Fiction: The Leopard: Ada, Part Three

I'm talking to you because you are the only one I know who isn't me. I keep thinking I should find you, but now I'm a little afraid of you. Where are you from? Some parallel universe, maybe; some iteration of who I might have been, all those possibilities and divergent, mathematically probable paths. How did you get here? Neither of us know, despite being with each other for nearly six months. 

Of course, I am aware of being timeless, now. Six months means as little—or as much—as six billion years. It reminds me of the Bible, a bit: to God a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day. That's precisely what time is like for me now.

I've begun to accrete. I probably shouldn't. There was probably a reason why I decided to divide myself up into infinitely small bits of matter and energy and explode myself out in a universal party of quarks and plasma and hydrogen. I just don't remember what that reason was.

But these accretions. I'm trying to keep them small but it's not really working. My hair is down to my waist, rather than the chin-length bob it was yesterday. I thought about growing the most awesome beard ever but I'm a woman now so I went with a long, full head of hair. And all the minerals my body needs, I've collected as I walk barefoot in the park. And I've replaced all the telomeres and corrected all the errors in my DNA and RNA. I'm starting to reach the limit of what I can do to myself without anyone noticing.

The truth is, Mark, I want to bring myself back together. I want to know what all these disparate parts of me know.

It reminds me of another quote. Not in the Bible this time. Was it Sagan? Some scientist: "We are a way for the universe to know itself."

I can't know myself until I get into everyone's heads. Not just other people, but the animals, the insects, the fungi and ferns and flowers. And not just those parts of me that are alive. I want to know what the sun knows, what it feels like to exist as a constant explosion and implosion of atoms; what it feels like to cast the light that feeds life, to be the original source of organic energy.

I'm unsure of how to start. Knowing myself might mean the subsumation of all of the other parts of me. Which would leave me with just you. And you are not me. And what would happen to you?

I need to think more, but I am constantly distracted my own beauty. I, the lichen, on myself, the stone, resting in my bosom of grass and soil, which is like a beautiful cloth draped over myself, the earth, and my graceful, twirling dance around myself, the sun, hot and bright and yet only a small mote within myself. Is it not beautiful? Am I not the most beautiful being? Were you this beautiful, Mark?

Ah, I could scream and dance and fly through the air with the wonder of myself! To know all this! Who can know all this and not want to collapse herself down to a singularity? That's what I want to do: to fall back down into myself—into who I was before I banged the door open to the possibilities of being multiple things—and rest there, with all these different events to sort through, to lift each pure jewel of experience to the light of myself.

There is no end.

Fiction: The Leopard: Ada, Part Two

Mark, I keep thinking about you, thinking you'd be the only one to understand. Maybe you would understand, but probably not. You were always busy keeping your edges in place.

Have you yet stood outside on a Fall day, a day like today, in a park where the leaves are on fire with the end of life and the wind pulls them up and down like kites, or rolls them along the ground like frantic nestlings? I think you haven't. I think you feel safer in my parents' home, letting them shelter you from all the noise and motion of the world. You are missing so much.

I found the last ice cream vendor in Central Park. I had lived in a small space of my brain—your brain—for so long I'd forgotten about money. I reached for a waffle cone and the guy, his voice strong and laughing, asked me what I wanted and I said chocolate and then, as he held up the ice cream to me, I realized I couldn't pay.

"I don't have cash," I said, "can I trade you for something?"

"Unless you know how to give a killer blowjob. . ." he said, grinning.

"Something better," I said, and held out my hand toward his free one. He raised his eyebrows but reached out anyway. I had to help him keep his other hand steady so he didn't drop my ice cream. Together we expanded, molecule by molecule, to inhabit each other's bodies, the ice cream cart between us, the tarred and pitted pavement, the soil and roots and grass blades. Our mingled existence expanded outward to include the cart's canopy and there we sat, like a soap bubble, molecules and atoms in the air bumping against us, making a film of dust that defined our edges.

Those of us born into the physical world only ever know other living things through a veil of parsed and edited experiences. We divine that others are alive because we first realize we are alive. We are only ever truly alone, despite how desperately we want to pretend otherwise. But you changed that for me; you and I were together inside that veil. It was a revelation of sorts, and liberating, despite being stuck as a silent appendage for so long. And now I passed the revelation on to the ice cream vendor. It was as tender an experience as lovemaking. It was like making a snow globe and falling and dancing and falling again inside the safety of that scrim of air; dancing with a part of myself I had never met before but instantly knew to be both alive and to be me.

All those words of mine, the thoughts I'd scribbled in my journals, the paper and ink you destroyed in your efforts to understand what you were; I think they were an effort at returning to a state like the one I felt in the park.

Another presence arrived, pressed against the bubble.

"Can I have an ice cream, or are you going to just stare into each other's eyes all afternoon?"

I brought us back. The bits of air that had become solid fell like dust bunnies dropped from a dust pan, surfing the air currents and drifting away.

I looked at the chocolate ice cream in the waffle cone. It was still perfectly frozen. I had been the ice cream for a moment. I had been everything in the bubble. I looked at the vendor. His eyes were glazed, almost sleepy. He handed me the ice cream. It was delicious. It was more than delicious. It was the best chocolate ice cream I'd ever had.

The wind was at my back, pushing me forward, and my tongue was rich with cold chocolate, and my eyes were filled with the peculiar light of Fall, and everywhere I looked I saw myself, coded and shaped into something else, distinctly me and distinctly different, and I understood that everything in the universe was me. All my life I had been aware of being alone, trying to embrace that aloneness by writing, by working as a night guard in an empty building, sleeping during the day, doing the minimal amount necessary to keep a girlfriend when sex seemed like a way to transcend the curse of being a concrete, discrete particle. And in the park, when I saw myself everywhere I looked—the trees, the water, the ducks, the bread fed to the ducks, the vast ocean of microscopic creatures seeding the soil—the vast loneliness was finally gone and I was home. I wanted to tell someone. I wanted to tell you.

Fiction: Lesbian Assassin Book 2: Mr George Spreads Cheer & Goodwill Toward Men, Part 4

"She's pretty, ain't she," Frankie says, running his fingertips down Nancy's arm. Nancy's eyes open but they don't focus on anything. She's unconventionally pretty. What I can see of her, anyway. There's a sheet over her feet, legs and torso, which strikes me as pitifully and incongruously proper, considering she's strapped down to a hospital bed, about to be turned into a sex slave.

"She's deep under," the nurse-guard says, a sloppy, leering grin on his face, "you can do whatever you want and she won't know it."

"She'll feel it, though," Frankie says. He turns to me. "You want a crack at her? A little girl on girl action before we straighten her out?"

"Passive and drugged out doesn't do it for me. I prefer the kind of girl who'll fight back when I knock her around." Close enough to the truth that I don't flinch. Frankie and the nurse-guard laugh. Frankie claps me on the shoulder.

"Just like one of the guys," he says. I laugh along with him and nurse-guard, focusing on the idea of both of them dead on the floor and my guns hot in my hands.

"I gotta piss, just like one of the guys," I say, "Where's the bathroom." Frankie takes his hand off me and points to the far end.

"Door on the right's a closet, the other's the toilet."

Once inside the bathroom I pull out my phone and verify the FBI's app has been recording. I e-mail the audio file then text Rowan: work done? Not sure. Code for: is this enough proof? Do I have permission to extract myself and anyone I think requires assistance?

I get a text back: I'm keeping dinner warm.

Code for: stay there and keep recording.

I relaunch the recording app, slip it back in my pocket. I flush the toilet, wash my hands. Every action is clipped and fierce, a controlled anger. I take a deep breath. The FBI's goals are bigger than Nancy but it's hard to see that when I walk back down the narrow room of hospital beds to discover that Frankie's stripped her  of the sheet and is pumping two of his pale, skinny fingers in and out of her cunt. He's giggling. I want to puke.

Nurse-guard looks from Frankie to me. I must have a certain look on my face because he blanches and takes a step back.

"I thought you were a professional," I say, trying to pin my disgust on something other than watching a drugged girl being raped.

Frankie keeps his fingers in her but cranes his neck to look at me.

"Just checking the merchandise."

"Didn't you have a chance to do that when you first abducted Nancy?" I ask, trying to get him to ditch the cliches so the evidence is clearer.

Frankie shakes his head. He slips his fingers out of Nancy and straightens up, turning slightly as I move a little closer to join the group.

"I've been sick," he explains, "holding on to her while she struggled took a lot out of me. As soon as I got her down here I passed out on another bed, myself. Got up a few hours ago, but by then Doc was here and Nancy's procedure had already started."

"What you got?" I ask, morbidly curious.

"Dunno."

"You should see Doc," nurse-guard says, "every time I see you, you look worse."

"Yeah, okay. Next time Doc comes over I'll ask him to take a look at me. I just keep thinking it's, like, a cold or flu."

"If it is, that's all the more reasons to keep your hands off the girls," I say, my voice cold and judgmental. Frankie shrugs but meets my gaze. I see a flicker of the professional, managerial man Mr George trusted, and it contrasts strongly with the man standing in front of me now. It occurs to me that perhaps Mr George has seen this contrast and is making plants to oust Frankie. And if I can see that, maybe Frankie can see it, too, and maybe he finds me a threat. Yet another reason to be on my guard around him. Even better, though, is to use this idea to poke around a little more, incite him to confess something.

Fiction: The Leopard: Ada, Part One

There was nothing I couldn't do, once I was like you. You, poor thing, trying so hard to understand the laws of physics, to leave the laws of metaphysics behind, played by the rules. But I, having grown up in a world of cells and atoms, I knew which rules I could bend, which tethers I could cut. 

Once you'd left my hospital room, my new body's family was ushered in by a nurse who demanded quiet and calm. They were anything but. Their daughter, dead for days, was now alive and smiling. There were screams, tears, repeated hugs and caresses, and it took all my focus to avoid hurting them accidentally. Ada, my new name; I heard it repeated endlessly. Ada, Ada, my darling Ada, my baby Ada, my lovely Ada, Ada, Ada. . .

The nurse finally hustled them out: the father, tall and thin, with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes; mother, with unwashed, unruly hair, dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep, sallow and weeping; brother, slack-jawed and shell-shocked; sister, constantly teary-eyed, hardly able to look away from me. Once they'd left, the quiet rang in my ears like a bell singing, Ada, Ada.

I didn't know where my edges were. Lying in the hospital bed, I could feel my sense of self expand to include the bed, the air around me, the linoleum floor below and the plastic-shielded wall behind.

Sometimes I wanted to be back in that tiny space in your—my—head, I wanted to be nothing, to simply observe. But those times were relatively few and fleeting.

The nurse came back to check on me. She took my temperature and blood pressure, then checked my wounds. There weren't any. I'd unwrapped the splint around my fingers and pulled out the stitches from my healed skin. The nurse was surprised to find smooth, unmarked flesh. She backed out of the room, stuttering her intent to find a doctor. 

I stretched while I waited. I'd tried to be kind, to avoid frightening people, but it was becoming tiresome. I didn't want to have to explain anything to a doctor; I wanted to be out, to be free, to whirlwind around the city like a leaf or a bird or the wind itself, pushing the leaves and birds along the corridors of the streets and alleys. The wind is only the wind, the leopard is only the leopard, and nothing less.

You had gone along with all the tests and controls imposed upon you simply because you didn't know anything, every experience helped you learn. You learned to love my parents, loved what had been my life, and was willing to submit in order to keep those things. There was no need for me to go through the same learning period, and I knew nothing of my new family—Ada's family—to make the doctor's poking and prodding and difficult questions worth my time.

I resolved to unfetter myself. I untaped and removed the saline drip and needle from the back of my hand. I stood, naked, and strode across the room to open the door. Material from the stainless steel doorknob flooded over my hand to settle on my forearm. I left the doorknob with an impression of my fingers, as if they had sunk into a ball of butter.

The hospital hallway was bright and clean, reflective surfaces making my eyes water. It was quiet. I trailed my fingers across the upper half of the wall, above the resin wainscot, and the latex from the paint flowed up and over me, forming a cream-colored, skin-tight bustier. I closed it up with a stainless-steel zipper in the front. I turned back for a brief moment to see the remains of the paint—a chalky white dust—barely coating the wall board. I liked the bustier. I liked the way it moved with me. I made something similar for pants but didn't bother with a zipper this time; I realized there wasn't a need to have a mechanical method for clothing removal.

"Ada!"

I was at the intersection of two hallways, where nurses and aides worked inside a round island of countertops and computers. I walked left to find my—Ada's—family huddled in a corner of a waiting area.

"I'm very sorry," I said, "Ada is dead."

There was silence, from both the staff and the family.

A hand grabbed my arm.

"Ms Garcia, I can't imagine you feel well enough to be up and about. Why don't you allow me to escort you back to your room."

I turned to find a doctor. I resisted the urge to make his hand melt. Instead, I extended myself into him, along his nerves, to his brain and there I was the queen of all I surveyed through both pairs of eyes.

"I'm quite well, actually," I said.

"Yes, I can see that now." I spoke with his mouth.

"But I'm not Ada Garcia. You should double-check your records."

"Of course. I'll discharge you. You're free to go." I realized I rather liked having a puppet.

"Thank you, doctor."

"My pleasure, Ms—" I hesitated. I did like the name Ada.

"Ada Lopez," we said.

The family erupted in a chorus of objections and obscenities. Their daughter had come back from the dead only to reject them.

"Call security," the doctor called. To everyone there, it looked like he was escorting me away from Ada's family. Ada's brother broke apart from everyone else and came after us.

"You cannot break mama's heart again," he said, "you need a psychiatrist and drugs and whatever else can help you, Ada. You're my sister. You think I don't recognize my own sister?"

"Look closer, and you won't see your sister," I said, "your sister is gone." The doctor and I stopped. I held out my hand to Ada's brother and he moved closer to grip it. Through his nerves I brought him down to the scale of his own atoms, electrons circling like dizzy planets around the sun of the nucleus, then back up to his brain. Together we explored the memories in his synapses, the sight of Ada's body, very dead, very stiff. Then I let him go.

Tears streamed down his cheeks. "Who are you." His voice cracked, not with fear, but wonder and grief.

"Tell them," I said, "Tell them I'm not theirs."

Kink in Real Life: Does Your Doctor Know? Part 2

I finally went to a doctor for the first time in three or four years. I hadn't had health insurance in a while, mostly because I couldn't afford it. And, when I did, I never managed to make the time for a visit. The appointment went smoothly enough, even though, after the nurse gathered all my preliminary information, including my long self-care to-do list, the first thing my doctor asked was why I wanted to be tested for STI's, considering I'd been monogamous for so long. He asked me to repeat the part about considering hiring a sex worker. He was momentarily flustered but managed to remain professional. This was after letting me know he was a Christian. So.

Look, wanting to be with other people is normal, but that's not our social narrative. When something is outside of our social narrative we tend to want to hide it. But hiding things like desiring sex with someone other than one's primary partner can lead to a host of problems far, far worse than a one-night stand, which is why I chose to disclose my thoughts to my primary care physician within five minutes of meeting him for the first time.

I wanted to explain myself to him, to argue the pros of hiring a sex worker for a one-time event. Instead, I just said it was something my husband and I had discussed previously, that I wanted the tests as part of my approach to avoid harming others, and that I wanted to hire a woman because I felt that would be less threatening to Mr Myrrh. The truth is, it's not about Mr Myrrh, it's about me. The truth is, I probably won't hire a sex worker. The truth is, I'm really quite torn about sex as a monetary transaction and I'm sensitive to the possible moral and ethical issues. But I want that option there because, sometimes, at the height of these increasingly crazy perimenopausal cycles, I want a third person in my bed.

I decided that this was important to share with my doctor. I wasn't looking to shock him, poor thing, but I am resolved to follow a line of thinking that's very important to me: that if I'm not honest about what I'm experiencing then I am supporting a false narrative that does damage to others. And, if I can share the results of that honesty here, perhaps my own experience can help others choose to write their own stories.

Warmly,
Ms Myrrh