T at 42

I believed it was too late. I didn’t but know that the molecules in a physique of water go in any path. Think about Orlando’s shock when he wakes up a girl after dwelling many years as a person. Think about mine when, on the Friday earlier than my forty second birthday, I inject T for the primary time. It’s the colour of one thing {that a} wasp—not a bee—may make. The precise colour I imagined Ben Affleck’s character capturing into his buttocks in A Physique to Die For, once I watched him 1 / 4 of a century in the past from the leaf-print sofa that appeared in all people’s home. Congratulations, says my physician—you may have the testosterone ranges of a teenage boy and the estrogen of a girl in her 40s. No one mentions that I’ll have a bit of dick—or perhaps they do, the way in which the adults instructed me I’d have a damaged coronary heart sometime and I believed it meant one factor whereas really it meant one thing wildly completely different. Time has nothing to do with it. The T coursing via my physique looks like somebody left the lights on all evening lengthy. I’m Rio. I’m Tokyo. I feel I lastly perceive why males are males, I say to my pal. She jokes, Don’t be out right here in these streets, however we’re each a bit of interested in what comes subsequent. I stroll the town feeling for the primary time just like the pavement belongs beneath my toes; block after block with this unusual, erect new feeling. I chase one thing that retains altering, the way in which Orlando for tons of of pages goes after the goose that flies too quick.  However I don’t wish to be Orlando. I wish to be George Michael. I wish to be Bruce Willis in Die Exhausting and Die Exhausting III (however not Die Exhausting II), or Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills, or an X-Man who exists solely to be harm. You might be T-shaped, the web site says. You possibly can have the jaw you’ve all the time pictured your self having. You possibly can develop a beard that received’t sweat off or smudge. My voice modifications. My odor, too—the distinction between bread and toast. One thing slots into place. My very own phrases in my chest, rain in a drum. The canine listens higher to instructions now. Kids startle. The ladies I move have a look at me with a query on their faces. My father-in-law blinks at me like I’m any individual he’s alleged to know, or a German panzer he as soon as noticed on the Historical past Channel. My goals are filled with all these things I might by no means earlier than do whereas unconscious: land a punch, get caught in a torrential downpour, experience a thundering animal with a sloping physique and a thick, moist coat. Each feminine ought to have a bit of shot of this once in a while, I feel—however then girls would set fireplace to their fleets the way in which they did in Troy after they wished their males to pay attention. My father all the time wished a son. He cried when the final woman was born. I ponder what he would say now, if he weren’t ashes; I ponder if we might each carry the scent of soldered steel. Water molecules transfer in any path, sure, besides those on the floor have nowhere to go however down. Orlando lived 300 years with out ageing. As do I, from Friday to Friday, syringe to syringe. A prick beneath my stomach button, tiny beads of T shining like Orlando’s pearls towards Virginia Woolf’s moon. If water strikes in all instructions, then so should blood, proper? And if time has nothing to do with it, then I’m again on the sofa with my childhood pal, telling her, I want I have been a boy. She’ll run and inform / her mother is banging a spoon towards a bowl / a guttural sound comes out of the mom’s mouth / which ends with That’s such an unpleasant factor to say. So I spend lifetimes as a girl. I put on a yellow costume I really like. I’m the earlier than and the after. On the finish, Orlando appears up, sees a aircraft for the primary time, is aware of it to be the goose. On the finish, I perceive there isn’t any water, no physique, no blood, solely an concept taking form towards the flickering gentle. So what ought to we name you? What are you now? Him? She? They? Them? Name me Orlando.   

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