…The second-to-last night (the penultimate night on Earth), we were having dinner at their new place, the one we’d been trying to move into for months now. They showed me their books, their paintings (haunted self-portraits of a girl under water, or a girl lost in the dream of her own beauty, her own schizophrenia, an enclosed and infinite pain: but also they were no longer self-portraits, they were portraits of a dead girl, a girl who’d been dead for aeons, who’d escaped or gotten lost through a trapdoor in the basement of time, who’d…). They gave me jewelry to wear. I had a vision of the two of us, of future afternoons in the living room: languid afternoons, erotic afternoons in which nothing happens. They sang Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” for me (a prefiguration of their transition), serenading me, and afterwards they made me cum, fingering me vigorously and telling me what a whore I was, or am. This is all for my pleasure, they said. Your pleasure doesn’t matter. I moan. You’re just a fucktoy, a doll I bought at the store, you exist to be fucked, you’re pure sex and nothing else, you don’t have a soul, you don’t have a brain, you’re nothing but degraded lust, nothing but holes to be filled by so many cocks, a mouth to be used by so many pussies, a bimbo, a bitch, etc. They suck on my tits with a sexual hunger I’ve never seen before, and I explode.
…The next night, the last, they bent me over the sofa and said the same things to me, or the same things plus some new things (even dirtier and more humiliating things). They made a fish pilaf for dinner. While they cooked I chopped garlic and watched a YouTube video on the mysterious reputation, the mysteriously benign reputation, of the German Wehrmacht, and on its true crimes, its secret atrocities. Though there was nothing mysterious about it, nothing secret, which was the point of the video, all crime and all atrocity having been committed in the open, in open air. They’d mentioned the book Treblinka over a dozen times in the last week: the part about the prisoners blowing up their own camp, accepting their own death, which was inevitable anyway, so that the deaths of others might be made, if not impossible, then more difficult. They’d mentioned this while arguing with other leftists online about the necessity of voting. We’d taken a Lyft in the pouring rain to turn in our ballots at the last minute. We ran through the streets soaking wet. I threw an illegal sign for a right-wing candidate in the trash. Afterward we sat on the shimmering concrete beneath an awning smoking cigarettes. A big black spider crawled on me, and I had the girliest freakout of my life. When it was off me, they told me it was a black widow. I felt it crawling up my skirt for days. After I came, on the last night, they said something about death and about a lighthouse, about nostalgia for a time when death felt like a far-off dream, when they were a lighthouse whose light was bright enough to steer death away from their shores, etc. They often talked about an island and about the ocean in respect to past relationships, and to ours. I had started as the ocean, in the sirenic intensity of my seduction, and ended up the island, a wounded and solipsistic island against which their waves crashed, with desperate love that became, in the end, mere desperation. That afternoon we’d gone to my therapist together, and felt hopeful. I went to bed, they said, in a state of blissful babbling, a kind of erotic reverie that was neither waking nor sleep. In the morning we broke up.
…Nothing changes: at least not the irreparable.
…I only came a handful of times with them, but it was more than with any other partner, except with R. But that relationship had lasted eight years, as opposed to a couple months. The twilight of that relationship appears to me as an endless and disconsolate orgasm on a Sunday afternoon. It appears to me, too, as a trip, or a series of trips, through the Midwest, trips the reason for which I can’t remember, trips that may never have had a purpose or a destination in the first place. And it was somehow always winter at the end, even in California. In the end it was always winter, as if our lives were only the passing of the seasons, as if love had a grave to return to, finally.
…And now they have the time to return to themselves, time for their art, time to get rid of their breasts and microdose testosterone and become Oscar Wilde (“without the anti-Semitism”). And they’ll move away from California, maybe to a little house in the Chicago suburbs, a place the desert hasn’t swallowed up yet, a place that contains a paradisaical childhood. And they’ll wait for me, maybe. Or maybe not.
…I have nothing left, or very little. Some days it feels that I’m estranged from everybody. But I have the commensurate time to get bigger tits and, knowing that I’m dying faster than most, to move to a small Catalonian beachtown and write a dozen novels transcribing the monsters, lusts, labyrinths, and ghosts of history and my youth…
…We would have held each other’s hands through an atemporal childhood, if we didn’t keep slipping into the present. We both had memory loss, and a prodigious memory: an anamnesis of the other. We were addicted to each other. We left each other with new and incurable infectious diseases and with a piece of each other’s broken hearts. We wandered the Earth like ghosts, in a cloud of diasporic melancholy, dislocated, fractured, trans Jews without a home, for whom “home” was a word that had never made sense, could never have made sense. Nothing seemed entirely real to us, and how could it have, given what we held in our cellular memories, memories of unbearable loss, memories of other lives we no longer remembered, lives from before we were born. You’re an angel, I told them. They spoke to me often about Lucifer, about the sense they had that every human being on this planet was a fallen angel, a radiant being composed of pure light who had committed an unknowable and ineffable crime, and was being punished for it, punished in total amnesia of the crime, but not of their home in heaven, which was a place one could never forget, not even in a concentration camp, especially not in a concentration camp, etc.
…They kept their friend Buzz’s gratitude journals, which he wrote in every day throughout his adult life. Buzz had gotten AIDS in the eighties when his boyfriend cheated on him and had been disowned by his billionaire family (he was the heir, prosaically enough, to a tupperware fortune). Buzz liked to drink and tell stories. He liked to tell people how beautiful they were. Once he pulled up something on his computer and called Em over. He had tears in his eyes from laughing. You see this?, he said. It was a picture of a very large scrotum with a boot tied around it. These are my lover’s balls, Buzz said, collapsing in a fit of ill laughter. Aren’t they the biggest and most lovely balls you’ve ever seen?
… Em was with Buzz on his deathbed, staying with him until the end. Em’s best friend was still dying in Sweden at the age of thirty. Em was still crying in an empty bathtub in a house that no longer existed except in a sepulchral memory. The last trace of me was being wiped off the surface of the Earth, and I went extinct among the stars.
…This is not a break up, they said. It’s a setting free of a caged bird, and a setting free of myself, too, who’s begun to feel like your cage. And you can return to me one evening, if you like. In a dream, in reality, it doesn’t make a difference.
…Having nowhere else to go, I flew away.