Always Kiss the Corpse (18 page)

He came over. “I tried to follow up but I couldn't find anything right away so I left it for later. Haines and the woman must have settled off the page.”

“The woman dropped the charges?”

“Or Haines compensated.”

“Diddled his patients, did he?” She continued reading.

Stockman Jones, M.D. U. Penn, 1973, urological and surgical residency at the Menninger Clinic, 1979, articles about the variance of surgical process in transgendering, male to female and vice versa. Also a number of publications on the importance of religion when making life-shaping decisions, all very delicately phrased.

“A born-again?”

Noel shrugged.

Richard Trevelyan, Ph.D. Northwestern 1972, thesis on “Significance of Esophageal Varices in Carcinoma of the Liver,” abridged and published in
Science
in 1973, much academic chatter back and forth. Then a post-doc at Temple U., Research Associate. 72-79, M.D. U. Chicago, 1983, residency in endocrinology and internal medicine at Johns Hopkins. Looked like Trevelyan had ejected from the academic system later in his career than Albright and Jones. Many published papers on liver and blood, such as “Significance of Estrogen Levels in Obstructive Liver Disease.” Also on the diseases of sex trade workers.

“These guys did home in on sex,” Kyra noted.

“There's also a history of ‘The Team.' Sort of self-hype.”

“Oh good. Tell me.” She combed her hair, tangled strand by strand.

Albright, Jones and Haines met at a conference on treatment of sexual definition in Phoenix. They were all Brilliant Young Things. Each presented a paper. They liked and respected each other, they covered a large spectrum of medical knowledge. They consulted each other and decided to set up a clinic together. Where? Seattle looked like a great possibility.

They collected Trevelyan in 1997, soon moved the clinic to Whidbey and renamed it WISDOM, coinciding with the Bendwell grant. Noel read to her, “In a rural atmosphere, bathed in the mellow breezes off the Japanese current, those in sexual discomfort can release themselves from their bonds, let them waft away as gently as rain-forest fog.”

She laughed. “Wonder how much it costs for bonds to waft away.”

“No idea. My bonds never waft away when fog settles in.”

“What did you learn about the sex change process?”

“I'll dig around. Do your nails or something.”

≈  ≈  ≈

Kyra pulled the Tracker out from between two cars parked very close on each side, swung toward the exit and fumbled on the dashboard for the garage door remote. The door slid up. Outside, all the promise of spring was being washed away by a misplaced November storm. Rain slanted from a low-slung pearl sky, splashing mud. She glanced at her watch. “I better step on it.” She did.

“Watch the road, it's slippery.”

She touched the brake pedal. “What did you learn about transgendering?”

“Mostly I confirmed my ignorance. I know almost nothing.”

“Till you got on-line?”

“Not really. There's a lot of info. I just barely scratched the surface.” Noel pulled his laptop from its case and opened his Word files. “Like from a site called the Transgender Café, sort of an info/chat room.” He searched about. “The stats vary immensely. Some estimates of twenty thousand transgendered people in North America, some saying two-tenths of a percent of the population, which would make it half a million. There's a report that argues one in thirty thousand males, one in one hundred thousand females. Huge differences, but more than just the occasional oddball.”

Kyra zipped up the ramp onto the I-5. The heater spewed warmth and she turned it down. However irritating her Tracker, it warmed up quickly. Why did she dislike it so?

“It seems a kind of new frontier of consciousness. Trans is the touchiest category of sexual existence. You remember when bisexuals used to be vilified by the gay community?”

“Not really.”

“Well, that's what's happening to trans folk now.”

“You keep saying ‘trans.'”

Noel shrugged. “It's one of the terms that keep coming up. Some prefer ‘intersex.' Some don't like transgender, they prefer transsexual. And the other way around. Here's the best definition I could find: ‘when a person's emotional and psychological and intellectual identity is different from what their physical body and sexuality would otherwise predict to be the case.'”

“That's pretty clear.”

Noel sighed. “Actually, it's not. Because the definition is based on the whole idea of being different, which would make a politically outspoken trans or intersexed person really angry. Because for them it's not a matter of being different. They aren't different from themselves.”

“Huh?”

“It's as if all your mental and spiritual and physical bits are lined up in a way that the larger world sees as odd. Some trans people feel like women in men's bodies. Some feel like lesbians in straight women's bodies. A woman I read about calls herself trans, physically she's a woman, likes that, likes being feminine, and is attracted to female-to-male transsexuals.”

“Complicated. Do we have a politically correct term?”

“I don't know.” He paused. “And what you get on the Internet can only be an abstraction of what it really feels like. I love the web, but it ain't real life.”

Kyra drove in silence, absorbing. Just plain being a woman was hard enough.

“Then there's the rest of it,” Noel went on, “all the science. Masses of work in sexuality and embryology, neurology, endocrinology in the last twenty years. Nobody knew this stuff when I was in school.” He glanced at another report. “So, in relation to when you confused homosexuality with transgendering—”

“I didn't.”

“When you thought I could explain Sandro better to Maria than you could.” He opened another file. “Completely different. The homosexual, male or female, feels he or she is in the right body and has no desire to trade it in. But the transgender candidate knows his or her external sex characteristics don't fit the internal gender state.” He scrolled down. “Some studies figure there's a disconnect between the way the brain and the sex organs develop. Female is the embryonic default position— Don't grin!”

“Can't help it.” Kyra grinned more. “Sure, all embryos start out as female and need huge doses of androgen to switch to male. But we've had thousands of years of being told male is the dominant position, or the default. So I'm allowed to grin. Years of blaming women for not producing sons when it's actually the man's department to supply the Y chromosome.”

“Mmm,” mumbled Noel. “Here's something else, and I agree with it. The most important site of gender identity is between the ears, not the legs. Got that?” More finger-moving. “There's a gene called the Testicular Determining Factor. It's in charge of one's sex and fetal gonadal development. Oh. The first recorded sex change was in Roman times.”

“Surgery? Then?” She shuddered. “Is surgery part of all transgendering cases?”

“Seems so.” Noel clicked another file open. “Costs anywhere from five thousand to twenty-five thousand per. And things can go wrong, but that doesn't get advertised a lot. I saved a long entry about the procedure.” More tracking. “Six to eight days in the hospital, then bed rest for however long it takes. Of course that's in the States. Wonder how long they let you stay in hospital in Canada.”

“What?”

“The overhaul of the health care system.”

“Oh, right.”

Noel clicked some more. “The surgeon fashions a vagina out of the penis. A longer penis means a deeper vagina. Tissue from a short penis can be augmented—”

“What do they do, just turn the penis inside out?”

Noel felt his scrotum shrivel. He'd scrolled through this on screen as clinically as he could, but now, reading it again, he twinged from thighs to gut. Out the window, blurry trees, farms, a herd of wet cows. He didn't want to know how fast Kyra was driving.

“How do they make a penis in a woman-to-man procedure?”

Now he feared his balls would withdraw completely. “Don't have anything on that. I imagine from the vaginal lining.” Noel glanced at Kyra. Tight mouth and raised lip. Her innards withering too?

“I can't imagine wanting to be the other sex.” A double-trailer cargo van swayed by, spraying them faster than the wipers could cope. For a moment it blinded her and she slowed.

“As I was telling you,” Noel scrambled around on his computer, “one can't say that.”

“What?”

“The other sex. There aren't only two. All sorts of variations. Sex as continuum. You also can't think of nature versus nurture any more, it's all interwoven.” He read: “‘To show how potent a small change at the molecular level can be, boys are sometimes born with uterus, fallopian tubes and internal vagina, but with cryptorchid testes where the ovaries should be and normal male external genitalia. They have hysterectomies and grow up as male and male-identified. Then there are genetic males with normal androgen levels but female external genitalia and undescended testes.' And so on. Fascinating.” He continued scrolling and reading silently.

Kyra felt grateful. Necessary detail. Armor for her WISDOM visit. The Tracker sped along, regularly passed by whooshes of large trucks. A calmer highway across the flatland lay ahead. Now the wind swept them head on.

“Here's a bit about so-called girls who changed to boys at puberty,” Noel announced. “Their undescended testes flooded them with testosterone, the testes descended, the labia fused as scrotum and the clitoris enlarged into penis.”

“Holy shit,” said Kyra.

“It says the boys adapted and became well-adjusted men with families. They were raised as girls but always felt like boys. Amazing.”

“Natural transgendering?”

“I guess.” A couple of minutes later: “Hermaphroditism is natural in some species.”

“Yeah. In certain fish and molluscs. I did a course on that in oceanography.”

“When you were a kid, did you belong to a secret club? Everyone with special names?”

“Yeah.” She laughed. “When I was eleven. And if you forgot anybody's name the penalties were dire. God, it was hard enough to remember my own name. You?”

“We had a complicated handshake. One hand backward. Same fear, ostracism. You want so much to belong. Not be different. Or just a little, and have others to be different with. To belong with.”

“And being sexually different?”

“Yeah, well, that's always the big one.” For Sandro, he suddenly realized, the motivation might have been to belong with himself.

“You said there's a transgender e-café?”

“Yeah.” A rise of trees loomed out of the distant gray. “Lots of people need to talk to people like themselves.” A minute later they crossed the Deception Pass bridge. He looked down. Water blended with mist, all below drifting, obscure. So it should be, crossing to an island, Noel thought with satisfaction—their car as on a ferry, its prow hidden in the proximate fog. A fine metaphor.

ELEVEN

The Mokas Mortuary hearse drove so smoothly the wheels might have been riding on air. Only a Cadillac, but maybe they'd customized the springs and shocks to give each of their corpses an even ride. Vasily didn't feel like talking this morning so just as well Nico had a hangover; that and driving took all his attention. A great evening and amazing night with Cynthia but at 8:03, the moment he'd switched on his cellphone, there was Andrei. Vasily's explanation of using a bit of benevolent persuasion yesterday to get the hearse arranged had undercut Andrei's annoyance, but something remained in his tone, maybe worry. Vasily promised to have the body in Seattle later today. Andrei said he'd talk to the docs at the clinic and seal off that spigot.

Vasily and Nico left the highway and drove down to Mukilteo along the Sound. The hearse clock said 9:34 as they lined up for the ferry. Their only conversation this morning was to choose between the ferry and the bridge at Deception Pass—more miles across the bridge but the ferry was slow and you had to line up early. Nico wanted to drive to Whidbey. Vasily saw Nico's red eyes and made the decision: Nico needed sea air. Nico objected to the hearse on the ferry, salt spray bad for the paint. Vasily said he'd spring for a wash when they got back. Vasily reminded Nico that Andrei was paying so they'd do it Vasily's way. End of conversation.

The twenty-five-minute crossing over the choppy waters of Possession Sound was rougher than Vasily liked, and foam did leap up to spray the hearse. He spent the time organizing the contents of his satchel. In Clinton they drove up the hill and away from the water.

In his early twenties he'd come across to Whidbey first with Miriam, then with Lisa. A ferry made a girl feel freed from her parents and on the island nobody would spot her walking into a motel. Some good times on Whidbey, Vasily remembered. Nico drove past Useless Bay Road. Vasily smiled. It'd been there ten years ago. Soon as Lisa read it she'd said they had to drive down, so he did. Now I'm free, she said, and started to cry. They'd had a good time. Back in Seattle, Vasily had dropped her pretty quick.

Now Nico drove north past one small church after another, Trinity Lutheran, All-Saints Confessional, This and That. Vasily wondered about those communities. For sure their kids would marry out. Cynthia was great in bed and even to talk to, but he'd never marry her. He was Greek after all. If he wasn't Greek maybe he'd marry Cynthia. Was Andrei right, time to settle down? That meant getting married, having kids, it didn't really mean settling down. Maybe after being married for a while he'd settle down.

They passed the road to Langley, then Holmes Harbor in Freeland, by Greenbank and a sign for the Naval Air Station Hancock Target Range. On the left a road headed to Fort Casey, now abandoned but with World War II battlements still in place. He remembered spooky relics, gun emplacements on the ramparts and cavernous storage rooms below. One evening in late summer he and Miriam hadn't been able to hold off any longer, no way would they make it back to the motel, so in one of the lower rooms they'd found a mid-sized cannon, great turn-on for Mir, and they'd screwed standing against its lower barrel . . .