The Convulsion Factory (9 page)

“After what he put Lana through?” Megan went on. “Whose side are you on? Lana was fragile.”

Alexis reached across the table, intimately touching Gary’s arm. “Lana was like a … a goddess to our little family. She was the first to get the go-ahead for her final surgery.”

Megan wiped her eyes, smearing mascara. “It should’ve been me. But no, my therapist says I’m not stable enough.” She gulped her drink in desperation. “He’s not satisfied with my reasons for the change. He says I’m doing it because as a boy I was so threatened by the thought of wanting to make it with my mother.” Hysterical laughter. “Freudian quack.”

“Answer me one thing,” Gary said, low and electrified. He yanked open his shirt to bare his chest.
“Just what the hell is happening to me?”

They stared at his nipples, in full extension, plumped as though ready to nurse. By now a pattern of four more pink-brown welts had erupted beneath them, down his ribs, like especially prominent mosquito bites.

Alexis smiled broadly, mischievously. “Isn’t that sweet. You empathized with Lana more than we gave you credit for.”

“This is some kind of joke to you?” Gary shouted. In that moment he wanted to hit Alexis, woman-in-the-making or not.

“It
must’ve
been love.” Gabriel leaned in to dart his once-feminine tongue onto a nipple. Unexpected pleasure trilled through Gary, horrifyingly intense. For a moment he wanted to feel it again, ever the hedonist.

He snapped his shirt closed, head aswim. “But I’m not the one who was taking hormones.”

“When two people love each other,” said Gabriel, “a little bit of each one stays inside the other. From you, Lana took a certain amount of independence, I think.”

“And this is what I got from her? Tits?” His laughter rivaled Megan’s in hysteria.

“It’s much more than that, Gary, surely you can feel that by now,” Gabriel said.

Gary peered down his torso and felt a rush of vertigo. With a clearer head maybe he could make sense of this, pinpoint some allergic reaction as the culprit. But a clearer head was at least a morning away.

“I don’t want this, I don’t understand…”

Gabriel propped his head atop a loose fist. “Do you know what the worst part of being us is? The very worst aspect?”

The question sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Try for an answer, any answer: “Your body is wrong, a prison…?
What?
Just tell me.”

“That’s it for me, all right,” Megan said.

Gabriel cocked his head. “Not quite.”

“Oh, isn’t it?”
Megan shrieked, then stood and whirled on Gary. “I hope
you
know someday what it’s like to wake up every morning with something like tumors hanging between your legs! Because that’s what these are to me!” Clumsily, she hitched up the tight black dress she wore. Her genitals were framed within a garter belt and the tops of her stockings. “These are wrong! I don’t want them and
nobody will help take them away from me!
”

Alexis rolled her eyes. “I hate when you’re like this, girl. You’d think it was PMS.”

Gary watched, mortified, as Megan lowered herself enough to plop her genitals, flaccid from estrogen, onto the tabletop. Something new in her eyes, though, a drunken madness made worse by grief.

“Nobody cares,” Megan murmured, “I’m a joke and nobody cares,” then she seized Gary’s wine to smash the bottle against the table’s edge. She held the dripping, jagged remnant and for a moment it gleamed like surgical steel.

“Just a few little cuts, it’s no big deal,” she said.

Blood was drawn at the first firm stroke, Megan’s face twisting into an agonized mask of rapture and liberation. Alexis screeched and pushed herself away in the booth. Gabriel reacted with more sorrow than shock, shutting his eyes as Megan continued to saw.

New sights, sounds, tastes, sensations … damn them all. This was too much. Gary bolted to his feet and reeled from the booth. Fixed his eyes on the way he’d come up and lurched toward it. A moment later a firm hand gripped his elbow to steer him another way.

“Let me help you,” said Gabriel.

He tried to wrest free. “I just want out of here.”

Gabriel held firm. “And this way’s quicker, I promise.”

Gary struggled another moment, then saw the exit sign glowing where Gabriel pointed, and surrendered.

Gabriel hustled him through the gathering crowd, and when they burst through the exit, released his arm. Now on the roof, Gary recalled Lana’s talk of the garden. The fresh air hit him like smelling salts, thick and tainted with the watery brown scent of Mississippi mud. It drew him on, and he lurched past greenery, shrubs and bushes and small trees in planters. Within, shadows moved to the rhythms of breathy moans, and he saw them: face to face, head to lap, groin to buttocks.

Help. He needed help. Medical help.

Near the far edge of the roof, Gary collapsed, spent and shaking. He rolled onto his back, beginning to shed tears at the night sky while distant thunder rolled. The desultory rains were moving on, leaving gray and violet clouds in their wake, boiling past the face of the moon.

Gabriel knelt beside him, rested a comforting hand upon his traitorous chest. Beneath the hand, Gary’s skin throbbed. It wasn’t unpleasant, this rebellion, and part of him yet remained intrigued.

“Poor Gary.” Whispered, soft.

“What’s wrong with me?” Choking on tears.

Gabriel shook his head. “Megan — I’m sorry you had to see that. I was afraid she’d hurt herself someday. Things could never move fast enough for her.”

Gary shuddered.

“I never got to answer my own question. What the worst part of being us is. Can you guess?”

Again, that nudge of familiarity. Further this time, all the way to recollection. Lana had put to him the same question the night they’d met, before he had known the truth about her. The riddle had gone unanswered, soon forgotten.

“No,” he said, “I can’t.”

Gabriel looked fondly down at him, that androgynous face at once strong and tender. But calculating. “We can’t go all the way across, you know. We never will make it one hundred percent.”

His hand stroked Gary’s lap, popping the button of his slacks and drawing the zipper down. Massaged him, bared him, and, heaven help him, against all expectations he was growing erect.

“If you’re going man-to-woman the surgery’s pretty successful but the hormonal changes are lacking. If you’re moving the other way, like me? The hormone change is better, but not the surgery. They can build me something that
looks
like a cock … but it won’t much act like one.” Gabriel gave him a squeeze. “This spontaneous hard-on? It’s something I’ll never know. At least,
their
way.”

Gabriel began to peel away his own clothing and reveal his hybrid body. Still on his back, Gary saw moonlight glint off the shiny healing scars of a double mastectomy, amid sprouting hair. Lower, Gabriel’s last remaining femininity hid within a triangle of hair.

“You’ve known Lana’s half, now try my point of view,” Gabriel murmured, then straddled him, mounting firm.

Raped.
The thought was murky, surreal.
Am I being raped?
His hips surged upward all the same. Tomorrow had always been soon enough for self-reproach.

“So the very worst part of being us?” Gabriel stared down, sheened in sweat. “We’re made, not born.
We can’t procreate.
But … I think maybe you can change that.”

This was more than coitus, Gary knew when he saw the others gather round to watch. This was tranquilizer. This was anesthesia. Bribery and reward and homage.

“A friend once told me that the South is a land of ghosts.” Gabriel’s breath was deepening with the rhythm, voice growing huskier. “I believe that. And I believe that New Orleans is a magic place. There are people here, they know things that others feel they have no business knowing at all. Maybe they’re right. But
I
don’t think so.”

When Gabriel stripped Gary’s shirt away, he saw the twin rows of nipples aligned down his torso. Erect and straining, like those of a sow lying before her farrow of piglets.

Gabriel bent low, placed his lips to one, and sucked.

Gary gasped, shaking his head yet unable to deny the river of warmth flowing inside, a glow he could label only as maternity.

“Lana looked for someone like you for a long time. I never saw her any happier than after she met you. Someone open-minded … eager for new experiences … who wanted to break with his past.” Gabriel touched a quieting finger to Gary’s lips when he started to speak. “But let your conscience off the hook. She didn’t kill herself over you. She did it for us.”

Once content to observe, the others now started forward.

“It was the one sacrifice she wanted to make, to thank the rest of us for making her feel like she belonged somewhere. It didn’t take long to make up her mind once she decided you were the one. Your leaving just … accelerated the schedule.”

Gabriel kissed him on the lips, then eased his weight back onto Gary’s hips again as the others closed in. Half-men, half-women, walking wonders of endocrines, scalpels, and implants, taking positions at the nipples, joining to him with suckling mouths. They were very gentle, did not bite.

“Lana was carnal … and she was spiritual … and maternal. Like any goddess should be.” Again, Gabriel shushed him, still grinding with muscled hips. “Making children is more than functioning body parts. It’s a thing of the spirit, too. Lana understood that more than anyone I know. And now she’s closer to you than she could ever have gotten with her body. Can’t you
feel
her inside yet?”

He searched hesitantly, tentatively. Thinking perhaps there was another light, another warmth, pulsing within.

“No matter what, though,” whispered Gabriel, “don’t ever think she didn’t love you. She did. She
does
.”

Of course she would. How could she ever have done this to someone she hated?
What is love? Two souls and one flesh.

Gary writhed, caught in a hurricane of tears and love, revulsion and desire. Fighting would accomplish nothing. And he was so needed.

So he lay back in this roof-bound Eden, beneath the roiling sky, and let them nurse. Soon, more found their way to the roof to take their place in line. And within, and from within, the juices flowed — testosterone and estrogen, progesterone and androgen — a mother’s milk to nurture and nourish wonders greater still.

Gabriel cupped his cheek. “You are truly honored. You’ll be the madonna of an entirely new gender.”

Gary surrendered fully, pleasure and contentment swamping his last efforts at denial. He stretched his arms wide, satisfied that he and Lana would forever be as one, and reached to embrace their children.

He stood back, grinning with arms crossed, to watch those hips of hers sway while she threw. Had a wind-up that drove him truly and deliciously insane. This, after she’d kissed the tip of each dart for luck. Oh, she was overflowing with promises of finer things to come later in the night.

Sad about her aim, though. Darts all over the damn place.

“I don’t think this is your game.”

She turned chin over shoulder to stick out her tongue at him. “I got games you never even played.” She danced away to retrieve the darts, came dancing back with all six and handed him his three. Green ones, his lucky color.

“The trick,” he said, “is breath control. You breathe out on the throw, nice smooth exhale. And never,
ever
, take your eyes off the spot you want to hit. Not even long enough to blink.”

Down and dirty blues thumped from the jukebox while he sank all three darts in a tight cluster. He raised both arms to receive worldwide acclaim.

“Am I the master, or am I the master?”

“Careful you don’t stick yourself with one of those, or that shit you’re so full of is gonna run right out in the floor.”

He pretended to bristle. “Sure is a lot of sass coming from someone hasn’t even hit herself a bull’s-eye yet.”

“Keep making a big deal out of it” — she licked her finger and pretended to clean the zipper of her jeans — “and I know something
you
won’t be hitting again anytime soon.” A huff. “Anyway, I know what the problem is. I’m distracted.”

“By what, that music? Sweety-pie, the way you’re shaking your moneymaker, I dare say you’re making it work for you.”

“No, no, it’s not the music. It’s that goddamn barmaid! Never have I heard a voice that inspires more natural annoyance in me.”

She had a point. That voice did tend to carry. The gameroom was separate from the main bar, but still, they’d been listening to the barmaid going on nonstop about one thing and then another for the past hour. He sighed with the truth of it all.

“Sugar, go take care of it.” Turning kiddish on him, trying to wrap him around that sweet little finger of hers. “For me? Pleeease?”

“Where do you think we are, high school or something? Your problem,
you
take care of it.”

She pouted until it was clear he wouldn’t give in. Then her face went hard and she made for the pool table. Rolled the dead shitkicker slumped half across it off onto the floor and snatched that monster ten-millimeter she favored, next to his shotgun, and went stomping behind the bar. Through the doorway he watched her point the pistol down, out of sight.