A Year Without a Name Read online

  “My name is Cyrus,” I said, without faltering.

  We left the party and walked around Lake Merritt. We kissed leaning against a railing, next to a drained-out part of the lake caked in goose shit. She was the first person I’d kissed who only knew me as Cyrus. We walked more, toward where she lived. I told a story in which someone addressed me as Grace, without thinking. As soon as the word left my mouth, I tensed up as if I’d been caught in a lie, one in a long line of men going to new cities and conning strangers with new names.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just changed my name. I’m still getting used to it.”

  She smiled like it was normal and kissed me on the cheek goodbye.

  The next morning I wrote her a message: “Hey, it’s Cyrus. Last night was fun.”

  “I thought your name was Tyrex,” she wrote back.

  I borrowed a friend’s car and drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, stopped to go to the beach at Fort Baker, because that seemed like the kind of thing I ought to do, alone, en route to becoming myself. I took off my socks and my glasses and put them inside one of my boots. I rolled up the legs of my jeans. I stepped ankle-deep into the frigid water, with my coat still on, then lay in the sun breathing into my breasts, scanning for nostalgia, fear of loss, attachment. All the blocks were analytical; historical and political arguments. I couldn’t find the sensation of attachment anywhere in my torso, or maybe I had no idea what to look for.

  The surgeon’s office was in a strip mall medical center in Marin, across the parking lot from an organic grocery store, a pharmacy, a Starbucks. I sat in the waiting room across from a girl who looked maybe fourteen or fifteen, there with her mother. I didn’t want to assess her gender, to find proof that she had undergone transformation, but my eyes traveled to the parts of her body that would reveal the truth I was looking for. Her hands, her arms, her neck. This was a gender-confirmation surgeon, after all. Why would a regular fourteen-year-old girl in ballet flats and lip gloss, the kind I would have fantasized about as a teenager, be waiting for an appointment?

  The consultation was brief, maybe ten minutes total. The doctor, handsome and charismatic, a chest tattoo peeking over the top of his shirt collar, had me undress from the waist up. I pulled off my shirt, shimmied out of the binder, looked at myself straight on. Breasts hanging there, white lumps, with the miraculous power to pull my attention away from anything and everything else, to hold all the meaning in the entire room, to foreclose all potential.

  “Beautiful,” the surgeon said, as he traced his finger along the underside of the left one. “I can already see the definition of your pectoral muscle.”

  “Is that good?” I asked.

  “Yes. We’ll make the incision along that line. Very good. You’re an excellent candidate.”

  Candidate, as if I’d been selected, as if I might really win. My parents didn’t know I was in San Francisco, didn’t even know I was seeing a surgeon, but I had an overwhelming urge to call them, to tell them what I’d accomplished.

  “Mom,” I’d say. “Dad. I’m an excellent candidate.”

  Back in LA, after the surgical consultation, I befriended Roman. I recognized him from the internet. He’d run an Instagram account where he posted pictures of transmasculine people in diverse settings and iterations of hotness. I looked at the account often to make myself feel less scared of what I worried my future held. I’d been looking at pictures of Roman for two years, watching his jaw square out and his body grow leaner the longer he took testosterone. He’d moved back to Orange County, where he was working construction. I invited him over to our house. We drank tea and ate a chocolate bar—he was sober—and drove in his truck to a party downtown. His truck was full of dirty clothes, fast-food containers, construction equipment, old coffee cups. Outside the party he reached into the back seat for a rumpled wifebeater. He was hungry, so he took a bite of cold scrambled eggs from a discarded takeout container. It made me squeamish, the smell of his car, the indiscretion of his consumption, the unbridled way he lunged out of the vehicle. I studied his every gesture.

  As soon as we entered the party he started dancing, hard and fast. He took off his wifebeater and hung it from the back pocket of his boot-cut jeans. He moved like a go-go boy, a lithe Mark Wahlberg. Controlled, but with sway. His biceps and pecs flexed even when he moved imperceptibly. He closed his eyes while he danced, forehead up. He looked like a man, a beautiful young man. A real man, unlike me. I was a girl obsessed with men, their muscles, their expressions, their movements.

  My envy made me nauseous and I left the party without telling him.

  The next day I called the LGBT Center to make an appointment to procure testosterone. They had no availability. I called another clinic. They were booked too. I called a third and made an appointment for two months out. I didn’t give up or back down. Three times I said, “I’d like to make an appointment to begin hormone replacement therapy. I’m assigned female at birth and I’d like to start taking testosterone.” No thought, just action.

  Roman offered to let me use his testosterone while I waited for my prescription. I drove down to San Pedro to meet him by the Port of Los Angeles. Down the 110 in my convertible, until I could see the cranes above the harbor. We met outside a sandwich shop, on a corner in a quiet neighborhood near the ocean. Suburban ranch houses, American flags. He ordered a french dip sandwich and I ordered one too. He eats whatever he wants, without concern. I followed suit, pretending not to fear any deviation from my dietary regime.

  We slid through a chain-link fence and walked down a long, skinny incline to the beach. Round stones and sheets of shelf rock; swirling tide pools. One rock had graffiti on it: “Fuck Love 2018.” Another tag, in the same handwriting: “Love Forever.” I wanted to find the ruins of the old White Point Hot Spring Hotel, a resort that collapsed in the twenties. I’d read that there were still pieces of the hotel’s foundation visible when the tide was low. I loped after Roman, who stepped sturdily from stone to stone. The bottom of my pants got wet. I slipped a few times.

  On the way back up from the beach, we passed a group of men drinking beer and watching the sunset. They nodded at us.

  “Hey, man,” they said. “Hey, man.” Men saying hey to men. I didn’t talk, lest I break character and ruin the scene.

  We drove around San Pedro in my car with the top down. At the base of a hill, I heard flapping, squawking, air parted by feathers. A long shadow passed over us, blocking the remaining sunlight. A peacock landed in the middle of the street, galloped toward an alleyway, its tail billowing behind it. More squawking, then another peacock in the road. Then another, then another. We must have seen a dozen on one street.

  I hadn’t seen peacocks since Zoya and I had walked by the tree in front of the moon, the day we’d gotten our picture taken. Since then I had associated peacocks with her, with the unrealized potential of our love affair. At one point not so long ago I’d wanted the peacocks to be a sign that Zoya and I would be together. Now a peacock would be the bird I saw the first day I took T. Was I nearing the end of my story?

  Roman and I parked at a lookout, the containers of the port stacked on the horizon under fluorescent stadium lighting. He’d prepared a syringe for me with one dose. I lifted my shirt up and he grabbed my stomach flesh in his left hand, wiped it clean with alcohol. I looked out at the cranes and containers. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t ask how he’d do it or what it would feel like when he stuck it in. I didn’t look at the packaging, ask where the testosterone came from, research its history, the conditions under which it was made. I just sat there, quiet, let him insert the needle in me and squeeze thick liquid into a pocket of subcutaneous abdominal fat.

  I didn’t feel anything until he pulled the needle out. The sting of the liquid pooling under my skin, then relief.

  We hugged goodbye without exchanging words. I drove home up the 110 with the top still down, even though I was cold. My heartbeat was low and steady. In between
my legs, pressure, like something was growing. My brain picked up sensation in parts of my body it hadn’t before: eyelids, fingernails, elbows; tongue, hair follicles, shins. The headlights on the highway had weight; the wind had a taste; the clouds hummed. I was of the scene, not outside it looking in. I was. I was. I was. I was. I woke up the next morning, still pulsing.

  8

  I​N JUNE, THE SURGEON called to tell me that a slot for a double mastectomy had opened up on July 2. I wasn’t supposed to get surgery until October; I’d convinced myself I needed the summer to prepare emotionally and physically for the procedure. To shave off more excess femininity, to stop drinking entirely, to finish my book, to abolish my need for validation once and for all. When it came time for surgery, I’d be Cyrus. Settled and secure. Unburdened of Grace’s most unpleasant qualities.

  But with the prospect there, it seemed unfathomable to wait another five months. What would I do? The same thing I did every single day, for 155 more days? How much more could I learn from waiting? My desire proved to be uncontainable.

  I committed to the new surgery date, knowing that my closest friends wouldn’t be able to change their schedules with such short notice. I would ask my parents to care for me during my recovery. I had previously told them not to come, for fear that any glimpse of concern or confoundment would preclude my capacity to feel relief. I feared their care, what I might owe them in return.

  For many months, my communication with my parents had been primarily shaped by misunderstanding. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them what was true: that I was getting the surgery, no matter what; that I’d started hormones; that I had a new name, albeit a name I was still easing into. I couldn’t tell whether I was withholding these truths to protect myself from judgment, or because of some deep will toward privacy, even obfuscation. My parents were attached to their second daughter. Disgust rose in me when I imagined being anything else to them, a similar nausea to the one I’d felt when I was young and I thought about them having sex. I was not convinced that I could fit inside the category of child, whatever the gender. Child, the sweetest property of all.

  The new surgery date triggered action. I wrote them a short, succinct letter: “I am trans,” I wrote. “Not intellectually, or partially, or aesthetically. Fully, deeply, transgender.”

  Despite my belief that anyone, irrespective of how they do or do not augment their body, is free to disidentify with the gender they were assigned at birth, I deferred to simplicity.

  “We understand,” my father wrote back. “Thank you.”

  “Good morning, sunshine,” my mother texted me. “Or should I say good morning, son-shine.”

  My confession of utter transness sacrificed nuance for legibility. I defaulted to the trope that I was born in the wrong body. That I had the soul of a man. Which implied that I believed in such a thing as a man in the first place. Which implied that I believed that, were I to live as a man, I would finally be okay.

  But I didn’t have time to be rigorous. I just needed them to believe me. At least, enough for me to believe myself.

  The week before the surgery, I got a letter from my insurance provider:

  A request has been made for coverage of “top” surgery to help with your change from female to male gender. We are unable to approve at this time. We require that you must have a desire to live and be accepted as a member of opposite sex for at least six months. The letter from your therapist indicates only “recent months.” Therefor [sic], you don’t meet our requirements that you desire to live and be accepted as male for at least six month [sic].

  The name of the physician who wrote the rejection letter was Jim. Dr. Jim. In his capacity as assessor of my surgery application’s merits, Dr. Jim utilized circular logic so effectively that he almost convinced me. He was right, after all: I had not unilaterally desired to be a male for more than six months. At most, I could desire it for a minute at a time, maybe two.

  My parents volunteered to cover the surgery up front so long as I contested the denied claim and reimbursed them after the fact. (If they paid for the removal of my breasts, would I think of them every time I felt my new chest? Would I remain theirs?) I accepted their money. Of course I accepted their money.

  My father woke me up the morning of the procedure at eight. I washed my face and chose an outfit: a button-front shirt, to put on when I woke up after the procedure, loose athletic pants, slip-on loafers. I went into the kitchen of the suburban home we’d Airbnb’d, where my father waited for me. We were wearing virtually the same outfit.

  “Morning, girlie,” he said.

  Feeling too indebted to correct him, I breathed in, shut my eyes briefly, tried to hold on to the notion that Cyrus was more than a myth I’d summoned into existence.

  We sat in the kitchen for a while, reading the paper. My mother came downstairs, then my sister. She’d come up for my surgery, even though her life was hectic and full of sadness. It comforted me that she was there, though I didn’t tell her.

  We all got into my parents’ rental car to drive the eight minutes to the surgical center. My father drove and it was like every other time the four of us had shared a car, except I sat in the front passenger seat instead of my mother. I turned on the radio. I looked out the window. I hoped the ride wouldn’t end. I thought about asking him to turn around. I wondered if it was too late. I wasn’t wearing a binder, either—the first time, I think, in five years that I’d ridden in a car somewhere new, unbound. I reached my hands under my shirt and squeezed my breasts. Was I supposed to have more of a ritual than this?

  My father asked me how I was feeling.

  “Good,” I said. I heard myself talking, but my ears were ringing.

  No matter how many people reassured me by describing their own experience of surgery, I couldn’t shake the fear that I wouldn’t wake up. Just something about time collapsing like that: conscious one second, unconscious the next, the space between disappeared, a long-awaited shift occurring in darkness. My mother comforted me by describing the calm before anesthesia: wrapped in warm blankets, the fentanyl hitting your system and relieving all worry, the sounds of nurses and doctors preparing themselves around you. “You’ll feel so good,” she said. “I’m jealous.”

  They laid me down on a crucifix-shaped table in the surgery room: arms outstretched, legs spread. My friend had warned me it would feel sacrificial. I scanned the room for red as they started to pump fentanyl through the IV—red was something to ground and center me, pull me into continuity. But everything was white, pale blues, yellow, gray plastic. I lifted my head. The doctor saw me searching and asked what was wrong. I was about to say, “Can you get me something red?” when I saw, in the lower right-hand corner of my view, five letters—F-O-C-U-S—in bright red font, across the bottom of the door.

  “Why’s it say that?” I asked the nurse.

  “So we focus,” she said. My spine got warm; I liquefied.

  I awoke to someone saying “Cyrus.”

  “You’re in Recovery, Cyrus. You did great. You’re all done.”

  I was shivering a little, already felt tears leaking from my eyes. I knew Cyrus was me, intellectually, but I needed some other aspect to be summoned in order to fully wake up.

  “Can you call me Grace?” I said.

  “Cyrus” was the name in quotes on my fluorescent green hospital bracelet, but Grace was there, too. She’d been right under the surface today. Horizontal, vulnerable, wrapped up tight. I needed her to be addressed directly in order to move forward.

  “You’re in Recovery, Grace.” I smiled and cried, asked where my parents were. My voice sounded soft, higher, a voice I knew from a long time ago, waking up groggy in the morning to my mother’s knock on the door.

  “Five more minutes, Momma,” the voice said.

  The following week passed in a Vicodin-infused haze. I had to wear a hard white compression vest, shaped like a tube top, stuffed with gauze, cotton, and rivets to keep my grafted-on nipples in place. The top
kept my chest tight so there wasn’t room for liquid to gather and swell me up. When the painkillers started to wear off, I ached at the wound sites, two horizontal incisions at the bottom of my pectoral muscles, where the breast tissue was removed. As part of the procedure, they removed my nipples, resized them, and reattached them in a more masculine position; the spot where my nipples had once been tingled and burned. I kept picturing my nipples during the surgery, temporarily placed on the operating table like stickers.

  We spent the week in a Cape Cod–style suburban home. There was a white picket fence around the house. Inside, a full bar, a mahjong table, and framed color photos of white couples in pastel clothing standing next to vintage American cars. My parents slept in the master bedroom, which had white carpet, white curtains, white sheets, and two white bedside tables. I stayed in the child’s bedroom, in a twin bed with monogrammed pillows. My sister slept in the room next to mine. In the living room, there was a coffee table book called A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style. I lay on the sofa under a blanket, unable to get up without my father’s help. I flipped through the book’s high-gloss pictures. White man after white man after white man, dressed in pastels, beaming. I feared the book was there for a reason, evidence of my worst fears about what this process of so-called masculinization would turn me into. Even in the aftermath of the surgery, my relief was crosshatched by the paranoia that I wanted to be a man because it was easier and because I was awful. How did I know it wasn’t my fault, my shortcoming, that I couldn’t make the other way—womanhood—work?

  I had shaved my head the month before surgery, a close buzz I got at a barbershop, exhausted one day by how consistently I’d been gendered as female with hair down to my shoulders. The haircut was working, insofar as that shallow, cosmetic alteration ensured that I was referred to as “sir” at least half the time.