JOEL // EXCERPT

I’d forgotten who I was that summer, and I couldn’t recall the accident that had caused it. I theorized that perhaps I had been hit by a bus, head cracking against the asphalt or a lamppost or the curb, leaking all my thoughts out like egg yolk where they’d retreated to untraceable places. Or I’d been mugged in a back alley, my mind caved into itself with a pistol whip. I wondered if whoever I had been had drifted into the dull, thick pink sky of a lazy sunset, if I’d sluiced off of silver car bumpers and tree trunks where the locusts were ringing like the farewell fanfare of my unbecoming. That or I’d simply dissipated into a black sky where I became the car exhaust and the light pollution and the space trash.

The problem was that I didn’t wake up where I’d been lost, bleeding or bruising or hurting, like a newborn baby covered in a biofilm of vernix caseosa, grasping at the city streets with foreign hands or staggering out of an Emergency Room without my shoes on like another street-tethered drunk. My life didn’t break apart like the earth and come rushing at me with its consuming molten core, hungry to burn me to the bone, to eat away what I was with the irrevocable stench that lay in psychiatric wards and waiting rooms like a feverish dog. Or perhaps it did, and that too was part of what I couldn’t remember.

I woke up in my bed in June, naked. It took me until my black coffee was cold and there was a ringing in my right ear to notice that I didn’t know who I was, sinking into me as imperceptibly and inevitably as a dream fades in the moments after you’ve woken. I hadn’t dressed but rather perched myself in a chair in the kitchen like a featherless, fleshy, flightless bird, as a crane fly danced ridiculously at the big apartment windows where sunlight was glaring in like the gates of heaven. It stunk of that light, as well as the coffee I’d poured into a plain mug, the kind that you find in diners, which was starting to congeal with a stagnant white skin. It was a small apartment; the confusion at my predicament was akin to a helpless exhaustion.

I stood and walked into the hall, where a Cheval mirror had been placed at the end. It refracted the light that glanced off the top, which shot in a beam straight across the floor until it hit my feet. I stopped and I looked at myself, at a body that was human, tawny, gaunt, transsexual. The head of thick hair I wore was unkempt and uncut, as dark as pure chocolate, and I felt it stifle my head like a cotton hat. There was hair on my legs and underneath my armpits, adapting peculiar curls. My chest was flat. I touched grafted nipples, pink-brown, above lip-like scars. There was a triangle of fur between my thighs, a decided lack of external genitalia.

I looked down. My toes were bony and my toenails were dark. There were old white scars on my knees from stories I could not recall, and old aches with sources I could not discern, but nothing new, nothing flashy, nothing bloody. I found on my thighs, where the flesh was thickest and softest, a patchwork of old white lines beneath stripes of fresh purple, an unwell landscape of scar tissue. The ringing erupted again, knocking tinnily off the inside of my skull, burrowing like a frightened bug with rapid wings in my right ear canal. I sat down on my knees on the floor where the sunshine had warmed it and put my head in my arms, waiting for it to subside. It left a headache in its wake that pounded like an agonized heartbeat.

Curled on the ground there like a spider within its legs I could smell myself, the stink of my own sweat, of the inside of my own body through the private openings in private places, and my heart tried nervously at the inside of my breastbone like the rush of a flood pulsing at your front door. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell nor was it a comforting one, just a reminder of the physicality I had woken up in, within a world that felt like a stranger’s faint, hot dream.

When I looked back up, tracing the trim of the vacant brown wall with my eyes, where it met cracks and miniature valleys in the paint job, I knew this place was supposed to be mine, but I knew nothing else. Somehow I had made coffee, but now I lacked the recollection of how I had done even that, or why I had made it black, if the man whose home this was ever truly drank it black. If I had wanted to put sugar in it, I would not know where to find it inside the cabinets.

That morning I searched the apartment naked, like a captive exploring their confines. I felt as vacant as my surroundings, as if placated by the simplicity. The foyer had uncomfortable yellow walls and bare wooden hooks, where there hung one moleskin chore jacket and a colorful scarf, the latter of which smelled foreign, as if it hadn’t belonged to me even before I’d become someone else. When I stood on my toes to peer through the peephole in the door, like an intruder already inside, I saw the off-white walls and concrete floors of an external corridor. The door across from my own read 412 on a metal placard.

Apparently, before, I’d owned one pair of shoes (sneakers worn with time) and brown Reef sandals. The doormat had flattened rubber bristles, like it had been walked on many times but I’d never cared to replace it. When leaving the foyer, the airy kitchen was to the right, where pale ceramic floor tiles were glossed with blue flowers, and all of the cabinets were painted buttercup-yellow. The top of the small table was spotty with cigarette marks, and when I ran my finger along the underside I could feel something carved there like braille. For some reason I didn’t look, as if it were secret.

There were only seven things in the refrigerator: A skinny liter of two-percent milk, a package of flour tortillas, a molding tub of take-out Indian curry, a bag of Mexican-style shredded cheese, boxed white wine, and a quart of Diet Coke gone flat. It mimed a story I didn’t know, or perhaps the converging of multiple I couldn’t grasp. In the cabinets, I found bags of brown rice and boxes of protein bars. Beneath the sink, a plastic bag hung from the handle with greasy, wadded-up napkins inside, and a bottle of detergent felt half-empty. The dishwasher itself had a few dirty plates inside, and the door felt sort of broken whenever I opened it.

The living room was displayed to the kitchen with an open floor plan that felt both broadly empty and oddly exposing, especially given the big, boxy windows that cut the wall into glassy geometric patterns. They were frosted in such a way that I could see nothing through them but for vague shapes and colors. Some were propped open just slightly, and when I put my nose to the openings I tasted salt in the air, and saw knots of crane flies hiding in the sills like live nests. I didn’t look any further out of the windows, for what I saw of the heads of arroyo willow trees and shingled adobe roofs struck a peculiar anxiety in me, like a still-wet kit not ready to nose its way into a world that had been powering on without it.

In the living room area, there was a futon, draped in diamond-patterned saltillo blankets made of rough fabrics. An egg-shaped chair with a beaded throw pillow spun in circles on a swivel, which I found by sitting on it and feeling the coarse quality it had adapted, as if it had been found on the side of the road or among dumpsters. There was a rug on the floor with braided stripes on it: dark reds, medium reds, ruddy oranges, sunrise yellows, and a thread of blue, like the ocean between venetian-blind gaps.

I found underneath the dusty television a spread of magazines dated from the winter. The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. They had all been marked through with blue and black ink - the bearer of the black pen gave models thick mustaches and Coke bottle glasses, sprawling witty insults and scathing commentary with an almost appealing slant in the penmanship. There were blue animals in page corners and blue annotations in articles about seas full of trash and streets full of bombed bodies. In black, over a minimalist cartoon, someone had written: TOO SAD, with a crying face weeping fat black tears.

A coffee mug sitting on a red suitcase displayed numerous gel pens, as well as safety scissors, a dead Bic lighter, and a creased scrap of paper that, once unfolded, read: Wifi password: 1838R0s3Bud. When moving the mug, I found that the suitcase wasn’t that at all but rather a cleverly disguised vinyl record player. That explained the storage crate full of records, fit together as snug as book pages, which I then leafed through. I discovered Chet Baker, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Redbone, Juan Gabriel, Santana, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Nico, Kate Bush, Fleetwood Mac, Pearl Jam, and Weird-Al Yankovic. There was an inscription on the back of the Running With Scissors album - ‘happy birthday’ in big, bubbly script, punctuated with a lopsided heart.

In a jewelry box lined with fake velvet beneath the ovular coffee table, there was to be discovered a collection of rolling paper and a marijuana grinder with the graphic of a jungle tiger colored onto the top. But there was no pot inside, only the residual funk. And, I noted, in the living room, there was only one piece of decoration - a bowl of potted succulents - and one thing pinned up onto the wall - an unframed poster of Mel Brooks’ 2005 film The Producers.

The hallway at which there was the Cheval mirror at the end was so short it could barely be called that. Both rooms were to the left. Firstly, there was the bathroom, of which there seemed to be no door on the hinges. It had been replaced by a silkscreen. I went inside, and the linoleum was the same as in the kitchen, though this time slightly colder beneath my feet. First there was the toilet, beneath a cabinet roped with lights shaped like flamingos. They glowed with a jarring neon Las Vegas pinkness. I looked inside of the cabinet and found aloe vera lotion, ibuprofen, nail clippers, a mostly-empty box of multi-shade Band-Aids, Tums, and nail polish remover.

Beyond a dividing wall, the bathtub was shallow and the laminated shower curtain was see-through, growing mildewy at the bottom. A pink loofah hung off of the faucet, and a thin shard of oatmeal soap sat in its damp enclave, whittled down with squeezing fingers which left horizontal gulleys. There was dandruff shampoo and Generic Value Products conditioner laying at the bottom of the tub.

In the sink there were coils of what I assumed to be my hair, wet against the porcelain. I looked at myself in the mirror, under a yellow light fixture, studying dark, broad eyebrows over even darker, more intense eyes. Did I feel half as intense as my soil-brown eyes suggested? I had soft features, but not delicate, not small. Tiny hairs fuzzed my upper lip. I narrowed my eyebrows and felt scared by myself for a moment. Then I pulled my mouth open and saw blocky teeth with spaces in between - prying back lips, silver metallic fillings winked in the deep confines of my cheeks.

Dropping my hands, fingertips now wet with my own saliva, I continued on my search, now fueled not only by a need to find my name, my life, within the casual, domestic clutter, but also by a pure curiosity. As if glancing through the windows of someone’s home, perhaps in passing at night, when they are setting the table and laughing in electric candlelight, a whole world and a few mere steps away.

There was one toothbrush - green - propped in a foggy children’s cup with animals dancing along the corners. The spearmint toothpaste was almost all used up, spiraled into itself like a snail shell. Then there were two: A small white box labeled “Testosterone Cypionate Injection, USP, 200 mg/mL”, and one orange pill bottle.

I opened up the box first, finding within it a capped syringe and a very tiny bottle with what appeared to be a clear liquid inside. There was also a piece of paper which I clumsily unfolded, finding it to be some sort of prescription. I had no time to scan the name of the clinic, or skim the short letter, because what I saw first was only the name that popped out at me.

Joel Reed.

And I knew that it must be mine.

I let this sit in my mouth. I swallowed it slowly, an obstruction in my throat. It thickened in my chest and pondered like a heavy presence in my stomach. Whether he was me, after having some sort of awful dementia-inducing accident, or he was someone else completely whose life I had stolen, there was no way of knowing. So I folded the prescription back into squares and left the box the way I had found it, as if I’d disrupted something I shouldn’t have. I found the same name on the pill bottle, beneath ‘sertraline.’

I left the bathroom unsettled and unsure, entering the bedroom with those feelings marinating in my belly. It was the final room, and while not large, it didn’t give off the feeling of being too small, either. The bay window on the right wall was cracked open enough for me to simply see a stark blue sky, and to smell the inescapable, steaming brine. I stood in the threshold and absorbed where I had awoken.

The bed was big, a mattress stacked on top of a box spring, and unmade to the point of tangled sheets and blankets thrown askew. One flat pillow - blue - lay like a deflated crown on the head of a sleeping king. Yet it was above that, pinned on the wall in a way that felt solemn and obligatory, there was a print of Our Lady of Guadalupe, bowing her head in a green robe. A rosary with wooden beads dangled off the same nail that held her in place.

My eyes drifted to a simple bookshelf, holding three rows of books with spines that appeared old, ragged, or thrifted. A canvas bag sat slumped on the desk sitting beneath the window.

On the bedside table, I discovered Joel Reed’s phone in a matte black case. I pressed my thumb to the on button, but it didn’t turn on, subsequently dead. I’m not sure what caused me to do so, but I peeled the phone case away and found inside of it a ticket to a screening of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, and an expired bus pass. I placed it back down and tried the silver laptop sitting on the bed sheets, but it too flashed a red symbol at me, admonishing me for its death. I didn’t know where any of the chargers were, and so I let it be.

I surveyed the bookcase. There I found names such as Albert Camus, Kurt Vonnegut, Octavia E. Butler, Jeffrey Eugenides, Chaim Potok, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Samuel R. Delaney, and numerous obscure essayists on the topics of racial discrimination and gender liberation. I picked one at random - Vanessa Hua, of forbidden cities - and found the pages full of annotations, much like the magazines.

Beside the books there sat a small wooden table - an ofrenda. It was draped in red and blue cloth, cluttered with browning marigolds in empty pasta sauce jars. A paper plate held aging offerings - soft, spotted bananas and dry, spiraling orange peels. Grainy photographs with dates penciled on the back (1975, 1988, 2009) were propped on coffee cups stuffed with lavender stalks. A black-and-white picture of a Native man in regalia, a picture of a smiling brown-skinned woman with very long hair holding a chubby baby, and, lastly, a picture of a white man in a cardigan with zig-zags, sitting in an armchair whilst looking down at a white birthday cake. My lack of recognition at the sight of their faces, printed on well-worn photos creased with time and affection, turned restlessly in my stomach, an aimless sorrow, the grief of an amnesiac. So I continued on.

I moved to the desktop, where I unlatched the top of the bag and opened it. I pulled from it Joel Reed’s belongings - a composition notebook, a smaller journal with a cyan cover, a soft brown pencil case, and white headphones. In the smallest pocket I found a simple leather wallet, a box of Marlboro Green menthol cigarettes, and a lighter with Spider-Man on it.

I thumbed through the composition notebook first and felt my chest turn leaden as I found that each line of each page had been blacked out. Dates trailing back as far as last spring marked the tops, but whatever Joel Reed had written, he - or someone - had gone back over it with Sharpie. It bled through the paper, leaving blots on the very back. Discarding that, I grabbed the cyan journal and found the same result - even pencil drawings had been scribbled over passionately, poisonously. I wondered if I had meant to forget, if I had made sure not to provide myself with such sources. I threw the journal down with newfound strength, as if it had burned me.

All of a sudden there was a desperateness inside of me, a hungry neediness clawing up through my throat, spitting into my mouth silently. That was when I tore through the room, no longer hesitant of disturbing Joel Reed’s stagnant accumulation, no longer a passive, watching presence. In drawers I found collections of indigenous jewelry - dangling hand-beaded earrings, elaborate necklaces, silver rings, heavy turquoise bracelets. I found black nail polish, disposable deodorants, a pack of cards. In the back of a closet, choked with clothing, there was a vibrator hidden in its plastic container. And underneath the mattress, Joel had kept hidden a vintage candy tin with blades inside. I didn’t want this, didn’t need this. As frustration spilled out of me in the form of a wordless cry, I did all I could think of, and I flung myself down onto the bed and held my face in my hands.