What I can say is that I always (until the moment my bandages were taken off) knew in some way that I lived in the wrong body. I’ve spoken with transsexuals (in fact, I came to know a few of them during my time in Thailand, as they are Dr. Silpasuvan’s primary base of customers) who’ve told me exactly the same thing. There is an inchoate sense in which something is wrong long before there is a sense of what could be done to make it right.
It helped (you could say, in a sense at least) that I did not grow up in a judgmental family or a family that really was very interested in my appearance or what I might do to modify it. I never experienced any pressure to dress a certain way or live up to a certain kind of social appearance. In fact, whether or not I put on clothes in the morning was almost entirely up to me. Furthermore, beginning in my early teenage years, I existed in a social milieu that, to put it bluntly, tolerated, even encouraged, freaks.
You might have thought that this atmosphere of social liberty (some might even call it neglect) would have led me to radically alter my appearance in the conventional ways, by dyeing my hair, for example, or getting piercings or tattoos. I never had any appetite for such things. In fact, I dressed in a monotonous, unimaginative way, barely keeping enough clothes around to make it from week to week. I lived inside a cocoon, one could say, poetically, I suppose, waiting for the real change to happen.
It was the suicide of my best friend in the spring of 1993 that caused me to radically rethink the course of my life—
I fold the pages back, quickly, abruptly, and replace them as they were in my bag. Martin is as he was, churning through his daily mile, flashing me the happy grimace of the endorphin addict. My ears fill up with the silence, the ambient non-noise, of all this empty space: lapping water, humming ventilation fans, low, indistinct Muzak, the attendant’s flip-flops slapping the tiles as she paces back and forth, waiting to hand out her second towel of the morning. Expensive silence. How much money, it occurs to me just now, we spend to create these sterile bubbles, these vacuums abhorred by nature. How much money Martin spent; and now he wants to be the first with the brick, the needle, to let the pressure out, to let the world come roaring in? It makes no sense; it makes perfect sense. Look what I’ve made, he’s saying to me, through the stinging chlorinated air. I made this. I made this.
Why have I never had much entrepreneurial spirit, that competitive, world-defining, world-acquiring instinct, so identified with my kind? Wendy always used to find it amusing that young people in Wudeng would come to me for business tips, assuming, in those days, that as an American I would have absorbed supply-side economics in the womb. I had nothing to tell them. This silence, this anticipatory silence, gives me tremors. The future, you could say, gives me tremors. And there Martin is, reaching after it, claiming it, his muscled arms as classic as a Rodin sculpture, or a hood ornament. Pulling me, phaeton-like, with him.
Why, I wonder, why does he even need a story at all? What does he need to explain? Look at his happiness: isn’t that reason enough?
• • •
You know what the girl’s name is? Finlayson. Finlarson. I think it’s Swedish. Anyway, she comes up to me and says, Mr. Perkins, I’ve got the records you requested now, follow me. And she actually opens up the counter and lets me walk back into the stacks with her. Starts taking down boxes and showing me things. Old deeds, lien records, structural assessments, for the whole area. I wish I’d had a camera, or a backpack; I would have just started squirreling stuff away while her back was turned. And then Vonetta comes around the corner and sees me there and says, excuse me! We are not allowed to have the public back in here for any reason! And this Finlayson girl says, this is the Office of Public Records, and I’m a state auditor. Can I have your name, please?
I’m surprised Vonetta didn’t have a stroke.
She turned purple like a goddamned grape. Get the hell out of my office! she says. Nobody talks to me like that in my office! I am a city of Baltimore employee and a shop steward of AFSCME Local 522! And Finlayson says, I don’t care if you’re the mayor, I’ve been instructed to open up these records pursuant to discovery in this case, and if I have to get a marshal in here to do it, I will.
Lee, Martin says, I think you’ve shot your chances of ever getting anything out of that office ever again.
That’s exactly what Vonetta said. She gave me this burning-up look and said, don’t bother coming in here no more, Lee Perkins, and I said to Karen, looks like I’m going to have to buy you a lot more tickets on that Baltimore — Annapolis bus. And she says, don’t bother, just get me a gas card; if I drive I’ll get here quicker.
Girl got balls.
She has no idea what she’s up against.
Vonetta Harper’s going to take early retirement.
Forget that. She’s got her little minions, and they’re just trained in the fine art of playing solitaire and ignoring requests.
What I know so far: Lee Perkins, to my right, is a lawyer, an assistant district attorney, who works on property misuse and real estate fraud. Paul Delacroix, across the table, runs the ESPN office at Camden Yards. Marshall Haber, next to Martin, teaches history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. We call ourselves the Chamber of Commerce, Marshall said to me, as we were being introduced. That way we can expense the meal. We’re one another’s clients. On paper, that is. Or sources, in my case. I view this as research. Weekly research at the DAC. It’s on my calendar.
For the most part it’s as if I wasn’t there at all. I sit back from the table, pad in my lap, clicking and unclicking my pen under the table, but writing only a few words, names, and phrases. When Martin explained what I was doing, they nodded, and Paul said, Martin Wilkinson, spokesman for the Talented Tenth, which produced a mild rumble of laughter.
Kelly, Marshall says, turning to me now, what you need to know about Vonetta — I’ve tangled with her, too — is that she’s the most powerful woman in Baltimore. Hands down. God love her, she may be a tyrant, but she knows everything about everything. You can’t register a deed or file a property transfer or a zoning request without her. You know in that TV show, The Wire, they had all that stuff about drug dealers and property developers? That was all based on her office. She was pissed because they wouldn’t give her a walk-on part. Tried to revoke their filming permits.
That was her one shot at the big time, Paul says. She’s too ugly for reality TV, God knows. Else she’d go on The Apprentice and be the Bad Black Lady, like that other one, the crazy one.
Let’s change the subject, Martin says. We increase her power by talking about her, right? Everyone knows Vonetta’s all reputation. A dictatorship of one.
Baltimore, the city of fiefs.