I assumed it was too late. I didn’t but know that the molecules in a physique of water go in any course. Think about Orlando’s shock when he wakes up a girl after residing a long time 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’ve the testosterone ranges of a teenage boy and the estrogen of a girl in her 40s. No one mentions that I’ll have a little bit dick—or possibly they do, the way in which the adults informed me I’d have a damaged coronary heart sometime and I assumed it meant one factor whereas truly 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 night time lengthy. I’m Rio. I’m Tokyo. I feel I lastly perceive why males are males, I say to my buddy. She jokes, Don’t be out right here in these streets, however we’re each a little bit inquisitive about what comes subsequent. I stroll 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 a whole lot of pages goes after the goose that flies too quick. However I don’t need to be Orlando. I need to be George Michael. I need to be Bruce Willis in Die Laborious and Die Laborious III (however not Die Laborious II), or Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills, or an X-Man who exists solely to be damage. You may be T-shaped, the web site says. You possibly can have the jaw you’ve at all times pictured your self having. You possibly can develop a beard that received’t sweat off or smudge. My voice adjustments. My scent, 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. Youngsters startle. The ladies I move take a look at me with a query on their faces. My father-in-law blinks at me like I’m anyone he’s imagined to know, or a German panzer he as soon as noticed on the Historical past Channel. My goals are stuffed with all these things I may by no means earlier than do whereas unconscious: land a punch, get caught in a torrential downpour, journey a thundering animal with a sloping physique and a thick, moist coat. Each feminine ought to have a little bit 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 hear. My father at all times wished a son. He cried when the final woman was born. I’m wondering what he would say now, if he weren’t ashes; I’m wondering if we might each carry the scent of soldered steel. Water molecules transfer in any course, sure, besides those on the floor have nowhere to go however down. Orlando lived 300 years with out getting older. 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 in opposition to 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 buddy, telling her, I want I had been a boy. She’ll run and inform / her mother is banging a spoon in opposition to a bowl / a guttural sound comes out of the mom’s mouth / which ends with That’s such an unsightly factor to say. So I spend lifetimes as a girl. I put on a yellow gown I like. I’m the earlier than and the after. On the finish, Orlando appears to be like up, sees a airplane for the primary time, is aware of it to be the goose. On the finish, I perceive there isn’t a water, no physique, no blood, solely an concept taking form in opposition to the flickering gentle. So what ought to we name you? What are you now? Him? She? They? Them? Name me Orlando.
