A Year Without a Name

by Cyrus Grace Dunham

  In one of the books about Amelia Earhart, I read about an old woman in Florida who claimed she’d heard Amelia’s voice calling for help on her transistor radio when she was a little girl, her SOS sent across the world as a misdirected radio wave. I told my dad I couldn’t sleep because I heard Amelia’s voice calling out to me, speaking over my thoughts, like she had out of the radio. Amelia was there inside my head. During the day her voice was on top of my voice, so fast and afraid that I couldn’t understand myself. When I looked down at my body, I wondered if I was just a doll or an action figure. What did it mean to be alive? Was I real? Would I just disappear in the night, like Amelia had? If people were looking for me, how would I know? I would be utterly alone, until I was nothing.

  The closer we got to LAX, and the farther I got from Zoya, the more my neuroses set in. I could hardly eat the complimentary dinner because of my obsessive calculations about its nutritional content and its sourcing. What chemical pigments had they added to make the flesh of the farmed salmon appear pink? In what ocean was this particular salmon’s floating net cage? How many millions of other salmon lived alongside it in its feedlot? How many people had been underpaid to handle it? How long was it frozen before being reheated in saffron dill cream sauce?

  Political analysis becomes its own kind of pathology. One learns to locate violence in even the most intimate and banal moments. Sex: a rehearsal or a failed rejection of power differentials. Drinking: a market-driven addiction we use to momentarily forget we’re in the midst of the apocalypse. The top of the mountain near my house in Northeast LA: where I can see which homes belong to people who believe they deserve to keep their lawns green with water piped in from Colorado. I’ve used deconstruction to distance myself from the present since I was a child. My education has affirmed that my capacity for deconstruction is central to my intelligence.

  At LAX customs, there was a blank space on the wall where Obama’s portrait had hung. Trump’s face still hadn’t replaced it. Waiting to go through border patrol, I replayed Zoya’s voice saying “they’re asleep,” saying “overwhelm me,” saying my name. Grace. It lost its history when she said it, became something new.

  I looked down at my passport. Grace Dunham. Female. Five foot ten. Born January 28, 1992. Fake smile, thick glasses, ponytail. Female. Who was she kidding? I didn’t even believe myself.

  A Lyft driver named Rick pulled up outside the terminal in a white Prius, his iPhone scotch-taped to the dashboard. The back seat was full of books.

  “Feel free,” he said, “to take a look at the books. Look through them all.”

  All the books had his face on the cover, smiling, a little off-center. The titles were printed in sans serif: The Art of Thinking, volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4. “Rick is an enlightened artist, novelist, and musician who follows no man’s rules and truly marches to the beat of his own drum,” the bio read.

  “Cool stuff, eh?” he asked.

  He kept turning around at stoplights to tell me things: he’d changed many women’s lives; they’d sobbed in the back seat, broken down, kissed the top of his head, asked if he was an angel.

  Somewhere in Baldwin Hills, he asked, “Do you think you’re real, girl?”

  “I don’t know, Rick.” The answer, of course, was that I did not feel real. Not in the slightest. The only thing that felt real to me was my all-consuming desire to return to the childhood bedroom of the girl I’d just spent two weeks with, whom I felt was the guardian of my becoming.

  “You’re not real, girl,” said the enlightened artist. “We’re just plugged in. Holograms in an ectoplasmic network created by the architects, the archangels. This is a game, girl. Play it.

  “What do you think, girl?” he said. “What do you think?”

  What I thought was that I wanted a wall of manhood around me. I was sick of being porous to all new positions and incapable of not empathizing.

  We neared my neighborhood. Off the highway, past the IHOP, turning on Cypress, toward the river, up San Fernando, closer and closer to home. We turned onto Future Street.

  “Listen, you’re cool, I want to give you a gift.”

  He handed me a screen-printed CD. His face smiled up at me. A CD of love songs.

  “Enjoy it. Listen closely. Peace, Grace. Peace.”

  After he drove away, I threw the CD in the trash.

  Hearing him say the name Grace disgusted me. I unlocked the door, went up to my room, threw my luggage on the floor, and pulled the picture of Zoya and me out of its envelope. I held it by the edges, tilting it so the sunlight bounced off different parts of Zoya’s body. Then I looked at my yellow notepad, where I’d written down, four times: “Don’t turn me into a fiction. Don’t turn me into a fiction. Don’t turn me into a fiction. Don’t turn me into a fiction.” Eight thousand six hundred eighty-eight miles away from her, Zoya seemed hyperreal. Without her, my sense of self dissipated. The fiction was me.

  2

  THE WEEK I RETURNED to Los Angeles, I dreamed I had anesthetic awareness during top surgery. My eyes were closed and I couldn’t move. I felt the surgeon sliding fat and glands out from under the incisions, leaving empty pouches where my breasts had been, then stitching the flaps of skin back down to my chest muscles. The combination of immobility and consciousness wasn’t so terrifying. I breathed into the sharpness of the feeling as they finished closing me up and was calm.

  In the dream I woke up groggy. The procedure had been its own trancelike dream within the dream. After, I sat slumped over in a wheelchair, eyes a quarter open. I wore a compression top velcroed around my chest to keep the skin down. It kept me inside myself, a tight hug. A stranger wheeled me through a hallway into a waiting room.

  Then I was in the lobby of my high school: grand, red-carpeted staircase, marble floor, classical Greek statues cast in plaster framing the entryway. Circles of girls whispered, and circles of boys messed around with each other, their backpacks slung over one shoulder. A few pubescent couples sat on the bottom steps, holding each other’s hands with awkward purposefulness.

  I leaned back against the wall in an oversized army-green T-shirt and baggy blue jeans. They hung on me, as if my mom had gotten them with extra room for me to grow into. I wasn’t hunched over, but I still felt concave. My arms were at my sides, not crossed over my chest in a protective X. I ran my fingers through my hair. It was thick and a little stiff. I looked down at my fingers. They were long, rough. The veins on the backs of my hands popped out. A muscle in my forearm twitched when I moved my thumb. I felt an energy stored in my back, my shoulders, my biceps; if I needed to pull myself up, or push myself over something, I’d be able to. I loped from one side of the lobby to the other, the bottoms of my jeans dragging under my shoes. Loose and limber, I moved gently. My body worked. Relief. So much relief. I let myself believe this was a permanent state of being.

  I woke up from the dream in my bed in Los Angeles, expecting strength and flatness. Lying on my back, adjusting to the morning light, I slung one arm under my head, reached down with the other to scratch my chest. My hands felt small, like a child’s. They found breasts. Lumps between me and myself, between me and whomever I wanted to feel against my chest, between me and the world. The thing about these appendages was that, even though everyone I’d ever slept with assured me they were especially good tits, to me they were utter surplus. One lover had commented on the perky, upright optimism with which the nipples pointed toward the heavens. This made me develop a habit of stretching the nipples as far as I could toward the ground, until they looked like those pink cusk eels that live in the bottom of the ocean, slithering without sunlight.

  I could never, once the breasts started to grow, see them as a permanent part of me. It seemed like if I pricked them with a needle or cut a slit at the bottom of each sack, all the excess liquid should drain out and the skin should pull itself taut again, back against my ribs, where it belonged. I imagined that the seeping liquid would be white and thick, like the mucus that gathers on the stems
of milky sap plants, all the food of the hypothetical children I would never have gathering on the floor below me in a puddle. Better there than inside of me.

  I flipped over onto my stomach, the flesh-mounds underneath me, and wrapped my pillow around my head. Loss, dread, betrayal. All-encompassing disappointment filling in the space made by longing. Without someone next to me to hold, I had to face my own body.

  Zoya had been distant. She had warned me this might happen but that I shouldn’t take it as a sign of her diminishing love. Nonetheless, within seventy-two hours of returning home, I’d begun writing the script of my own rejection, just as she’d cautioned me not to. And, to make the script bearable, I’d reverted to—or, more accurately, marched on with—some of my preferred coping strategies: alcohol, ketamine, cocaine, anything that was available. Substances, whatever their effects, melted my masterful, forensic analysis of every moment into an indiscernible sludge. When I was sober, I surveilled myself. My sentences, my twitches, my limbs, my hand motions, the way I gasped for air at the end of a sentence. At least, if I was sludge, I could relax. Uppers and downers, as different as their outcomes might be, have a shared strength, which is their ability to take you either over or under yourself, until you’re far enough away that you don’t have to be yourself at all. Or whoever you’ve convinced yourself you are.

  When Zoya did call me, it was at strange hours: five a.m. her time, after a night she hadn’t slept. She told me she’d looked at apartments in Mumbai and found one near the sea, where she’d put a desk in front of the window. She thought I’d like sitting there. She kept the logistics of our reunion abstract. I pushed toward concrete planning. Could she visit me in June? Could I come see her? I’d have more money soon; I’d buy a plane ticket. I’d come for the summer. Maybe I’d stay.

  I’d been cycling through our two and a half weeks together on repeat, looking for clues as to whether what happened between us was more than just a convincing hallucination. Looking for signs that I could continue to be the person she desired even when I was away from her. I still had heightened sensation in the spots where she touched me: the back of my neck, the tops of my shoulders, my forearms. She had made them radiate some kind of warm, tingling potential. I hated myself for still believing that one person, a lover, could rid me of whatever kept me hating myself in the first place.

  I kept the printed picture of us from the photo studio in its white envelope, hidden in between books. The ritual of taking the picture out of the envelope grew increasingly masochistic: instead of reminding me I had existed alongside her, it made me that much more aware of her absence.

  It’s not that I hadn’t been in love, or in pain, before. I met Antonia when I was twenty, and six years later we were still entangled, neither technically together nor wholly apart.

  Antonia had big owl eyes, and her pupils dilated when she focused on something. She was also a photographer, like my mother, which gave her gaze a particular power. Her beauty pulled at something ancient in me, provoked an urgency that made all previous desire seem manageable in comparison.

  The first time we met, she stared at me as if I was hiding something. I still had long hair then, which I kept out of my face with bobby pins. I was still a young democrat and a young woman. She appeared to know something about me that I didn’t yet have language for.

  As things progressed, Antonia never called me pretty or beautiful. She intuited what would be most uncomfortable and necessary for me to hear.

  “You’re not a girl,” she’d say. “You’re too handsome.”

  It seemed like if I followed her, I’d end up somewhere I’d always assumed was off-limits to me: a place where people externalized their desires without ambivalence.

  Early in our relationship, Antonia started photographing me. Never all of me, just parts of my body, isolated in the frame. My elbow, chest, foot, or knee, alongside objects she’d collected and anthropomorphized: a bone, a burnt fan, an ax, a rose. She’d print the images, then distort the pictures by burning, freezing, or bleaching them. Once the final image was complete, I was illegible; another component in an abstracted surface. In the final image, the visible parts of me barely looked human, let alone female. Submitting to her vision was a home, of sorts. I was something abstract in her eyes, something more mercurial than girlhood.

  When I found the courage to ask Antonia if she was having sex with other people, she told me desire was not a scarce resource. I set out to prove to her—but mostly to myself—that I agreed. I lost my ability to sleep, spending the night in half-dream hazes of her fucking men, women, and creatures that made her feel things I never would, never could. When I suspected she’d been with someone else, I vomited, then said things like, “I’m in pain, but I would never want you to limit yourself because of me. Trust that I know my own limits.” Really, I was sick with jealousy. This jealousy registered in my body as it had when I was a teenager and I saw a girl I fixated on directing her attention toward a boy. Antonia affirmed that her devotion was unwavering, made space for all my paranoia. But I couldn’t explain away the fear that she didn’t love me, that someone else—anyone more masculine than I was—would replace me.

  Previously, I had understood myself as sane, insofar as I hid my perversions underneath my high-achieving-blazer-wearing-female-debate-champion-with-a-side-braid persona. As a child and an adolescent, I developed compulsive strategies for suppressing my preoccupations. When I longed to kiss or tie up girls, I recited the provinces of Canada, or ranked the most famous European modernists, or made lists of cities with each new one starting with the last letter of the one before it. Information calmed me down. There was so much to know. The more I knew, the more special I’d be. Gropius, Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe. Saint Petersburg–Guadalajara–Ankara–Asmara–Arezzo–Osaka–Amman. British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland, and Labrador. West to East and back again. I reminded myself I’d be something great when I grew up. I would hide my visions and build great buildings instead, or I’d build great enough buildings that the visions wouldn’t matter. I drew homes partially built into hillsides or suspended off cliffs hanging over the oceans. Museums, government offices, and hospitals as beautiful as they were practical. I pictured big, clean, open rooms I’d shaped. Everyone would feel important and clean inside of them. Light would pour in from all sides. I imagined an apartment where there was nothing around me I hadn’t chosen on purpose, because it meant something or because it was beautiful. I imagined a closet full of suits, organized by color.

  Soon after I fell in love with Antonia, all the pushed-down pain erupted. Every moment I had ever believed I was unlovable seemed to rise, such that I was utterly inconsolable about betrayals she had yet to enact on me. She stayed, trying to help me understand what I couldn’t yet say.

  Two years into our relationship, Antonia and I dated someone together, Stella. She wore red lipstick and lots of black lace. She bought slices of raw steak at the butcher shop in the morning and ate them with her coffee. When we met, shitfaced in a rooftop hotel swimming pool, surrounded by bankers, the first thing I asked her was what she did, which was make music; the second thing I asked her was whether she wanted to be famous. (I was always blacking out and asking people about fame, then. I needed to know they could be honest about the power it had over them, over everyone.) She said no. Two days later was Antonia’s birthday, and the three of us had confusing sex in my parents’ bed, on top of the same pink sheets where I’d had sex for the first time.

  In the subsequent configuration, I fluctuated between jealousy and euphoria. When I slept between Antonia and Stella, I felt an abundant safety for which I had no language. Three was a family; at times, it seemed unbreakable. But if I woke up to them embracing, I spiraled into existential dread. Seeing my partner, my supposed anchor, sleeping peacefully in the arms of another person—this was a loss not only of security, but of identity.

  Our first fall together, the three of us went to M
aine, to the town where Stella had spent her adolescence. We drove around in her car, an old Mercedes coupe; I didn’t have a license yet, but they let me drive the twisty country roads anyway. We drove to a field where we walked through shoulder-height goldenrods. On the other side of a pine forest there was a cliff next to a lake. The three of us had sex on the rocks and I scraped my knees. After, I slid down into the water. I swam backward, away from them. They started to have sex again without me. The water was cold and it numbed my skin. Watching them, I stopped having a body. I was the water and the water was me. If I wasn’t me, there was nothing to be afraid of. No one could leave me or stop loving me. I didn’t exist, and so I wasn’t Grace. I wanted to stay watching them in the water into infinity.

  Along the way, I fell in love with Stella, too. In her company, my body was less constraining. I noticed myself making bigger gestures, moving without fear of my own clumsiness.

  My devotion split in two. I split in two as well. Afraid to risk losing the love of either of them—and the sense of self summoned by each—I clung to them both, managing simultaneous realities that could not coexist.

  Ultimately, Antonia and I stayed together. But more and more people in my life began to accuse me of dishonesty. My mother told me I had a lying bone. A friend who had caught on to my habit gave me her marked-up copy of a 1975 Adrienne Rich essay called “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.” Rich writes that the liars, afraid of themselves, cannot bear their own contradictions, cannot face what might be lost if they are honest.

  I said whatever I thought people wanted to hear. I’ll be there at seven p.m. sharp. Yes, Saturday works. No, I love you and only you. I’m certain. I desire no one else. I’m hungry. I’m not hungry. I miss you. I need you too. I want to come. I’m coming. I just came. I’m sorry. I’m not angry with you, and I don’t resent you. I couldn’t lie to you. I didn’t lie. I didn’t lie. I didn’t lie. I didn’t lie about lying.