A Year Without a Name Read online

  It was not lost on me that my reproductive system functioned seamlessly, despite my having no use for it.

  Sisterhood makes it difficult to distinguish between bodies. At least, as the one born six years later, I’ve found it nearly impossible not to experience her sorrow as my own. It sits in my chest, heavy and constant. If she is lonely, I am lonely. If she is afraid, I feel it too. The desire to protect her from pain is not an altruistic one. It’s to protect myself, too. The only other option would be to carve her out of my chest altogether, which I could never, and would never, do.

  When she first got famous I had a nightmare in which I wore her skin like an outfit and attended an event in her place. The dream ended with a mob of people ripping the skin off of me in strips. The skin had fused onto me, adhered to my nerve endings, and become my own, so that when they ripped it off there was pink, sinewy muscle underneath, my heartbeat visibly pumping through the veins. I crouched on the ground until I was fully skinned, just pink, twitching muscle. The pain was worse than anything I’d felt in my waking life.

  Outside my house, I helped her out of the car and to the door. I had cleaned to prepare for her visit—mopped the kitchen and bathroom floors, vacuumed all the corners, folded blankets, fluffed pillows, organized books and newspapers. I wanted her to know I could keep a home. But she was in a daze, so I led her up to my room, where I tucked her into my bed and gave her a heavy blue rock to hold in her hand. I thought that holding something cold and solid would ground her enough to keep the pain from carrying her away. I opened the screen door so the breeze could come in.

  “I like all the bird sounds,” she said. “It’s cozy.”

  She drifted in and out of sleep while I read beside her. I made her tea and peeled an orange I’d taken from a neighbor’s tree. I’d memorized which houses had which fruit in which season; guavas in early fall, persimmons in late autumn and winter, citrus in spring. I’d found date palms and pomegranates, and green tomato vines growing out of a trash-covered hillside.

  I put the orange and tea next to her on a tray while she slept. She mumbled, breathed deeply, but didn’t wake up. When we were kids we slept together in a lofted bed that looked out over the air shaft in the back of the building, a cavernous chute with no doors leading to it, decades of dust at the bottom. The air shaft made a strange humming sound. I couldn’t sleep facing it because I was convinced someone was trapped alone at the bottom. I was afraid either she or I would get sucked down there, be trapped forever. I’d lie awake in the middle of the night, eyes wide in the dark, on guard, protecting us both from the air shaft’s pull.

  Now, seeing her sleep in my space, among my few but precious possessions, I felt I had the infrastructure to take care of her, to be a respite from her chaos, a protector. With my own structure in place, I could hold her pain, rather than getting swept away by it. And, perhaps, if the structure were stable enough to contain her, it might also contain me. Neither one of us would get taken away.

  Half-awake, she talked about how she hadn’t felt safe in months. I told her to stay for a few days, unsure whether she could hear me. I’ll make you more tea, I said, soup, and solid food when you get hungry.

  “I love you,” she said, four times.

  I remember her as a little girl, tortured by fours and eights. She had to do everything four or eight times, like say “I love you, good night,” or turn the light switch on and off, or stop and turn in circles on cracks in the sidewalk. One night my parents had to carry her through the house crying and screaming because she thought if she didn’t keep counting she’d get AIDS. When I needed to cry, I was so ashamed that I went and hid in the closet, held my breath so I wouldn’t make any sounds.

  When she stopped being able to control the numbers at all, she had to start taking a medication that made her tired all the time and made her sweat in the night. We shared a bed because we were both too scared to sleep alone. I tried to sleep as close to the edge as I could, so the sweat wouldn’t get to me. She got chubby and couldn’t do her homework. I was humiliated by her, for failing to be a regular girl. Her failure entered my body, like I was failing, too.

  I never told my parents or her that eight was my number, too. The number I needed to get to when I counted items of clothing on men’s bodies or cycled through visions of girls and women. I didn’t want my family to think I was crazy also. I pushed the eight down below language, where it was real without being a part of my persona. I can’t remember if I took eight from her or if we came to it independently, because of its balance.

  She slept through the afternoon; I came and went from my bedroom, doing chores. I knew my desire to hold her hostage in my house, in my life, was born out of my resistance to hers. But I was also stubborn in my certainty that I, of anyone in her life, was in the best position to let her rest, to let her disappear.

  I wanted to show her the small acts that grounded me each day: make a pot of coffee, do the dishes, sweep the kitchen floor, water the plants. Moments that are for no one, toward nothing, except the maintenance of a day. Moments not worth being written about, maybe, but that make me feel the most connected to being alive.

  I found myself fantasizing about a future in which she would take care of a garden, walk her dog, fry an egg and put it on toast, take pleasure in scrubbing the bathtub clean. She would have eight books by her bed, or eight vases on the windowsill. Eight isn’t evil anymore in this fantasy. It is hers now, and it protects her. If I visualize this clearly enough, maybe she’ll accept what I’m trying to offer her: the space to be quiet and the pleasure of being invisible.

  I’d been hurt by my sister sketching me in her work with the broad strokes required to create a character. The character got inside me, disoriented me. The power of the page is such that I couldn’t tell what was real, her story or my own. I splintered into multiple truths until my own recollection seemed like nothing more than an abstraction. Is there any way to write about the people who shape my life without reenacting the flattening that’s been done to me? Writing about someone I love, someone toward whom my love is pained and tangled, I feel I’ve failed before I started.

  Taking my own life as subject matter makes me feel like a woman. There’s no theoretical praxis for this. It’s an emotion more than a belief. The most rigorous analysis I have is that everything in my life—who I am, what I do, what I don’t do—exists in an unbreakable duality with my sister. She, the woman. She, the writer. There are only two options: to be her or reject her.

  I don’t have the language for why I equate womanhood with subjecthood. It’s an equation I was given at a young age. Woman tells her story. Man listens. In all her gendered glory, I saw and continue to see my sister as having incalculable agency, indomitable power. This is precisely why I revere her. This is precisely why I am able to be angry at her.

  After my sister’s surgery, I spent two nights with her in her hospital room. I tried to sleep under a starchy white sheet, on a couch my legs hung off of. The nurses came in at hourly intervals to check her vitals. The lights were never fully off. I wrapped the stiff fabric around me in a cocoon, lay on my back, and used the mechanical hum of the building to lull me into a half-awake trance. She woke up hungry, and I went down to the cafeteria to get plain pasta, a roll with butter, or a white bread and cheese sandwich.

  The next night, after my sister fell asleep, I left the hospital to meet my friend stella (who, unlike the other Stella, chooses to spell her name with a lowercase s). When I’d first met stella, she was visiting town and staying in the home of her friend’s father. I drove to pick her up and the home turned out to be a French provincial mansion behind a gate at the top of Mulholland Drive. I rang the buzzer and a famous American actor opened the door in a striped pajama suit, not unlike the one my father wears. Not unlike the one I wear, actually.

  “Do you like my house?” he asked.

  He led me to the breakfast table, where he was doing a crossword puzzle and eating curried chicken for breakfast.
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  “Are you an actress?” he asked. “You have star power.”

  He’d caught the stench of fame on me, I guess.

  I met stella at a bar in Hollywood, twenty minutes east of the hospital. We had two drinks each; then I said I had to leave, to get back to my sister.

  “If you saw yourself as separate from her,” stella said, “you might finally feel free.”

  I returned to the hospital with even greater determination to care for my sister. I also knew that in the middle of the night, softened by IV painkillers and antianxiety medication, she would confide in me that she was unhappy. I wanted to hear her say it wasn’t just her illness. I wanted to hear her say it was her life. I sat in a hospital chair, a foot from her bed, listened to her lamentations, and fulfilled my own confirmation biases. Proof: that fame was what was harming her; that we were still connected enough to see the same things; that this period of her life might end up having been a brief experiment.

  If I felt compelled to protect her, then I might have reason not to blame her. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her fault. She was just a little girl, swallowed up by a big bad machine. And I was her sister, her dutiful sister. Two daughters. Works of art.

  When I imagined myself a decade into the future, I saw something in the shape of a man, tall but lean, soft stubble on his face but hair nowhere else on his body. But the word “sister” hovered over him, neon, glowing. It felt more indelible than my own name, my own body. I don’t know why. I told myself it was because she was famous, because the fact of our sisterhood had been dragged into public without my consent; in fact, sisterhood had always dominated my sense of self, for as long as I’d been conscious.

  Seeing her as a victim of her own opportunity was the best way to keep the myth alive. What myth? The myth that our family was special. The myth that we were biologically linked for a reason. The myth that as the children of artists we had inherited their greatness and were carrying it forward. The myth that we deserved what we had. The myth that the lives of people who make things are more significant than everyone else’s.

  These myths were all one and the same to me.

  The substance of fame wasn’t something I’d only seen touching and changing others. It had changed me. It made me paranoid, on edge in every interaction, wondering whether people knew I was connected to fame, were triggered by it, and so saw me as a walking trigger. I saw myself as a physical embodiment of a hierarchy in which some people’s lives are considered more valuable than others, and as a corrective for that violence, I wanted to disappear entirely.

  When I looked at her, I saw a character transported to a hospital bed, a pixelated billboard momentarily captured in human form. When she was sick, at least, I could remember she was mortal. Her sleeping form brought continuity, drew a line back in time from now to the air shaft we slept next to as children, the cavern by our bed that threatened to swallow us up.

  Our father came to Los Angeles. Whatever was inside me—a propensity for incurable isolation—I knew, on some level, I’d gotten from him. Being a father had given him purpose, had eased the emptiness. I suspected he’d be happy if we went back to him, moved into our childhood bedrooms, let him make us toast every morning. And sometimes I wanted to, though I knew I couldn’t.

  When I was little, I ran away when my dad tried to pick me up or hug me. I turned my head away so that he couldn’t kiss my cheek. I hated the hair on his arms and the stubble on his face. I knew I hurt his feelings, but the more hurt he felt, the more I didn’t want to be near him. Once he leaned down to pick me up and I threw a basketball at him and shattered his glasses. Another time I punched him in the nose. Looking at him filled me with rage. I knew he was a good dad, but I couldn’t help the angry feeling.

  He used to tell my sister and me that women were superior to men. Being female was divine, he said; it was something to be proud of. He even said sometimes that he wished he was a woman, because women understood what was happening around them more than men did, because women got to talk about their feelings and be soft with one another. When he was a kid in the fifties, his favorite show was American Bandstand and he’d stand in front of the TV and slow dance with the air.

  My sister had moved to a hotel room on the Sunset Strip for the remainder of her recovery. I sat in an armchair, using my laptop as a shield, observing my father compulsively adjust the lighting, try to open the sealed-shut windows, and demand that she drink water, which she had never enjoyed doing. She protested while also appearing to take comfort in his orders. Father and daughter—their dynamic was well rehearsed and swiftly returned to. His attempts to manage chaos had repulsed me since I was a child. His fury at a departure time two minutes later than expected. His panic at a light turned too bright. His horror at a towel left on the floor instead of draped over a hook. Few things seemed more male than this assertion of power through arbitrary administration. As I aged, I noticed the same inclinations in myself. The more aware I became of our similarities, the more I began to regard him with an aching tenderness.

  When my father or sister referred to me using “she” pronouns, they stuck in me like tiny hooks. Not that I had invited them to do otherwise. But still, I kept track of how many times they each said “she,” and the number hung above our interactions, proof of my delusion. The more times they said “she,” the more convinced I was that “she” would always be me. Quantity held validity. She. She. She. She. I couldn’t bring myself to ask my dad not to call me “girlie.” It was just a word. I could defend anyone else’s right to gendered self-determination, but I couldn’t take the girlie away from him.

  After my sister fell asleep, I watched her face contort with pain. Her nose crinkled and her eyes twitched. She’d never stopped being a little girl. She was just a little body, full of fear and dreams. I wanted her to be safe and out of pain. I wanted her to have a different body more than I wanted myself to. It was a flicker of a feeling and soon it was washed away by panic, as the room closed in on me.

  I couldn’t stay. If I stayed I’d lose myself.

  5

  A​ FEW WEEKS AFTER leaving my sister, I got a cryptic text from my mother: “Can you do me a favor?”

  It was one a.m. in California and four a.m. in the Northeast. I was at a house in the far north San Fernando Valley, in pseudo-ranch country, that friends had rented on Airbnb for a birthday party. There was a stable at the end of the street, and large watercolors of white men on horseback and vintage wagon wheels hung in the house’s hallways. We found secret bookcases in the office full of blue and red leather-bound volumes of advanced Scientological language and protocol. Some of us sprawled across the carpeted floor to read entries from dictionaries and excerpts from an “auditor’s guide” aloud to one another.

  “If there is a process which one should do with another process,” I read, “then that process should be understood thoroughly, for if done incorrectly it would be likely to produce confusion into all the other processes…therefore, let us examine with rigor the name of this process. It is the REMEDY OF HAVINGNESS.”

  It didn’t seem so off base. Systems thinking: all processes affect other processes; nothing exists without anything else.

  “This is profound,” I said.

  “Do not start with that,” someone said.

  I usually felt conspicuous in the relative likelihood of my joining a community ruled by dogma, even if it was Scientology, just to be a part of something. Just to remedy my lack of havingness.

  Alas, later in the manual: “By ‘remedy’ one means the correction of any aberrated condition. By ‘havingness’ one means mass or objects. It means the remedy of a preclear’s native ability to acquire things at will and reject them at will.”

  I’d migrated to the bathroom when my mother texted me. A group of people were piled into the lukewarm whirlpool bathtub, eating wet chocolate cake.

  “?,” I texted.

  “Will you bring me a puppy? She’s
an Old-Time Scotch Collie. She’s in the desert outside LA.”

  In May, after my time in the hospital with my sister, I buried myself in writing the story of Zoya. I needed this after losing track of myself during the interlude with my sister and father. If the two poles of existence were dedication to family and dedication to the romantic, it was safer to choose the latter. At least my life would have a trajectory of differentiation: from loyal daughter-sister to lover. As a lover, I could be a boy.

  But I could not resist the opportunity to be of service to my mother. As a child, I went almost everywhere with her, no matter what she had to do. Shopping, to the doctor, to work, to meetings, to parties, to see friends, to the bank, to the post office. At stores I sat in the changing room and watched her try things on, giving my opinion. After school, she gave me the job of answering the phone in her studio, which was two floors below our fourth-floor apartment, in a former button factory. Back then she had long red hair that she dyed with henna in the bathtub. I helped her coat her wet hair with hot paste, which made the water run green. Her hair had five colors in it: red, purple, gold, pink, and silver at the roots when she didn’t dye it for a few weeks. Her nails were usually red too. I sat beside her while her manicures dried, keeping her company. When I was young and she got sad, I tried to be helpful and mature, so that she’d feel better. Her sadness was usually because of something having to do with art, like when she felt excluded from something, or overlooked. She said she felt “invisible.” This seemed odd because, to me, she was more visible, more important, than anything or anyone else. She explained that feeling invisible wasn’t rational. It’s just something you feel. That you can’t explain away.

  The assignment of bringing her a dog, then, a creature in which she could invest unbounded care, had particular significance. My mother reserves her purest sweetness for children and dogs.