I slammed open the glass doors and slid along the tile floor, my sneakers squeaking as I landed at the counter, panting beside the line of people waiting to fill out their forms. The man at the front desk started. “Excuse me! Can I help you?” His face went sprintingly from annoyed, to startled, to curious, to horrified as he looked me over.
“I need to do an emergency walk-in! Okay?”
He began breathing through his mouth and nodding unconsciously, the way people do when they are mesmerized by something inexplicable. The people in the line next to me were staring too. A couple of them had stepped away from me. “Uh-huh, sure. Have you . . .” his eyes scanned my head, “been here before?”
“Yeah. Yes,” I hollered, leaning over the counter and pointing at his computer. “My doctor’s name is Murphy. Is she in today?”
He looked from me to his computer to me again, his eyes wide. “I think so.” He typed something on the screen. “Your name?”
“Sheldon. Sheldon Peters.”
“Okay, your preferred pronoun?”
“What?”
“Ummm, Mr. Peters, is it?”
“Yes!” I shouted.
“What seems to be . . .” he paused again, just staring at me. I looked around quickly. One of the women in the line had backed all the way up to the door and was holding it open, watching me warily. “I’m sorry.” He blinked and tried to smile. “What seems to be the nature of your emergency?”
“I . . . I . . .” I coughed and leaned over toward him. I pointed at my head, and I meant to whisper it, but instead I screamed, “I’ve got the Gaza Strip on my head!”
He shot straight up, tipping his chair over behind him, then stiffened. “We’re going to get you a wheelchair,” he told me brusquely. “Nurse!” He looked at me for a couple more seconds, then turned and disappeared through the door behind him, shouting for a nurse.
They were very sensitive to differences in this place. It’s a special sort of clinic geared toward queer and trans people. I’m sure all the staff had been through all types of sensitivity trainings. But I could tell I was pushing their limits. The walls were calmingly purple. I tried to block out the sounds of machine gun fire and shouting, which luckily are only loud enough to hear if you get very close to me. While I was waiting for my wheelchair I read the mural on the wall. It was a quote by Audre Lorde. It read:
Every woman has a militant responsibility to involve herself with her own health. We owe ourselves the protection of all the information we can acquire. And we owe ourselves this information before we may have a reason to use it.
I read it twice. Even though I was no longer a woman, it comforted me.
The guy came out running with a nurse and a wheelchair. The nurse shoved me down into the chair. The line parted for me and the nurse kept patting my shoulder, telling me everything was going to be okay. All the way up in the elevator, she tried to pat away my terror and hers.
The nurse who was patting me left as soon as another nurse came into the examination room. This woman was large, Rubenesque and tough looking with lots of eye makeup and a rose tattoo on her arm. “What do we have here?” She put her hand on her hip and tapped her foot. “They tell me you’re a real special case. But I seen everything. I’m from the Bronx, you know. So go ahead and try me. Let’s hear it.”
I shrugged and directed her gaze to the top of my head. “I think I’ve got the Gaza Strip on my head.”
She clicked her tongue, unimpressed. “Mmmmm-hmmmm. And what are your symptoms?” She tapped the pen on the clipboard, appearing slightly bored.
“Symptoms?”
“Mmmm-hmmm. That’s what I said.”
“Well, uh. It’s the Gaza Strip. And it’s on my head. See.”
“Fine. Let me take a look.” She laid the clipboard down and took me by the chin, turning my head side to side slowly, getting a good look at it, then released me.
“I don’t know,” she said, “that looks to me like it might be the Great Wall of China.”
“I don’t think so.”
She rolled her eyes, annoyed. “Are you a doctor?”
“No.”
“Well see now, neither am I, and that’s why I got to get your symptoms. We’ll let the doctor do the diagnosing, ohhhhkay?”
“Okay.” I nodded and scratched.
“Don’t you start scratching.” She smacked my hand away. “That’s the worst thing you could do. Now, what symptoms are you having that makes you think this is that Gaza thing?”
“Well,” I thought hard. It seemed strange to think of them as symptoms. “There’s a checkpoint. I mean, it seems to be a checkpoint.”
“Okay.” She wrote it on the paper. “Checkpoints. Go on.”
“And there have been ongoing bombings mostly landing on the right side of my head.”
“Bombings coming from the east going to the west?”
“I mean, that’s assuming my face is south, and also depends on what area of the wall I’m dealing with here, right?”
She raised a painted brow. “Hey, we don’t even know that it is a wall yet. Any other symptoms?”
“Yeah, well, earlier a miniature man fell out of my head, and . . . well, he seemed to have been shot, and he died.”
“Dead men falling.” She wrote it down and placed her pencil behind her ear. “The doctor will be here in a minute. You just hang tight.”
She left the door slightly open. I could hear the news on the television in the waiting room. I walked to the door and listened. They were talking about Israel just like they had been constantly, all week. I heard the word “escalation,” and then “fourth day of fighting.” The doctor knocked on the wall. I went back to the wheelchair as she entered, my hands folded tensely in my lap. She smiled too big at me. I tried to force one in return.
“Hello, Sheldon, haven’t seen you for a while. I hear we’re having a bit of a special problem today.”
It wasn’t long before I realized there was nothing any doctor could do for me. First, Dr. Murphy had asked me where I got my hair done. I had to explain to her that I didn’t do it on purpose. This whole thing just sprang up overnight. She kept me in there for five hours, bringing in almost all of the doctors in the building. They took my blood and urine and my entire life history. Dr. Murphy, at first, was worried it was a side effect of the tea and surgery. But they quickly ruled that out. A few of them thought it was a virus and one of them was dead set on it being a genetic mutation. But no one could come up with any definite answers. I was in and out of specialist offices for weeks. One of them even paid to have me flown to LA so he could observe me. I lived in a little room with a double-mirrored wall. He wanted to keep samples of the dead people that were falling out of my head, but I wouldn’t let him. It’s my body. Well? It is . . . I mean, they, are coming from my body. I let him test a few then give them back to me. It’s weird, the relationship I have with them, the bodies.
At first, I was keeping them in a glass jar in my room, with the intention of throwing the jar away when it got full. But that didn’t seem right. There are tough-looking guys with guns, but there are also old ladies, little kids, old men, and frail-looking people. I went to the 99-cent store by my house and I found these little glass kind of jewelry boxes. They look like pill holders, but they have like twenty-four square compartments and each compartment has a tiny little plastic sparkling jewel in it. It’s just 99 cents each for one of these boxes. I guess the things are like little sequins girls collect to decorate clothes and phones and things. I bought a ton of them. When dead bodies fall, I take out a little plastic jewel and put in a dead body. I hope they don’t mind sometimes when I put the Palestinians and Israelis in the same box. They have different compartments, so I think it’s probably going to be all right. It doesn’t happen often and who’s going to know, anyway? I keep the plastic jewels in a scrapbook with a date written by each one. It’s easy to do because the jewels are sticky on one side. Then, when all twenty-four little compartments are full,
I find somewhere to bury the glass box. That’s not easy to do. I know this all sounds morbid, but I’ve gotten used to having a bit of morbidity as part of my everyday life. I’m not going to say I understand what’s happening there better than anyone, ’cause I don’t at all, but I think I get it better than any American who’s never been there.
All the specialists confirmed that the thing on my head is indeed a section of the barrier wall running along the Israel-Palestine border. The best explanation I found was from the guy in California. He deduced that these weren’t the actual people from Israel and Palestine on my head, but flesh-and-blood animated replicas. It’s a living-scale model. He deduced this, seeing that nothing I do, like shampooing or combing, seems to affect or hinder their actions. They are not aware of me or my head. I don’t understand at all how this happened, but the specialist said something, which I wrote down, about chaos theory, and explained to me that everything only has the slightest probability of existence. He said that we know this is true because, and I wrote this down, “it is impossible to simultaneously measure the velocity and position of the divided nuclei in motion.” So, he deduced, if everything only has a slight possibility of existence, then things that cannot exist have an almost equal possibility of existing. In other words, if everything is barely possible, then the impossible is not far from possible.
I feel like I’ve lived ten lives this last year. I’ve had so many opportunities to go places I never would have and speak in forums I never even imagined I’d be granted access to. After I got back from California, I had to start to try to live my life again. But it was hard. Israel and Palestine have a seven-hour time difference from New York, so it is much easier to sleep during their night than mine, because that’s when my head is the quietest. Although it hardly ever seems totally quiet, I’ve also learned to deal with the symptoms pretty well.
Sometimes there are moments I almost forget it is there, or that it wasn’t there to begin with. It sounds mostly like white noise to me now. A lot of people think I should go there, to Gaza. But that would really freak me out, being in the place, standing on the place that’s standing on me.
When I got back from California, I had a ton of messages from friends and everyone. I hadn’t spoken to anyone for nearly three weeks. I hadn’t wanted anyone to know. I thought I could get it cured and come back like nothing had happened. But like I said, I had to go on with my life. We all do.
Kim had actually left me three messages, the first one was sweet, and the last two sounded increasingly concerned about my sudden disappearance. I was terrified of calling her, but I figured maybe she could help since she seemed to be up on the situation in the Middle East.
When she first saw it, she just sat me down on the chair and circled me, watching my head for like an hour, like it was a documentary or something. She even told me to be quiet a couple of times, bending close and trying to listen. But it’s not possible to pick up any one distinct conversation. There are so many of them, and I’m sure most of them aren’t speaking English. Groups of people chanting, shouting, or screaming are pretty audible to me or if you put your ear close, as are loud machines, gunshots, bombs, and things like that.
“This is amazing. This is a blessing in disguise,” Kim told me, clasping her hands, looking excited and solemn. I told her I just wanted it gone. She said that she would help me. That there would have to be someone out there who could do something for me, and we could put ads up on Craigslist in lots of countries and cities. She also begged me to go speak at a rally the next day. I told her I didn’t really know much about the situation in Gaza. “What do you mean?” she squealed. “It’s on your head. Just speak about that. Speak from personal experience. That’s the most powerful thing anyone can do.”
I don’t know if she’s right about that, but I agreed. She offered to stay that night, finally. I told her no, though. I definitely didn’t feel like doing anything with her, and I doubted it would be comfortable to sleep next to me. I hadn’t told her about the falling people yet.
She was getting her bag and about to leave when it happened. She later said she could see little rays of light like glitter bursting above the wall, and there was a sound like tiny firecrackers, then twelve people fell off of my head, onto the kitchen floor. Some of them were already dead when they landed, but a few of them were having seizures. We could see them moving for a moment before they became still.
“Oh no.” Kim dropped her bag and fell to her knees, carefully inching toward them. I hung my head, ashamed. “Oh god, no,” she whispered. “How is this possible?”
I shrugged, feeling like I wanted to cry, but not in front of her. She looked up at me, her eyes reddening and filling with tears. “Turn on the news.” I walked over to the television and powered it on. Kim stood up and started flipping channels until she found a news station. They were talking about the economy. But it was a split screen, and on the bottom it showed live footage from Gaza. The footage was just dark and then there was a sudden burst like fireworks on the screen. “Oh my god! That’s what just happened on your head!” The strip running below the footage said something about cluster bombs. “Those bastards!” Kim said. “You know what cluster bombs are?” I shook my head no. “They just disperse a bunch of tiny little bomblets over a wide area. It’s completely indiscriminate.” She wasn’t really talking to me, but sort of making an outraged speech, like she was at a rally. “There’s no way to use one without risking killing everyone around. They are the worst for civilian casualties. How can they say they’re targeting Hamas when they’re using cluster bombs, for fuck sake? The United Nations should outlaw them! I can’t believe they haven’t been sanctioned!” She stared down at the floor. “Oh hell, I can’t believe it. You have evidence right here. We can just look and see if they’re civilians.”
“How can you tell?”
“If they have weapons or not.” She pulled me down to the floor to inspect the tiny dead bodies, but once she got down where she could really see them, her face paled. She was completely silent just gazing at them. So was I. After a long time watching them not move, she asked me in a whisper, “What do you do with them?”
I stood up and turned off the television. “That’s personal. I’m sorry, but I just want to be alone now. I’ll see you in the morning at the rally.”
Kim stood up and gave me a long hug. She left without saying anything else.
That first rally I did, I just got on the microphone and spoke for five minutes from my personal experience. I said how awful what was happening was, and that the fighting had to end. I said that I for one knew this was no way for people to live and that it was costing countless innocent lives. Everybody cheered. I could see a few people were crying. After the speech, a few Palestinian New Yorkers and even a couple of Israelis came up to me and wanted to look at my head to see if they could make out any of their relatives. I let them. They didn’t find who they were looking for. I was nervous the whole time that someone was going to fall out, and that it would be one of their relatives. Luckily, no one did. I got away as quickly as possible, and I told Kim that if I was going to do that anymore, I would need to know that no one was going to come inspect my head afterward.
That evening, Kim came home with me again. We wrote an ad together that she posted on like every Craigslist site in the world.
The next day, I had about two hundred new messages. None of them were from specialists who wanted to help me. They were all from journalists who wanted to interview me. The first interview I did was with the Daily News. I was on the cover the very next day. They called me “The Gazahawk Man.”
I didn’t even have a chance to see it for myself that morning before my mom called, totally going out of her mind. She insisted I come home right away. I thought it was better for her to see for herself that I was still alive and healthy. I took the train to Jersey and met her at home that afternoon.
She was waiting by the door when I walked up. She pushed me inside fast, I think before th
e neighbors would have a chance to see me, then she locked the door behind her and peeked out the window like maybe I was being followed. She sat me at the kitchen table and served me a bowl of the chicken soup she had already prepared. I reminded her I was a vegetarian. “Well maybe that’s why this sort of thing keeps happening to you, Chelle,” she said.
“What do you mean?” She insisted that I eat it. I took a couple slurps of the noodles and laid down the spoon. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”
“Oh no?” She motioned to my flat chest.
“Mom! That’s totally different. That was surgery. I chose that.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t a choice.” She buttoned and unbuttoned the top of her shirt, like she does when she’s upset. “Well, which is it? You can’t have it both ways, Chelle.”
I sighed and leaned back. “It’s Sheldon now, Mom. Sheldon. Is that really so hard?”
“Oh no, no, no.” She was starting to tear up and her voice was getting squeaky. “It’s not hard. It’s easy! It’s always sooo easy with you, Sheldon.”
“I didn’t come here to fight, Mom.”
“I know. I know. But this is really a lot, Chelle. You have to understand, this is a lot for me.”
“It’s a lot for me too, okay?”
She nodded, then wiped away a few little tears. “Do you really want to walk around with the Gaza Strip on your head for the rest of your life?” She stood and put more soup in my full bowl. “You really should think about this before you commit to it.”
“Mom. God. I told you, this wasn’t my choice.”
“I know. I know.” She sat the soup bowl down and waved her hands in the air. “I know we’re all different in some ways. But first it was girls. And I said okay.”
“Ummmmm, no you didn’t.”
“And then it was a different name and baggy jeans and I accepted that.”
I rolled my eyes and groaned.
“Then it was the surgery. And Chelle, I just don’t know. But now this. What am I supposed to do with this?” A series of pops started going off. I grimaced and sneezed as little flakes of dust rose and fell around my face. “Oh Lord, have mercy!” My mother jumped back and crossed herself. “Is that what happens when you get upset?”
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