Annabel (27 page)

“What?”

“You should take down that hood. Take it down and clean up your face and get some new clothes that fit. It’s weird — you had the same jacket on that other time I saw you, and now you look fatter but that jacket is way too big. It’s like you got bigger and smaller at the same time.”

“It’s muscle mass, Steve. The hormones gave me muscle mass like a man, and now it’s going away and everything is softer.”

“Take the hood down off you so I can have a look at your face.”

Wayne did not want to take the hood down, so Steve took it down for him. Wayne was glad there was darkness, though he knew Steve could see his face because he could see Steve’s, in the light from the ships and the dock lamps. Steve looked at him and frowned with the effort of trying to examine his face objectively.

Wayne had delivered a duck on Old Topsail Road earlier and a little girl had looked up at him from the doorway while her mother went to get the money. The little girl had stared at him, then shouted along the corridor, “Mommy, is that a lady or a man?”

Now he felt the fluid in his abdomen, accompanied by an ongoing ache, and he remembered the fetus that had formed in him before. He imagined its eyes and he easily imagined its face looking at him now. If it had happened before, what was to stop it from happening again? What was to stop him being haunted by one pair of eyes after another, just the same as that first pair?

“The thing I’m most worried about right now,” he told Steve Keating, “is not how my face looks.”

27

Lotus

W
AYNE DID NOT EXPECT,
when he went to the Grace General Hospital, that the doctors would treat him as a model on which to train their students. He understood it in retrospect, but that did not make it any easier.

The Grace General was close to downtown. It was on a part of Military Road that sat on the descent to the harbour. It had black railings like the churches and it had impressive smokestacks with white smoke belching out, and a thousand blank, dark windows, narrow and small like the windows in a castle a child would draw, but not a beautiful castle. There was a Subway restaurant across the road, and a taxi stand, and a corner store and other one-storey businesses that looked hovel-like next to the big cream-and-soot-coloured building. What was the hospital burning, Wayne wondered, that caused all the white smoke? Gracie Watts had once told him that hospitals were constantly getting rid of dangerous waste, and he wondered if that was what was going up in smoke now over the traffic lights and the hamburger stand with broken clapboard. He wondered what kind of dangers were in the smoke.

He had a lot of explaining to do when he tried to tell the receptionist and the nurses why he had come in. He had to make not one but seven trips to the hospital before they understood his case, or thought they understood it. He brought in the forms his father had forwarded to him, outlining the medications he was supposed to take and their cost, and he gave the names of the doctors who had treated him in Goose Bay, or at least those whose names he remembered. Several times during this process he lost his courage and thought, These people are never going to be able to help me. He watched other patients in the corridors, and that made him want to run away. There was a man whose mouth sat perpetually open lying in a cot next to a bucket of grey water that had a mop standing in it. From a cafeteria somewhere in the bowels of the building came the smell of alphabet soup and meat pies. When doctors finally did listen to Wayne, sitting in an admission room holding clipboards, he realized they were not doctors but people who interviewed you before a doctor did. They interviewed him at length, then left him to wait a long time alone in the room.

He went through with all this because he feared the swelling and the tenderness in his belly. When, after several visits, his records finally arrived from Goose Bay, a doctor named Haldor Carr came in with two more doctors and seven interns. These observers all watched carefully, hoping to learn a great deal from Haldor Carr about a kind of case most interns never got to see.

His first real appointment involved the doctors telling Wayne he should not have done what he had done. They were unhappy that he had stopped taking the green pills, the white capsules, and the tiny yellow pills. He should at least, they said, have consulted with them first and agreed upon a timetable. He should not have taken matters into his own hands. Now they could guarantee nothing. They could not guarantee the safety of any medical intervention from now on, and had Wayne considered this before he had acted so rashly, they would not now all be in a position of risk. It was not just the patient’s own health that was at risk here, Haldor Carr said.

Wayne realized the doctor had stopped talking to him and was addressing his interns. Haldor Carr was a teaching physician, and he was teaching now. Wayne was an exhibit. He wanted to leave the room, but if he did that there would be no way to find out if his body had again become pregnant. He was terrified it had, so he stayed in the room with this crowd of people, none of whom looked at him directly except for one girl, an Asian intern, small and serious.

Wayne did not know what Dr. Haldor Carr was ready to do in the name of teaching and of medicine. He might remove Wayne’s penis, or his womb. Wayne heard him talk about these possibilities. Or Haldor Carr might do nothing but reopen Wayne’s vagina and ask each intern to insert a gloved hand and feel the cervix, the placement of it and its distance from the vaginal opening.

Wayne listened to all of this and felt helpless and angry. He realized the doctor did not know any right or wrong thing to do, and that his motives for deciding were not the same as his own. Haldor Carr had power and Wayne felt powerless. He was lying down, but he forced himself to sit up and use the only thing of influence that he owned: his voice. His voice did not want to come out of hiding, but he knew he had to exercise it or Haldor Carr would choose one of the surgeries and perform it.

“When you open my body this time,” Wayne said, “and let the fluid out, I don’t want my vagina closed up again. I want it left open. And I don’t want you to remove anything.”

This way, Wayne thought, he would become who he had been when he was born. At least he would have that. The truth of himself, who he really was.

The doctor did not want to hear about it.

“If you can’t agree to that,” Wayne said, “I’m going to walk out of the hospital.” He did not want to walk out of the hospital at all. But he said this as if he possessed great certainty.

Wayne had spoken up, and now he had done so, he knew he had spoken with his whole self: with the voice of Annabel and not only that of Wayne. If Haldor Carr wanted to teach those interns, he had no choice but to do what Wayne asked.

As Haldor Carr let out the trapped blood with its stench of iron and fermentation, all Wayne could think about was whether there had been a second fetus trapped inside him. But Haldor Carr did not speak to him. When the interns had cleaned up the blood, the doctor resumed teaching them.

“Here” — he touched Wayne with an ice-cold wand of metal — “latent and manifest tissues share the same characteristics. This penis has presented as ambiguous. In the absence of the medications this client was meant to take, it has reverted to what we might consider to be an elongated clitoris. But we might equally consider it still to be a penis, though a truncated one. This is the kind of thing that happens when a patient refuses compliance.”

Wayne tried to interrupt. “What about in the Fallopian tube?”

Haldor Carr wrote in his notepad as if Wayne had not spoken, and his interns crowded in to learn what he thought. They had their backs to Wayne. But the small, serious girl heard.

“What did you say?”

“Last time this happened, in the Fallopian tube there was a fetus.”

She laid her hands on Wayne’s abdomen and pressed down, but not hard. She touched him carefully. The other interns listened to Haldor Carr tell them all he knew about hermaphroditism. About phalometers and undescended testicles. About charting levels of testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone. About how, twenty years ago, there had been no surgical removal of Wayne’s lone ovary or the womb, and look at the mess this patient was in now. They moved in a pod to the other side of the room. The gentle intern inserted gloved fingers carefully into Wayne and did an internal exam. She was a good student and she did this conscientiously.

“You have a womb. You have a cervix. You have one ovary. You have one Fallopian tube. Everything is clear and there is no fetus. Everything is okay.”

The doctor and the other interns kept their backs to Wayne. They were looking at a chart.

While the gentle intern removed her gloves and washed her hands in the sink, Wayne touched the opening behind his penis and felt hunger leap from inside the pain. The hunger was an old memory. Not his own memory but a memory belonging to women and their latent passion, ready to flare.

The gentle intern had come back, and she said, “Before everything heals, it’s better not to touch.”

But he had ignited the centre of his body, which no one had done: not Gracie Watts, and not himself. He remembered Wally Michelin, who had somehow touched this centre but in a way that belonged to the mind, the heart, and the imagination. There was a lotus inside a person, and another person could share its atmosphere, its fragrance, even if those two people were not touching. Wayne did not understand why he should think of Wally Michelin at this moment, except that there was bliss in knowing this centre of the world, and it had to do with deep connection with another person.

“Do you wonder,” the gentle intern asked him, “what your life would have been like if you had been brought up female?”

“My name would have been Annabel.”

“Annabel. That’s beautiful.”

“But look at me.”

“I see you. I see there was a baby born, and her name is Annabel, and no one knows her.”

The intern said this, and Annabel, inside Wayne, had been waiting for it. She heard it from her hiding place.

“You can use her name,” the intern said. “Haven’t you got a friend you can tell it to?”

“I did.” Wayne longed for Wally Michelin. “But I lost her.” The incision Haldor Carr had made began to hurt. It hurt a lot, and now all Wayne wanted to do was sleep.

“You have no one?”

Steve Keating had begged to drive Wayne to the hospital. He had badgered him about it until the last minute. Steve had been very interested in the whole story of the part of Wayne that was really a girl.

“I guess I do have one friend,” Wayne said.

But the name, Annabel, was a spell that altered Steve Keating.

Steve had kept the scientific information about Wayne in confidence — there was enough fascination in it for him that he had not needed anyone else to know. But when Wayne came back from hospital and told Steve Keating the new name, Steve could not assimilate it as he could the other facts. It was not as if Wayne had asked Steve to call him the new name. Wayne simply told it to him, and the sound, Annabel, floated like a water lily in Steve’s mind. It bobbed, surprising him in the night as he walked towards Derek Warford and his friends on the wharf.

“Keating,” Derek Warford said. “Where’s your friend tonight? Your new buddy. You and him pretty close or what?”

“Get lost.”

“What’s his name, anyway?”

Steve paid for a bottle out of Warford’s six-pack. He bought a couple more. When he had drunk them, he said, “His name’s Wayne Blake. And guess what.”

“What the fuck, Keating.”

“He just had a sex-change operation.” Steve did not know what else to call it.

“Fuck off.”

“He changed his name to Annabel.”

“Get lost.”

“Look at him up close next time you get the chance.”

“You’re full of it, Keating. You need your balls kicked in. That’d be a perfect sex-change operation for you, wouldn’t it, boys?”

Jack’s Corner Shop had a shelf of Hunt’s tomatoes and Chef Boyardee ravioli and Carnation evaporated milk. A shelf of paper towels and toilet paper and maxi-pads and tampons and garbage bags. A rack of chips and Cheezies, and a shelf of batteries and iron-on patches and WD-40, and a shelf of paper plates and plastic knives, forks, and spoons and birthday candles in the shapes of numbers. Beside the hot dog machine stood beef jerky and apple flips from Janes’s Bakery and one jar of pickled eggs and another of pickled weiners, and lotto tickets, and behind the counter there was a meat slicer on which Jack’s wife, Josephine, and his daughter Margaret Skaines sliced three hundred dollars a week’s worth of turkey roll and bologna. The boys of the Battery went there for smokes and slices of Maple Leaf bologna, and this was what Derek Warford was doing the night he saw Wayne, who had spent a half-hour after work up in the place Steve had shown him — Katie Twomey’s verandah — watching the lights on the water. Wayne had parked his van across from Jack’s Corner Shop and walked up the hill. For the past couple of nights he had not seen Steve. But he did not mind quietly watching the lights alone. Steve had been inclined to talk on and on.

Derek leaned against the counter as Margaret Skaines wrapped his slices in waxed paper, and he took a good look at Wayne.

“How’s it going?”

“Not bad.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

Margaret Skaines gave Derek his meat and he paid a dollar forty-nine for it, and he bought himself a couple of Sweet Marie bars that Jack’s had on sale for sixty-nine cents. He unwrapped his first bologna slice, peeled off the plastic rind with its red and blue letters, threw it on the floor, and bit into the pink, then moved closer. Wayne saw his teethmarks in the bologna and the brown ridges in the skin over his Adam’s apple, and he felt a finger of fear. Derek Warford sized up Wayne’s chest, noticing it in a new light.

“Sorry for your troubles there, Wayne.”

“Pardon?”

“I heard you had to go in for an operation. Hope it wasn’t too serious. Hope it wasn’t prostate cancer or nothing.”

Wayne saw that Steve had told Derek something.

“No one likes to go under the knife.” Derek looked at both sides of his slice. He was particular about flies and specks of dust. “Myself, now, you wouldn’t catch me near anything like that. What was it you had done? You didn’t lose nothing, did you?”

Derek leaned close enough to escape the earshot of Margaret Skaines, who was wiping the meat machine with a paper towel and lemon spray. Wayne smelled the lemon mist and the bologna on Derek’s breath as Derek whispered, “You didn’t lose your balls, I hope.”

Wayne headed out of there and got in his van. He did not feel like going back up to Katie Twomey’s veranda now, but he did not want to go home. He wanted to watch the lights on the water because they calmed him, so he drove the van up Signal Hill Road and he parked it in the parking lot beneath Cabot Tower where lovers and tourists parked. On the ocean side you could see nothing because there was so much fog. You would not know an ocean was even there, just a smoky haze that blocked your view. But on the harbour side the fog tapered and trailed in torn fingers, and the green and red and orange ships’ lights and the lights of the cranes and of the arterial road and the churches and the whole city lay spread out, and Wayne looked at those. He did not know Derek Warford had watched him drive up Signal Hill Road, and when six people opened his van doors and got in, it took him a minute to realize it was Derek Warford and his crowd.