Kathleen Winter - Annabel

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.