Hassan stepped in with his bright teeth and assured her that yes, Ada was in good hands, she’d been fine when he saw her the night before, and it was all just a rough morning. “She’ll be okay, we’ll take care of her,” he lied.
Donyen had already walked out in a temper before he arrived. “I know I abandoned you,” she said later. “I was angry. I’m sorry.”
The doctor discharged Ada, to my collapsing relief. Saachi had been calling but I wouldn’t take her calls or Chima’s. She called one of Ada’s friends instead. “She needs to stay in the hospital,” Saachi said. “Let me talk to her doctors.”
She couldn’t. I’d had Ada revoke all Saachi’s access back when she started calling us unstable, so she wasn’t Ada’s emergency contact anymore, and since this was America, the doctors refused to talk to her. “We don’t have the patient’s permission,” they said. Later in the evening, Ada spoke to Añuli.
“Are you okay now?” Añuli asked.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Ada lied.
“Okay. Good.”
That was it. Just like that, I had lost.
Chapter Seventeen
How many days are we going to use to count the teeth of the devil?
We
Tell a child to wash her body and she washes her stomach. Asụghara was a fool for what she tried. Of all the paths she could have chosen, she went and picked the one that was taboo to Ala, as if she would be allowed to complete it, as if she forgot whose child the Ada was. Life does not belong to us to take. And on top of that, she should have remembered that we are ọgbanje; none of us die like this.
It had been a good gamble nonetheless, having the little beastself out in the world, allowing her to leap from bed to bed and shake hearts between her pointed teeth. When she failed at returning through the gates, we felt the sting of it strongly. If Ala did not want us to return yet, then we had been disobedient by trying. The brothersisters were no excuse, even though they had commanded us to come back—between them and her, the choice of who to obey shouldn’t have been a choice.
So we were still caged inside the Ada, with the grainy memory of charcoal coating the back of her throat. She was more isolated than ever and we were chafing at still being flesh, so the only thing left to do was hunt. If we were trapped in a body, then we would do bodily things. We painted the Ada’s mouth and lined her eyes with night, and we went out with Asụghara on a long and relaxed leash. It was easy, as it always was. At the bar, there was a man with eyes like anchors and hair like snakes, and although he was shy there, he held the Ada’s hand when she got out of the taxi and walked with him to the brownstone he lived in. What a gentle strange thing, we thought. We felt large and cruel next to him, Asụghara hiding behind the sweet of the Ada’s face, puzzled by his delicacy. In his apartment, we watched as he moved around his shelves and furniture. He was a craftsman and there were fine things everywhere. The Ada said something that amused him and he took her face in his hands, laughing, and kissed her in a pure and glimmering moment.
In the tightness of his bedroom, Asụghara put our palm against the red houndstooth wall and cried out as he moved in the Ada. The flesh was flesh, and for a little while, we could forget all the hurt, all the weight of over two decades of embodiment destroying us. He was so beautiful.
“You don’t have to be gentle,” Asụghara told him. He looked in our eyes, raised his hand, and hit us hard across the Ada’s face. The impact rattled her jaw, but we didn’t look away; we felt the taste of rain fill our mouth. Ah, he was such a gentle, strange thing, to hurt us so perfectly. In the morning, before his reality descended on him again, he turned his head to the Ada.
“I needed this,” he whispered. “I needed you.”
She had forgotten his name, if she ever knew it, and we never heard from him again. Months later, when the summer was starting and Brooklyn was spilling sunshine, the Ada ran into him at a street festival and he lowered his anchor eyes as he passed. We forgave him easily. After you have let the wilderness in you come out and play, after you have spilled your darkness in front of a stranger, it can be difficult to look at them in the sentience of daylight. Besides, he was only a beautiful blip in the crazed timeline of embodiment—he mattered so much, and yet, not at all.
In the months since we’d been in his bed, the Ada had been to Lagos, to Cape Town and Johannesburg, where Asụghara had taken bodies in backseats and hostel beds and living room floors. We had overreacted and scared the humans, forgotten their names and faces, betrayed some friends and left others. Even all of that was nothing compared to the best thing we’d accomplished, when we laid out the Ada’s body on a surgical table and let a masked man take a knife lavishly to the flesh of her chest, mutilating her better and deeper than we ever could, all the way to righteousness. After such carvings, how could one human matter?
The Ada’s surgery happened the spring after Asụghara’s failed attempt, just five months later. Before then, we used to think of the body as belonging truly to the Ada, as something that we were only guests in, something that the beastself could borrow. But now that we had been spurned from the gates, now that we were sentenced to meat, it was time to accept that this body was ours too. And with Saint Vincent, our little grace, taking the front more than he used to, the body, as it was, was becoming unsatisfactory, too feminine, too reproductive. That form had worked for Asụghara—those breasts with the large, dark areolae and nipples she could lift to her mouth—but we were more than her and we were more than the saint. We were a fine balance, bigger than whatever the namings had made, and we wanted to reflect that, to change the Ada into us. Removing her breasts was only the first step.
You must understand, fertility was a pure and clear abomination to us. It would be unthinkable, unbelievably cruel for us to ever swell so unnaturally, to lactate, to mutate our vessel. Could there be anything more human? The ways of our brothersisters, of ọgbanje, were clear. Do not leave a human lineage, for you did not come from a human lineage. If you have no ancestors, you cannot become an ancestor. We were happy to obey these instructions; we had always ferociously protected the Ada from the blasphemy of having another life grow in her. How many times had Asụghara allowed a wash of sperm into the Ada’s body? Yet each time, we hardened against it and nothing took. We were a miracle like that, a mercy to the Ada.
When Ewan left and Asụghara allowed Saint Vincent to take the Ada’s body and start binding her chest—all of these things were in preparation for a shedding, the skin splitting in long seams. The first time the Ada wore the binder, she turned sideways in a mirror and Saint Vincent laughed out loud in relief, in joy, in the rightness of the absence. The Ada was wearing faded purple jeans, and the soft of her belly swelled out from under the cutting bottom edge of the vest. But she could endure that, even the sharpness around her armpits. The flatness was worth it. The Ada pulled a short-sleeved T-shirt over the vest and ran her hands up and down the mild curve. It felt like armor, like we were bulletproof, like Saint Vincent was being built up in layers of determined fiber. The Ada wore the binder every day and washed it by hand in her small bathroom sink. Once, she made the mistake of putting it in the dryer, weakening the elastic. Saint Vincent suffered with each fraction of looseness she had caused, so she was more careful after that.
Before Asụghara put us in the emergency room, we had been searching for doctors to alter the Ada, to carve our body into something that we could truly call a home. Saachi finally realized, in her panic over the Ada’s suicide attempt, exactly how much of her daughter actually belonged to her, which was to say, not much at all. The Ada was slipping from the human mother to us, to a freedom Saachi didn’t trust. After all, how could she keep the girl safe if the girl wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t obey, if the girl was us? We were grateful that Saachi had at one time cared for the Ada, had kept her alive as a baby and been an excellent guardian as far as she could, but what did she know of graces or beastselves or ugly, unwelcome embodiments or the sacrifices a snake must go through to
continue its timeline, the necessity of molting, the graves built of skins? We ignored her as gently as we could—this body was ours, not hers; this girl was ours, not hers, she had to understand where her jurisdiction ended and how pushing further was blasphemy.
The Ada used a therapist to assist with our carving plan and we discovered that humans had medical words—terms for what we were trying to do—that there were procedures, gender reassignment, transitioning. We knew what we were planning was right. Even the things that the Ada used to dislike about her body had mellowed out once we let Saint Vincent run. Then, the broad shoulders and the way they tapered down to narrow hips and small buttocks finally fit. Men’s clothes draped properly on this body—we were handsome. We considered removing the breasts utterly and tattooing the flat of her chestbone, but that decisiveness still felt wrong, one end of the spectrum rocketing unsteadily to the other end—it wasn’t us, not yet. So we chose a reduction instead of a removal; we cut down the C cups of blatant mammary tissue to small As, flat enough to not need brassieres, to not move, to be a stillness. The Ada wanted to include her human mother in the carving and we allowed it because, we supposed, vessels are loyal. But Saachi was against the surgery—she called the doctors and threatened them till they pulled out; she fought with the therapists, fought to have us seen as unstable, sick. She called Saul, who she never spoke to, not since the divorce, and told him, outed us to him.
“Your daughter is trying to cut off her breasts,” she said.
The Ada was furious but we remained calm. We understood what was necessary—humans often fail at listening, as if their stubbornness will convince the truth to change, as if they have that kind of power. They do, however, understand forceful things, cruelties—they obey those. So we terminated Saachi’s contact with the Ada’s doctors, we excluded her, exiled and excommunicated her. This was when she stopped being an emergency contact; this was why she had no access to the Ada’s doctors when Asụghara tried to kill the body. For a woman who looked to drown her loneliness in her children, it was a brutal thing to do, to push her out. But we had to strip her of power, to remind her that a mere human could not thwart us, that she stood no chance. We do not return your children until it suits us, if ever.
When we found the next doctors, the human mother knew nothing about it. The Ada brought in pictures of small chests, small enough to where we didn’t think of them as breasts, small enough to where we could feel reverted to a time when we weren’t capable of biological things, when we were neutral like we should have been. The Ada hoarded her student loan refunds until she had enough: thousands to pay the doctor and the anesthesiologist. She braided long yarn onto her locs so they could be tied back and left alone as we recovered from the surgery.
Saachi called the Ada, unaware of the plan, excited for a visit she was planning to see her sister. “I’m coming to New York,” she said. “I need to get a visa for China.”
The Ada began to panic but we brushed her aside. It was an unnecessary reaction—what a waste of time to spend it being human. We wrote to Saachi and informed her that the Ada was getting an operation the day before Saachi’s flight would arrive.
“You are welcome to stay at the apartment if you’re going to be supportive,” we wrote. “Otherwise, you have to stay at a hotel.” It was simpler this way. We were an inevitable force; it would be easier to fall into our flow than to question things. Like we said, she needed to understand. The girl belonged to us, had always belonged to us.
On the day of the surgery, the doctor drew thick black lines over the Ada’s chest. He explained how he was going to make incisions in the underneath fold of the breast, slice up the middle, ring the nipple in a smooth, round, and bloody cut. The fatty tissue would be removed; the dark circle of areolae would be made small, tiny, a bare orbit around the nipple. The gashes would be stitched with a material that the flesh would take in later so it wouldn’t have to be taken out. Pictures were taken. They slid a thin and strong length of hollow metal into the Ada’s arm and fed her drugs through it. She had never been sedated before; we had known nothing of the taste of such drugs since the days we were born, and it was a strange artificiality as we counted down, as we went absolutely nowhere. There were no gates, no middle spaces—we were just gone and then we were back and it was hours later and we were missing weight from our chest.
Saachi arrived the next day and said nothing about the surgery, asked no questions. We approved of her decision. She accompanied the Ada to the post-op appointment, to the clean, organized waiting room, then back to the exposed brick of the Ada’s apartment and her yellow kitchen. She helped the Ada change the dressings and caught her arm when the heat from the shower made our body faint. It was a relief; we were grateful for the reprieve, not for us, no, but for the Ada. Malena was there as well, witness as she always was, and the Ada smiled to see her mother share Heinekens and Dominican cigars with this her saintridden friend. As for us, we were fascinated by the white tape that hid the cuts, by the fine stitching, by the new body. We juggled the Ada’s chemistry and decided to purify her: we ran through her cells and rejected alcohol, meat, dairy, processed sugars; we made them cramp her stomach, hurt her head, and twist her intestines. This was our body and it would become what we wanted, now that the reconfiguring was done.
Before the surgery, the Ada had told her friends that she couldn’t wait for when she could wear dresses again. They were confused. They stared at her bound chest and boy clothes.
“Why would you go more feminine without boobs?” they asked. “Most people get it done to be more masculine.”
The Ada shrugged and we moved in her shoulders. It was simple how we saw ourself, dresses creeping up the thigh, gashing open at the front to show chest bone—tulle and lace and clouds of clothes. Just like how having long hair weighing down our back made us want to wear buttons up to our throat, men’s sleeves rolled up our biceps, handsome, handsome things. None of this was a new thing. We had been the same since the first birth, through the second naming, the third molting. To make the vessel look a little more like us—that was the extent of our intent. We have understood what we are, the places we are suspended in, between the inaccurate concepts of male and female, between the us and the brothersisters slavering on the other side.
After our first birth, it took only a short time before we realized that time had trapped us in a space where we no longer were what we used to be, but had not yet become what we were going to be. It was a place that always and never moved. The space between the spirits and the alive is death. The space between life and death is resurrection. It has a smell like a broken mango leaf, sharp, sticking to the inner rind of our skin.
The prophecies that came later, from Malena and others, they explained this—the shifting, the quick skinnings and reshapings, the falling and revival of the scales. But by then it was too late for the Ada to do anything except try to keep up with us, try not to be drowned in the liminal fluid we swam in. It tasted sharp as gin, metallic as blood, was soaked in both, down past the red into the deep loam. Ọgbanje space. We could rest in it like the inside curve of a calabash; we could turn in on ourself, wind back to our beginning, make those final folds. Sometimes they call this the crossroads, the message point, the hinge. It is also called flux space, the line or the edge—like we said, resurrection.
Chapter Eighteen
My god, my god.
We
There had been, in all of this, some comfort in knowing that we were not the first to pass through and wake up in flesh. Since the baptism, since they called him up from the acid of the sea with prayer, we’d known about Yshwa. He remained throughout the years, drifting by and over, his face shifting, the bones underneath bubbling and moving. We understood Asụghara’s resentment of him, for his refusal to take flesh again for the Ada, but his choice made sense. It has always been obvious that Yshwa, like other gods, is not moved by suffering in the ways humans imagine.
Perhaps he would take flesh one last ti
me, when the world was ending, just to watch it burn. Or he might continue to stay away, despite how many people awaited his glorious redescent. If we were him, we would do that, stay away. Why exist in this realm by choice? Humanity was ugly and cratered; it made sleep a relief, a brief escape where we could slide into another realm. That was as close to death as we could get, as close to the gates, to returning home or anywhere else. If we had been released like Yshwa, no amount of praying or fasting or midnight vigils would bring us back, no matter how much olive oil or blood was spilled in our name. But that was not what happened.
We remained trapped and so Asụghara softened toward Yshwa as he kept visiting the marble for his meetings with the Ada. At first, Asụghara would turn away and pretend not to hear the soft ripple of their conversations, the only form of prayer the Ada was capable of anymore. Ever since Soren, she couldn’t kneel or press her palms together to worship Yshwa the way she used to—it felt false. Too much had been broken. So the Ada simply spoke to him as they took walks along grassed paths and black beaches, where they would sit on sea bones and watch the water.
Yshwa was different every time he manifested. He used variations of his original human form, changing the height, the degree of brown in his skin from mild to deep, the cleanliness of his linens, the kink of his dark hair, the breadth of his nose. His hands would be long fingered with smooth, pearled nails, or broad and stocky with callused palms that he picked splinters out of as they spoke. Sometimes he was tall, thin, with a graceful neck and tired eyes, his skin black as stone. Or he’d be thick, barrel-chested, thighs like foundations, skin like burnt sugar. He was always gentle.
When Asụghara started to turn toward him, slowly and hesitantly, Yshwa called no attention to it. He continued the conversations as if he’d been speaking to both Asụghara and the Ada all along, as if he’d always known the beastself was listening and his words had been meant for everyone. We approved of Asụghara’s change of heart because, after all, Yshwa understood better than anyone what we were going through, having died in his own flesh form, and having him was better than being alone here. Besides, since his embodied days had been so long before ours, we could accept him as an older sibling. It was nice to have another brothersister.
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