I imagine the pain I feel in my crotch is a lot like that of giving birth. It feels like I’m being split in two, without the benefit of any pain medication. All I can see is a red haze while I continue to roll around and wish for the pain to end.
It does a couple of agonizing minutes later. I sit up against the wall. There’s still a tingle between my legs. Since there’s no one in the alley, I stick my hand down there to feel for blood.
I don’t feel blood. I feel a penis.
Chapter 10
It’s not difficult to break into Dr. Palmer’s apartment. Before I can get started, I have to stop off at a hardware store for an allen wrench and a sturdy piece of wire. The cashier gives me a funny look that could be from what I’m buying or more likely how I look. In an alley, I bend the end of the wire ninety degrees and then slip both into my pocket.
There’s a guard inside the front door of the building, but all I have to do is wait until he goes to use the john and then I dash through the lobby, to the elevator. I already know where Dr. Palmer’s apartment is from when I visited it five years ago. Then I was an eighteen-year-old woman, a couple of days removed from being a man.
I take the allen wrench and piece of wire from my pocket. I insert both into the lock and then start to fumble around. I’m a little out of practice, plus my hands are smaller—yet hairier—than the last time I did this. I need about five minutes to get the door open. I’m lucky none of Dr. Palmer’s neighbors see me, but then it’s probably too early for most of them to be home yet.
The apartment hasn’t changed in five years. Dr. Palmer still doesn’t have much furniture. There’s only a couch in the living room and a small table with a couple of chairs in the dining room. On the table I see the invitation Maddy sent her for the wedding. It’s supposed to be in two months. Now I don’t know if it will ever happen.
I hurry into the bathroom to take off my clothes. I start to cry as I confirm what I felt earlier. Between my legs is a stubby penis, not much bigger than a toddler’s right now. There are miniature testes as well. I know they’ll get larger as the days wear on, to grow into a man’s privates.
I go into the kitchen and yearn for a drink. There’s only a half-empty bottle of red wine in the fridge. She probably drinks one glass a day for her heart. I take a bottle of water—it gives me a little smug satisfaction to see the doctor splurges on Evian—and then go curl up on the couch. She doesn’t even have a television. What does the woman do for fun?
There is a tiny stereo system on a shelf. It’s mostly Latin stuff, music from the doctor’s native Ecuador. I pop a CD in before I return to the couch. The woman sings in Spanish, so I don’t know the words, but it has a peppy beat.
I start to cry again as I realize my career as a singer is over. Steve Fischer couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. It was only when I became a woman that I discovered my new voice sounded so beautiful.
God, what will I tell Mac? That’s why I’m at Dr. Palmer’s apartment instead of the lab; I want to see her alone. I know Mac will be at Lennox, to wait for me to show up. Right on cue, I hear my phone buzz. I fish it out of my purse to see a message from him; he wants to know if I’m running late. I hope he won’t wait all night for me.
Eventually he’ll call Maddy and then Tess. They’ll contact Grace and Jake. Jake will have the cops look for me. I figure no one will look for me here. All I have to worry about is if someone notices I tampered with the door.
The music and the exhaustion from such a hectic day eventually lull me into sleep. When I wake up, I need a minute to remember where I am. My face itches. When I scratch at it, I can feel the stubble from earlier is longer. I return to the bathroom and see a patchy beard along my swollen face.
I still sit down to pee. My tiny prick works like advertised, though like earlier it takes a bit of effort to coax anything out. I doubt this will do my kidneys any good. I’m sure Dr. Palmer will want to check those out. She’ll want to check everything out.
Back on the couch, I think about what to do. I’ll finally have to come clean with Maddy about who I’ve been all these years. She’ll hate me, or hate me more than she already does. Mac tells me hate is too strong of a word. Maddy resents me for the divorce and then never contacting her. Mac says Maddy is angry because she never got the closure she needed in our relationship. How much angrier will she be to find out I’ve lied to her for five years? That for these last five years I’ve been her best friend and her big sister?
These thoughts still bounce around my head when my stomach rumbles. I decide to raid Dr. Palmer’s fridge again. She doesn’t have anything in the fridge that’s edible, just some fuzzy Chinese food that I toss out for her. In the freezer I find a Lean Cuisine lasagna to heat up.
While I wait for the lasagna to cook, I check out Dr. Palmer’s bedroom. It’s as Spartan as the rest of the place. She has a functional wood-framed bed and two chests of drawers. On one chest of drawers I see a couple of photographs. Dr. Palmer is in the center of one, Maddy and I on either side of her; we make funny faces while the doctor grins slightly. We took that a couple of years ago in the lab during one of our routine physicals.
The photograph next to it is of far more interest. Dr. Palmer is a lot younger in that photo, her hair longer and body fuller. She’s probably in her late twenties, the prime of her life. She wears a heavy cream-colored sweater and jeans while she stands in front of a maple tree, its leaves yellowed. Against her is a younger man in a denim jacket, black button-down shirt, and jeans. Though his hair is longer and he doesn’t have glasses, I recognize Mac.
As I pick up the photo, my hands shake. I knew Dr. Palmer and Mac were good friends; she recommended him to me for therapy. During one of our early sessions he said he and Dr. Palmer had been lovers during his internship. Here’s the proof of that; the way they lean against each other isn’t like two good friends.
I can’t help but feel jealous. I can already see now what will happen: Mac, devastated by what has become of me, will go to his good friend to cry on her shoulder. At first they’ll just talk, but then their hands will touch, they’ll lean in, and their lips will come together. Before long they’ll be naked on Dr. Palmer’s worktable, surrounded by the FY-1978 that inadvertently brought them back together—
As the microwave beeps, I know what I need to do.
***
I’m dozing on the couch when I finally hear a key in the lock. I look up at the clock and see it’s almost one in the morning. Where the hell has she been? Does she always work this late or was she helping Mac and Jake to look for me? Or she might have hoped I’d show up there.
The door opens a crack. I scuttle across the couch to stay in the shadows. She shuts the door behind her. Before she can reach for a light switch, I say, “Don’t turn on the light yet.”
“Who’s there?” she says. I can’t blame her for not recognizing my voice.
“Just a friend.” I hear a metallic rattle in her purse. “You packing heat now, Doc?”
“Maybe. Why don’t you come out and see?”
“Sure, but I’m warning you it’s not going to be pretty.”
I reach over for a light switch. I doubt the dull yellow glow of the table lamp does much to help my face’s appearance. The metallic object in Dr. Palmer’s hand is a stun gun. “You going to shoot me with that?”
She squints at me the way Mr. Swift did. “Stacey?” she asks. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“What the hell happened to you?”
“I’m being cured.”
She stuffs the stun gun back into her bag. Then she crosses the living room to get a better look at me. She runs a hand over my cheeks to feel the fuzz. “Cured? What are you talking about?”
“I’m becoming Steve again. I’ve even got a tiny package…down there.”
Her eyes widen. “Are you serious?”
“You want to see it?”
“I think I should. Let’s go into the bathroom.”
&nbs
p; There’s not much more of a humiliation than to have to expose myself to Dr. Palmer. Nothing except when she squats down to touch it. The penis is too little yet for me to feel any kind of arousal from the tug she gives it. “Jesus Christ,” she says.
She leaves me in the bathroom for a minute. When she comes back, she’s got a cigarette in her mouth. “Can I have one of those?” I ask.
“I thought you didn’t smoke?”
“Stacey doesn’t. I’m not really Stacey anymore, am I?”
“Good point.” The doctor lets me have her cigarette while she fetches another. I take a drag off it and then start to cough. I need a couple more puffs before I really get the hang of it. Maybe it’s because I’m turning into Steve again or maybe it’s just the shitty day I’ve had—shitty three weeks really—that the nicotine soothes my nerves.
“I don’t believe it,” Dr. Palmer says. “When did this start happening?”
“I guess it started three weeks ago.” I tell her about the hair on my legs that reappeared at record pace. Then I describe how the hair spread to my arms and belly and how the latter expanded more every day. I tell her about the incident at the studio, how my voice changed. I hadn’t realized it then, but now I understand it was changing back into a man’s voice.
She runs a hand over my scalp. “Feels like male pattern baldness,” she says. She takes another puff and then shakes her head. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I feel like shy little Stacey again for a moment. I stare sheepishly at my feet. “I was so busy.”
“Stacey, you know you’re supposed to tell me the instant anything changes. We’ve talked about that before.”
“It’s just with the wedding and the studio session—”
“That doesn’t matter. You can’t keep secrets from me.”
“Why? It’s not like you could have done anything. Could you? You’d have just taken my blood and said you’d work on something that you’d never actually make. Or something that might work in twenty years.”
“Stacey—”
“Steve!”
“Steve, maybe I couldn’t have done anything, but we could have handled the situation together. We could have made the transition easier.”
“There’s not going to be any more transition. You’re going to change me back.”
“I can’t do that—”
“Yes you can! Give me another shot of your miracle drug.”
“Not a chance in hell,” she says. “We don’t have any idea what it’ll do to you, not after being dosed three other times. Not with all this going on.” For emphasis she waves at my hermaphroditic body.
“You have to. It’s the only way to make me a girl again.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes.” I look down at my feet again. “I love Mac. I want to marry him. This is the only way for us to be together.”
“What about your daughter? Don’t you think she’d like her father back?”
“She likes me better as her best friend—her sister.”
Dr. Palmer puts a hand on my shoulder. “We should give this a few days so you can think it through. And so I can know exactly what’s going on.”
“I don’t need a few days! I want to do it now. Before it’s too late.”
“You don’t know if it will even work.”
“I have to try. For Mac.”
“I’m sorry, Steve. I can’t do it. Not until I get a chance to run some tests.”
“Fuck your tests! Give me the fucking shot!”
She takes me by the shoulders and pulls me close to her. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m not like Dr. Ling. I care about you too much to shoot you up with something without knowing what it might do to you.”
I start to sob into her blouse. Gradually she eases me into the living room. As she sits down with me on the couch, I reach over and find her purse. The stun gun is still in there.
I jab the gun into her ribs. Dr. Palmer straightens. “Steve, what are you doing with that?”
“You’re going to give me the shot.”
“The hell I am.” Dr. Palmer slides back a little. “Go ahead and shoot me.”
“Fine. I can do it myself. All I need is your ID to get in.”
“You don’t know where it is. And even if you did find it, there are security locks now. You need a code.”
“So give me the code.”
“Not on your life.”
“This is my life! I’m going to lose everything: Mac, my daughter, my singing career. Don’t you understand that?”
“What you’re asking me to do is unethical. Do you understand that?”
“I don’t care. I just want to be me again.” I still have the Taser pointed at Dr. Palmer, though it’s hard to tell with the tears in my eyes. “I like being Stacey now. I’m happy. I’ve got a future. There’s no future for Steve Fischer.”
“You sure about that?”
“Even if I’m still young, what am I supposed to do? I can’t sing. They won’t let me back on the force.”
“You’ll find something else.”
“No! I don’t want to start over again.”
“Steve—”
“Help me, Doctor. Please. That’s your job, isn’t it? Haven’t you got that whole Hippocratic Oath thing about doing no harm?”
“It’s more harm to give you the shot.”
“Maybe. Maybe it won’t be. Maybe I’ll turn back into Stacey, just like I was.”
“Based on the evidence, I’d say the chances of that are remote.”
“Then maybe I’ll turn into some other Stacey, but at least I’ll still be able to make things work with Mac. And Madison.” I reach out to take Dr. Palmer’s hand. “I know the risks. I want to do this. Whatever happens will be on me.”
Dr. Palmer stares at me for a couple of minutes. She finally sighs. “All right. But I’ll need to get some of your blood before we do anything. We can’t miss a chance to learn what the hell this drug is doing to you.”
***
No one questions Dr. Palmer as she pulls into Lennox Pharmaceuticals at two in the morning. The security guard at the front gate barely glances at her ID before he opens the gate. I’m not sure he even saw me in the seat next to her. Given what’s happened to security guards here in the past, maybe he figures discretion is the better part of valor.
“Top notch security like always,” I grumble.
The guard at the front desk inside the building is just as unconcerned. He doesn’t look at the name Dr. Palmer writes on the visitor log. “We’ll just be a few minutes,” Dr. Palmer says. The guard nods but doesn’t say anything.
The lab is still on the fifth floor. That’s where it was the first time I came here as Steve Fischer, when I was still a police detective. I found Artie Luther up here with Dr. Palmer’s former boss, Dr. Gita Nath, the inventor of FY-1978. Nath survived that night, but was killed the next day by one of Luther’s thugs who slit her wrists to simulate a suicide. By then I had already woke up as Stacey Chance and narrowly escaped being incinerated along with my apartment.
As Dr. Palmer said earlier, there have been some changes. The serum—both samples and formula—are kept in a vault. Dr. Palmer makes me wait outside while she types in the code to the vault and then goes inside to get what we need.
What she comes back with is a syringe that contains a pink liquid. The pink is added to indicate the batch is intended for female patients. Give it to a man and he turns into a woman. At least that’s what happened the first time. I hope it happens this time.
“This is from our latest batch,” she says. “We were going to start testing in two weeks.”
“Well now you get to test it on me instead of some monkey.”
“Not monkeys. People.”
“People? I thought it took years for that.”
“The original serum was already going to start human trials. We’ve just been tinkering with it a little in the wake of what happened to you.”
“So what do you think it’ll do to me?”
“I have no idea. In theory it should make you a woman. If we’re lucky you won’t get much younger.”
“If we’re not lucky?”
“Then Tess will have her granddaughter back.”
“That really cheers me up.”
“You said you knew the risks, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“You want to back out?”
“No,” I say. I think of Mac and Maddy. “I’ll do it.”
Before that, she takes a half-dozen vials of my blood. “If you weren’t so damned impatient I’d do an MRI, X-rays, ultrasounds, the works,” she says. “Then we might know what the fuck is going on with you.”
“Yeah, well, let’s just get this over with.”
Dr. Palmer sighs. She picks up the syringe. “If anyone finds out, they’ll take my license,” she says.
Then she jams the needle in my neck.
Chapter 11
The first time I was injected with FY-1978, my entire body went limp. Artie Luther used that opportunity to shoot me in the head, tie an anchor around my leg, and then drop me into the harbor. While underwater, I had an out-of-body experience, where I watched myself change into a woman from the outside.
A year later, when Dr. Ling injected me, I stayed awake and in my changing body. Those were two of the least pleasant experiences in my life. Both times it felt like someone had me in a vise and was very slowly compacting me. The second time was made even less fun because I lost all the permanent teeth in my mouth and grew a mouth full of baby ones in the span of a couple of minutes.
This time, after the shot I go limp. I let out one scream that probably the entire building can hear. Then I pass out. There’s no out-of-body experience; I don’t feel like I’m being run through a car crusher. Nothing but empty blackness.
Then I open my eyes. I can’t see much, which I take for a positive sign; at least I’ve still got Stacey’s bad eyes. Even when I squint, all I can see is a beige blur. I hear the soft whirring and beeping of hospital machines. How long have I been out? Long enough that Dr. Palmer brought me down to the recovery rooms the company keeps hidden from public view.
Chances Are Omnibus (Gender Swap Fiction) Page 67
