A Year Without a Name

by Cyrus Grace Dunham

  Calling something a lie implies that one has the truth in one’s mouth and swallows it. What if one can only speak—only think—what one suspects another person wants to hear? Then where is the truth? How does one learn to think it?

  The more I suspected people thought I was a liar, the more impossible it seemed to tell the “truth.” There were so many truths; I didn’t know how to locate one. Lying was embedded in every gesture, every statement, every interaction; every time I reaffirmed the presumption that I was female, which was constantly. I resigned myself to being incapable of not lying. To do otherwise would require being a new person entirely, one who had not fashioned themself—“herself”—around hiding.

  I felt continually closer to unraveling each day back in Los Angeles, each day that Zoya seemed more like an apparition. Random things made me cry. The person dressed as the Liberty Tax mascot on the corner of La Brea and Pico. An old woman in a purple gown pushing an empty stroller. A sign outside a boarded-up turquoise bungalow that said “Institute for Levity.” A fucking hummingbird. Everything burst with meaning. Everything was a mouth about to swallow me.

  I couldn’t interact with anyone or anything without absorbing their feelings—or, more accurately, what I perceived to be their feelings. A hybrid sponge-sail, I sucked it all up, then lost my course. I wanted harder skin, better boundaries, interconnectedness without losing myself. I hated my body, even though I could hardly feel it.

  I hesitate to call the exhausting day-to-day of embodiment “dysphoria,” that catchall for the pain of having a body that doesn’t align with one’s sense of self. What was a sense of self, after all: a delusion; mental illness. I struggled to believe my own discomfort. I just felt crazy. And if I admitted I was dysphoric, I’d have to deal with the fallout. I’d have to decide whether to do something about it.

  In its most basic definition, dysphoria simply means “a state of unease.” The unease was far-reaching. I was vapor trapped in a container. The bugs I held hostage in Tupperware when I was a child. A windowless room with no doors, a single dangling light that never turned off, no beginning and no end. An eternity without sunlight, a breeze, moisture, the crickets chirping through the window. Coming to in a shut coffin, six feet underground, shrieking at graveyard earth. Waking up on Pluto, perched on its gray curve, the galaxy in front of you, unreachable. The ocean underneath Antarctica, entirely encased by ice. Rising to the underside of a frozen lake, sealed off but pounding. Never being touched. Never being spoken to. Never being looked at. Claustrophobia in perpetuity; isolation in infinitude; the body experienced as every metaphor for confinement.

  How to know if the problem was gender or personhood. How to know if the problem was gender or me.

  This was where drinking came in. It melted me, postponed the question of whether I needed to be an active agent in escaping my own bodily claustrophobia. When, as a teenager, I started binge drinking on the weekends, I woke up with foggy memories: a boy’s tongue in my mouth; his hand down my pants; vomiting. The memories of a regular girl, having fun. I hadn’t enacted them; I had drunk and so they had happened to me.

  The first time I got high was in the woods in Prospect Park. A group of boys had showed a group of girls how to inhale and keep the smoke inside long enough. It was September, still warm, and I was dressed up in a three-tiered baby-blue miniskirt. At first I didn’t feel anything, just the sting of the smoke in my lungs. Then my eyes started throbbing in my skull. I was wearing tight goggles and being a teenager was a video game. Everyone else was real. The boys were handsome, happy, and full of laughter. The girls wanted their approval. Each boy was a main character, an amalgamation of characteristics that rendered him a leading man. Letting men be protagonists was indulgent and pornographic. It was not what I’d been taught. It was nasty, backward, even medieval. The more I tried to block the boys from becoming protagonists, the more I succumbed to the storyline. Until his hands were my hands, his feet were my feet, his dick was my dick. The story always ended with him—with me as him or in him—seated in a chair, head back and eyes closed, moaning in ecstasy, a girl’s mouth around me. The scene throbbed in the back of my eyelids, begging for completion, for ejaculation.

  I went into the trees and lay down on the ground. It was cold and I had goose bumps all over my skin. But my body wasn’t real so the cold didn’t matter much. The skinny, breast-budding, miniskirted pale thing was just a container. I focused on my heartbeat and felt it pushing blood through my body. I felt the blood sloshing around inside me, hot at the edges of the container. I looked down and saw a dirty little skirt and gangly stick legs. When I closed my eyes I felt the blood forming into an extension of myself, long and hard, lifting up from between my legs. I felt the tip of myself radiating heat and numbness, an ache in the base of my back that curled my spine and toes. I counted to sixty-four, pushing the tingling feeling further out into the extension at each number. I counted to sixty-four again. Soon the numbers were so close together that they stopped being separate. Then I was hollow, a porcelain casting of a person, filled with liquid light. The cast shattered. There was no container.

  After that I became addicted to the splitting feeling. It hurt a little, and I knew that when it hurt my body cracked and I wasn’t me anymore. It was just a few seconds but the crack was so big that it got me through the day, knowing I’d get to split again at night. I lay in the dark on my back and counted to eight, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Eight times. If I got too close to the crack I stopped and stepped back; at sixty-four, I let it swallow me. It was like this for a while, just counting until I let the painful ache get huge, until I figured out that I could pair it with the visions I’d made in my head since I was little. I used class, when I was supposed to be paying attention, and the subway ride to and from school, and the walk from the train to my house, and the elevator ride, and every other moment I was alone and undisturbed, to visualize the scenes, down to the colors, individual touches, and dialogue, then play them in my head like movies. I was never in the movies, because I wasn’t compelled by myself as a character. Usually, the star was a young, handsome, kind boy. He was pale and lean, but strong. Soft-spoken, but severe. He had thick brown hair and thick eyebrows, and posture that made him curl like a question mark. Sometimes he was with an older woman; sometimes, an older man. They coveted him and he lay there like a baby when they touched him, overwhelmed by how much they wanted to hold him.

  A few weeks after I got back from India, I started having panic attacks again. Deep, rolling ones that hit hard and then came back smaller, again and again. The rhythm of panic was oceanic. I stayed still, letting the swell run its course, resigned to the fact that I might not emerge.

  I had my first debilitating panic attack in the bathroom of a midtown theater, at a premiere celebrating the release of my sister’s television show. I was wearing a light gray suit that had previously been my father’s. My first suit. In the lobby of the theater people grabbed at me and asked me how proud I was. “So, so proud,” I’d say. “Couldn’t be prouder.” I was as angry about fame worship as I was guilty of it. I hadn’t learned any other way to be.

  I sat in the audience between my parents while a young woman spoke onstage in a beautiful dress provided for the occasion. The walls of the theater were red and gold. She made jokes and the crowd laughed in a joint roar. The woman onstage, from a distance, shared many physical traits and speech patterns with the person whom I knew as my older sister. It was an effective hologram, a convincing depiction of a smart-but-humble, funny-yet-earnest young woman. A rosy-cheeked, lovable daughter of the audience. On my right, a striking, gray-haired man in a trim suit and thick-framed glasses sat with his hands folded on his lap. He looked like my father. The elegant redheaded woman known as my mother sat on the other side of me, clutching my hands with her long, pale fingers, her red manicure. I was supposed to know and love them, swell with pride for the woman onstage. Either they were imposters or I was a sociopath. The theater was an opaque box with no
exits and it was rapidly running out of air. Being a daughter was a show was a myth was a commodity was a white lie was a dream was a movie.

  The panic attack announced itself in this way: at first, the sped-up, echoing voice of Amelia Earhart, my narrative ghost, calling out to me. White aliens, she was saying. White aliens. White aliens. White aliens. The words made it hard to breathe. I had the acute feeling that no one I was looking at was real. White aliens taught other aliens to succeed at all costs, to put the dissemination of one’s own message above all else. White aliens taught white aliens that to die alone or a nobody was the worst thing a woman could do.

  I went to the women’s restroom, which was empty, and entered the large corner stall, where I vomited up water and popcorn and collapsed onto the floor hyperventilating. I wondered if I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t breathe and I clutched at my chest. Clawed at it. It occurred to me that my body was not mine. Neither was my brain. Grace? Who is Grace? I was a cloud stuck inside a person I didn’t choose to be.

  At some point the sobs subsided. I splashed water on my face. I went back to the theater. I explained away my momentary break as the product of my burgeoning political consciousness. I was learning concepts to explain why the world around me looked the way it did: money hungry, fame driven, alienated, and bereft of care. Naturally, I was having physical reactions.

  Afterward there was a party. I drank. People talked to me and I answered, the good student that I was. College is wonderful. I’m really enjoying my classes. Yes, I’m dating someone, an artist. I’m so endlessly proud of my sister. It’s a lot to live up to but I’m just glad she’s getting to live out her dreams. I’m not sure what I want to do. I’m interested in a lot of things. Journalism, politics, law. I agree, it is important that there be visible gay women in power.

  That night at Antonia’s, she fell asleep and I stayed up, curled in a ball on the floor. The more I tried to stop crying the more I hyperventilated. It occurred to me that I’d never been real. I recalled being a child and the memories felt as if they’d been implanted, pictures downloaded into a manufactured brain. That was a nice time, being young in a small world. That was a nice time, getting to be a child. I heard myself talking to Antonia, sobbing; it was the voice of a little girl who wished she was a boy.

  After that night, the sorrow bubbled up from its unnameable source more and more often. First, just at night. Then also during the day. Soon, in explosions of anxiety that swallowed up whole weeks.

  The more disoriented I became, the more I clung to Antonia. If I found the right words to tell her where I was, why I was there, she could pull me out of isolation, keep me close to her. I remember sitting on her bed, hunched over while she stood looking down at me, just telling her it hurt, over and over. I couldn’t tell her what the it was because I didn’t know.

  Unable to contain my frenzy of need, I wrote Zoya a scathing email accusing her of hiding from my love. I thought I was being brave and honest. In retrospect, I was just being desperate. She wrote back, a day later, a gentle and measured interrogation of my entitlement to her emotions, of my unseemly, and particularly American, impatience.

  Ashamed, I went to a party. I needed to be sated by something, though I didn’t know what. In a warehouse between two industrial neighborhoods, the party was full of hundreds of shirtless, mostly white gay men. I did ketamine and coke. Rather than relaxing into euphoria, I was engulfed by envy for the homogeneity of their bodies—the V-lines where their lower abdomens met their obliques; their visible triceps muscles; the shadows underneath their protruding pecs. The men appeared to be dancing with their own twins. Slight mutations of the Mark Wahlberg genus. The substances in my bloodstream heightened my awareness of the testosterone in theirs. Sculpting, chiseling, hardening, and enhancing them. Estrogen dominant, I would melt and soften until I turned to liquid, milk on the floor.

  Back when boys started going through puberty, I kept lists in my mind of which ones had hair under their arms and above their lips. The ones who got hair first started looking stronger, too. They weren’t so scrawny anymore. Those same boys got extra-sweaty and smelled bad. That was all because of testosterone. Some of them even had lines on their abdomens, or biceps that bulged when they pulled a textbook off the shelf. When their shirts were made of thin, soft cotton, you could see their muscles through the cloth. When I was alone in front of the mirror, I copied some of the movements the boys did in gym class—throwing their hands up in frustration, clapping to get another player’s attention, hitting their fists against their chests when they were happy, knocking their heads back when they were frustrated. I did the movements and watched how the cloth of my shirt caught on my skin.

  I lost my sense of linear time and found myself on the stage at the front of the party, a plywood and paint re-creation of the Oval Office, hung with portraits of Trump and his cabinet, splattered with white paint and glue meant to look like jiz.

  A man I didn’t know grabbed me and kissed me. “It’s a bukkake show,” he said.

  Bukkake. Milk. Mark Wahlberg. The White House. Aliens. All aliens. I could either be part of the sea of white men or let dissociation vaporize me, turn me into a nanoparticle of condensation floating into the oblivion.

  Orbs of dislodged emotion levitated above the ground. Claustrophobia. Dread. Loneliness. Infinite, already-failed solutions. A lonely ghost who can’t cease to be itself. The men became floating cubes, backed by blue light. What’s the difference between a man and a box, anyway?

  At some point I dragged myself through the warehouse to the outdoor port-a-potties. Inside the port-a-potty I tried to pee standing up. Piss drizzled down my legs, onto the gray plastic ledge around the toilet. Then either the lock got stuck or I couldn’t figure out how to open it, so I slammed myself against the door. One, two, three slams. The port-a-potty started to tip over. I got out mid-tumble, watched it swing back and forth, wavy, until it reached standing position and was sturdy again.

  The next day, unable to get out of bed, I called my best friend Jessica and admitted to needing her. She came over, made me shower, laid a blanket over me, forced me to eat, and fed me a corner shard of Klonopin, splitting the rest of the pill up into three pieces and wrapping them in tinfoil.

  She was my oldest friend. As teenagers, we both believed we were disgusting, albeit for different reasons. She was one of those beautiful girls who believed she was rotten. The distance between our interiors and exteriors bonded us to each other. Back then we rode the train home from school together every day, getting off at the same stop and standing on a street corner talking until it was dark out. I thought about coming out to her for many years before I finally did. She was the only person to whom telling the truth seemed at all possible. But I couldn’t get the words out. They sat in my throat, stuck. When I finally told her, the confession pulled the seal off my solitude. She is, perhaps, the only person I’ve allowed to watch me change. Thus, she is the only one who knows my continuity. I’d like to think we provide coherence for each other and, in doing so, make changing safer.

  She’s always been the one to both schedule and escort me to obligatory appointments—the DMV, the cognitive behavioral therapist, the gynecologist.

  “You know this is about you,” she said. “Not Zoya.”

  She told me my obsessions were a stand-in for what I didn’t wish to look at in myself. I knew she was right and I also resented her scrutiny. I wanted her to let me be in love, let me use that in-love-ness as a compass so I could pretend I had direction. The hope of pretending is that, with enough time and practice, the performance becomes you.

  That night I sat on the floor of my room and wrote a list of New Year’s resolutions on a piece of pink printer paper I’d found on the carpet at Staples, even though it was already March.

  Less alcohol.

  Don’t lie.

  Don’t make decisions from a place of panic.

  Keep your nails short so you can’t pick scabs on your head.

&nb
sp; Spend more time alone.

  Don’t seek out lovers to fix you.

  Be honest with your family about your gender, whatever that means.

  Be honest with yourself about your gender, whatever that means.

  3

  I​ WASN’T EXPECTING to hear from Anna. We hadn’t spoken in a year and a half. Anna and I met when I was eighteen and she was twenty-two. At the time, she was still using the name and pronouns she’d been assigned at birth. She’d been one of my best friends; then we kept hurting each other until neither one of us knew what to apologize for anymore. Now, out of the blue, an email from her:

  i have been thinking about you a lot for different reasons.

  i have been doing big work around my gender, trying to answer some of the things you asked me about in the past. i feel like to be concrete i would need volumes with you—may we get that.

  I’d heard through friends that she was no longer identifying as a man. The last time we’d seen each other it was freezing and we’d sat on a bench in Washington Square Park. I asked her, again, why she was living as a man if she didn’t feel like one. She’d wished she was a woman since she was a child. She’d softly told me, again, that she felt a sense of responsibility: to be a good man, a kind man, a self-aware man. This angered me, though I was equally beholden to womanhood at the time. But in my map of the world, the map I’d been given, manhood was something to reject and womanhood was something to extol. I wanted her to rid herself of her manhood so that I could stop envying her and disdaining her in equal parts. When she didn’t, I resigned myself to our drifting apart. Apathy was a much less painful place to be than grief or anger.

  Nonetheless, when she emailed me, all the missing came rushing back in. So much had happened, so much we hadn’t spoken about. I wrote back right away telling her to visit me. She took a long weekend off work and booked a ticket from Philadelphia to LAX.