There is an argument in the train. I don’t notice how it started—I am in my own head, until suddenly men in the aisle are screaming. It’s that first moment of overwhelming noise that still disorients me, even after all the practice I’ve had staying quiet in this new, loud world. Deep panicked breathing starts in my chest. Only when I look up and see angry mouths, bruised dry lips stretched around metal loudspeakers, then I can work to calm myself. The two men are angry, but they’re not psychotic. It’s the mouths that make them sound that way. Although the mouths also make these confrontations escalate, when even a compliment stabs at your eardrums and vibrates jagged wire against your surgical scars. I breathe deep through my nose, careful to keep my own loudspeaker still.
It’s important to me to stay myself, quiet and respectful, not just another angry person making public life unbearable. I have learned that ears can protect themselves if they know a sound is coming, so I watch the men shout and grab at each other. A deep, piercing headache starts, but I am good at ignoring those now. The men stumble in front of me, almost falling. One of them is bleeding from red, raw lips. Blood slides across disfigured teeth and lands on my shoe. I don’t react, keep watching, breathe through my nose.
They shamble out at the next stop, too tired to keep the fight going. I can close my eyes and count breaths until the end of the line.
I walk through my neighborhood. It’s a quiet place, meaning a rich one. I’ve been hanging onto my rooms for a few years now, waiting for my landlord to challenge me about paying student prices so long after graduating. I’m not worried yet; like many others, he is caught up in his personal tragedies. As long as I keep hearing his staccato, robotic grief from the floor above—his metal mouth amplifying only the exhaled sobs and leaving the irregular intakes of air silent to me—then I know he isn’t thinking of money.
Today his curtained windows are mute, as I approach the thick, muffling hedge around the house. He isn’t home.
“PLEASE!”
I clap my hands over my ears. Something is talking to me from inside the locked yard, a waist-high lump in a winter coat.
“PLEASE!”
It’s a child. I unlock the gate and open it, but the child doesn’t move to leave. It only lifts its head, and red blood and scabs shine in the sunset light, fresh wounds around a newly implanted leaden box. I don’t remember how young that happens now. The rules keep changing.
Tiny down feathers drift out from a hole in the child’s coat. Above the collar, there’s no scarf or hat, just an unprotected brown face and shaven head. Its surgery looks especially deep: I see scars reaching across the jawline, way past the visible machine, searching for something deep and important to scoop from the child’s center. Even its slight shiver from the cold produces a weird rasp, a sound that scrapes at my headache.
We stare at each other, but when I hear a louder buzz and realize the child is inhaling to scream again, I snap and scream first. It’s a weird, wrangled scream, through jaws that barely open, amplified through spirals of metal behind my teeth. The meaningless sound reversing back through my bones and sinuses reels me into a daze, pushes me past the child-lump on the narrow path and through the unlocked front door of my home to escape.
I crash the door shut and instantly flood with anger at myself for making noise. I smash my head against the door and shout. I’m furious at the child for making me lose control. I count to three. I smash my head against the door and grunt in pain. I smash my head against the door as hard as I can, and stay silent.
Leaning my forehead against the heavy wood, I look into myself and all its familiar pains. My headache is blunted into a vast, dull background to everything. My jaw muscles are knots. My stomach and arms clench around frustration.
I make myself look forward to next week, though I also dread it. Next week I will laugh without pain and dance without a shred of self-consciousnesss. I will be okay, for a while, I tell myself. I’ll go to the ambassador’s dinner and we’ll all smile and demonstrate what being okay looks like.
I take the whole evening to do very little. I go to bed and turn the pages of a book without reading it.
I sleep badly, as I always have since the operation, and wake stiff-backed and still, making as little noise as possible.
The clothes frame standing at the foot of my bed announces the person I would have to become. A dress of daffodil and plant stem green, chosen for a spring that hadn’t come yet. Its hollow shape is a throat ready to swallow me: an open bodice huge enough to fall down, an insectile waist cinched tight enough to break my bones. If I put it on, I know it would fit my body perfectly, which is the worst thing of all. I’m uneasy and off-balance as I put on my usual, ill-fitting clothes, and hurt myself pulling the flattening bandage around my chest.
By the time I pee and brush my teeth, it’s already time to let my coworker in. He’s standing at the door, condensation from his breath freezing on the copper of his delicate loudspeaker. It’s a cold morning, but he would never ring the doorbell. We get along because we both cling to silence. It’s important to us never to break, to fall into that state of sensory pain where you can’t handle all the ways you want to respond. As I’d broken last night.
I retreat to my kitchen while he shuffles off his coat, steps out of his laceless shoes. Two cups of hot water from the faucet, so much quieter than the kettle. Two teabags. White bread and butter. It takes us a long time to eat, pushing fragments of food through letterbox slots, and in the long silence I become anxious. I realize I want to share my plans with my coworker, even though he won’t understand. I hadn’t planned to explain myself to anyone, but we’re all so limited in connection now. When I have a taste of it, it’s hard not to pretend I can grow it into more. I swallow lukewarm tea. I whisper my secret.
“I’ll be at the embassy gala.”
My coworker’s hands pull his bread apart without pause, lay the pieces in rows onto his plate. For the first time in all his visits, I want more sound from him.
“All the diplomats and ambassadors will be there,” I say, no longer whispering. “The government wants to show what nice and happy people it makes. They don’t have enough volunteers to be choosy about my politics.”
He’s still silent, still eating. I have time to feel despair. My ears are already ringing from my own voice. I continue, trying to provoke a response from him.
“They’ll make me wear a dress, of course. There are no trans people in this free, amplified world. I’ll put on makeup and smile at my dance partners ogling me. I’ll be someone else, someone you’ve never met, someone I’m used to hating. But at least I’ll be fucking dancing.”
Somehow I don’t feel pain from my own noise, even though I’m too loud now. I’m focused on my knuckles pressing into the wooden table, and on the nameless man across from me shrunken in on himself, eyes lowered, breathing through his nose.
“You don't even know what we go through, do you? What makes me able to do this? That’s on you. I’m not going to explain myself.”
I scrape the chair legs as I stand up, trying to make him wince and immediately angry at both of us for my own action.
“Just get out of here. And don’t visit again for now. Not while I’m different.”
He leaves without a gesture, the most offensively inoffensive of men. At some point it’s your fault if staying yourself is making you pathetic.
The landlord starts crying again. I imagine his staccato sobs ejecting spit. Rust on his skin. The sun moves painful reflections across the kitchen sink. My whole body tastes the tang of metal, buzzes the tones of a rattling screendoor in wind. No matter how small I get, being myself is too much.
Don’t worry. It’s not the first time I’ve been here. I am not as helpless as the men around me. I’ve worked hard to understand myself. Trans people have to. And even in a world that wants to kill me, I have options.
I spend the last hours of daylight walking by the canal. I’m not looking at the trees or water. I’m centering myself in myself, preparing.
Leaving the canal for the local shops, I buy a long, narrow cardboard box, and ask the packaging store employees for a bag of scrap paper.
At home, I unfold the box, ball up the scrap paper and throw it inside for packing material, and write the address of a government office on an address label.
I heat my dinner. While it’s cooling I take a bucket and a mop out of the hall closet, and bring them to the bathroom where I will fill the bucket with soapy water tomorrow.
I wheel the clothes frame to the entryway. There’s no need to sleep worse just because it’s there. I unwrap my bindings and sigh a tinny sigh at my sore flesh. It’s all right. I won’t need to bind for a couple weeks.
I go to bed early, and fall asleep, ignoring the piercing pain of the day’s accumulated sounds.
In the morning, I am deep inside my sanctuary, a tiny windowless room. One plastic chair, one workbench. High up, in the corner, a square of brighter grey on the grey paint walls, where a picture once hung. I am naked in the chair.
I pick up the largest tool, its blade a thumbnail’s width, and hold my chest aside so I can place it gently against my breastbone. The bone clicks. I let out a thin, held breath, making a quiet whistle that is almost beautiful. My bones part, and my chest opens up. Fat and muscles slide easily around my body so my arms are free to work.
I lean forward slightly, and a gentle wash of blood spills onto my thighs, no more than a finger’s full, leaving my bright interior clean and visible. I pick up the next tool, a long, flexible metal band, and apply the perfect amount of pressure to curl its end around the first of my organs, popping it out of its crevice. Shining and green, whorled like two snails making love, the organ lands on my welcoming free hand. I love the organ, as I love all my organs. I rub its hard surface for the pleasure of the sensation before placing it on the velvet cloth on my workbench.
I am performing this self-surgery with no mirror and no light. I don’t need them. This is me, and I know myself.
I loop a fine fishing line around the hook of a horse chestnut almost too small to see. With gentle pressure from my little finger, I pop out a brassy oval, punctured with fine holes. One by one, tenderly, I turn and slide and retrieve. The workbench fills with rows and rows of my immaculate parts. I am not nervous, for there can be no surprises in my endlessly reexamined self, but I work slowly, with the care of a watchmaker and the reverence of a priest. Sometimes I undo my work, sliding a hemisphere back into its perfect receptacle, so I can feel it a second time.
I still myself into silence for the last removal. I am panting, pushing dying dog sounds through always-dry teeth. I must pause for some time, drained and hollowed out.
My final organ is flexible and strong as good wood, as meaningful as the clear sky. Its long spiral is always wet with my blood, though every other organ stays dry. Longer than my torso, it stands upright at the back of me, and I can’t reach either end.
First I turn this slick helix, winding it a fraction of a turn upward. I feel it press against my throat, choke me gently. When I know it’s curled past the delicate hyoid bone, I push the spiral down, hard, and its base presses deep into the resisting softness of my groin. I moan, but even in the frequencies of metal I delight in my moan. When the wave of sensation passes, I lift my chin, stretch my neck, and gently, carefully pull the core of my self forward, up, and out.
Now I think about banquets of fruit ice and the joyful rhythm of hard shoes on lacquered floors. I turn on the light, struggle with my torso until it closes again. There’s not as much blood and mess as you would expect. It only takes me fifteen minutes to wipe the surfaces and mop the floor, and that includes knocking the cobwebs off the ceiling with the mop handle.
I retrieve the box from my bedroom, putting on a sweatshirt while I’m there to warm my naked body. In one clumsy sweep of my arm, I knock the whole mess of me off the workbench and into the cardboard container. I close a flap of the box, but then I let go, staring at my spiral core. Laughing at my own sentimentality, I obey the impulse to retrieve it, wrap it safe in soft cloth, and pack it properly. Tonight I’ll unpack old clothes. Tomorrow I’ll visit the post office.
It takes three weeks, usually, for them to review and return my organs. I’ll dance to live music at the gala, make jokes at work, wear low-cut dresses and laugh when strangers flirt with me. Life will be easier for three weeks, without myself.
