Smoke (36 page)

Tom exhales in a narrow stream of hot, grey mist.

Smoke. Some say the place gets its name because of the tobacco, but perhaps it's because its bravest men never really leave, they evolve into something larger than themselves, into elusive mists and visible fogs that rest high above the village. Doc John never gave a second thought to it; he's only ever wanted to call it home.

On the morning of the sesquicentennial he wakes with a start as he has on many mornings since the day he and Alice were married. Perspiring. Ready to bolt. He's been dreaming again, the same dream in which he's lying on the Ambassador Bridge under a warm blanket when someone—he doesn't know who—rips the covers from his body and leaves him naked and exposed. In the dream people drive up, gather, point and laugh; a few are ready to take up arms. When he wakes, relieved that Alice is already downstairs, he feels himself begin to shrink as though even with rising he might still disappear. He tries to push away the feeling that soon his life will be unwrapped like a long-forgotten present. The first thing he does is dress.

For most being bound would not feel like any kind of salvation. Alice occasionally curses those tight-fitting girdles she wears, but for him the bandages offer protection from prying eyes, and the gift of a life he's struggled against all odds to maintain. Some men tighten a necktie in much the same fashion and feel stronger for it. Some men step into work boots, lace them and fall into line as they are meant to. He is held together like this, with gauze and pins and in a precarious manner, always under the threat of exposure. It has been so many years that he no longer thinks much while he dresses; he simply dresses.

The bindings flatten his chest. He winds them tightly around his torso, covering himself from the bottom of his rib cage to well up under his arms. He pulls them as tightly as can be tolerated while leaving his lungs free to breathe. After all these years, the muscles in his chest no longer resist and a flabby layer of flesh pushes against the gauze. He winds the bandages six or eight times before fastening them off. Then on goes his undershirt and the neatly pressed dress shirt, followed by his vest. Curious, the order to which a man habituates himself; alter that order and the house might come tumbling down. Once his feet are into clean socks and his toes are no longer cold on the drafty floor, he fastens the gear. He learned to craft it from cloth and finely treated deerskin, soft as a newborn. Read about it once in a medical book. He still adores the faint odour of old, sweaty leather and the feel of a tight grip eating into his thighs.

The straps are brown. The member itself is dust and bone coloured. He sewed it tightly with horsehair, by hand. He's made several over the years though this last one is the most durable. He's watched Alice mending to discern how she manages a tight stitch and so, in a way, the thing has her handiwork all over it. In the beginning it had felt artificial. Fake even. But once he discovered how to pack it into his pants so that its discreet bulge was authentic and once he learned to use it in bed so that his wife was satisfied, to lift it before urination and to dress before she rose, it became a second skin. Without it he feels naked, the victim of an amputation. He wears it while he sleeps. He rarely removes it except briefly each morning to wash it or himself, and even then its absence is replaced by a phantom limb. Without the harness he isn't the man he wants to be, though he doesn't wear it because he thinks it makes him a different person, a better person. He doesn't wear it to change the world. He wears it, he knows, so the world won't change him.

As a physician he remains hard-pressed to define the sexes or the space between or beyond them—define human—to anyone's satisfaction. Before the accoutrements of hair and clothes and shoes that he adopted, there was that small brave knowing,
knowing
that the blood pumping through his veins was on a course all its own. He'd once thought himself a monster, a reversal of nature, a perverse wretch. Sure he had.
What am I?
he'd asked in his quietest moments.
Who am I?
He'd felt as guilty and confined as that girl in the Mo Axler story. He long thought of himself as wrong and kept it under wraps through his younger years when his father's textbooks all confirmed it, until holding on in silence rotted straight through his core like a worm desecrating an apple. Mind body. Body mind. He still doesn't understand which governs though he is sure they must match. Week after week, year after year that original plot goes on stuttering in his brain like one of Walter Johnson's records stuck on the player.
Man man man
. But a human being could exist somewhere between male and female, couldn't they? Or be neither? Or both? What if there are others straddling this equator called sex. Do they move through the world with an ever-widening sense that there is no cure for ambiguity, that to carry on with any measure of peace and safety they have to choose? I am a doctor, he tells himself whenever the question of definitions returns. A husband. The man I always wanted to be. Once he'd decided there was no turning back.

He'd left home and started over. Since then he has taken the trouble of wearing a coat and tie, always the height of fashion, pressed trousers and lifts in his shoes. He maintains carefully barbered and oiled hair with which he never plays. He won't cross his legs at the knee or allow himself to appear animated. His gestures are large. He shaves his face daily. He dresses left and this affects the hang of his trousers. He cleans the gear with saddle soap and water, and before it begins to smell, replaces it using the same measurements. Alice is accustomed to the feeling of straps on his body. When they make love it's always dark. He flirted with suits and ties in private, when he was younger. Studied others for years. And what he found was that in matters of recognition, costuming and confidence were just about everything. Yes he's discovered since leaving Detroit that if he dresses as the other men full-time, behaves as others do and does so with his head held high, he gets by. It's as if his skin somehow stretches into maleness and it's that stretch, that sense of entitlement, which shows most convincingly to the world.

In the earliest days of his marriage when his time of the month came around and there was the worry that Alice might detect blood dotting his underclothes in the laundry hamper, he explained about the hemorrhoids he suffered time to time. Then the change came and that stage brought relief; an end to any lingering biological reminders of an underground existence and where he'd been, adding a wirier sprig of whiskers to his chin, further lowering his voice and squaring off his jawline. Passing requires luck, keen observation and vigilance, and accommodating expectations so that eventually he cut the feminine from his daily routine as if it were a slow-spreading disease.

He is no woman. Not now and not even when he was living in Michigan. His skin isn't soft as a woman's, except for his face and hands, which he's taken care to keep manicured—a physician must have sensitive hands. Everywhere else has always been tough and dry and that's as he prefers it. For years he's stared into the faces of the wounded, treated colds, allergies, cancer, tobacco poisoning, treated those who have problems with sugar and nerves, and they've all looked back at him with relief and security. He does his job better than most, has rarely missed a day, never forgets an appointment or rushes a patient out of the office. He even treats those who have no money to pay. He believes it's his debt to do so, the cost of freedom and deserting his family. He's practised medicine without allowing himself, even once, the luxurious instinct to recoil. He's cut into diseased flesh, read up on new medications, punctured skin with needles, tended burns. It's penance, he knows, as much as it is pride.

His decrepit face, once smoother, reveals nothing any more except borrowed time. And each of the four chambers of his heart beats its own message; beats privacy, secrecy, beats sacrifice. Fear. His stomach is inflamed and ravaged by an excess of acid. Still, there have seldom, if ever, been funny looks or even raised eyebrows. Occasionally a new patient, one from a neighbouring town or village, will stare a bit long, think that she's glimpsed something not quite right. And recently Buster has become suspicious. But these moments are easily shaken off and forgotten, and until this morning not even Alice, who's held his hand each day and accompanied him on this walk across an invisible threshold, could know for certain that the past will be revealed in the end. His hair, yellowing and thinned out in patches, is relaxing to the touch like fine cornsilk. Loose flesh hangs off his arms like balloons filled with wet sand. Brown patches of speckled skin decorate his hands and face more than they should at his age. All bodies transform, he knows. Young to old. Thin to fat. Some soon, some late, sometimes transforming full revolutions. They belong to no one; not the families they are born into, not those who offer love or assistance, not even the communities they inhabit. He hopes for a place far ahead, far, far into the future, where one day bodies might become maps of possible return, where a body like his might be an individual right and not a public outrage. Perhaps in Smoke? Michigan? But not yet. He lives as everyone does, rooted to a specific time and place, and that circumstance makes him a wanted man.

And yet, there is a growing field to treat such conditions. Endocrinology boasts of hormone therapies, radical surgeries. If he were young today, he wonders, would
he
seek such treatments? If he could erase all traces of this transfer would he do it? He had once wanted nothing more than to be released from the tomb that concealed him, and he would have risked infection, scarring, life itself, to do so. He would have travelled the earth seeking willing surgeons, bribed them if necessary. But now, in his latter days, he has the luxury of seeing the limitations of remedies like conformity. There must be a purpose to me as I am, he thinks. I exist.

And what female qualities, if any, he dares to think, still lurk in the chemistry of my brain and blood, under my skin? Do these qualities make me a more nurturing physician? A better doctor? What if my bedside manner has been tempered by a dulcet touch in a way that Elgin Baker's, for example, has not? Should I really eradicate that? Perhaps I am something else altogether, he thinks. A category not yet named. We all become something else, even as the sun sets, and again when it rises. We become something else on the way to something else again. Only a fool and the dead don't change.

Doc John knows better than to ever voice these thoughts out loud or to lose himself inside Utopian fantasies for he's heard of boys not unlike him strung up like mutton in back alleys or on fence posts. He's doctored all kinds from all kinds of places—he's even doctored himself. There is no point any more in imagining life as anything other than what it is. Confounding. Messy. Flawed. There is no proof, no good science, in conjecture. But oh, the stories, the marvellous tales he's embellished from what he witnessed and overheard long ago, now those
are
worth imagining. They tell everything the real world is not yet able to hear, and why not? Curing and fixing and recovery is not all there's been to his life. There was a world before. Back-room deals and business conducted under the table. There was love and death and guns and there was a girl once. There were many things and many people but with Alice he has known pleasure so bright it turns ugliness to beauty and justifies existence like no stamp on a birth certificate ever could.

Changing sex is no disappearing act; it's a love letter to the self.

I
T RAINS IN THE EARLY MORNING
—skies like mud, and then a quick drizzle that peters out. By breakfast the September sun is poking through the clouds, the clouds are moving off like defeated opponents and Smoke is lit once more like the blessing that it is. Alice serves a late breakfast of burnt toast and orange marmalade and answers two phone calls—one from a man in Zenda looking for a doctor to treat his cataracts and the second from Doc Baker in Tillsonburg.

“John, Elgin Baker on the phone.”

“Tell him I'm on my way out. Band rehearsal's in twenty minutes.”

“He wants to speak with you directly. Says it's important.”

The doctor rises, disgruntled, and walks down the hall to the phone. He clears his throat, picks up the heavy black receiver. “John here. You can? Right. I'll let folks know then. You coming today? Right, right. We'll see you.” He hangs up and returns to finish his breakfast.

“What was that about?”

“He'll start taking referrals as of Monday. Got a nephew fresh out of school to help.”

“Then it's finally resolved.” Alice moves towards her husband, sits on his lap and reaches her arms around his neck. “Good. You'll have more time for other things.” She leans in and kisses him on the lips. It's a long, dry kiss, almost chaste in its delivery but not quite.

“I've got a few ideas already,” he says.