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Dawn is my favorite time of day, perhaps because I see it so rarely. I love the cool blues as the sun arises, and the way they change, moment by moment, from east to west. I love the wind of dawn that kisses my cheek at that instant when the east is fully daylit, and the west is fully dark. Clouds above the mountains herald the sun in brillant white, with none of the gaudy pinks of the blowsy sunset. Clouds above the sea are unlit fortresses, defending the stars with their blackness.
Kristen and I sat in the terminal and waited for our flight. I hadn't changed back yet, and probably wouldn't for at least a week. The two women, one tall with long blonde hair, one short with short brown hair, who sat holding hands, attracted some curious looks; but no one said anything. For this mercy from conservative San Diego, I was grateful.
No one was sitting nearby. "Rats," I said to Kristen. "I missed another chance to propose."
She smiled, and squeezed my hand. "Yes," she said softly.
The first time I changed was a complete surprise. Thanks to the circumstances of my mother's birth, I had no idea such a thing could happen, let alone that it could happen to me. On top of that, I hadn't even been expecting a seizure. I went to bed, in the trailer that Dave and I shared, without an aura.
The room was dark when I woke up, though the heat argued it was late in the day. "Unggh," I said, and sat up. I felt very strange.
"It's alive!" Dave said from the hall door. "And how are we feeling?"
"Like I've slept for a year," I grumbled. "Phew! And I smell like it, too!"
"I hung a bathrobe on the bathroom door," Dave said. "I'll be in the living room."
That puzzled me, since a towel around the waist had been enough before. But I needed a shower in the worst way, and my bladder was full. I grabbed a towel out of the towel drawer of my captain's bed and walked to the bathroom in my underwear. The order of rooms in the trailer, from back to front, was: my bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, and the living room, which was also Dave's bedroom. There were sliding wooden doors between my room and the bathroom, and between the bathroom and the kitchen area; Dave had shut them both.
But I needed to piss too much to stop and wonder at my roommate's odd behavior. I peeled my underpants off my body and dropped them in a corner with a sodden thump. "Gah, what a stench," I muttered, and stepped up to the toilet.
I'm sure my shriek was heard all over the trailer court.
"How do you feel?" Kristen asked, sitting on the couch next to me, and holding my hands. "Do you feel different? I mean, you look a little different, but not too much."
We were in the front room of the trailer. Dave had called Kristen for me while I cleaned up and put on clean clothes, then he fled the scene. Truth to tell, I was glad to see him go, for a while. The way he was acting made me feel even more like a freak.
"Odd, but natural," I said. I didn't let go of her hands. "At first I felt like a man who'd been shoved into a woman's body, but I'm adjusting. I don't feel sick, or deformed, or mutilated. I guess, given enough time, it'll feel right to be female, like it felt right to be male."
"The hormones rule," Kristen said.
"Yes," I said. "Everything smells different. Is that female, or just me changing?"
"How would I know?" she said reasonably. "Different how?"
"Stronger," I said. "But things that haven't changed don't smell the same." I leaned over and sniffed her neck. "Hmmm ... You smell different, for one thing."
"David!" Kristen half-shrieked, half-laughed, freeing one of her hands to push me back. "You can't just go around smelling people!"
"OK," I said. "But I wanted to see ... Ever since you got here today, there's been this scent ... I wanted to see if it were you; and it is."
"What kind of scent?" Kristen said.
"Oh, I don't know," I said. "How do you describe a smell? Kind of like bread baking; kind of like vanilla; kind of like a rose; none of those, but like all of those."
"I'm not wearing any perfume!" Kristen protested.
"I know," I said.
"And it's not just smell," I went on. "My glasses aren't right, either. I'm still astigmatic, but the nearsightedness in one eye, and the farsightedness in the other, have corrected themselves. I actually see a lot better without my glasses now."
"Why did the one fix itself, and not the other?" Kristen wondered.
"I don't know," I told her.
"What are you going to do?" Kristen asked.
I shrugged. "What can I do? Adjust, and see what happens. Thank God it's summer and I don't have classes. If I change back, OK. If I don't, eventually I'll have to change my name ... and other things. For starters, can I ask a huge, huge favor?"
"Probably," Kristen said cautiously. "What?"
"I seem to be having my period," I mumbled. "Would you show me how to use a tampon?"
A month passed. Kristen showed me what it was like to be female, and gave me the courage to go out in public. It was a lot easier to go to Mission Valley, whether to buy underwear or just to have lunch, with my girlfriend along — and you can read that "girlfriend" in either sense of the word. Kristen isn't a lesbian, but my own preferences hadn't changed. Are you a lesbian if you're born and raised a heterosexual male, then your body changes to female and you're still only interested in women?
I was still living in the trailer with David, and he was being a perfect gentleman. Only, it felt odd that he should be a gentleman towards me. We talked about it a few times. I told him that if I were interested in guys, he'd be first on my list — but I wasn't. Kristen was still my whole world.
A second month went by, and I cried a lot at night. It would be an exaggeration to say I considered suicide, but I did wonder, on the odd days as it were, if I could live my whole life this way. (On the even days it seemed almost as if I'd been female forever.)
By the third month my hair had grown out to a short bob, my skin was fully padded with a female layer of fat, and my breasts felt natural. They weren't very big, but it no longer felt like someone had superglued two water balloons to my chest.
"You're shaking!" Kristen said, putting her arms around me in the food court. "What is it? What happened?"
"S-S-Some guy," I said, full of rage and hysteria.
"What?"
"H-He asked me for a date!" I said.
"What did you say?" Kristen asked.
"I didn't say anything! I was too busy trying to decide whether I should hit him or not!"
"Well, girlfriend," Kristen said, "I guess you'd better hurry up and pick a new name."
Maybe it was coincidence that I had a seizure that evening, or maybe it was the stress of the last few months. Maybe it was just time for me to change back. Dave and I were in the living room of the trailer. He was making mail, bending the rings around each other with a pair of pliers in each hand, and I was scribbling in a notebook, working on what would become the first draft of Arthur's Vow. We were talking about this and that (it didn't interfere with the kind of writing I was doing), and as always there was a record on the stereo, either Kismet or the original Borodin music.
"Dave," I said suddenly, "turn up the music, it's fading."
Gibber gibber gabble?
"Oh," I said, trying to get up. My knees had turned to water.
"I think ..." I said, standing up, and then I fell. The last thing I saw was Dave dropping the mail on the floor and coming over to me.
I woke up tired and sore from the usual violent exercise of a seizure, and of course sweaty. I took inventory. I didn't seem to have broken or banged anything — Oh my God! I was a man again! My penis was back, and my boobs were gone.
"You're awake," Kristen said, and turned on the light. The sight of her in the dim overhead was like the sun rising after a storm.
"Every time I need you, there you are," I said.
"Where else would I be?" she said, sitting down on a chair next to the bed.
"I couldn't have gotten through the summer without you," I said, taking her hand.
"Oh, so now you don't need me anymore?"
"I'll always need you," I said. "Excuse me for saying this on my back, but — Kristen, will you marry me?"
She looked down at our hands. "You haven't said you love me, David."
"I've loved you since the moment I first saw you, back in junior high," I said. "I loved you as a boy, I loved you as a woman, and I'll love you forever, sick or well, man or woman, rich or poor."
"Well, then," she said, and leaned over and kissed me.
"So, will you marry me?" I asked again, when my mouth was free.
Still holding me, she put her forehead against mine. "I will," she said, her hair flowing around us both.
Since that summer, I've had few actual seizures, but I've been threatened with one every full moon. When the aura does evolve into a seizure, I change, not into a wolf or an ape, but a woman. It sometimes takes the whole month to change back, so it's a good thing that I'm a writer, and don't have to go to a job every day. The one mercy is, if I do change one month, I don't change again the next.
So far, anyway.
Some research (for a story, I told everyone) led to the identity of my mother's Indian father, now dead alas, and the reputation of his people as outsiders feared by the other local Indians as witches and skin-changers. So perhaps it's no wonder that I have seizures when my brothers don't, and even though Dad wasn't gassed by the Russians. If the seizures and the sex change are a legacy from my mother's father's people, it makes sense that I'd be the one affected. I was always the person most like my mother, in appearance, in being free of all the allergies my father and brothers had, and in temperament and character.
I'm my mother's son, God help me. And my mother's daughter, too — part of the time.
"Here's something interesting," Kristen said, looking up from her omnicom — a doctor has to read constantly to stay current. "Some geneticists have completed the human genome."
"What? I thought that was done already. Ten years ago, wasn't it?"
"Yes and no," Kristen said. "Despite all the lessons to the contrary, male doctors keep leaving women out of their studies. Now some women have added both of the female X chromosomes to the genome."
"And?" I said, hearing more to come.
"It seems there's more variation in the X chromosomes than all the rest of the genome," Kristen said. "What genes are present, where they're located, whether one or both or neither of the pairs are expressed which a man doesn't have on his little twisted Y chromosome — women differ more from men, and more from each other, than men do among themselves."
"I guess men and women really are different," I said from my female body. "How much?"
"Between one and two percent," Kristen said.
I had to laugh. "Christ!" I said. "I was telling Steve just Saturday, that's how much men and chimps and bonobos and gorillas differ!"
"So when a woman says to a man, 'You big ape!'," Kristen began.
I laughed with her, and then they called our flight.
Out we walked to the waiting plane. I recalled a poem I wrote on a trip to Michigan State, one February long ago, when in my early-morning dreaming I'd considered the jet as a living creature with its own awareness. "Myself they filled with themselves," the plane had whispered. Dew glistened on the beast's sleek sides, while the fog lifted, very slowly.
We took our seats. The engines started. The beast rolled down the runway, picking up speed, the wind of its passage whipping rivers of dew past the porthole windows. I squeezed Kristen's hand. She turned her head and smiled sweetly at me, and squeezed back. The roar of the engines was a shout of joy. Like a toy the Earth I cast away.
| Table of Contents | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Monday |
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