We won’t keep you here too long, Mr. Billings, the male attendant says, glancing at Rachel but mostly looking at the mouth that had spoken. You’re doing very well. Really, you’re an exemplary subject. You should be so proud.
There are so many things that Rachel wants to say. Like: Please just let me go, I have a life. I have an art show coming up in a coffee shop, I can’t miss it. You don’t have the right. I deserve to live my own life. I have people who used to love me. I’ll give you everything I own. I won’t press charges if you don’t sue. This is no kind of therapy. On and on. But she can’t trust that corpse voice. She hyperventilates and gags on her own spit. So sore she’s hamstrung.
Every time her eyes get washed out, she’s terrified this is it, her last sight. She knows from what Lucy and the other one have said that if her vision switches over to the dead man’s, that’s the final stage and she’s gone.
The man is still talking. We have a form signed by your primary-care physician, Dr. Wallace, stating that this treatment is both urgent and medically indicated, as well as an assessment by our in-house psychologist, Dr. Yukizawa. He holds up two pieces of paper, with the looping scrawls of two different doctors that she’s never even heard of. She’s been seeing Dr. Cummings for years, since before her transition. She makes a huge effort to shake her head and is shocked by how weak she feels.
You are so fortunate to be one of the first to receive this treatment, the man says. Early indications are that subjects experience a profound improvement across seven different measures of quality of life and social integration. Their OGATH scores are generally high, especially in the red levels. Rejection is basically unheard of. You won’t believe how good you’ll feel once you’re over the adjustment period, he says. If the research goes well, the potential benefits to society are limited only by the cadaver pipeline.
Rachel’s upcoming art show, in a tiny coffee shop, is called “Against Curation.” There’s a lengthy manifesto, which Rachel planned to print out and mount onto foam or cardboard, claiming that the act of curating is inimical to art or artistry. The only person who can create a proper context for a given piece of art is the artist herself, and arranging someone else’s art is an act of violence. Bear in mind that the history of museums is intrinsically tied up with imperialism and colonialism, and the curatorial gaze is historically white and male. But even the most enlightened postcolonial curator is a pirate. Anthologies, mix tapes, it’s all the same. Rachel had a long response prepared, in case anybody accused her of just being annoyed that no real gallery would display her work.
Rachel can’t help noting the irony of writing a tirade about the curator’s bloody scalpel, only to end up with a hole in her literal head.
When the man has left her alone, Rachel begins screaming Jeffrey’s name in the dead man’s voice. Just the name, nothing that the corpse could twist. She still can’t bear to hear that deep timbre, the sick damaged throat, speaking for her. But she can feel her life essence slipping away. Every time she looks over at the dead man, he has more color in his skin and his arms and legs are moving, like a restless sleeper. His face even looks, in some hard-to-define way, more like Rachel’s.
Jeffrey! The words come out in a hoarse growl. Jeffrey! Come here!
Rachel wants to believe she’s already defeated this trap, because she has lived her life without a single codicil, and whatever they do, they can’t retroactively change the person she has been for her entire adulthood. But that doesn’t feel like enough. She wants the kind of victory where she gets to actually walk out of here.
Jeffrey feels a horrible twist in his neck. This is all unfair, because he already informed Mr. Randall of his conflict and yet he’s still here, having to behave professionally while the subject is putting him in the dead center of attention.
Seriously, the subject will not stop bellowing his name, even with a throat that’s basically raw membrane at this point. You’re not supposed to initiate communication with the subject without submitting an Interlocution Permission form through the proper channels. But the subject is putting him into an impossible position.
Jeffrey, she keeps shouting. And then: Jeffrey, talk to me!
People are lobbing questions in Slack, and of course Jeffrey types the wrong thing and the softcore clown porn comes up. Ha ha, I fell for it again, he types. There’s a problem with one of the latest cadavers, a cause-of-death question, and Mr. Randall says the deputy assistant secretary might be in town later.
Jeffrey’s mother was a Nobel Prize winner for her work with people who had lost the ability to distinguish between weapons and musical instruments, a condition that frequently leads to maiming or worse. Jeffrey’s earliest memories involve his mother flying off to serve as an expert witness in the trials of murderers who claimed they had thought their assault rifles were banjos or mandolins. Many of these people were faking it, but Jeffrey’s mom was usually hired by the defense, not the prosecution. Every time she returned from one of these trips, she would fling her Nobel medal out her bathroom window and then stay up half the night searching the bushes for it, becoming increasingly drunk. One morning Jeffrey found her passed out below her bedroom window and believed for a moment that she had fallen two stories to her death. This was, she explained to him later, a different sort of misunderstanding than mistaking a gun for a guitar: a reverse-Oedipal misapprehension. These days Jeffrey’s mom requires assistance to dress, to shower, and to transit from her bed to a chair and back, and nobody can get Medicare, Medicaid, or any secondary insurance to pay for this. To save money, Jeffrey has moved back in with his mother, which means he gets to hear her ask at least once a week what happened to Rachel, who was such a nice boy.
Jeffrey can’t find his headphones to drown out his name, which the cadaver is shouting so loud that foam comes out of one corner of his mouth. Frances and another engineer both complain on Slack about the noise, which they can hear from down the hall. OMG creepy, Frances types. Make it stop make it stop.
I can’t, Jeffrey types back. I can’t ok. I don’t have the right paperwork.
Maybe tomorrow Rachel will wake up fully inhabiting her male body. She’ll look down at her strong forearms, threaded with veins, and she’ll smile and thank Jeffrey. Maybe she’ll nod at him, by way of a tiny salute, and say, You did it, buddy. You brought me back.
But right now the cadaver keeps shouting, and Jeffrey realizes he’s covering his ears with his fists and is doubled over.
Rachel apparently decides that Jeffrey’s name alone isn’t working. The cadaver pauses and then blurts, I would really love to hang with you. Hey! I appreciate everything you’ve done to set things right. JEFFREY! You really shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble for me.
Somehow these statements have an edge, like Jeffrey can easily hear the intended meaning. He looks up and sees Rachel’s eyes, spraying tears like a damn lawn sprinkler.
Jeffrey, the corpse says, I saw Sherri. She told me the truth about you.
She’s probably just making things up. Sherri never knew anything for sure, or at least couldn’t prove anything. And yet just the mention of her name is enough to make Jeffrey straighten up and walk to the door of the observation room, even with no signed Interlocution Permission form. Jeffrey makes himself stride up to the two nearly naked bodies and stop at the one on the left, the one with the ugly tattoo and the drooling silent mouth.
I don’t want to hurt you, Jeffrey says. I never wanted to hurt you, even when we were kids and you got weird on me. My mom still asks about you.
Hey pal, you’ve never been a better friend to me than you are right now, the cadaver says. But on the left, the eyes are red and wet and full of violence.
What did Sherri say? Stop playing games and tell me, Jeffrey says. When did you see her? What did she say?
But Rachel has stopped trying to make the other body talk and is just staring up, letting her eyes speak for her.
Listen, Jeffrey says to the tattooed body. This is already over,
the process is too advanced. I could disconnect all of the machines, unplug the tap from your occipital lobe and everything, and the cadaver would continue drawing your remaining life energy. The link between you is already stable. This project, it’s a government-industry collaboration, we call it Love and Dignity for Everyone. You have no idea. But you, you’re going to be so handsome. You always used to wish you could look like this guy, remember? I’m actually kind of jealous of you.
Rachel just thrashes against her restraints harder than ever.
Here, I’ll show you, Jeffrey says at last. He reaches behind Rachel’s obsolete head and unplugs the tap, along with the other wires. See? he says. No difference. That body is already more you than you. It’s already done.
That’s when Rachel leans forward, in her old body, and head-butts Jeffrey, before grabbing for his key ring with the utility knife on it. She somehow gets the knife open with one hand while he’s clutching his nose, and slashes a bloody canyon across Jeffrey’s stomach. He falls, clutching at his own slippery flesh, and watches her saw through her straps and land on unsteady feet. She lifts Jeffrey’s lanyard, smearing blood on his shirt as it goes.
When Rachel was in college, she heard a story about a business professor named Lou, who dated two different women and strung them both along. Laurie was a lecturer in women’s studies, while Susie worked in the bookstore co-op despite having a PhD in comp lit. After the women found out Lou was dating both of them, things got ugly. Laurie stole Susie’s identity, signing her up for a stack of international phone cards and a subscription to the Dirndl of the Month Club, while Susie tried to crash Laurie’s truck and cold-cocked Laurie as she walked out of a seminar on intersectional feminism. In the end, the two women looked at each other, over the slightly dented truck and Laurie’s bloody lip and Susie’s stack of junk mail. Laurie just spat blood and said, Listen. I won’t press charges if you don’t sue. Susie thought for a moment, then stuck out her hand and said, Deal. The two women never spoke to each other, or Lou, ever again.
Rachel has always thought this incident exposed the roots of the social contract: most of our relationships are upheld not by love, or obligation, or gratitude, but by mutually assured destruction. Most of the people in Rachel’s life who could have given her shit for being transgender were differently bodied, non-neurotypical, or some other thing that also required some acceptance from her. Mote, beam, and so on.
For some reason Rachel can’t stop thinking about the social contract and mutually assured destruction as she hobbles down the hallway of Love and Dignity for Everyone with a corpse following close behind. Every time she pauses to turn around and see if the dead man is catching up, he gains a little ground. So she forces herself to keep running with weak legs, even as she keeps hearing his hoarse breath right behind her. True power, Rachel thinks, is being able to destroy others with no consequences to yourself.
She’s reached the end of a corridor, and she’s trying not to think about Jeffrey’s blood on the knife in her hand. He’ll be fine, he’s in a facility. She remembers Sherri in the computer lab, staring at the pictures on the internet: her hair wet from the shower, one hand reaching for a towel. Sherri sobbing but then tamping it down as she looked at the screen. Sherri telling Rachel at lunch, I’m leaving this school. I can’t stay. There’s a heavy door with an RFID reader, and Jeffrey’s card causes it to click twice before finally bleeping. Rachel’s legs wobble and spasm, and the breath of the dead man behind her grows louder. Then she pushes through the door and runs up the square roundabout of stairs. Behind her, she hears Lucy the nurse shout at her to come back, because she’s still convalescing, this is a delicate time.
Rachel feels a little more of her strength fade every time the dead man’s hand lurches forward. Something irreplaceable leaves her. She pushes open the dense metal door marked EXIT and nearly faints with sudden day-blindness.
The woods around Love and Dignity for Everyone are dense with moss and underbrush, and Rachel’s bare feet keep sliding off tree roots. I can’t stop, Rachel pleads with herself, I can’t stop or my whole life was for nothing. Who even was I, if I let this happen to me. The nearly naked dead man crashes through branches that Rachel has ducked under. She throws the knife and hears a satisfying grunt, but he doesn’t even pause. Rachel knows that anybody who sees both her and the cadaver will choose to help the cadaver. There’s no way to explain her situation in the dead man’s voice. She vows to stay off roads and avoid talking to people. This is her life now.
Up ahead she sees a fast-running stream, and she wonders how the corpse will take to water. The stream looks like the one she and Jeffrey used to play in, when they would catch crayfish hiding under rocks. The crayfish looked just like tiny lobsters, and they would twist around trying to pinch you as you gripped their midsections. Rachel sloshes in the water and doesn’t hear the man’s breath in her ear for a moment. Up ahead the current leads to a steep waterfall that’s so white in the noon sunlight, it appears to stand still. She remembers staring into a bucket full of crayfish, debating whether to boil them alive or let them all go. And all at once she has a vivid memory of herself and Jeffrey both holding the full bucket and turning it sideways, until all the crayfish sloshed back into the river. The crayfish fled for their lives, their eyes seeming to protrude with alarm, and Rachel held on to an empty bucket with Jeffrey, feeling an inexplicable sense of relief. We are such wusses, Jeffrey said, and they both laughed. She remembers the sight of the last crayfish rushing out of view—as if this time, maybe the trick would work, and nobody would think to look under this particular rock. She reaches the waterfall, seizes a breath, and jumps with both feet at once.
Micah Dean Hicks
Church of Birds
from Kenyon Review
The swan boy lives in an abandoned church in a sleepy green town by the river. He is small and young-looking still, though he is sixteen now and has been the swan boy for years. His hair is dirty and grown out long enough to cover his shy face. His clothes are striped with greasy white stains, radiating down from the shoulders of his rough shirt. No one would give him a second look if not for the huge white shield of a swan’s wing that he has in place of a left arm. The people in town do not talk to him. Though they call him the swan boy, he has a name, and that name is Ben.
He has no job, but Ben gets up early and stays busy about town all day. He is clumsy with his big wing, but patient. He has learned to climb trees using his feet and good arm, while he holds out the wing for balance. Ben steals birds’ nests, little braided crowns, and fills his church with them. If he finds the alien blue of their eggs, he takes these too, holding them carefully in the fold of his wing. He has tried so many times to hatch the eggs with the careful heat of his own wing, but he has never been able to do so. Once he held a clutch of eggs so close that he cracked them in his sleep and woke up cold and covered in yolk and shell.
In the town’s small square, Ben throws bread from his pockets and waits with a fisherman’s tattered cast net. When pigeons come, he makes his clumsy throw. Sometimes he only tangles himself in the net. Sometimes the birds are wary of him. Today two sooty pigeons stand at his feet, heads hammering the paving stones for his stale bread. Ben throws open the net, his wing arcing over his head like he’s preparing to fly away, and the net falls over them. They thrash and cry, but Ben gathers them against his chest and rushes back to the church.
Shadows lick across the stained windows within. Ben bangs on the door for a count of ten, listening to the scatter of wings inside, then darts in with his catch. He lets the net fall, and the bruised pigeons hop out and flee over the wood floor, covered in their own watery shit. His hundreds of birds, scared by the noise at the door, crowd the back of the church or dart through the high, open space of the sanctuary.
Though the church is filthy with bird droppings and musty-gray with dust, there is color here. Red cardinals, bluebirds, orange-breasted robins sing and skip through the air. Many are the pigeons, marbled white
and black, taking on colors from the stained glass as they fly through squares of bloody red, Byzantine gold, or glacial blue. There are ducks nesting in the corners, a crane with a crooked neck. There are no ravens because they are too clever to let him approach, no owls because he is afraid they would eat the others, and no swans because he cannot bear to look at them.
Troughs of water for drinking and bathing sit in the middle of the floor. Sacks of birdseed, ripped open, spill across the old carpet in a shower of white and black and amber seeds several inches deep. A ring of bright mold limns everything like a cold, slow-burning fire.
The new pigeons join a clutch of others on the exposed rafters. The sound of the birds is like the river below, or coins spilling, or weeping. Ben lies back on a damp pew and watches them fly for hours, admiring how whole their bodies are, how beautifully suited to doing one perfect thing.
When he rolls over to sleep, his human hand brushes something small and stony. He brings it to his face and smells rot, feels out the tiny beak with his thumb. He will sleep with the dead bird in his hand. He will bury it in the morning. He will cry, and he will rage, and he will wonder why it died when he gave it everything it needed. He will check that there is enough food and water, study the birds to see if any are sick, take every precaution he can. He will wait, and in a few days it will happen again.
When he dreams, Ben remembers flight. He and his five brothers in their stout swan bodies. The wind rushing over their black-masked faces and the white tips of their wings. How they landed on a brick street after a rain to feast on meaty worms surfacing from their burrows. The green brack of river fronds hanging from his beak. And his brothers’ five voices, each a mirror of his own.
They weren’t meant to be swans. It was a curse, though it didn’t feel like a curse. Their sister Julia saved them. She was required to close her mouth and not laugh, or speak, or even write for six years. One year for each of her cursed brothers. She had to sew them each a shirt of weeds. It was not easy for her, the silence. She sewed her mouth shut to keep her promise to her siblings, but as soon as she did, a man appeared. And since she didn’t say no, he took her home and made her his wife, and she had his children. All the while, she sewed her shirts of grass and cried her silent, angry tears.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 24
