Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

‘Oh yeah,’ said the cook. ‘He didn’t go to the bathroom. He just went straight through the back.’

***

On a chisel-blade corner in Greenwich Village was a business that announced itself, in a red neon cursive and stencilled letters in silver sticky tape, with:

CASEY BYRD, THERAPIST, A.N.A.C., S.U.T.

‘I’M ALL EARS’

The corner was mainly glass, blocked out with sheets of paper except to let the neon sign show. The door opened on to a first-floor reception area. In the same wedge-shaped space were a chair and a chaise longue. The city lights made will o’ the wisps through the sheets of paper, and the neon sign hummed irritably like a fly trying to push through the glass. In the sharp corner of the room sat a late-middle-aged woman with a heavy tan, short parrot-blue hair under an astrakhan cossack hat, and tattoos all the way up her bare arms. Sweat and hair dye streamed down her face. She also wore safari shorts and knee-length flight socks.

‘I saw the sign from outside,’ said Clive. ‘I’d like to talk with Casey Byrd.’

‘You’re talking to her. Do you have an appointment?’

‘No …’

‘That’s okay. Normally I’d close up now, but I’ve had a quiet day. Lucky for both of us.’

‘Yes. I’d just like to say, straight off the bat, as you might say, that I was born a woman.’

‘Please — to the couch.’

‘No, I’d rather get this part out — and out of the way — right now, standing here, otherwise it will become a distraction. I was born Jean Dotsy, in the Irish Free State, seventy-four years ago. I became a man, not entirely of my own free will, some forty years ago. The transition was drawn out and not completed. The treatments were rudimentary. They were able to fashion a tube of sorts for me but it has only ever effectively operated as a run-off pipe, never a penis, and I never could grow a beard for all the pills that I took and oils that I applied. Anyone who is close to me, which is one person, recently departed, knows this about me.’

The woman took off her cossack hat and patted her forehead with a handkerchief.

‘So — your secret died with this person who’s just died?’

‘No, not quite. No — lately I’ve become rather uncomfortable in my skin and have made no great secret of who I was formerly. Many, many people probably know.’

‘And this uncomfortable feeling …’

‘No, that’s not the problem I’ve come here about. I mean, that was easily dealt with. People have listened to me on that one, they’ve heard me out, or at least it hasn’t seemed to bother them.’

‘The problem is then that you, well — you say that you didn’t undergo this transformation willingly?’

‘Again, no, that’s not my problem. Not in the way that you think it is.’

‘But it is a problem?’

‘Not the one I’ve come here to talk to you about!’

‘Okay. So your problem is that not enough people take you seriously as a man?’

‘What?! Yes, but … no! That’s not it!’

‘But you don’t want to be taken seriously as a man, because you didn’t become one willingly?’

‘No! No! I did want to become one! I mean, I must have, even before my hand was forced.’

‘Your hand was forced …? What kind of cruel society …? Ireland, you say …?’

‘But it was my decision, ultimately! That’s to say — it didn’t take much pushing. I mean, I was pushed — there were other forces, and it was necessary to take drastic action, and I didn’t come from a culture and a time where I could make such big decisions of my own free will, and these forces forced me to put my body finally beyond use , but … I grew into my new skin. I was happy to have that skin, you know, when I did have it. But this is all … No, I’m not here for help in that way. This was all after the important change.’

‘I see. I understand.’

She invited him again to take the chaise longue, and he stretched himself out this time.

‘The important change. Okay. So — your acceptance of yourself as essentially a man?’

‘No! I never did think that I wanted to be a man. There was no light that flicked on, no moment of “Ah, eureka!” before I did become a man. I didn’t very much like men. I wouldn’t have wanted to become a man, it wouldn’t have entered my simple mind.’

‘A-ha!’

‘I hated them. No, that’s too strong a word. No — I hated them, I did! The last time I spoke to Veronica, in that tearoom on the Terenure Road —’

‘Woah, woah, pull up —’

‘— just the day before, I’d been to the doctor about my fainting fits. I was fainting a lot around then. I’d fainted that time after trying to make myself pee standing up. But there was a germ in there, you see, and that was the cause of the fainting. I’d let a germ in. But the doctor, do you know what he said to me? “You need a husband”, and, as I got up to leave, “Smile, Jean, just smile.” If there’d been anything I could have done to take the smile off his face I would have done it, let me tell you. And the next day, over lunch, Veronica looked over my shoulder and she said to me, “That Indian medical student has been staring at you the whole time”, and I knew that she was trying too hard, and I knew that she was troubled, and I said to Veronica, “How do you know he’s a medical student?”, and she said, “What else could a handsome Indian man in Dublin be but a medical student?”, and I said, “You’ve obviously not read about the recent murder case in Dublin in which a handsome Indian cook beat his Irish girlfriend to death with a pestle and hung her on a meat hook to drain and cut her into small pieces with a cleaver and put her in a pot of mince and served her to the guests in his restaurant.” And later, later the same day, after I drove all the way out to Dunleary and parked my car, a little Ford Anglia, by the coal pier, there was a man with a cap pulled low on his head carrying a bale of something wrapped in waxed butcher’s paper — paper which, now that I think about it, he probably used to masturbate with — and he startled me by peering in at my window and rapping on the glass with a penny, and I could see the yellow boiled sweet he was sucking, there in his mouth, and I drove further down the road to a place near the baths where in any case there was a view of the open sea. He was the last man I saw while I was alive for the first time. Can you imagine? But my problem now is not men , or how I feel about being one, or how and when I came to the decision to become one.’

‘While you were “alive for the first time”? Do you mean —’

‘I’m a ghost, you see, as well as anything else. Well, I’m technically not a ghost.’

‘No. You are technically not a ghost.’

‘No, I am a sort of reincarnated spirit.’

‘Yes, I can see how you might see yourself as a reincarnated spirit.’

‘I am a reincarnation of my own spirit. And the body that I occupy is my own.’

‘Interesting way of putting it.’

‘That was where I expired in the last life. In Dunleary, in my Ford Anglia, by the baths looking out to sea. I was young, but I had warnings, and the warnings did not alarm me. Just that morning, as I’ve told you, I’d had another collapse. Standing above my toilet with a bare foot on each arm of the mat. “To hell with it,” I used to say. “To hell with it”, like an American person. I would take it upon me — take off my black fashion pants, then my knickers. Sometimes I would feel that the angle was not right and I would have to bring my feet forward until my knees touched the freezing cistern and I would put my hands on the ceramic top and I would look at the window. It was not a window you could do much else with but look at — you could not look through the window. The wavy surface of the glass I would think of as the wavy surface of the tide. The mould that clung there was seaweed drawn in the churn. I would feel for a moment a calmness, like I was part of something, a natural flow, that I never had to think or worry. I would think of water, how it sounded and moved, and I would listen to the sighs from inside the walls. My legs would quiver and they would not stop quivering. I would move my hands to the backs of my knees and I would be tense there, like metal traps. I would wait and I would push. I would wait for some command. I would get confused and I would wait for — I didn’t know — a feeling, something — waited and pushed and commanded it myself. I would say, “There must be some valve”, and then I would collapse. But because I had an explanation for these collapses — I had a germ inside me — and because I would always come round from them they did not panic me unduly. If I was standing when I felt a fit coming on, such as over a toilet, I made sure to sit down, such as on the toilet. And later that day by the baths in Dunleary I was already sitting down, in my Ford Anglia. I felt the usual sensation in my knees and saw an expanding blot in the centre of my vision, a spot of blight, a tear in the light, and I slipped away with typical compliance, dreaming of a world and a life not beyond the sea that I was facing but beyond the wastes that lay behind me. I did not think that the thing rising in my throat was blood and in any case I was so tired now. And it was with calmness too but confusion that I observed my body from the position of the angle of the windscreen and dashboard — the inside angle, the acute one. I seemed to be revolving slowly like a creature on a spit. This was the “I” that was observing, not the “I” that I was observing, who obviously was in no state to be observing. My body looked very sad and blue and large and clumsy, like a crow, dead, with its mouth slightly open and its tongue pale and dry and slipped. I think I wanted to cuddle myself, to keep my body warm, because it was curled, girding the heart, the way leaves curl, and I had been wearing a brown cardigan with a loose-knit weave that looked like it gave no protection at all. This other me — the one that I was now — felt so tiny and light and free, and yet I was not free because I was stuck on that axis, turning very, very slowly. So slowly that I only got long looks at my body after what seemed like many hours of passing through metal and glass and acrid precursors to modern plastic. After the completion of one of these rotations, perhaps the third or fourth, I noted sadly — although maybe I am just recalling it with sadness — that my body had fallen over to the side, so that the head was on the passenger seat, and the face was set in the weirdest leer. Everything began to change. “Began” is the wrong word. “Everything” is the wrong word. There was no beginning, no linear or planar arrangement of time, and there were no “things” in this new place, and “place” is the wrong word too in this context, clearly. Although I did at some point perceive sweetly scented soft domes in suspension which became stone and which I gnawed on and which caused some hidden teeth to break through my gums, gums which I had seemed to retain, or perhaps develop, for my journey, although “journey” is perhaps not the right word either. And I felt a ridge like the rib of a vault although I was not high up as under the vaulting of a roof but very low down as under the vaulting of a crypt, and I was pressing upwards, against this rib, and this pressure rolled me upwards with the rib towards a point where it and other ribs converged. A grinding sensation, or a grinding noise, gave way to a conversing sensation, that is, a conversation, between a greatly divided form of me or separately existing mes, and many others, all of whom I could easily occupy or assume, whose consciousnesses I could take on, who, in this everywhen, could say this and think that while another said this and thought this, and — was a button pressed? Yes, a button was pressed, revealing sections of governing code: obelus up-tack pilcrow interrobang caret ampersand caret inverted question mark hyphen right pointing guillemet interpunct comma underscore underscore underscore backslash dagger pilcrow interrobang tilde yen sign registered trademark manicule smiley face smiley face smiley face smiley face underscore asterism maqaf meteg smiley face —’