*
Through a spitting rain, he found it an hour later, twice stopping street locals to point him in the proper direction. The Fringe had been built in a renovated warehouse downriver from the French Quarter. Night seemed deeper here, the air ancient. Few would ever come here by mistake.
Although Lana had spoken of the Fringe several times, he’d never accompanied her here. He supposed that she alone had been enough to sate his curiosity about her kind, so until tonight he’d had no real need of this haven for gender-benders, and those who sought their company.
Within its dark and hallowed walls Gary found a world of alternatives: music, clothing, anatomy. A maze of multiple levels in architecture, as Lana had described, each was dimly lit and an enclave unto itself. There was supposed to be some sort of garden atop the roof, where ephemeral couples might retreat for whatever liaisons their bodies, lacerated or not, would allow.
Gary bought a bottle of wine at the main bar, weaved through the open center where dancers writhed beneath black light and strobes to music that sounded like the roar of an industrialized armageddon. The volume could peel skin.
Here he was groped endlessly and let it happen, reeling with an intoxicated pleasure in so many sliding hands, so much sensory delight despite the known world of his own flesh turning strange on him. Here, at least, pretensions were few, the common denominator belonging to rhythm and movement and surrender. The real effort lay in pulling back, pushing on, remembering why he was here.
He found them near the uppermost levels, Gabriel and Alexis and Megan tucked into a secluded booth. One noticed him, then all watched as he approached their table and slammed down the wine bottle.
“Finally.” Gabriel looked pleased.
“We’re mourning the way Lana would’ve wanted us to,” said Alexis, the blonde, tipping a highball toward a forest of bottles and glasses, hours’ worth of bereavement. “Sit, sit.”
He glared down at them while fumbling with his shirt buttons.
Megan perked up, brushed ringlets of hair from her face. “I so don’t want this asshole at our table.”
“Megan,” chided Alexis. “Don’t be a bitch.”
Gary sat beside Gabriel, tense as a coiled spring. He left his shirt unbuttoned but draped shut, feeling steam build inside.
“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.