The Lost Daughter Collective

by Lindsey Drager

  That in those moments, Peter could think only that his story must not be unique, and if he could swing his story from the margins of society to the center, perhaps his son would not have to deal with such serious uncertainty.

  That despite the risks, they moved forward because they could comprehend no another way. That this uncertainty now haunts them quietly, privately.

  That his child never truly had a childhood because it was riddled with efforts to maneuver who he’d be as an adult. That on the way home from the regular trips to the Thought Doctors, the child would talk about the future as an abstract ever-after and the present as a means toward getting there.

  That he worries for his child’s safety and security every day, worries about reactions from those with closed minds. How the horror of violence hovers above the hours they spend apart and ceases only when his child walks through his door.

  That he knows his son endures forms of prejudgment, but that his son has learned to carefully disregard this. When he thinks of his son at night, as he is falling asleep, his thoughts toggle between pride and protection.

  That if he had not interceded—financially, emotionally—the risks would hang heavy in his mind: abuse of substances, introduction of viruses, living without a home, or even end-of-life self-initiation. Conscious of the ways he did not let events unfold, he is thankful for each morning his son hugs him.

  That to be born with and abide by Body-Spirit Synthesis is a privilege. That if this is you, you are lucky. That if this is you, you are blessed.

  That one day in the future, his story will be languaged and dispersed because children whose spirits desire a Body Shift will be as commonplace and ubiquitous as the fact that men rule the domestic and women leave home to work.

  That it is time to speak what Peter thinks but so far has not come to say.

  That because we have so few stories about such children in the Archive of Narrative, Peter will tell his.

  IT IS NIGHT AND the men are preparing to gather their coats. Just as they are rising to fold their chairs, they hear a knock. Woodsman turns toward the room’s door but Smith grabs his arm. We left the door open, he says, and Woodsman replies, I know. With the knock on the door, the fact is made clear: to enter, Peter is asking permission.

  Woodsman greets him with a nod and a cup of coffee. Peter takes the cup and holds it with two hands, then raises it to his lips for a cautious sip. He sits at the head of the circle and meets the gaze of every other man. Then he nods his head and begins.

  EVERY DAUGHTER WAS ONCE a girl, except his.

  It started with shadow. The child Peter then called she would watch it for hours, casting her form on the ground. Something about it was wrong. She used to tell him it wasn’t hers and a cold chill would run down his spine. She would say it wasn’t hers and then point to the place where her form ended and her shadow began. See the gap? she would say. It is not connected. This one isn’t mine.

  This was when she was two. And this is how he came to know that two is the beginning of the end.

  The Lands of Never are not some mythic district; they are the places you think you will not ever be. But he found himself there, in the Lands of Never, when he inserted the needle into her thigh that introduced to her body the serum that would make her male, and held her hand after the surgery to remove her breasts. When he saw hair growing on the chin of what he still thought of as his daughter. When the voice dropped to a baritone and his child started smiling again.

  So imagine girls with ribbons, dolls, and bracelets; building blocks and dirty nails and mussed bangs. And then imagine his: his, who could not look in a mirror, who never slept. His, who was so disgusted by the sight of herself naked that in the middle of her fourth year she stopped bathing.

  What changed his mind was the day she looked up at him and held up a handful of hair. My hair, it’s falling out, she said, and it was; it was falling out at a frightening rate. Later they told him it was because of stress. Does this mean it’s time? She was so full to the brim with promise. Time for what? her father asked. My real body. The body I’m supposed to have. I must be shedding this one so the real one can come through.

  Peter started the FOLD to grow free of his daughter. Because he had a daughter once, too. And while he is now the happy father of a healthy son, he still thinks about the past.

  This is how he is the father of a daughter who he never saw grow up. He is the father of a daughter who is lost. But his loss is different, and he knows there are others who understand her particular brand of gone. That is how the FOLD started, and that is how he will start another group for the Parents of Once-Daughters-Now-Sons.

  FATHERHOOD IS AN INDUSTRY and a daughter is a beach. But what binds them is cycle and scope. You can put the contracts in your briefcase—you can put the shells in your pocket—but you can’t bring home the business or the shore.

  Peter’s full story takes hours to tell, and when it is finally done, the men sit in comfortable silence. Throughout they have been reading each other’s bodies, and this is how they know that Peter is at once already gone and will never leave.

  They sit suspended for what feels like ages and it becomes a kind of enchantment, this quiet. That the hours pass but the men register only minutes speaks to the slippery something that we call time, which elongates or contracts accordingly. For time is a device founded within the site of the mind. While many have spent whole lives trying to interrogate this invention, what we know without question is this: time was born to allow us to tell our tales.

  And as the Fathers of Lost Daughters sit in this ebbing temporal site, morning breaches the cityscape and begins to slowly fill the thirty-third floor of the abandoned umbrella factory. It first breaks in a bright beam nearest the window and then stretches lazily over the circle of men, reaching the bottom apex of the circle and then

  growing north; at first it touches Miller and Smith, then Wainwright and Woodsman. Angler and Butcher are next, then Barber and finally, at the peak, Peter himself.

  It is after the sun has risen and the men realize they have made it through another Daughter’s Day that Barber decides to speak up.

  Do you know that cautionary tale about the ice girl and her father without risks? Barber asks.

  Yes, that story—I would tell her every night. She wanted to hear it all the time, Butcher says.

  Smith chuckles to himself. It’s funny, he says. I never wanted to tell her the end because it was so cruel. You know how folklore can be so ugly—I wanted to spare her, Smith says, and looks up into the rafters of the room. But I spent so many years leaving off the end that I can’t myself remember how it goes.

  I remember, says Angler, grabbing Wainwright’s hand.

  So do I, says Woodsman, and Barber nods.

  I told her I would tell her when she was older, Miller says, seemingly to himself, and Butcher nods, while the other men join in with a chorus of me toos.

  Would you tell it now? Smith asks. Please?

  BECAUSE ICE CONTESTS LOGIC, it only follows that the ice girl would transgress. The ice girl placed her work on display and many people came to view it. This is how the ice girl exhibited her fears. And when her father arrived, prepared to bear witness, he always missed that which she aimed to display, as she had committed herself to a medium that, with time, is lost. This is how, even when she began to speak again after her fifth year, she found herself still mute.

  In the exhibit that would come to be deemed her last, the ice girl chose a new medium, shifting from an ice girl to a woman of glass. Her father would not miss her final show. As the Laws of Climate tell us, glass is solid when its temperature is equal to that of a room.

  And this is how, when he entered the exhibit in the typical manner—late—the father without risks did not see a floor wet with the past, but rather stood witness to her work. The work was this: massive teeth living in half of an oval, opening at the exhibit entrance so that spectators stood in the place where a tongue might rest.

&
nbsp; The father’s entrance into the work struck him like a blow and he was overcome with emotion. To perceive these transparent masses in their grandeur was enough to resurrect a series of images he never knew, images of his daughter’s early projects, of the woman the ice girl never called mother in her final, ugly days. And he thought then of his daughter at age ten and fourteen, at age twenty, sitting alone, the crowd gone, watching the heat devour her work, watching the body of ice she had so carefully managed come under the control of another force, that frightening mechanism called time. For years the father had thought that his daughter’s artwork was mere play, but he understood in that moment that what she was doing was everything play is not.

  This revelation launched the desire to see her. But when he searched through the exhibition, his daughter could not be found. For she had nestled herself into the tiny back room of the grandiose gallery and, practicing poise, posed herself between two cement blocks among the closet’s collection of display ephemera. Then she began to slip fragments of jagged glass across that abstract plane where arm and hand meet.

  The shocked cries of those who found her matched perfectly the stunned noise of those who entered the gallery to stand witness to her latest work. The rooms lived on opposite ends of the building, and so the response permeated the space, reverberating off the walls and saturating the confines of the exhibit. Though in reply to two radically different events, the sound was the same: it was the sound of thwarted expectation.

  And so the story of the ice girl and her father without risks lacks a transparent, singular lesson, because its lesson is at once amplified and fractured, like a shattered mirror.

  But because we are human beings and therefore exercise a longing to translate experience to knowledge that can be passed on, the story might be reduced to this: the opposite of play is not that which is serious, but that which is real.

  BEFORE HE LEAVES, THE men ask Peter his surname. Peter tells them, shakes each man’s hand, and then walks out the door.

  The fathers adjourn the meeting with their mantra. It is as they are saying it together that they realize the first line no longer holds.

  Every woman was once a girl

  and every girl was once a daughter

  For every woman in the world,

  there will always be laughter in slaughter.

  The men rise and their chairs make a scraping sound on the floor. They grab their coats and bags, begin to prepare themselves to head toward home. On the way out the door, Butcher says, Ryder, huh. After all these years. His last name was Ryder.

  No, Barber says, he said Righter. Righter, or that which is not wrong.

  I heard Writer, Angler says, miming a pen and using his palm as a tablet.

  That old, archaic vocation? Wainwright says, slipping his arm into Angler’s.

  Yes, Writer. That’s what I heard, Angler says. Wainwright pulls the door closed behind them.

  The room is left empty, except for the chairs that live in a half circle. From far above, in the rafters of the abandoned umbrella factory, the chairs look like rotting teeth on the bottom of a mouth.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lindsey Drager is the author of The Sorrow Proper, winner of the 2016 Binghamton University / John Gardner Fiction Award. Originally from Michigan, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the College of Charleston, where she teaches in the MFA program in fiction.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For material borrowed and reimagined in this book:

  L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Alan Watts, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Fred Botting, Sharon Horvath.

  For all else:

  Richard Powers, Ander Monson, Selah Saterstrom, Laird Hunt.

  Emily Forland, Michelle Dotter, Guy Intoci.

  The Vermont Studio Center.

  Ron Drager, Valerie Drager.

  Leland Drager.

  Allan G. Borst.