.

  She told him then that it was true and not to worry, for love between women is the safest kind. But her father did not understand. How would she carry on a family? How would she create children within her frame?

  Virginia told her father then that not all families contain children. She had no intention of ever mothering, for, as she had recently been thinking, she was not sure what children were. Were they the way a person ensured something was left crawling and creeping on earth’s soil when she was buried? Were they the shadowy apparitions of all the people of her lineage? Were they a kind of self-centered pleasure or a kind of self-induced pain? Put less simply, were children the rubric or the body of work?

  Virginia was still awake hours later, when her father returned from a long walk around the village. He was quiet for a long while, and Virginia listened, wondering if a daughter chose to be one, or was sentenced upon birth. Daughterhood is a vocation concerned with following carefully prescribed rules, avoiding endangerment, evading threat; being a daughter means mastering the art of defense. The wonder, then, is what would happen to a daughter who rebelled.

  What Virginia did not know then but would soon learn is this: anything could happen when daughterhood ceased to be a protected occupation.

  Virginia crept from her room.

  It had taken him several drafts, but there it lay; the story of what was to become of Virginia, written in a missive to her sister. She read it with a kind of horror and confusion, a kind of disgusted awe. For her mother had taught her that love was rare and when it surfaced, it should be invited very gently into one’s life. Love, her mother had said, was like the thinnest paper; easily torn but capable of the largest number of folds.

  Before she left, she placed two folded words upon her bedroom door. For You, a dedication for the paper story her room told. For a room is like a book, in that it is a private province. A room is like a book in that it is most charged with possibility when it is entered alone.

  When Virginia’s sister would go on stage to perform the women she was not, she imagined Virginia might be out there in the audience. She hoped that if she were, Virginia would see in her movements that freedom is not a state but a dwelling, a room one of one’s own. And when her sister found a narrative couched between the covers of a book written by Anonymous, she read Virginia in the margins of the story—she read what was left unsaid.

  From the stage, an audience looks like a single being that moves uniformly in laughter or through tears, taken aback or pulled in. The players on stage are a cast of apparitions who mimic and mirror the failures and follies of the many-mouthed beast. Virginia’s sister would think this as she took her place in the dark of backstage for her curtain call. As the curtains rose and the lights shone, she would lift her lips into that faux, required smile and the audience would howl and clap and stand. And there, toward the back, would be always her father. He would stop clapping then and leave before being seen, as he was now estranged to both of his daughters. But it was in these moments he came to understand the first rule of narrative: if you break it down and apart, in the end, every story is about a woman and her machine.

  AT SUNDOWN THE MEN recite their mantra twice and listen to a fresh pot of coffee brewing. The sun goes down over the city, swelling the closer it gets to the horizon, which they watch from the massive windows on the west side of the thirty-third floor of the abandoned umbrella factory.

  The evening ritual involves silent reflection on the events of the day she became lost. In one of the first years, they had gone around the circle to tell the whole story, but this was a grave mistake. The first to go—Barber—had barely finished his tale when several members broke down. Butcher kept repeating that he could not do it, and by the time it was Woodsman and then Smith’s turn, they realized the horror of the thing they had done; they had mandated a reliving. And because the men were vehement in rules regarding uniformity, their act now required every man in the group to tell his tale. The subsequent meeting made it clear that this event was the closest to catastrophe the group had ever been. Moving forward, the Daughter’s Day procedure would adopt silence after the sun went down to commemorate her life, not her loss.

  As hours pass and the day reduces, they grow increasingly anxious that Peter may not come. It is crawling toward night and the men are full of coffee and regret.

  As the silence hovers in the room, the men think of the last few conversations they had with their daughters. How those conversations had been populated with questions about the veracity of story.

  I know the story is not real, but Father, the girls said, is the story true? The story of the ice girl and her father without whisks?

  Risks, the fathers would say, her father without risks. And yes, for all stories that feel dimensionless are true. All stories that are amplified infinitely are true, and it is at the very center of the tale where lies The Truth.

  But now, on the thirty-third floor of the umbrella factory at the end of Daughter’s Day, the men think their reply was fallacious. Now, as they watch the sun sink behind the cityscape, they think this: the story of the ice girl and her father without risks cannot be true, because risks are everywhere, always, living at the break of day, at the moment before the body decides to wake.

  But more to the point, the story is not true, the men think, watching the sun turn the city into an open wound, because stories that feel dimensionless and that are infinitely amplified are neither fact nor fiction, but tucked firmly in the fissure between. These stories live neither in the Lands of Never nor the Land of Now. These stories live in the Region of Perhaps.

  WHAT PETER THINKS BUT cannot come to say:

  That he thinks of his son’s birth as a series of vignettes: cropped hair, skinned knees, bad words.

  That he thinks of his daughter as spectral.

  That the period between son and daughterhood was marked by tumultuous events: regular visits to the Thought Doctor to diagnose him with Body-Spirit Synthesis Disorder; quarterly visits to the Corporeal Fluid Authorities to get permission for male serum; three visits to the Governing Order to legally change the child’s name; too-often visits from the Law Keepers, the collateral damage of a childhood characterized by the urgency to amend.

  That time became an obstacle: get his name changed before schooling, get his body fluid levels right before multiversity, get him through another Child-to-Adult Change before the first is done.

  That he cannot remember how many times he asked his child, Are you sure? That he knows now each time he asked it, the question hurt his son.

  That he cringed when they called his child disordered—that it was required to move forward with the Shift, but that he prefers to think of his child as exercising Body-Spirit creativity.

  That
there were years of visiting Thought Doctors in an effort to get him diagnosed. That his child disdained such visits because they made the child lay bare his every thought in order to secure permission for the medical aspects of the Shift. That in the end, they decided that the child’s desires were “valid.” That in the end they told him that his child’s desires were “real.”

  That they had to discuss two-human union far earlier than he would have ever thought because it affected the decision to give him scheduled shots of male serum. That they had to discuss the possibility of his child bearing children, should events unfold unconventionally.

  That all the Corporeal Fluid Authorities could offer as they reviewed the risks was may cause and could lead to and possibly induce. That the Corporeal Fluid Authorities consistently told them society needed more trustworthy research to be sure of the long-term effects.