Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

by T Fleischmann

  It’s taken a lot of resistance, that I want to leave my gender and my sex life uninscribed—that it took me years to consider the fact that I did not have to name my gender or sexuality at all, so that now I must always tell people that I am not something. I insist on this absence more, even, than I used to insist on my identities, that I was a bisexual boy, or genderqueer, or a queer, which was actually just unpleasant for me in lots of ways, come to realize. I stand by only a quarter of what I said when I was queer. Queerness, when I first encountered the idea, aspired to a life away from identity categories, eroticizing what lies outside them, but today it seems the word often points to a reification of identity, to new rules. The uninscribed, like Gonzalez-Torres says, is a site of change, where I might understand my actual context and do something about it, rather than getting tangled up in a game of words, and so that is where I would like to focus. I am of course still written into this whole structure, I can’t escape the language, but that won’t stop me from refusing it anyway, and believing that a blank paper might transport me somewhere else.

  That I’m never really in a relationship in a recognizable way puts me at odds with identity also—single and coupled, available and attached, free of the expectations held by boyfriends and girlfriends. Jackson and I settle into a rhythm of first texting all the time and then Skyping. He’s a guy I Skype a lot, is what he is. Sometimes at the end of the conversation he shows me his butt, and I make him a little video where I dance around and jerk off in a pair of heels with Bongwater’s “The Power of Pussy” playing too loud, blaring. To keep us focused, we begin a plan to sneak-install sexual sculptures at the historical sites of gay cruising in Chicago, sites that are new to me and in a city he has never seen. We talk about simple, lightweight constructions with a minimalist design intended to enhance and (very subtly) encourage pleasure-seeking—at a long bit of high plants at the side of Lake Michigan, for instance, he suggests a very short wall, placed just so to offer total privacy to a couple horizontal people.

  I would take a legal risk, even if only minor, to honor faggots, because I sometimes feel I have been denied friendship with them. I was surprised how I ended up spending less time with gay men when I stopped claiming that identity—although of course it would be that way, I realized later. Being a faggot sometimes felt like installing the sculptures would feel, like a fear of someone catching you doing something, and in a place you weren’t supposed to do it, which is very different than the feeling I often have now, which is as though everyone is looking at me and what are they going to do about it. So many different ways to be illegal, these constantly overlapping conscriptions to our behaviors by the state, and the countless ways they enact themselves onto us or through us. I dream the sculpture’s wooden weight would somehow be a blockage in that system—clunk, clunk, every time someone is happy because of it.

  As fall begins to exert its emptying onto Chicago, I become aware both that the cold is near and that I’ve barely had sex since moving to the city. These are linked because if I do not figure out how to have sex in this new city soon I will sleep alone all winter, everyone hiding inside and covered in blankets and sweaters. I find sex differently, depending on where I am. In Seattle, the best way to find someone to have sex with was to go to a basement where maybe a band had been playing or to this one punk bar with dicks on the walls. In New York, walking on the street between any two places seemed to work well, while in Berlin I just kept taking drugs when they were offered to me and then when someone suggested a different party, I went to that new party, and I had sex there. Chicago is different, though. I even have to actually quit smoking here, where my Virginia Slim Menthol 100s are fourteen dollars a pack, which is the same as in New York but also, actually, too much. No one here knows I used to wear different eye shadow, here where some people call me “T” instead of “Clutch,” an old name back again. Soon I’ll put on a long puffy coat and then even the people who recognize me won’t recognize me when I’m walking toward them.

  The lingering warmth of fall means I’m more often in a light jacket over a dress or a button-down collar and skirt, my shape still available. I never really write poems but in Chicago sometimes I write a poem, I think because of all the transit. Being vulnerable to other people’s hands and voices twice a day makes me want to think about what is inside a moment, which poems are good at doing.

  Less Again

  I am walking to the L to go

  downtown to the Loop and

  on seeing me some of the men

  passing on Devon Street

  become taken by the thought of

  or maybe an image of penis

  which they hadn’t been

  thinking about before

  (this happens also on the train

  and then the walk from the train

  although different men)

  and perhaps it is their penis

  and perhaps it is my penis

  they really can’t distinguish

  some of them can’t and just

  as the owner of the penis is

  mutable so too the turgidity

  how or if the thought is sexy but

  I don’t notice these men

  I hadn’t thought of them

  until right now as I am sitting

  in my office and even if I try

  I can’t recall how they look

  their hands that were probably

  near their knees or hips

  or the cuts of their hair

  more blood in their cheeks

  and then later less blood again

  I write poems in my office and I feel a lightness because I like my poems to be small moments to consider a thing and to have thought through it to let it go. You can claim your power, in a small moment like that, with a poem.

  I have to make my own way, putting things aside and going ahead, picking other things back up. With winter fast approaching I open an OKCupid account and say that I will do the “36 Questions That Lead to Love” with any trans person who is interested, dinner on me. The thirty-six love questions became popular when the New York Times wrote about how asking and answering those questions could make strangers fall in love. You sit across from someone you don’t know, taking turns back and forth asking these increasingly vulnerable- and personal-seeming questions, and when you’ve asked all of them you stare into each other’s eyes for three minutes without saying anything, and then, poof, you’re in love, motherfucker. The instructions don’t say how to make this work for anyone who isn’t sighted, so I’m not sure how much the staring is part of the connection or if it’s more something snazzy for show at the end. Lots of people actually do have healthy and long-lasting and joyful relationships after doing these thirty-six love questions, which makes it seem like we’re all boring, horrible creatures who would get along fine if we just shared some information about our lives with one another, but who refuse to. If it works, though, it seems like a brilliant trick, like I will pull a cord and love will fall down onto me endlessly. I put up my profile and set a goal, that I will do this thirty times, and when I am in love with thirty people, I will have a horrible and wonderful party where I introduce all thirty to one another, and they will have nothing in common but their love for me. We will all then have gone through something we feel weird about and that we don’t totally understand—an experience only we will ever understand, deepening our love.

  Weeks pass (I read Etel Adnan’s two-volume selected works, To Look at the Sea Is to Become What One Is, and, voraciously, a stack of comics) and then finally one person takes me up on the offer. Their name is Ryan and they are very beautiful and I talk to Jackson about how gorgeous their smile is in their profile picture. When our date comes I wear an olive-green fall jacket over a mustardy green romper. We sit down and we say the questions to each other. We say, “Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?” and “What do you value most in friendship?” and “If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicat
e with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?” We sit on the outside patio of a cute little restaurant, and they are quite beautiful, and as it turns out we are of the same loosely accumulated trans social fabric of activists and artists. I put my blazer back on and we go to the park where we stare into each other’s eyes (their eyes are beautiful) and then decide we are not in love. A week later we have sex, and a couple of weeks after that I see them at an art gallery, but we can’t really talk because they have injured their tongue giving head the night before.

  I do manage to scrape together some sex on Scruff, although I’m interested only in people with complicated genders, and everyone is so young. I prefer dates who are at least thirty years old, who are good conversationalists, and who are too busy to really hang out. I mainly, however, wonder at this new problem, where an active and healthy sex life disappears and I am in love with someone on the other side of the world. These are related only because they are happening at the same time, but happening at the same time is a relation anyway. It makes it feel as though my desire has been drawn away a bit. It also does not help that my few attempts at finding a date nondigitally fall flat. “Want to have a date sometime?” I say to several people, and none takes me up on the offer. The critic who did not go on a second date with me even passes through the city to give a talk and does not go on a second date with me again; he invites me to meet up and then I go home and he goes somewhere else. I have occasional exceptions, falling into group sex with a bunch of rowdy, drunk trans girls, but mainly I find that sex is now elusive, in the past, and that while my body is no less mine than it has ever been, the conversation in which it is made explicit quiets to a monologue.

  At the same time, my days become increasingly filled with professional activities: presenting ideas to a committee of strangers, attending a meeting followed by another meeting, giving a lecture. Each of these are instances in which I have to talk, and in which everyone else listens to me and looks at me. The way people react, I know that they are thinking about what they would call my gender and, in the way most people find gender and bodies to be irreducibly the same, that they are thinking also of my body, the small weight of my breasts maybe visible in a sweater. I know that when I am talking to a large group of people, in their heads are odd confusions about me, and that when I am talking one-on-one, a slight nervousness sometimes—the fear that they will say the wrong thing, and their language will reveal how they see me.

  I am expected to come and to talk, to be inside of an institution, to hurry to the basement of a different building where I can find a bathroom, and then to walk into a room with cloth hanging on my shoulders, and with my powdered face with hair in it. It is as though the institutional architectures of buildings and policies are forcing me to talk about language, about pronouns and bathroom signs, which are not things that I care to talk about. And when I am made to talk about those things anyway, the ache of my bladder and the student harassed by faculty, that is when people turn away from me. No one tells me, we just all know, that my job is to say something that will bring us elsewhere, to a place everyone can be comfortable. No one tells me this but I can see their faces. I can see we are all scared by what we aren’t saying.

  Next morning, two friends, who had been at one of their meetings, gave forth a report of the awfulness of the solemnity with the innocent yet majestic appearance of the woman preacher, that they were struck with wonder and amazement by her preaching and praying, which were wholly in the method of friends or quakers. Thus her behaviour, conduct, and appearance soon sounded abroad; and on the succeeding evening an unruly company assembling, it was thought prudent to keep the doors and windows shut, there being apprehension of personal insults from the liberties taken by boys, &c. A dreadful scene of outrage ensued; stones, brick-bats, &c. were thrown against the house; which was contrary to the laws of hospitality.

  —The American Museum, February 23, 1787

  Begin with the Death Book of the Society of Universal Friends, a bound record of the deaths of the members of the religious sect founded by the Publick Universal Friend, called the Friend, the Comforter, the All-Friend, and so forth. “By living witnesses of the deceased, I have the following history,” the faithful Ruth Prichard records at the start of the book. Scripted behind the front cover years later, “25 minutes past 2 on the Clock, The Friend went from here” marks the death of the Publick Universal Friend on July 1, 1819. The deaths of other friends and followers continue, written in varied hands, until 1830.

  As this strange group writes it in their Death Book, to be “yet in time” meant that one was living, while those who “left time” were dead. “Huldah Botsford left time,” and “The Aged Freelove Hathaway left Time,” and “Jacob Weaver, an Ethiopian, left time.” Other followers received more ink than these brief notes. The book’s entry on Mehitabil Smith, for instance, shows the Friend graveside, quoting Ecclesiastes 7:2, that “this is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to heart.”

  Long before “25 minutes past 2 on the Clock,” before founding and leading this group and keeping the tally of their deaths, the Friend lived a quiet life near the ocean. They were born in what they then called the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, of the Kingdom of Great Britain, and named Jemima Wilkinson, the eighth child of a man who grew cherry trees in his orchards. Lawrence Wilkinson, the Friend’s greatgrandfather, was the first Wilkinson to arrive on the continent. He had served as a solider in England, defending King Charles I from Cromwell, until his estate was seized by Parliament, causing him to flee to Providence. There he received twenty-five acres, selected from a large parcel of land granted to the English by the Narragansett people, who had lived there for thousands of years. Over several decades, Lawrence expanded his holdings to around one thousand acres. John Wilkinson, his son and the Friend’s grandfather, acquired more acreage from the Rehoboth North Purchase, a sale of land arranged with the Pauquunaukit leader Wamsutta. When the governor of Plymouth Colony decided he did not favor the sale with Wamsutta, however, he had him arrested, leading first to the sachem’s death and then, in 1675, to the bloody King Philip’s War, which drove many indigenous people out of the region and into other tribes. It was said of John in that war that “he feared nothing in human form, and his rashness was sometimes checked by severe casualties.” Living a much quieter life, the Friend’s father, Jeremiah, held only a small parcel of orchards, which he inherited from that Rehoboth North Purchase, and which provided for his family. It is on these acres in Cumberland that young Jemima Wilkinson played, climbing the rock ledges and roaming a nearby swamp, until, at age thirteen, their mother died, and they became an adult.

  One day—the year, as it were, in which a new nation was declared around them—a disease spread through this Rhode Island town. Perhaps it was typhoid, or perhaps what people of the time called “Columbus Fever,” named after a military ship that held British prisoners of war, docked nearby. Regardless, the fever caught Jemima Wilkinson and, slipping out of the conscious world, the twenty-four-year-old also expected to leave time. Instead, however, they soon shot awake. They then spoke, declaring that Jemima Wilkinson had gone to heaven, and that a spirit of the Lord had removed the fever. A genderless holy entity now inhabited this body—the Publick Universal Friend, they declared their new name. As the Universal Friend of Friends describes it, the archangels

  putting their trumpets to their mouth, proclaimed saying, Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone, that there is one more call for, that the eleventh hour is not yet past with them, and the day of grace is not yet over with them.

  Later, the All-Friend’s brother told them that, in the fever, they had declared simply, “There is Room Enough.”

  The Friend quickly took to sermonizing, spreading the word divinely given to them, announcing their miraculous rebirth and extolling the virtues of celibacy, restraint, and humility. They started to wear m
asculine clothing and a hat made out of beaver pelt, which they would remove when indoors, and they cautioned, sternly, against pleasure. Regularly, traitors of the American Revolution were executed in town squares near Cumberland, providing the Friend with easy audiences, and occasionally with converts, true believers who would invite the All-Friend to come speak in their homes, or a nearby public meeting house. Some evenings, the Friend received divine messages in their dreams, which they would share in the next day’s preaching. Some of these prophecies were very specific, and the Friend was confident enough to predict the exact day of the apocalypse, which would arrive on April 1, 1780.

  Before the apocalypse could come, however, and after two years of preaching in the smaller towns of Rhode Island, another divine message told the Friend that they must go to England, back to the country their great-grandfather had left, to spread their word. While they received permission to make the trip from the commander of the Revolutionary forces in Rhode Island, General John Sullivan, after traveling to Newport and preaching there, the plan fell apart, and the Friend instead relocated to a new follower’s farm near the village of Little Rest. The apocalypse of April 1 likewise failed to arrive, but just a short while later, on New England’s Dark Day of May 19, smoke from the nearby burning of forests rose and blew until it met uncommon cloud formations and, together as one smoke-billow, blocked completely what had been for days an unusually red sun. No one of the time knew the source of this darkness—a solar eclipse? a volcanic eruption? It would be many years before the truth was known, that fires had consumed forests hundreds of miles inland, north of the vast lakes, and that it was this smoke, its great plumes, that turned the day to night. Fearful of the darkness, people lit candles at noon, and many prayed. The Friend, however, saw this dark sky and recognized it as exactly what they had predicted, as an apocalypse coming, albeit six weeks late.

  The same day the sky turned dark, the Friend’s devoted follower Susannah Porter perished. Susannah had been one of the Friend’s favorites, but when they tried to resurrect her, Susannah’s faith proved too little. “She died in the Arms of the Friend,” the Death Book states, one of its earliest records. After Susannah’s death, it seems the Friend found little need to stay put. They soon left Little Rest and the towns they knew, striking out for bigger cities, larger crowds, and more followers.