by Jarett Kobek
“lol,” wrote Ellen in her reply, “what the hell is a bromato?”
“the answer is 2 complicated,” wrote Hilary.
Ellen agreed to visit San Francisco. Hilary offered to pay for the plane ticket.
Ellen’s vacation took some wrangling with her office manager and her grandmother’s neighbor. The neighbor, who burned with the meanness of a Pentecostal Christian, viewed Ellen with a great deal of suspicion but agreed to take care of Ellen’s grandmother.
HILARY LIVED IN A 3BR APARTMENT near the corner of Fillmore and California. She had five roommates. Hilary was being overpaid by Bromato. She was the only person in the apartment with her own room.
She put a spare futon mattress on the floor.
Ellen slept on the mattress.
“The neighborhood isn’t that interesting,” said Hilary. “I wanted to, like, live in the Mission but this was the only place I could find.”
“How much do you pay?” asked Ellen.
“Sixteen hundred dollars,” said Hilary.
“A month? That’s more than double my grandmother’s mortgage. For a room.”
“Who wants to live in Truth or Consequences?”
WHILE HILARY WAS BUSY at work, Ellen wandered alone through the streets of San Francisco. She did all the usual tourist crap like seeing the Golden Gate Bridge and taking a boat out to Alcatraz and riding the Cable Cars and going to City Lights, where she bought a copy of Howl, which was a poem about men performing oral sex on each other in mental hospitals.
She was amazed by San Francisco’s public transportation. Never before had she experienced the sheer pleasure of not driving. Never before had she experienced the wonder of city walking.
On her second day in the city, a young man asked Ellen if she liked getting fucked from behind. She’d been in San Francisco for less than forty-eight hours. This was the ninth man to sexually harass her.
Ellen didn’t make eye contact with the young man who asked if she liked getting fucked from behind. She walked away. When she neared the Hilton on Kearny Street, Ellen let herself breathe.
Nine instances of sexual harassment in less than forty-eight hours. It was like being in Truth or Consequences, but at least in San Francisco no one was sexually harassing her for photographs uploaded to the Internet.
Her life had become so baroque that this felt like a relief.
She started walking. A man in a suit asked Ellen to smile.
Ellen walked to Washington Square Park. She sat on a park bench in Washington Square. She started to cry.
The sound drew the attention of another man. He said that Ellen looked too pretty to be so sad.
IN THE EVENINGS, Hilary took Ellen to bars in the Mission, where they met up with Hilary’s friends and co-workers. Ellen had resisted the idea at first, saying, “The last time I went to a bar, things didn’t end so great.”
One night, as they were headed home from a bar called Doc’s Clock, Hilary said, “It’s been wonderful, like, having you here. No one here fucking cares about any of that shit. Why don’t you, just, you know, move here?”
“With what money?” asked Ellen.
“I could totally get you a job at Bromato,” said Hilary. “It’s not like we have any standards. You should see some of the idiots at work.”
“I can’t leave my grandmother,” said Ellen. “Otherwise, I’d be out of New Mexico in a heartbeat.”
ON HER LAST DAY in San Francisco, Ellen’s flight back to New Mexico was scheduled to depart at 3pm. Ellen decided to rise early and walk through the city for a final time.
She woke up Hilary. It was a work day. They said their goodbyes.
“Come back any time you want,” said Hilary. “My door is always, like, open.”
“I might,” said Ellen. “I really might.”
She showered and left Hilary’s apartment.
ELLEN WALKED TO FISHERMAN’S WHARF, a place that she had avoided on the advice of Hilary’s friends. One of these friends, who worked for Facebook, had said, “The only people who hang around Fisherman’s Wharf are frat assholes and tourists. It sucks.”
But Fisherman’s Wharf was the one tourist destination that Ellen hadn’t seen. She had no idea if she’d ever come back. So why not?
When she got to Fisherman’s Wharf, almost no one was on the streets. Most of the stores were closed. Hilary’s friend was right. It did look like a place for frat assholes.
Ellen walked west. She sat down on the small beach of Aquatic Cove, watching the shallow waves lap up against the sand. Back in Los Angeles, she’d always liked the beach.
Not sun bathing. By the time she was thirteen, New Mexico had drained away the sun’s pleasure. But there was something about the repetition of the sound of the Pacific.
It was the same thing with Aquatic Cove. Peace washed over her. She felt herself dissolving into the cosmos.
She looked at her phone. She was losing time. There was a plane to catch. She started the walk back to Hilary’s apartment.
ELLEN WAITED for the traffic signal to change at the corner of Van Ness and Broadway. The light turned green. Ellen stepped off of the sidewalk.
There were more people on the street than when she’d left Hilary’s apartment. They were going to pointless jobs where they would earn meaningless money to buy ugly shit which they thought might alleviate their garden variety misery.
When Ellen was almost halfway across the street, she heard a slight, high-pitched sound.
She felt the blast of wind. She turned. She saw the grey blur of an electric car, less than two inches from her body. She didn’t see the driver’s face.
The car went through the red light.
Ellen looked to the other side of the intersection. A young woman, about Ellen’s age, was rushing across the street.
The electric car smashed into the young woman’s body. The young woman flew back four feet and crumpled against the pavement.
ELLEN WAS ONE OF MANY PEOPLE who rushed to the woman. Some were on their cellphones. They were calling the police. The thought hadn’t occurred to Ellen.
One man, who had some eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis, took charge of the situation, yelling at everyone to stay back.
“Don’t move her,” he yelled. “Don’t touch her!”
The woman’s face was covered in blood. Her breathing was shallow. The gore obscured the woman’s features.
That could have been me, though Ellen, I could be the one on the ground, bleeding and broken, dying amongst strangers.
The broken body. Van Ness. Broadway. The old church. The faces. The cellphones. A billboard above an apartment building advertising Man of Steel.
But there were no men of steel nor women neither.
Ellen walked back towards Hilary’s apartment. She had come so close to death. She had almost died and she’d spent the last six months worried about the opinions of people who lived in Truth or Consequences.
She had almost died and she’d spent the last six months tormented over shit from high school. She had almost died and she’d spent the last six months acting as if her life was preordained for failure.
But life wasn’t preordained. Life was an electric car just out of the Broadway tunnel, speeding through a red light at Van Ness. Life was a young woman crushed in blood, gathering a crowd of people on their cellphones.
I can’t keep living like this, thought Ellen. I’ve got to do something else. I can do anything in my life. I can do anything I want.
MAN OF STEEL was a film adaptation of Superman, a comic book intellectual property.
Superman was worth billions of dollars. Its creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, signed over the rights to their intellectual property for $130.
They were both 24 years old. They were from Cleveland. It was 1938.
A BLOCK LATER, as her thoughts cleared, Ellen realized that she had no money and was returning to Truth or Consequences to care for an elderly woman. Life wasn’t an either/or proposition. Li
fe was both random death and decades of suffering. Life was a trickle of days that dripped away with no meaning and no purpose.
She had been raised to think that her identity was hers and hers alone. But Ashley Nelson had taught Ellen a lesson.
A person’s identity wasn’t just about what they wanted or how they lived or the choices they made. Life wasn’t made of self-determination. Life was the Chinese wage slave manacled to a factory line, building iPhones. Life was a $130 cheque in 1938. Life was about trying to salve the wounds inflicted by other people, fixing the damage done by strangers and friends.
And thanks to the corporations headquartered in, around and near San Francisco, the capacity for that damage was infinite.
chapter thirty
Christine was out with her friend Denise. Denise was one of Christine’s bridesmaids.
Denise and Christine were having drinks at The Two Sisters, a literary themed bar on Hayes Street. They avoided the specialty cocktails. They both ordered vodka sodas.
They talked about the wedding. Christine and Bertrand had come up with a way to minimize the misery of planning.
They decided to get married at City Hall.
“We’ll be just like Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio,” said Christine. “Plus, it’s cheap. It’s only a couple thousand.”
JOE DIMAGGIO was a native of San Francisco who played baseball for the New York Yankees from 1936 until 1951, punctuated by a four year break for World War Two. He didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.
Baseball was a sport, which meant that it was a formalized system of control. Baseball involved moving balls around a constricted space in an attempt to create the illusion of meaning.
Joe DiMaggio’s time with the New York Yankees had created enough illusion that he ended up as ill-conceived metaphorical bullshit in Ernest Hemingway’s short novel The Old Man and the Sea.
The Old Man and The Sea was a book about how a senior citizen demonstrates the continued potency of his testosterone reserves by killing a dumb animal before being outwitted by other dumb animals.
MARILYN MONROE was the world’s most famous actress until an allergic reaction to celebrity forced her to swallow a bottle’s worth of Nembutal. She didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.
She married Joe DiMaggio at San Francisco City Hall.
The marriage ended in tears.
Then she swallowed a bottle’s worth of Nembutal.
When Christine said that she and Bertrand would be like Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, she didn’t mean that her marriage to Bertrand would end in tears and then Christine would swallow a bottle of Nembutal.
She just meant they’d have a nice wedding.
CHRISTINE AND DENISE left the Two Sisters. Denise walked towards Market Street. Christine walked towards her apartment. She stopped at a Thai restaurant on Haight Street.
She ate some green curry chicken and then walked home.
About ten minutes from her apartment, she felt very strange. It was as if she’d drunk six vodka sodas instead of two.
SHE STUMBLED into her apartment. Her head was spinning. She couldn’t do anything but she didn’t want to sleep. She decided to watch something on Netflix, so she watched Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse.
Netflix was a streaming video service. Christine paid Netflix $7.99 a month and in turn Netflix gave her access to a wide range of films and television programs.
THE SCREEN WAS BLACK.
The title appeared in white text: A TORINÓI LÓ.
Narration began over the black screen.
The narration was about the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and a horse he encountered in the streets of Turin.
Christine’s eyes rolled back up into her head. She knew that she was going to be sick. She wasn’t sure how but she knew that she had been poisoned.
She ran to her bathroom. She flung open her toilet.
She vomited and vomited and vomited.
When there was nothing left in her stomach, she felt sober.
“Can I blame Béla Tarr’s for this?” she asked the empty air. Then she said a prayer to Ray Kurzweil.
But, really, Béla Tarr hadn’t poisoned Christine. Neither had the alcohol. It was the green curry chicken from Haight Street. The meat was bad.
Do yourself a favor. Stop eating chicken.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Christine still felt wobbly. She couldn’t go out. She invited Adeline over to her apartment.
Adeline was happy to come over. She liked Christine’s apartment and she liked Christine’s cat. Christine’s cat was a fat old Maine Coon named Beard.
Back in New York, back in the 1980s, Adeline and Baby had co-owned a Maine Coon. They had named him Captain Jenckes of the Horse Marines.
They’d found the name in a book about Maine Coons. The first Maine Coon that appears in the historical record was named Captain Jenckes of the Horse Marine.
“Captain Jenckes of the Horse Marines” was a mouthful. So Adeline and Baby called their cat The Captain.
Beard reminded Adeline of the Captain.
ADELINE AND CHRISTINE were sitting in Christine’s living room. They were talking about the wedding.
“I’m sorry to keep going on,” said Christine. “Ever since I said yes, I feel like I can’t talk about anything except getting married.”
“Have you and your beau decided upon the ceremony?”
“Bertrand is a failed Catholic,” said Christine. “We can’t be married in the Church. For obvious reasons. I think we’re going with a justice of the peace,” said Christine. “It’s easiest for everyone. Me included. You have no idea about how stressful this is until you’ve gone through it.”
“Which is one reason,” said Adeline, “that I have long eschewed the diabolical art. Not that I stand in judgment on your decisions.”
“I didn’t think you were,” said Christine.
“Have you arranged matters with your families?” asked Adeline.
“It’s complicated,” said Christine.
THE COMPLICATIONS emerged from Christine’s decision to outwardly conform as a woman. She had been always been a woman but she was born with the reproductive biology of a male. She had lived the majority of her life outwardly conforming as a man.
Some members of her family continued to insist that Christine was a man. They did not take seriously the schism between gender and sex. They believed that Christine would grow out of it and return to being a man.
Christine had never been a man. She was always a woman.
Her brother had come around. Her mother was tolerant. Her father wouldn’t speak to her. This says nothing of the extended family.
When Christine was still called Christian, she lived as a gay man. Her extended family practiced a benign tolerance towards Christian being a gay man. They disapproved but didn’t exclude.
Christine as a woman proved too much.
It was possible that Christine would only have two family members at her wedding.
BERTRAND’S FAMILY was no easier.
Christine had warned him that he should approach the topic of her pre-transitioned life with caution. She had told him, flat out, that she didn’t mind if he never told his family.
“I don’t care if a bunch of people in Belgium know about my personal history,” said Christine. “I have my own problems here in America.”
Bertrand insisted on telling his parents and his siblings. He said that if they loved him then they too would love the person that he loved.
This was before he had proposed marriage.
“Be careful,” warned Christine. “Nothing is ever as simple as you think.”
Bertrand hadn’t listened. He did a very poor job preparing his family for the news.
He called his parents and told them flat out. He did the same with his siblings. The same with his aunts and uncles and cousins.
It went worse than when Christine had told her family that she was no longer Ch
ristian.
Other than one cousin who was an artist and lived in Berlin, none of Bertrand’s family was coming to the wedding.
And his cousin could only make the wedding if Bertrand paid for her airfare and found her a place to crash.
“IF THERE’S ANYTHING I’m glad about,” said Christine, “It’s that gay marriage is legal in California again.”
“Darling, you aren’t gay,” said Adeline.
“It’s a little sad but I never legally changed my gender. It’s so much paperwork. Now there’s not enough time.”
ADELINE TOLD CHRISTINE that Adeline was working on a new comic called The Blind Washerwoman of Moorfields.
“Have you done much work on it?”
“Only the first few pages. The Blind Washerwoman makes her way through the familiar town of her birth. She thinks of her old father and how cruel it is that death takes us all.”
CHRISTINE WENT INTO HER BEDROOM and came back. She was holding a magazine.
“Have you seen this?” she asked.
She gave Adeline the magazine, which appeared as it does on the next page.
FAREED ZAKARIA was one of the many best selling authors and public intellectuals who supported George Bush II’s War in Iraq. He had a decent amount of eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.
Back during the War in Iraq, Fareed Zakaria had believed that bringing something like Jeffersonian Democracy to a country with no history of participatory politics would be a net good. He believed it would stabilize the Middle East.
This opinion had been very popular with public intellectuals in the run-up to the War.
Most private intellectuals, who were people without best selling books or prominent media positions, had opposed the War.
