Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab

by Shani Mootoo

  After Carmen left and Rosita and Lancelot had gone to their rooms, I once again felt horribly alone. I needed someone with whom I was close; I needed Catherine. Yes, I decided, I would telephone her. And regardless of tradition, I made myself a drink first.

  I measured a robust jigger of Scotch into one of the thin-walled heavy-bottomed tumblers that Sydney used to use, tossed in two cubes of ice and filled the glass with coconut water. I splashed Angostura bitters on top and shook the glass, rattling the ice cubes to mix it all up. I had made myself a fine drink. I polished it off in one go and fixed another.

  Usually when I called Catherine, I would lean against the counter where the phone was. This time, though, I was compelled to heave my ass onto the counter, sit on top of it, and speak to her as I perched there. I would not have considered doing this before. Before. Before Sydney’s death. After Sydney’s death. Or should that be his passing, his going away? In any case, the house was now mine, and I could damn well do in it as I pleased. I put down the glass gently, although I was tempted to bring it hard onto the tile countertop, smashing it, cracking the tiles and summoning Rosita and Lancelot from their rooms. The glass was mine. The tiles that might have broken were mine. The trouble to have them repaired would be mine too. But I was too adept at standing outside of myself, watching, commenting, analyzing, to execute an authentic tantrum. Rosita and Lancelot would have come running out of their rooms, and I would have had to admit to an episode of indulgence or grief-induced insanity.

  I could garner social points back home by owning a house in the Caribbean, couldn’t I? I reasoned. But did owning the house, and knowing how a Scotch and coconut water cocktail was made, and watching a very special man die in a hospital here, make me Trinidadian? Did saying I know Trinidad take on new and heightened meaning now? In that moment of grief, I saw the bequest of the house as shameless bribery: Here, Jonathan, have this house instead of me, who, you might notice, you’ve never really had. Take this, and in exchange for it forgive me for my absence, for my self-absorption, for destroying the vessel that held images of all that you were as a child. I will give you this house, but I can’t give you myself. Ever. Pressure mounted behind my eyes, my jaw tightened and the top of my head felt as if it would explode, scattering my brain on my new ceiling. Looking up, I realized I hadn’t paid attention to the fan on the ceiling before. The wide wood blades were furry with old dust. I could now order Lancelot to clean them, I mused. I could tell Lancelot to clean this house from top to bottom, to get down on his knees and scrub this place from one end to the other. To scrub the shame from all my useless longings and expectations that, for nine years, had built up, and dried up, here. I imagined launching my glass across the room, putting my fists through every cupboard door in the kitchen. This inanimate thing, this house, mocked me with Sydney’s betrayal of the closeness he and I once, long ago, had shared.

  The room spun, and my head felt light. I lifted the glass to my mouth and emptied it. Sweat rolled down the sides of my face and neck. What was I supposed to do with Sydney’s damned stories and the other bequests implied in them? I had three more days before Gita and Jaan arrived. And then there would be the funeral. Catherine was right. I had been unfairly put-upon.

  I mixed another drink. Two jiggers went into that third round. One sip and I knew that I was not going to get from Catherine what I needed—the fortitude to endure this time. I called my mother instead. She told me that I was drunk and quietly said goodbye.

  I retreated to my room exhausted, but I could not rest. I was tempted to turn again to Sydney’s notebooks, to the letters and the childhood notes from Zain. But I knew the stories they contained intimately. And every single time I read an entry from one of Sydney’s notebooks, I had the sense that he was doing more than keeping a record of his life and of his thoughts. I sensed he imagined a reader—me. If anything confirmed this for me it was the last entry he’d made, written just before he stashed away the three little books in his safety box at the bank. That one, I believe, must surely have been written to me. I could almost recite it by heart:

  Surely it is a failure of our human design that it takes not an hour, not a day, but much, much longer to relay what flashes through the mind with the speed of a hummingbird’s wing.

  Yes, a failure of design. It surely was.

  Zain’s words came to me as well, and I imagined her particular Trinidadian accent. I knew parts of her letters by heart now. I would find nothing new in untying the bundle of cards and letters she’d written. In any case, I did not want to read Sydney’s words or Zain’s words this time. Perhaps what I wanted was the feel of the notebooks and of that bundle in my hands. I took out the package and held it. But this, too, was not what I wanted. I put the lot back on the desk and looked at it askance, and the sense grew in me that it was now my turn to speak. After a while, I was ready: I wanted now to gather up the words, to cull the stories, to understand for myself what I had been told during those nine years of visits here. I now wanted to lay it all back down in my own words. In my own words, but faithfully. As I had heard the stories. As I had read them. As I wished it all to be.

  On my desk was a notepad. I opened it to a clean page. I took a sip of my drink, savoured it. I was hesitant, for I sensed that once I began, I would embark on a commitment that would consume me for as long as it took to fulfill it.

  I picked up the rollerball pen.

  The words came faster than I could write. In no time there were paragraphs and then there were pages.

  Night in the tropics falls with no regard. Like a cleaver, it descends in an instant. We hadn’t intended to stray, but the sudden blanketing darkness intrigued us. I wondered aloud how much darker it could possibly get in the valley. “Let’s see,” you said and turned onto the narrow little-used Golf Course Road. Half a mile or so up the quiet road, you rolled to an unsure halt in our lane, put the gear in park and pulled up the brake handle. The air conditioning was on, the windows rolled up. You left the engine idling. I looked back. There was no light, not from camps in the mountains or from squatters’ dwellings. There were no snaking headlights in the distance to indicate the presence of another vehicle. All that was visible in this forest darkness was caught in the car’s high beams: on either side shrubbery, which encroached on the asphalt, and a few metres of the narrow road ahead.

  You switched off the engine, and I rolled down my window. The quiet was deafening. Then you switched off the lights, and the darkness seemed impenetrable. We could have been at the end of the universe, Zain, but we were not, and although I thought of you and me as a force to contend with, I worried about the possibility of unseen bandits. There was no sound of cars, no drone of planes, no machinery and, thankfully, no human noises. Then forest sounds emerged, all at once, sustained, endless, pulsing. What should have been cacophonous discord was pleasant. Cicadas. Frogs. Birds hooting. Monkeys howling. A far-reaching hollow tock—the bellbird’s tock. If a quick single clip of sound could be mournful, there it was. Wind in the trees. Little things jumping in the bushes. A short distance away, something caused a commotion in the trees.

  “Did you hear that?” I whispered.

  I heard the keys in the ignition tinkle and knew that you were about to switch on the engine. Whatever it was that was causing the commotion, however, seemed to be falling from a height. In mid-fall it caught, or perhaps it caught itself, and in my imagination its sounds translated to wings that flapped frantically against branches and then an easier flapping as the thing, some big bird, an owl perhaps, righted itself and made away.

  I thought about all the cautioning—don’t stop your car in lonely areas, especially at night. Keep your doors locked and windows turned up. “Let’s not go just yet,” I suggested anyway. My voice cracked as I tried to whisper. “A long time ago,” I told you, “cacao thieves used to collect fireflies in Mason jars fitted with lids made of wire netting. In the darkest hours of the night when they crept through the land looking to cut ripe pods off the tree
s, these were their lanterns.”

  I had rested my hand on the side of my seat. You gripped my fingers—a little coarsely, so I thought nothing of it.

  I squeezed your fingers slightly.

  “Tell me something,” you said. “Why did you move off so quickly, back there at the beach, when I touched your arm?”

  When I didn’t answer, you assumed I didn’t know what you were talking about, so you explained. “I mean when we were watching the sky, just after the sun had set.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know exactly when you’re talking about.”

  I knew because your touch still clung to me; I felt the pounding, still, of fear and panic against my chest.

  “So? Tell me why.”

  I could not see the details of your face, but I could tell that you were looking directly at me.

  “Because of the way I look,” I said. “I don’t look like most women. I think other people see that.” It was like using plastic chopsticks to pick slippery words out of a soup. You did not respond. Then I heard the rustle of your body as you came closer. What are you doing, Zain? I wondered. My skin began to burn as if I had a fever. I felt suddenly frightened, as if my world were about to be turned upside down, or even right side up. My thoughts became muddled, and words came out of my mouth without my willing them to do so, and I could feel myself shake as if I had caught a chill. “I mean, they have no idea that we’re like sisters. Like sisters, Zain. Aren’t we?”

  In the darkness you found my lips easily. I remember the smell of your skin, the sun trapped in it, your breath so close to my mouth, the scent of your cologne sharpened by whatever it was that was happening in the car.

  “Sid,” you said, and for a long time that was all. Then you said, “I wish,” and again, nothing more.

  This made me unable to think, and I became mute. Your breath on my cheek was like a flame and a breeze at once. I waited, and your unspoken wish hung in the air like a tiny filament of light. It was a small eternity.

  I was exhausted and yet my mind brimmed. I knew the day ahead would demand a great deal of me, and that a night’s rest would serve me well. But even after I relieved myself and headed to my bed, I again felt the dizzying pull of reinterpreting all I had heard and read. I went back to the desk.

  Zain, just before you and Angus drove me home, you came into the guest room carrying an envelope stuffed with the U.S. dollars you’d been saving. You pressed yourself against me, put your hands flat and gentle on my breasts—and you whispered, “They’re beautiful, but I know you keep dreaming of what it could be like to live in the world the way you want to.”

  I had told you—and you remembered—how I felt that my breasts betrayed me. I had told you that if someone, seeing my short hair and the way I dressed, was unable to tell quickly if I was male or female, they would decide who and what I was by looking at my breasts. I had also told you about the gender transformations that were done in Canada. At first you recoiled. I was embarrassed to have revealed so much to you. But some time later you confided that you’d had breast enhancement surgery, and I was surprised; I hadn’t realized how much about you I didn’t know. Enhancement and reduction were different sides of the same coin, you said. But you went further. “Cut the damn things off, if you want,” you said. You put your hands to my breasts, this time so easily. “They won’t grow back,” you said. “But I bet it will be as if you have been reborn. You just might blossom yet, Sid. And what shall we call you, then? Why don’t we choose something that sounds like Siddhani. Let’s just squish the name. It’ll sound like ‘Sydney.’ What do you think?” You were laughing, but I was aghast, stunned and moved all at once. It doesn’t matter what you do with the money, you said, but from now on I want to call you Sydney. Okay?

  When I think about how I lost you, Zain, and about how I lost the boy, my son, Jonathan, and even about how I lost his mother, India—yes, I left her, but that’s a technicality; when I think of Eric—and I think of that bastard every day; when I think of Angus, of the art reviews I got and the ones I should have got, of the shows and the galleries I should have been in, and of how my paintings were always contextualized by the colour of my skin or by my immigrant status in Canada; when I imagine holding a woman, imagine how she would feel in my presence; whenever I think of any of this, I hear you saying, Cut the damn things off.

  It isn’t a directive I hear, Zain, but deep understanding.

  Still I continued, emboldened.

  It’s been seven months now since Mum’s death. I had thought that, given the length of time since then, I could broach with Gita the subject of the change I’m going to make. I am unable to be in touch with Jonathan, and this is, perhaps, a good thing for him. So Gita is the only one who matters now. But when I told her my plan she asked if I had gone crazy. She told me I needed professional help, I needed to see a psychiatrist. She told me that if I did such a thing to myself she would have nothing to do with me. She would not entertain any explanation. She asked how I could even consider doing this to her. Although it was my body that I wanted to tamper with, we carry, she said, the same family name. She said that if I went ahead with it she would consider me dead, and never allow her son to have anything to do with me. She screamed that I was a freak, that I had no respect for my dead parents, for family, for society, or for God.

  I’d phoned her convinced that this was what I wanted to do, but I have now lost my nerve. I’m trying to remember why I am having this surgery and wonder if I should start the testosterone injections. Why do I want this?

  It cannot be just because of the disappointment I saw cross India’s face when, in the men’s department of a clothing store, the line of the jacket she wanted me to try on was not right.

  It cannot be because I will cut a more dapper figure if I go through the change, for regardless of the angularity the doctor says I will eventually develop, the coarser skin, the moustache and goatee that I will grow on my face, the hair that will thin and recede on my head, the voice that will forever split and crackle and the muscles that will grow—regardless of all of this I will be able to do not a thing about the width of my hips and my thighs, about my height, or the colour of my skin.

  It cannot be because India wanted Jonathan, as she often told me, to grow up with a strong role model of his own gender. (It truly cannot be this, for her boyfriends Graham, Bill, Charles, James, et cetera, prove my point entirely.)

  It cannot be because I believe I know how my best friend died and yet I cower from doing anything about it out of fear that the very fact of my being, and of her friendship with someone like me, will bring judgements against us—against her—and taint the possibility of a serious investigation and justice.

  It cannot be because my perfect other will allow me to love her in ways that she relishes and sinks into, yet, at the end of the day, she will not choose me.

  It cannot be because in your presence, Zain, I feel the limb that has grown between my legs and that wants, almost of its own accord, to rub your skin, to touch your parted lips and your face and hair, to coax you farther apart and slide in with abandon … No, it cannot be this, because, in the end, I will, let’s be real here, never achieve such an able-bodied appendage.

  So why, then, am I doing this thing to my body, to myself, to the people who love me? It cannot be, and yet it is—for all of these reasons.

  And for none of them.

  My head throbbed in concert with the knocking on the door. Lancelot pushed the door open and said that the pundit would be here any minute.

  I glanced at the desk, and yes, I could see that there were words on the pad. Words in my handwriting. I got up out of bed and flipped the pages, and saw that I had indeed worked through the night. I remembered, then: it was not until the room had been aglow in orange light and I could see that the sun was on the eastern horizon that I had rested the pen on the notepad and crawled between the sheets.

  10

  On the way to the veranda I passed Rosita. She did not look a
t me. I knew I had disappointed her. She must have known that I had broken with tradition and had “a” drink the evening before. It was going to be a horrid, busy day, and my head as heavy as a sand-filled soccer ball.

  Pundit had cataracts and couldn’t drive, so he was driven by his daughter. I invited the two of them to sit on the veranda, but he directed me inside the house to sit at the dining table, he at one head of it, she and I on either side. I wondered if he possessed supernatural powers and could detect the forbidden alcohol in me. My head pounded.

  Rosita brought us each a glass of orange juice. She wouldn’t look at me.

  Pundit told me that his sisters and brothers all lived in Toronto. He had gone once to stay with one sister. It was during the month of September, some years ago. He had visited the CN Tower and gone to Niagara Falls. It was pretty, and very clean, but he’d found it too cold. He asked if I was married. Even though I answered that I was not, he asked if I had any children.

  His daughter’s short haircut surprised me. I suppose I had expected that as the daughter of a Hindu priest she would have long hair. I imagined that at this table, too, she would be silent. Indeed, I was surprised that, on account of the particular business at hand, she was sitting with us at the table in the first place. She had—and again I found this unexpected—lively eyes. They were lined thickly with the kind of mascara that Indian women in paintings wear. She looked directly at her father as he spoke, and when he asked me a question she looked directly at me.

  Pundit asked what I did for a living, and when I answered that I was a writer he said that it followed then that I must surely understand about the great events of life: birth, that is, and death. He placed his hands together as if to pray, but it was merely a gesture that accompanied his pensiveness. He said that the dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, success and failure, desire, hunger—hunger for material things, riches or sexual fulfillment, or, say, even for food, even for enlightenment and purity—are minor events. They are theatre. They are dramas. The gods loved theatre and drama. Didn’t someone once call us the playthings of the gods? he asked.